Race Across the Sky (29 page)

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F
or a moment Shane felt himself sinking. A dull roar filled his ears like a swimmer being pulled underwater.

Then he emerged, his head clear of the sea, and he realized that the baby was in the pack on his brother's shoulders.

He held Caleb with all of his might. His smell was unfathomable. His legs spasmed as if alive apart from him. June ran over, screaming, reaching upward for Lily.

The baby was crying loudly and pushed her arms out to her, her face bright red. June unbuckled her, pulled her out, and Caleb slipped down to the floor.

Shane was frozen. His wife was waiting for him to move, but it was stomach turning, the way Caleb's muscles were shaking inside his body. June knelt beside him, kissing his cheeks, Lily in her arms.

“Get them in the car,” Janelle said.

But June clasped Lily to her chest, shaking her head.

“We're going to the ER.”

“They'll take her.”

“No one's going to take her away.”

Shane caught his wife's eye. It was not, he shook his head subtly, out of the realm of possibility.

June explained, “Caley needs an ice bath. He needs one right now.”

Janelle said clearly, “We'll take two cars.”

Shane moved quickly. He took Caleb and Nicholas, and Janelle drove June and Lily. They moved up the steep hill of Van Ness. In the mirror, he saw Caleb's eyes closed. This did not seem good.

“Hey,” he called.

His brother's brown eyes fluttered. His body shook immeasurably. Shane met Nicholas's happy eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Your uncle,” Shane told him, “is out of his fucking mind.”

At the hospital he was blindsided by melancholy; he had last visited here the day of Nicholas's birth, perhaps the happiest day of his life. He carried Caleb to the emergency room as Janelle took Nicholas, June, and Lily to the Children's Hospital across the street.

Inside, they sat in the crowded waiting area between a large Chinese family and an old ponytailed man who stank of something he placed as gin. Janelle texted a constant feed of updates: her mother was coming to take Nicholas home. Lily was being registered.

“Ice bath,” Caleb repeated.

“Please be okay,” Shane muttered. “Please don't go anywhere.” This was the finest hospital in San Francisco, Shane told himself. There was no need to feel any panic. Still, he returned to the triage nurse, and explained Caleb's request.

“We have a gunshot victim,” the nurse told him flatly.

Over the next hour, Caleb seemed to worsen. His muscles stiffened and his breathing grew shallow. Finally, he was admitted to a bed. It was a small space, separated by stained green curtains from its neighbor, filled with clusters of wires, machines, the smell of pain and antiseptic. A new nurse brought in a thin faded hospital gown.

“Everything off. Tie this in the back.”

Shane removed Caleb's disgusting rags. Underneath was a hell of welts around his waist from the pack's belt, sunburns along his arms and ribs, blisters and open sores all over his shoulders. He looked as if he had been tortured. Shane pulled off his shorts and saw Caleb's thighs, swollen and grotesque. Then he moved to his feet.

Shane jumped back.

They were all wrong. Gnarled, discolored, toes facing the wrong directions, absent of nails. The skin was black and scarlet. They were not even identifiable as feet. They were inhuman. He retched.

“Ice,” Caleb slurred through cracked lips.

Shane sat him onto the bed and began to pull the gown around him. Jesus, he kept thinking, this body. What it was capable of. What it had been through.

“Hey, Caleb”—he tried to smile—“what do the losers of these races look like?”

The short nurse attached a heart monitor to his chest and began inserting IV lines into his forearms. When the needle touched his skin Caleb sat up and attempted to push himself off of the bed.

The nurse shot Shane a look of concern. “Please have him stop fighting.”

“He needs an ice bath.”

The nurse frowned. “He doesn't have a fever.”

“That will stop his muscles from . . . look.” He gestured to the convulsions in Caleb's body.

“You can ask the doctor,” she informed him, opening and loudly closing the curtain behind her. After some time, a small physician swept them aside. He struck Shane as tired; in his eyes were long shifts of service.

