The Breathtaker (32 page)

ONE WEEK LATER

D
IVIDING OKLAHOMA
almost in half was an area called the Cross Timbers, an impenetrable swath of blackjack trees and scrub oak that ran down the center of the state. To the east of the Cross Timbers were the woodlands, where the annual rainfall sometimes exceeded fifty inches. To the west was the drier half of Oklahoma, once home to the Plains Indians, a group of warlike nomads who followed the migrating buffalo herds. This was where the Wild West began, in the arid prairie of the Great Plains.

From west to east, the land fell away like the steps of a staircase, the high plains of the Panhandle giving way to descending beds of sedimentary rock. Red sandstone from the canyons of the sandy river valley swept across the plains in great undulating waves. The dirt was red, the wheat was yellow, the sky sometimes green during tornado season; but the heart of Oklahoma beat red, white and blue.

Charlie stood on a rise with Willa and Sophie, facing the southern sky, where the horizon merged into one hazy line and the distant storm, infused with lightning, was in excess of fifty thousand feet. Swirling rain, fog, the constant growling boom of thunder. His father would’ve approved.

Sophie clutched the canister of her grandfather’s ashes in her arms, the grief making her quiet. Her silver locket was clasped securely around her neck. The skies to the north were striated with horsetails, and whenever the sun burst from behind the clouds, they could see shimmering fields where hundreds of wildflowers turned various shades of pink and purple in the flapping wind.

Wearing a white shirt and a wide tie, Charlie helped his daughter open the canister, and together they prepared to release Isaac’s ashes into the oncoming wind. She rose up on one foot, the bones of her vertebrae rippling like the segments of a caterpillar, while Willa read aloud from a Christina Rossetti poem. “Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.”

Sophie tensed, nervous wrinkles creasing her face. “You do it,” she said, handing her father the canister.

Charlie flung the ashes into the air. “So long, Pop.” They filtered up like the ephemeral bodies of swarming insects, while an unearthly light splintered through the clouds. What was strong in him came from his father; what was wrong with him came from his father as well, and he could accept that.

Willa closed the book and eyed them with tremendous empathy. He held her tightly, reminded of the loneliness he felt whenever she got up for work each morning, the warm little concavity she left in bed beside him. She rose on shaky legs to kiss him, a single tear sliding on a curved path down her cheek. The sun rose higher across their faces, and for one trembling moment, all was right with the world. Charlie Grover was a hopeful man.

“There goes Grandpa,” Sophie said softly. “There he goes.”

Together they stood staring at the spectacle of grass in motion. Coneflowers and blazing stars brightened the grasslands, where enormous herds of buffalo used to graze, herds measuring up to twenty-five miles long and fifty miles deep. The herds were gone. Their grief flooded forward like the wind.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Sara Ann Freed, Jamie Raab and Larry Kirshbaum, Carter Blanchard, Helen Fremont, Wendy Weil, Rich Green and Keya Khayatian, Harvey-Jane Kowal, Kristen Weber, Molly Kleinman and Emily Forland, Eric Brown and Mike Rudell; and most especially to my husband, Doug, whose wisdom and insight grace these pages.

About the Author

A
LICE
B
LANCHARD
won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction for her book of stories,
The Stuntman’s Daughter
. She has also received a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, a New Letters Library Award, and a Centrum Artists in Residence Fellowship. Alice Blanchard lives in Los Angeles with her husband.

D
AISY
H
UBBARD
caught herself staring at the flight attendant’s elegant French knot and wondered why she didn’t have the flair some women had with their hair. As a scientist, Daisy had always been hopelessly pragmatic when it came to her looks and seldom wore jewelry, never used perfume or nail polish. She pressed her unpowdered forehead against the cold glass. They were hurtling through the atmosphere, cruising along at six hundred miles per hour under the illusion of stillness. The moon floated in the night sky as if it were tethered to the ground by an invisible line. Daisy gazed at the landmass below. They were flying over scattered American cities—cities she’d never been to, cities whose identities evaded her now, constellations of light blossoming out of the darkness. Clusters of wattage, billions of bulbs.

