Rise (13 page)

The little girl had been wearing a yellow dress. He hadn't seen her as she crossed. Traffic was stopped in the right-hand lane, and he was talking with Ruby on the phone. She had the vegetables ready, but he needed to pick up a roasted chicken from King Soopers. One of the good ones this time and not one that was all dried out. He needed to pay attention. The law hadn't taken effect yet, and it was perfectly legal to use his cell. He changed lanes because those idiots would make him miss the light. He changed lanes because he was tired and because he was hungry and impatient and because there was no God.

The girl wore a yellow dress, and there were flowers on the skirt. He saw these things. The flowers and her lace socks and the book bag she swung in the air. Her older sister was a few steps behind. She was close enough to see but powerless to change things. The girl flew over his hood. She cracked the glass as she went upward. Light as a bird flushed from the bush. Light as a skipping stone. He knew what had happened before she came back down. He stopped the car and dropped his cell phone and ran back to where she was. She lay against a storm grate. Her long brown hair had come undone.

The older girl began to howl. A sound unlike any he'd heard
before. She went to her knees and covered her baby sister. A bus driver came and tried to help, but she pushed him away. She set her palms over her sister's nose and her bare feet and all the places she was bleeding. She moved her hands in circles. As if she could plug those holes and mend the bones where they had broken. She leaned over her sister and pressed herself against that still body, and it took three paramedics to pry her away.

They took their tandem out on Saturday and rode up to the reservoir. It was warm for late October, but the mountains already had some snow. Up on the hills the cottonwoods were turning. Delicate things those yellow leaves. They fluttered like paper wings. He was in front and Ruby in back, and they rode together like a single person. He'd bought the bike ten years before as their first anniversary present. He told her when there were bumps and when to ring the bell, and there were other couples, too, in matching bike shorts and tunics. Seven thousand feet above sea level with a sky so bright it hurt his eyes. “Look at that,” Ruby was saying. “Look at the baby deer,” and it came near the road and tilted its head and its mother was there beside it. Past barns that had lost their rooftops and cabins set back from the road and he could see the water in the distance. So blue it was almost black. Ruby once said they lived in the perfect place. Winters need to be cold and the summers hot, and the seasons give life its rhythm.

They found a shady spot and ate their turkey sandwiches. She'd put in chips and horseradish, and his eyes watered from the sting. She climbed on a rock when she was done with her meal. She pulled her knees close to her chest. “Maybe this will be your medicine,” she said. “Just coming up here the two of us and sitting in the sun.” Her nose was sunburnt, and she worked her jaw the way she did to keep from crying. He wanted to climb up beside her on the rock, but there was only room for one.

Good evening good night turn off the light. Sleep with the roses and rabbits tonight
. She strung the blossoms, and her hands were white. A ladybug crawled across her cheek. There were more on the blanket,
mounds of them moving in circles between the flowers.
You'll wake up tomorrow if God wants you to. Open your eyes and the sky will be blue
. She reached for his wrist with those long fingers. It was time to show him the water. Her baby girl was waiting beside the rocks. Her skin was cool despite the heat, but he pulled his hand away. He didn't want her to stop her singing.
There's no hurry
, she said.
I've got nothing here but time
. She closed her dark eyes and sang to him like a mother. She rocked him in her arms.

He saw a lady at the gym with an ankh tattoo at the nape of her neck. She was always there no matter when he went. Her black hair was shaved close to her head, and she never smiled or talked. She worked in with him on the machines sometimes. A slender woman with narrow fingers, but she lifted more than most guys, and once he saw her do handstand push-ups against the mirror. The lady with the tattoo and the two gay guys who were serious about their sets, the grandma who wore orange lipstick when she worked with her personal trainer. He knew them all and nobody ever said hello, and that was how he liked it. He varied his routine to keep his muscles guessing. Push-ups on the BOSU ball. Three sets of twenty with claps in between and he felt the stabbing in his shoulder blades before he was halfway through. Crabwalking across the gym's basketball court, one-legged squats, nine minutes jumping rope. One thousand three hundred and fifty jumps, and his knees popped sometimes from the strain. Push-ups with his arms extended. Fingertip push-ups when he felt strong, or push-ups on one hand. Straitjacket sit-ups with his arms hugged tight across his chest. Sometimes he could see his heart beating through his wet T-shirt. Who knew what kept it going.

