Race Across the Sky (19 page)

• • • • • • • • • • • • 

W
inter raged against the wooden planks of the house.

At night the sound of it trying to get in through the walls, pushing, scratching, like wolves, kept Caleb awake on his mattress.

But for all its discomforts, the Happy Trails Running Club seemed in good temper; most of them loved winter. Running in the daily new powder was akin to running on sand. The extra effort strengthened their calves and lungs and hearts.

Caleb pulled on double layers of waterproof socks, fleece head gear, his Houdini shell, hat and goggles, and went downstairs to the back door to wait for everyone. Only June and Lily were missing. Caleb glanced around nervously. This was strange; morning was prime playing time for the baby. She adored crawling over seventeen prone bodies, everyone tickling her, holding socks, her favorite things, out to her. He turned to go look upstairs for them when Mack emerged from his room, his arms spread out triumphantly. He wore a small pine green hooded sweatshirt, his azure eyes beatific.

“ABC is covering the Yosemite Slam,” he shouted, clapping his hands. “They pulled it from ESPN, gave it to their big guns.”

Everyone stopped and gazed at him. Caleb watched him with awe. He had set himself a goal, to establish Happy Trails as the premier ultrarunning organization in America, with a televised event. And he had accomplished this in under seven months.

“They'll have ten cameras stationed along the course.” He spoke animatedly, rushing around the open main room like a dervish in a tie-dye. “Get this, they're going to fly a helicopter over the densest parts, to get aerial footage of everyone climbing Half Dome. Then they're going to edit it to four hours and air that on a Saturday in summer, and show the whole thing online.”

Kyle, Juan, and John laughed and high-fived. Mack was smiling fully, his small arms literally shaking.

“You know what we need?” Alice asked loudly. “Team shirts!”

“Team goddamn shirts!”

“What color, Vive?” shouted Leigh.

Aviva smiled. Caleb had noticed a change in her mood since Rae had been expelled, a darkening sadness, but this seemed to draw her out.

“Pink?”

Makailah and Alice cheered, “Pink for everyone!”

Young Ryan called, “Screw that. Yellow and green, like Brazil. That shit's awesome.”

“White,” John added, “will keep us coolest.”

“And match your hair,” Makailah laughed.

John ran his hand over his crew cut head, nodding happily.

Mack raised his voice, “‘Colorado men are we! From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus! From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come, Pioneers! O pioneers!'”

They all shouted the last line excitedly. Caleb felt Aviva's eyes on him.

“What about you, Caley? What color should our shirts be?”

“It doesn't matter,” Caleb told them, adjusting his goggles. “Let's just run.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Many times, when he was sure he could not be seen from another point in the cold, snowy woods, Caleb would break from the trail.

Then he would double back through the white firs, dodging the quicksand of powder and roots, until he reached a spot in the wilderness that he had marked with an old yellow sweatshirt.

There he would slide down the incline of the mountain, to a back road which wound in serpentine circles. He would run this west for ten miles. At the end he would reach a cluster of cheap houses, where the undocumented off-the-books workers lived. No stores, or town, just these twenty thinly constructed houses, and a low-budget playground.

It possessed an old chipped red seesaw, two infant and full-size swings on rusted chains, and a straight metal slide that burned skin in the summer sun and was covered in ice now. Behind them the red and brown houses popped against the white world.

This was his secret place, where he met June and Lily. When she had the good fortune to swing next to another baby, Lily would conjure a thin-lipped smile that lit her whole being. She would reach for them, emit sounds of such loveliness that he stopped feeling the icy winds and lost himself completely.

The first time Caleb had met them here, bathed in sweat and breathing loudly, a Mexican teenager had gone to get her boyfriend, a lithe kid with green prison tattoos along his shaved scalp. Since then, Caleb had slowed down to a walk a good mile before the playground, to try to appear normal.

He found June pushing Lily slowly on a creaky swing. The baby was dressed in a worn pink coat from Goodwill and a white fleece hat with ear flaps, both of which seemed too large for her. She was so thin, he saw, anything would look big. It was very cold, and they were alone. An empty playground, Caleb felt, is a sad thing.

When Lily saw him, she sang the syllables of his name: “Cay-cay.”

Since Mack had ordered their separation, Caleb had spent less time holding her, stroking her cheek, inhaling her milky breath, and he worried that their bond might be thinning. Her hair was changing, its red evolving into a strawberry blonde, and growing longer. A cleft seemed to be retreating from her chin.

“Hey, Lulu,” Caleb hollered, letting the vowels linger into silliness. She looked away demurely, and he laughed.

But June wasn't smiling. In her fleece and sky blue mittens she looked uncomfortable, her face was creased and distant. Now that he was standing still, the full chill of February hit him.

