darius insisted on parking.
“You don’t have to,” Miranda said from the backseat.
“I know that,” Darius answered without taking his eyes from the snarl of traffic leading into Los Angeles International Airport.
“We want to,” Sophia turned from the front seat and smiled. She regretted the phony cheerfulness of her voice but didn’t want Miranda’s last memory to be of her parents bickering. She was, as they said, “making an effort.”
“I don’t have to park and you don’t have to go.” Darius glanced at his daughter in the rearview mirror.
“I know.” Miranda tried to modulate her voice so it sounded mature, wise, and suffused with a sad kind of love for her parents. The most important thing was that they not hear the tremor of excitement running through her at that moment. She was going to Alaska to meet her lover! She had dropped out of school! Okay, “taken a year off.” She was having the adventure of a lifetime, getting away from these sad, sad people who happened to have given birth to her. But whatever. She would not be sucked into the vortex of their despair. She might be leaving Helen, but Helen, of all people, would not have wanted her to stay. Helen was the one who used to encourage her to live life, take risks, wear something other than black. Helen once told her she was an idiot not to lose her virginity sooner. “Nobody’s going to want you when you’re old and crinkly,” she had once told Miranda, who had, at the time, been offended but now saw her point. Especially given what had happened to Helen.
“The point is”—Sophia glanced irritably at Darius—“you can come back anytime. We’ll pay for your ticket. No questions asked.”
“If there’s any change with Helen, you know I’ll be back in a second,” Miranda answered, looking out the window. Who was she kidding? The medical literature was practically unanimous—if there wasn’t a change after four months, there probably never would be. “Why do you think the airport is called LAX?” she asked, trying to change the subject. “Where does the X come from?”
“It would take at least twenty-four hours to get back, which would probably be too late,” Darius answered. “But that’s your choice.”
Miranda did not answer. There was no need to go through the fight again. It had been a painful last two weeks since she announced her decision, and more than once, she had found herself resorting to “I’m eighteen years old, I can do what I want.” But in the end, they had come around, had even given her a credit card “for emergencies,” and gone shopping with her at an outdoor clothing store, where she’d loaded up on bright yellow Gore-Tex clothes—“So you can be found easily in case of an avalanche,” the salesman explained. “I’m not going skiing,” she started to explain, but then stopped herself. Let him think what he wanted.
After cruising the entire first floor of the parking garage, Darius went up a level and took the first available spot. Level B, area 9.
“B–nine,” Miranda observed from the backseat. “Benign.”
Darius cracked a small, reluctant smile. It was a childhood game. Whoever devised the best mnemonic in the parking lot got the front seat. Miranda, being older and more verbal, usually won.
“Benin,” Sophia played along. “Wherever that is.”
“West Africa.” Darius turned off the engine. His photographic memory made him hell on trivia games.
Miranda got out of the car and struggled with an overstuffed duffel bag. On the phone from Alaska, Jason had tried to lecture her on packing light, but his rapturous description of material deprivation had had the opposite effect. Stuffed inside her bag was a down pillow, three pounds of good coffee, two dozen CDs, three tubes of toothpaste, a plastic bottle of extra-virgin olive oil, six bars of dark Belgian chocolate, six months’ supply of tampons, five tubes of ChapStick, four packages of dental floss, and twenty-four AA batteries. Among other things.
Darius left to rent a luggage cart.
“I’m jealous,” Sophia said, when he was out of earshot.
Miranda did not answer. She hated the idea of her mother being jealous of her.
“I should have done more adventurous things when I was young.”
“It’s not too late.”
Sophia shook her head. “It’s different when you’re older.”
“You’re not old.”
“I always felt sorry for people who ate alone in restaurants. That was my mistake.”
Miranda was about to ask her mother what she meant when Darius came careening around the corner, both feet on the cart. “I found it next to the elevator,” he said happily. “Free!”
“You do like your bargains,” his wife observed dryly.
“It’s the little things in life.” He grabbed the duffel bag, moaning theatrically at its weight. “You don’t think they sell bricks in Alaska?”
“Ha, ha,” Miranda answered.
Sophia let herself relax. This was the best the family had gotten along in weeks, maybe months.
Inside the terminal Miranda was surprised that the line for Alaska Airlines consisted mainly of old people in windbreakers and white sneakers, all carrying aqua blue nylon bags with the words “Buccaneer Cruises” written in the shape of logs.
“You have a seat assignment?” Darius asked.
“A window.” Miranda nodded. “You really don’t have to stay.”
“As long as we’re under an hour, the parking garage costs the same,” Darius pointed out.
A beleaguered-looking woman wearing a Buccaneer Tours baseball cap arrived and asked all the “Buccaneers” to form a separate line to the left, leaving only Miranda on line.
