The Art of My Life (26 page)
Read The Art of My Life Online
Authors: Ann Lee Miller
Tags: #romance, #art, #sailing, #jail, #marijuana abuse
January 28
Have you ever had a
painting or relationship that was snatched away before its time?
What do you do with the agony left in its wake? I don’t want to
waste my suffering. Or worse, distill it down to
bitterness.
Aly at
www.The-Art-Of-My-Life.blogspot.com
Cal had run out of Dr. Pepper this
afternoon and now it was midnight. Aly’s two-day-old coffee sloshed
in his stomach. He’d fought the Gulf Stream current for twenty-four
hours and crashed somewhere around Jupiter, only to wake up
panicked that the Coast Guard had found him.
He’d slapped white paint over the
Escape’s
name on the transom, and started off
again.
He could have shot straight to the
Bahamas from New Smyrna Beach, but thirty-four blue water hours
one-manned was more than he’d wanted to handle. He’d made the right
decision hugging the coast to West Palm Beach.
Exhaustion draped him like a cast net
weighed down with a hundred sinkers. He shifted into machine mode
to knock out the last three hours to West Palm Beach.
The baggie of stems and pieces he’d
scavenged from Leaf’s food truck, duct-taped to the inside of the
keel, taunted him like it had since he left New Smyrna Beach. His
mind replayed Aly’s belief he could stay sober. She thought he gave
in to despair too easily. Well, who wouldn’t give up—facing a life
without Aly, without Fish and his family?
He didn’t want to remember, but he’d
nearly lost Aly by smoking while sailing. He’d made it this far
without lighting up. He could make it the rest of the
way.
His eyes panned a three-sixty around
the horizon and land surrounding the boat. Every light intensified,
turning into a Coast Guard cutter. He was channeling Leaf’s
paranoia along with his inability to make it in society. For the
first time he resented his grandfather.
Mom had beat the genetics she’d been
dealt. He sat there, a hand on the wheel, his mind as blank as the
night channel, asleep and awake at the same time.
Then, thoughts sluggishly moved
through his head. Mom had married Dad and normalcy. She’d started a
business. Cared—too much—what people thought. But there was
something else, something bedrock. God. She must have thrown her
arms around God in a headlock at some point. That explained why she
crammed religion down him with his Flintstone vitamins.
He had to have some of Dad’s laid
back, relational genes, too. But he sure got Mom’s intensity,
artistic bent. Life came hard for both of them.
Mom had been different lately, almost
like she was trying to accept him the way he was. In a searing
moment of truth, he saw that his deeper connection was with his
mother, not his father. In the next breath, he felt the loss of
never seeing her again. Or Dad, Missy, Jesse and Kallie. Jillian
and Chase’s small faces crawled through his mind. He’d never see
the kids grow up. He’d miss the day Fish decided to forgive
him.
Wind whistled through him, whipping
their faces, and a lifetime of memories away.
He dashed below for a sketchpad and
pencil. But when he pressed the pencil to the paper, pain paralyzed
him. He fired the pad and pencil through the open hatch.
He tied his sweatshirt hood tighter
and tried to think about nothing for long stretches. After so many
hours under sail the wind seemed to wear away his skin, snake into
him through the pores on his face. The drone hummed in his ears
till he wondered if it could drive him insane. Mental health wasn’t
a strong suit in his family.
Aly. He’d resisted thinking about her
for twenty-nine and a half hours, but his mind and body were too
tired to push her away one more time. He’d thought it was just the
Gulf Stream fighting against him, but everything in him clawed to
get back to Aly. If he turned around he wouldn’t be going back to
Aly. He’d be going to jail.
Razor-wire topped fences, cement block
walls, metal bunks, every day the same as the last. For five years.
No way.
Then Aly was in his arms. He breathed
her. Made love to her. Held on and never let go. His chest quaked.
Again. The numbers on the GPS blurred. A knot formed in his chest.
His shoulders shook.
He wiped the wetness out of his eyes
with the arm of his sweatshirt and stared at the GPS. West
Palm.
His body on autopilot, he dropped
sail, anchored, and fell onto his bunk more tired than he’d been in
his life.
Tomorrow he’d sail the last ten hours
to Grand Bahama—his future loomed colorless and empty as a rusted
fifty-gallon drum. His last conscious thought—a plea, a
prayer.
Aly.
Aly stared into her morning coffee,
wondering if she had slept at all. Whenever she closed her eyes she
saw Vic Franco and his shotgun or Cal saying there was a warrant
out for his arrest.
