Race Across the Sky (28 page)

“Kept going? To where?”

“You.”

“To my house?” Shane asked incredulously.

She nodded yes.

His frustration overflowed. “Caleb's not a superhero, okay? He can't run two hundred miles with a baby.”

“Yes he can,” she explained. “This is what he does.”

“But things go wrong in these ultramarathons, don't they? Everyone who starts plans on finishing, but sometimes they don't.”

“Please,” she whispered, “he has my daughter.”

Shane looked out the dark window, shaking his head. “I didn't see them on the highway.”

“He wouldn't be on a highway.”

“That's the shortest route.”

“He'd be where he feels safe.”

“Where is that?”

“In the mountains.”

“Well, we're not going to drive through there,” Shane gestured at the wilderness frustratedly.

“On the small roads,” June nodded. “That's where they are.”

Shane left the diner lot and pulled onto a smaller road that seemed to run parallel to the highway. This seemed to be what Caleb would have done. He moved slowly, thinking how senseless it was to imagine that they would just stumble upon them.

For the next hours they scoured the pitch-black road. Two hours turned to three, four. He found his way back to the highway and drove to another strip of fast food for coffee, but it was his fear that kept him awake. Next to him June's eyes strained, finding hope in every shadow, seizing it with an audible intake of breath, and then dropping it in pain.

They spoke very little; somehow the silence felt necessary. But somewhere near Stockton he felt a desperate need to connect, to stay awake if nothing else.

“So what's it like?” he asked her.

“What?” she replied, the exhaustion leaking from her voice.

“To run like this?”

An unexpected blissful expression took over her eyes. “It's beautiful.”

“But you put yourself through all this pain?”

“Pain's not a problem. I mean, physical pain.” She looked out her side window, speaking to herself. “The other kind of pain hurts more.”

“What kind?”

“Being a mom.”

Shane nodded.

“No one ever tells you how much it's going to hurt. They make it seem so perfect in those books,” she said, her voice rising. “But when I'm listening to her try to breathe, watching her just try so hard to crawl, and laugh, and she smiles anyway? I've never respected anyone like that. She looks at me wheezing and I can't make her better. I'd rather run a thousand miles. I'd rather run Yosemite and break my back than go through one more second of not being able to help her.” She turned her head from side to side in the manner, he thought, of an injured bird.

“I have a son,” Shane reminded her by way of commiseration.

“Is he healthy?”

Shane put a hand on her shoulder. It felt to him like bone, and he pulled away. Embarrassed, he stared ahead at the amethyst sky, looking for shapes on the shoulders that might be his brother and her baby.

• • • • • • • • • • • • 

L
ight rain slipped from a crimson sun.

Caleb pushed himself across a road. Russet-colored cows speckled the hillsides, but none seemed to notice them. The rain refreshed him, though he worried the road would become slippery. He felt it ascending, felt his quads begin to burn. He noted with great relief that he needed to pee.

He stopped by a tree and pulled aside his begrimed shorts. The pain that came next made him shriek. An explosion of fire in his back and sides. What was this, he cried? He glanced down and saw that his urine was nearly solid. Chunks of matter pushed from him. He fell to his knees, swaying, Lily hovering in the pack above him. His kidneys were not functioning, he understood. If he did not drink water now, then his bladder would become infected. And this time there would not be Mack to heal him.

He opened his mouth desperately to drink in the light rain; in the distance a cluster of gray clouds promised more. But as he moved forward, he saw that these were not clouds at all, but mountains. He stared at the distant range in awe; with a shudder, he understood that he would have to run through them.

“Should we drop?” he whispered to Lily.

In seeming response, she slapped the top of his head.

More cars started to pass them along the road. A sign informed him that they were approaching a small city called Dublin. There would be motels there, he realized. He could call Shane, bathe them both in a cool tub, lay Lily out on a bed for a proper sleep. But fever awaited him there, he knew; his body would shut down completely, and he might not awaken for days. There was nothing but to keep going.

The light rain kept steady. As he ran, one of Mack's passages of Whitman came to him. He had always liked it, and so he recited it, but whether aloud or to himself he did not know.

“‘Over the white and brown buckwheat, over the dusky green of the rye. Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs. Carrying the crescent child. Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, appearing and disappearing, I tread day and night such roads.'”

He whispered it again, and again, catching on the line about carrying the child, until the words lost meaning and only their sounds were left. He reached the final gas station before the mountains just before sunset. Pulling open its door, every smell was accentuated; the fake bread inside its plastic, the chemical Hefty bags, the detergents and the overripe fruit, overwhelmed him. A heavy-bellied man in a stained pine green golf shirt behind a counter stared over his glasses at him, his mouth opening.

By the microwave Caleb crouched down and used the sharp edge of a can opener to slice the outer sides of his sneakers. Immediately his swollen feet spilled out, a tremendous release.

