Sand tries to escape not because she thinks escape is possible, but in order to keep certain parts from going numb. She shrugs, flexes, twists, shifts her weight-unobtrusive protests against the binding of her hands behind her, to the bottom slat of one of her ladderback chairs. The wide front window of her cabin frames freedom-the undulant horizon dividing forested slopes, rock outcroppings, welts of golden grasses from a toothache blue sky. A view to die for, she has thought. Now her heart stalls at the hyperbole, clutches its blood, then on the verge of bursting, releases it with a heavy throb.
Minutes ago she was outside, in broad daylight, bent almost double to pinch the unassuming blooms from her rows of basil, the purple-leafed, the lemon-scented, the ruffly. She sometimes talks to her crops, whispers apologies-this frustration of theirs is for the general good, she explains, it won't last forever, soon they'll be allowed to go to seed. She reminds them they have it pretty good in their beds of fluffy, conditioned soil, threaded with thin black hoses that drip, drip all morning. Outside the boxes only weeds with prickers and fat, furry leaves survive in the hard cracked earth.
Tending her basil has stretched and strengthened her, limbered her up, given her waistless, heavy-breasted body a taste of the dance, pas de deux with shovel or hoe. She can be her mother's daughter now that her mother is no longer capable of laughing at the comparison. Once upon a distant time as doomed swan or consumptive courtesan, Velia died with sublime grace to awed sighs and applause. Now she is doing it for real, in undignified stages, demoted to the lowest level of a continuing care facility, where she spends her days in a wheelchair, scrubbing the backs of her hands with her spit or trying to remove her socks.
Minutes ago, outside, in broad daylight, Sand had one of her panoramic visions-- herself, enclosed by her patch of land, cradled by the valley, nestled in the mountains-and she had felt safe. She was a farmer now, she thought proudly, her uniform, the baggy white pants and white men's shirts she scavenged for next to nothing from the Salvation Army. White, to shield her from the scorching sun. White, the flag of rediscovered simplicity, fresh starts.
After spending most of her forty-nine years worrying herself sick, minutes ago she dared to think: This must be bow it feels not to have a worry in the world.
Trudging up to the house for iced tea, she noticed the door was open. She stepped across the threshold, and startled at the sight of a stranger, standing at her sink, in her broad daylight, drinking her water from her glass. His hair was albino blond, straight and unkempt, his skin an unhealthy pink, and his eyes the color of bleached denim with tight little pupils. The blond stubble on his face caught the light and sparkled. He raised his other hand high enough for her to see its complicated grasp of a gun.
She leaned on the doorframe, blinded for an instant, faint. Hallucination-her brain took a stab at reassurance-like the first time they tried her on Prozac and the dose was too high.
As if directing traffic, he waved her into her own house.
"I don't believe it," she said, but until recently, she always had, firmly believed in the omnipresence of disaster-if you didn't get hit by a car, or choke on a bite of meat, or develop a melanoma, then a lunatic might well break into your house. Parents, doctors, lovers mouthing probabilities couldn't shake her faith. No matter how gigantic the roulette wheel, the ball had to stop somewhere.
For reasons he didn't explain, this man had been trying to drive a truck along the railroad tracks. The tires had to give out somewhere. Hers was the nearest house. He spat a facetious, "Sorry." He wasn't shaving a spot beneath his lower lip, from which dangled a two-inch wisp of beard.
"Now, of all times," she said sadly. What a foot she'd been, lulled, tricked.
He looked at her, head cocked, until his eyes crossed.
"I'd stopped expecting you," she said.
He glanced around the cabin. "You expecting someone else? Husband? Kids? Cleaning lady?"
As if these were magic doors. Pick the right one and he would vanish. "My daughter,"
He opened his mouth, closed it.
"Maybe my daughter. She didn't say for sure."
Through his teeth he said, "Don't do anything dumb, and you won't get hurt."
"You got that line from the movies," she said. Couldn't he see they were two halves of some statistic, pawns in a dreary game? Couldn't they change the rules?
"That's a dumb thing to say."
"I didn't mean you deliberately copied. You probably don't even realize-" "Dumb."
"You're right. OK"
Her life arcs before her eyes like a joke on rainbows, a wobbly trail of fizzled careers, changes of address, ungentle men. Regular blasts of Velia's scorn to keep her expecting the worst so resolutely that the latest prescriptions never began to take the desperation away. Nor could Erica-child of still waters, born with unfathomable know-how-- even Erica at her most diplomatic and dutiful could not completely calm her mother's fears.
