The Edge Of The Sky

by Drusilla Campbell

  Dom refused to hire anyone to help her keep the big, rambling house. He believed housekeeping was her job, but even more, he wanted no invasion of the family’s privacy. No stranger poking into drawers and closets and carrying tales into the world. What tales? Lana wondered.

  She said, “It was an accident, of course, and the girls feel awful. . . . They’re in the kitchen with Tinera.”

  “You brought them with you?”

  “They need—”

  “I don’t believe their needs count for much under the circumstances.” He did not sound angry, just worn out, worn down, done in. He dropped into the chair opposite Lana and covered his face with his hands. “It was a boy, Lana. A son.”

  He lowered his hands and Lana thought she had never seen such misery on any man’s face. If he had moved toward her at that moment, she would have held out her arms to comfort him.

  “A boy, Lana. At last.”

  “She was only a few weeks along. There was no way to tell—”

  “I knew, I knew.” He shook his fist. Not at Lana but close enough to make her pull back. “I knew in my gut since the afternoon we made him. When I came it was different, more powerful.”

  Enough with the details, Lana thought.

  She said, “I know it’s just words but honestly, the girls and I are so terribly sorry. But if it was a boy—”

  “I said it was a boy, Lana. You don’t believe me?”

  “If you made a boy once, you can do it again.”

  “If?”

  “Dom, I believe you. You made a boy.”

  “My brothers all have sons.”

  Lana stood up. “I’m going to see her—I won’t stay long.”

  “She’s upset.”

  “So are the girls. They need to tell her how sorry they are. Especially Micki.”

  She walked to the sitting room door and put her hand on the glass knob.

  Dom said, “She’s asleep.”

  “Then I’ll just look in.”

  He stood in front of her, all five-feet-eight of him: a stocky, cement-solid Italian—and a stallion, according to Kathryn’s innuendos.

  “She’s my sister.”

  “She’s my wife.”

  A stalemate. And then, faintly, the sound of canned laughter.

  “She’s watching TV,” Lana said.

  “Before you do anything, we need to talk.”

  Maybe what she smelled wasn’t sweat—maybe it was hostility.

  Over his shoulder Lana looked out the window through a stand of untidy cottonwoods across a narrow strip of grass and garden and the turnaround where one of the illegal Mexican laborers Dom employed was raking the gravel. In the corral Jacaranda, Kathryn’s tall bay thoroughbred, bent his forelegs carefully, dropped to the ground, and rolled in the scrubby grass, rocking from side to side on his back. Dom had no interest in horses, but Kathryn was never more comfortable than on the back of a fifteen-hundred-pound animal. For the first time this seemed important and Lana knew that later she would have to think about why her sister was both strong and weak at the same time.

  “It’s not just what happened last night,” Dom said. “Last night . . . It’s not you, Lana. Kathryn loves you and I don’t want to get between you two. But your daughters . . .” He shook his head. “They’re out of control. And a bad influence on my girls.”

  “Wait a minute, Dom. That’s not fair.” She blinked and focused on the thoroughbred, watched it lurch to its feet and swing off to the far end of the corral. “You and I, we have different ideas about raising kids. And that’s okay, but if you want my opinion, your daughters—”

  “I don’t want your opinion,” he said. And then he smiled and the charm came out like sunshine. He put his big hand on Lana’s shoulder, close to her neck. She felt his heat on her skin. “This is so hard, this family stuff. You know I don’t want to be harsh, you know how much you and your girls mean to me, but we’ve talked about this, me and Kathryn . . .”

  “Kathryn loves Micki and Beth.” She stepped away. “Whatever your feelings are, don’t make her part of this.”

  “Hey-hey-hey, Lana, ease up. Let me say this, okay?” He moved closer and ran his hand up her neck and cupped her chin, turning her face toward his. She pulled aside and he smiled and she thought how this was what he had wanted, to get a physical reaction from her. “It doesn’t have to be forever. Jesus, that’s the last thing we want. Me and Kathryn just think that until Micki and Beth work out their problems, it would be best for everyone if the kids didn’t spend time together.”