“I'm Doctor Ong.”

He began a cursory examination, pressing into Caleb's abdomen, listening to his chest.

“What happened here?”

“He ran an ultramarathon. Two hundred miles.”

“Ice bath. Reiki,” Caleb whispered weakly.

“We don't do reiki here. This is emergency medicine.”

“He runs these all the time,” Shane suggested. “He always does this ice bath.”

“You can do that at home.” Doctor Ong spoke seriously to Caleb. “Your heart rate's over one-forty. You're dehydrated. It's putting a strain on all of your organs. I'm going to order a CT and some blood work to check your heart, kidney, and liver function.”

Caleb shook his head back and forth. He looked to Shane like an animal under threat. “No radiation.”

Doctor Ong turned to Shane with a sudden force. “He needs to let us do our job.”

“He will.”

Abruptly, he left.

“Let them check you out,” Shane said.

“I want to go home.”

“What's one CAT scan, to make sure you're okay?”

“I have the right to leave here.”

The nurse returned shortly, carrying a pill.

Shane squinted at it. “What's that?”

“It's to calm him down. Doctor Ong wants him to have it. I can put it into his IV,” she whispered.

“It's up to him.”

Caleb turned his head away. He's pushed his body like this for a decade, Shane thought. He knows what to do. But then he gazed at his brother's body and thought, maybe he has no idea.

He sat on a stained chair and attempted the conjuring of memories which might bind Caleb to him. Fred's Mariners obsession, the duck wallpaper in their kitchen, the time Potter ran into the woods for two days. When he mentioned Potter, Caleb smiled.

Then his phone rang, and Janelle's voice, one of his favorite sounds on this earth, came to him in the cramped room.

“How is Caleb?”

“He's a mess. But they're taking care of him. How's Lily?”

Janelle sighed. “She's lying on a cot with an IV in her. It's so hard to watch. She keeps saying ‘cay cay.' June says that's Caleb.”

“What are the doctors saying?”

“So, one doctor said babies are resilient, she's a little sunburned and a little sore, but she doesn't need to be admitted. They were going to let us go. But a few minutes ago, this other younger doctor came in. She's acting like we left Lily outside and went to a bar for a weekend. Her eyes,” Janelle reported, “hold large quantities of anger.”

“What's her deal?”

Janelle's voice was shaky. “She wants to know how she got this dehydrated. I said my brother-in-law got lost on a hike, I didn't tell them it was a three-day run. June was right, they'd have called DCFS before I finished the sentence. She wants to do tests, but I don't see how they have anything to do with being dehydrated.”

“What tests?”

“She's paging an eye doctor.”

“Maybe she thinks her eyes got hurt in all that sun?”

“They want to x-ray her whole body.”

Shane swallowed. “They what?” From over the phone, he heard Lily cry.

“What's wrong?”

Shane touch Caleb's shoulder. “You really took care of her. She's fine.”

Caleb's eyes lightened.

“She's just pissed off.” Janelle paused. “She's awesome.”

Doctor Ong opened the curtain, accompanied by an unshaven resident and a thick-muscled Latino orderly.

“So, we're going to take him for his scans.”

Caleb shook his head again. And then he swung his long legs over the side of the bed onto the linoleum floor. The resident gasped.

The orderly stepped forward, and Shane moved to block him; there was a second when violence seemed possible. Doctor Ong's expression communicated an exasperation that Shane felt deeply sorry for.

“If you refuse treatment, we are not responsible for the result, do you understand?”

“Yes,” Caleb replied weakly, holding out his IV. “Please take this out.”

“I'll need you to sign a document to that effect.”

“Hey,” Shane said softly to him, “you need to stay here.”

“I'll sign.”

“Well then,” the doctor said to no one in particular, “discharge him.”

“Hey, no,” Shane said again.

“I know what to do,” Caleb told him gently. “Trust me.”

