Oxygen (17 page)

From the airport
I call Charlie Marsallis’s office and leave my cell phone and my sister’s home numbers on his answering machine, in case any charges arrive from the district attorney while I’m away. The second call I make is to my malpractice insurance company. After punching in an endless string of automatically answered and forwarded numbers I land in Caroline Meyers-Yeager’s voice mailbox. Her recording informs me she is away from the office for more than a week but her assistant would be happy to help me, or I may leave a message at the tone. I begin with a polite summary of my meeting with Charlie Marsallis and end with a barely restrained rant about unethical legal charades, which is amputated midstream by the beep concluding my allotted digital space.

The jet engines fight the tenacious grip of gravity—a battle I always marvel at surviving—and the supernatural feat of soaring five miles above the earth takes hold. I am, for the moment, unavailable to prosecutors and accusers. Thousands of feet below, the Rocky Mountains slough into farms and deserts; the Colorado River is siphoned into perfect green circles stitched across brown land. Just before we descend I take the white box from beneath my seat, open it and release the slender gold chain from its chocolate rose, then clasp it around my neck.

Lori lives in the plains just west of Fort Worth, where cattle drives used to camp on their way to the transcontinental railroad and settlers laid claim to Indian lands with barbed wire. Now, a grid of pavement allots quarter-acre swatches of azaleas and scrappy live oaks to homeowners who coax green growth out of the dust. The lushly watered lawns invite barefoot play, until the Texas sun slaps you back inside. The moment I step out of Lori’s car the heat swallows me like a blood-thirsty beast. It takes my breath away.

Behind me the
tick, tick, tick
of a sprinkler reminds me of summers spent racing through their spray. In the two years since I last visited, the sprawling brick and stucco homes have seeped toward the flat horizon to claim more open space for the seemingly endless array of families able to afford them. The sidewalks are deserted.

“Is it OK that I put you in Lia’s room tonight? I didn’t have time to get the guest room ready yet—I’m using it for an office and papers are spread out all over the bed.” She is scooping up baseball mitts and LEGOs and balled-up socks as we walk in. “Sorry about all this junk. You look hot.”

“Seems like I can’t handle Texas summers anymore. Too long up north in the rain, I guess. When did you cut your hair? It’s cute.” It cups her chin at the front, and the highlights pick up the pale taupe hue of her skin, her dark eyes.

She ruffles the feathery fringe at the nape of her neck. “I cut it all off around Christmas. I’m coloring some of the gray—can you tell? Now we don’t look so much alike, huh? Sit down, I’ll get some iced tea.”

“Where is everybody?” I call out to the kitchen.

“Neil’s at a sleepover and I made Elsa take Lia to the pool so I could pick up the house—you should have seen it in here two hours ago.” The room is sprinkled with evidence of five lives, scattered like excavated artifacts of the modern American household, a maze of plastic toys and polyester clothing, a cornucopia of synthetic abundance. Lori brings in the iced tea and settles opposite me across a vast, beveled-glass coffee table stacked with home decor magazines and real estate journals. An abandoned game of Monopoly spills to the floor when she sets down the tray of tea and frosted glasses. “They’re excited to see you. Elsa is beside herself.”

“I was hoping she’d be at the airport. I wonder if Lia will even remember my face—I haven’t seen her since right after her third birthday.”

“We look at your picture. She knows you.” Lori crosses her legs beneath her in the armchair and studies the swirling ice cubes in her glass, then looks back at me and smiles—her smile so like our mother’s. “So, should I ask you how you are?”

“Probably not.” I pick up my tea and focus on squeezing the lemon wedge, stirring the tea with the yellow rind. “I think, right now, I want to feel every one of the two thousand miles between me and Seattle. Thanks, though, for letting me come at the last minute like this.” I smile, looking back up at her. “And for asking if you should ask.”

“You’re welcome. You’re
always
welcome.” After a pause, she adds in a brighter tone, “Well, you look good.”

I have to laugh. “No I don’t. I look haggard.”

“All right, you’ve looked better. You must have been up all night, getting things pulled together. Do you want to take a nap before everybody gets home?”

