Race Across The Sky Part 31

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, G.o.d." Janelle heard her say to herself. "They're still running."

Dawn unveiled a painting, pinks and grays, oranges and whites, masterly mist over brown tallgra.s.s. 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 gla.s.s. After all this time it still unnerved him.

He spread her arms and attempted some rudimentary reiki in the damp gra.s.s. 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 gra.s.sland.

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 cl.u.s.ters 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 tallgra.s.s. 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 gla.s.s sat in front of her. He could smell her from across the table.

"I had to eat," she explained softly, embarra.s.sed, "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."

"Kept going? To where?"

"You."

"To my house?" Shane asked incredulously.

She nodded yes.

His frustration overflowed. "Caleb's not a superhero, okay? He can't run two hundred miles with a baby."

"Yes he can," she explained. "This is what he does."

"But things go wrong in these ultramarathons, don't they? Everyone who starts plans on finishing, but sometimes they don't."

"Please," she whispered, "he has my daughter."

Shane looked out the dark window, shaking his head. "I didn't see them on the highway."

"He wouldn't be on a highway."

"That's the shortest route."

"He'd be where he feels safe."

"Where is that?"

"In the mountains."

"Well, we're not going to drive through there," Shane gestured at the wilderness frustratedly.

"On the small roads," June nodded. "That's where they are."

Shane left the diner lot and pulled onto a smaller road that seemed to run parallel to the highway. This seemed to be what Caleb would have done. He moved slowly, thinking how senseless it was to imagine that they would just stumble upon them.

For the next hours they scoured the pitch-black road. Two hours turned to three, four. He found his way back to the highway and drove to another strip of fast food for coffee, but it was his fear that kept him awake. Next to him June's eyes strained, finding hope in every shadow, seizing it with an audible intake of breath, and then dropping it in pain.

They spoke very little; somehow the silence felt necessary. But somewhere near Stockton he felt a desperate need to connect, to stay awake if nothing else.

"So what's it like?" he asked her.

"What?" she replied, the exhaustion leaking from her voice.

"To run like this?"

An unexpected blissful expression took over her eyes. "It's beautiful."

"But you put yourself through all this pain?"

"Pain's not a problem. I mean, physical pain." She looked out her side window, speaking to herself. "The other kind of pain hurts more."

"What kind?"

"Being a mom."

Shane nodded.

"No one ever tells you how much it's going to hurt. They make it seem so perfect in those books," she said, her voice rising. "But when I'm listening to her try to breathe, watching her just try so hard to crawl, and laugh, and she smiles anyway? I've never respected anyone like that. She looks at me wheezing and I can't make her better. I'd rather run a thousand miles. I'd rather run Yosemite and break my back than go through one more second of not being able to help her." She turned her head from side to side in the manner, he thought, of an injured bird.

"I have a son," Shane reminded her by way of commiseration.

"Is he healthy?"

Shane put a hand on her shoulder. It felt to him like bone, and he pulled away. Embarra.s.sed, he stared ahead at the amethyst sky, looking for shapes on the shoulders that might be his brother and her baby.

5.