Slowly, the nurse bent to Caleb's arm and pulled out the plastic tubing of his IV line. No, Shane shook his head. He stepped outside to find Doctor Ong, the nurse, a hospital administrator, someone to stop this. Caleb dressed in what was left of his soiled clothes and limped out of the room. Moving past other green curtains, which hid other patients, he felt an obscene negative energy overtake him. He walked slowly back to the waiting area, his limbs shaking. Soon he would get his bath, more fluids, sleep. He decided it would be much better to wait for Shane outside, in the fresh air, under the healing sun.

He stepped through the hospital doors into the world. Caleb had never been in San Francisco before; immediately he could feel the sea-level oxygen, as rich as cream. The texture of this air, damp and rough with salt, surprised him. It was so different from the mountains. Behind light clouds a golden sun was beating, he could feel it soaking into his skin. He felt sanguine and alive. He was here. He had made it.

Running alongside the Arthur Breed Freeway, from the end of the mountain range into Oakland, had been a fever dream; he was still unsure what had been real and what was delirium. Drunk with hypoglycemia, he had woven nearly into the street. And then the Bay Bridge had risen like the hull of a battleship to a man in the water, offering rescue. Caleb had limped up its bike ramp and onto the swaying steel. At its summit, he had stared out over the water at San Francisco. A hill there possessed a beacon which appeared as if it had been placed there for them. He had started walking across the bike lane, suspended over the boats of the bay. Suddenly he had smelled black chemical smoke, heard police sirens, screaming. He froze, reaching up to take Lily's dangling feet. But then he had nodded, understanding; that had been another bridge, a different day. Now he was not running into chaos, but into safety.

In ultramarathons, Caleb was well aware, it was not uncommon to see runners collapsed within sight of the finish line. The agony on those runners' faces was one of the most horrible sights on earth.

And so Caleb had determined from the start never to visualize San Francisco as his finish line. He had focused only on an imaginary house called 122 Bay Street. And in the end, the moment he had seen that number on Shane's door, his mind had assumed victory and his body had ceased to function.

Yet now he felt kinetic energy surging through his exhausted legs. A warm sun caressed his shoulders, this rich air filled his chest, his blood returned oxygen to his starving cells. And the IV fluids had done quite a bit of good, he realized. Caleb felt a smile spreading over his face. Not one he forced on, not a Happy Trails smile, but a natural, primal joy with roots deep inside of him. In the distance he noticed a patch of blue water. The bay, he thought. He crossed the street, read a street sign for Ocean Beach. Oh, he whispered.

Caleb had not stood on sand nor seen the ocean in twelve years. After all this time in the mountains, it would be wise, he knew, to feel the bottom of the continent.

As he walked downhill toward the beach, he missed the weight of Lily against his shoulders. He felt a melancholy, which was alleviated when he considered how soon he would see her. He believed he loved her as much as it was possible in the world.

Caleb walked slowly down to the waves. He felt the power of their energy immediately. As he stepped on the rocky sand, he could feel it washing his body clean. Now his pain was different; it was not a tearing, but a rejoining, of his tissues, of his cells. Even the cool salt air against his raw skin didn't hurt. All of that was behind him. He was connecting with something completely different now.

And then, instinctively, because it knew no other way, his body lurched forward, and he began to run. He broke Mack's rigid form. His spine was not straight, he landed on his heels, his face was turned up to the sun. He was looking out at the magnificent endless ocean, and, he laughed, his breath actually was blending with the air, he really was smiling with the sky. These were no longer just words, but facts.

As he moved he could feel the world melding with his molecules, there was no division between them any longer, no space at all, and so when he fell, and was distantly aware of the sand scratching against his knees, the saltwater filling his mouth, even while his body thrashed, he was still running.

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H
e thought he might never stop sobbing. If it weren't for Janelle, he might never have left the hospital.

