Copyright © 2008 by Claire Rooney
Bella Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First Edition
Editor: Cindy Cresap
Cover designer: LA Callaghan
ISBN-10: 1-59493-140-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-59493-140-6
To
Darlin’ Neal,
who took the shifting sands and gave me something better to stand on
Acknowledgments
No woman is an island, though some of us try really hard.
A special thank you to:
David Bernstein for listening even when he didn’t think I thought he was
Laurie Kutchins for being brave enough to answer the hard questions honestly
Mary Thompson for the enlightening arguments over obscure points of narrative theory
Susan Facknitz for giving me the ability to decipher Emily’s horrible handwriting
Inman Majors for the funny parts
Cindy Tingen for being there every Saturday at 8:30 without fail
The Gaston Group for the pumpkin goo and other squishy stuff
The Taos Summer Writer’s Conference for their support and encouragement
Kate for helping me explore the issues
And to Dorothy for the wicked dreams
A very special acknowledgment:
And not least, my heartfelt thanks to the extraordinary woman who suggested (oh, so politely) that if I didn’t like her book, I should go write my own. Wow! What a great idea!
About the Author
Claire Rooney lives on the east coast and divides her time between the mountains and the sea. During the day, she moonlights as an Analyst, holding a degree in Computer Science with a minor in Creative Writing. At night, she comes home to an ever revolving number of critters and works hard until the wee hours writing and trying to keep cat paws off the keyboard. Claire has been a frequent collaborator and contributor to Sister Speak, a literary journal and was the guest editor in 2007. She is, at this time, far enough over forty for it to be rude for you to ask and 100% certain that gravity works. But she’s still cute as a button. Look for her next book, The Color of Dust, coming soon in 2009.
Chapter One: BRIDGES
On my wedding day, while my father was putting on his tuxedo, I was pulling on a pair of black leather pants. As I shimmied the leather over my thighs, I pictured him tying on his bow tie, his long, nimble fingers making quick, precise pulls. While I buckled, zippered and buttoned, I imagined him sliding the jacket up over his still-broad shoulders, pulling down on his shirt cuffs with short, sharp tugs. I pulled my tank top over my head and imagined him standing in front of his mirror, looking himself over with a critical eye, lifting a hand to smooth back his steel gray hair. Flashes of brilliance would sparkle from his diamond cufflinks. He would tuck a small white rose into his lapel with a warm glimmer of gold gleaming from his wristwatch. I pictured him stepping into his shiny black shoes, toes pointed like a dancer’s, bending to arrange the tassels. I shoved my feet into a shiny new pair of Rockstomper boots and buckled them tight against my calves.
I stood in the middle of my room . . . but maybe I shouldn’t say my room. It was the same room that had been wrapped around me ever since I was a child, but I never felt any sense of affinity with it. Mostly, I think, because I never had any say about what went inside it, not the color of the carpet, not the pictures on the wall, not the toys in toy chest, not the clothes in the closet. My life had been full of the lack of choices. Even through the pallid rebellions of my teenaged years, all my choices were made for me, what I would eat, who my friends were, the shade of my pantyhose. This room, my life, never had a chance to be my own. And then, the last straw fell, the one where I couldn’t do enough pretending to make it go away but wasn’t strong enough to see it through. I had come to a point where I had to make a choice or give up choosing forever. At twenty-four, the point seemed a long time in coming.
I stood in the middle of this room holding myself still, listening for my father’s heavy tread on the circular stair, for the tiny clicking of my mother’s heels on the marble in the foyer, the whoosh of the front doors opening. But there was nothing to hear, just the awkward beating of my heart and the soft squeak of my boots as I shifted my weight from foot to foot. The house was too big, the front hall miles away, too far for me to hear the sharp bark of my father’s voice or to see the timid dip of my mother’s head, the slight hunching of her shoulders as his hand reached out for her. The silence howled against my ears. It always did in this house, this cavern of stucco, stone and ivy.
The new leather of my pants creaked and moaned as I walked over to the window and drew back a corner of the heavy curtain. I squinted my eyes against the bright sunshine and watched my parents walk down the portico steps, my mother, tottering on her heels, my father’s hand wrapped firmly around her elbow, his long fingers denting the flesh of her arm. They ducked into the limousine that was sitting patiently in the circular drive. It seemed to me that limos were always waiting much more than they were going. I always felt sorry for the drivers lounging around in their black suits inside a black car with the sun shining.
A second limo sat parked in the drive, a white one. Jeffries leaned against the driver’s side door, his legs crossed at the ankles, smoke from his cigarette curling up from his fingers. He was a good driver, as far as drivers went, always polite and never judgmental in that silently sneering way that some of them had if they disapproved of the destination or the company they kept. I’d always liked Jeffries. I was sorry my father picked him to drive me to the church. He blew out a thin stream of blue smoke from tightly pursed lips. With a flick of his wrist, he looked at his watch.