Even the suggestion makes me aware of how exhausted I am. Lori leads me down the hallway, lined with her own black-and-white photographs of the children, into Lia’s bedroom—an altar to Walt Disney. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Belle crowd the pillow and I place them next to the bed before turning back the quilted spread. Last Christmas I gave her a pink tulle princess costume with sparkled plastic high heels. Lori told me she wore it to bed every night for weeks, despite the scratchy lace.

Above me a canopy floats on four wooden pillars, and ruffled curtains swoop back into braided ties like Rapunzel’s locks. What a dreamy five-year-old bed—enclosing its sleeping treasure in a safe and private kingdom. I pick up an oversized picture book from the floor and browse through it, waiting for drowsiness to settle. The illustrations are luminous, the pages framed by interlaced ivy and climbing roses, bodices and dancing slippers embroidered with filigreed golden weaves. Every story describes evil vanquished by good, loneliness banished by love, wrapped up with a final triumph of royal nuptials. At what age did I notice the fairy tale always ended with the wedding? At what age did I begin to question the unwritten conclusions of women’s lives?

I’m awakened with a start when Lia jumps into the middle of her bed. I shriek and then roll her over to tickle her belly, doughy and soft beneath her T-shirt. How sweet that she can love me in the flesh after knowing me mainly as a voice over the telephone.

“Look how big you’ve gotten,” I say, brushing her brown hair back from her face. Her eyes are dark and shiny as coffee beans. “Your mother must be feeding you too many vegetables to get you so tall in just two years.”

“Come outside, Aunt Marie. You have to see my secret garden.”

She stands and pulls me to my feet with five-year-old urgency. Lori is basting chicken pieces in barbecue sauce as Lia leads me, arms over her head grasping my hand, through the kitchen and out the screen door, letting it slam behind us. Their terrier circles in a whirlwind to get her attention. The concrete is still warm, radiating back the day’s heat. Lia steps catlike across the prickly coolness of spiky grass; the naked soles of my feet tingle with this unaccustomed contact with earth.

She guides me around behind the garage to a fenced enclave of garbage cans and redolent grass clippings. There rises a pyramid of sand, abandoned after some recent landscaping venture, an adult’s forgotten project converted to a child’s wonderland. We crouch side by side, conspiratorially, and the seemingly solid mound of sand discloses castles and moats, Tupperware lakes and twig forests, winding mountain roads and intersecting tunnels carved by her small hands. Caverns of sand shelter plastic knights battling rubber dragons, and fat pink ponies with blue manes parade inside a pencil-fenced corral.

Lia crouches in the way of little girls, heels flat against the ground, knees accordioned against her chest, a flexibility granted before the pelvis wings open for childbearing. A breeze of evening air, moist and still warm, lifts off the Texas prairies; her fine hair feathers across her eyes and she sweeps it aside with a clutched fistful of princesses. Her skin is pure in the shadowy evening sun, a downy gold, unmarred by whatever strains will engrave themselves on brow and chin in her future. I reach over and stroke her face. Her body, at this age, is an efficient machine of DNA repair and well-regulated cell division, birth upon birth of refreshed generations of perfect tissues. By the age of twenty it will begin to lose the race with time, sliding slowly into the decline of age, ceding itself unto the next generation.

“Aurora’s going up to her bedroom now. She’s changing clothes for her birthday party.”

“I see that,” I say, squatting beside her in the dirt until my legs begin to ache and I sit down cross-legged. “How old will she be?”

“She’s sixteen. This is her pony and she’s just a baby. She’s one years old.”

“Well, we should help her get dressed up, then. Will she be wearing her crown?”

Lia smoothes the nylon hair and wedges a glittery tinfoil crown over the doll’s forehead. “She’s getting married on her birthday.”

“She’s mighty young to get married, isn’t she?”

Lia is absorbed in stretching a tiny blue gown over Aurora’s inflexible arm, her breath staccato with each tug at the material.

“Aunt Marie, when will you get married? Mommy says I could be in your wedding someday.”

“Did she?” I reach over and loosen the Velcro waistband impeding Aurora’s vestment. “Well, I guess I haven’t found the man I want to marry yet.”

She jams sandy high heels onto Aurora’s feet, and sticks her upright in the sculpted castle. Then she rocks back over her heels in the dirt and looks up at me, squinting slightly against the setting sun. “Are you looking?”

“Looking?”

“Looking for your husband?”