Shane moved through hours and days, met with whomever they had to meet, arranged for transport and accounting, worked with Fred over the phone on details. A mist followed them up to Washington. Staring out the airplane window holding Nicholas's small hand, Shane traced its long winding trail along the coastline. At the airport he introduced June and Lily to Fred and Julie, but they were all too overwhelmed to make much of an effort. All weekend, Fred maintained a stoicism that Shane believed could be punctured by a passing breeze. His mother, Julie, sat on the sofa, or on her bed, staring at nothing, and it made his heart break. No matter how many times he put his arm around her, tried to get her to speak, she gave only the most minimal response.

June held Lily at all times. She did not sleep. He could hear her at night, pacing downstairs. A house of zombies, Shane saw. That was what he had brought back from San Francisco.

June made a quiet plea for the scattering of his ashes along the trails that he had loved, but Shane shook his head.

“That's not going to happen.”

“It's what he wants,” she insisted.

“I know. But my mother wants him near her.”

“He should be in Boulder, looking at the mountains.”

“They think Boulder killed him.”

June looked as if she had been slapped. “Boulder saved him. He told me, so many times.”

“I know what killed him.”

The service was small; Caleb had not stayed in touch with anyone here, and so Fred and Julie's friends had made up the majority of the guests. They stayed in Issaquah for three days, during which June fielded repetitive questions about Caleb's recent life. Fred and Julie eventually believed her when she explained that Caleb had been happy. If you could have seen him, she told them. But that had been the wrong thing to say.

And then, exhausted and with Nicholas showing symptoms of a cold, they flew back home.

The following morning, with no job to go to, Shane sat on the white couch. He was supposed to be watching the babies play on the rug, but his thoughts were far away. He had told June that he knew what killed Caleb. And it was true. It had been him.

By dangling a drug for Lily like bait, compelling him across mountains and heat, he had forced him to run himself to death.

And for what? Over time, Mack's healing might have begun working on Lily. Once she was old enough to raise her own kinetic energy levels, her body might have corrected itself. And she would have been raised in the Happy Trails Running Club.

She would have begun eating and running like them as soon as she was able. The people in that house might be exhausted, brainwashed into a cult of personality around Mack, might never be senior partners in a law firm, but they never worried about layoffs or what was in their food or what their houses were worth. They knew extreme physical pain, but they were taught to beat it. They were fulfilled and secure. They bathed in a boundless energy, enjoyed a connection to this world that Shane could barely conceive. Was this really something to take a child away from?

And if his drug worked? Then Lily would grow into some version of an American girl. She would not be taught to overcome suffering, but to indulge it. She would ignore the shimmering grass on her way to school, focused instead on what a classmate had posted online. She would exchange the power of kinetic energy for the stasis of car seats and couches. Walking along a street she would stare down at her phone, not ahead at the sky.

Had he helped her, or hurt her, by bringing her here, and taking away a man who loved her? What was the truth of that?

He heard Lily's wheezing from the floor, watched the stretching and reaching of her upper body for every breath. The idea of sitting on the vials in the refrigerator was beginning to derange him.

It took some hassle with the Greenbrae Medical Associates nurse to get Wenceslas to the phone. He was with a patient, his nurse explained. Finally he got on, sounding concerned. After some prodding, he agreed to stop by on his way home. Shane hung up, but did not move. The day passed slowly. There were some e-mails from Brad Whitmore recommending a labor attorney, but he did not act on them.

Shane ordered a dinner that he thought June might eat, vegetarian rolls, brown rice, tofu. He had been wrong; she would not touch any of it except the rice. At seven, the buzzer rang, and he opened the door to Wenceslas Chin.

“Hey, guys.” Wenceslas's voice was a blend of lightheartedness and concern. “What's going on?”

He stood stout in his black suit and round glasses, a folded umbrella between his palms. Janelle handed him a peppery Shiraz and led him to the white sofa. As Shane told him everything, his face grew pale.

“He ran here from Yosemite?”

