Catching Air (2 page)

She pushed her wet hair out of her face before answering. “Hi, Rand,” she said, keeping her irritation out of her voice.

“Hey, K, is Peter around? He didn’t answer his cell.”

“Sure, he’s right here.” Kira handed Peter the phone and scooped up the carton of eggs—miraculously, none had broken. That was probably the best thing that had happened to her since she’d left for the law firm fourteen hours earlier, she reflected as she set down her heavy briefcase.

“Hey, man, long time,” Peter was saying. Then: “Vermont? Whoa.”

Kira left the rest of the groceries for Peter to collect while she went into their galley kitchen. She loved cooking, but she was too exhausted to find anything inspiring in the vegetable drawer or on the condiment shelf tonight, so she reached for a Tupperware bowl of puttanesca sauce in the freezer.

“Looks like pasta and pellets tonight, Fred,” she told the goldfish circling the glass bowl by their tiny window. “Don’t get too excited, though. You’re the one getting the fish food.”

She salted a pot of water and put it on to boil, then shook a bit of food into the fish tank. Fred ate quickly, then kept circling, moving quickly but going nowhere. She watched him for a moment: How had it come to this, that she felt such a deep kinship with a thumb-size vertebrate?

She was julienning a carrot for a salad when she heard Peter’s footsteps approach.

“So what’s in Vermont?” she asked.

When he didn’t answer, she turned around to see him leaning against the doorframe, his tall, lanky body nearly filling the opening. His sandy blond eyebrows were tightly knit above his clear blue eyes.

“Is everything okay with Rand?” she asked quickly. Rand had a magnetic attraction to risk—he rode motorcycles too fast, quit jobs before he had new ones lined up, and, until he’d met his wife, Alyssa, had chatted up pretty girls without checking to see if they had jealous boyfriends nearby. Somehow he always landed, catlike, on his feet.

“He’s fine,” Peter said. He cleared his throat. “He and Alyssa are moving to Killington.”

“Sounds nice,” Kira said. “Actually, it sounds a little menacing. What’s in Killington?” All she knew about the area was that it was a big draw for skiers.

“Remember that lawsuit from when the moving truck rear-ended him?” Peter was saying. “Rand finally got a settlement.”

Kira nodded.
Rand’s luck,
she thought. He’d been stopped at a red light when the brakes on the truck behind him had failed—brakes worn so thin that they should have been replaced months earlier. Rand’s Jeep was totaled, but when a fireman wielding the Jaws of Life cut him out of the crumpled metal, Rand had emerged with only a broken arm, two cracked ribs, and a bump on his forehead. He’d walked out of the hospital four hours later with a fiberglass cast and the card of a personal injury lawyer.

“He wants to use the settlement to open a bed-and-breakfast near a ski slope,” Peter said.

Of course he does
, Kira thought, stifling a laugh.

“Does he know anything about running a B-and-B?” she asked. “You have to keep books and do marketing and build a website and cook fancy breakfasts every day . . . I can’t see Rand and Alyssa doing all that stuff.”

She glanced at Peter, whose eyebrows seemed to have inched even lower, which meant he was contemplating something. Peter, her tech-savvy husband, whose start-up company aimed at providing mobile technology services was faltering. She glanced down at the container of homemade puttanesca sauce she’d cooked the previous Sunday.

“Oh, no,” she said involuntarily.

“Hear me out,” he said. “Don’t say no yet.”

I think I just did
, Kira thought, but she nodded.

“You hate your job—” he began.

“I wouldn’t say I hate it,” she interjected. “It just . . . Well, it isn’t what I thought it would be. Whoever invented the concept of billable hours was a sadist. I work all the time, Peter, and it isn’t ever enough . . . They want me to pad my time, to—to
lie
to clients to make the firm even more money, and it’s disgusting—”

Peter reached over and began massaging her neck with one hand. For such a thin guy, he had fingertips of steel. “Oh,” she sighed, feeling the tight cords along the sides of her neck yield. A headache she hadn’t even noticed began to ebb away.

“My business hasn’t taken off the way we’d hoped,” Peter continued.

“It hasn’t been that long . . . ,” she began loyally before her voice trailed off. Peter was a whiz with computers. The problem was, so were a million other people who were willing to work more cheaply, like college students.