  “How long did you have in mind? A year? A decade? Maybe when they’re grannies they can be best buddies.” Lana rested her hand on the back of the chair and focused on the balls of her feet. “What are you talking about? Exactly.”

  “Lana, these things happen in families. Adolescence, it’s a hard time. That’s all I’m saying—don’t get carried away.” Dom folded his arms across his chest and looked down, pressing his stubbly chin back against his throat. “A kid like Micki, she’s fightin’ her way through it and believe me, I know what that’s like. Me and my brothers, we wanted to kill each other.” His gaze met Lana’s. “But there’s this peer pressure thing and for my girls to be around yours, especially Tinera at this time in her life, it’s a bad idea.”

  Lana wanted to slug him. “What am I supposed to tell Micki and Beth?”

  He half-smiled at her. “Tell ’em the truth. It won’t kill ’em.”

  The truth: Your uncle is a bastard and a son of a bitch. If he vanished off the face of the earth, I would never lift a finger to find him. It was what she thought but she could never say it, not against her little sister’s husband.

  “I’m going to see Kathryn now.”

  “Lana, Lana, you’re so angry. Why are you so angry with me?” He held out his hands as if to show he was unarmed. “I’m not the enemy here. I’m just doing what I have to, protecting my family.”

  “Well, good for you.” Lana did not hear his response, just the bark of his voice behind her as she left the sitting room and went in to see her sister.

  She closed the bedroom door behind her and pressed the button on the knob to lock it. If Dom wanted to interrupt he could break the door down.

  The shutters were closed and the bedroom lay in deep violet shadow. The air smelled like rose potpourri, a heavy, sickish odor.

  “Can’t we open some windows?” Lana asked. “It’s a gorgeous day.”

  The television flickered, there was laughter and the back-and-forth of sharp female voices; but Kathryn lay on her side, facing away from it. Lana walked across the room and turned the set off.

  “Leave it,” Kathryn said, not moving.

  “After we talk.”

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  “Yeah, but you still have to.”

  “God, you’re bossy.”

  Lana walked around the room opening the shutters, sliding the windows back.

  “It’s cold,” Kathryn whined.

  “Put on a sweater.”

  Lana let the golden afternoon light into the spacious bedroom with the gilt mirrors and massive furnishings she knew Dom had selected. She knelt on the bed to prop and rearrange the pillows.

  “Sit up.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Shitty, thanks.”

  Actually, Lana thought, for someone who had spent the night in the emergency room, Kathryn looked pretty good. Her fine blond hair was arranged in two stubby pigtails, she wore her diamond stud earrings—a half-karat larger than Stella’s, Dom had made sure of that—and without makeup the natural roses in her cheeks made her look young.

  “I have a killer headache.”

  “Let me get you some aspirin. Is there some in—?” Lana opened the drawer of the bedside table. “Oh my god, what’s this doing here?”

  She pulled out a .38 revolver like the one Jack had bought her years ago. Lana knew how to use the gun—Jack had made sure of t
hat when they lived in the cottage on the grounds of Urban Greenery; but now her own revolver lived in its leather case on a shelf in her closet. The ammunition was in her dresser.

  “Dom works late. He wants me to be able to protect myself.”

  Lana spun the chamber. “It’s loaded. You can’t keep a loaded gun right out where your kids could get it.”

  Kathryn groaned. “Why are you nagging me, Lana? The girls won’t touch the gun. They aren’t stupid. Anyway, it makes no sense to keep a gun for protection unless it’s loaded. Dom says—”

  Lana removed the bullets. “So don’t tell him.” She put them in a drawer under Kathryn’s sweaters, then she went into the bathroom and came out a minute later with aspirin and a glass of water.

  “How bad’s the arm?” Lana asked.

  “Not bad. Hardly hurts at all.”

  “God, Kay, I’m so sorry. About the mis.”

  “I know.”

  “Dom told me I couldn’t come in.”

  “But here you are.” Kathryn patted Lana’s hand and managed half a grin. “That’s my big sister.”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  Kathryn shook her head. “Did you ever find out who the guy was in the Jag?”

