Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth)

by Buchman, M. L.

  Then he got his face into the air ahead of the sail. The wind roared in his ears. The bow sliced the waves below his feet laying twin white curls of water to either side. The air was so fresh and so clean it was impossible that it was the same stuff that he’d breathed every day in New York. Here it was in his face. In his hair, in his soul.

  It was the most alive he’d ever felt and he never wanted it to end.

  # # #

  Before Cassidy had felt even a little normal after yesterday’s outing, it had required a very long, very hot bath and most of an afternoon curled up in front of the gas fire. The drenching rain had caught her barely halfway back to the car. Her suede jacket was a ruin and her leggings had defended her for thirty seconds, at most.

  This, at least, she knew how to solve. REI may have expanded into a national brand, but their flagship store was just a few blocks from the Seattle Times where Jack was an editor. She should have set up a lunch date, they hadn’t seen each other in a week, but she couldn’t find the energy. Not the best of signs, but she’d think about that later.

  The underground parking garage was a collection of small, ratty cars that should never have seen the light of day and nearly a fleet of Toyota and Honda hybrids. She parked her Jetta and glanced around for the inevitable parking level reminders. “Evergreen.” She wasn’t on level “2,” she was parked on a tree. And there was no sign of an elevator anywhere.

  The small exit sign indicated that the garage in no way connected to the store.

  She went back outside and clambered up the walkways and bridges over an artificial waterfall that was actually quite impressive. It roared and splashed, even had spray. She could smell the damp mist on the morning air as she hiked up concrete stairs spiraling through the trees.

  The elevator, when she finally found it, was outdoors as well, and wholly unused. Apparently everyone who came here was so damn healthy and outdoorsy that they took the stairs up above the waterfall. She stabbed the button for the top level. Rapped it twice more for good measure.

  The glass elevator stopped on a wide concrete veranda that afforded a view out over downtown Seattle and the older buildings of the Denny Regrade. This view of the Sound would be gone in a few years as the city continued its growth, but Queen Anne hill would be visible for decades to come.

  A latte vendor tended his outdoor stall and a crowd clustered about pretending it wasn’t thirty-six degrees and drizzling on the second of January. They were clearly all certifiable. Being born and raised locally had not provided her with the die-hard, outdoorsman independent spirit that was still de rigueur in Seattle.

  She raced through the doors. A greeter smiled and asked if she needed any help. Cassidy assured her she was okay. It was warm inside and buying clothes was one thing she could handle.

  A shout drew her attention upward. A twisted rock some forty feet high soared upward at the end of the lobby. A woman was falling. Cassidy let out a scream to match the climber’s just as a safety rope jerked tight and the climber swung brutally against the stone.

  Then Cassidy heard the woman’s laughter over the pounding of her own heart.

  A man clung to another face. “Quit goofing around, Teri. You fall on El Capitan and we’re going to let you go.”

  “Gimme a break, Tom. I slipped is all.”

  Her buddy scowled and Cassidy hurried through the door, resisting the hesitancy about grabbing the nasty axes that served as door handles.

  Maybe she did need help, like help packing a moving van and getting back to New York. Or at least with what was arrayed before her. To her left was a vast rack of backpacks big enough for her to climb into, each with a thousand straps. To her right were more sleeping bags than she’d seen since her one Girl Scouts’ campout.

  “Keep moving, Cass.” Books, energy bars, silvery packets marked “stroganoff” and another “ice cream.” Weird, it wasn’t just a story people told. Even as she watched, someone selected a half dozen packets and put them in a basket. She moved on and arrived among kayaks and there was nothing but canoes and bicycles ahead of her. To her right, skis and snowboards. A bit farther, boots.

  Boots.

  She needed boots. Good start. She’d work from the bottom up. A plan of attack, excellent. She moved across the wooden floor and entered the racks of boots. It didn’t smell like it should. Not the canvas and fine leather of Nordstrom or Saks. Not the mellower tang of Gucci nor the smooth sweetness of Armani. There was a heaviness like saddles that had hung too long in a tack room. Manly boots doing manly things.

