Authors: Lynne Spreen
She went inside, opened all the windows, and began the process of organizing and cleaning. First she broke down the bed, returning the dinette table to its pedestal and the cushions to their function as bench seats on either side. Then she rolled up the bedding, stuffed it in a cabinet, and hung up Frieda’s clothing. In the tiny restroom, she found an overnight kit with toothbrush, hair brush, and assorted pill containers. These items, along with Frieda’s clothes, would eventually be packed in a cardboard box and marked for shipment to Denver.
When the back end of the van no longer spoke of the woman whose journey ended there, Karen sat down at the dinette to rest. She noticed a string of amber beads on the floor and leaned down to pick up the rosary. It could only have fallen to that precise spot if Frieda had dropped it from the bed last night, no doubt clutching the beads as her nervous system faltered. How long had she suffered in darkness, alone in her terror, until she had gathered up enough strength to somehow call for help?
Karen lay down on the bench seat and cried, her grief ballooning to embrace the totality of her losses, of Frieda and her parents, her marriage and her work, and mortal life from which she could not regain a single misspent minute. When her head was so congested that she could no longer breathe, she choked off the last of the tears, and standing, felt her way to the towel rack where she mopped her face and neck. She looked in the mirror and saw swollen slits where her eyes used to be. She picked up the rosary, went outside, and dropped into a chair. With the beads laced between her fingers, Karen leaned back and simply listened. The wind rustled through the soaring cottonwood trees and ravens squawked in the distance. The river rushed by, its currents rippling against the rocks. She could smell the damp mud along the shore, and the rich sweetness of decomposing vegetation. Eyes closed, she could be anywhere. Where would she want to be?
She felt the beads of the rosary. The last time she saw it, Frieda was clutching it in one hand and the armrest in the other, praying they could outrun the dangerous men on the highway outside of Cheyenne. Karen wondered what Father Engel would say if he knew about their flight to freedom. Would he blame or absolve her?
It didn’t matter. Life had unfolded and caught her up in its danger, and she had reacted in a fiercely logical manner. She and Frieda had traveled many miles together, unlikely compatriots as one of them journeyed toward her end and the other, toward her beginning.
Her eyes opened, and she blinked in the sudden brightness. With no job, no husband, and no reason to hurry back to California, or anywhere at all, she had only to decide her next destination and point the van in that direction.
Duty pulled her home to California where she could make a contribution. The job market would be friendly to her, and she knew it wouldn’t be long before she secured another high-paying, powerful position. All she had to do was climb into the driver’s seat, turn the key, and return to that which was familiar.
She heard Frieda’s voice again, from just two nights ago, sitting by the campfire, talking of the future.
Decide how to live your life,
she said,
or somebody else will.
To hear Frieda tell it, Karen was a youngster with the world at her feet.
“If you were ninety, you’d know what I mean,” said Frieda, “but right now, you can’t see it. That’s human nature. We don’t know what we have until we lose it. That’s why I’m warning you.”
They had sat quietly, listening to the snap of the flames.
“What do you think I would do if one morning I woke up and I was your age, forty years younger than I am right now?” said Frieda. “Let me tell you, girlie, if that happened, nothing would stop me. Nothing.”
Now Karen watched a trio of kayakers paddling down the middle of the river, and she marveled at their courage or, depending on how you looked at it, stupidity. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the river was placid, because it was so wide and deep you couldn’t see that it flowed dangerously fast. You had to look. If you watched carefully, you would notice objects racing by, here a duck resting on the current, there a log as big as a car, and both of them gone in an instant.
.
T
he palm trees swayed in the morning breeze, their fronds waving to welcome Karen home. Sunlight reflected like diamonds off the iron-blue Pacific, and the smell of salt in the air filled her lungs. Even the traffic couldn’t put a dent in her happiness. It was good to be back in sun-drenched Southern California, relishing the familiar. A wide grin broke across her face.
She parked next to a row of shiny new cars and went up in the elevator. When the doors opened, many arms reached out to hug her, the associates and colleagues she thought she might never see again, and her throat tightened. She broke away from them and walked down the hall to Peggy’s office.
