The Moment Before (17 page)

Mom, Dad and I sit in our pricey Rose Festival Queen Coronation seats, and in front of us, in a semi-circle up on the stage, is a wave of pink. The princesses are ethnically diverse, but they are all sisters today in matching gowns, each of them delicately arranged on a chair, sparkly silver tiaras nestled upon their royal coifs.

Nick is nowhere to be seen. This morning I helped Martha apply gobs of concealer, rubbing out the black circles under her eyes. Years of charcoal shading has given me a terrific skillset. If I don’t make it as an artist, there’s always a career in makeup.

“He didn’t take it very well,” she told me.

“But, you told him what you heard, right?”

Martha assured me. It’s over. Nick is history.

Now, gazing upon her calm face, her perfect smile, you’d never know she just broke up with her boyfriend. Of course, the pill she popped probably helped.

I tell myself to calm down. Enjoy the outing with my parents. Aside from his mandatory Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, it’s Dad’s first public event since his heart attack, and, twenty pounds slimmer, sober and well-rested, he looks like the handsome old dad of years ago. Mom and he are holding hands like a new couple. For the moment, I’m thinking, everything is perfect.

A Rosarian, dressed in a dashing red tuxedo, takes the podium and talks about how each of these girls is an example to young people everywhere. They are the future of our city. Even though there’s only one girl who will be crowned Queen, they are all winners.

Bullshit,
says Sabine. Sabine, who earlier told me to pocket the key to her car. Now, my fingers reach down into the pocket of my raincoat and dig the metal notches into my skin.

A few more speeches, a list of donors and sponsors, a plug for Pacific Power.

Then, the moment we’ve all been waiting for.

“All princesses please stand.”

The pink wave rises. I grab Dad’s hand.

A disembodied announcer’s voice booms out the echoey loudspeaker.

“It is my pleasure. To introduce. This year’s Rose Festival Queen…”

The princesses are rapt. Trying to look poised, because the close-up cameras are zeroing in. God forbid you scowl when your name isn’t the one bouncing off the coliseum walls.

“…Martha Hornbuckle.”

Dad pumps his fist in the air. Mom stands and claps so loud you’d think Martha was her own daughter. And me? I’m happy in a quieter way. A fairy-tale ending way. Martha is Cinderella up there, without Prince Charming, but with all the riches and treasures.

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
ooh
ing and
ahh
ing. 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.