The Edge Of The Sky

by Drusilla Campbell

  Kathryn asked how Micki was doing. “She knows I’m not mad?”

  “She needs to hear it from you,” Lana said. “But, yes, she knows you’re not mad.” With the resumption of school, Micki had begun obsessing about The Fives, the officially banned but blatantly active school sorority that had announced her as one of the candidates for membership.

  “She’s a sure thing, isn’t she?”

  “So it appears.” Lana did not dare consider that Micki might be disappointed though she occasionally wondered how it was that, after years of being teased and hounded, Micki was now considered eligible for an elite sorority. “I feel sorry for Tiffany. She won’t like being on the outside looking in.”

  “Maybe she’ll get chosen too,” Kathryn said. “She’s on the list, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, but Mick says she doesn’t have the kind of style The Fives are looking for.”

  Kathryn grinned. “God protect us from teenage girls with style.”

  As they rode the only sounds were the soft clop of the horses’ hooves and the carping of crows in the scrub oaks. The sun was warm on the back of Lana’s neck. After some time she asked the question that had been on her mind since New Year ’s Day and in the back of her mind for years. Once she had asked it, she knew it was the reason for her visit.

  “Why are you afraid of Dom?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t act like you don’t get it.”

  “What brings this up all of a sudden? I’m not afraid of him. What a strange thing to say.”

  “It’s not strange at all. If you don’t think people know you’re afraid of him, you need to come out of the fog and look around. It’s obvious.” Lana reined Graylight to a stop. “Help me to understand, Kay. Please.”

  “This is just you and Mars making up stories.”

  It was true—Lana and her sister did talk about Kathryn, but not in the trivial way that “making up stories” implied.

  “He loves me, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m not saying he doesn’t.”

  “He’d never hurt me.”

  “And I never said he would, Kay.” Lana felt a stir of alarm. Why was being hurt even relevant?

  They rode on to the top of the hill. Beyond lay another valley, higher and shallower than the one that cupped Tres Palomas. At the far end a few cows grazed in the tall grass around a clump of cottonwoods, but otherwise the valley was as empty and peaceful as it must have been when Spanish soldiers first rode up from Mexico. The rain had brought up fresh grass, making the meadow before them a wash of green and gold.

  Kathryn and Lana dismounted and tightened their horses’ girths. Graylight turned one brown eye on Lana and watched her, as if amazed that she had caught on to her trick. That was the thing about horses, the reason Lana never felt quite safe on one: they could be tricky.

  She heard a sound and looked around her horse’s head. Kathryn was crying.

  “Oh, honey,” Lana said and wrapped her arms around her. “What’s this about? Tell me.”

  “You’ll get mad at him. You don’t understand—”

  “Just tell me what’s going on. I won’t let on I know.”

  “But he’ll be able to tell you know something.”

  “No, he won’t. He’s not psychic.”

  “You have to promise.” Kathryn looked at her, blue eyes glassy. “This is just between us. Forever.”

  Forever was a long time but Lana gave her word. But as Kathryn spoke, Lana realized these were things she did not want to know; they shocked and angered her and she had nowhere in her mind to put them.

  “I feel so trapped,” Kathryn said. “I can’t breathe and if I complain he says he’ll show me what it’s like to be trapped and he takes my keys away, sometimes for a week or more.” More than once he had stranded her on the ranch with only the phone and knowing she was too proud to call anyone, even her sisters. “Sometimes it’s just because he’s mad at the world and taking it out on me, or the house isn’t clean enough, or I’m not cooking the way he wants me to. Sometimes he says I need to settle my mind, spend more time alone. He says it’s for my own good.” Kathryn looked hopefully at Lana, her eyes like blue glass medallions. Bright cheeked, blond hair wisping out from under her helmet, she looked hardly older or more in charge of her life than the little girl made to sing and dance for Stella and her friends.

  Dom declared periods of silence when he forbade Tinera, Nichole, and Colette to speak to their mother.

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s the market. Work. He gets these moods. . . .”