Sand had wanted to work with her gifted hands, she kept thinking she could earn a living by contributing beauty to the world in the form of macram6, batik, necklaces and pierced earrings composed of feathers and beads. junk, said Velia. Wildgoose chase. When are you going to get a real job?
Sand didn't want to depend on any man. She was never caught by surprise when they left her. Alone again, she and Erica repossessed the queen-sized bed, picnicked there on pizza and popcorn, played Old Maid, and watched TV. Sand plugged back in the nightlight and dozed off with her eyes fixed on it: if its glow suddenly went dark, she'd know an intruder, possibly lunatic, had passed over the threshold, and her plan was always to push Erica off the bed on the side next to the wall, then roll underneath it after her. Sometimes she slept with an extra pillow across her chest to blunt the force of a bullet or knife.
Maybe all those men had been intruders, somewhat lunatic, she thinks now. The last of them, Rob, moved with her into this valley, then used her credit card to buy a sea kayak and take off for Alaska. He needed more action, he said. "You belong here, you're a gatherer. I'm still into the hunt."
One of the first, Erica's father, would never have known his daughter existed until Erica started asking questions, begging for his name. What did you do to make bim go? Couldn't you have hung onto him for my sake? Am I like him?
No, not at all, Sand told her, not intending to be. He had receding hair, after all, acne scars, and big, bumpy knees. Whereas Erica was peaches-and-cream perfect, she played soccer like a dancer, she was a miracle Sand couldn't understand, probably hadn't deserved. But like her father, Erica was mainstream, savvy and deep-down hardhearted-prom queen from the word go. Ninety-nine chances in a hundred father and daughter would click when they finally met. Sure enough, Erica went.
When Sand and success finally clicked, she was painting fingernails. She rose from an hourly wage in a shopping mall to her own burgeoning business, a boutique and adjunct school offering eight-week training courses to would-be nail artists. In certain circles she became famous for her fine, single-bristle renditions of ballerinas, each finger performing a different move-pirouette, jetS, chasse, coupe-and an arabesque across the diagonal of each thumb.
The year before she cashed it all in to buy her farm, she went to Houston for the annual conference and competition of the National Association of Nail Artists, and took home the $10,000 award for first place.
Success felt hollow. The art of fingernails had proven repetitive, mechanical, commercialized. As a career, it had gelled too late. Too late to keep Erica from moving in with her hero of a father who bought her a Honda and promised to send her to Stanford.
When Sand called Velia with news of her prize, Velia said, "Delicious apples are fine as long as they're crisp, but once they start getting mushy, I don't want them."
He asked for a hammer. "Don't try anything," he said. As if she were thinking up strategies. Instead of not thinking scary thoughts. Different parts of her body trembled when called upon, but her mind she swept root-canal blank, made it cling to an old mantra: just do what you're told, by this time tomorrow it will be over.
Yes, but.
It won't kill you.
No?
He wasn't impressed with the loose-headed tool she produced from the pantry, or with the flower pot of bent rusty nails she had collected digging the beds for her herbs and never gotten around to throwing away.
He nodded toward a set of louver doors. "That the only closet?" He didn't like having to ask her things, having to wait for answers. He would have liked to barge around checking for himself. Minutes ticked by of his shallow breathing, his face stretched into a pastel grimace. The miniature beard hung from his lower lip like a single buck-tooth. He had on camouflage pants whose earth-tones had faded from countless washings and heavy-soled combat boots. His bright white shirt was from The Gap. One hand wore that gun her eyes must avoid, the other clutched a broken hammer and a terra-cotta pot. Maybe he always looked like that-wildly impatient, almost alarmed. Erica's age. A kid out of control.
He didn't like having to follow her. "Who in the fuck built this house anyway?" He stopped short in her bedroom, turned on her.
"I don't know," she said. "I haven't lived here that long."
"You'd have thought they'd put in one decent closet." He lifted a boot and kicked at one of the louver doors to the walk-in. "Piece of shit," he said. "How'm I supposed to nail these suckers shut?"
"I don't like them either. They're on my list to replace. Do you know how much a solid door runs? I haven't made any profit yet, and closing costs wiped out my@"
"Lady, shut up."
She thought she heard fear mixed with anger-thought she glimpsed a human being behind the mask. "I'm not trying to make you feel guilty. Things'll work out eventually. I don't have much here but you're welcome to anything--"
He hurled the pot of nails at the corner of the room, it landed with a clank and broke into large pieces. So did her empty poise. She clenched her chattering teeth.
"If I can't nail you in a closet, how am I supposed to keep you out of the way?"