  Reaching the end of the boot aisle, she faced the wall of individual boots waiting for their other half. There wasn’t a single manufacturer she recognized. No Anne Kleins, no Kenneth Coles. These all had tough, outdoorsy names. Vasque. Montrail. Ugg. Even the women’s boots were from these companies poisoned with testosterone.

  “Can I help you?” She turned and an incredibly fit girl who looked no more than nineteen confronted her in a little green vest and a white turtleneck. This time she’d take the assistance.

  “I need some new boots.” Her three-hundred dollar Weitzman’s had dissolved on the trail. As the path forced her back down the hill she’d just climbed, she’d lost a heel when it got stuck between two rocks. By the time she climbed up again and then prowled around for another half hour seeking the right parking lot among the trees, the leather had actually separated from the sole so that her foot stuck out. She’d done the last hundred yards with the broken boot in her hand, her sock-covered foot squishing with freezing mud, and the other leg two inches longer at the heel. It was amazing she hadn’t gotten frostbite or something.

  “Do you know what kind you want?”

  Again she faced the wall. They all looked the same. Brown tops, black rubber soles. But she knew how to handle that as well.

  “The best.”

  “What kind of hiking are you doing?”

  “That matters?”

  The girl was really polite. Not at a Nordstrom personal shopper level, but she managed to hide any disdain she was feeling from her perfect, teenage face.

  “Oh, yes.” She pointed at the one pair with a four-hundred dollar price tag. “We just sold eight pairs of those to a women’s team who are taking on the seven summits challenge.”

  “The seven summits?” Cassidy had entered not only another world, but they spoke a different language here.

  “Kilimanjaro, Denali, Elbrus, Aconcagua, Carstenza Pyramid, and Everest. I’m forgetting one. Hold on. Don’t tell me.”

  As if Cassidy might have a clue what she was talking about.

  Her blue eyes searched about. “Oh, and Vinson. I always forget Vinson.”

  “Vinson?” Kilimanjaro, Denali, and Everest were the only ones she’d ever heard of but she finally got the idea. The highest peaks on each continent. And a team of women were going to climb them in those boots. The ones perched smugly right there on the wall glaring down at her for daring to enter their presence.

  “Antarctica. Nearly five thousand meters. I like to read about it, but I’d never be crazy enough to try it.” The girl was terribly cheerful, which would be irritating if it weren’t so genuine. She was just way too perky.

  “I, uh, won’t be climbing Vinson.”

  The girl laughed, “Everest either?”

  “Nope.” She joined in the laugh and it felt good.

  “Heavy backpack?” The girl inspected her from the black leather jacket down to her Josef Seibel heeled, leather loafers, but was nice enough to keep her thoughts to herself as Cassidy was demoted another level.

  “Nope.”

  “Walks around Greenlake?”

  “A bit tougher than that.” Slogging uphill through the mud and the moss, definitely a bit tougher than the three-mile, paved, jogging path with a total elevation change under twenty feet.

  “Light hiking, but the best?”

  “Yes, that sounds good.”

  The girl reached out and unerringly grabbed a boot that looked just
like all the others. She excitedly launched into a long description, but after Cassidy heard the words waterproof, she tuned out the rest. That would teach the stupid mud to mess with a veteran shopper.

  Most of the other items fell to similar tactics. She became better at it as item after item filled her basket. On the second floor “light hiking” linked with “cold weather” had gotten her a lecture about skipping polar fleece and going with the traditional layering of silk socks under wool. Including “year round” had added long underwear of Merino wool. “All weather” had added waterproof yet breathable pants from some company named by aliens, Arc’Teryx. Or manybe they were a dinosaur. But the price was the highest, over two hundred dollars, so they must be the best.