She caught her troubled reflection in the window and tested her forehead for a fever. A migraine had moved in and unpacked its bags. She had taken the night flight from Boston to Los Angeles and was on her third glass of sour-tasting Chablis, the Boeing 747’s turbo engines droning steadily in the background. She tried to process what the detective had told her over the phone:
Your sister stopped paying the rent and disappeared from her apartment without a trace. Her current whereabouts are unknown
.

The plane suddenly began to shake with turbulence, and the “FASTEN SEAT BELT” sign blinked on. She hadn’t reviewed the emergency instructions yet—something she traditionally did before each flight—so she picked up the laminated card. The printed instructions reminded her that the seat cushions doubled as flotation devices, the life rafts were stashed inside the overhead compartments, and the nearest exit doors were pretty far away from Row 23, Seat A. As she studied the brightly colored diagrams, she became convinced that, should the plane crash for whatever reason, she and the strange man seated next to her would plummet into some polluted, unknown city and become one with the asphalt.

Daisy shoved the laminated card back in its plastic sleeve and closed her eyes, while the plane bucked and shuddered against the oncoming wind. They were thousands of feet above the cold, silent earth. She wanted an aspirin badly, but she’d packed the bottle inside her checked luggage. The next jolt against the jet stream took her breath away. Fear was shortness of breath. Fear was rapid breathing.

Now the strange man sitting next to her said, “Watch the flight attendants. If they’re not scared, don’t you be scared.”

She smiled gratefully.

He offered her a peanut. “What’s your name?”

“Daisy,” she said.

“I’m Bram.”

“Hello, Bram.” They shook hands.

“Are you from Boston, Daisy?”

“Yes,” she said, remembering that she wasn’t very good at idle conversation. Most people didn’t like to talk about the things she wanted to talk about—quantum physics, the Earth’s rotation around the sun, the fact that Einstein got his best ideas shaving.

“So, Daisy.” Bram seemed to enjoy the sound of her name on his tongue. “What brings you to L.A.?”

“My sister’s missing,” she told him.

“Missing?”

“She’s schizophrenic. She does this sometimes. She runs away. Only this time it’s thousands of miles away from home.”

He looked at her as if she’d just rattled off a list of fatal plane crashes. They exchanged a few more inanities before he fumbled for a magazine and pretended to read.

After a while, the turbulence eased, and she could swallow normally again. She turned to look out her window at the pitch-black below—the haunting emptiness of the American West. The sun felt all of its 93 million miles away. She could hear Detective Makowski’s voice inside her head now, low-pitched and authoritative.
“We checked the Jane Doe’s. We’ve checked all the morgues. Nothing’s come up.”
She stopped breathing momentarily, unable to absorb the fact that the police were already thinking that her sister might be dead.

After they’d landed safely at LAX, the man named Bram followed her silently off the airplane. The terminal was a blur of activity. She trailed a huge crowd down a long green corridor toward the Baggage Pickup area. There were countless twists and turns, and they had to pass by two metal detectors. Daisy found an ATM machine, but it was broken. She looked around and realized she was lost. “Which way to Baggage Pickup?” she asked a passing stranger.

“Follow me.” Bram took her by the elbow.

Daisy didn’t trust men who steered you places, since there was no telling when the steering would end. It was only eleven o’clock (2 AM back in Boston) and she’d had too many bravery drinks. Most of the people inside the terminal were dressed for the beach, colorful logos splashed across their jeans and T-shirts, and Daisy was feeling seriously overdressed in her tailored blouse and knife-pleat skirt. These terminals were well air-conditioned. She felt a chill and wished she’d worn a sweater.

They found the Baggage Pickup area and waited for their luggage. The baggage handlers kept hurling people’s suitcases through a trapdoor in the ceiling. Bram got his right away, then stood around waiting for hers to arrive.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Thank you. Really.”

