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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781515237990 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | CreateSpace Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/11/2015 |
| Series: | Chloe Newcombe , #1 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Betsy Thornton worked for Cochise County Attorney’s office for over fifteen years as a victim advocate. She lives in Bisbee, Arizona.
Read an Excerpt
chapter one IT SEEMS LIKE SO VERY LONG AGO THAT I boarded the plane from New York City to Arizona, on my way to the small town of Dudley, to see my little brother Danny and to see Hal, and, in fact, it was long ago—before cell phones came along and BlackBerrys and computers you could Google on. Hal. I am haunted by him still—I think of time and how elusive it is, how yesterday is no further away than tomorrow. As if by an act of will we might silence our ambitions, our desires, so that we no longer go forward but slip backward over that barrier of time into the past, changing things at will.
But I had been able to change nothing, and what happened first with my older brother James, then with Hal and with Danny, set me on the course of a life I never could have imagined before I boarded that plane.
“The future is fixed,” Hal, the perfect man, said to me once. “The past is always changing.”
This was back before Arizona, when I was visiting the sunny house in Topanga Canyon where my brother James lay dying.
So why is it, with the future so close, on the next breath we take, it gives us no warning? I had no premonition, no feelings at all really, wrapped in a cocoon of travel fatigue as the plane began its initial descent into Tucson. The woman seated next to me who’d boarded in Albuquerque leaned across to look out the window. She was dark-skinned, Hispanic or Indian, with odd eyes, one brown and one blue. Her fat brown hand, embedded with silver and turquoise rings, rested on the back of the seat in front.
“There’s the Pinaleño Mountains,” she said with a sigh of satisfaction.
The jagged humps of mountain lay below like a dinosaur resting, the terrain unbelievably empty. Later I learned they call these mountain ranges in the middle of the desert sky islands. Had we already flown over Dudley? Back in New York I’d had to look closely before I found it on the map, just a dot in the southeast corner of Arizona, close to the Mexican border.
It was early fall, but the pi lot had said it was ninety-five degrees in Tucson, ninety-five degrees and clear. The plane sped through a sky that seemed as if it would always be clear, too blue to have even heard of clouds. In the bright light, my black leggings and black top looked rusty, the skin of my arms and my hands clasped in front of me city-pale.
“Do you live in Tucson?” The woman gave me one of those sideways looks that take in everything.
“No,” I said, and hesitated. A few years earlier I’d taken a bus from New York City to Barnet, Vermont, to visit my brother James at Karmê Chöling, where he was studying Buddhism. I’d sat next to a woman who’d tried to convince me hour after hour that she was the real Duchess of Windsor, usurped, banished. Since then I’ve been leery of conversations with fellow passengers, but this woman, her life laid out in the map of wrinkles on her face, held me with her strange eyes.
“I’m going to Dudley, actually,” I said.
“Dudley,” she said. “That’s that mining town. But the mines closed down. It must be like a ghost town now.”
I smiled, conjuring up an image out of a cowboy movie: a long dusty street fronted with boarded-up buildings. Pale wraiths slipped through the boards, suddenly becoming ghosts of former boyfriends and then of Logan, whom I’d loved for nearly a year.
Giving up a man is like giving up cigarettes. You know he’s not good for you and you don’t even really like him anymore, but just one more time can hardly make a difference. I was flying away from Logan and the chaos of separation, reunion, separation; vertigo.
Maybe I’d find a new life out here, better—just thinking that made me want to spruce up, get ready. Was there still time, I wondered, before the final descent? Yes.
“Excuse me.” I stood up, squeezed past the woman, and went down the aisle to the restroom.
In the bright cramped space, miles above earth, I applied blusher and eyeliner. Maybe someday in the future when things were different between men and women, I would give up my eyeliner, the little line I apply along the lower lashes that makes all the difference. Damn Logan anyway, I thought, as I used my little finger to smudge the line.
Trying to get my bearings, to find a mythology for the place where I was going, I remembered a movie set in Arizona I’d seen years ago, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and the kind, vulnerable rancher, played by kind, blue-eyed Kris Kristofferson. Alice hadn’t appreciated him; she was bent on a singing career and freedom. Freedom. Heady with the word, in the springtime of the women’s movement, women had met and talked in little groups in empty lofts and stuffy apartments, myself included. I’d departed from a marriage as a result of it: what was a kind and vulnerable man compared to that magic word?
I think of long ago, of James, Danny, myself, and our parents at the country club after church. Out the enormous picture window was a pond with ducks, and my professor father was expounding on their migratory patterns. Beyond was the golf course. We sat at a round table, the Newcombe family, neatly dressed but unchic, except for James, who adorned everything he wore with his presence. He was already in high school, winning class elections, making straight-A’s. I was in eighth grade, uninterested in ducks and squirming to be free of my dull family, whose idea of fun was a wild night en famille playing card games or Scrabble.
