Bridge To Happiness (13 page)

“I saw the car.” A soft Southern drawl coated the driver’s deep voice and the door locks clicked. “Hop in.” He shoved the guitar and music in the back of the crew cab.

“I appreciate this.” Shaking hands, he said, “I’m Mike Cantrell.”

“Rio Paxton.”

Mike recognized the name from years back, when Rio Paxton had been chosen Country Singer of the Year, youngest in history, and his songs were all over the radio. There had been some kind of talk of burnout, cancelled concerts and the kind of wild behavior that could consume someone caught in the fires of instant fame. Rio Paxton and Olsen could have compared notes on screwing up life.

Paxton must have seen his recognition. “Yeah. That’s me.
Wunderkind
. I incinerated pretty fast and very publicly. I still can’t remember 1989.”

“My youngest son was born in ‘89. He can incinerate a few things himself. Just dropped the bomb that he wants to can college and join the professional snowboard circuit.”

“Cantrell?” Rio paused, then looked at him curiously. “Like Cantrell snowboards?”

“You got it.”

“Is your son any good?”

“Yeah.”

“’89? He’s only a year or two younger than I was then. Keep him in school and out of the spotlight.”

“I’m trying. It’s hard to talk to a hardheaded teenager with no experience.”

“He knows everything. Didn’t we all?”

Within minutes they’d launched into natural male conversation—car engines (horsepower) and music business, snowboards and horse ranches near Sparks, talk that filled the time along the straight asphalt roads toward Reno.

The airport was on the town’s southern outskirts, built and expanded on a desolate plain of Nevada’s vast chaparral; it was easy, accessible, efficient and made for the kind of travel that after age fifty made Mike occasionally long for a life much simpler, in a place unlike ebullient San Francisco, and removed from the complicated lifestyle he’d carved out for himself and his family. A man’s dreams could change.

They pulled right up to the airport curb. No cabs, no limos, no waiting in lines of people blocking the sidewalks and unloading carts full of luggage, no interminable drive into the city from the airport.

Mike took Rio’s card. “I appreciate this. I’ll send you some new equipment for the ride.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, but I will.” Mike grabbed his bag from the seat. “Thanks, again, man.” He shook Rio’s hand. “I would have missed this flight.”

“Glad to help out.”

Mike shut the truck door with more than enough time to deal with the rental car agency and easily make his flight. There was no need to rush through the automatic glass doors.

Behind him came the sudden rumble of a Ford big block and the truck pulled away, the mute, distant CD sound of Jerry Jeff Walker singing
Up Against the Wall You Redneck Mother.

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love.

—
Joyce Carol Oates

And how am I to face the odds

Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?

I, a stranger and afraid

In a world I never made.

—
A. E. Housman

It was two a.m. when I awakened to the incessant ringing of the doorbell, and Mike’s side of the bed was still empty. But he’d called me earlier to let me know he was coming home, late apparently. “March,” he’d said, “I’ll be there, but I’ve had one
helluva
a day, good and bad.”

When he was out of town, I had this habit of chain-locking the kitchen doors, which drove him nuts. I climbed out of bed just as the phone began to ring. I guess he had lost his patience, and was now resorting to using his cell phone to wake me up.

Ignoring it, I stumbled out of the room and downstairs, muttering about the faults of men and husbands in particular. He had a set of damned keys. Where did he leave them this time?

Both the doorbell and the phone rang again and again. “I’m coming!” I pulled open the door, not exactly smart for a woman who locked the place up like Fort Knox. By the time the thought crossed my mind that it was two in the morning, the door was open and I was staring at a dark uniformed cop standing in what looked like parade stance, tall and straight, illuminated by a muted yellow bug light Mike had just replaced the Sunday before.

“Someone’s home,” he said into the black cell phone at his ear, and a few seconds later the house phone stopped ringing.

It was damp out and cold, and I was wearing only a thin sleep tank and drawstring bottoms, so I wrapped my arms over my chest.

He looked me in the eyes with an expression that was strained and serious. “Mrs. Cantrell? Mrs. Michael Cantrell?”

Like dense fog rolling in, an alien kind of emptiness settled over me, starting from the place where my heart had just stopped beating. I felt separated from the scene suddenly unraveling before me, and what was happening hit me with such clarity it took a moment to speak. “Is Mike alive?”

“I’m sorry.” His look, his whole demeanor was one I would come to recognize over the coming months as an awkward mix of apprehension and pity. People don’t know what to say to a widow, especially when you were the person who had to tell her she had just become one.

Mike Cantrell was dead because he was in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong moment. Just a few miles from home, a driver going the wrong way on one of San Francisco’s one-way streets killed my husband of thirty four years and the father of our four kids.