  Lana shook her head.

  “She still isn’t talking?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “And you believe her? You trust her?”

  “You sound like Ma. Yes, I trust her. She’s a good girl.”

  “If she were mine,” Kathryn said, “I’d shake the truth out of her.”

  “You mean Dom would. He’d probably hold a gun to her head until she confessed.”

  Kathryn smiled.

  “She and Beth are with Tinera in the kitchen,” Lana said. “As we speak.”

  “You brought them?” Kathryn sat up straighter.

  “She feels awful. They both do, but Micki ’specially. They need to apologize.”

  Kathryn shook her head and pulled the pink, satin-edged electric blanket up around her chin. “I’m not mad at them. Just tell them that.”

  “I’ll go get them. You can tell them yourself.”

  “Don’t push him, Lana. Please.”

  “All they need is—”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Kathryn, it’ll take less than five—”

  “Tell them I love them. Tell them anything you want to make them feel better.”

  “He says you think they’re a bad influence on your girls.” Lana fixed her with a stern look that came straight out of their childhood. “Is that true, Kay?”

  Kathryn lay back, masking her eyes with her forearm. “Don’t make me pick sides. Not you, too. Just believe me, I can’t see them. If you love me, just tell them I’m not angry, and I don’t blame them. Honestly.” She lowered her arm and looked at Lana and in the wide, dry light of her blue eyes, in the parched sea of their color, Lana saw a survivor clinging to a shipwreck. It was one of those instants of vivid illumination that occasionally came to her like the flare of an ancient instinct; she knew with certainty that when she and Mars teased Dom, when they called him a retro-male, a throwback, and a fossil, he laughed along with them and played the sport, went home, and took his anger out on Kathryn. Lana could argue with her sister and eventually get her to agree to see the girls and when it was over she would have been just as much a bully as Dom.

  “Okay.” Lana rose from the edge of the bed. “I’ll take them home and I’ll lie—”

  Kathryn jerked forward and grabbed Lana’s wrist. “It’s not a lie. I do forgive them. Totally. You can tell Mick I’m grateful. Tell her she did me a favor.” She spoke like someone trying not to scream. “Tell her I never wanted that baby in the first place.”

  Chapter Seven

  Lana told Micki and Beth the medication given Kathryn in the hospital had made her too groggy to visit with them. Their feet crunched on the gravel as they walked to the car; Lana felt Dom watching their departure and had a wicked desire to turn around and flip him the finger.

  “What did she say about the baby?”

  “It wasn’t a baby,” Beth said. “It was an embryo.”

  “She was philosophical, Micki.” Lana had planned this answer as she left Kathryn’s room and walked down the hall to the front door. “She said she’d get pregnant again. It’s easy for her.” Not precisely true, but it would make Micki feel better.

  “She’s not mad at me?”

  “Not a bit.”

  But apparently Micki was unconvinced because over the next several days, she asked the same question several times. “It was an accident,” Lana always told her. “Aunty Kay knows you’d never do anything to hurt her on purpose.” Lana kept waiting for the next question—Then why doesn’t she call me?—but Micki never asked it and Lana wondered if she was afraid to hear the answer.

  In mid-January a series of Pacific storms stretched end-to-end like a wagon train rolled over southern California, deluging San Diego with as much rain in ten days as the region sometimes got all year and disrupting the city’s relaxed Latin pace. Mudslides devastated housing developments in North County and storm sewers overflowed, contaminating miles of beaches. If you didn’t own an umbrella there wasn’t a store that could sell you one after the first day of downpour. Urban Greenery was a bog and everyone came to work in old clothes and heavy shoes or boots, cursing and blessing the rain in the same breath. The parking lot stayed empty all day. Lana used the time to clean and reorganize the showrooms and displays.

