She settled into the comfort of business class at the start of the break she wanted—no, needed. Not one of those weeks away from work when her email and cell phone kept her on a long-distance tether to the office and problems other people should be handling. No, she needed the type of break where she could disappear for a while; where she could lose track of time and look at a calendar without the faintest idea of what day it was.
Bree breathed deep and soft next to her, getting her wish of uninterrupted sleep. Eliza’s eyes adjusted as the information cycled through her screen. Their altitude, their speed. The outside temperature of fifty degrees below zero should she want to step outside for some fresh air. Their tiny plane was stuck on a dead-straight line from Los Angeles to Sydney.
Was she on the wrong course?
Eliza flicked her tablet on and fired open the bookmarked websites she had pored over for a month. The website for Outback Tours sat on top of the rest—and the text that had burned into her soul flared again into view. Text overlaying a photograph of an indigenous man in a black shirt and khaki shorts.
Find yourself in the middle of nowhere.
Those first two words had chipped away at her with infuriating regularity since she’d first laid eyes on the photo. Find yourself. The words that had sparked this mini-crisis of self-evaluation.
Eliza had never thought of herself as lost. Since the internship, she had dragged herself up the corporate ladder and around blockages, managing nonperformers, and finding ways not to smash the glass ceiling but slip around it. Relying on herself—a lesson learned in the harsh furnace of business, which burned those around her who were unreliable.
Find.
She stared at the word on the screen. Eliza had spent a month focusing on that word, analyzing everything about herself to find why it annoyed her like a run in her stockings, but now the second word drew her in.
Yourself.
Had she focused on the wrong word? The word find had taunted her, poking at her growing discomfort. Maybe it wasn’t so much that she was lost but that she was no longer herself. The young woman desperate to change the world had become a passive participant in it, navigating her way through, pressing on but leaving it untouched.
The data of their flight cycled on her screen. Six hours fifty-seven minutes to go. Their tiny plane headed for a bend in the flight path, a change of direction. Eliza zoomed out on the screen. The bend led to another straight line. The plane clung to a predetermined path it couldn’t change.
Eliza closed her eyes. Maybe she could.
* * *
San Francisco shimmered through Lincoln Horne’s corner office window. Sweeping views of crystal blue from the Bay Bridge right across to Alcatraz—Angel Island—on a good day. The flags atop the buildings that housed the rest of his competitors in the Financial District fluttered in the shining haze of a lazy August morning. The colors were richer, sharper than normal.
The soft leather squeaked as Lincoln rose on the balls of his feet and smoothed his Brooks Brothers suit pants. A ten-year fight had delivered this stunning water view. It was enough, for the moment. On every drive up to his office, he felt like he’d reached the mountaintop. He nearly had. Two floors away from the summit of his career. In his thirties.
Twenty floors below, an army of employees scurried to work, ready to be told what to do and to think. A shining red-and-green cable car jerked its way through Nob Hill, picking up speed as it threaded its way between the narrow avenue of buildings that shepherded California Street down to the sparkling water.
Lincoln turned at the no-nonsense knock, and the door opened before he could offer an invitation. A silver-haired man in a Gucci suit burst through.
Lincoln hustled around his desk to greet his boss, knocking over an empty photo frame. “Mr. Davidson, come in.”
The old man enveloped Lincoln in a solid embrace, slapping his back. “We are looking forward to you joining us on the top floor. You’ve worked hard and you thoroughly deserve it.”
“Thank you, sir. I am definitely looking forward to becoming a partner.”
The conversation felt easy, like between old friends more than colleagues. Equals. Lincoln could get used to the perks of a chauffeured limousine and partners-only drinks at The Daily Grill on Geary Street.
Mr. Davidson gave Lincoln a final pat on his back, then headed for the door. He rested his hand on the door handle. “There is one more thing, Linc. You will be sharing an office on the top floor.”