His question triggered echoes. She thought she saw her panic flicker behind his pale eyes.
"I can stay out of the way," she said, without expression, forced to the script.
He motioned her back out to the greatroom.
"That's one thing I'm good at." She was talking to herself. "It's why I'm here."
"You got any rope?"
"Rope?"
"Rope, lady." He danced his weight from one boot to the other, then back. "Jesus Christ, do you think I've got all day?"
"I'm just trying to think. There's a ball of twine I used-"
His free hand had yanked a knife from the wooden block next to the sink; now while the hand with the gun pinned the telephone cord against the counter, he chunked the blade down so hard that odd noises escaped her lips. He looked pleased, proud of the sounds. He came towards her with a long corkscrew of cord, backed her into the chair. He smelled like the summer muck exposed by the receding water of her pond.
He let go of the gun, she could feel it there, by her feet, "It's for your own good," he told her in a different voice. He fumbled with her hands, the cord-his touch was rough, angry that she was old enough to be his mother. "In case there's a shoot-out," he said.
Another spurt of fear, but feebler now, despite the vision-her trapped in this chair, a sitting duck, bullets shattering windows, ricocheting off walls, friendly, deadly fire.
"In case they bring in a SWAT team, you know. They want me bad."
Outside above the mountains' infinite regress she sees her mother dancing, a lone cloud of white tulle, white flashes of satin shoe. She hears her mother's voice-ever confident that it is addressing a matter of universal concern: "The whole business of bearing down goes against everything I have trained my body to do, in ballet, you see, you must be weightless, you are always willing yourself up, into the air, to hang there for that impossible extra second, so you see how difficult it is, childbirth, the damage to a dancer's instinct, her spirit really, you see?"
Sand's brother had just been born, he was waking in the middle of the night crying. Four-year-old Sand knew why. In the sound of his cry she saw gaping space, a giant empty sleeve. Her family teetered like made-in-Japan dolls on its brink.
No one had sat her down and said, Sand, the Russians have the Big One now, and it would be a year still until she started kindergarten and learned how to march single file into the cloakroom, there to fold herself into a fetal mound, hands clasped around the back of her head. And there were many years ahead of lurking, all-natural dangers-- leukemia, lockjaw, quicksand, lightning, tuna fish contaminated with botulism, and Velia's favorite: splinters that entered your bloodstream and wasted your heart. Many years, and then Sand's own father, Air Force Ace, would begin dropping little ones on the people of Hanoi, and they, placing no value on human life would finally shoot him out of the sky.
Yet it was as if all these possibilities were released by her new brother's inconsolable waiting, they careened around in her brain until she had to cry out in the night herself, dragging her exhausted mother out of bed once again-to warn everyone, to get them to do something, if anything could be done.
What the just-retired ballerina and just-promoted jet pilot did was sigh one more time at the nuisance Sand could be, but they zipped her into her snowsuit, wrapped up the future Commander-in -Chief of the Armed Forces in his baby blankets, and carted the whole family over to the base hospital emergency room-just in case it was her appendix. The doctor, her parents, everyone got mad at her when it wasn't.
"I never said anything about a stomach ache," she tells the farthest misty ridge. "That was their idea." The ache had come from someplace else, which had just caught the truth of forever and alone.
He is in her bathroom, taking a shower, taking his time. Using her shampoo and her soap. The water stops. His voice rings through her two rooms: "You got an extra toothbrush?"
She clears her throat but her answer falters, drops in her lap.
"Hey, lady, I gotta have something to brush my teeth with."
She collects her breath, forces out, "The only toothbrush I have is my own."
"It's mine now," he calls back.
"You're welcome," she says softly, in the tone she used to use to remind Erica, who is her father's now. She has seen her daughter only once since the night she, Sand, got home from her shift at the video store to a dark apartment, nothing cooking, and then the sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook, the bulgy, slightly backslanting script, "I've decided to go stay with my dad for a while. Please don't try to call me for six months. I've decided I have a right to a stable, normal life. Also don't expect an answer if you write." The i's were dotted with hearts.
The surrender of a toothbrush is nothing after that.
Velia, svelte in black and high, high heels, crosses her ankles, raises her long, boneless fingers to her throat, and decides to tell the truth. In an opposite corner slouches a vague recollection of Sand's first psychiatrist who thought it might be useful to get Velia's input, before he decided why lumpy Sand at Erica's age couldn't decide anything at all.