He left looking mildly disappointed.

She didn’t like the sickening fluorescent wavelengths and grew dizzy watching people’s luggage rotate by. Several other night flights had arrived from the East Coast, and soon this corner of the terminal was noisy and overcrowded. As the suitcases with matching totes came flying through the trapdoor in the ceiling, Daisy instantly recognized her ugly yellow suitcase, the one she’d dragged around with her from college to graduate school to her internship at Berhoffer. She’d always been embarrassed by that cheap, cheese-colored vinyl, which had never failed to give away her lowly status as a scholarship student who knew nothing about cotillions or summers in East Hampton, and who’d never set foot inside a country club. She made the mistake of attending a liberal-arts school for spoiled rich girls whose doting dads bought them Thoroughbred horses to be stabled nearby. Daisy had been brought up on her mother’s accounting salary; somehow it’d never occurred to her how poor the Hubbards were until she’d gone away to college.

Now the baggage handlers tossed Daisy’s suitcases down the chute as if they were trying to see how far they could throw. The wheeled pullman landed with a crack on the edge of the luggage carousel, its lid popping open, her unmentionables spilling out.

“Idiots,” she grumbled, snapping it shut again. She couldn’t help feeling small and insignificant as she wheeled her bags over to a plastic bench molded to fit the contours of something—not the human body, that was for sure. She sat in exhausted silence, while people became pinpoints. The airport was so huge and impersonal, she dissolved into apathy. Banks of fluorescent lights made a constant hum, like a dull chorus. So this was how Los Angeles swallowed you whole—right away, before you’d even set foot outside the airport gates.

She leaned against the cement wall until the back of her head began to throb. She swore she could feel the Earth’s motion somewhere underneath her breathing. Conflicting noises washed over her like dust disturbed by a fan.
Anna’s missing
. She didn’t want to think about it. Fear was paralyzing. Fear was immobilizing. She stood up, determined to keep moving, and dragged her luggage across the lobby and through the sliding glass doors, where she was hit by a torrid blast of muggy air.

She swam through this soup down the gritty sidewalk toward the taxi stand. The cabdriver was tall and gaunt and reminded her of an aging character actor. He deposited her luggage into the roomy trunk of the cab, while she slid in the backseat. All around them, concrete terminals stood in beams of washed-out light.

“Where y’all from?” the cabdriver asked in a southern drawl that reminded her of Truett.

“Boston,” she said, suddenly nostalgic for everything she’d left behind.

“Beantown, huh? Miracle City?” He glanced at her through the rearview, tires squealing as they swerved away from the curb. He drove past monolithic buildings and dark alleyways—was the city always this desolate? “Remember Dukakis riding around in that tank, looking like an idiot?” he said. “And then his campaign tanked, remember? Miracle City, ha. That was some miracle.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about. She leaned against the sticky vinyl seat, the pain milling aimlessly around inside her head now. They drove past a series of squat, empty-looking buildings, then took an entrance ramp onto the freeway. The sky was filled with millions of stars struggling to penetrate through the smog layer. It was hard to believe that, thousands of years ago, there had actually been glaciers in Hollywood instead of palm trees.

“I’m from Alabama originally,” the cabdriver said, turning around briefly to look at her. His nose began with a broad bridge and grew vigorously from his face before ending abruptly in a pair of deeply grooved nostrils. “Me and the missus moved here twenty-five years ago and never regretted it for a single second. Nossir. There’re plenty of advantages to living in the second-largest city in America, you know? Out here, you’ve got more of everything. Out here, everybody has a different set of wheels. Nobody needs a cab.”

And it was true, the driveways were crowded with vehicles of every kind—SUVs, motorcycles, trucks, mini-vans. They were cruising through a residential area now, the gridlike streets stretching for miles past identical-looking bungalows painted pink or persimmon or peppermint. Everything seemed so promising here, so full of hope and opportunity.

“Hey, do you like pie?” he asked.

“Pie?” Daisy blinked. “Um… sure. I guess.”

