Lifelines: Kate's Story (6 page)

The
last time...

She’d
bought a spring salmon from a Madrona Bay fisher the first Saturday in July,
served it with rice and asparagus spears. David, victorious after typing The
End on the first draft of  Madrona Legacy, caught her hand when she delivered
his plate, and tangled his fingers with hers.

“You
look nice,” he’d said softly.

Disoriented
by his return after months of single-minded focus on the book, she felt her
face flush, but wanted also to pull back. She wanted to be wooed ... dinner,
candles, foreplay.

As
they ate, she relaxed from the solitude of life with a book-obsessed writer who
pretended to be a school principal by day. When he pushed his plate away, she
said, “I’ll do the dishes.”

“Leave
them.”

She
wanted to be wooed, slowly, but when he pulled her closer, she sank into his kiss.
She wanted talk, candlelight, time, but his hand brushed her breast and her
agenda slipped away ...

...
empty highway, rain-slicked pavement, black looming shadows. Colder ... colder ...
push the heater into the red. Tears on her face ...

It’s
over. All gone.

The
Subaru topped the rise on the last hill and Kate let the car float into the
small valley ahead. Time to go home. David’s house, David’s bed. Needy mother,
distant daughter, unhappy clients.

Floating
... if she could float away ... escape Evelyn and Jennifer and Socrates ... escape
David’s empty house ... if she could let it all go, close her eyes and...

Close
her eyes.

Jesus,
Kate! Open your eyes!

Trees
whipped by and she was ... floating. The road. Drifting. The car refused to
respond to her pressure on the wheel.

Ice.
Black ice. Car cocked off-true, skimming over the road. Big tree ahead speeding
towards her. Other trees flying past  ... road ... wheels ... control.

Don’t
touch the brakes. Steer. Jesus, Kate! Steer!

The
Subaru glides over the road, no friction, no response to hands on the wheel.
Someone’s hands, they don’t feel like hers. Silence floats, and she wonders if
the crash itself will be silent.

Massive
old oak tree, filling her world, everything silent. Is this how it ends?

...let
go ... stop worrying ... stop trying.

I’m
going to die.

David?

The
tree ... the car ... die smashed against the tree. Will David come?

I
drove too fast, closed my eyes on life because I don’t care.

Not
yet, please ...God, get me out of this.

Sound
... lost ... car flung ... tree, can’t see the tree.

A
scream tears at the car’s belly, whips the world like a tilt-a-whirl in the
circus. I’m yanked back, head flung against the headrest.

Silence.

Heart
pounding. The sound ... harsh gasps of breath tear her throat and ears.

Where’s
the tree?

She
stares at blackness. The tree ... maybe four feet away to her left. Telephone
pole against the right side of the car. Subaru parked between, nose faced out,
as if ...

She’s
alive, for no reason.

All
those sounds underneath, she’d flipped in a tight circle, ripped over rough
ground. Now silence, as if she’d parked here deliberately. She must have been
doing at least sixty, suicide on this road. She’d felt the cold, heard the
engine complain. Black ice, freezing air over wet pavement. She’d closed her
eyes.

God,
get me out of this.
She’d been saved from her own suicidal night-driving by a God she wasn’t sure
she believed in.

She
reached for the key, wasn’t surprised when the engine failed to respond.

Shift
lever.

She
pulled it into neutral, turned the key again.

The
Subaru’s engine purred.

The
oak tree blocked out the sky. Certain death, that tree. She should be dead.

When
she pulled the car into gear, she heard wheels crunch on the ground.

Hesitantly,
the Subaru crawled through the field grass onto the road. Moved so slowly over
the pavement that she realized something must be seriously wrong with the
engine. She was driving at Socrates’ old-dog speed, the wheel gripped tightly.
If she had any sense at all, she would stop and call for help on the cell
phone.

Can’t
talk; can’t fumble the auto club card from her purse.

Car
won’t move.

Foot
on the accelerator. Her foot ... she needs to push harder.

The
Subaru shifts from a crawl to a slow glide.

Not
so fast ... don’t forget the ice.

Someone
laughed. Must be her. She was alone on the upper highway, in no fit state to
drive. The car wouldn’t go because she hadn’t pushed the throttle. Go slow,
Kate. Very, very slow.

She’d
pointed the wrong way, car moving south, Bellingham city lights looming against
the sky. Home was behind her.

She
eased the Subaru over the peak of the hill. So cold. She saw a light ahead and
crawled to the side of the road. Speedometer ... twenty miles an hour. Don’t
hurry, drive very carefully.

The
light resolved into the sign above Ernie’s Motel.

Closer
... she read the word
Vacancy
.

She’d
gone far enough for tonight.

W
hen
Mac switched on the power in the small room behind his office, the bed emerged
naked, navy stripes painted onto once-white mattress fabric.

He’d
last slept here a little over two years ago, when he’d moved back into this
cramped room for the two weeks preceding his marriage. He’d wanted Rachel to
feel at home in his house, not a newcomer or a stranger, so he’d insisted she
move in two weeks before the wedding. He’d moved out, which Rachel said was
crazy. After all, they’d been sleeping together seven months, and she’d stayed
over on several occasions.

But
he wanted the marriage to be right. Rachel called him old-fashioned. He didn’t
know what constituted old-fashioned; how could he, when he’d learned his life
skills in construction camps?

He
worried that he was fifteen years older than his wife, that he’d never
witnessed a functional marriage. He wasn’t sure Rachel knew the formula for a
working relationship either; her mother had died when she was twelve.

Mac
vowed they’d do it right. It seemed to him that for a marriage to mean
something there should be a distinct border between before and after the
wedding. He created the division by resisting Rachel’s suggestions they live
together, by staying away from her for those two weeks before the wedding.

