The Moment Before

by Suzy Vitello

  Good for her, says Sabine, meaning it.

  The Jumbotron hanging from the center of the coliseum zooms in on a little African American boy in a white suit. He holds a jeweled crown on a pillow and walks slowly, carefully to Martha, who, at this moment, is being draped in a long robe.

  The camera pans to Martha, whose hands are completely covering her face while her shoulders shudder, the appropriate moment for tears, but I know those tears are not just because she won. Everyone’s eyes are on the Jumbotron, or on Martha, or on the loser princesses who are graciously hugging their sister, the Queen. Maybe it’s Sabine’s voice that tells me to look off to the side. Maybe it’s instinct, but I know that nobody else sees him at the edge of the curtained-off area dressed in his own white tux and top hat. His cocky, arms-folded posture. His gangly Ichabod Crane self. And even without the benefit of a high-tech camera, even with my regular eyes, I can tell he’s been drinking. A lot. There’s no doubt in my mind what he’s planning.

  “I’ll meet you at home?” I tell my parents before dashing out to the aisle and scrambling up the stairs and out the main entrance. The only problem? I have no idea where Nick parked the Volvo. It could be anywhere. One of four parking garages or the latecomers lots that charge $20 for the benefit of an easy exit.

  It’s raining pretty hard, and as I wander up and down the main drag in Sabine’s platform sandals looking for any glimpse of the Volvo, cars are splashing through puddles, drenching my legs and feet. My hair is the coat of a wet dog. Mascara is runny down my cheeks; I see drips of black rolling off my chin. I circle back toward the Coliseum, and teems of people are now leaving the building. I’m a salmon swimming against the current. I text Martha, Please let me know you’re ok. Saw Nick.

  But, I know it’s fruitless. The princesses are banned from having their phones anywhere near the ceremony.

  Maybe I should let security know, I think. Maybe I should alert Martha’s parents. Maybe Nick just wanted to watch. A zillion possibilities are slamming through my head. I decide to go back into the building and head for security, but just as I’m rounding the corner to the back entrance, I catch a glimpse of a white tux and a flash of pink chiffon. The sparkle of jewels. Two figures swimming through the crowd, which then parts with oohing and ahhing. When I fight my way forward, I notice that he’s carrying her. Camera phones raised overhead. They think this is part of the show.

  Martha is out of it. How many pills did she take to get her through this day? And then I remember Sabine telling me about the night she lost her virginity. Nick gave her something to relax. Who knows what Martha had in her little box of pills? Xanax? Ruffies?

  As I fight my way through the jumble of people that stands between me and them, I realize that I need to call Connor. Now. Connor is the one person Martha and I both need on the team. Standing beside one of the Rose Quarter fountains while thunder claps and rain pelts, as Martha and Nick grow into a vague blur, I take in a deep breath and press in the number I’d recently deleted from my “favorites” list. In a gush of words, none of them “sorry,” I recount the sequence of events.

  “Where are you?” is all he asks.

  I meet Connor across the Broadway Bridge, on the other side of Rose Festival traffic. There are no yard tools in the back of his stepfather’s pickup, but there are lots of boxes.

  “I’m moving,” he says. “To Bend. Today, actually.”

  I take that in, swallow my disgust for myself. The smell of him, the feel of his body in the bench seat next to me. Why didn’t I put up more of a fight? There was plenty I could have done to change that outcome, but it’s too late now.

  “Where do you think he took her?”

  In my head I’ve been pondering that very question. “I think it depends on what he’s after,” I say. “Clearly, it’s not forgiveness.”

  We rumble through The Pearl, all the high-end cafes and boutiques, everything so clean and new. Connor’s wipers are on super-fast, and I’m soaked to the bone. The jumble of thoughts I have range from fear for Martha to joy that I’m with Connor to worry that, once again, I’m setting myself up for disaster. “I think he’s off his rocker. I mean, kidnapping the Rose Festival Queen?”

  “Does anyone else know she broke up with him?”

  “I doubt it,” I say. “She wanted everything to be perfect today. Keeping up appearances and all that. People probably think the dramatic carting off by the prince was a new Rose Festival act.”