Her hair had been long just like her daughter's. Her eyes were almost black. She carried a backpack, and it had red ladybugs stitched across it and a button that said Marisa. She cradled that bag in her arms, and she didn't look around the room, not at him or the nurses or the police officers who were still taking down notes. His lawyer was
coming. Sid Taborsky from the firm who knew all about backdated stock options and Medicare fraud, and Sid was useless because the girl was dead and nothing mattered now. The woman stood alone in the corner. Her older girl wasn't there, and neither was her husband if she had one. She didn't look up when the doctors came and when they told her the news. She didn't cry, and she didn't move.
My baby's not dead
, she said.
My baby's right here
, and she held that bag when she went to her knees. She held it against her chest, and he looked at the oval of her face and those long white fingers and he almost believed her.

The corporate folks needed him in Chicago for three days. He had to hold some hands in person and not just over the phone. One of the equity holders in a subsidiary was having doubts about the deal. He wanted more changes to the disclosure schedule or he'd pull out and everyone would be left hanging. “Be careful with those guys,” they told him the day before he left. “Spellman's a screamer. I saw him break a keyboard once when things didn't go his way.” The next day he'd give away bottles of Oban scotch if he'd really crossed the line. That was his way of saying sorry.

Ruby helped pack his bags. She had the shaving kit ready, and she folded all his shirts, and she took him to the airport, too, so he wouldn't have to park. “Don't look so worried,” she said when she stopped in front of the terminal. “I'll call you every morning. I'll wake you up just like I do at home.” She grabbed his arm before he walked inside. “Make a muscle,” she said. She leaned out the window to give him a kiss, and she looked so sweet with her eyes closed.

A bench with the girl's name at the Franklin School and a willow tree planted in her honor. Ruby arranged these things. Sid Taborsky worked out the settlement and the no contest plea. Funeral and medical costs and the loss of future earnings. A year without a driver's license and fifty thousand dollars restitution, and none of it was enough. He wrote a letter to the mother and to the sister. It said how sorry he was and how he thought of them every day, and Ruby said he
should meet them in person and ask for forgiveness. She said it would make it easier to forgive himself, and maybe she was right. He dialed the number a dozen times but hung up before it rang.

He'd dreamt those first months of falling. He jumped from a plane and his chute wouldn't open. He was climbing rocks, and they were slick from the rain. He fell from windows and bridges and balconies, and he opened his arms the way divers do. He arced backward in the air. These thoughts calmed him. He walked at night, going as far as Prospect Lake where people kept pit bulls behind their fences. He stopped carrying his pocket knife or his can of pepper spray and he waited for something to happen, but nothing ever did.

Ruby said we have choices, each of us.
You have a choice just like your father did. He chose to smoke those cigarettes and to skip those doctor's appointments. Don't you make the same mistake
. He needed to do something good with the time he had. He owed it to himself and to that little girl, and it was easy for her to say that, his sweet Ruby whose plants were always blooming. Who took yoga every Thursday at the courthouse gym. She'd gone to visit his father those last few months. She tried to get Ethan to come along, but he always found a reason not to. Tip her over and she'd right herself. How could she understand? Sometimes he was so tired. Every day he was treading water, and he wanted only to stop.

