Kevin’s crying, too, but tearlessly, because the wind of his descent is sandblasting his face. I love you! he wants to shout, but the wind’s also pummeling his lungs, he’s dizzy and lightheaded and he might even pass out before he hits the pavement, which would be a blessing, but he desperately wants her to know this one thing, he wants it to wing through the ether via some sort of telepathic wormhole, he wants to tell her that he loves her, that he always did and he always will, though the future tense doesn’t mean much at the moment and is losing value fast, at fifty-five meters per second. But I want you to know that, Stella, I want you to remember that I loved you when you hear the news, I want you to remember that I loved you when you realize I went to Austin without telling you, I want you to remember that I loved you when you understand what I was doing there, I want you to remember that I loved you when you realize that I was thinking of leaving you — I want you to know that I loved you and was thinking of you at the very last moment of my life.
Will she forgive him? Is there time for that? Maybe not, that’ll have to come later, if at all, and Kevin hasn’t got any more time. What’s he got to look forward to now? He won’t be there when she comes home on Tuesday to an empty house, he won’t be there when she gets a call from his sister, Kathleen, because when they pull his driver’s license from his pulped remains, Kathleen’s his emergency contact, he never got around to changing it to Stella, and Kathleen and Stella don’t get along — Stella sets my teeth on edge, Kathleen told him in a rare moment of candor, and Stella’s always offering to help Kathleen lose some weight, if, you know, she really wants to make the effort — Stella’s going to have to hear it from her, maybe even off the answering machine or voice mail, as she stands in Kevin’s empty house, carrying his child. Oh, she’s gonna hate me, she’s gonna despise me, she’s going to be mortally wounded, well, maybe not mortally, since Kevin is getting a sudden, instantaneous tutorial in what “mortally” really means, and in this last, infinitesimal moment of his life, as the litter in the street and the grain of the pavement rush at him, he’s hoping that she takes it in stride, and he’s pretty sure she will, Stella is nothing if not a survivor, Stella’s a fighter, Stella has an uncanny way of landing on her feet, Stella keeps her sunny-side up, Stella makes lemonade. Stella’s going to be okay, Stella will get another man, even though that might be harder to do if she has a kid, and not just a kid, but a kid by a man who died in some spectacularly public and horrible fashion, who’s even a kind of minor celebrity now, one of the two jumpers from the tower in Austin. Look at the mess I’m making, and I’m not even dead yet. But even if she doesn’t get another man, she’ll raise the kid all by herself, she’ll buy every baby book in the baby book section and she’ll clean out Baby Gap and Ikea and stuff the house to the rafters with kid paraphernalia — no, it’s the kid he ought to be worried about at the very last, the son or daughter who right now is only pee on a stick and few thousand cells in Stella’s belly, it’s the kid who’s going to have to face life without a father, it’s the kid who’s going to learn at a tender age that his father died before he even got the news that he was going to be a father, it’s the kid who’s going learn that her father’s death will have been seen by millions before she was even born. Deal with
that, munchkin, it’s bad enough to lose your dad at a young age, and I ought to know, but my own kid will have to live with the knowledge that the most important fact he’ll know about me is the way I died.