He chugged a Powerade in the aisle, but his body responded too rapidly to the salt and corn syrup; his head spun, he went hypoglycemic. He rummaged through his backpack, trying to determine how much money he had left, but it all went blurry in his hands. It was difficult to grip any thought firmly in his mind now, other than his finish line, 122 Bay Street, San Francisco.

The man was watching him as if encountering something unholy.

“What you doing with that baby, man?”

“Please,” Caleb rasped, dropping canned ravioli, milk, doughnuts, a pear, and two brownish bananas onto the counter.

“They's a shelter up on Conway.” The man raised his eyes to Lily. Looking away, he said angrily, “You ain't need these doughnuts, man.”

Then he swept his forearm over the rest of the goods, pushing them into a thin black plastic bag, and slid it across the counter to him, along with the money.

Caleb tried to thank him, backing out of his store to a bench. Outside he balanced the Kelty on its metal tripod legs, and sat Lily on his lap. He handed the pear to Lily by its stem, his fingers far too disgusting to touch it, and she held it and nibbled happily. When she was done, he ate its last bites, and turned and vomited it all onto the pavement.

Caleb glanced down at his infected shoulders. They bubbled wiht green pus where the pack's straps pressed into the skin. He saw what was left of his squalid sneakers. A nasty rash, scarlet blotches with white pinpricks, encircled Lily's upper legs like red ants. It would not be safe, he thought, to venture into any human contact from this point onward. When they had eaten, he changed Lily, deposited their waste into a trash can, and carried her across the street, into the trees. It would be wise to stay here in the shade. As he kissed Lily's cool forehead, his eyes were drawn up to the dusk sky. Soon the stars would come. They saw the whole field of play. They knew if Mack was still in Yosemite, or getting nearer to them, or back in Boulder, if there were police around them, if June was all right, if he was going in the right direction. Standing against an oak, he looked down. Kinetic energy was pouring from his body in long, golden lines. Dripping from his chakras, his forehead, the center of his chest, his groin, all over the ground.

When he looked up again, it was pitch night.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Shane woke to dirty sunlight.

It poured through the smeared windows of the room, filled with grease and dust. He rubbed his pounding temples.

On a single bed across from him, June lay face down. For a moment he thought she might be dead. She had not disturbed a single sheet. He forced himself to watch, and to his relief he saw her back rising and falling.

He went to the bathroom to wash out his mouth and use the shower. He returned feeling not much refreshed and shook June's shoulder. She sat up grimacing and touched her side. Her straw hair had gone crazy.

“Do you want some Advil?”

She shook her head. “I haven't taken anything toxic in a year.”

“Some toxicity,” he suggested, “may be necessary for survival in this world.”

At a gas station, Shane stepped away from her and phoned Janelle. She answered on the first ring.

“I've called every shelter, hospital, and motel in between here and Yosemite,” she told him, sounding exhausted. “They're not there.”

“Caleb will call the house again.”

“I've got the phone in my hand everywhere I go.”

“Jesus,” he yawned. “I slept for shit.”

“Come home,” she told him. “You're too tired to drive.”

“I'm not,” he lied.

“You'll get into an accident.”

“I've been stopping to rest. I have to keep looking.”

There was a long pause. “I know,” Janelle told him.

The day seemed to promise haze. They drove silently near Modesto, its outlying farmland, straining their eyes for anything in the far distance resembling a human being.

“Can I ask you something personal?”

“Sure,” June answered, “of course.”

“What Caleb's doing, it seems like something you would only do for, you know.”

He left his words dangling, but June did not respond.

“Is she his? Lily?”

June's face slipped gently into a smile, and she looked off wistfully into the distance. “I wish she was. I really do. He would be a great father. No, her dad is a bartender in Taos. He's not interested in her. But if you asked Lily who her dad is, she'd say Caley. When I came to Happy Trails, she was three weeks old, and he just took care of her from the first second.”

“I've never seen Caleb take care of other people.”

June watched him. She could see how much Caleb had grown to mean in his life, through his absence from it.

“How old is your son?”

Shane smiled. “Ten and a half months.”

“Lily's almost fourteen. They can be friends.”

He thought about this as he drove. This image of Caleb living down the block, his adopted daughter and Nicholas growing up together as cousins, the family eating together every Sunday. It was a dream, he considered, realized by a nightmare.

“This kinetic energy?” he asked quietly.

“What about it?”

“Are Lily and Caleb giving it off right now?”

“Sure.”

He gestured toward the windshield. “Can you focus on them? Like, pick it up?”

June frowned and shook her head. “That's what I've been trying, all this time. Every second.” Her voice broke. “I can't
feel
them.”

“It's okay,” he replied quickly, sensing his question had pushed her someplace he did not want her to go. “Every car he sees has a cell phone, and he can stop any one of them.”

