The Candy House(23)

MILES


From below, hot-air balloons look very still. So the first surprise—after Drew came crashing into the basket—was our swaying, shuddering rise. I felt nauseated as we pitched in the wind, and remembered that all I’d had that morning was coffee. I opened the breakfast box I’d taken from the Clubhouse and crammed a granola bar into my mouth. As we pendulated up, our relationship to the light began to shift, and I realized that all staged brightenings—in movies, in plays—are efforts to capture this first brightening: day dawning on earth. The thing itself. The desert sneaked into view in patches still devoid of color. I ate an egg burrito and gazed down, dimly aware of Drew and the balloon operator chatting behind me. I decided it was a good thing Drew had come along after all: They could talk to each other, and I could sightsee in peace.

By the time the sun nudged at the mountaintop, we were high above the desert. It felt strange to be in the open air at such a height; the intermittent hum from the balloon’s burner wasn’t like an engine noise, and I could hear birdsong from below. As I drank from my water bottle, the sun’s upper edge cleared the mountain and dropped its light on the world below. In that instant, a skein of brilliant color snapped into view: Sasha’s sculpture. From the ground, it had seemed a hodgepodge, but from my new height, it acquired structure and logic, like random scribbles aligning into prose. Skipping lines of color raced through the desert, skittering and twisting, backtracking, thickening, then scattering almost away: a skylarking utterance of surpassing joy that rushed up from the land and encompassed me. Where the sculpture gave way, the desert looked empty.

Tears broke in my eyes, and I pulled down the bill of my cap. “Look,” I said to Drew. “Look what she did.”

Drew, too, appeared spellbound. “I can’t believe I’ve never seen this at sunrise,” he said.

As I gazed down, reading Sasha’s buoyant testimony, my mind broke free like our hot-air balloon lifting away from the earth. From my new height, I saw my life with brute simplicity; my overweening pride and contempt, and then my failure, so much failure—failure everywhere I looked. I had tried, Lord, I had tried. But it wasn’t enough; it was nothing. My children were grown and whole and didn’t need me; were perplexed by me, I often felt. I was alone, had been ebbing away for years in a purgatory that seemed, from this height, more dire than death. There was nothing to go back to.

Tears muddled my vision, blurring Sasha’s sculpture. Each time I blinked, its colors winked back at me in code: Here. Now. Enough. GO!

I seized one of the braided steel cables and hoisted myself over the basket’s edge, a mix of cold and warm air splashing around my dangling legs. For a fraction of a second I balanced there, my mind vacant with hypnotic purpose. Then I let go. There was a brief, horrifying drop, my body beginning to accelerate, and then something—the crook of an arm, it seemed—caught me under the chin and clamped my head against the side of the basket. I cried out, choking and flailing from my neck. Gravity gulped at my legs and seemed about to tear my body from my head when I felt whoever was holding me begin to tip out of the basket. Then a metal hook, or brace, caught me under my left armpit and jerked me up and over, flipping me backward into the basket, where I smashed headfirst on the bottom. My skull plate juddered, and a rush of metal singed my mouth and nose and eyes. I blinked through a strobe of stars and saw Drew leaning over me, panting like a madman. He hit the side of my face and sat down hard on my chest.

“No, you don’t, you fucker,” he breathed, and hit me again. “No, you don’t.”

“Get off him,” the pilot yelled, yanking at Drew. “He’s passing out.”

“Let him.”

“You saved his life and now you’re gonna kill him?”



* * *



Through the windows of the psych ward, where I was transported by ambulance, the scrubby desert mountains resembled a painted backdrop. I stared at those mountains to avoid looking at my shaken children and frightened parents (now both in their seventies); my brothers, Ames and Alfred; Trudy, who held my hand and asked if I needed more money. All of them wanted to help, and their tenderness filled me with despair for having brought them yet more sorrow and disappointment. Failure upon failure. I wept uncontrollably, and the doctors scrambled for some better way to stabilize me. It took almost three weeks.

There was one exception to my remorse: the man who’d saved my life. I hated Drew for having thwarted my bold urge, which now had abandoned me. Drew hated me for, as he put it, trying to kill him within twenty-four hours of my arrival. Now we shared the booby prize for his heroic act: a person no one wanted, not even me.

Our blunt exchanges of enmity began while I was still an inpatient, but it was after I was discharged and back in Drew and Sasha’s guest room (whose windowsill she had lined with flowering cacti to cheer me up) that we gave full vent to our mutual loathing. I shouted at Drew through the desert silence, and he shouted back at me. Sasha begged us to stop, demanded we stop, and stormed out of the house when we ignored her. We couldn’t stop. One night, as we raged at each other across their deck, Sasha began spraying us with a garden hose the way Trudy, back in Winnetka, used to douse fighting cats. Stunned, we covered our heads until, helpless and waterlogged, we both began to laugh. That was a turning point. “Do I need to get the hose?” Sasha would ask when she sensed us drifting into conflict. Drew had begun forcing vitamins on me in the hospital; at his house, he imposed a high-protein fresh-food diet and enrolled me in a punishing course of physical therapy. As my color improved and I worked on my limp, I caught Drew eyeing me now and then with a look I struggled to name. Then I got it: curiosity. I was fifty-one. Whatever I did with the rest of my life would belong to Drew as much as me. My actions mattered immediately and directly. This discovery roused my old ambition; I felt it prickle to life like a limb so long asleep, I’d forgotten it.