  Once, after Kathryn had made him angry—“I don’t even know what I did”—he made her stand in front of her daughters while he listed her faults and told his little girls he would rather see them dead than grow up like their mother.

  “I’ll kill the son of a bitch.” Fury vibrated through Lana like a harp string. “Kay, he’s sick. You have to leave him. You can come to me. I have room for all of you. It’s not safe here.”

  Kathryn seemed surprised by Lana’s reaction. “He’d never hurt me, Lana.”

  “What do you think this shit is? He doesn’t have to punch you out to hurt you. You’ve gotta book it, Kay. Now.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “I didn’t say it was easy. Did you hear me say easy?”

  “I’m not sure the girls’d come with me. They’re crazy about him and I don’t know what all he’s told them.” Kathryn shook her head. “I can’t risk losing my girls.”

  “Well, that’s another thing. His relationship with Tinera is plain peculiar.”

  “I’d leave him in a heartbeat if he laid a hand on one of the girls.”

  “Call Michael. He’ll get you a good lawyer.” In her mind, Lana began to make a to-do list—call a lawyer, go to the bank—and gradually she felt calmer as if some kind of internal gravity had been restored. Wendy’s husband was a corporate attorney connected throughout the city. He and Jack had been best friends years before Lana met either of them. He had helped arrange Micki’s adoption, and she had called him whenever the weight of minutiae connected to Jack’s death threatened to overwhelm her. “He’s like part of the family, plus he’s a very wise and kind man, Kathryn. He’ll help you find the right lawyer.”

  Kathryn dug the pointed toe of her riding boot into the rocky soil.

  “You’re an abused wife.”

  “You’re exaggerating. He’d never put a hand on me.”

  Was that pride in her voice? Was she proud of the bastard’s restraint?

  “Kathryn, haven’t you been reading the papers and magazines the last twenty years? Go on line. There are hundreds of sites devoted to Dom’s kind of abuse.”

  For some reason, Kathryn laughed.

  “Talk to me, Kay.”

  “I knew you’d hate him. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “I don’t hate him.” Jack always said hating was a waste of energy. He told the girls to save it for the real evil in the world. “I don’t like him but I don’t hate him. He’s sick.” It would almost be better if he did hit her. “This kind of abuse is sick, it’s . . . demented.”

  Kathryn pressed her face into Jacaranda’s neck.

  “Come home with me,” Lana said. “We’ll wait for the girls and then—”

  “He hasn’t been bad the last few months.”

  “Well, gee whiz.”

  “He was so happy when I got pregnant again. I know if he had a son, he wouldn’t be . . . like he is. He wants one so much it makes him . . . strange. He wasn’t like this when we were first married, Lana. He says he had more hope back then. You know how hard he works, all the good things he does. He was a finalist for San Diego Man of the Year last year.”

  “I know all this.”

  “Well, he says he just doesn’t know what the use of it is, building a business and making a good name, unless he can turn it over to a son.”

  “And so you let him bully you, because yo
u feel sorry for him?”

  “I know how it sounds to you, but it’s not so simple. It’s not easy, living with someone who gets depressed like I do. I can’t always be there for him.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Kathryn dipped her head away.

  Lana thought she might throw up.

  Graylight swung her head around and lipped the shoulder of Lana’s denim shirt. She pushed her away.

  “Let me get this straight. If you don’t want to have sex, if you’re depressed or PMSing or—God forbid, just not in the mood—he takes away your car keys.”

  “Don’t be mad, Lana.” Kathryn’s high, sweet voice broke. “I love him. And he takes good care of me. The bad times, they’re not so often. Out of fourteen years?”

  Lana did not like whiners and victims who made no effort to get out of the trouble they were in. But this was Kathryn, for whom she had always felt a weight of responsibility.

  “Just try to forget I told you. I never should have. It’s this being cooped up, the rain, it makes me even crazier than usual.” Her sister had finished talking. She swung herself up into the saddle.

