The girls came down for breakfast at a few minutes before seven and she told them. Beth put her face in her hands and wept. Micki got up and sat beside Gala and cried into her coat. Lana sat at the table and cried, too. No one pretended this small death was not a big thing, that her heart was not breaking a little and again.
“What’re we going to do with him?” Micki asked.
“Linda’s folks gave their dog to the pound.”
“No way,” Micki cried. “We can’t do that!”
Lana had given this event a lot of thought and had even talked it over with Frances.
“I’d like to have him cremated.” She paused, looking at her daughters. “I want us to take him up to Garnet Peak and scatter his ashes. Together.”
The girls were noisily enthusiastic about the idea. She hushed them.
“I know what I did was wrong,” she said when they could listen to her. “I’ve never forgiven myself and I spent hours—hours—in therapy trying to figure why I was so crazy. . . .”
Beth pulled her chair closer and laid her head down on Lana’s knees. Micki stood behind, her arms draped over Lana’s shoulders, her chin resting on the top of her head.
“I loved your father and in the end I didn’t want to share him, not even the pain I felt about him. Partly I couldn’t stand to see you two suffer but mostly it was just a selfish thing I did and I guess in my whole life it’s maybe the only thing I truly regret. I know that scattering Buster’s ashes together isn’t the same but—”
Beth looked up at her. “It’s okay, Ma. We get it. It’ll be like a symbolic reenactment.”
“A what?” Micki asked.
God bless Rachel Hoffman, thought Lana.
They chose a clear, still day when the ranger’s office in Cleveland National Forest said there was little wind. At Micki’s insistence, they dressed for the occasion in long skirts and brought flowers from the garden. Beth had chosen Buster’s urn, a fancy ceramic cookie jar from the French Garden Shop. Lana flinched when she read the price tag but said nothing.
The Laguna Mountains lie forty-five minutes east of San Diego and are the southernmost extension of the Sierra Nevada, rising in places to almost six thousand feet. They divide the arid coastal plain from the vast desert to the east and are themselves dry through most of the year. It had been another winter of scant rainfall and there was no snow on the ground, although in previous years Jack and Michael had often gone cross-country skiing in the Lagunas, once encountering a mountain lion sitting in the trail with his back to them. Without the allure of snow and in the middle of the week, Lana and her girls did not encounter another car as they drove along the winding Sunrise Highway off I-8, passing campgrounds and lodges and occasional vacation homes with their blinds drawn. In the meadows the wild grass was the color of ripe wheat and woven through the forest like a rusty yellow thread, appearing and reappearing in groups and alone. Lana saw the damage done to the pines by drought and beetles.
At the Pioneer Trail exit Lana turned off and parked in the lot.
They were entirely alone.
Beth and Micki had figured out the details and Lana had only to nod and be agreeable. She remembered the last time she had parked in this place. There had been half a dozen cars in the lot belonging, she later supposed, to hang gliders. Still, she had felt utterly isolated.
They walked single file along the rutted dirt trail, Beth leading with the cookie jar full of Buster’s ashes, followed by Lana and Micki carrying the flowers. They passed shrines Lana had never noticed before, cairns of stones with plaques and signs honoring men whose names she had never heard. Hang gliders, she thought. Or maybe just ordinary earthbound men, husbands and fathers.
Under a brilliantly blue and cloudless sky, the path to the peak led through a dun-and-green landscape of scrub oak, manzanita, and varieties of pungent shrubs Lana could not name. In sheltered crevasses, minute pink and white flowers bloomed. The rocky escarpment rose to the left, colored gold and deep maroon with streaks of green in the face of the rock. Beth led the parade to the east side of a rock formation and stopped. At their feet the path was only inches wide.
Lana bit back an automatic caution.
Micki said, “Watch your step, Ma.”
“I want to say some words,” Beth told Lana.
“Of course. Whatever you like.”
On the day she scattered Jack’s ashes, she had no voice. If she had opened her mouth she would have screamed.
Beth said, “Daddy, these are Buster’s ashes. He’s never belonged to anybody before us and we don’t want him to be afraid. So we’re giving you his ashes and asking you to take care of him.”
Micki said, “And Daddy, we want you to know that we will always love you and always miss you forever.” She looked at Lana. “Now you, Ma.”
“I don’t—”
“You have to say something.”
“Just say what you’re thinking,” Micki told her.
The wave of emotion that tumbled over Lana was a cousin to that which had rocked her to the core three and a half years earlier in this same place. She resented her daughters’ demand that she speak up and say what was in her heart, as if to do such a thing were easy or even possible. But then, a second wave of feeling passed through her and obliterated the first. This second wave was warm where the other had been cold, cool where the other had scalded her. She felt only gratitude. For Jack and their years together, for her daughters and for Buster. The tears in her eyes came from a pain that had joy in it. She reached into the cookie jar and withdrew a handful of ashes. She swung her arm out and opened her hand. The wind lifted the ashes and carried them away.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
850 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10022
Copyright © 2004 by Trudar Productions, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-0535-3
The Edge Of The Sky Page 36
