Race Across the Sky (27 page)

Caleb began to tell her fairy tales. Whatever he could remember of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel. But some these were frightening stories and not good for being so close to the woods.

Soon Lily fell asleep, he could tell by the way her weight slumped against his shoulders. Some hours later, the single-lane road widened, and traffic grew heavier. To his west he saw the outskirts of what looked to be a small city, and passed a blue sign. It read
OAKDALE, 14 MILES.

The sky was turning violet, the weather was finally cooling. He felt they both needed to eat, and he wanted to change and hold her. He wondered if he looked normal enough to walk into a store.

Caleb slowed to a walk, let his breathing normalize, the sweat dry on his skin, and turned toward town. Sensing some change, Lily awoke crying. He felt her tiny arms pound the sides of the pack.

“Lulu,” he called to her cheerily, “good evening to you.”

In a convenience store parking lot he stopped. Removing her from the backpack Caleb noticed an annular patch of sunburn on her smooth shoulder; he must have missed it when applying sunblock. He kissed her damp hair and carried her inside in his arms.

He purchased cans of protein shake and pasta, baby food, a plastic tube of aloe. There were, he saw, a few big hills left.Outside he blinked into the emerging streetlights and saw a taupe Holiday Inn a few blocks away, lit brightly against the blackening sky. A bench had been placed under plastic palms and an orange heat lamp. A bellhop in a tan uniform watched them walk across the street.

“Waiting for my wife,” Caleb explained, sitting on the bench.

He did not, he realized, look like a man waiting for his wife. He looked like a man who had been running for thirty-six hours. But Lily prohibited the bellhop's more obvious conclusions, and he looked away.

Caleb pulled off her shorts and diaper, fumbled through the back pocket of the Kelty for wipes, and cleaned her. He put on her blue fleece, fed her, and rubbed aloe along her sunburn.

“Cay Cay,” she smiled, her one tooth protruding from her lower gum like some optimistic flag.

He held her wheezing chest to his. “We're going to get you better,” he whispered into her perfect ear.

Caleb emptied packets of salt into the protein shakes and killed them in one long sip each. Then he took stock of his position. Possibly he should go inside this hotel and call Shane, but the same issues he faced at that diner would assault him here. His running was going well, and anyway he was too tired to speak clearly. He laid Lily on the bench, her head on his lap under the heat lamp, leaned back against the wood, and dropped into a dense sleep.

Sometime later someone shook his shoulder.

“My man.”

Caleb sat straight up, blinking. His mouth was dry. A Latino guy with a shaved head and strong breath was glaring at him.

“You been here like two
hours
.”

“She's sleeping,” Caleb whispered, forcing his eyes open. His neck was stiff.

“What room you in?”

He blinked rapidly. What was his story again?

“If you ain't a guest here you got to move on, bro.”

The man walked back inside. Caleb could see him talking to an older man with an earpiece. A cold panic shot through him.

Lily was sound asleep. It was the middle of the night, and red lights blinked in pitch blackness. A black Jeep squealed alongside them. Its doors were thrown open, and Kyle and Juan jumped out. They grabbed his arms, pulled them inside. Mack turned from the driver's seat, screaming.

Caleb almost fell off of the bench, and the shock snapped him out of this hallucination. He blinked, breathing hard.They must be out here looking for him, he realized. Gently he slipped Lily's sleeping body back into the Kelty pack, rolled up a T-shirt and placed it behind her neck for support, lifted the thirty-odd pounds over his shoulders, and clicked the plastic belt shut. Feeling a sour panic, he turned off of the main avenue onto a small street filled with aluminum houses. He read a street sign in the starlight and saw that by an act of karma he was on Yosemite Avenue.

The power nap had worked magic though; he felt recharged and able. If he had stayed in the Yosemite Slam, he would be scaling El Capitan now, he thought. It seemed a comparatively easy thing to run across these gentle dark hills, following the shadow of the distant interstate, beneath the silence of the stars.