She turned to him, nodding assuredly. “He's not stopping anyone. We're just on the wrong road.”

Shane connected with her confidence. No matter how irrational, it gave him a certain degree of comfort. He noticed a sub shop across the street.

“Hungry?” he asked. “We're not going to find any perfectly balanced stew or anything. But you need to find something you can eat.”

He took her inside and ordered for them both. He ate a sandwich and June picked at a salad, and they walked back toward the car. He stared at his Civic, which had accompanied him along his journey up the ladder at Orco, throughout the northern swath of the state, to thousands of medical practices, conferences, sales conventions.

If only, he prayed, it would only get him to his brother.

• • • • • • • • • • • • 

B
racketed by lights, the dark highway ascended straight up the mountain like a runway.

It possessed a wide shoulder; clearly it had been constructed to allow drivers some room to correct before plummeting to their deaths. This would provide them a little safe space, so long as a sleepy trucker did not run them off the edge.

“Okay. Lulu,” he shouted, “lift off.”

And he started up the steep incline under the flutter of a billion stars.

In the darkness 4x4s exploded past them like fireflies, small quick cars like lightning bugs. A large truck groaned by; from below them it had sounded like a wounded wolf. Caleb pushed a smile onto his face and forced himself upward. His quads and calves were engorged with blood to nearly twice their normal size. When he stopped and removed the backpack and reached for Lily, she pushed him away. She had never done anything like this before. He stood confused in the total blackness. Then he understood: it was his smell. It must be a baby's instinct to squirm away from a failing body.

His pain reached some new peak. Immediately he recognized it as different from any he had known before; he possessed no idea what to make of it.

As he moved forward, each step was its own war. His skin was so raw that the barest movement of his shorts and shirt felt like sandpaper. His shoulders bled where the straps tightened. His dry eyes ached from running against the air for three days. Everything from his feet to the tip of his nose was torn asunder. He felt frighteningly cold. Possibly his body had stopped producing rhodopsin; if that was the case, he thought, then he would soon go blind.

He felt as if he were being punished. But, he wondered, for what? For forcing himself off of his proper path, his father's voice explained. Fred appeared then beside him, it was just as it had been in those Issaquah days of his childhood. Only this time, he spoke.

“You have made a life that was not yours.”

Caleb nodded. He understood. It was the truth, he knew. If he had never seen Mack's book, if he had just stayed in New York and continued with his life like most everybody else had, then certainly he would not be in the midst of this outrageous torture. Fred agreed.

Instead, he would have attended the 2001 InterFinancial Holiday Party at the Whitney Museum. There he would have been introduced to a colleague's roommate, Dania, a brunette psychology student. He would have felt an instant spark as their fingers brushed by the bar. A year later, he would have given up his apartment with the untouched Wolf stove and moved into her one-bedroom. And the following Christmas, at a Vermont inn filled with firelight, he would have proposed.

Shane and his new girlfriend Janelle would have been in their wedding. As the city recovered, and his bonuses exploded, Caleb would have bought a house in New Jersey. And they would have had two girls, with his thin brown hair and long, loping legs.

As he ran, these images pummeled him. No, he agreed, tear ducts swelling, he should not be running up this mountain in the dark; he should be in that warm house with his wife and their daughters. Look how happy they were, how they filled him each evening with awe. Oh God, he sobbed, what had he given up?

A new pain electrified him. It came from no muscle or joint, but it was worse than any he had ever known. It came from very deep inside and burned him as if his nerves were being set aflame. But he had been taught to never succumb to agony, to confront it, and so Caleb forced himself back to that peaceful house. He studied himself.

He had gained some weight. His body full of antibiotics for his recurring sinus infections. He watched himself put on some expensive but rarely used sneakers and begin to jog through the planned curves of his town. Three pathetic miles later, he was bent over, his lungs burning with lactic acid, tugging at his shorts. He felt that something had gone wrong, that some crucial thing had gone unnoticed, but he would never understand what it was. And he burst into tears, that would not stop, no matter how long he stayed hunched over on the street.

And watching this vision of himself, Caleb broke through the wall. With a rush of joy, he knew that had he stayed in this life that Fred had meant him to live, he would have died never understanding the source of his suffering. It would have been not the tearing of his tendons but of his being which would have tormented him to his last hours.

The road he was on right now was the correct one for him, he cried. After all, he had chosen wisely. The stars seemed to have receded while he was lost in this dream, and when he focused on the road again, he realized that his legs were no longer straining upward, but pushing against the blacktop as he moved downhill. In the distance he saw the dark shadows of a flatter plain.

He pulled off the backpack, lifted Lily out, and examined her as best he could in the darkness. Her diaper was damp, and she allowed him to stretch her legs and hold her, thank God. But it was time to end this.