There was only one small hour left standing between now and the time that I should be getting into that car. He was waiting patiently in his black suit standing in the bright sun. What a shame it was that he would die of heat prostration or lung cancer long before he would see me tiptoeing down the stairs in my wedding gown. The dress still lay draped over the foot of my bed, like an abandoned lover, still wrapped in its plastic sheathing. I watched Jeffries wave a lazy arm in the air as the black limo drove away. It circled around the drive and disappeared behind the long line of hedges that hid the less fortunate parts of the world from our more privileged eyes, all the honest dirt and toil carefully hidden behind a veil of green leaves and red blossoms. I let the curtain fall into place and turned to face the interior gloom.
The room was quiet and still with only the faint whir of the air conditioner humming just at the edge of hearing. This room was always too quiet. Even when I was a little girl, sounds crashed against the oak paneled walls and fell in shattered bits to drown inside the deep pile of plush carpeting. When I was very small, I used to scream sometimes just so I could hear something, a faint vibration, the glimmer of an echo, the sound of the nanny’s feet thudding down the hallway. I wanted to scream now, a deep, ragged, epic scream, large and long enough to shatter the silence of all those years, but I didn’t dare. I paid the staff an obscene amount of money, a significant chunk of my carefully hoarded allowance, to stay out of this wing. And they would, but not if I started screaming, not if they thought I was hurt.
In a way, it was money needlessly spent. I didn’t need to pay them. They would have honored my wish even if I’d just asked for the time to be alone in my last hours of singleness. They understood what it was to be bound into servitude. Their bindings were born of necessity instead of political expe
dience, but it was still the same chain. They were good people. That thought came with only a bit of a twinge. God only knows how many rules I was breaking just thinking that, thinking of the staff as real people. But they were, and I wanted to leave them with something for the trouble I would be causing. In just a few hours, their lives would become a frantic kind of hell. I counted to ten to steady myself and then crept out of the room, tiptoeing over the plush carpet, quieter than a mouse, quieter than the maids, in search of a pair of scissors.
I started with my bangs. A deep breath, a quick snip, and twelve inches of shiny black hair lay in a frayed rope on the bathroom floor. Small spikes stuck up from my forehead. That was it, then. The first bridge was burning and I could almost smell the smoke. I wiped the sweat off my palms, got a firm grip on the kitchen shears and snipped again and again and again.
The strands fell to the floor in chunks that seemed heavier than they should have been. I imagined my father, as the scissors snicked, riding in the backseat of the limo. His face would be serene as he counted the cost of every hors d’oeuvre, every bouquet, every bowl of punch, and weighed them against his gains. Those gains included, of course, the son-in-law he purchased, the young man with the old money ties who would give him entrée into new conduits of power, buy him things his newly minted money could never touch. A daughter was not so high a price for that, and the net balance would be to his advantage. It always was. Of my mother, I pictured very little. I could see her long dark hair, pale skin and quiet gray eyes. She would be sitting in silence, small and frail, shivering slightly under the cold shadow of my father’s indomitable will.
A shade of her face stared out at me from the mirror. My coloring I got from her, the blue-black hair and pasty-skinned paleness, but the square jaw and the height came from my father. I stood just an inch and a half shy of six feet. My eyes came from him, too. They were brown like his, like a fine dark chocolate, like rich garden soil. Like horseshit.
One last snip of the shears and my hair lay curled on the floor all around me, dark strands on the cold white marble, a full circle of burned bridges, the blackened remains of all I ever knew. A sense of loss swelled inside me, filling my throat, stealing my breath. It was not the loss of the things I would be leaving behind or for the things I wouldn’t own anymore, but for all the things that never were mine and never would be now. The scissors fell from my hand and hit the marble with a clatter.
I pulled myself together, blew my nose, dried my eyes and swept my hair off the floor. I stood over the commode and watched it swirl around and around, flushing five times before it finally all disappeared. The kitchen shears, I tucked into my back pocket as I shut the bathroom door behind me. Standing in the darkest corner of my closet, I began to pack a pile of bright new blue jeans and crisp white T-shirts into a set of motorcycle saddlebags, settling them over top of my silk underwear and lace filigree bras. The clothes went into one side and the money went into the other, tightly bundled in thousand dollar stacks.
This plan had been a while in the making, ever since my father first introduced me to my new fiancée, and I was sure I had it all figured out. There were maps in the side pockets of the saddle bags with eight possible routes marked out in yellow, gas stations dotted in red. I had phone numbers for all the smallest motel chains and a prepaid cell phone tucked inside the money bag.
It was just starting into March. Balmy in southern California, the beginning of spring and beautiful riding weather. I’d been to Paris once, in the springtime, and summered twice in the Swiss Alps. I spent most of my falls at the house my father kept in Washington, D.C., where fur coats hung in the hall closet. But for all of that, I lived my life in southern California and had no real concept of weather. The sun shone or the wind blew. It rained on occasion, and maybe there was hail on a special day. Sometimes the earth moved, but that was all I knew. It never occurred to me to pack a sweater.
I buckled the bags closed and thought of the guests waiting at the church. The haute monde swathed in the best haute couture, not for my sake, or even for my father’s, but for the hope of being seen, for the dream of being filmed or photographed wearing the right thing, standing beside the right person. The peacocks preening for the vultures. I could imagine them growing ever more impatient, shifting in their places as delicate bottoms became bruised by the hard pews. They would murmur polite questions to their neighbors that would grow less polite over time.