  She threw in a black PolarTec fleece jacket with no one’s help at all. But the waterproof jackets were impossible. Even asking for help didn’t clarify the mess. The selection was larger than Saks designer racks and apparently each jacket had a different feature that made it particularly wonderful. She finally walked away when she learned that they all stopped at the waist.

  Cassidy wanted something longer and warmer. Thankfully she knew right where to get that. Michael Kors had a beautiful, knee-length, down-filled coat in this year’s line. He didn’t make it in black, but there was a brilliant red one that would look great. That would make it easier to tolerate the massive damage she was doing to her shopping budget with clothing she’d wear only twelve times in her life. Eleven, she’d already been to the January lighthouse.

  The basket was getting heavy. This was nuts. There was over a thousand dollars in there. Of course her agent had just e-mailed about her the London Times picking up her column in their Travel section with a query about a straight wine column in the Sunday edition; she was going international. Cassidy would justify this splurge as a proper celebration.

  Back on the ground floor, she passed close to a counter covered in a nest of electronics. She was nearly attacked by an overeager boy who looked so healthy he’d probably climbed Vinson before his fifteenth birthday. With his eyes closed. Backwards.

  “I see you’re going out in the weather,” she followed his glance to her basket. On the top were the red fleece watchcap that she’d chosen because it would match the Kors coat and the heavy gloves that she’d reluctantly chosen over the nice pair of sheepskin ones. “All weather” and “waterproof” had combined there.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Going off the beaten path at all?”

  The two hours she’d spent slogging through the muddy forest of Discovery Park answered that clearly for her.

  At her nod, the boy nearly exploded with joy.

  “You’ve just gotta have one of these!” He waved something at her too quickly to focus on.

  “What are they?” As soon as he stopped waving it about she saw the price tag of three hundred dollars and prepared to walk away.

  “GPSs.” At her blank expression, he launched ahead. “Global Positioning System. These toys tell you exactly where you are. See?” He punched a couple buttons and a pair of numbers appeared. Numbers a lot like the ones she’d been unable to decipher on the outside of her Dad’s lighthouse envelopes.

  “Then you can key in your destination, latitude, then longitude. We’re west so we’re minus.”

  That was what the numbers on the envelope were. Latitude and longitude. She felt stupid for not figuring that out, not that there was any reason she should have. She’d never seen coordinates in decimal form before. The whole experience been an adventure like Hansel and Gretel, always searching behind herself to see just where she’d dropped all of those IQ points she’d had before she walked through the doors. But hey, now she knew where Mount Vinson was. Or was it Vinson Mountain? Massif? She looked behind her, but didn’t see anything on the floor.

  He continued stabbing at the keys like a pro then turned it to her. “And there you go.”

  The tiny screen connected a green dot to a red one by a thin wandering line of red.

  “The nearest Starbucks coffee.”

  “And there I go, where?”

  “That’s you’re route. How you get there.”

  She inspected it more carefully and could see that the line followed the streets of a tiny map. He tapped it and it zoomed in. A bright arrow pointed toward the front door.

  “Do you have one of those that would show,” she clamped down on her tongue for a moment, “parks and other such places?”

  He waved it at her again. “This is it. Look. I’ve loaded in Washington State detail and the National Parks and the Blue chart. This is really cool. Look.” More button pushing and he turned it back to her.

  It showed a map in tan and white with tiny numbers on the white.

  At her blank look, he rambled on. “Blue chart. Water. The blue stuff. It has all the coastline info.”

  “Like lighthouses?” It slipped out before she could stop it.

  “You bet!”

  She’d clearly been labeled as a tourist.

  “Did you know we have one right here in Seattle city limits? Here it is over in Discovery Park. Shows the water depth.” He aimed a ragged fingernail, probably broken while wrestling a grizzly bear for food, at one set of numbers. “There’s the lighthouse and how often her light flashes. Then you just toggle it like this and, bang, there’s the park and most of the trails. The maps are pretty good even down at that level. Hit this button and you get the topo overlay so you can see which trails go up and which ones down. It’s just the best.”