His
cell phone rang while he was still glowering at the bed. He resisted the
impulse to answer. Who could the caller be but Rachel, and what could he say to
her? If the bank hadn’t called to say her checking account was overdrawn, he
would never have looked through her bank statement—and if he hadn’t, she would
never have told him about the pregnancy. And no, he hadn’t forgiven her.

He
shut off the cell phone mid-ring and yanked open the closet. No bedding, just
the coveralls he used to work on his vehicles. The building business was good
enough he could hire a garage to do his repairs, but he’d lived most of his
life in places bare of conveniences and he’d learned to do for himself. Habit
and pride dictated he look after his own equipment.

Where
the hell had he put the sleeping bag he’d once used for bedding? He would have
to sleep in his clothes tonight. Better that, than going home to face Rachel
again. These days, he never knew what would happen when he found himself in her
presence. He wanted to feel cold indifference, but sometimes a terrifying rage
clawed at his control.

He
unzipped his suitcase and glared at his clothes.

Take
them out. Hang them up.

When
he married Rachel, he’d assumed he would never sleep in this room again. Now,
he found himself remembering—not Rachel, but his father. 

Six
years ago, Mac had arrived in Madrona Bay on a six-week leave from the Peruvian
construction job he’d been thinking of quitting. He’d been working in Peru five
years, past time to move on. He planned to talk to his father, Jake, about
whether to take the Superintendent’s job on offer in Indonesia, or sign up for
Chile, which he hadn’t seen since he was sixteen.

Ever
since he headed off to Indonesia at the age of eighteen, he and his father had
met once a year for a fourteen-day flight to somewhere exotic. But this time,
Mac found Jake on the second step of death’s ladder. Against his father’s
protests, Mac cashed in the Tahiti tickets and cancelled his flight back to
Peru. Jake claimed he didn’t need help. He’d been working for the government
when the cancer hit – good medical insurance, bad prognosis.

Jake
had worked in construction all his life, making good money in a variety of
third world countries, then his last few years on a series of Washington state
jobs from Blaine to Seattle. He’d been a Scotsman who found lucrative work in
places where his young wife wouldn’t follow. When Mac was five years old – they’d
called him Richard back then – his muscular father was a stranger, home in
Edinburgh for Christmas on leave from a mysterious place called Iran.

Richard
heard the fight without understanding. Mother screamed but the stranger didn’t
shout back. When Mother stood in the doorway with a suitcase in her hand,
Richard wondered if this meant a holiday. His friend George had just left for
Christmas in London with his parents.

But
wherever she was going, Mother didn’t take Richard with her.

The
stranger packed Richard’s clothes and said, “Just you and me now, son.”

In
time, Mac understood the words to mean he would now live with his father.

“We’ll
make out,” said Jake.

They
did, living in a compound in Iran for three years before Jake took a job in the
Canadian oil fields. After Canada they flew to Venezuela. Then Brazil, followed
by Chile, where Richard’s adolescent muscles gave him entrance to the
construction crew.

In
bunkhouses at the edges of the world, he heard talk of women abandoned and
lost, children rarely seen. Few of these men would have assumed responsibility
for a small child beyond writing a monthly check. Perhaps none would do what
Jake had, making Richard part of his life instead of handing him off to an
orphanage. After all, as he’d heard one man say, how the hell could a man be a
regular husband and father in a construction camp without running water?

As
Richard’s adolescent muscles hardened, the men began to call him
Mac.
He
called his own father
Jake
because
dad
didn’t fit men who worked
together.

They
got by.

When
Jake got cancer, Mac couldn’t walk away. He’d made big money since his
eighteenth birthday. He could have bought a house in Madrona Bay, maybe found
work on someone else’s project, but he’d been the boss on the job in Peru. And
his father might have cancer, weakened muscles and tired eyes, but Jake lived
for his work.

Mac
purchased a business license, equipment, and the scrap of industrial property
where he built the construction shack – a place to store tools and equipment,
an office, and the tiny bedroom where he’d live until he found something
better. He bought a truck and got a sign painter to paint
Madrona Bay
Construction
on the doors.

Jake
scouted out the first contracts and did the estimates, while Mac did the muscle
work. Their first job was the expansion of Madrona Bay’s veterinary clinic,
followed by six dry weeks. Without Mac’s savings they’d have starved. As it
was, Mac took advantage of the slow start to begin a house on a small
waterfront property he found for a good price. By the time business got better,
he’d moved himself and Jake into the house.

He’d
built houses, factories, power dams, and hospitals in a scattering of
countries. He’d never before built a home with his own hands, then lived in it.
Hadn’t expected the roots to grow so fast that now, four years after he moved
into his first and only house, he stood in this temporary industrial bedroom
and felt homeless. He didn’t know if he’d ever again sleep under the roof he’d
built and shingled.

He’d
forgotten that home was where he took off his tool belt, nothing more.

The
Peruvian project was finished now, but he could check around. Within two weeks
he might be on a jet to Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, or Chile. Sweating in a hot
climate to the inevitable deadline, he’d work so much overtime that Madrona Bay
would cease to matter. Just sweat and money and the rough voices of other
homeless men ... 
Get the fucking foundation poured before dark. Smell the
frigging rain in the air. If we don’t pour
now
we’ll have our fingers up
our asses until the monsoon’s over.

Mac
shoved his suitcase off the bed and felt bitter pleasure as it smashed on the
floor. He yanked off his belt and unlaced his work boots. Saturday tomorrow,
and he’d scheduled the concrete trucks for eight-thirty. Even if his marriage
had turned to dirt, he still needed sleep.