“We’d live in a beautiful home,” Peter said, his voice deep and soothing. His fingers kept digging into new spots of tension, and it was hard for Kira to remember why she’d been arguing. “No more crappy apartments. Rand is offering us a one-third share if we help get the B-and-B off the ground. And if things go well, we could hand it over to a professional innkeeper in a year and keep making money.”

Kira tried to think of what to say next. “I’ve never even been to Vermont” was what she finally came up with.

Peter let go of her neck and wrapped his arms around her waist. She could feel the heat coming off his body, and the steam rising up from the boiling water, and the humid Florida air filtering in through the window. It seemed, suddenly, as if she’d been hot for her entire life, her thighs always sticking to the vinyl seats in her car, her hair forever matting against the back of her neck.

Vermont,
she thought, testing out the word, envisioning snowflakes drifting onto her cheeks and pine trees spreading open under an enormous blue sky.

Peter was right; she hated her job. She worked so hard, arriving at her windowless office by seven every morning, writing long, excruciatingly detailed reports, gobbling a Cobb salad at her desk, poring over documents until her eyes felt gritty and her entire body ached. She lived in the Sunshine State, yet she sometimes went days without ever glimpsing the sun.

And instead of being grateful, the firm had punished her. She’d been put on a kind of probation—her partnership delayed for a year—because she didn’t beef up her hours like the other associates, and had spoken the truth to a client and embarrassed the partner who’d overbilled him. She was still reeling from the injustice. Wasn’t the law supposed to be an honorable profession? When she entered law school, she’d envisioned taking on pro bono cases for persecuted immigrants and abused women. She’d thought she’d change lives—stand up in a courtroom, her voice ringing with passion as she fought for truth and justice. Instead, she was the one who’d been changed. At thirty years old, she felt as brittle and worn-out as an old cornhusk. And she had yet to help a single pro bono client.

“You could hand in your notice and we could leave in a couple weeks. I’ll teach you to ski. We could spend some time together for a change,” Peter was saying. “If we don’t like it, we can always move back.”

Her left-brained, sensible husband—so different from his spontaneous, irresponsible brother—had already made up his mind. How had that happened so quickly?

“I don’t know,” she said. For some reason, tears filled her eyes. Peter was offering her the escape she’d been yearning for, and now that she was standing on its brink, it felt terrifying.

“It’s such a big decision,” Kira said. And they saw Rand and Alyssa only once a year or so. Wouldn’t it feel strange to suddenly be with them constantly?

“Sleep on it,” Peter said as he carried their plates to the little wooden table in their dining nook. “We can talk more tomorrow.”

But as he came back into the kitchen and slid past her to get the salad, he whispered words that spilled into her mind like blue ink into clear water, clouding her thoughts. She knew their echo would keep her awake for the rest of the night.

“We’d both be home all the time,” he’d whispered as she instinctively stiffened, somehow knowing what he’d say next. “Maybe we should have a baby.”

• • •

The rain had finally tapered off, and gauzy clouds hung low in the sky. Alyssa stepped out of the Jeep, stretched her back, and took her first look at the B-and-B. The A-frame house sat perched atop acres of sprawling land like a pioneer surveying uncharted territory and deciding that yes, this would be the perfect place to settle. Alyssa was a firm believer that houses had personalities, and she liked this one’s style; it looked strong and welcoming. She lifted the Nikon hanging on her neck, framed the shot, and snapped.

In a few months, the panoramic vistas would be transformed when a white coating erased the vibrant summer colors. But the view would still be every bit as spectacular. Just imagining it made Alyssa’s lungs expand and her heart feel lighter. Back in D.C., where Rand had worked as a carpenter and part-time guitar teacher at a kids’ music school and she’d photographed weddings and babies and family reunions, she’d often felt as if everyone were trying to rush her along—brushing past her with an impatient exhalation on the sidewalk or honking when she didn’t step on the gas the second the light turned green.

Out here in the minty air, under a sweeping sky, she probably wouldn’t hear a car horn for weeks at a time.

Rand slung an arm around her shoulders. “Tonight we’re gonna uncork a bottle of wine, grab a blanket, and hit the hot tub. This”—he used his hands to draw an invisible square around them—“is an unpacking-free zone until tomorrow.”