“I need to talk to you,” she said quietly.

He smiled.

“I'm not doing it.”

“Not doing what?”

“I'm not taking Lily to your brother.”

Caleb's eyes darted to Lily nervously. “Why?”

“You know,” June began in a new breezy voice like an overrehearsed anchorwoman, “Shane's going to tell us about some chemical that he wants to put into her, how much of a miracle it is. But Buddhist monks live to be a hundred without ever taking any medicine.”

Caleb smiled calmly. He understood now. “You talked to Mack about it.”

She pushed a strand of hair away from her mouth with her gloved hand and frowned. “Even if Mack said he would buy us plane tickets today, I don't think it's right.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He's worried about you.”

“What else?”

Her voice got harsher. “He told me how these drug companies shoot people up with drugs they know nothing about, just to learn if there are horrible side effects. How they give babies drugs for adults just to make them be quiet.”

He shook his head; she was even using Mack's inflections now.

“Mack's the one who can help her.” She pointed to him. “He healed your knee. And Kevin's diabetes.”

“But he's not helping her, Bluebird. She's the same as when you came here. It's been ten months.”

“She's not getting worse. He's saving her every day.” Her voice wavered and tears began slipping silently from her eyes.

“Is that what he's saying?”

“I'm so lucky Mack took us in. How many people show up here, and he turns them all down? But he accepted us. Without him, we'd be living in some studio apartment in Taos, I'd be working in the bar all day, with some day care watching Lily. I love you, Caley, but I didn't come here for you.”

A sudden shortness of breath caused his chest to contract. Behind June, Lily's swing had slowed, and she sat still, waiting for them to notice. A sharp wind blew through the playground, rustling the ends of her reddish hair. All she had in this life was her mother, he understood that. All decisions were June's to make.

“If staying here is what you think's right for Lily, then that's what you do. It's simple. You're her mother.”

June was watching him closely.

He met her soft eyes. “I love her.”

June took a long breath. The sun shifted behind the smoke-white sky, and June lifted Lily out of the plastic swing. They carried her across the playground to a snow-covered slide. Caleb brushed it clean of ice and crouched at its bottom, waiting for Lily's laughing face. He felt, in this cold morning, like he imagined a family would. This could be enough, perhaps, to sustain him for some time.

When Lily grew tired, June loaded her back into Mack's Jeep, and Caleb kissed them each on their foreheads. Something hard and ruinous was forming in his stomach.

He turned and began his four-hour run, ten miles along the wintry road, a backcountry climb up the side of the snow-packed mountain, and another twenty miles through the ice-covered trails, back home.

Knockouts

• • • • • • • • • • • • 

“G
ood night, Doctor Acharn,” Yasmine El-Fayed waved to Prajuk.

Yasmine was his youngest microbiologist, an expert splicer who had come to him from Amgen. Usually, Prajuk made time to talk with her, wanting to keep tabs on the mood in the lab. Tonight he barely heard her.

When the door closed behind Yasmine, Prajuk glanced around the empty room. In stark contrast to the small room Shane had rented, Helixia's labs were immense and immaculate. Stainless steel benches, sparkling glass beakers and vials, temperature controlled, and videotaped with three cameras at all times. The leftover molecules of chemicals, media, and the people who had been standing together all day in the room, along with the occasional mouse, were dissipated by an eight-million-dollar air-filtration system. The work done here continued even after the human beings departed, as the bacterium, the spores, the virus cells, reproduced, multiplied, spread in their petri dishes.

It was ten at night. Down the long corridor doors opened and closed. Prajuk composed himself and produced a beige key card from his shirt pocket. At the far end of the corridor, he pressed it and his forefinger against a plastic rectangle, which read his fingerprint and card code, emitted a clicking sound, and popped the storage-room door open.

Swallowing nervously, Prajuk went inside. A small desk, normally occupied by a short Honduran kid with a perpetually runny nose, sat empty, and Prajuk walked into the stockroom unhindered. Petri dishes stood in circular towers like stacked coffee-cup lids. Cardboard boxes full of test tubes, microscope filters and lenses, latex gloves, 3M masks, lots of stuff from 3M actually, were shelved to overflow. Prajuk moved past them to the heavy equipment. On one side of the wall were two top-loading centrifuges.

They were squat boxes, like small washing machines, the size of a desktop computer. Prajuk considered them for a few seconds, judging their weight. On Sunday he had done something to his lower back while jogging past the Marina Safeway. He exercised a deep squat, as they had taught him in the Khon Kaen gymnasium of his youth, placed his hands on the side of a centrifuge, slid them under, and lifted.

