Race Across the Sky (16 page)

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W
alking into work, Caleb ran into Ed O'Neil, struggling happily with an enormous roll of posters.

“The Gay and Lesbian Alliance ordered twenty oversized. I was printing 'til midnight.” He added awkwardly, “They're pretty neat.”

Caleb smiled in as friendly a manner as he knew.

For the next four hours, he paced around the store, making his constant small movements. At eleven, Enrique, the mailman, opened the front door. Enrique liked to brag that he was paid to get the best lower-body workout imaginable.

“I guess that seems pretty crazy to you, right?” he told Caleb, sorting bills into the open honeycombs. “Walking all around in the snow all day and liking it?”

Caleb wondered what Enrique would say about his night runs in total darkness and subzero wind.

“You got yourself a letter,” Enrique said, handing him a white envelope.

Caleb hesitated. The envelope possessed a preprinted return address with an orange logo: Helixia. He abandoned Enrique and walked to the back office, shutting the door behind him. He was shaking. Four months of waiting. It bothered him, how much this meant to him.

Hi Caleb,

I have a present for Lily. I ordered it, but it's going to take some time to arrive. Would you all be able to come here to get it?

Shane.

When a UC sophomore came to relieve him at noon, Caleb undertook a frantic sprint down the mountain to the house. At the slight curve of the road by the cluster of aspens, he came upon a small group of his housemates, huddled in a tight circle. The warm light fell on their suntanned skin so that they looked like warm stones in a fire.

Leigh, Juan, Alice, Makailah, and Kyle were listening intently to someone. Slowing down, he realized it was Rae. She stood so much smaller than the rest of them that it had been hard to see her. Her black hair was pulled into her usual tight ponytail, her arms folded. Caleb inched closer.

“It's too dangerous.”

“It's all dangerous,” Kyle was explaining dismissively.

“He's going to have aid stations,” Makailah insisted.

“Look, he's not hiding it,” Rae insisted. “Ask him.”

“You're saying he wants us to get hurt?”

“He's planning to make this the most dangerous race in the country. They're
selling
it that way. The trails are totally isolated. No rescue Jeeps can get near them. They cancelled the original Yosemite because two runners died there, and they're bringing it back even more unsafe.”

“But why would he put us at risk?” asked Alice plaintively. “You're not making any sense.”

“It's not about us,” Rae said, pushing a loose strand of Cherokee black hair from her forehead. “It's about television. He's not thinking clearly. Something's going wrong.”

“You don't have to run it,” Kyle told her.

“I'm not.”

Caleb was stunned. Never had he heard dissension like this, in all his years here. When he shifted his weight, a tiny branch cracked beneath him. Kyle turned quickly, his marine instincts undulled by either the passage of time or his quitting of methamphetamine.

They turned as one and stared at him. He knew they all thought him to be closer to Mack than they were; he was, in their eyes, management.

“Hi, Caley,” Leigh nodded gently.

“Why are you guys talking about this here?”

Kyle nodded at him. “You think Yosemite's too dangerous to run?”

Caleb shrugged unsurely, just wanting to get to June. He felt uncomfortable with how they all were watching him, all of them hungry for something. He understood now just how much Mack had riding on his Yosemite Slam. It was more than television coverage or the promise of more recruits. It was the trust of the Happy Trails Running Club.

“Every ultra is dangerous. Look what happened to me at Hardrock.”

“Right,” Kyle agreed.

“He just wants to get the sport seen. Like the Tour de France. He wants to open more houses. That's something he wants to do.” Caleb witnessed a chipmunk sprinting through the thin bark of the trees. “He's been open about that.”

“You're running it, right?” Leigh asked.

Caleb looked past them, toward the house. Through these trees, it looked vulnerable to him, sitting as it did in the shadow of the mountain. An avalanche, an electrical storm, might smother it. It depended on their nurturing, their priming, their care, more than he had realized.