Lincoln slumped back on the desk. Everyone had their own corner suite on the top floor. No one shared. What was the point of working like a dog if he had to share the limelight he was due?
Mr. Davidson sneered. “Get used to it. You’ll be splitting everything down the middle from now on.”
Lincoln woke to the crunchy tinkling of ice splashing across his tray. He reached for the letter and ran his thumb over the gold embossed lawyer’s logo at the top.
A letter written on behalf of a wife who was his ex-wife in all but a legal sense.
After all the gifts and all his promises, she’d gone ahead and done it.
* * *
Bree jolted awake. “Who is it? Emily or Imogen?”
It took her mind a moment to join the rest of her body. Sam wasn’t nudging her with one of the girls at their bedside; she was at forty thousand feet, and the jolt was a pocket of colder air. She pushed up the eye mask, cracked open one eye, and looked at the LCD monitor. Five hours to go.
Eliza snored lightly—completely at peace, not a hair out of place even in sleep. The years had been more than kind. They’d been lavish in their generosity.
Bree wriggled her toes, cocooned in warm airline socks. People slept alone in the dim half-light of business class or were bathed in the fierce wash of a screen. Bree needed another nap before they arrived in Australia. Another connecting flight meant she needed as much sleep as possible when she could get it. No different than raising two girls under the age of three.
She lifted a finger to the screen and punched her way through the in-flight entertainment, hoping for good music. She was blessed—the latest album from Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch. She started the music and closed her eyes. The melodic twang of his guitar. The sweetness of her voice. A rough clipping and tailing of lyrics, somehow carrying both the stab of pain and the promise of hope.
She let her mind drift to the Ryman Auditorium, whose center stage she had once dreamed to grace. She sat, enthralled, at the two voices entwined as one, the song melancholy but strong. What she wanted to be.
The voices rang beyond the final strummed chord, and she opened her eyes, now damp with tears. On the other side of business class, noisy snores erupted from Lincoln—his head thrown back, his mouth wide open as he twitched and rolled in a fitful sleep. Andy was buried under a blanket that twitched with the occasional flicker of obvious dreams.
Bree closed her eyes again and lay her chair fully flat as more melancholy strength piped into her headphones, and her soul. She drifted back to the Ryman and the singular spotlight, under which sat a microphone in its stand, the stage now empty.
* * *
Andy’s fidgeting wasn’t driven by a dream. He was trying to escape a nightmare.
With the airline blanket tented over him, he flicked through his tablet, sourcing jobs in Australia, preferably somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Google Maps confirmed Australia had plenty of that. He had three months on his visa, time enough to work out his next moves.
The blanket dropped away, and Sue—Andy’s friend from his Cincinnati flight—looked away from her movie and fixed Andy with a smile. Andy feigned waking from a deep sleep and pulled the blanket back over his head. He had hoped the flight to Australia would be the first time he could stop looking over his shoulder. But the need for a constant state of alertness remained, forty thousand feet above the Pacific.
Andy tapped in Cattle Station Jobs. Months of research revealed that while Texans had ranches, Australians had catt
le stations. He flicked through the scant options, checking each one not for salary and conditions but for distance away from civilization.
He selected Onkaparinga Station—twenty-five hundred square kilometers of outback for cattle to roam, which quick mental math converted to about a thousand square miles. About the size of Rhode Island. Surely he could lose himself there for a while. He would draw a line in the sand. Sure, it was another one, but if that line was miles away from the battering waves that usually washed away his good intentions, it would be different this time. It had to be.
* * *
The ice clinked in the muted drone of business class as Lincoln reached for the letter. The handwritten wording on the bottom was in the same hand as the front of the envelope.
You shut me out even though you claimed to love me. Until you get over your past, you will never have a future. I could put up with it because the money was good, but with all the women . . .