Somehow she and Fish had given the
Coast Guard their statements without telling any outright lies.
When they docked the
Escape
, her mother, Kallie—minus Jesse
who had taken the kids home to bed—Cal’s folks, and Henna cheered.
Every one of them hugged her and Fish. Even Starr, who actually
said she wanted to be closer to Aly in the future.
Missy had gone home to crash, and no
one knew where Cal was, least of all her.
And she still didn’t. She’d been glued
to her phone for the thirty-six hours since she’d last seen him.
She slept curled around it, hoping Cal would call—somehow erase the
hurt that he hadn’t told her about the arrest warrant; tell her
he’d worked things out with his probation officer—but he
hadn’t.
She’d been an idiot to think he
wouldn’t ignore texts and disappear for days at a time now that
he’d told her he loved her.
She stared at the phone willing it to
come to life. It vibrated and shimmied. She stared at the pink
metal in shock, then lunged across the counter. Cal?
Fish.
Her heart sunk. “What’s
up?”
“
Cal took off on the
Escape
the night of the boat-jacking. Left me a note saying
he wanted to get his head together for a couple of days, not to
call the Coast Guard. I didn’t think too much about it till the
police showed up this morning looking for him.”
Fear tasted like she’d run her tongue
across a window screen. “Did you tell his family?” “Just you. I
don’t know what to do. I’ve got a charter that leaves in ten
minutes, and I won’t be back till four thirty.”
“
I’ll handle it. Thanks
for calling.” She shut her phone and dropped her head onto her
folded arms. “Oh, God.”
If Cal had wanted her to know where
he’d gone, he would have called, stopped by. He was in some kind of
trouble. He’d run, that much was obvious. He’d told her he’d never
go back to jail. His family would be frantic.
She swallowed the metallic taste.
Where would Cal run?
There was only one place she could
think of to look. She downed her coffee, grabbed her keys and
purse, and jumped into her car. She had to try.
Starr gripped the bar and stared
unseeingly at Jackson’s silhouette. Behind him, morning sun burned
through the glass wall.
Cal, violating probation, gone. Aly
didn’t know where.
Starr sank to the floor and clenched
her arms around her knees. He’d run. A shudder passed through her
body. She’d thought Cal was staying away from weed. And Henna had
gotten rid of his supply. He’d been out of jail six months. Starr
had almost started to breathe regularly.
How could Cal, who had always had
family to back him up, live on the run? He would progress to harder
drugs, die with a needle in his arm. Alone.
She vaguely sensed Jackson lifting
her, cajoling her to stand and come with him.
How could they find Cal? Where would
he go? Did he have friends she didn’t know about? He’d barely been
out of New Smyrna Beach.
Jackson walked her across the drive,
into the house, and released her beside their bed. She lay back and
stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d whimsically stuck to the
ceiling, her version of camping out.
Always before she could dull feeling
with activity—prune the lemon tree, clean out the pantry, teach a
class, dance. But now, she lay still on the bed, a hundred-pound
ingot of fear and hurt planted on her chest. If you could divorce
your child and cease loving him, she would.
Jackson sat there for a long time
stroking her hair absently and she didn’t have the will to bat his
hand away. There was no comfort. His shoulders that had always been
so powerful, slumped with helplessness. He, who had comforted so
many, had no words for himself, for her.
Their pain rose in the room like dirty
water in a car that had gone over a bridge. Her body lay paralyzed.
Not even an eyelid blinked. But her mind dragged her back to the
first time she entered the jail to visit Cal. Would Cal be found
and sent back?
She’d walked across the thin, worn
carpet of the visitor’s room, scanning the prisoners’ faces
projected onto computer screens separated by study carrels. She’d
passed visitors parked on mismatched chairs—a black woman balancing
a toddler and an infant on her lap, an old man in grease-stained
jeans. Dirty, poor, amoral by association. Now she was one of
them.
“
I’ll give you
something to cry about.”
The words her father had used to stop
her tears decades ago clamped down on her. They cinched the pain
inflating and deflating her lungs until she could barely suck
oxygen from the air.
She sunk onto the visitor’s chair and
curled her fingernails into the hard plastic seat. Her gaze welded
to the video monitor, and through it, to her son’s hungry eyes,
scanning her face as she consumed his.
If she pressed her palm against the
cement block wall and Cal did the same, she could almost touch
him—if he wasn’t squirreled away in some distant part of the
jail.
