Race Across the Sky

by Derek Sherman

  “‘You’re going to kill that baby,’ he’d shout at me, finger in my face.

  “And then in my third trimester, the snow and the tourists hit, and I got kind of super clingy with him. I kept waking him up at night, and calling him at work. And he said he needed to move out, just so he could sleep. But he never came back.”

  Caleb said nothing. The park was humid; mosquitoes swarmed. He wondered at how well she was running.

  “Now, I wonder if Todd was right. Maybe all that running while I was pregnant, like, dislodged something? Or sent some adrenaline into me that did something to Lily?”

  “I don’t see how it could.” He hesitated. “Did she always breathe like this?”

  June nodded, “Oh yeah, since the first day. They sent me home from the hospital with this machine called a nebulizer, this stuff called prednisone. I had to force a plastic mask over her face. Her bones were so soft they didn’t even seem finished, I thought each time they were going to break. I put this medicine into the machine. When I turned it on, it was so loud, and the mask filled with this mist, and she was scared, she flailed around. If she could have, she would have pulled it off. I felt like I was torturing her. And after it was done, her tiny heart would just be racing, I could actually see it pounding underneath her skin. After a week my manager at work called and said everyone wanted me to bring Lily in. But I stayed in the apartment, listening to her breathe. Twice a day, I sat with her in front of the TV, with this loud machine.

  “One night I was looking for a kids’ show to calm Lily while I put the nebulizer on her, and I stopped on a show with these two men talking on a couch. It said Running Talk. And that was when I saw him.

  “He was wearing a purple T-shirt, and these orange Crocs, and he was talking about the miracle of kinetic energy. And I felt this explosion in my belly. Maybe my running caused Lily’s problems? But maybe it could also heal them. I read all about you guys online. And I figured, Boulder isn’t so far. So last week, I drove out of one bunch of mountains, and up into another.”

  For a few hours they ran single file, and he watched her thick hair slip in strands from its clip. At a switchback the trail widened and June pulled next to him.

  “I think,” she panted, “I’m done.”

  Caleb nodded and slowed to a walk.

  “Did I do okay?”

  “It’s been four hours.”

  “It has?”

  “You’re in better shape than I was when I came here.”

  She touched him then, her damp, hot hands around his arm. For a moment he had believed she was going to kiss him. But he felt her fingers trembling, and her voice came an octave higher.

  “Can Mack help my baby?”

  “Yes, he can.” He blinked. “We all can.”

  The look she gave him then, the way her eyes, almost too big for her, swelled, made him stumble. She was out of breath, and he wanted to breathe for her.

  • • • • • • •

  A week afterward, Mack had announced that June and Lily would be moving into the house.

  Leigh and Makailah bought a crib in town, and played roots reggae from the boom box as they all assembled it. John moved into Hank and Juan’s room, and they painted the empty one yellow, with a moon and stars on the east wall. Alice drew up a schedule of care for Lily, so that June could run every day. One day Makailah came back from Pedestrian with a purple Kelty hiking backpack, designed to carry babies on long hikes, for their group runs.

  Every evening in his room, Mack performed energy healing on Lily. June laid her down on his mattress, and he would hover his palms over her lungs and heart. June could feel the inexplicable heat pulsing from them, but Caleb saw no change in her baby’s breathing.

  One morning, preparing to go up to O’Neil’s, he watched Rae holding her and cringed at the sharp whine of her wheezing. From somewhere deep inside of him, a feeling arose. He barely recognized it.

  All day he lived with it. Ringing up customers, pacing the store, filling his trays and cartridges, it gnawed at him. It was doubt.

  When Mack had cured his recurrent sinus infections, he had been a part of that process, willing Mack’s energy through his head. Energy healing seemed to him to be a two-way process. This baby could not participate.

  In the morning, he found June by the kitchen and motioned toward the back deck. Outside the air was crisp, as if spring had reconsidered its advance.

  “I think we should take Lily to a hospital.”

  June looked at him appreciatively. “Caley, I did that. Nothing they gave her worked.”