All the women? Hardly. He’d run out of patience explaining he’d stayed faithful to his marriage vows while it became obvious she had no intention of keeping hers. The “other women” had only started once Dianne had kicked him to the curb, saying she didn’t want him back under any circumstances. She’d only gotten back in touch with him once news spread that he would make partner.
She’d added one last line to her own note at the bottom. In defiance. To make an angry point.
“And it’s because of this mental anguish that I want more than half.”
Mental anguish? Their marriage had crammed two months of his happiness into two years. Two years! His head pounded as the alcohol fought with his broiling anger. Lincoln chugged the rest of his drink, drowning out the anxiety that threatened to overtake the excitement of the reunion.
He scanned the legalese dotted throughout the letter, his thumb brushing over the embossed lawyer’s logo at the top of the page. Formal notice of intention . . . file for divorce . . . irreparable differences . . . division at the court’s discretion . . .
But he drew his gaze back to her words that cut him to the heart: “Until you get over your past, you will never have a future.” Lincoln was tired of hearing that, and it came from more sources than Dianne.
He dragged his bleary eyes to the far side of the cabin. His past was fast asleep. He flexed his jaw as his determination to reconnect solidified in his vodka-soaked, sleep-starved mind.
* * *
Bree sat in the center wedge of a packed auditorium, hemmed in by a murmur of impatience. The stage was clear, a single spotlight pinpointing a Gibson guitar behind a single microphone on a stand. The audience waited on tenterhooks for the next act to arrive.
The impatience grew as Bree craned her neck to see into the wings of the stage. Who was due to perform? She wracked her brain—she didn’t even know who she was here to see.
Bree felt eyes on her. To her right, a woman in gray drilled her gaze into Bree. Beyond her, a balding, ruddy-faced man in a checked shirt glared. She again scanned the empty stage for some clues—any clues—of who was due on the stage and why people were so angry.
Down her row, face after face turned to her, animosity etched into each one. Animosity directed at her.
Why are they looking at me like that?
People from the rows in front of her turned, resting elbows on chair backs, penetrating glares aimed at her. Bree shrunk away from them as the spotlight bounced from the Gibson’s neck on the stage. Her thin smile melted into numbing horror at the guitar’s pink-and-silver inlay between the frets—frets that had spent years under the flash of her fingers.
The Gibson was hers. Her beloved guitar that had graced the stage and the radio station at Flagstaff College. The guitar she was now using to pass on to her girls her love of music.
A creeping embarrassment heated her cheeks and neck. The entire audience now turned toward her, a few of them jerking their heads to the stage. Anxiety bit deep. Were they waiting for her? There was no way they were all here to listen to her performance.
She fumbled in her pocket for the ticket stub. The dim light revealed the artist’s name due to perform. It couldn’t be—
A burning spotlight clunked to life from above and illuminated her in her seat. Faces hardened and eyes narrowed as a perfect silence descended onto the auditorium.
They were waiting for her. Ready or not, she had to go up onstage. She felt a tap on her shoulder. Something about the tap felt familiar. Heavy. Accusing. And her mother’s perfume drifted across her shoulder.
Gulping down breaths for courage, Bree moved to stand but her feet remained rooted to the floor. She put all her focus into one leg, but it was frozen. Panic swept over her as she wrenched her legs to move, but she was going nowhere.
From the right wing of the stage, a man emerged, wearing all black and a headset and carrying a clipboard. He moved into the spotlight and leaned into the microphone. “Bree Carter, you’re wanted onstage.”
Bree was light-headed. There had been a misunderstanding. She wasn’t ready to play. Her throat constricted, choking off any words of defense against this wave of expectation she could never fulfill.
The stage manager tapped on the microphone and cleared his throat. “Bree Carter, you’re needed on the stage.”
Her body refused to cooperate. The spotlight clunked off and the house lights went up. Tut-tuts of disappointment pecked at her shattered confidence as tears flowed and people rose to leave, bitter complaints floating across to her and down to her from above.
The stage manager shook his head. “Sorry, miss, your audition is over.”