“Of course.”

He walked inside, up the stairs, and found June and Lily playing on the little oval rug in their room. June had hung bright yellow curtains with a blue moon over their window. Religious decorations were forbidden; Mack wanted no reminders of any faiths other than forward motion. But these he found acceptable. It is strange, Caleb noted, that the moon, moving tides, affecting behavior, a perfect circle, perhaps the most powerful proof of a guiding force in all experience, has no religious connotations at all, ignored by the symbologies of the world.

He showed June the letter. She read it, frowning, “I don't understand.”

“He wrote it assuming Mack would see it.”

“So it's code?”

He nodded.

“So, ‘present,' that means medicine?”

“Yes.”

“In San Francisco?” She stared at him questioningly. “How do we get there?”

Caleb shook his head. He was not in possession of a credit card, a driver's license, a cell phone, even a bank account. He supposed June still had these things.

“I guess Mack will buy us the plane tickets,” June nodded happily.

“I don't think,” Caleb said softly, “that he will.”

She blinked, not following.

“He won't want us leaving here before Yosemite.”

“But that's not for seven months.”

Caleb nodded slowly.

“I have my license, I'll rent us a car. Mack always says we're free to leave.”

“Yes. But not to come back.”

She froze, understanding him now. “I need to come back here, Caley. This is where we live. I don't want to live any other way.”

“Then we need to ask him the right way, so he'll help us.”

“How do we do that?”

Caleb considered this. If he came through at Yosemite, if he won and delivered Mack into the pages of
Sports Illustrated
, then surely Mack would give them a month away from the house and welcome them back, if only to disprove certain media reports that Happy Trails was a cult.

But could Lily wait seven more months? Think it through, he told himself. Mack would never let him leave before Yosemite, but maybe he might let June and Lily go. After all, Caleb was his only chance to win. Didn't he need him happy and focused?

Possibly, Caleb understood, there was a deal to be made.

He looked down at Lily. Being near her created surges of emotions that he could not identify. There was no godliness in the trails which touched the depth and power of this.

“I love her,” he whispered, as Lily's red and swollen feet kicked at the rug.

June kissed him; her breath was thin and sour. Caleb held these two girls, all the time listening for footsteps, for whispers of someone coming to catch them, and take away his perfect peace.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

The broker was a frighteningly thin Latino man in his early twenties.

He wore a purple silk shirt and tight black jeans, and was the owner of a thin mustache that gave him the appearance, Shane thought, of a Guatemalan pimp. He walked Shane through a concrete building called Greenway Plaza as if it were an apartment complex on a beach. But it was not full of condominiums; the building was full of labs.

“Only thirty percent occupied. Quiet.” He lifted a pointer finger to the air.

Shane assured him, “Quiet is good.”

This was the second building he had been shown. It was difficult to see a functional difference between them, but Greenway Plaza had the advantage of being just ten minutes from Helixia, up Pinon Drive. Every floor held five labs, each the size of a grade school classroom. The labs came bare, just a long bench, two stainless steel sinks, a tall shelved cabinet. Specific equipment, materials, even chairs would need to be leased or purchased. Rent was three thousand dollars a month; Shane had been hoping for better.

“Will you be needing furniture?” the broker inquired with a smile. He must get a kickback, Shane realized.

“All taken care of.”

“Okay, okay. So what are you going to be doing here? Just curious.”

“Curing a disease.”

“Oh,” he nodded. “It's a perfect space for that.”

Shane left in a sunlit daze. He had expected signing a lease to leave him excited and proud. Instead, he experienced a flood of buyer's remorse, which evolved into a previously unknown degree of terror.

Looking back at the building from his car, it occurred to him how many excited people rent labs just like this, each certain they possess a secret which will change the world. How long does it take for them to burn through their seed money and wind up handing these dull keys right back?

He desperately wanted to call Janelle and talk to her about what he had done. But he had made a decision that surprised him, which was to not tell her any of it.