  “What did they tell you when you told them it wasn’t helping?”

  “They told me some stuff about testing her genes.”

  “Did you ever do that?”

  “I came here,” she explained.

  “I think it’s a good idea to do it.” Caleb hesitated. “But let’s not tell Mack just yet. Let’s see what they say, and if they have something that works, we can talk with him about it then. Would you want to do that?”

  “I’ll do anything,” she whispered.

  At O’Neil’s that day Caleb called Boulder Community Hospital and obtained the name of a pulmonary specialist. The nurse told him to have Lily’s blood drawn at a local clinic and sent to their office, and an appointment would be scheduled. June accomplished this between cleaning apartments.

  The following week, Caleb left the house for work, but instead met June and Lily in Rocky Mountain National Park, and they began walking toward the hospital. Above them bramblings flew in formation, a straggler coming in from the west.

  “We’re not really adding very much around here, are we?” June asked him.

  “What do you mean? Everybody loves having you.”

  “I doubt it. A crying baby all night?”

  “You make it nicer. And you’re on the other side of the hall,” he smiled.

  June looked at him as if she might cry, and she took his hand. He glanced at Lily in her bright sarong, a smile spreading like an amoeba across her mouth. In a coffee shop window, Caleb saw a man in a banker’s suit, drinking from an enormous cup, glowering at his phone. He was reminded of himself a decade ago and felt pleased at his progression.

  They arrived at an office building adjacent to the community hospital. After a long wait, they were seen by a young doctor. He had missed a spot, Caleb noticed, when he’d shaved. He listened to Lily’s tiny chest, while a nurse called up her blood work on an old PC.

  “I can see why the steroids aren’t doing anything,” the doctor explained affably. “Okay. Your daughter was born with a genetic condition called alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency. We don’t see this a whole lot. That explains why no one diagnosed it before.”

  “I don’t understand,” June frowned, glancing at Caleb.

  Caleb watched the doctor try to smile gently. His eyes, however, held large quantities of concern. “The air is full of things that harm our lungs, okay? Bacteria, viruses. We inhale them with every breath. And we survive. Because our lungs release a substance that attacks these foreign bodies, called neutrophil elastase. It’s like a pit bull, it attacks anything in its path.”

  Caleb was nodding, following. June gripped his fingers and he squeezed them. “But like a pit bull, it needs a leash to hold it back, or it will attack the good things too. Like healthy lung tissue. That leash is a protein that your liver produces, called alpha-one antitrypsin. It all works fine. But,” he swallowed, his eyes moving to Caleb’s and then to Lily’s, “what the blood work is showing, is that Lily has a nonfunctioning gene.”

  “What does that mean?” June shook her head at Caleb. She was lost, frantic.

  “The gene that instructs her liver to produce alpha-one antitrypsin is switched off. The reason the inhalers don’t work, okay, is that they are anti-inflammatories. And your baby’s lungs aren’t inflamed. They’re
being attacked.”

  “When will it stop?” she shouted.

  “It’s not going to stop.”

  Tears slid down June’s thin face.

  “What happens to her?”

  The doctor took a deep breath. “Most likely, she will develop emphysema. Probably within a year or two. There’s some medicine for some of the symptoms, but there’s nothing to really address the disease. I’m sorry. I’m going to call some friends of mine who specialize a little more in conditions like hers. We’re going to figure this out, okay? Rosa will make an appointment for you to come back in two weeks.”

  On the street outside, June collapsed. It was all Caleb could do to catch her in his arms. He walked with these two girls, with the loose aim of walking to Dushanbe, a tea shop nearby. He was aware of some strange fracturing inside of him. It was time for his run, which he had not missed in ten years, but he had no thought of leaving them to begin it.

  After an hour of herbal tea, June felt strong enough to go home. As they walked down South Boulder Peak, June had stopped and kissed him.

  “I think I love you,” she had told him quietly.