Over before it had begun. Just like last time.
* * *
The woman stared back at Eliza from the darkened window, a carpet of blinking Los Angeles lights stretching out behind her. Flawless skin, jet-black hair tied back, two tendrils framing her eyes—chocolate-brown pools of promise.
This woman looked incredible—she had to be in an industry with perfection as its prerequisite, creating generations of women with built-in disappointment when that perfect beauty wasn’t achieved. Oil to the machine.
Eliza stared into the eyes of her reflection. How did she get here?
At her heart she opposed the ideals she was paid handsomely to champion. Was she that driven in her job that all she did was tick whichever box was next?
Something in the reflection’s eyes flickered. A restlessness. A slip of the mask.
With a burst of white light the reflection melted away and Eliza was faced with the harsh reds and oranges of the Australian outback. The rocky ground crunched under her feet as she made her way along a dirt road, emptiness in every direction for miles. She spun, looking for a reference point but was rewarded with nothing.
Ahead of her, the road veered to the left, then sliced toward the horizon. She spun faster. Eliza saw nothing but red, felt nothing but sick. Dizzy and out of control, she put out her arms and a hand reached for her—
She woke with a start, Bree’s hand sitting on her shoulder.
“We’re nearly there, Lize. Sorry to wake you.”
Outside Eliza’s window the stark black had submitted to the first rays of a sunrise they had spent half a day fleeing. The soft lilac of the sky gave way to the full, rich spectrum of blue.
The flight map said Australia was close. Eliza craned her neck to see ahead of the plane. The first smudge of a haze appeared as an entire continent appeared to rise from the sea. She elbowed Bree and pointed ahead as the exotic, faraway continent came into view and stretched as far as the eye could see. The change was so sudden—like God had reached down and plonked a whole country in the middle of nowhere. Which, in a way, He had.
Bree stifled a yawn. “I can’t believe we’re nearly there.”
Neither could Eliza. She sat back, her nerves still pulsing from the dream. It had to mean something. She had looked into her own eyes and seen something that showed her she needed to change.
Eliza was sure her life was about to restart.
A cramp seized Andy’s shoulders as he pulled them in tight, hemmed in by a domestic flight cursed with the lack of the luxurious space of international business class. He had withdrawn into the view. For two hours the ground had changed thirty thousand feet below as the crisscross suburban gray of the city gave way to deep green, which gave way to dusty brown, which gave way to an ochre orange. Now the earth was rich red. It was as if the lifeblood of the country was being cleansed as it flowed back to its heart.
Andy smiled, again safely out of reach. The sign warning against cell phone use in passport control at Sydney Airport had provided him with a welcome alibi. And the adrenaline rush of running the gauntlet of duty-free alcohol had given him a few moments to slip away and buy snacks, security against the possibility Lincoln wasn’t joking about eating bugs and spiders.
Andy winced at the only slip—absentmindedly switching on his phone in the airport transfer bus and releasing a cacophony of messages. And while he thought he’d recovered, he was sure Eliza was staring at him from across the aisle.
She leaned across him to see the view. “The outback is huge!” A crinkle appeared above her nose. “We never got around to finishing our conversation from before.”
So she had seen it. Andy’s defenses dropped into place as he unraveled the spiel the long flight from Los Angeles had allowed him to prepare. “Am I in trouble? I’ve got troubles like everyone else, and I’m looking forward to unwinding in Australia and getting away for a while, you know?” That answer should withstand serious scrutiny.
Eliza frowned. While his answer might’ve been perfect, he’d answered the wrong question. “That wasn’t what I was referring to.”
The familiar chill of uncertainty gripped him.
“You said you never wanted to be found again. What did you mean by that?”
Andy’s mind fired in all directions as a new threat found a hole in his carefully constructed perimeter. “I . . .” He slumped with a sigh. He had nothing. “I don’t know, what does it mean to you?”
Where the Road Bends Page 4