  Sabine intervenes. A matter-of-fact statement. He drugged her.

  “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  Any embarrassment I feel for what I’m about to say vanishes in the face of a certain realization. “Well, Martha is famous for her pity hand jobs, right? And, occasionally, other favors? But I’m pretty damn sure she’s still a virgin.”

  Connor’s eyebrows squinch. Oh, how I’ve missed them.

  I set him straight, pointing up toward the vast hill of green ahead of us. “He’s taking her to the Witch’s House.”

  Connor navigates the pickup through the narrow, convoluted, one-way streets near Lower Macleay Park, and surprisingly, when we get to the tiny circular parking lot, there’s not one car there. Not even the Volvo.

  “Any other ideas?” I know he’s up there. I don’t know how I know, but I do. “The top lot,” I tell Connor. “By Audubon.”

  We turn around, the rain still coming down in buckets, and wind up the steep streets of Northwest Portland. When we pull off Cornell and into the lot, my heart is beating as fast as the wiper blades. It’s there. Sabine’s Volvo. A single car in a lot usually overflowing with hikers and picnickers. Then, I see why. There’s yellow caution tape crisscrossing the trail. A corrugated sign that reads, Hazardous conditions. Trail closed.

  “Now what?” says Connor.

  “I guess we go rescue the Queen,” I tell him.

  I reveal the key I’ve squirreled away, and we quickly sort out a plan. Connor will head to the Witch’s House from the top, and I’ll drive the Volvo back down to the Macleay entrance, and hike up from the bottom. “Are you sure?” he says, as I climb into my sister’s car.

  Connor’s familiar face. His eyebrows and his lips. The perfectness of him. “We have to hurry,” I say.

  I watch him hop over the tape and disappear down the trail, and then I peel out of the gravel lot, the way I’d seen Sabine do a zillion times.

  It takes forever to get back down there, the line of cars at the stop signs, pedestrians and their umbrellas and covered baby strollers. I’m prickly and hot with anxiety. When a dog-walker stops in the middle of an intersection to adjust her umbrella, I finally understand road rage. I narrowly miss the back end of the retriever at the end of her leash as I barrel by.

  Still, nobody in the lower lot. A torrential downpour is blasting our fair city as it does intermittently throughout Rose Festival each year. The Volvo’s wipers are old and crumbly, and I can barely see as I guide the car to a stop. I’m flinging myself out the door, when—Take me with you.

  It’s clear as day, that voice. Like she’s standing next to me, whispering in my ear. Brady, take me with you.

  Before tearing up the trail, I reach under the passenger seat, grab the Ziploc filled with Sabine, and slip it into my coat pocket. Dad, so out of it with grief and whiskey, he forgot he’d left her here. And Nick is apparently not as thorough a detailer as he fancies himself.

  The bottom part of the trail is paved. Disability Access, reads a copper plaque on a rock, and by the time I’m past the paved part, where more yellow tape and hazard signs announce the closure of the trail, I realize that there’s blood in drops behind me. I’ve been running in Sabine’s platform sandals, and I’ve cut two nasty gashes into my feet. I keep running; the burning and aching just make me run faster. Maybe that’s what St. Agatha thought as the knife severed her breasts. The bloody holes in her chest, nothing but fuel for her mission. This must be it then, the way people are guided by
faith. Feeling everything, all the pain, all the fear, and continuing on.

  My phone announces a text. Connor. Hurry.

  The trail is blocked by a mudslide, and I scramble over it, one of my sandals coming loose and slipping down the bank and into the river below. I kick the other one off, too, and keep moving, running barefoot up and up. Now the trail is undercut and no wider than my hand in places, and I grab onto ferns and roots to keep from falling.

  Climbing the last uphill section, around a corner, I lose my footing, and in one desperate grab, I clutch some ivy, the scourge of the park and the fir trees. Ivy that the industrious boy scouts somehow missed. Thank God. It’s the only thing that keeps me from falling the height of an old growth fir, to the rocky creek below.