“What the hell?” Peggy looked up from her keyboard. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I could say the same about you.” The women embraced, and Karen took a seat. The drapes were drawn against the sunlight, leaving fluorescents as the only illumination in the smoky office. “What happened to the cruise?”
Peggy shrugged. “Boring. Nothing but fat people eating. I got off in Barcelona and flew home.”
“And Wes let you come back.”
“I know where the bodies are buried.”
“But you hate him.”
“Aw, he’s not so bad. Behind that weasely exterior, he’s a lot like my kid. The one I never see. Besides, he actually apologized to me. How many people can say that?”
“You’ve got the magic touch.” If Peggy wanted to believe it, Karen wouldn’t disabuse her. She stood up.
“What’s next?”
Karen glanced at her watch. “I have an appointment with the weasel.”
“Age discrimination is a joke. You can’t make it stick.” Wes sat back in his chair, glaring at the file that sat reeking between them on his desk.
“I can and I will, and you know it.” Karen tossed him a business card. “I have a whole firm full of lawyers ready to go.”
The file contained the names of eighteen older employees who had been fired in the past twenty-four months. All were over forty. All had acknowledged in writing that Wes had badgered them repeatedly before their terminations, using expressions such as “geezer, old fart and battle-ax,” and opining that the company needed an infusion of “new blood” and “young ideas.” All were willing to file age discrimination lawsuits, according to Karen.
“Fuck.”
“Exactly.” Karen sat back, smiling.
Wes scowled at the window, beyond which a small plane chugged across the sky, towing a banner. Something about vodka. “What do they want?”
“Call Peggy. Tell her to bring the checkbook.”
.
K
aren stared out across the arid landscape. Other than wheel marks carving through the sagebrush, no sign remained of the Bronco. She hung the rosary on a rusted metal fencepost and returned to the Roadtrek. Without the sound of Frieda’s voice, there was only the low whine of the road and a gentle vibration of housewares stowed securely in the galley.
Karen got back in the van, holding it steady as an eighteen-wheeler blew past. She ran through a list in her mind, trying on the options. Her golf clubs were in the back. She might follow the Lewis and Clark Golf Trail through North Dakota, or the Audubon through the southern states, or one of the dozens of other golf trails across the country. She could spend a few weeks in Dickinson with her family and friends, check on Father Engel’s office situation, and maybe even drop in on the governor, but then she would head south ahead of the snow. The CRS ladies had said they would be in the Florida Keys for Thanksgiving and Karen planned to join them.
Out of a cloudless sky, a blast of wind attacked the van, but this hefty Roadtrek could handle it. It was a 210, the biggest and beefiest of the line, bought with the proceeds from her house in Newport Beach. Heading north on the same highway she’d travelled with Frieda, Karen knew about wind. It never stopped. It only changed direction. On each curve or rise the prevailing gusts might come at her from any point on the compass, blasting first one way and then another. At the top of a hill, she passed a fluttering highway sign bearing a picture of Mount Rushmore. Past that she saw nothing at all except miles and miles of sweeping dry grasslands rolling out to the horizon in every direction.
She realized she was speeding out of habit and eased up. Over the past three decades in which she had reported to work every day in a large corporate building, years in which she had lived cheek-by-jowl with her neighbors in a gated community, in which she had driven slowly down congested roads through frenetic cities, she had forgotten what was meant by the concept of space. Now, unconsciously, she had been hurrying to get through it, but there was no need. No cars rode her bumper. The sun was plenty high and the day would be long. She was free to choose her own speed through this vast park-like space.
The highway, one lane in each direction and narrow like a ribbon, stretched out in front of her for a dozen miles before disappearing over a hill. When she reached that crest, she knew she would see another ribbon reaching out for ten or fifteen more miles and when she finished that and topped the next hill, there’d be yet another ribbon road and another and another, a dozen or more times that afternoon. As the miles rolled by, she became enthralled by how much country surrounded her, and just how incredibly vast it was.