  After several squally days the sky cleared for a few hours and shone like an enormous lapis dome on which someone had painted horizons of towering clouds backlit in gold. On such days Lana and Jack had walked on the beach bundled in parkas they wore only three or four times a year. A good storm brought up from the sea floor shells and colored stones and bits of smoothed glass as subtly colored as gemstones. They gathered these and brought them home for the garden. Lana could not go to the beach alone. Instead she left work after lunch and drove out to the ranch to see Kathryn, hoping to catch her at a time when she would have neither husband nor children for distraction.

  She found her sister in the barn saddling Jacaranda. Kathryn wore a plaid flannel shirt and snug Levi’s tucked into the top of a pair of expensively tooled leather boots. Her fair hair was tucked up under a watch cap Lana had knitted her in wool as blue as her eyes. Perhaps because of the season—no one had been spending much time out of doors the last two weeks—Kathryn looked paler than usual, and puffy-eyed as if she had been sleeping too much and too hard, late in the morning, in an overheated room.

  “You’re too thin,” Lana hugged her. Through the flannel shirt, she felt Kathryn’s ribs against the palms of her hands.

  “Lets go for a ride, huh? While the weather holds?” Kathryn pointed in the direction of a tack room door standing open. “There’s boots in there. And a helmet.”

  Lana did not want to ride, but she did want to talk to Kathryn and a trail ride was a good time to do it. Outside, away from the house and on horseback, Kathryn was always more relaxed than in her home.

  “The horses have been crazy, cooped up inside,” Kathryn said as she laid a western saddle across Graylight’s back for Lana. She patted the mare’s gray flank. “You’ll have to watch her. She’ll be twitchy.”

  “How about you?”

  “Am I twitchy?” Kathryn smiled. “You know how it is. I love the rain but the gray skies make me blue.” She laughed. “Sounds like a line from a song, doesn’t it?”

  “Are you taking your pills?”

  “Yes, Big Sister.” Kathryn made a face.

  Kathryn hated to be reminded that she was under medication for depression. She resented the pills that lifted her spirit, felt taking them labeled her as crippled in some way. Lana believed Kathryn had been depressed most of her life, even as a small child when, to cheer her up, Stella had taken her shopping at Saks or to the hairdresser where she paid someone to paint her little girl’s nails and backcomb
her blond curls.

  Mars said Stella would have done these things regardless of Kathryn’s disposition because she was her favorite, the family doll. Kathryn smiled for everyone, passed around canapés, twirled and sang, “Shine little glowworm, glow and glimmer;” and when she was four, Stella and Stan and their friends thought she was irresistible, lisping through lines like thou aeronautical boll weevil, illuminate yon woods primeval.

  Lana looked back now and felt a tug of sympathy for Kathryn, singing and dancing and smiling on command. But at the time it seemed her little sister got all the attention while Lana got none. So naturally she envied her, but she was too sweet to resent deeply or for long.

  “How’s Dom?” Lana asked as she adjusted the stirrups on Graylight.

  “Furious. Construction stops in the rain.”

  On the way to the ranch, Lana had passed a ten-story office building with a sign out in front, FIRENZI CONSTRUCTION. These signs were all over the city. In the Golden Triangle the firm was building a massive complex for a German pharmaceutical company and near the Gaslamp a multistoried parking complex was rising from the rubble of an old warehouse. Lana thought how phallic this kind of construction work was and how perfectly it suited her brother-in-law.

  It had been months since Lana last rode; she could not sort her way through the double reins.

  “I’ll do it for you,” Kathryn said. “You just put on your boots.”

  The riding pants were two sizes too big and the blue denim shirt smelled and looked as if it hadn’t been washed in some time. “I hope the fashion nazis aren’t around,” Lana said.

  “You’ll do,” Kathryn said over her shoulder as she led Jacaranda out of the barn. “You smell good to Graylight.”

  They stood on hay bales to mount and then turned their horses up the gentle slope behind the barn along a narrow trail cut through rocks and scrub. Graylight and Jacaranda, accustomed to going out together, flicked their ears and tossed their heads in the sunlight, happy to walk and trot side by side, allowing Lana and Kathryn to talk. Occasionally Jacaranda remembered he was a stallion and nickered under his breath at Graylight but she was not interested, gave him no enticements, and so he mostly left her alone.