“Two hundred miles.”

Janelle added, “Somehow he kept Lily safe the whole time.”

“Who's Lily?”

“He had,” Shane explained softly, “a baby with him.”

Shane led him to the kitchen, where June was feeding the children. Nicholas sat in his high chair, Lily in the spare. Wenceslas looked at the strawberry blonde girl as she happily held a plastic cup.

“That wheeze, that's what you mean?”

Shane nodded.

Janelle spoke. “At the hospital they made us see an eye doctor. And they x-rayed her whole body.”

“They were looking for abuse. In many abused babies, retinal hematomas are present. When they're shaken, or hit, damage is sustained behind the eye. The x-rays are to look for previous fractures.”

“They didn't find anything.”

“Why would they?” June asked her, shocked.

Wenceslas gestured to Shane, and they stepped out of the room. “Tell me about this drug.”

Shane answered his science questions as best as he could. He tried to recall its precise enzymes, described the thrill of being allowed to look through the microscope at raw genetic matter, the building blocks of all. Wenceslas listened to him with a professional impassivity, but a clearly growing excitement soon revealed itself.

“You did what?” he asked several times.

When Shane was done, Wenceslas stared at him for a full minute.

“So it's in your refrigerator now?”

“Want to see it?”

Shane went back to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and returned with one of the small vials. Wenceslas held it up to the lamp, as if attempting to divine its calibrations. He shut his eyes for a moment. Then he looked seriously at Shane.

“I can't let you give this to this baby.”

Shane froze. “Sorry?”

“If you're really planning to administer this, I have to call Social Services.”

“Oh, Wen. Don't.”

“I don't have any idea what's in here.”

“It's been tested. I told you. It might not work, but it won't hurt her. It's safe.”

“They say Tylenol is safe, and it kills babies all the time.”

Shane panicked. “Let me call Doctor Acharn. Let me just get him on the phone with you. I told him you're coming. He knew you'd have concerns. He can answer your questions. Okay?”

He had his phone in his hand a second later.

“Prajuk, okay. It's me.” Shane started. “My friend Doctor Chin is here. We're about to . . . can you please talk to him?”

He handed the phone to Wenceslas. While he took the call, Shane considered the lab, the lawyers, the hospital, the FDA, Helixia. The forces at play here were too large to fight.

Thirty minutes later, Wenceslas walked inside and sat down beside him.

“So?” Shane asked him pleadingly.

“So, I told Doctor Acharn that I would read the research on the Airifan trials. That's the most that I can do, Shane. He's going to send me everything he has on this protein and what you did with your mouse. I was going to ask you to give the vials to me, but he feels they need to be temperature stable right now.” His eyes found Shane's, and in them Shane could read different decisions being played out. “Promise you'll wait until I go over this stuff. Promise me, Shane.”

“I promise.”

Janelle took Shane's glass, swirled the wine roughly and drank.

“What do you think about this?” Wenceslas asked her.

“I think it needs FDA approval.”

To Shane's surprise, Wenceslas cocked his head. “Why?”

She narrowed her eyes, confused.

“Unapproved medicines are given to children all the time.”

“No, they're not.”

“I'm sure you know a few. Bear bile. Monkey claw?” He gave Janelle a knowing glance. “Chinatown doctors prescribe this stuff every day.”

“That's different. Those have been proven over centuries.”

“I saw echinacea in your kitchen. Echinacea is unapproved by the FDA. More than a few physicians think it causes liver damage. But it's on the shelf at every drug store, and in infant drops, by the way.”

“Those are herbs. They're natural.”

“Our drug,” Shane informed them enthusiastically, “is natural.”

“Natural herbs are as powerful as pharmaceuticals,” Wenceslas added. “Anyway, it's not FDA approval I'm concerned with. There are thousands of drugs just like Shane's that are available without FDA approval.”

“Where do you buy them, back alleys?” Janelle asked.

“Walgreens.”