But what about Lily? He considered the generations of babies who had survived hard passages into America. Who had been packed for months among tubercular émigrés on suffocating Irish ships. Who had been carried across the Sonoran Desert under raging heat. Who had been baked alive on Cuban rafts, laid among blankets crawling with boll weevils. Who had been frozen in open wagons, kept below deck on rancid boats, on their way to America.

These babies survived, grew strong, and all of them had made it without the benefit of a specially designed child backpack. Lily might get uncomfortable, and if so he would stop and help her. But she was would be fine.

As the weight of the pack pressed warmly into his shoulders, he could feel her slowly blending into him. Which was no hallucination, he understood.

Because, in fact, she was.

• • • • • • • • • • • • 

J
une sat on a small patch of land by the freeway.

She practiced a sitting meditation. Hearing Mack's voice guide her through each organ and muscle of her body made her feel sick so she replaced it with her own. She began feeling better. The pain in her side was subsiding. After a few hours, she considered the six-lane interstate in front of her.

Caleb would have arrived at the next exit by now. He would have taken care of Lily, found food, and then borrowed someone's cell and called his brother. They were waiting patiently in some Burger King booth for her, she imagined. That Caleb had stumbled, had fallen ill, had broken some limb or punctured some organ, did not occur to her. Lily was in the best arms in this world. June felt an unsustainable urge to get to them, and the more she envisioned Lily, the more insistent this need became.

She stood, tried taking a step toward the speeding cars, and extended her arm for a ride.

A small white truck slowed; she did not appreciate the appearance of its driver and shook him off. She kept walking, afraid to try to run. Her hand, she realized, was pressed against her side in anticipation of more pain. Perhaps a kidney was infected; if so, it would not take any more stress. And then an old blue Explorer paused and its passenger window lowered.

An older woman with long gray hair called to her. “Hey. You all right?”

The first time June answered her throat was too dry and no sound came out. She gathered herself and tried again. “Car's broke.”

“Come on in here.”

June drew a long breath and pulled the door open. She noticed a steel coffee mug in her cup holder. Her radio was tuned to slick country music of the sort Todd liked. It felt safe, she thought, in here. As June sat down she watched the woman pull back abruptly. Her smell, June understood.

“Are you hurt, honey?”

“No. Just, you know, really tired.”

The smell of coffee, leather, the bounce of the wheels, she feared she might vomit. A vivid vision of Arizona overcame her, her brothers shooting targets in the desert, surprisingly sharp and defined.

“You sure about that?”

June smiled. “Our car had trouble. I just need to get to the next exit.”

The woman nodded and drove forward. She signaled at the first offramp. June saw two gas stations, and a small truckers' diner. Some rigs were parked outside. She gazed at its concrete step, as if she recognized something there.

“My family's waiting for me inside,” June told her, pointing to the diner.

The woman's face broke open with relief. “Oh, great.”

“Thank you for the ride. You're awesome,” June smiled, stepping out slowly.

When the car drove away, June hesitated. She wanted to take a minute to calm down, to appear strong, to get herself together before Lily saw her. But she ran to the door as fast as she could, pulled it open, and burst inside.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Janelle heard the phone from the baby's room. She had been replacing the soft lightbulb in the little blue lamp on the dresser. The noon light dappled the copper mobile above her. She had purchased it in Berkeley on a happy Saturday in her first trimester, and it always filled her with the joy of those giddy and expectant months.

“Is Shane there?” a woman asked in a painfully soft voice. “Shane Oberest?”

“This is his wife,” Janelle stated, her voice rising as if asking a question. Over the phone she could hear murmurs of voices and distant music.

The woman asked urgently, “How is Lily?”

Janelle frowned. “June?”

“Yes. How are they?”

Janelle took a long breath, steadying herself against the dresser. She could feel this woman's anxiety across the ether. “So Shane's on his way to get you guys,” she explained, her hands raising up to calm her.

“They're not
with
him?”

“June, I'm sorry. With him?”

“Lily and Caleb, aren't they with Shane? Driving?”

“Caleb left a message that you're at the Groveland Hotel?”

“No,” June sobbed. “No. That was before.”

All of Janelle's years as a manager flooded back through her body, and she turned very serious. Her voice dropped a full octave. “Where are you? Ask someone exactly where you are.”