Her parents had dug a saltwater spring
of tears she should have cried. But in the past twenty-four hours
Cal drilled even deeper and cracked a fault in her foundation. Ice
water—fear, despair, loss—flowed in and chilled her
core.
Cal’s gaze, mahogany with anger, hurt,
skittered from the webcam. Sea-bleached hair her fingers once
clutched kinked against the shoulders of his orange jumpsuit as
though waiting to spring back around her knuckles.
She searched beneath the unnatural
pallor of his tanned skin for the six-year-old who had taken Calvin
of Calvin and Hobbes’ name. The irony of a preacher’s son called
John Calvin Koomer caged in the Volusia County Correctional
Facility fanned hysteria through her. But she stilled her body and
concentrated on inhaling the smell of pencil eraser scrubbed across
a piece of paper. She glanced down, expecting to see rubber
shavings, but only her purse sat on the shelf.
The scratch of Cal rubbing the stubble
on his chin came through the mic. He opened his mouth, then closed
it, locking in whatever thoughts he might have voiced.
She knew what she needed to say.
I
love you. Nothing you do will ever make me stop loving you.
The
words had come to her in the half-sleep spanning the hours she’d
lain in bed spooned to Jackson, long after his shoulders had ceased
to quake with grief. Words she was certain God wanted her to
say.
She cleared her throat, and Cal’s eyes
darted to the monitor, pliable, needy. She hadn’t seen the soft Cal
in such a long time, she hardly recognized him. A kernel of warmth
burst open in her chest, and her arms ached to hold him.
Behind her an oscillating fan creaked
and started its journey in the opposite direction.
She still loved him even though he’d
just ruined a lifetime of salvaging her reputation—the one her
parents started annihilating before her birth. It would take a
miracle to keep this episode of Cal’s life out of the
The
Hometown News—
one God was unlikely to give up.
I love you
stalled on her
tongue.
“
I’m sorry,
Mom.”
She wondered if he read the battle
inside her. Of the three kids, Cal knew her the best.
She and Jackson had been too lenient,
too strict, too stupid, too blind. They must have done something to
deserve public humiliation. Only minorities and white trash landed
in jail.
Cal hooded his eyes, shutting her out,
and last night’s fear surged into her stomach. “Are you
okay?”
“
Just great.”
She flinched at his
sarcasm.
Cal sighed, relenting. “The holding
cell in New Smyrna Beach was the worst. The metal door clanged
shut. I had all night to stare at the leftover ink on my fingers
and think. Not knowing how long I’ll be locked up—”
“
I mean, no one’s… hurt
you?” Her voice quavered at the end. She wasn’t naïve. Cal had
Jackson’s good looks. Surfing bulked his muscle mass, but perverts
came in all sizes.
He blinked three times in rapid
succession, reminding her of a tic he’d developed the first three
months of preschool. “I can take care of myself. Just a bunch of
druggies, DUIs, and a guy who got loaded and peed off a hotel
balcony one too many times during spring break. Look, it’s Daytona
Beach, not Miami. You’re worrying for nothing.”
His life had imploded, but he
reassured her. She moistened her lips. “Dad talked to you about
posting bail?”
Cal flicked his chin up, then
down.
Starr would sleep in the house on
Riverside Drive where she and Jackson had lived for thirty years,
but her heart would be trapped here with Cal for the duration of
his stay. The unfairness of her sentence churned bile into her
throat. She should think about Cal’s pain, but right now her own
was more than she could stomach. “Twenty-one grams of pot. What
were you thinking?”
Cal shrugged.
“
Forty-two joints. Did you
plan to sell them?”
Cal’s eyes widened. “Since when do you
know how many joints can be rolled from twenty-one
grams?”
Starr glanced at the perfectly shaped
half-moons of her nails. “Since my mother grew weed in the
backyard.”
Cal’s brows shot up.
Her fingertips had grazed the scar at
her temple before she realized and clenched them in her lap. She
had to hold together the fissure Cal had cracked in her. No matter
what. God only knew what would ooze out.
Jackson’s hand had stilled on her
head.
Her eyes stared out the window at the
palm fronds ruffling in the breeze. Cal in jail, as horrible as it
had been for her, felt safer than Cal on the run. She couldn’t
survive not knowing whether he was dead or alive.
She should pray for Cal. For his
safety, that he’d come home. Her mind drifted to what Cal must be
feeling and fishtailed away. She could only pray that God would
make her pain stop. Jackson would have to pray for Cal.