Running Hot

by Rachel Hanna

  Cody glared through the windshield. "That kind of scares me. Even if it's over."

  I smiled, not happily. "Yeah. Well. It is over. He came home one night in a foul mood. His agency had lost an important account and he'd been instrumental in messing it up. Nothing that doesn't happen in advertising, but he was on edge anyway, and the agency was looking at layoffs anyway, and he was worried and he took it out on me. It wasn't the physical so much. It was that he changed the locks on the doors, dead bolted all of them and they only opened with a key. Which I didn't have."

  Cody was starting to hurt my fingers. I wouldn't have taken my hand back for the world.

  "He didn't really hurt me that time. It was more the being locked up. I couldn't run. I couldn't do anything. I had no phone, of course. No internet. No landline. Just me, there, every day, waiting for him to come home. The third day I waited for him to leave for work and got dressed in my running clothes. It was early January and it had been so cold and gray and we'd just hit the annual warm spell. Sun was out, temps in the high 50s. I'd been looking forward to it. When he stopped me?" I glanced at Cody. He was watching the road, that muscle jumping in his jaw. "Despite everything else, that was the final straw."

  "Why didn't you go out a window?"

  "He'd screwed them shut. All the downstairs windows. But I'd been looking out the back windows, at how high up they were, at whether or not I could make it down a blanket rope or some other movie like move. That day? Sun out, temps up, Jason off to work? I snapped. I was staring down at the ground, trying to judge how far, could I crawl along the garage roof and make it down to a fence? Not without hurting myself and I wasn't willing to chance the run. I honestly think I was just aching for one run."

  I turned and grinned at him then. It startled him. He blinked several times. "What?"

  "Well," I said. "After I broke out the bedroom window with Jason's weights, it seemed only proper to go after more than one run."

  It was a slow smile he gave me, not the least smirky.

  And so I told him the rest, summarizing, moving quickly – that Jason hadn't gone that far that day. Maybe he suspected something. Maybe he'd parked down the block. But the minute I emerged from the back gate he was there, his BMW spotless and shining in the sun. He was shouting before he even got the window down, before he got stopped, and I had time to run along the dirt along the side of the house, the unfinished sidewalk he'd never risk the Beamer to forge, so he had to park and lock and shout at me the whole time to stop.

  It was wide open behind our house, BLM land, all Jeep and dirt bike trails, and it should have been dangerous and intimidating, but I ran into it because it promised safety. I darted along paths I knew, surrounded only by sage brush that didn't hide me, and Jason shouted and gave chase but I had a good head start and I didn't stop, and when he began to falter, I found my endurance. Up and over the foothill, down into the maze of valleys on the other side. Eventually I'd come out in the community of Red Rock, one north valley closer to Reno than my own, and when I did drop down off that foothill, I headed straight to a convenience store and called first Melody and second, the sheriff's office.

  We drove in silence for about ten minutes after that, Cody's hands tight on the wheel now. I didn't say anything. He'd asked, but I'd still dumped a huge load on him.

  About ten minutes after I'd stopped talking, he swerved to the side of the road, cut the engine, undid his seatbelt, got out and walked fast up the side of the highway, covering maybe an eighth of a mile. He stopped then, far away but I could still see he was breathing hard. He stood with his hands on his hips, staring at the sky, then turned and walked just as fast back to the truck. He got in, looked at me, unbuckled my seatbelt and, without saying anything, pulled me into his arms, cradling me like I was going to fall apart, like I was something precious he wanted to protect. One arm circled my shoulders. One stroked my hair. He lowered his cheek atop my head and just breathed and I felt one more remnant of ice I hadn't known was still inside me begin to melt.

  After several long minutes, he started to talk.

  "My grandmother is an amazing woman. She's almost ninety now, walks every day, drives around town in this absurd Lincoln and pays her bills in person. Not because she can't figure out the internet – she licked that the minute it came out – but because she likes the responsibility. She grew up in the time of TB and she got it in high school. Her family lived in Michigan, where it was too wet for her, but that was home, they had a farm and they expected her to stay and when she married she was expected to move nearby and be available to help the family because that's what they did then.