After some mumbled conversation, June answered with an address. Janelle went downstairs to the computer and checked.

“That's between Groveland and Oakdale. It's okay, it's right on Shane's way. He's almost there. It'll just be an hour or so.” She paused. “But Caleb and your baby? You don't know where they are?”

“Oh, God.” Janelle heard her say to herself. “They're still running.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Dawn unveiled a painting, pinks and grays, oranges and whites, masterly mist over brown tallgrass. It seemed a thing of glory. Far in the distance he squinted and made out a red barn. If ever there was such a place as America, Caleb thought, it was here.

Caleb was jogging through farmland. He stepped off of the curving road into a field of wild rye and brome. It was almost certainly owned by the occupants of the barn, who he hoped were still asleep. He knelt, slipped off the pack, and gently lifted Lily out into his arms. She was just waking up, and her warmth cheered his heart. But each breath she inhaled released the high-pitched scratch of metal upon glass. After all this time it still unnerved him.

He spread her arms and attempted some rudimentary reiki in the damp grass. Afterward he rubbed her swollen feet. Then he nuzzled against her until she laughed.

His own feet had swollen as well, and rubbed disconcertingly against the filthy fabric of his sneakers. The sides of them were raw. He would need to wash them soon, he saw; infection seemed imminent.

But he was proud of his night run; he had managed his hallucinations well, ignored roads that lifted without warning into the sky. He felt like he had finished another leg of a race. It was time to take a moment. He found a bruised banana in the pack and peeled it for Lily. She grabbed it in both her tiny hands, and he watched her enjoy it on the grassland.

By a fence he saw a hose. He took a risk and turned it on and cleaned his feet. Then he doused his shirt and washed Lily gently with it, dabbing at her peach and pink cheeks. He filled both of their bottles, and then they rejoined the country road.

In every ultramarathon he had ever run, he had enjoyed the benefit of pacers and stocked aid stations; it seemed an entirely different thing to be running unsupported. But of course he wasn't unsupported, he realized. He had this beautiful little girl.

He had thought that he had been carrying her to safety, but in fact, he understood, the opposite was true. It was Lily's fingertips brushing the back of his neck, her tugging of his ears, her energy seeping into his shoulders, that was propelling them onward. She was the fuel for it all.

The sun swelled against the sky. He scanned the countryside. Clouds, he saw, might not be forthcoming. In the increasing heat, wild mood swings descended on him. For miles he felt nearly superhuman, and then suddenly it would all crash down upon him, and he would slow to a pained walk and begin to cry. He ran like this, swinging from confidence to terror, under a fiery sun which lit the world with hues of orange in the millions and beyond.

Caleb stopped, hands on his hips, when he saw the animal.

At first he thought it was a wolverine. It was the size of a small dog, possessed of a long cracked snout over thin black lips and sharp teeth. Desperate coal eyes, mangy charcoal fur missing patches in clusters that looked torn out. A smell reached him, thick and hot and wrong.

The animal blocked their path. Stared right at them. Frozen there, Caleb thought that his own unwashed stench must make him seem like an equal, to be fought and eaten. Above him he sensed Lily stiffen. He raised his hands up to make himself appear bigger. But doing this exposed his chest and throat and he felt this was not wise. Then the animal lunged.

And he recognized Potter.

Oh, Caleb began to cry, where have you been?

Potter, the Oberest family dog, had been brought home from a shelter by Julie on the occasion of her fortieth birthday, but almost instantly she had become Caleb's. Coming back from a run with his father through the misty Issaquah roads, Caleb would emit some pheromone that bade the dog straight to him. Potter had slept on his bed, greeted him at the school bus, followed him around the small house, arousing Shane's jealousy in the bargain. Caleb had last seen her on a winter morning during eleventh grade when, after school, Julie had picked Caleb up in their station wagon, tears in her eyes.

“Lulu,” he cried, “Lulu, look! It's Potter!”

Potter jumped up and put her paws onto Caleb's belly, then abruptly darted playfully off into the tallgrass. Caleb ran after her at a full sprint, as Lily grabbed his hair, shrieking with joy.

