Part 32 (2/2)

”How old is your son?”

Shane smiled. ”Ten and a half months.”

”Lily's almost fourteen. They can be friends.”

He thought about this as he drove. This image of Caleb living down the block, his adopted daughter and Nicholas growing up together as cousins, the family eating together every Sunday. It was a dream, he considered, realized by a nightmare.

”This kinetic energy?” he asked quietly.

”What about it?”

”Are Lily and Caleb giving it off right now?”

”Sure.”

He gestured toward the winds.h.i.+eld. ”Can you focus on them? Like, pick it up?”

June frowned and shook her head. ”That's what I've been trying, all this time. Every second.” Her voice broke. ”I can't feel them.”

”It's okay,” he replied quickly, sensing his question had pushed her someplace he did not want her to go. ”Every car he sees has a cell phone, and he can stop any one of them.”

She turned to him, nodding a.s.suredly. ”He's not stopping anyone. We're just on the wrong road.”

Shane connected with her confidence. No matter how irrational, it gave him a certain degree of comfort. He noticed a sub shop across the street.

”Hungry?” he asked. ”We're not going to find any perfectly balanced stew or anything. But you need to find something you can eat.”

He took her inside and ordered for them both. He ate a sandwich and June picked at a salad, and they walked back toward the car. He stared at his Civic, which had accompanied him along his journey up the ladder at Orco, throughout the northern swath of the state, to thousands of medical practices, conferences, sales conventions.

If only, he prayed, it would only get him to his brother.

6.

Bracketed by lights, the dark highway ascended straight up the mountain like a runway.

It possessed a wide shoulder; clearly it had been constructed to allow drivers some room to correct before plummeting to their deaths. This would provide them a little safe s.p.a.ce, so long as a sleepy trucker did not run them off the edge.

”Okay. Lulu,” he shouted, ”lift off.”

And he started up the steep incline under the flutter of a billion stars.

In the darkness 4x4s exploded past them like fireflies, small quick cars like lightning bugs. A large truck groaned by; from below them it had sounded like a wounded wolf. Caleb pushed a smile onto his face and forced himself upward. His quads and calves were engorged with blood to nearly twice their normal size. When he stopped and removed the backpack and reached for Lily, she pushed him away. She had never done anything like this before. He stood confused in the total blackness. Then he understood: it was his smell. It must be a baby's instinct to squirm away from a failing body.

His pain reached some new peak. Immediately he recognized it as different from any he had known before; he possessed no idea what to make of it.

As he moved forward, each step was its own war. His skin was so raw that the barest movement of his shorts and s.h.i.+rt felt like sandpaper. His shoulders bled where the straps tightened. His dry eyes ached from running against the air for three days. Everything from his feet to the tip of his nose was torn asunder. He felt frighteningly cold. Possibly his body had stopped producing rhodopsin; if that was the case, he thought, then he would soon go blind.

He felt as if he were being punished. But, he wondered, for what? For forcing himself off of his proper path, his father's voice explained. Fred appeared then beside him, it was just as it had been in those Issaquah days of his childhood. Only this time, he spoke.

”You have made a life that was not yours.”

Caleb nodded. He understood. It was the truth, he knew. If he had never seen Mack's book, if he had just stayed in New York and continued with his life like most everybody else had, then certainly he would not be in the midst of this outrageous torture. Fred agreed.

Instead, he would have attended the 2001 InterFinancial Holiday Party at the Whitney Museum. There he would have been introduced to a colleague's roommate, Dania, a brunette psychology student. He would have felt an instant spark as their fingers brushed by the bar. A year later, he would have given up his apartment with the untouched Wolf stove and moved into her one-bedroom. And the following Christmas, at a Vermont inn filled with firelight, he would have proposed.

Shane and his new girlfriend Janelle would have been in their wedding. As the city recovered, and his bonuses exploded, Caleb would have bought a house in New Jersey. And they would have had two girls, with his thin brown hair and long, loping legs.

As he ran, these images pummeled him. No, he agreed, tear ducts swelling, he should not be running up this mountain in the dark; he should be in that warm house with his wife and their daughters. Look how happy they were, how they filled him each evening with awe. Oh G.o.d, he sobbed, what had he given up?

A new pain electrified him. It came from no muscle or joint, but it was worse than any he had ever known. It came from very deep inside and burned him as if his nerves were being set aflame. But he had been taught to never succ.u.mb to agony, to confront it, and so Caleb forced himself back to that peaceful house. He studied himself.

He had gained some weight. His body full of antibiotics for his recurring sinus infections. He watched himself put on some expensive but rarely used sneakers and begin to jog through the planned curves of his town. Three pathetic miles later, he was bent over, his lungs burning with lactic acid, tugging at his shorts. He felt that something had gone wrong, that some crucial thing had gone unnoticed, but he would never understand what it was. And he burst into tears, that would not stop, no matter how long he stayed hunched over on the street.

And watching this vision of himself, Caleb broke through the wall. With a rush of joy, he knew that had he stayed in this life that Fred had meant him to live, he would have died never understanding the source of his suffering. It would have been not the tearing of his tendons but of his being which would have tormented him to his last hours.

The road he was on right now was the correct one for him, he cried. After all, he had chosen wisely. The stars seemed to have receded while he was lost in this dream, and when he focused on the road again, he realized that his legs were no longer straining upward, but pus.h.i.+ng against the blacktop as he moved downhill. In the distance he saw the dark shadows of a flatter plain.

He pulled off the backpack, lifted Lily out, and examined her as best he could in the darkness. Her diaper was damp, and she allowed him to stretch her legs and hold her, thank G.o.d. But it was time to end this.

Caleb settled the pack back onto the ruin of his shoulders; he began bleeding there directly. He clipped the waist belt shut and began walking down the final stretch of the mountain range, as the sky dialed back to a light gray of granite.

He saw houses then, emerging from the shadows. Small, close together, nestled in a valley. He could smell the ocean in the air.

And he understood that he was staring at the beginning of Oakland.

Shane awoke in agony.

His lower back ached. His neck had stiffened discomfortingly. He was in a terrible bed, in a roadside motel. He had trouble getting up to go to the bathroom, and something had begun to pulse above his right eye.

He went to the hallway outside the room and spoke with Janelle. When he returned, he stood in the doorway and stared at June.

”I need,” he said quietly, ”to stop for a while.”

June seemed to look smaller, sitting up in her bed, pulling its thin bedspread against her chest. ”Okay, sure. Of course.” She hesitated, looking down at the same stained s.h.i.+rt she had been wearing for three days. ”You want to stay here and rest while I look?”

”I need to go home.”

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