Caleb settled the pack back onto the ruin of his shoulders; he began bleeding there directly. He clipped the waist belt shut and began walking down the final stretch of the mountain range, as the sky dialed back to a light gray of granite.

He saw houses then, emerging from the shadows. Small, close together, nestled in a valley. He could smell the ocean in the air.

And he understood that he was staring at the beginning of Oakland.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Shane awoke in agony.

His lower back ached. His neck had stiffened discomfortingly. He was in a terrible bed, in a roadside motel. He had trouble getting up to go to the bathroom, and something had begun to pulse above his right eye.

He went to the hallway outside the room and spoke with Janelle. When he returned, he stood in the doorway and stared at June.

“I need,” he said quietly, “to stop for a while.”

June seemed to look smaller, sitting up in her bed, pulling its thin bedspread against her chest. “Okay, sure. Of course.” She hesitated, looking down at the same stained shirt she had been wearing for three days. “You want to stay here and rest while I look?”

“I need to go home.”

“Home,” she repeated.

“Food, a change of clothes, refuel. Caleb will call there. It's the best place for us to be.”

June's face seemed to freeze. He watched her walk to the bathroom and shut the thin plastic door, heard the shower start. He closed his eyes, exhaling loudly. There was no right answer, that was the thing. Outside in the dusty morning sun the sight of his car filled him with dread. What he needed, he thought, were those beads that cab drivers sit on.

“I can drive,” June told him.

He looked at her. Standing in a damp towel she seemed frailer than he had yet seen.

He smiled. “I got it. No worries.”

He started down the same side roads, but they both understood that he was driving west. After two hours of silent motion, Shane saw his city rising up from the bay. The first mariners had built the initial houses by the docks, and the next wave had built theirs on top of those. The following settlers had wanted to live here so badly that they built even farther up the hills, creating this magic sweep of houses piled on houses like schoolchildren in a class picture.

Rain came as they crawled over the Bay Bridge. His wipers squeaked sadly against the glass, but they did not seem to cleanse anything. He drove around the Embarcadero into the Marina, parked on the corner of Bay, and led June up the front steps of their narrow blue house. Janelle was waiting in the doorway with some rice noodles and jasmine tea.

As she hugged June tightly, Shane watched her face. He could see she was repulsed by June's smell, and the feel of her body, and yet he watched her pull this woman in even closer.

“I've got clothes for you, honey, and a bath.”

A flood of emotion washed over June's face. Janelle led her up to their bedroom, sat her on their bed, and stroked her hair.

“You guys are so nice,” June told her in a voice like parchment.

Her voice sounded, Janelle thought, as if she had fractured both of her legs.

“Are you in pain?”

She nodded.

“Where?”

June began shaking wildly. Her teeth were chattering. Her eyes filled with tears. “I want my daughter.”

Janelle watched helplessly. If she had lost Nicholas, she knew, she would have cracked much sooner than this. Outside the fog pushed past their front windows like a family of ghosts.

Shane and June slept through the afternoon. Janelle phoned her long list of local hospitals again, but none had seen Caleb and Lily. When Shane woke, she decided firmly, police were going to be called. She had given Caleb two days, and it sickened her that they had not enacted a full-force and professional search by now. She had picked up her phone to do this herself but hesitated. She felt the need of June's support; there were repercussions that she had not had the right to set off without warning. In the meantime, she took Nicholas for a walk down to Fort Mason, inhaling the damp air, until she felt ready to return home to whatever would happen next.

When Nicholas was asleep she sat on the couch, listening to the still sounds of the house. She must have fallen asleep somewhere around one. When she opened her eyes, Shane was sitting next to her, staring at the bay window. She smelled coffee, and him, and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Shane checked his phone. “Five.” He leaned in and kissed her cheek. “I love you.”

They stayed like that, arms around each other. When Nicholas cried, Shane was stunned to learn that a full hour had passed.

“I got him,” he said, kissing her forehead.

Upstairs Shane glanced at their bedroom door. It was still shut. He changed the baby and brought him down to Janelle.

“I'll go get some muffins on the corner. Then I'm going to head back out.”

“By yourself?”

“This is the first time June's slept more than four hours in a year. And when she wakes up, you can get out and do some stuff with Nicholas today instead of sitting by the house phone waiting for Caleb to call.”

Janelle swallowed. “Listen, I almost called the police.”

Shane nodded.

“It's time, for sure.”

“Okay, I'll call now.”

“I'll do it from the car.”

“Take some water with you, some . . .”

They heard footsteps on the stairs and turned around. June was standing on the bottom step, thin and spectral, looking confused. He saw her lip tremble.

“I'm coming.”

“I think . . .” And then Shane noticed a shadow upon their step.

Frowning, he set his coffee down and walked to the door, and opened it, and his brother fell into his arms.