Thinking of my professor parents at that country club table, I see them differently now, but then I saw my father, wearing the same awful Harris tweed jacket he’d worn for years, and my mother, youthful and unsophisticated in a sweater and plaid skirt, and I knew there were enormous mysteries in life involving pain and uncontrollable passions, mysteries I was prepared to dedicate my life to understanding, but I could find no clues there with my innocent parents at the country club.
And I also see Danny, who sat across from me, his hair newly cut, too short, wearing a blue suit, which was a little small. Those things made him seem vulnerable. He had not yet given up trying to live up to the impossible model of James, so on the lapel of his suit he was proudly sporting his perfect attendance button from Sunday school.
• • •
A male and a female flight attendant flanked the door of the plane as the passengers filed out. “Thank you for flying US Air,” they chimed. “Have a good day.”
“You too,” I said politely, but their smiles were closed off, their eyes unseeing, as if only their voices belonged to US Air.
Inside the airport a cluster of tanned healthy people stood waiting, dressed as though they were on their way to the beach, their bright shorts and halter tops making me feel like a drab alien. They waved and spoke excitedly: met and embraced. I walked through the crowd alone, searching for a glimpse of my brother.
So many years had passed since that day at the country club. James, so brilliant, talented, and kind, had died of AIDS in California two years before my flight to Dudley. Danny, of the perfect attendance button, was a renegade who’d gone to prison in Michigan for a year when he was eighteen for dealing marijuana; a good-looking bad boy and not always reliable. Would he even be there at the airport?
Then there he was, standing by one of the windows, hands in the pockets of his black jeans, looking out at a big plane. His dark hair was slicked straight back and he needed a shave, giving him the scruffy elegance of a pop star. He wore beat-up ostrich-skin boots and a white dress shirt, buttoned at the throat pseudo-nerd-style. I thought he looked wonderful, romantic.
A rush of love made a lump in my throat, and I held back, looking at him. A young woman carrying a baby walked in front of me, blocking my view for a moment, and when she passed on, I saw that Danny was talking to someone, a man in a pale blue linen sports jacket. The man looked prosperous: hair was well cut, the jacket too. A friend? But Danny’s face was angry—they seemed to be arguing.
Then Danny looked over and saw me. At least I thought he did, but his face showed no sign of recognition. He said something to the man, who turned away, toward me—round apple cheeks, boyish—then he was gone, swallowed up in the crowd.
Danny smiled and waved. “Chloe, hey!”
We reached each other and hugged, his beard scratching my face. I rested my head on his chest for a second, reassured by his physical solidity.
“Who was that man?” I asked.
“What man?”
“The one you were just talking to, in the blue sports jacket.”
“No one.” He stepped back, his eyes crinkling with charm, that con man charm that he had learned in prison. I worried about his time in prison clinging to him forever, an albatross. “Look at you, little Chloe, all dressed in black like a poet manqué.”
He took my carry-on.
“And what’s a poet manqué?” I asked.
He grinned, ducked his head. “I’m not sure.”
We walked together down the long hall toward the main terminal.
“Hal,” I said. “How is he?”
Danny shrugged. “Dunno.”
“But you’re staying at his house?”
“He’s hardly ever there,” he said flatly. “I mean, every now and then he’ll show up for a day or two, but mostly he’s gone—working with AIDS patients in Tucson, some kind of group-living thing. He’s got a place in there where he sleeps. You know he moved out here right after after Ja-Ja-Ja—”
Danny had stuttered for a while in grade school. He’d conquered it, but it came back every now and then under stress. I finished his sentence: “After James died.”
“Yeah. After the funeral.” He paused. “I bet you really came to see Hal, not me.” His voice was strained. “You’ve always been in love with Hal.”
“That’s not true!” I felt my face flushing. “I came to see you, Danny”—I touched his arm to reassure him—“and Hal.”
Hal had been James’s lover, and the last time I’d seen him was at the funeral. It wasn’t a good sign that after two years Danny could hardly say James’s name.
By now we had reached the main terminal. We walked across the industrial carpeting and Danny stopped at a bench.
“Let’s wait here for Kristi,” he said. “She went to the restroom.”
“Kristi?”
“My—my girlfriend Kristi Marsh. Didn’t I mention—”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Chloe, I’m really glad you’re here. You don’t know how glad.” There was an urgency in his voice that alarmed me. “How are the parentials?” It was Danny’s term for our parents, a way of deflecting feeling.
“They’re in Italy right now,” I said. “On sabbatical. Oh, Danny, you’re so bad the way you don’t write. They worry.”