Suddenly she understood something that confounded her for years–how people could look at the sky or the ocean and feel reassured at their own insignificance. She had always wondered how feeling small and powerless could give a person comfort, she who had always drawn security from significance. As Karen had moved up the career ladder, accumulating more money and power, she felt the world was less dangerous.
Yet at this moment, she realized what they might have meant: as you accepted your insignificance, you could also accept that you were not in control of nor in charge of the world. You could go through your days concerned only with your own small world and the circle of people who loved you.
“Room enough, and time.” The phrase tickled around the edges of her memory, something she’d read in a book or heard in a movie, a blessing proclaimed by the Native Americans about places such as this. Here on this highway in the vast freedom of the plains, her mind uncluttered by a daily agenda or the demands of a frantic populace, she could permit herself the luxury of thought. She slowed the van until it came to a stop, the highway deserted for miles in both directions. The wind rocked the van, blowing in through the windows, rearranging her hair until she was blind and thrumming past her ears until she was deaf. Karen shut off the motor. Her bare feet touched the blacktop, warm but not hot. She filled her lungs with the dry, clean air, right off the plains and miles from any town. She heard a ground squirrel chirping and saw antelope walking along on the other side of the barbed wire fence, tearing clumps of grass from the rich earth. The rippling grasses were topped by feathery beige flowers that resembled wheat.
Insignificance: for the first time she considered she need not accept responsibility for everybody and everything within range in her world. In taking on that responsibility she had not only overburdened herself, but shortchanged those for whom she worried. Why had she assumed them incapable, taking that weight on her own shoulders? Other people surely carried within them their own strength, their own resources, and she finally saw she had not been responsible for her parents’ satisfaction with their lives, nor that of her relatives, nor her former employees at Global Health, nor what happened to the planet after she left it.
Instead, she saw herself as a bright, vivid figure standing on a timeline, her ancestors barely visible behind her, their small, beloved bodies dim and fading into history. In front of her she saw only stick figures moving into the unknowable and impersonal future, as anonymous as the ancestors. As if she slid a magnifying glass along the ruler of history, the figures became larger and clearer as they edged nearer in proximity to her own life. They gained names and identities, but only for that small space in time they shared with her.
In front of the van she stood on the center line of the deserted highway, her arms outstretched, eyes closed. The wind embraced her with its clovered breath, wrapped itself around her waist, between her legs and under her arms, lifting her. She turned in a slow circle, her arms reaching out, her fingertips lengthening to touch all that she could see in three hundred and sixty degrees of solitude and peace.
It was enough. It was everything.
.
Gratitude and love to my family: my sweet husband, Bill, whose kindness, patience and generosity are seemingly without limit; my incredible mother, Marie Kuswa who is still my most ardent cheerleader; sibs Karen, Tom, Verne, Nan, Cynthia and Bob, for never losing faith; and my awesome kids and grandkids: Danny, Amy, Ella, Andrew, Lisa, Carlos, Richard, Jeff, Donna, Mike, Miranda, Sara, Sean, and Baby Spreen, for being everything a mom could want. I am proud of all of you.
To my critique group who made me feel smart when it was warranted and the rest of the time told me when my writing stunk: Ray Strait, Jim Hitt, Harlee Lassiter, Vicki Hitt, Mary Jane Kruty, Peggy Wheeler, JoLynne Buehring, Judy Howard, Kathy Shattuck, Kathryn Jordan, and Jim Parrish.
To my friend Tammy Coia and her unending dedication to helping women capture their memoirs on paper.
To my mentor, Michele Scott, my editors Jennifer Meeghan and Wendy Duren, and my cover artist Damon at
Damonza.com
for the professional boost I needed.
To all my Hemet and Palm Desert friends who cheered me on without hesitation: the Wolfe Pack, Palm Springs Pen Women, and the Palm Springs Writers’ Guild.
To Michael Stephen Gregory and his crew for making it possible for me to learn and grow professionally at the Southern California Writers Conferences.