  “You know what I wonder about sometimes?” Her voice was airy now, as if they had been discussing nothing more significant than movies or recipes. “I wonder how far I could get on horseback, just riding East, I mean. It probably wouldn’t be hard to reach Arizona. And I could hide out in the hills.” She giggled. “I wouldn’t like the camping part, but I could do it, I could force myself.”

  Lana looked hard at her. “What are you planning?”

  “Don’t you ever daydream about getting away somehow?”

  In the last year and a half? Daily. Sometimes twice an hour.

  “Stop daydreaming and get real.” Lana mounted Graylight and gathered the reins. Her hands were slick with sweat. She felt like telling Kathryn to grow up and take responsibility for herself and the girls. But she couldn’t. Mars would say to Kathryn, “Get a life—sue the fucker,” which was one of the reasons Kathryn never called or confided in Mars. Lana’s role was to be supportive and receptive and pass Kathryn’s confidences on to their older sister so that in the end, among the three of them, they knew the same things. Lana thought there must be a psychological term for this kind of triangular communication and she was pretty sure it wasn’t healthy. But how did a family change habits frozen in place for decades?

  “Either come home with me or call Michael. I know you don’t like to think about divorce but the truth is—you know this—not all families are meant to stay together. No matter how much—”

  “I’m not leaving him. I can’t. Not now.”

  “Why not?”

  Kathryn bent down to stroke Jacaranda’s neck, sat straighter, and shifted her seat in the saddle. “What do you think I mean?”

  “You can’t be. It’s too soon.”

  “Not for the Fertility Queen of the Great Southwest.”

  “You miscarried—what? Three weeks ago? It’s impossible.”

  “I always know. The next day. I’ve never been wrong.”

  Lana focused on the far horizon, the rolling hills and cattle, the crows screaming. When she breathed in, the cool air seemed to burn her nose. She tried to think of something honest and supportive to say, but her mind was a blank. She turned Graylight toward home and kicked her into a trot.

  Kathryn came after her. “Don’t be mad, Lana. If I try to divorce him, he’ll punish me in ways you can’t imagine. I can’t imagine.” They slowed to a walk. Kathryn reached across the space between the horses and touched Lana’s arm. “In the end, I’d be worse off than if I stay.”

  “You can get protection. A restraining order . . .” A great weariness filled Lana, as if the bolts of her back had begun to rust. “You have to take care of yourself, Kathryn. Do it for the girls. He’s poisoning them. Not just against you but against being women. If this goes on, can you imagine how they’re going to grow up? What kind of prehistoric men—” Kathryn’s eyes had glazed over. Lana’s words were not registering. “When we get back to the house I’m going to write down Michael’s number. I want you to keep it. In case. That way you’ll have someone to call.”

  “He’ll find it.”

  “Well, shit, Kathryn, hide it where he won’t. Are you saying he goes through your things? He searches your closet?”

  “No. No, I don’t think he does that.”

  “If you have to hide it, stick it in the toe of a shoe you never wear.” Lana paused. “Will you do it? You won’t throw it away?”

  “I don’t need it. I know Michael. I know how to reach him.”

  Chapter Eight

  Lana’s nerves were bopping. She could not go home or even back to work, so she parked her car in the first mall she came to and walked the length of it. She wandered through Crate and Barrel, looking at the dishes and glassware but not really seeing them. At The Pottery Barn she sat on a tapestry-covered display couch and immediately jumped up. If she had not she would have lain down, tucked her legs under her, and curled in a fetal position. As she hurried from the store she was pretty sure the saleswomen were whispering about her.

  Lana was eight years older than Kathryn, and the joke between the sisters was that Lana had changed Kathryn’s diapers more often than Stella. And shoved her stroller miles along Sunset Cliffs. And met her after school to walk her home, helped her with homework—Kathryn had never been a whizbang student—taken her to the doctor and dentist, to her dancing and piano lessons. But there was no way she could help Kathryn out of the mess she was in with Dom. So why wouldn’t her mind leave it alone?

