Breaking Her Fall

by Goodwin, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780151008063
• ISBN10: 015100806X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-08-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Just before 11 o'clock on an ordinary summer night in Washington, D.C., Tucker Jones hears a devastating allegation about his daughter, a party, and some boys. From that heart-stopping moment, Breaking Her Fall moves with irresistible force to its wrenching and redemptive conclusion. In a desperate rage, Tucker races to the party to find his daughter already departed, but his full-boil interrogation of the insolent boys ends with one of them crashing into a glass tabletop. In a second, Tucker's rage turns to remorse, but the gears of the legal machine are quickly set into motion, and they threaten to grind Tucker exceedingly fine. He can easily lose his home, his business, and his freedom, but Tucker is most concerned with losing his daughter. Stephen Goodwin charts their uncommonly difficult passage from bleak despair to reconciliation and then to hope with extraordinary grace and insight.

Author Biography

Stephen Goodwin is a professor of creative writing at George Mason University.

Table of Contents

""Breaking Her Fall is a frank, plain-spoken, passionate novel that got its grips on me

It is, in one sense, a page turner, and in another a true and good story of human frailty and imperfection survived.""

Richard Ford On an ordinary summer night in 1998, my daughter, Kathryn - Kat, we all called her, a fourteen-year-old who still liked to wear her blond hair in pigtails - told me that she was going to the movies with Abby, her best friend, but they never got there

Instead, they hooked up with some ot

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

On an ordinary summer night in 1998, my daughter, Kathryn-Kat, we all called her, a fourteen-year-old who still liked to wear her blond hair in pigtails-told me that she was going to the movies with Abby, her best friend, but they never got there. Instead, they hooked up with some of the other counselors from Rockrapids, the outdoor camp where both girls were working that summer, and decided to blow off the movie. It was a hot, dense Washington night, and one of the boys-Jed Vandenberg-invited everybody back to his house. He had a pool. His parents were away. The kids started drinking beer and vodka shooters, and before long some of them had peeled off their clothes and jumped into the pool. They started playing Big Dare, a drinking game. Just before eleven, when Kat was supposed to phone to let me know that she was safe at Abby's house, I got a call from a stranger, a man whose daughter had been at this same party. He told me that Kat-your daughter, he said-had gone into the pool house to perform oral sex on a parade of boys.I wanted to kill that man. Performed oral sex on a parade of boys. I can still remember his exact words and his exact tone of disgust and judgment. He might as well have said, Your daughter is a slut, and I felt as though I had been shot. I felt a deep, burning fury, a heat and pressure that originated in my chest and made it hard to breathe, hard to speak, hard to see. Even my eyes felt burning and heavy, boiling in their sockets. I felt shocked and furious, and I was standing in my bedroom-naked, as it happened, with Christine extending her hand toward me in sympathy and puzzlement, whispering, "Tucker, Tucker, what is it? What's wrong?" and I brushed her hand away simply because she didn't know what had happened. She couldn't know. She was in her blue-and-white robe, stretched across the bed, fumbling with the remote to mute the sound on the VCR as she reached for me with her other hand, and I cannot forget the hurt, bewildered look that crossed her face when I batted her hand away. She hadn't heard what this man had told me, and even if she had, she couldn't have known that I had already crossed a line dividing one part of my life from another, dividing the past from the part that was to come. I was a single father and this was a moment I had dreaded, the moment when a child of mine slipped out of my safekeeping and walked straight into harm and grief. I'd been unable to protect her-failed to protect her, I thought-and I was ready to do anything, anything, to bring her back. My life was going to change. Had changed already.That, of course, is how I now remember and interpret that moment, the minute or so-it couldn't have been much more than a minute-that I was on the phone with a stranger, another parent whose words seared into me as an accusation. I have replayed that conversation, that whole night, a thousand times, and I come back again and again to that moment when confusion and dread and rage lifted me from the

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Excerpted from Breaking Her Fall by Stephen Goodwin
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