It was the first and only secret in their marriage. At first he been shocked that it had even occurred to him, but he had understood quickly that this was his only option. Janelle had been with Helixia for eleven years. They had hired her with no experience and grown her into a well-compensated product manager. She was a tireless, loyal, and dedicated employee, and as soon as he told her, she would face an impossible decision: to say nothing, which would make her part of this and put her at the same risk as he and Prajuk of being fired and ruined. Or to tell her manager, which would mean she would betray him, Caleb, and this baby girl. It would not be love, he thought, to put her in this position. Also, he was reasonably certain she would take a management view of this endeavor.

Plus, Shane decided, there was no need to stress her out this early in the process, with so many pieces that could fall apart at any time.

Then there was the money. A hundred thousand dollars was a future-changing amount of money, and this was no investment. There was no chance of him recouping even a dollar. Even the three thousand dollars he had just signed over would astonish her. But, Shane felt, he had every right to spend it. During the decade before they had met, he had amassed six figures in savings. Janelle had told him while they were engaged that she was setting aside her own savings for her parents' care. How was this different? It was his money, from the same premarriage period, being used for his family's health. Morally, he felt in the clear. The difference of course was transparency, but he was certain that once Janelle knew everything, the question of whose money it was would be a minor discussion.

For these reasons, he had told his wife nothing as he researched labs, made appointments with this broker, accessed his entire Orco 401(k). But as he drove closer to home, he realized that there was yet another motivation to keep this to himself.

And that was that it lit up some primal part of his brain, in an unexpectedly profound way, to shoulder this burden alone.

One morning, after the drug was in Caleb's hands, he would take Janelle out to dinner and tell her everything that he had done. His tale would be complete, with no hanging threads, no stress. He would pour her a glass of wine and, as if unveiling a painting he'd been working on, tell her, “So this is what I did.” And her eyes would widen. He very much looked forward to that.

He used his time waiting in doctor's offices with materials about Sorion to peruse online catalogs and order equipment. He was startled to find that any biological fluid and technology was available for rental and delivered as easily as dinner.

Meanwhile, Prajuk began the process of finding a postdoctoral assistant. He placed calls to friends at Stanford and UCSF, describing a chance for a postdoc to work in a lab, doing hands-on gene splicing and cloning. Like all things associated with lab work, he informed Shane, this would take time.

That evening, lying on their bed, his feet brushing up against a board book about farm animals, Shane stroked Janelle's fine hair. The bedroom TV played meaninglessly in front of them. The baby was in his crib, trying to get himself down.

During Janelle's first weeks back at work, the interrupted sleep had not affected her adversely; in fact she had enjoyed waking every few hours to nurse. Maybe, Janelle had told him, sleep is like a glass of scotch, best enjoyed in sips. Her breasts, which she had been certain all her life were too small to ever nourish a baby, were producing enough milk to leave in sealed plastic bags for Hua to warm. Her mother would arrive at eight every morning in a huff of Shanghai provincialism, bringing herbs, reheating her sour cabbage soup. It all seemed perfect to Shane.

But tonight Janelle was torn. At work, she confessed, she suffered a sort of Nicholas withdrawal. Her office computer was split between spreadsheets and mothering websites, and she found it impossible to focus for more than an hour without calling home. Hua had a lifelong problem with phones and refused to answer unless she knew who it was, which caused Janelle no small amount of aggravation. And Shane was busier than she had ever seen him. He was not, she felt, present with her.

“Mom fed Nicholas bananas today,” she informed him, sitting up.

“I know we haven't started baby food yet,” Shane commiserated gently, “but it's not her fault. I saw a jar around here.”

“Not baby food bananas,” Janelle clarified. “
Actual
bananas.”

“Doctor Hess doesn't want him to eat solids yet.”

“I know. That's what I'm saying.” She hesitated. “Should I stay home?”