I didn’t have time to feel sorry for them, only about ten minutes left before Jeffries would start to wonder, fifteen before the search began. I slipped on my black leather jacket, threw the saddlebags across my shoulder and slipped out of the house through the service door. I made my way through the garden paths to the groundskeeper’s garage where, even in the dust and dim light, my motorcycle sat gleaming. A beacon of truth in my life full of lies. I strapped down the saddlebags, wriggled my fingers into my gloves and threw a leg over.
An hour later, I was standing at the top of a tall bridge, the bike grumbling quietly to itself leaning over on its kickstand in the emergency lane. Warm sunshine caressed the shoulders of my jacket while a stiff breeze off the bay combed through my ragged two inches of hair. I clutched at my cell phone, the fancy one my father gave me with caller ID, a camera, video streaming and a GPS tracking device he didn’t think I knew about. I stared at the blank screen. By this time, he would be talking softly, urgently, with the seething groom at the end of the long aisle, issuing instructions to his toadies or trying to bully the police into organizing a search party. Being a man of means, it would take him a while to think of the simple solution. I thought of the passing minutes as small drops of water dripping off the outstretched wings of the sculpted ice swan.
On the bridge, cars and trucks streamed past, sometimes honking, sometimes shouting, mostly oblivious. I leaned against the railing and watched the afternoon sun glitter off the water far below me, at the tiny whitecapped waves and toy boats with their colorful sails. We had sailed under this bridge, my father and I, countless times when I was small and still too young to understand the art of the deal, that one hand gives while the other hand takes, that to profit you have to spend, or that image is everything, nothing is for free and everyone is expendable. The bright sparkles of sunshine stung my eyes. I swiped at them with the heel of my hand.
The phone chirped and made me jump. I almost couldn’t believe the number on the screen. It was not my father’s number. It was Weasel’s, my father’s secretary. My fist spasmed around the phone. I would have crushed it if I could, ground it into dust, scattered its atoms to the wind. The flame of rage burned through me and turned my doubts to ash, blurring my world before spilling it down my cheeks. I screamed then, there on the bridge, where no one cared to hear me. It was long and loud and epic. I threw the phone as far out over the water as I could. I didn’t stay to watch it splash. My bike roared to life with an impatient growl, the back tire screeching as I twisted hard on the throttle, blazing a short score of rubber, burning the last bridge behind me.
Chapter Two: WRECKAGE
Nineteen days of stretched out highways, through big cities and small towns, over tall mountains and flatlands, wide rivers and rolling green foothills. It ended on a thin dark line of a rural East Coast road with a pair of glowing eyes ahead of me, the sheen of a recent rain on the pavement, the asphalt twisting wildly underneath a canopy of overhanging trees. I remember swerving to miss the deer as he tried to leap over me, the back tire of my motorcycle screeching and skidding as a hoof flew in toward my faceplate.
Lying in a culvert, cold water seeping through my leathers, warm liquid pooling against my cheek, I was thinking that I should take my helmet off before I drowned. I blinked and was standing in a field of knee-high wildflowers, their gently swaying petals gray in the moonlight. A chill breeze rustled through the field. The flowers shivered and bobbed their heads. I shivered too, my head throbbing as the breeze ruffled through my hair and nipped at my ears. I raised my hands and tou
ched them to my face. My cheek was damp, my fingers sticky. The stars wheeled overhead, the moon rose higher in the sky and started to set. A pinpoint of light caught my eye, shimmering in the distance. There was something special about that light. Something I should remember.
“Oh,” I said speaking softly to the flowers. “I’m supposed to go to the light.”
There was no one there to stop me, so I moved toward the light as best I could with the ground rolling and heaving under my feet.
It was a halogen light, bright and blue. Seemed odd to me, though, that the entrance to heaven should be lit with a halogen light. I tried to frown, but the muscles in my face wouldn’t work. Underneath the light was a door. Stranger still. I thought heaven was supposed to have a pearly gate, not one made of pine and in the shape of a barn door, but then, there were a lot of things I didn’t know about heaven. Maybe this was the back-door and the only way in for people like me. I knocked softly, but God, I supposed, had pretty good hearing.
“Can I come in?” I whispered into the pine. There was a sound of movement inside, a shuffling of feet and a wet sounding snuffle, but the door stayed closed. I puffed a tight little chuff that was almost a sob and slumped against the wood. The door slid a little to the side, and then I remembered, God helps them who help themselves. I leaned a little harder, and the door slid open.
It was dark inside and smelled of horses and hay, but it was warmer than outside and I was cold and wet. I closed the door behind me, staggered over to a corner piled with loose hay and slid down the wall. Sitting in the hay, I hugged my knees tight against my chest. There was a snort above me, and something snuffed at my hair. I heard stamping and then another sound, a soft, concerned nickering. A blanket fell over me. A smelly, coarse blanket, but its rough warmth was welcome. I snuggled deep into the hay, pulled the blanket over my head and went to sleep.
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