He took a cab from the airport straight to the Chicago office. Twenty-six miles east on the I-90 to Jackson and to Wacker and the cabbie listened to accordion music the whole way and never said a word. The meeting was in a conference room with views toward the water. It had already started when he got there. It had been going on all morning. There were white orchids on the table and stacks of tabbed papers. Danishes from breakfast with dried-out jelly centers. They argued about disclosure first and then Spellman wanted to know who'd pay the taxes. Ethan tried to explain how there wouldn't be any taxes, not the way this deal was structured, but Spellman was getting worked up. He scratched his bald head and pounded the table.
“Of course it matters,” Spellman said. “You can't tell me for certain how things will go. Eight hundred dollars an hour and you're just guessing here,” and Spellman's eyes popped the way those stress dolls do when you squeeze them. They needed some language to look at. They needed a draft tonight for their nine o'clock call. Hypothetical taxes and disregarded entities and Revenue Ruling 99-6. These things made him tired. Ethan moved his feet in circles beneath the table and kneaded the meat of his palms. All this sitting would give him a clot.

They took a break at two, and Ethan rolled his suitcase over to the hotel. The street was filled with construction crews. Men and a few women in yellow gear and muddy boots stood in line at the food trucks, and they ate hot dogs and gyro sandwiches standing up. A crew was laying rebar in the empty lot across the street. They tied it in places and walked along its length. Easy as gymnasts working the beam. It wasn't even thirty degrees out and the wind blew hard from the lake, but they didn't seem to mind. The buildings rose around them like cathedrals, and they were building another. It would last for two hundred years. He walked past them with his laptop and his suitcase, and all those winters in Colorado didn't prepare him for the wind. It was sharp as a blade how it worked its way through his coat. He pushed his collar up and kept on walking. Everywhere he looked there were cranes. Did they know how lucky they were? Those men who worked in concrete and steel and big slabs of marble. The welders and the bricklayers and the pipe insulation guys. They made things with their hands.

A group of kids walked past him with their teachers. On their way back from one of the museums probably. They wore name tags around their necks, and some of them carried pinwheels and held them high so the wind could turn them. They ran and pushed each other when the teachers weren't looking. The buses were waiting at the corner. The doors were already open, and the kids ran up the steps.

He set up his laptop when he got to the room. He unpacked his dress shirts and hung them in the bathroom. He turned the hot water on in the shower so the steam could work out some of the wrinkles. The room looked out onto a courtyard, and across the courtyard there was another tower with silver-colored windows. Seabirds flew
over the buildings. They were probably five feet across with their wings open. Heading south to where the ocean was warm. The water wouldn't freeze where they were going. The air was always mild. He closed the curtains, and the room went dark. They kept out every trace of the afternoon sun. The room looked like every other room in the hotel, and the hotels all looked the same, too, from one city to the next.

He needed to look at the latest redline. They wanted the language before their call tonight. He should set up his alarm clocks before he forgot, but he was tired from the flight and from sitting in that room. He was tired from not exerting himself, and he lay back against the pillows. Ruby had packed his toiletries, and she'd set some butterscotch candies inside his bag because they were his favorite. He unwrapped a candy and then another. He fell asleep to that sweet taste.

It was warm in the city. The air was still and the water, too, and the moon touched everything with silver. She took him by the wrist. Her hair was wet and coiled down her bare shoulders. He heard crickets and frogs and the slapping sound of water. He knew the route. The black lava rocks and the trees and the sand where it curved. The stars in their strange patterns.
It's time
, the woman said. Her skin smelled like vinegar and roses. The girl was already there, just a little farther along the shore. Her face had no marks and her dress wasn't torn, and she moved with her mother's grace.

It was time to take the ferry. Time to go into that water and nothing would hurt him there. The wind would never blow. He took off his shoes and let the waves wash his feet. The woman squeezed his hand. He looked into those dark eyes, but he found no mercy there. She pulled, and he stayed where he was. Her grip was strong as any man's. No more winters where he was going. He could set his burdens down. A fisherman dragged his basket along the sand. It was full with octopus and strange curling things, and he beat them against the rocks. His arm stabbed downward through the air. All around them things were blooming and bursting and falling to rot. It smelled like Ruby's greenhouse. The woman pulled again, and her face was angry.