Carefully Prajuk carried the centrifuge to the door and glanced again at the desk. Should he leave a note? Sign for it somehow? He determined that his need for a centrifuge was impossible to justify; better to hope it would not be missed. He pushed the door open with his foot and started down the long, quiet hall, perspiring noticeably.

Prajuk decided to take the stairs; there was little chance that he would run into anybody there. He stumbled with the heavy instrument for a flight and set it down, promising himself a cigarette upon completion. Then he lifted it again and finally pushed through the heavy door into the lobby of the Research building. Here was where he might be required to provide some explanation. But he met only the evening security guard, who said nothing as Prajuk set the centrifuge down and scanned his card. The benefits, Prajuk swallowed, of long-term employment.

Outside, he had difficulty spotting his car. A deep chill blew off the ocean. Why had he not worn his coat? His fingers began to burn. Soon they would numb, he thought, and he would drop the damn thing and break his foot. He was running out of bicep strength, and his lower back was protesting in a way it was now impossible to ignore. Sweat poured between his shoulder blades. In his pocket was his car key, with its red panic button, and Prajuk would have stopped to depress it but for the attention it would turn on him. Finally he spotted the white Volvo he had driven for almost a year a few rows away. He had just about reached it when he heard a voice.

“Doctor Acharn?”

Prajuk turned around and did not see, as he had briefly visualized, three armed Thais in black turtlenecks aiming assault weapons.

It was Jon Benatti, the Assistant Director of Science, and Anthony Leone's deputy.

Benatti approved budgets for equipment, raises, and new hires, though not the hires themselves, which was Anthony's province. Benatti's thin blond hair was combed over a balding patch, accentuating an elongated face and jaw. Prajuk set the big beige box down on the pavement, and to his horror its top popped open.

“Good to see you,” Benatti smiled affably. He glanced down at the centrifuge.

Prajuk nodded, sweating. “Yes.”

“How's Emerion going?”

“Oh quite well,” Prajuk explained brightly. “This thing, it always goes slowly but we hope to be in Phase One this quarter.”

“Taking your work home with you?”

It might be best, he felt, to act as if he did this every night. “What do you hear about Roche?” he asked Benatti casually. Rumors were flying that a joint research project with the European giant might be extended. Some rumors went as far as an approaching takeover bid.

Benatti gave him a poker face. “Over my head. Have you asked Anthony?”

“This thing is exactly what I tell people.” Prajuk tried to smile.

Benatti touched his shoulder quickly and lightly in that odd American way; there was always a need in Americans, Prajuk noted, to show both sides. Many new arrivals from foreign lands sought his advice as to working in the States. When Americans smile and touch you, he answered, beware.

“Need some help getting that in your car?”

“It's the only exercise I'll get today,” Prajuk said, popping the trunk.

He grunted as he placed the centrifuge gingerly beside his dry cleaning and a quilt-wrapped painting of a beach. Benatti kept staring at it. He clearly wanted to ask more, but Prajuk kept moving.

“See you,” he said, shutting the trunk. He rubbed his shoulders to communicate his discomfort in the cold as he walked to the driver's door, hoping even Jon Benatti would realize it rude to keep him longer. He got in, fired the engine, and eased out of the lot. He spent a long time watching his rearview mirror, where Benatti stared after him. Then he drove to Greenway Plaza.

“What's wrong with you?” Healy asked him when he walked in.

Prajuk placed his car keys on the bench. His shirt was wet, his mouth dry.

“There is a centrifuge in the trunk. White Volvo.”

Healy nodded and grabbed the keys. When he was gone, Prajuk sat down on a stool and placed his head between his hands.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Janelle left Helixia for good on the final Friday of January.

Her team threw her a nice party in the lunchroom, with boutique cupcakes and sparkling wine. Shane had attended and brought flowers. Her manager pulled her aside and reminded her that she could come back anytime. They all understood that this was not out of the realm of possibility. Janelle had been working since the sixth grade; they all sensed the potential for a serious reversal.

Driving her home, the car packed with office photographs and CDs, she seemed relieved, but Shane felt a nearly overwhelming anxiety. Everything had changed now; it was all his responsibility. And Prajuk was stealing centrifuges.

Shane promised to be home by eight every night to help out with Nicholas; twice he made it. But Janelle was not used to being housebound, and taking the baby to classes and museums did not satisfy her need to be out among people. He sensed the tension building weeks before she did.

Just before Valentine's Day, Shane sped back from the airport after a sales trip to Portland. It was nine o'clock at night. He had drunk an airport coffee too late, and now he was jittery. He parked poorly on Bay Street, opened the front door, and almost collided with Janelle, who was dressed in a sleek gray sweater and dark jeans. Her lips had been painted a matte red, her eyes brushed with blue, and she looked flawless to him. He started to put his arms around her waist.