She scans my face with serious purpose, curious about how this distantly admired aunt has missed such a critical benchmark. I prepare an explanation of the twenty-first-century woman’s choices in life, and then surprise myself with an abrupt and uncalculated answer. “Yes, I guess I am.”

This seems to settle some mild disturbance in her view of life’s natural order. Then she frowns slightly and says, “But not at night.”

I smile at the ease with which I can resolve this final puzzle about my world. “No. It’s too dark to look for him at night.”

The screen door bangs shut, and Aurora and her pony are abandoned to the fate of the night as Lia runs to the back porch. Lori is arranging chicken and hot dogs on the propane grill. She hands me a Coke and sits down in a canvas sling chair, dragging another beside her for me. The evening has cooled to a tolerable heat as long as I sit still. I roll the Coke can against my cheek to steal the cold.

Thousands of cicadas hum as twilight arrives; the sound inhales and exhales as one unified creature, hovering like an aura without visible source. It invokes barefoot summers playing in the open field behind our house—a field in which my sister and I once buried a mangled rabbit we’d found in the blackberry brambles, victim, it appeared, of some neighbor’s dog. A shopping center covers that field now; car radios have replaced the cicadas’ mating calls.

“I told Elsa to be back for dinner,” Lori says, turning her wrist to glance at her watch. She shakes her head and adds, “Her best friend has a big brother she’s got a crush on.”

“Yeah, I heard about that one. Do you know him?”

“No. But I’ve seen him and I don’t blame her. I swear, it happens overnight. Thank God she at least talks to you. I’m not sure she hears anything I say.”

I take Lori’s hand across the dark space between our chairs. “I’d tell you if I heard anything you needed to know. Promise. I don’t think you have to be worried.”

Lori gives me a wry smile that I remember signaling, decades ago, some secret held over me, the older sister. “I know. I count on that. But you start worrying about your children the day they’re born. Sometimes, when I’m waiting up at night for Elsa to come home, when she’s pushed her curfew to the last second, I ache for her to be a baby again. I ache for the days when I was the center of her universe, even though I know it’s selfish to want that. It’s almost cruel that we’re hardwired to love our children this intensely.”

“Does it bother you? Our phone calls?”

She looks bemused, wise about a realm of life I can’t fully comprehend. “It’s the best, Marie. We hardly even had one mom at her age. She has two. It’s been a hard year for her. Gordon’s last development flopped—over half the units are still empty. Then the investor for his upcoming project backed out on him. It’s turned our finances upside down—I’m managing his books now. I think it’s affected Elsa more than the others. She’s old enough now that she picks up on the stress—not to mention the cutbacks in all the clothes and makeup she wants at this age.”

“I can’t believe it, Lori. You never said anything about this to me.”

She flashes another strained smile. “Survival through denial. Works every time. Besides, you’ve had your own worries. We’ll get through it. Commercial real estate is that way—remind me to drive you past some of our deserted strip malls while you’re out here. But I confess, this one’s been a steep tumble.”

Lori lifts her soda to her mouth and sips with a soft gurgle of air and liquid. Lia flashes low and high on the swing set, pumping hard with her bare, dusty legs. I am ashamed at discovering how stoic Lori has been with her own trials, at how I’ve insulated myself within my crisis.

She swats at a mosquito on her neck hunting blood in the dusk and then flicks the crumpled insect into the long grass, sweat glistening over the rhythmic undulations of her carotid pulse. After a quiet minute she looks back at me. “Don’t say anything to Gordon about it, would you? Unless you decide you’d like to open a strip mall outside of Irving, that is. I’m sure he’d make you a deal. Not as much job security as anesthesia, but you could get a great buy on computer parts and acrylic nails.”

“Well, how serious is it? Is he worried about his business? I mean, you’re OK, right?”

She looks back at me. “Let’s just say there’s more demand for facelifts and appendectomies than nail salons and Domino’s Pizzas. I have to admit I miss the maid.” She swashes her hands at more mosquitoes and stands up. “I give up—they win. Let’s eat inside. Lia, come in for dinner. Wipe off your feet before you open that door.”

At this cusp of night it would be after nine o’clock in Seattle; late summertime dinners are eaten in full daylight. But here, nearer the world’s girth, it is almost dark at seven thirty. Lori sets a platter of chicken and hot dogs between two sterling candelabras on the glossy wooden dining room table.