  And then, I hear Connor’s voice. And Nick. I’m running as fast as I can. My heart in my throat, out of breath, blood streaming off my feet, my raincoat flapping against my calves and the rain continually coating every mud-sliding step. Connor’s voice is a quality I’ve never heard in him. Scared shitless, but forcing calm. “You don’t want to do this,” he’s saying. “You really don’t.”

  His back is toward me, Nick’s is, and he’s got Martha in his clutches. She’s leaned over his arm like a rag doll. Her cape is gone, but she’s still wearing her pink gown. The jewel-studded crown is on the ground next to her. Nick, his white tuxedo covered in mud, is holding something in his other hand. Connor can see me now and his eyes are shifting to whatever’s in Nick’s fist. And then I see what it is. A jagged piece of a beer bottle. He’s holding it against Martha’s throat. Martha, passed out and unaware that at any moment Nick could end it all.

  The stone ruin, the ever-popular party and cherry-popping destination, now serves as the stage for Nick’s desperate act of violence. Ferns have grown in the cracks of the stones. Blackberry vines wiggle out of the crevices like Medusa’s hair. We could be on a Greek Isle somewhere, or a South American jungle, but we’re not. We’re still in Portland. And the contradiction of nature and humanity is strewn about all over the steps. Broken beer bottles. An empty Luncheables container. A couple of popped balloons, their latex skins littering the edge of a crumbling wall.

  Nick doesn’t know I’m behind him. I have one chance. I signal to Connor, my fingers forming the mouth of a shadow puppet, up, down, up, down. I want him to keep talking to distract Nick while I inch closer, furtively tip-toeing on my bloody, bare feet. Don’t fuck this up, says Sabine.

  I slowly reach into my pocket, like there’s a revolver in there. And I get a big, healthy handful. Connor is telling Nick that he can help him explain what happened. And Nick just keeps saying, “You ruined everything.”

  And then, Sabine and me, the two of us, forever Irish twins, we take a deep, cleansing breath, and with all the strength in the world, the loudest cheer we can muster, we yell that fucker’s name. And as he swings around, I wind up just like Dad taught me, minor-leaguer, and when I release the charred remnants of my sister, and watch how perfectly the tiny fragments of her bones, the magnificent arc of her ashes, when I watch them spray all over Nick, in his eyes, up his nose, it’s like in that very moment, I get what cheering was for Sabine.

  And Connor, as Nick tries to shake the ashes out of his eyes, that former wrestling champion, my hero, he moves in with a Tongan death grip. Nick’s jagged bottle pops out of his hand, and I catch Martha as she slumps down into a puddle of pink gown. And then, it’s just Sabine I hear as the rain soaks us to the bone.

  Atta girl, Midge.

  twenty-eight

  Sabine died so suddenly. Nobody saw it coming. And part of why Mom and Dad had to blame Connor, well I understand that now. As Dad told me after the police sorted everything out, and after Nick—who will be tried as an adult for narcotics distribution with intent to harm, as well as kidnapping—was safely locked up, “Worse than having a child die is living with the fact that you couldn’t protect her. Blaming Connor made it easier, somehow.”

  When my parents found out the truth about Sabine, her pregnancy, the abuse from Nick and all of her mind games, it was hard on them, like they had this daughter with a secret life. Dr. Stern though, I have to say, he really helped with it all. The “I-statements,” the sharing our anger and sadness. It’s like we’re different now—a small, less scattered family. Dad’s calmer, Mom’s less preoccupied. And me? I have the Volvo back. I got my license the week after school got out, and the first thing I did was take Nona to bingo at Holy Redeemer. “This car, it suits you, Nipote,” she said as we crisscrossed North Portland. I slapped one of those EARTH bumper stickers where the ART part of the word is called out in red, I slapped it right over the Trample the weak. Hurtle the dead. I want to know that Nick’s tagline is under mine. That, in the end, Nick was the weak one.

  Tonight, there’s a party for Connor. A going away bash that his parents are throwing him. Suddenly, the boy’s a hero. But, he’s still going to Bend. As he put it, “A summer away might be just what I need. I haven’t seen my dad in a while, and, you know, he’s all about the 12-step life now. Might do me good.”