  "Only my grandfather, he'd been to Iwo Jima and throughout the Pacific during the war. He had a good job with the phone company and they were willing to transfer him to California where it was a lot drier and where his new bride wouldn't die."

  I made an mmm sound, and blinked. I tried to imagining a marriage made up of caring rather than controlling.

  "So he moved them to California and he saved her life and he never held it against her, never said it had been a hard thing to leave his family, he had seven brothers and one sister, his parents. He did it because he loved her. So when he got Alzheimer's and his knees were stainless steel and he'd get up every night to go to the john and forget he couldn't walk and forget it wasn't World War II and forget who she was, she still struggled to keep him home."

  "The volunteer firemen," I said. I was still in the safe darkness of his arms.

  He nodded against my head. "Came every time. Got him up, took him to the bathroom, got him back in bed, checked in with her."

  I struggled in his arms. "You said he..." And then stopped.

  "Died in a fire."

  That didn't explain it. Something drove him. Something made him stop talking and go cold and still, his eyes losing their light.

  So I waited, holding him as much as he was holding me, until he said, "I wanted her to change the stove. Everything else was safe. She had keyed dead bolts too, but for them, it was a safety measure – he couldn't get out and wander away. The bathtub was a step in. There were handles on the walls, not attractive but useful. She'd done a lot of the stuff people do to baby proof. It was all safe."

  He stopped again.

  "Except the stove," I said. "Gas?"

  A deep breath.

  I thought I understood. Maybe he'd caught a sleeve, his hair, had gotten too close. One night when Cody's grandmother was too tired to wake, when Cody's grandfather's knees held him up.

  "I'd asked her to change it. She kept saying she would. I was in college. It wasn't like I had the money, and my parents were off in Los Angeles getting a divorce. I asked her to change it."

  I didn't offer platitudes. I didn't speak. But what else could he have done?

  "She said she would."

  He was silent for so long I finally asked. "What happened?"

  "She paid for my semester at college."

  It fell into place like ice. Not his fault. In no way his fault. He'd been ready to do what he could, to save the money, to postpone college, to help her out, if she'd just use the money to change out the stove. Too late.

  "I'm so sorry," I said, over and over, and now I was holding him as he breathed, just breathed, in my arms.

  There was time, I thought, for the day I would tell him his grandmother deserved the free will all of us deserved. She had thought there was time. She had done everything she could. She carried a burden now he could talk to her about and help lift. He didn't have to carry it. Honoring her meant accepting what she had wanted to give him. Time to tell him she couldn't blame him, didn't, because I knew he still went to see her, still fixed up her place, still took care. And for her part, she fed him and fussed and sent him home with cake and clean laundry.

  For now I held him, understanding his demands of me on the mountain, his telling me what I could and couldn't do, demanding I go with him or let him drive me, the smirking arrogance that masked the fear that someone else wo
uld get hurt on his watch.

  There was time, because I wasn't letting go of him, and he wasn't letting go of me. I hadn't made it all the way over the mountain, but I'd done what I wanted with my race. I'd stood on my own two feet. I'd crossed the Sierra on foot, I'd run if not one hundred miles, then far enough to know I could.

  I'd run, one more time, from one life to the next.

  Time to go home. There'd be other races. The next I might have a partner. His calf muscles said he ran more than he had admitted. A partner, or a pacer, and if neither of those, then someone to cheer me on at the aid stations.

  Someone to meet at the finish line. Someone to go home to.

  It was time to go home. I lifted my head from his chest, blinked in the sunlight, met the blue eyes that met mine. I kissed him lightly on the mouth that wasn't smirking, but would be soon. I was pretty sure of that.

  "Let's go home," I said, and he didn't question my choice of words.

  He started the truck, and we drove up the mountain.

  * * *

  THE END

  Copyright © 2015 by Rachel Hanna

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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