  That last did it for her.

  # # #

  Cassidy didn’t glance toward the covered bottle of the last wine. She always preferred to let a wine speak for itself. She had little respect for judges who looked ahead, setting their expectations before they had discovered what was really in the wine.

  But this was different.

  This was a blind-tasting challenge. Ten bottles of wine lined up on an immaculate white table cloth. An okay ambience, a modern motif, the restaurant had been around six months or so.

  They should have decanted the wines into identical carafes; at least the foil had been stripped away and the brown paper presentation was always more popular with the crowd. Decanters simply made it easier to focus her attention.

  The final wine’s color was splendid. A ruby red so opaque it was almost black. The initial nose was a bit closed, but the wine had been properly served at sixty degrees, nicely below room temperature. Another point to the event sponsor. A quick swirl revealed abundant tears running down the inside of the glass. And the wine opened a bit. She swirled again. Dark fruit. Brown spice. Tarragon. Even… no, she wasn’t going to jump to conclusions. A bad habit on one hand. And on the other, she had an audience.

  The restaurant owner had done a nice job of marketing his “Ten on January Tenth” challenge, pulling more than just the usual crowd of oenophiles out of the woodwork. He’d promised some fine wines in the collection, U.S. and European. A nice spread of free appetizers hadn’t hurt either, though they needed to be further from the tasting table. Twice she’d had to cross to the far side of the cozy dining room to make sure the scent was the wine and not his Italian spicing. The second time, the owner noticed and in moments the waiters had shifted the more aromatic foods to the farther end of the buffet. Good service.

  The sip and quick intake of breath over the wine as it still swam on her tongue gave the expected results. Lemony and a confirmation of the anise on the nose rode into the finish. She spit into the bucket and nosed the wine again.

  There was something more. She didn’t have it yet.

  Another swirl and sip. More air. Another spit. Exactly the same dark richness.

  Ah. There it was. Not something there, but something missing. Almost no tannins at all. A wine this dark, yet so clean. Not mainstream. A true challenge wine to set apart the real tasters.

  She opened her eyes and realized that the restaurant was completely silent. Every face was turned in her direction, even the early
diners had stopped eating to watch her. Mr. Terence, that obnoxious cookbook chef who always avoided any request for his first name, probably said “Mister” on his birth certificate, had peeked at the wine label and then crumpled his bit of notepaper. The restaurant owner had noticed and was scowling. There was someone who had just lost his next invitation here.

  Cassidy didn’t need to look.

  It took her several moments to come back to the wine, the taste still rolling across her tongue. To come back and realize that she really had done something. She had moved out of the crowd of being but one of many in the New York tastings. Here, in Seattle, the many were waiting to hear her verdict. Hers.

  The temptation to dismiss the phenomenon as a big frog in a small pond was there. But Josh was here from Gourmet Week as well, which had made her nervous through the first four wines. He’d actually trained under Parker. He too wore a look of anticipation. He held up a piece of notepaper, carefully folded to show he was ready. He nodded for her to go ahead. Well, there was no avoiding it, and she didn’t need to on this one.

  “Italian. Apulia.” Some of the diners’ faces blanked. “That’s the region. The bootheel of Italy.” And the brightness returned.

  Josh was grinning when she turned to face Mister Terence who was making a show of hiding the bottle.

  “Taurino from the Negro Amaro grape. The Notarpanaro Salento Rosso. Either the ’97 or the ’01, but I’d bet on the former.”

  Terence’s face fell and Josh flipped open his slip of paper and turned it for her to see. He’d written just a number on it, “97.” The restaurant owner clapped his hands together and laughed, his teeth bright in his dark, Italian face.

  “An exquisite final choice, Mr. Parrano. It truly completes the other wines. Even a rearrangement of your last name. A nice touch.”

  He bowed deeply before taking her shoulders and kissing each cheek.