She stared at Wenceslas in disbelief. “They sell unapproved drugs at major pharmacies?”

“Every day.”

“Where's the FDA in this?”

“Look, unapproved drugs are like illegal aliens. Does the government know about them? Sure. But there's way too many to stop them all. Some of them work well. And some approved drugs are killers. That's what I'm concerned about here. Knowing this will be safe. Safe and approved are two entirely different things.”

“Read the Airifan research,” Shane begged him.

Wenceslas stood. “You guys have been through a lot. Please rest. I'll go over everything Doctor Acharn shares with me. I'm so sorry about your brother.”

Janelle walked with him out to his car. Outside it was dark, and frigid. She couldn't help but imagine Lily and Caleb running in weather like this.

“How is he doing?” Wenceslas asked her.

“Not good.”

“Yeah, he doesn't look good.”

“He spent his life trying to get close to his brother, he would have done anything. This is so fucking rotten, Wen.”

“Don't let him give that baby this medicine.”

“Oh,” Janelle agreed, “don't worry about that.”

Over the next day Shane seemed to withdraw completely. He even turned down an invitation from Prajuk for a Chinatown lunch. Janelle knew Shane was not used to depending on other people's permission to move forward. This had served him well in his youth; now it threatened to undo him.

He waited a week. On Friday, he called Wenceslas and attempted to communicate his agony.

“I'm at the point,” Shane informed him, “where I'm going to give her the shot and let you call the cops.”

“Okay. I'll come by tomorrow morning. We'll talk then.”

Somehow he made it through the day. In the morning, Shane went downstairs, made coffee, and sat stubbornly by the front door. Around ten, when Janelle and June were taking the babies for a walk, Wenceslas knocked on the door. He wore stiff dark jeans and a blue sweater, and thicker eyeglasses than was his wont.

“Come have a coffee,” Shane told him.

They sat at the small wooden kitchen table, among chewed- up sippy cups, a parenting magazine, and a set of enormous plastic teething keys, while Shane prepared a press.

“So, I've spoken with Doctor Acharn three times,” Wenceslas began. “He said he asked you to lunch?”

Shane said nothing.

“I've read the Airifan trials. They ran them on asthmatic children as young as six months old. In twelve- to twenty-four-month olds, there was a one point three percent incidence of liver damage. I have to say those are much better odds than a one-year-old child with alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency has.”

Shane watched him blankly. “So you're going to call DCFS? The police? Just wondering who I can expect at my door? Because I'm giving her this medicine. I listen to her breathing all day and all night. I know why Caleb was desperate.”

Wenceslas removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands. “I understand why you pursued this, Shane. I'm satisfied, with conditions.”

Shane sat forward. “What conditions?”

“I need to be here when she gets it. I need to monitor Lily daily for a week. I'm not a pediatrician. Once we see if this is working, we'll need to find someone sympathetic.”

“Of course. Thank you, Wen.”

“I can be here the rest of today.”

“Today?”

“In fact,” Wenceslas cocked his head, “now would be good.”

“But June and Janelle are out with . . .”

“You never hesitated this much pushing that Epherex shit on me.”

Shane pursed his lips, went to the refrigerator, and returned with a small opaque glass vial. Inside of it was Lily's life, he thought, or nothing at all.

When they returned from their walk, Janelle put Nicholas upstairs, and June set Lily on the rug among the toys. She joined them around the dark dining room table. The room's cream walls seemed to promise tenderness. There was only complete silence, save for the wheeze coming from Lily. June was the only one who had no idea what was about to happen.

“It's time,” Shane told her evenly, “to talk about why you all went through all of this.” He placed the small vial on the table. “This is a drug that a very famous biochemist developed for alpha-one antitrypsin deficiency.”

Wenceslas told her. “I've looked at their data, I've spoken with experts in your daughter's condition. And I agree this is a treatment worth trying. I'm here to monitor everything.”