Janelle pulled back, frowning. “Don't. I'm late,” she said, car keys in her hand. “I've been waiting for you. Nicholas has some stuff in his nose. Use the aspirator.”

“Aspirator? Where are you going?”

“I'm meeting Shia for a drink. I need to get out of this house.”

“Okay, well, give me a minute? I just need to change clothes and . . .”

“I've been on all day.”

“What have I been, off?” Shane stood in the doorway flustered.

“I know what you did today. You had a decent lunch with some doctors while you talked about Sorion. You had a beer on the airplane. You can handle a baby.”

“You have no idea what I'm doing,” he told her heatedly, the caffeine pushing his heart rate. He walked into their house, where Nicholas was indeed crying from his crib.

Janelle followed him, her heels clicking on the wood floors. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing, just go. Have fun.”

“What do I have no idea about?”

He knew from her tone of voice that he had triggered a process which would not end quickly. Or particularly well.

“We can talk later,” he tried anyway, starting for the stairs. Nicholas seemed to have stopped shrieking, but his own head was throbbing.

“We talk now.”

“I'm tired.”

“You've been working late constantly for months. What are you doing that I don't know about, Shane?”

He sat down on the bottom stair, gazing up at her. And then he told her everything.

He started with Prajuk explaining his team's discovery. He told her about Prajuk's interest in his idea to produce just enough of a drug for one person. About renting the lab, and how it worked there. But he was defensive and wired, and he ruined it. He had so wanted to tell her about this softly, proudly, when the drug was finished, when it was all beautiful. Instead, Janelle stood in their living room, her mouth falling open, while he rambled.

“You idiot,” she whispered.

In all of his life with her, Shane had never seen this expression on her face.

“What?”

“You can't do this to us.”

“Do this?” He cocked his head. “What's ‘this'?”

“They'll throw you in jail.”

“Who will throw me in jail, honey?”

She was shaking in the movements of an adagio. “Anthony Leone. Steven Poulos. Walter Pietrowski will have you renditioned to a fucking Syrian prison.”

“They'll never know about this.”

“Oh, Jesus. Jesus.”

He stood up, spoke with a passion he felt emanating from somewhere deep. “Imagine if Nicholas couldn't breathe. And someone saw a way to save him? Okay? Can you imagine that? What would you expect that person to do?”

“Please,” Janelle said in a deeply mocking tone; immediately it became the worst thing she had ever said to him.

“If I didn't pursue this, what would that make me?”

“A father and a husband. Which you won't be in prison.”

“Prison for what?”

“For theft,” she whispered harshly enough that he felt her breath upon his cheek. “Of physical and intellectual property. For making a drug without any license. I can just see you, holed up in some lab like a high school kid making meth, thinking you're not going to get caught.” Her mouth wrinkled in disgust.

“It's not as wrong as selling an antidepressant that I know doesn't work to every pediatrician in Mill Valley. And I did that for years.”

“That was
legal
.”

“Look,” Shane nodded. “We're the only ones who know about it. Me and Prajuk. None of us are tweeting about it. There is no threat to us.”

“Until Caleb's girlfriend, who you don't even
know
, posts it on her Facebook page.”

“She doesn't seem like she updates hers very often,” he replied with sarcasm.

Janelle stared at him. “It only takes one.”

He punched his thigh in frustration, “I
asked
Dineesh. I asked Anthony. I wrote a request for a grant application. I did everything the right way. They said no. I'm going to help this little girl, Janelle. I am going,” he repeated slowly, “to help her.”

“Shane,” she whispered to herself.

“So I did it myself. And I'm proud of it, actually. Anyway,” he exhaled, “we're almost done.”

“How can you be almost done? The approvals will take six or seven years.” She stared at him. “Oh
God
, Shane.”

There was nothing to say at this point, he recognized.

“You're not filing this with FDA?”

“This protein has already gone through testing as part of the Airifan trials. It was approved.”

“In
babies
?”

He swallowed.

“Airifan was tested on children with asthma. Not newborns. You could kill her. This baby. You could kill her.”

Shane spoke in a lower voice. “If this was Nicky, and we could cure him, you'd be driving me to that lab every night at a hundred miles an hour.”

She hesitated then. From upstairs, Nicholas wailed again. Shane seized the opportunity to get off of the staircase. Upstairs, Nicholas was asleep; he'd been having a nightmare. Shane bent over him, stroked his black hair. At what age, he wondered, does the world become so imposing that fear manifests in dreams? He had hoped it would be later than six months.

He returned downstairs to Janelle, who was curled on the couch, crying.

“Bad dream,” he explained.

She looked up at him. “Make it better.”