For example, what to wear to school? What if she chose her cotton jumper and it wasn't warm enough and she caught a cold which turned into pneumonia and she died? But what if her woolen one with the full skirt got caught in the closing door of the bus when she got off? Then she'd be yanked off her feet and dragged along the street receiving enough lacerations and contusions to cause her to die. No choice was death-free. Nothing for it but go back to bed.
"Cassandra has always been difficult," Velia says. "Scared of her own shadow. Withdrawn. I suppose I've never understood, since when I was her age all I wanted to do was perform, meet new people, travel the world. Her father too"-she touches her hanky to the inside corners of her eyes-"was a charming daredevil. Do you know what I think the problem might be?" The shrink doesn't, but Sand knows what her mother will say.
Nothing about Sand's love for her father, now missing in action, her complete devotion to him in spite of the mix of criticism and neglect she got in return. Nothing about how more and more Sand's girlbody is also missing under layers of belly and breast.
"I hate to say this," Velia says, but she doesn't really. She always loved it when the truth hurt. "Richard and I never planned on a family. I was a dancer, the sky was the tin-tit, Christensen as much as promised me my day would come. Except Cassandra came first, a complete accident. The beginning of the end of my career."
His bare footfalls thud heavy behind her. Though her nerves cringe, she doesn't let herself move. Then a hand grabs the back of her neck and, as she gasps, releases it with a shove.
He barrels across her vision dressed in only his pants and the illusion of a tank top where his sunburn stops. He still clutches the gun. He darts his head around the front window then ducks away. His back is pate as unbaked bread but well-muscled, V-- shaped. It's the shape she always pictured as she rubbed the flabbier, scrawnier backs that found their way into her bed. Water beads along the valley of his spine.
You'd think a body like that must contain some vein of goodness.
He has flattened his perfect torso against the wall beside a side window. He is looking for a fight.
He moves in abrupt jerks, one minute here, the next there, and all she can do is wait to find out which story the separate moments will cohere to create.
Which headline?
What do they want him for?
She bars the possibilities from her mind. The important thing is to keep flexing the numbness out of her hands and wrists.
"Anything out there?" She tries to sound matter-of-fact, neutral.
"You can't never tell," he says.
"I don't think this county has a SWAT team," she says.
"It's got nothing to do with this county." His eyes are on her-they cross and he blinks them straight.
She doesn't ask what it does have to do with. "Where's your TV?"
"I don't own one." No TV anymore, no tasseled pillows, no dried flowers and eucalyptus, no brass elephants, no paisley table scarves, no Matisse posters, no decorator's fishnet, no strings of little white lights. No mother, no daughter. No stash of Xanax and Zoloft for when her moat of anxiety floods its banks. No toothbrush. Suddenly that seems the definitive loss.
"You had a TV, you'd know who I am. You wouldn't be sitting there wondering was I one of those crazies, running around killing for the thrill of it."
As opposed to? She doesn't ask.
"They're waving around this attempted murder thing 'cause I punched out a Mexican south of Red Bluff and he cracked his head on the way down. Fucking insult," he says, drawing himself up to attention. "If I'd've been attempting, that cucaracha would've been dead." His lips stretch in a smile, to reveal flecks of decay-poor toothbrush, infected forever. "The government gets you coming and going, don't it?"
She drops her head-half a nod.
He uses her hair to pull it up again. "Lady, I'm asking you a question."
"Accidents happen," she says hoarsely.
"OK And I'm telling you there's plenty would like to do what I do, if they'd got the balls for it. Trouble with this country, nobody does anymore. Guys keep handing them over to you ladies. Know what I mean?"
She doesn't try to muffle her sigh, deep as a sob: in over your head, the drawing of the breath you know will drown you.
"Say something, damn it."
"I'm thirsty," she says.
The machine he is shifts into a different gear. "Sorry, my fault." He stomps over to the sink to fill her coffee mug with water, then stomps back to where she sits. He bumps the mug against her teeth and water spills down her shirt. He sets the gun on the table and tries again, grabbing the back of her head in one hand, guiding the mug with the other. As fast as she swallows, water still runs down her chin, soaking her collar.
He doesn't notice. "Whose balls you got buried out there in that garden of yours?" The rim of the mug between her teeth, water pouring into her.
"Don't look so scared, it was a joke." He grabs a dishtowel and scrubs clumsily at the front of her shirt. "Bet you won a few T-shirt contests in your day." He swoops over to a window again. "I'm more into legs myself "
He heads back to the bedroom. "Holler if you see anything," he tells her. "It's for your own good."