  He had possessed no idea of how to respond. Caleb felt that there might be two of him now; one running alone along the trails, headed only into himself. And one running with June, toward some new life. It might go either way. He felt like a coin which someone had tossed in the air. He knew that whichever way he landed, there would be consequences he could not stand.

  The sauna door opened. Caleb blinked, trying to remember where he was. Cold burst around him, and the image of her face under the noon sky fell drastically away, and Mack pulled him out of the sauna.

  The old man who managed the gym was standing there. He shook his head.

  “You guys some crazy fucks.”

  • • • • • • •

  Mack dropped him at O’Neil’s.

  It was two in the afternoon, time for his second shift. A small college kid took off his blue apron and handed it to him.

  “Do anything interesting with your morning?”

  Caleb nodded and went to stock paper trays. When he was sure Mack had driven away, he found the store mailbox key. He had been sure Shane would have sent him the names of doctors by now, but again he found it empty.

  His stomach tightened; it did not escape him that this must be how Shane had felt, all of these years, waiting for an answer to one of his long letters. Caleb worshipped silence and so had not seen its hurtful edge. He hadn’t realized he had been causing so much pain.

  He began his run back down the mountain. Along the curving isolated dirt road, he watched the house emerge from behind a cluster of pines, standing proud against the sun and wind and snow as if it believed in itself.

  After dinner there was Beam and board games. Caleb hung around the landing until he was reasonably certain that he wouldn’t be noticed, then moved quietly upstairs to June and Lily’s room.

  He could hear the baby coughing from the hall. Opening their door, he saw June on the floor, holding Lily in her arms, whispering to her. Her palm covered Lily’s chest, moving in circles, but the cough kept coming, always followed by a sharp wheeze. She caught sight of him and her eyes seemed to clutch madly.

  “Can you call Shane from work?” she whispered.

  Caleb swallowed unsurely. He had asked Shane to visit, and for his help. He accepted his silence as meaning he was working on it. Meanwhile, there was help here. After all, Mack had cured Kevin Yu, who had arrived at Happy Trails with type 2 diabetes and not shown symptoms in years. And Caleb had his own experience of Mack’s gift: he had suffered terrible sinus infections in New York, and now the only treatment he received was the heat shooting from Mack’s hands hovering above his forehead. Mack had only been working with Lily for two months; perhaps invading bacteria and glucose levels were easier for him to normalize than genes.

  “I’ll get Mack,” he offered.

  “He’ll want to know why you’re in here.”

  “I don’t care. She needs him.”

  “Wait,” June said, “hold her head.”

  Caleb cradled Lily’s head in his lap, and June shifted and moved her hands up from Lily’s ankles, over her belly, toward her chest.

  “This is what Mack does. You push the energy of her whole body up from her legs into her lungs. Okay? Now you do it from her head down.”

  Caleb ran his hands from Lily’s smooth shoulders down to her heart, where he met June’s hands, gripping her fingers. He was in communion with both of them. And he understood then that something in his heart had shifted. He had thought he wanted to help the baby out of love for June. But really, he saw, he was in love with Lily too. He held each of them in his heart equally. He willed all of his own body’s strength and energy into this tiny little being, whose lungs he could feel under her skin scratching and searching for breath. He willed it so hard he began crying.

  “I love you Lulu,” he said softly into Lily’s ear.

  June looked at him. “Did you just call her Lulu?”

  Caleb peered down into Lily’s eyes, which sparkled in the fading light.

  “He’s your brother,” June told him. “What’s he doing?”

  Caleb looked out the window to the white aspens and their hieroglyphic black eyes, which he knew were watching his every word.

  3

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Every day his face appeared different.

  Sometimes he looked like an aged Shanghai bureaucrat, or a Florentine cherub, just like Janelle, nothing like Janelle. His face seemed to be a template formed by whichever spirits happened to be floating by.

  He’s completely pure, Shane thought, lying next to him in their bed. The air that passes through his body comes back into the world purified.

  Then the thought of the air trapped and spoiling in Lily’s lungs swept over him; he pushed it away as fast as he could.