Finally the dog trotted beside him, slowing him down. And Caleb understood: Potter was pacing
him. Ecstatic, Caleb began to tell Lily stories. How much Potter loved the snow, about the time she chased Shane's school bus halfway into town. In the far distance, he could see a mammoth parking lot and a Walmart against the brown hills.

He glanced down to Potter, who wagged her tail, flattened her ears, and pulled away from what turned out to be the outskirts of La Jolla. He followed his dog across the field to a lushness of Monterey and Foxtail pines. Coyote brush. Tarweed. White-throated sparrows. Goldfinches. The swirling world.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

As Shane drove he searched for an isolated figure on the shoulder of the highway, wearing a tall purple backpack.

He couldn't conceive of what Janelle had told him. Caleb would be crazy to run here with a baby. The heat and exhaust from the blacktop would choke them. A sudden swerve from one of these SUVs would run them down. Was he crazy? This seemed to be the major question of his past ten years.

According to his GPS, the diner June was waiting in should be a straight line from his current position, maybe two more hours. But in the real world, this ridiculous highway curved and swung, west, then north, madness. All the while the Sierras rose on the horizon, gray and otherworldly.

Discomfort and anxiety pressed upon him. His phone could ring at any second. Janelle, police, hospitals might be on the other end, with news he could not bear. All his life he had known only self-confidence, like his father, like his brother. Try as he might, he no longer felt confident of anything at all.

Just after seven in the evening he pulled onto the gravel by a truck stop diner just northeast of Oakdale. Shane saw her right away, sitting in a front booth. She wore a filthy tank top, and black running shorts. Her face was skin stretched over bone, her hair knotted and wild. Dust streaked her cheeks. He remembered her large eyes, so blue they were nearly white.

“Hi,” he smiled, sliding into the booth opposite her.

A dirty plate and an empty plastic water glass sat in front of her. He could smell her from across the table.

“I had to eat,” she explained softly, embarrassed, “but I don't have money.”

“Don't worry, I got it. Do you want anything else?”

“Can we just go?”

“Sure.”

He ordered a large takeaway coffee. It came in a styrofoam cup, as in the pre-Starbucks days. Ahead the sky was dark and limitless; he felt as if he had traveled light years. When June got into the car, he offered her mints from his glove compartment and lowered the windows.

“So, how did you get separated?” he asked, starting the engine.

June shook her head. “I just couldn't run anymore.”

“He didn't wait for you?”

“He probably did, for a while. But he must have had to move. Once you start shutting down, you can't stop it. He knows his body. He probably just started toward the next town.”

“You don't think he hitched a ride?”

“Caleb?” she smiled. “He's not asking anybody for a ride.”

Shane found his phone and dialed 911. As it rang he realized he had never called it before; he wasn't sure what to expect.

“What's your emergency?” a deep-voiced Latina woman asked.

“My brother is lost.”

“How old is the child, sir?”

“No, he's not a child. He's forty-three.”

“Sir?”

“He has,” Shane explained, “a baby with him.”

June grabbed his hand, shaking her head wildly.

“No,” she said frantically, her breath raw, “you can't call them.”

He pulled his arm away, narrowing his eyes.

“How long has your brother been missing?”

This, Shane felt, was a good question.

“Around six hours.”

“You'll need to contact your local police when it's been twenty-four hours.”

“Hold on, I'm sorry.” He kept his eyes on June, she kept shaking her head no. “Okay, I'll do that. Thank you, Officer.”

Hanging up, he looked quizzically at her.

“We have to avoid the police,” she told him, loud and exasperated.

“Why,” he asked, stunned, “would we do that? They'll help us find them. They have cars, radios.”

June explained what she had heard at the store, what Mack had told the rangers, what Caleb had explained would happen to Lily should the police take them in. Shane looked at her. It did not seem like a preposterous fear.

They would see Caleb after thirty-six hours of running, and Lily, pale and undersized and wheezing. They would find out that they were not father and daughter. They would listen to Caleb explain that he was running to San Francisco. And they would call in Child and Family Services without a second thought.

“Okay, so you think he's in the next rest area?”

“Well, either that or he kept going.”