“Well okay, then. You’ve got to try the Pied Piper down on LaBrea. They make fifty different kinds of pies, I kid you not. You won’t find anything like that back East.”

He dropped her off at a small, ugly motel in the middle of West Los Angeles. A low-grade fear was making her ill. The sky was deep cobalt, and the closer she looked, the more stars she could see. She paid the driver, who tipped his hat and sped off. Then she dragged her luggage across the asphalt toward the manager’s office.

The middle-aged manager had a face like a tight ball. His mouth was slightly open, and he stared at the color TV on his desk. A ballgame was playing.

“Daisy Hubbard,” she said. “I made a reservation.”

The motel promised low rates, air-conditioning, free parking, and a swimming pool. AAA members received a 10 percent discount.

Inside the privacy of her own cabin, Daisy stretched out on the double bed and tried to find her inner self. The air conditioner hummed noisily and the room reeked of Lysol. She thought she understood what might’ve drawn her sister to the West Coast. Out here, you could reinvent yourself. You could slip on a whole new personality, and nobody would notice or even care.

She went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, then tugged at her hair with wet fingers, all her motions anxious and hard. The paleness of her skin alarmed her. She had a bad hangover and pinched her cheeks, trying to feel something. Even pain was preferable to this present torpor. She smiled at her reflection, revealing a set of perfectly proportioned teeth. Back in the sixth grade, she’d forgotten to brush her teeth on a regular basis, and when the orthodontist finally took her braces off, there were cavities in her front teeth as random as bullet holes. These days, her porcelain fillings were faintly stained because of all the coffee she drank. But she liked her smile. It was wide and friendly, unafraid to show off its defects.

Daisy collapsed on the motel bed and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the luminous neon glow leaking through cracks in the mini-blinds. She tossed and turned, while outside her window, fragments of light whizzed past. After a while, she fell into an exhausted sleep. Her dreams were shallow and disturbing, like mild stomachaches. She had a dim memory of Anna back home in Vermont, shuffling downstairs like a zombie and squinting into the noontime sun as she entered the kitchen with a cigarette dangling between her lips. Her long red hair was caught up in an elastic band at the base of her neck, her eye makeup was smudged and her face was puffy from too much sleep. Or maybe it was the meds. “Hey, you,” she said, trudging over for a lethargic hug and kiss on the cheek. “Finally made your way home, huh?” She smelled of sleep, of the desire for oblivion.

Daisy stirred and opened her eyes. The clock said one AM. She sat up and turned on the TV set, and some kind of plucky banjo music assaulted her ears. A man in a cheap suit was standing on his head. “You won’t find a better deal, I guarantee!” he hollered at the camera. He reminded her of Truett, same lanky sex appeal and hard-sell sensibility. In the next shot, he was doing cartwheels.

She wondered how there could possibly be fifty different kinds of pie and added them up in her head.
Apple, pumpkin, lemon meringue, Boston crème…
She counted all the way up to fourteen and figured there couldn’t be any more than that. Then she remembered.
Pecan
. Of course.
And peach
.

“Sixteen,” she said out loud, the unexpected smallness of her own voice sending shivers cascading across her scalp. Great. Instead of curing fatal diseases, she was counting pies. How could Anna have been so careless with her life? Was she trying to ruin everything?
Because congratulations, Anna, you’ve succeeded
.

Sweating profusely, Daisy got out of bed and decided to take a shower. She peeled out of her damp clothes, balled them up, and tossed them on the bed. Her back was knotted. The bathroom door didn’t close all the way. She worked her hands over her tense neck muscles as she stepped into the shower. She unwrapped the bar of complimentary soap and let the cool spray hit her. The shower stall smelled of other people, and the tiled floor was spotted here and there with mold. How well did they clean these places, anyway? She avoided rubbing up against the milky glass doors, while a sharp, tepid spray hit her face. She lathered herself all over, hands circling her skin, and hoped that by the time she was done, things would have magically righted themselves again.