Free Falling Backwards: A Memoir by Jann Arden

purgatory. If someone had of told me when I was sitting at that dinner table all those years ago that I would someday love Brussels sprouts, I would have shot them on the spot.
    My mom has since become a much better cook, although she can still whip up some pretty interesting dishes. I happen to love her liquid version of cheesecake. So what if she forgot one little ingredient? It tasted like cheesecake and that was all that mattered. My Lord, did we laugh that Christmas we were all slurping cheesecake out of bowls.
    Our new house was shaping up to be the biggest I had ever seen, and I couldn’t wait to move out of the white trailer and get into my own bedroom. In our old house in town I had shared a bedroom with my little brother, Patrick, which wasn’t terrible except for the fact that he had severe asthma and I thought he was going to die every night. Other than that it was fine. The poor kid was allergic to his own skin. His little shoulders were always hiked up to his ears just trying to take in a decent breath. In the spring, my parents would have to rush him to the hospital for a two- or three-week stay because he just couldn’t breathe. Every summer holiday we ever went on until he was about fifteen years old ended with us taking him to the emergency ward in some little British Columbia town. It must have been terrible for him and scary not knowing where he was, and for him to be away from his parents for who knows how long. Mom and dad couldn’t stay with him in the hospital because they had Duray and me to look after back at the summer cottage. So there Patrick would be at night, alone in a giant plastic tent, surrounded by strange nurses and doctors and feeling more homesick than it’s possible to imagine.
    Living out in the country made his asthma symptoms worse.All the trees and the pollen and the fields of wild grass and the animal hair were too much for his lungs to take. It was sad seeing him sitting on the sidelines while everybody else ran around playing. His whole body showed his disappointment. Thank God he eventually outgrew his asthma. It just went away one summer and never came back.
    Watching someone trying to breathe is horrible. My friend Danielle, who has cystic fibrosis, says it’s like drowning on dry land. I always thought that was so profound. Danielle has also always told me that she’d rather be hit than dragged. I think about that when I am alone at night.
    I remember the first time I became aware that I had something beating in my chest. I had never thought about my heart or what it did up until that point. My heart never crossed my mind.
    One summer when I was nine or ten, my family stopped for the night at a motel on our way to Wood Lake, where my parents took us on vacation every year. To our delight, there was a heated outdoor pool. We were in heaven.
    Children + water = happy
    Duray and I went diving in the pool for my dad’s car keys. We’d been swimming for a few hours and my hands and feet were a wrinkled, waterlogged mess. I looked like an eighty-pound raisin. One more time down to the bottom of the pool, I thought, before we quit for dinner. On my way down to fetch the keys, I felt something go pop.
    I thought it was because I had gone down too fast into the deep end of the pool. Maybe my ears had done something weird. I came up to the surface and felt like I was more out of breath than usual. I felt a heavy weight on my chest and my heart was fluttering when it should have been beating. I had no strength in my legs and I wasbarely able to drag myself out of the water. I told my mom that I felt funny, but there wasn’t much she could do. I didn’t say that my heart felt funny, I just said that
I
felt funny. She told me that I’d overdone it, and I thought she was probably right. A good night’s sleep cured everything.
    My heart felt fluttery for days after the pool incident, though, and I felt weak and breathless. The wild beating was all I could think about. I was a