What did it mean, good, or for that matter, her own? She has not led the life she pictured for herself--she's always thought she would do something original and world-- shaking-world-helping: something that would change everyone's mind about her. She always thought she still had time.
"Tell me about that car out there," he calls from the other room.
A burst of hope, unexpected and breathtaking as a kick in the chest.
"You gotta talk up," he calls.
She clears the if only's from her throat, the deals she is ready to make in exchange for one last chance. "It's ten years old. It has about ninety thousand miles."
"I can see that." He is in front of her again, filly dressed. "How does it run?"
"I haven't had any problems. I wouldn't try it over railroad tracks though."
He looks at her blankly, cross-eyed, then grins an insincere, "Ha ha," and gives her cheek a couple of I-get-it slaps.
"You've got almost a full tank of gas. You ought to be fine."
"I do, do I? What about you?"
"me?"
"What're you going to do the next time you get thirsty up here all alone? How're you going to take a leak with this chair tied to your back."
Matter-of-fact, neutral. "You could untie me."
"What I could do is take you with me."
His words slice right to the nerve holding her together. Tears spring to her eyes. "Please," she says. "Leave me here."
"You're just what I need, a juicy bargaining chip. Hey, how do you think it makes me feel when you do that?"
Through a film she sees the cabin empty, swaddled in spider webs, the basil beds choked by the explosive seeds of thistle, wild rose, mullein. She is mourning her lives, the ones she imagined, the ones she got.
At least she's been allowed to go to seed.
Maybe that's all there is, maybe the rest-beauty, romance, peace, and the general good-is nothing, society's PK
At the kitchen counter he is throwing open cabinet doors, rummaging.
"I have a daughter," she says.
"She have nice legs?" He sets aside a box of microwave popcorn, a bag of granola. "I take it you're too good for junk food."
"I need to write my daughter a note. Explaining."
"What's to explain? Man, I'd give my shirt about now for a half-dozen jelly doughnuts. Wanna know how I like to eat them?"
"You are not her fault.'
He stops, steps away from the kitchen so he can look at her, eyes the color of dirty ice. He shakes his head. "Dumb."
"I don't want her to feel guilty for the rest of her life. Thinking there's something she should have done."
His dazed irises slide toward his nose. "What?"
"She needs to know I forgive her for not forgiving me." For graduating from high school two hundred miles away then coming back and rounding up two old soccer teammates to help her load the contents of her room into the Blazer she borrowed from her dad. Shelves of perfectly preserved Barbie dolls and unicorns and trophies, posters of Madonna and Tom Cruise. "She needs to know I don't forgive myself," Sand added, for being afraid to protest as all remaining evidence of Erica disappeared into black plastic bags.
She could have tried harder, promised to change, thrown herself in front of the Blazer's wheels. Instead she'd acted as though she'd approved of the plan.
"Excuse me, but you sound like a couple of nut cases." He gives up on foraging, slams each cabinet door so hard it flies back open.
To each loud crack she thinks no. Erica is not a nut case. Velia, yes, Sand, maybe. But Erica wasn't, must never be. "In the event that something happens to me." There.
He relaxes, beams. "Something already has. If you'd had a TV, maybe you'd be showing a little respect."
She has gone too far to retract. "Something worse." The words may fend the something off, they may pave its way.
He is back in his element. "What do you think could be worse?" She refuses to say.
"I wish to hell you'd answer my questions."
"My hands have gone to sleep, I've got cramps in both arms, I don't know."
"The point is I can do what I want."
"If that's a question, yes. You could let me write a note to my daughter."
"No time," he says, abruptly preoccupied with the concealed sharpshooters he imagines outside. "We gotta load some of this stuff into the car and then we're outta here."
"I do need to use the bathroom."
"Shit." He throws up his arms, gun and all. His eyes go blank, he breathes faster-- he is trying to think.
She watches his face, sees the moment when a team of he-men with telescopic rifles melts into an old woman peeing all over the seat of a car.
He unties her hands as if they are cabinet doors; luckily they are beyond feeling.
"Don't do anything dumb," he grumbles, as if he knows he's repeating himself. He gives the gun a flourish. "If I hear anything I'm not supposed to hear-I'm standing right outside."
Her hands have been retied but more loosely. She has been loaded into the passenger side of her car, a sack of provisions plopped on her lap. Along the seam of the grocery bag, she reads the information Made with pride by Victor Morales. More PR, she thinks. The gun rides the middle of the seat, in plenty of space.
He swings onto her long driveway, swerves with it around the old madrone tree with its two trunks-the original upright one dead and gray, the other rich red one pushing out at an angle, almost as thick.