  Lana left the mall and drove into town. As she turned off the Martin Luther King freeway, she was distracted for a moment by the sight of the city cut against the sky and water as clear and clean as an image in a child’s pop-up book. And right there in the foreground she read a sign: FIRENZI CONSTRUCTION, BUILDING A BETTER SAN DIEGO TODAY FOR A BETTER TOMORROW.

  What was it the kids said when they meant vomit? Hurl. Lana wanted to hurl all over that sign.

  The next day Stella called Lana to say she had a headache and would Lana drive out to Lakeside and pick up the rent from Dora at the Hollywood Cafe. Lana arranged to do it at a time when Mars could come along, too; on the ride out, she told her everything Kathryn had told her.

  “Wow, I had no idea he was so creative.”

  Lana reached across the front seat of the 4-Runner and punched her sister’s shoulder. “This is serious.”

  “No kidding.” Mars did not speak for a mile or so as Lana maneuvered the car into the fast lane and they drove up past the college and into La Mesa. The moon roof was open and the sun felt warm as summertime on the top of her head. On the radio Holly Hoffman played jazz flute softly. Lana thought how the notes must fly out the moon roof and confuse the birds.

  Mars said, “Did you tell her he’s crazy?”

  “Duh.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She loves him.” Lana sighed. “He’ll change when he has a son. Yadda-yadda-yadda.”

  “I don’t think he’d hurt her, do you?” It was unusual to hear doubt in Mars’s voice. “I mean, crazy as he is, I still think he’s mad about her.”

  “Or just plain mad,” Lana said.

  “Jesus,” Mars muttered. She took a pack of Marlboros out of her purse and played with the box, passing it from hand to hand.

  “Smoke if you want,” Lana said. “I don’t blame you.” She shoved in the car lighter.

  “I’m trying to cut down. My house smells like a saloon.”

  “You know what I can’t get out of my mind? The image of her standing there while he dissed her. To the girls. Her own daughters. Just standing there, taking it. I don’t know who’s crazier, him or Kathryn for taking it.” The night before, Lana had lain for most of the night, eyes closed, blanket up to her chin, her mind playing out scenarios of rescue and revenge.

  “It’s up to Kay,” Mars said. “She’s a grownup.”

&nbs
p; “Well, I think we could debate that and anyway, you two have never been all that close. You’re almost old enough to be her mother.”

  Mars was fourteen when Kathryn was born a few months after Stella married Stan Madison. It was 1966 and Mars was already three-quarters out of the house, protesting against the war, smoking pot, staying out all night. The rages among Mars and Stan and Stella made Kathryn cry and no one except Lana seemed to hear her. So many nights she had taken the baby into bed with her. It got to be a habit, one that made them both feel better.

  Mars said, “She’s like Ma—she’s got lousy taste in men.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think any man ever treated Ma like Dom does Kathryn.” Lana grinned at Mars and they managed to laugh. “I’d pay good money to see one try.”

  The Interstate curved down into the El Cajon valley crowded with shopping centers and strip malls and houses and trailer parks and miles and miles of asphalt for driving and parking. During Lana’s childhood it had been greener and more open, a wide valley of fields and streams cupped by dramatic mountains—not high but rugged and in some places made impassable by boulders and scrub-filled canyons. In the distance the rock face of El Capitan shone like rose stone in the westering sun.

  Lana turned off Interstate 8 onto 67 and checked her watch. Almost four. She had meant to leave town an hour earlier but this and that had come up and she had not wanted to leave the job. Carmino had the flu and though Moises tried his best, managing the big nursery alone taxed his skills. Thank goodness she would be driving against the traffic on the way home, but even so, she would be late. She had left a note for the girls telling them where she was and asking them to put a pork loin in the oven. But they might not read the note in which case they would have to eat pizza again or order out. The list Lana kept in her purse was four pages long now and she was so fixated on crossing things off it that she often forgot about basics like paying the bills and putting a roast in a timed oven. Maybe she would bring something home from the Hollywood. Dora’s chicken-fried steak was wonderful, and there was nothing wrong with having chicken-fried steak for dinner once or twice in a lifetime.