Alyssa turned in to him, feeling the rasp of his chin stubble against her forehead. “Perfect,” she whispered, thinking again of how lucky she was to have found this man. Chance had been their Cupid: She wasn’t supposed to be waitressing at the diner that morning six years ago, but someone had asked her to trade shifts. Five minutes after she arrived at work, Rand had walked in.

Yummy,
she’d thought, taking in his thick, dark hair and a face that belonged to a hero on an action-movie poster. He was dressed in a T-shirt and old jeans, which she vastly preferred to an Armani suit.

“Coffee?” she’d offered. Granted, not her most seductive opening line ever.

“Yeah,” he’d said, then he’d looked up and their eyes had met. She’d instinctively reached to smooth down her hair, not because it was messy but because she felt certain it was standing straight up from the sudden jolt of electricity running through her body.

She’d been saving up her tips, planning to leave the next week for Portugal, the latest in her string of traveling adventures. Instead, she and Rand had gotten married within three months and her life’s real adventure had begun.

“Admit it,” Rand was saying now. “You thought there was a Wal-Mart next door.”

Alyssa laughed. “Was it wrong not to tell Peter and Kira we didn’t see the place before we bought it? Technically they didn’t ask. And the real estate agent sent us lots of photos.”

But Kira had e-mailed them a dozen times, asking questions that had never occurred to Alyssa.
Do you have a business plan?
she’d written.
Could the B-and-B be considered an investment property when filing taxes? What’s the square footage of the structure?

That was far from the only difference between her and Kira. Kira was barely five foot two and slender, with the cornsilk-blond hair of a child and dainty features.
A pixie
, Alyssa had thought the first time she’d seen her. Alyssa was seven inches taller and curvy, with a one-size-too-big hook of a nose that had been the bane of her adolescence, until the rest of her face filled out to blunt its impact. Their family’s bloodline, her mother used to laughingly say, could rival any mutt’s at the pound: Latin American mixed with Italian ancestry, topped off with a dash of Native American blood, which revealed itself in Alyssa’s olive skin and high cheekbones.

While Kira was plowing through college, Alyssa was dropping out, reasoning that she’d get a better education by slinging a camera around her neck, shrugging into a backpack, and hopping aboard trains to cross Europe and Asia. She rode elephants in Chiang Mai, slept on a sidewalk in Budapest when she couldn’t find a room, ate a boiled frog in Shanghai, and sunbathed nude in Corfu. Whenever she ran out of money, she returned to the States and worked as a nanny or waitress until she could afford another airplane ticket. Her life was glorious in its simplicity, her focus always on the next train, the next country, the next adventure. There were men along the way—plenty of men—but none who captivated her the way traveling did, until she met Rand.

Now her husband reached into his pocket and pulled out the big brass key the previous owners had mailed to them. “Could be dead bodies inside,” he whispered. “No one has lived here for what, three years?”

“The guests who never checked out,” Alyssa intoned.

Rand swung open the door to the house and they stepped inside. The entrance hallway took a sharp right turn and spilled into a large living room with a giant stone fireplace. Aside from dust and spiderwebs, the room was perfect, with its wide-planked, honey-wood floors, a nook that would work well as a dining area, and built-in bookcases.

“Tell me the rest of the place looks this good,” Alyssa said, walking past the dining nook and pushing through a swinging door to the kitchen. Rand followed, and they were silent for a moment.

“Tell me the rest of the place doesn’t look this bad,” Rand said. He ran a shoe over the peeling linoleum floor.

“It’s not that awful,” Alyssa lied.

She squinted, envisioning a fresh coat of paint on the scarred wooden cabinets and a new floor. “Guests probably didn’t come in here, so they didn’t keep the kitchen up as well as the rest of the place.”

“Let’s check out the rooms,” Rand said. They retraced their steps through the living area and climbed the steps to the four guest bedrooms. The smallest one had twin beds, a big picture window, and its own bathroom. Two others held queen beds and private bathrooms, and the largest boasted a king-size bed and Jacuzzi tub. The ivory paint on the walls had dulled with time, but there were bureaus, beds, and curtains that the previous owners had left as part of the settlement agreement.