  Janelle’s mother Hua arrived daily bearing fragrant Hunan lactation herbs, and Fred and Julie flew down the following weekend. Recently Fred had become adept at making sushi and spent Nicholas’s nap time rolling maki, squinting through bifocals under arched white eyebrows, adding his personal touches. His lifelong focus had never left him, Shane saw; it was simply being deployed in new pursuits.

  “Dad looks,” Shane commented to Julie, “like Gepetto.”

  His mother laughed. Her chestnut hair was cut short, and she wore a shapeless sweatshirt and high-waisted jeans. What force was it, Shane wondered, that commands women over sixty to take on the fashion of lesbians?

  Watching them, he realized with some melancholy that he had never really known his parents, not the way they saw and defined themselves, at their peaks, vital, alive. He had no memories of Fred winning a case, of Julie on the eve of starting one of her ill-fated catering companies, laughing in the messy kitchen as she made Fred try obscure appetizers. He had no image of them arriving at a cocktail party together, young and magical, or of them standing over his crib, full of dreams, the way he and Janelle now did at Nicholas’s. He knew them only as older people. He felt as if he had missed something significant.

  And, he understood with a sharp stab in his belly, Nicholas would never know him or Janelle the way they were right now, which seemed to be the real them worth remembering.

  After dinner, and several pointed glances from Janelle, Shane looked at his parents. “I saw Caleb.”

  Julie whispered, “Oh.”

  Fred shifted in his chair, lawyer’s eyes narrowing. “How did that happen?”

  “He wrote me a letter.”

  Janelle stood, opened a desk drawer, and retrieved it. He handed the blue paper to Julie, who stared at every word.

  “I didn’t tell you, because I wasn’t sure what I’d see. So, it’s a lot like we thought. He’s living with sixteen or seventeen o
ther people in a house, a big cabin really, in the middle of the woods. It’s about half an hour from Boulder.”

  “The Manson Family Runners,” Fred stated.

  “But they’re not like that. They’re nice, kind of normal people. And, he’s involved with someone.”

  “A woman?”

  “Versus a man?”

  “Versus himself.”

  “Ah.”

  “You met her?” Julie leaned forward, her elbows digging into her knees.

  Shane nodded. “Her name is June.”

  “We got a letter from him a few months ago, but it didn’t say anything about a girl? It just said he was fine,” she said quickly, looking from Fred to Janelle to Shane as if they had an answer.

  “How does he look?” Fred asked quietly.

  “Good. He’s really, really fit. He’s working at a copy store.”

  “A copy store.”

  Julie asked, “Did he say anything about coming home?”

  Shane did not reply.

  Janelle added, “But he reached out. It’s . . . fragile.”

  “Can we go see him?” Julie asked desperately.

  Shane touched her arm. “I know it’s hard, but I think you guys ought to wait. We need to let him lead.”

  Fred pursed his lips as if he had eaten something unpleasant. “You think I don’t know you all blame me?”

  Shane rushed a smile onto his face. “Nobody blames you for anything.”

  “Sure you do. I took him running all those years. I took you too, and you didn’t end up in a cult.”

  “Caleb would tell you I did.”

  Fred stared at him, and he changed his tone of voice. “Look Dad, it’s not our lifestyle, but it seems to work for him. He’s getting pretty known for these races.”

  “Events,” Fred corrected in a bitter voice. “That’s what he calls them.”

  “Do you follow him online? See how well he’s doing?”

  From the way Julie looked at Fred, he knew they did.

  In bed that night Shane stared at a spiderweb that had appeared in the corner of the wall. Did he blame his father for Caleb’s choices? No, he knew, of course not. He felt that he had learned only positive things from their ritual family runs. Goal setting. Discipline. How to see things in miles rather than in yards. Running had taught them all focus. And this focus had propelled Fred to senior partner at his firm, and fueled Caleb across finish lines so distant that Shane could not imagine them. Lying there, he wondered if this focus was coded deep in his genome, waiting to rise out of him, too.