But I understood. Danny was waiting for something to happen first, something that would turn his life into a success story. I thought of the letter I’d mailed them back in New York, written by a cheery upbeat person who didn’t exist. Like the letters Sylvia Plath wrote her mother, before she turned on the gas. Well, I didn’t want to extend the comparison too far.
I sat down on the bench, but Danny stood leaning against the wall, his face closed off.
I watched people go by—a thin tired woman in Birkenstocks with a baby on her back and a little girl holding each hand; a hurrying businessman in a pale linen suit, meant to impress, but now sadly rumpled; a tall young woman, pale blond hair short, walking in that self-conscious way very pretty women do, knowing everyone is watching.
Danny straightened up, put his fingers to his lips, and gave a sharp whistle. “There she is.” His voice was proud.
The blond woman, a bright flashy creature, came toward us, smiling, radiant. On three-inch heels, she walked like a gazelle. Kristi.
Gorgeous, I thought, and with looks like that, quite a handful, and I was willing to bet she had problems. Danny was a crusader where women were concerned. He liked them with problems, shady pasts, abusive former boyfriends. He liked to nurture them, protect them, bring them back to a better life.
I was introduced, the sister meeting the girlfriend. The three of us: ordinary, even banal—safe.
Danny and I walked out of the terminal while Kristi seemed to run circles around us like a puppy.
“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you so much, Chloe,” she said. Her voice was much younger than her sophisticated looks. “I could hardly wait. Danny told me all about the mink poodle pin he bought you for Christmas when you were ten and how much you hated it and about the time you chased him around the yard with a knife.”
“It was rubber,” I protested laughingly, startled by the memories.
“But he didn’t know that!” said Kristi gleefully.
I smiled at Danny, our eyes meeting. It felt good that he’d talked to Kristi about those silly things so full of meaning in close families. I was glad he could still tell the stories about our childhood, the times before disaster had struck—the death of James, Danny’s time in prison.
Above us was that clear blue sky, palm trees everywhere, and in the distance were mountains. I had a sense of emptiness, of space to breathe. We walked through the parking lot and reached a van, maroon with portholes, old and dented. Kristi got in back so I could be up front with Danny. Inside, it was equipped with swivel seats, a refrigerator, and a large pair of tacky foam dice hanging from the rearview mirror.
“What kind of van is this?” I asked Danny.
“A Dodge, I think,” he said. “Pray it starts.”
“Danny,” said Kristi. “Of course it’s a Dodge. He doesn’t know anything about cars,” she added proudly.
“Neither does Chloe.” Danny closed his eyes and turned the key. The engine turned over. “Thank God. Had to jump-start her to get out of Dudley.”
“It’s so great, great, great you’re here.” Kristi’s high excited voice filled the car with energy. I turned sideways to look at her. Her color was high, her eyes glittery. “We’ll have to go to Mexico, Chloe. It’s only ten miles from Dudley. We can buy curios. I bought a painted dragon there with fire coming out of his mouth. They make them down in Oaxaca. If Danny ever gets his act together, I’d like to take a trip—”
“Kristi,” said Danny protectively, “calm down a little, okay?”
The atmosphere changed, filled with an enforced silence that was palpable. We left the airport and drove down a street, stopped at a red light.
“It’s neat,” Kristi bubbled up again, glancing at Danny but unable to contain herself. “You guys being a family and all. I never had anyone but me. My mom just had one kid. Maybe my dad had more. Maybe I’ve got a bunch of half-brothers and -sisters. I don’t know my dad. I have a stepfather.”
Danny turned in his seat to look back at her significantly. “Otto’s a nice man.” There was pain in his voice, but I didn’t know why.
“He’s a nice man,” Kristi agreed dutifully. “There’s a Circle K just ahead. Don’t we need gas?”
The light changed and we turned into a quick-stop place, a big circular sign with a K in the middle. Danny pulled up to the gas pumps.
Kristi jumped out the back. “I’ll go pay.”
“Ten dollars’ gas and get some Thirst Busters too,” Danny called after her.
I got out and stood beside Danny as he clicked the gas pump to on. “Lots of energy,” I said.
“Too much today,” he said. “She’s wonderful and I love her, but she’s got this bipolar mood disorder. When she’s up she gets crazy. She goes up and down all the time unless she takes these pills, but she thinks they’re bad for her. I got busy with something and she stopped taking them, but I got her back on. She should be leveling out soon.”
The gas nozzle clicked off.
Kristi came out, balancing three enormous paper cups. A man in a cowboy hat stood holding the door for her. As she went through, he bowed and tipped his hat.
“What kind of pills does she take?”
Danny stood holding the gas nozzle, looking down at it.
“Danny?”
He replaced the nozzle.
I hit him gently on the arm. “Danny? Earth to starship, come on in.”
Excerpted from Dream Queen by Betsy Thornton.
Copyright © 2010 by Betsy Thornton.
Published in 2010 by St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.