  “Seems there’s a bit of that going around,” I offered.

  Maybe that’s the new rite of passage for middle age. Belief in a power greater than oneself and swearing off booze.

  As for me, I’m just happy junior year is over. And, as it turns out, I’ll be spending my eighteenth birthday in Florence, Italy. Mom’s secret? It wasn’t a lover after all. She’d been planning a surprise for me, going behind my back for letters of recommendation from Bowerman, McConnell, and even Lilith Cupworth. Things are not always what they seem. I’ll be attending the Young Artists Summer Abroad Program, working with some of the best art teachers in the world, walking the same streets as the masters did, centuries ago.

  And, as it turns out, I might see Martha on those same cobblestone streets. Rose Festival Queens travel, apparently, spreading the gospel of Portland, and all its wonders. Martha is now into yoga instead of Xanax, and she keeps telling me and Connor—and that scoop-seeking reporter, Rory Davis—that she owes us her life.

  Heroics aside, I have a sketch to finish up at the Cupworth Studio. There’s an element to the Connor sketch I need to add. An homage, I guess. Sort of like The Last Supper, where da Vinci wrote a story on his canvas. The last moment of grace before the fall. I need to put Sabine back on top. Her gorgeously arched form, the perfect balance, a foot cupped in her partner’s hand. The moment before.

  the end

  Acknowledgements

  To my writing group: Erin Leonard, Mary Wysong-Haeri, Diana Page Jordan, Monica Drake, Cheryl Strayed, Chuck Palahniuk, Lidia Yuknavitch and Chelsea Cain, thank you for your guidance, support and energy. Your big ideas. The way you’ve all modeled success and tenacity through these many years. Not to mention all those bottles of wine.

  BH2014: Shanna Mahin, Averil Dean, Amy Gesenhues and Teri Carter. You guys, my new best friends, I can’t even begin to gush on how fortunate I feel to have stumbled into your worlds. (Thanks, Betsy.)

  Erin Reel, true friend and supporter, thank you for your belief in my writing from one millennium to the other.

  Tom Spanbauer: the reason I keep writing.

  Melissa Sarver, thank you, thank you, thank you for continuing to believe in this book.

  Jennifer Bennett, Patty Kinney, Kayla Williams and all the wonderful writers I met at Antioch, Los Angeles – that MFA program changed my life.

  Love to the LitReactor peeps, and the students there, too.

  Mary Cummings and the gang at Diversion Books, visionaries and pioneers, you guys are really aliens from another planet, right? And I mean that in the best way possible.

  Laura McCulloch, Kelly Ambrose, and David Millstone my forever friends and cheerleaders. Thanks for years and years of laughter and support.

  Lisa Wish, Marshall Anderson, and Helen. I’ve thought of you often while writing this book.

  Ellen Urbani Gass, thank you fo
r your cheerleader insights.

  Katie Soulé, thank you for all your continued support and vision. Brendan, Lindsay, Thamires: best extended family ever! Dakota, I can’t wait until you’re old enough to read this. Wait, yes I can, because I’ll be ancient by then.

  To my Buffalo family, Frank and Evelyn Vitello. All of the Walker clan. Nothing but love.

  A special thought to the people who died too soon. Including Frankie Vitello, Lisa Walker, Candace Mulligan, and Jean Anderson.

  To the hills of Portland, upon which I’ve always worked out my half-baked ideas.

  Leona Kline, original wordsmith and Scrabble tutor, thanks for filling my childhood with words and ideas, and Gerry Freisinger, thanks for your fantastic sense of humor, encouraging love and inappropriate email jokes.

  Kirk, you are my white-boarding, idea-fueling, best, bestest friend. Thanks for hanging in there, and thanks for all the tea and muffins and sustenance delivered to my desk, and especially thanks for putting up with my, you know, moods.

  My kids: Sam, Maggie, Carson, I took out the OOOOOOOO, dude, you’ve been served per your astute edit. I love you three so much. You inspire me every waking hour.

  Cheers.

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