My mind spun from thought to ironic thought. He had flown back home safely. He hadn’t been driving his Porsche, the car most likely to kill him, because he refused to park it in the airport parking lot where people dented doors and banged bumpers. He was driving the sedan, a heavy, expensive, German car made of hard steel, with airbags and an engine that could reach top speed on the autobahn. A big engine and air bags, all those things that are supposed to protect you.

He had spent his adult lifetime driving in traffic and fog, those years driving that crappy old Chevy up to the mountains where the roads were snowy and slick and sometimes covered in deadly black ice. He’d flown in all kinds of planes all over the world. But a one way street just blocks from home brought his life, his glorious and wonderful life, to an end?

“I’ve had one
helluva
a day . . . ”

My whole world changed inside of a mere second. You hear that expression, even say it sometimes, having no real idea of the horrific truth of it. Life changed with a few words, two of which sounded so cheap.
I’m sorry.
The officer was sorry. I couldn’t do anything but stand there in front of that poor, apologetic messenger of death as tragedy punched me right in the face.

Crying felt impossible, because every human emotion spun around inside of me all at the same time. I turned away to see Mickey standing on the stairs, baggy pajamas hanging off his hips, watching, curious, his hair poking out like it had when he was three.

How do you tell your children the most important person in their lives was dead?

I found out how: You stand there, a phlegmatic shell in a zombie-like state, and say words you never think about saying, and then you watch some beautiful, innate part of your children evaporate right before your eyes. And that was only the beginning of one of the worst parts of life: dealing with death.

The numbness began
to leave me a week after Mike’s memorial service, when I had left the house for the first time and was hiding in the park where we had gotten married. I’d just had too much of everyone who wanted to be there for me, even my best girlfriends who, like everyone, watched me as if I were a vial of nitroglycerin.

Thank God for my kids. Because of them I couldn’t disappear. I couldn’t curl into an amebic ball or drive off and never come back. The family had to stay a family come what may.

Day in and day out, we all watched each other, circling like beaten dogs with fearful and wary looks that had never been in our eyes before. Somehow, we needed desperately to find between us something other than our kindred pain or the complete and utter fear. We tiptoed around each other, awkward and silently bleeding until there was more meaning when we didn’t talk than in anything we actually said.

A moment’s impulse was what made me run from the house, away from friends calling to see how I was, from the business that had been my husband’s life continuing on; from the tax forms needing to be signed; the bills that had to be paid; the mundane things that went on when everything inside of me screamed, Stop! Stop! Stop! The world had stopped.

My
world had stopped.

So I sat in brittle isolation, high on a glorious hill in my beloved, heterogeneous city surrounded by bays spanned with bridges and the Great Pacific Ocean. There was a reason why crooners sang about her, and I believed I had run to that exact spot looking for my own heart.

A twisted cypress tree with
thready
bark was at my back, and the cool wind off the water hit me in the face. It was too early for spring. There were no lush velvet pansies in the beds and no scrabbly dandelions or the bright yellow mustard poking through the grass yet. But it was a blue-sky, blue-water California day, with the wind coming in off the Pacific to gently beat the bay into soft white peaks, like meringue pies and whipping cream.

Cookbook language.
Do not over beat.
I had been doing that lately, unconsciously hitting my leg with my fist when I sat still for too long. Molly was the one who pointed it out to me, with a look that made me question how well I was doing at my big plan of not giving my children anything to worry over. Even as a child my daughter could zero in on the more obscure things in the landscape: the owl up in the tallest tree; a single whole sand dollar lost in bed of broken ones; a satellite looking like a star moving across the clear Sierra mountain night sky. I knew early my daughter was destined to be behind a camera, something that could capture her view of the world.

She had told me once there were three hundred and sixty-four mistakes in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, and I suspect she watched every episode and found them all. She usually won the family film pool of who-could-find-the-most-movie-mistakes, a Cantrell family tradition, which said a lot about the kinds of films we went to. Her skill came directly from Mike, who was such a film buff he had walked around whistling for most of the day when they released
Star Wars
on DVD and had added a loud thump sound when a storm trooper accidentally hit his head on the doorway.

That Lucas could poke fun at his mistake made Mike’s day—he could laugh at himself like that—but in a family of clowns, Molly took herself much too seriously. She was the one who had always sought something so much deeper than the rest of us. I like to think of myself as a smart woman. But my mind did not easily travel down the same
thoughtlines
as my daughter. We locked horns often, and to my great frustration I never could see our battles coming.

The Sunday before she had been talking to Phillip when they didn’t know I could hear them from the next room. I’m a mother, of course I stopped outside the room and listened.

“Why?” Molly said.

“Why what?”

“How many times had Dad driven down that same street? Why then? Why him? Don’t you ask yourself why?”

“No, Midget. And I don’t want to know anymore than we already do. He was driving home. Some truck jackknifes, turns over, a car turns the wrong way to miss it and Dad’s dead.” Phil paused and his voice dropped a little. “You can’t keep rehashing what happened.”