“That was fast,” Sophia said, after the bags were taken away and the overweight fine (fifty dollars) was reluctantly paid by Darius.
“I guess I should probably get going.” Miranda looked at her watch.
“You’ve got an hour,” Sophia protested.
“It could take a while to get through security,” Miranda answered.
Sophia glanced at Darius in a sudden panic. What if something were to happen to Miranda? This could be the last time they ever saw her. They should wring every last moment they could out of her presence. “Let’s buy some magazines. My treat.”
“Mom, I’ve got enough to read.”
“Coffee, then,” she said too brightly, like a Buccaneer tour guide.
“Soph,” Darius put a hand on her shoulder.
“Oh, shit. All right.” Sophia shrugged. She knew when Darius thought she was being too emotional.
There were only a dozen people on line at the security checkpoint, but after a quick, hard hug from Darius and a more lingering one from Sophia, nobody suggested prolonging the good-bye. Miranda handed her driver ’s license to the security guard and kept her head down. If her parents were still watching, she didn’t want to see. All those years growing up, Miranda had taken her parents’ physical closeness for granted. When she was a child, their sexual energy had made her squirm with confused embarrassment, but it also reassured her. Something connected her mother and father. Now, standing with their arms angrily crossed over their chests, torsos leaning in opposite directions, they were like two negative ends of a magnet repelling each other, according to some irrefutable law of nature.
Miranda leaned her forehead against the scratched plastic window of the plane and looked down. Beneath her, a snow-covered mountain rose improbably out of a rosy nimbus of clouds. She checked her watch. They’d been in the air less than two hours. She turned to the pale young man next to her who had been reading a dog-eared copy of The Brothers Karamazov the entire flight. Whenever a passage seemed to strike him, he’d uncork a pen with his teeth and underline the words with a check in the margin. Normally, she would never talk to a stranger, especially one like him, but the newness of her adventure made her uncharacteristically bold.
“Do you know what mountain range this is?” she asked.
The young man craned his head over her body, first glancing at her chest. “Mount Hood,” he answered, letting his eyes rest on her breasts, as if they were old friends.
“Mmmm,” she answered, buttoning up the chartreuse cashmere cardigan she was wearing, one of Helen’s best. She hadn’t wanted to take it but her mother had insisted. “No reason to leave it for the moths.” Miranda had pretended not to see the tears in her mother’s eyes.
“First time to Alaska?” he asked, folding a corner of a page to mark his place and putting his book away.
“Yes,” she said, and nodded, alarmed by the disappearing book. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your reading.”
“Dostoyevsky.” He shook his head. “He’s like chocolate. Delicious. But you can’t eat too much.”
Miranda tried to hide her wince behind a smile. She’d spent her childhood among young men similarly enamored with their own love of literature. When Miranda was finally old enough to read the works her father’s graduate students talked about so lovingly, she’d felt like a frigid lover, unable to respond for fear of sounding like one of those pompous young men. It was one of the reasons she loved Jason. He liked to read. Andrew Marvell. He’s a poet. I know. But for him it was something pleasurable. Not an existential road map for the rest of her life. And certainly not a way to make a living. Miranda loved her father but she did sometimes feel there was something unseemingly soft about teaching literature for a living.
“Martin Lane.” The young man stuck out his hand and launched into his history without further prompting. He had work lined up on a Japanese fishing boat. Or he did, if the pollock were running. If the work was there, he could make enough money in three months to live the rest of the year in Los Angeles. If not, he could easily find construction work, though it paid less and was harder to do. “See all these blue-hairs?” He dropped his voice and looked around the cabin of the plane.
“Mmmm.” Miranda hoped nobody had heard him use the term.
“They’re all here to look at real estate.”
“Really?” Miranda asked, unconvinced. “I thought old people liked to retire to warm places.”
“Where else can you get oceanfront property for less than a hundred K?” Martin shrugged. “And pay no income tax. They come for the summer and leave for the winter. It can get up to ninety degrees in Ketchikan. The houses are for shit, though. After a couple of winters, most of them need to be torn down. That’s what happens when you leave five feet of snow on the roof all winter. What about you?” he asked, glancing at her breasts again.
“I’m going to live with my boyfriend.”
Martin looked disappointed. “Importing talent.”
“Sorry?”
“There are, like, no women in Alaska. And the good ones get taken fast. I tried to get my girlfriend to come one summer, but after two weeks, she was, like, ‘Yeah, Alaska, where the odds are good but the goods are odd.’ So most guys import their talent. Is he a fisherman?”
“Who?” Miranda was trying to decide if being called “talent” was an insult.
“Your boyfriend.”
“No.” She shook her head. “He’s a…” She hesitated. “A lumberjack.”
“Whoa.” Lane reared back and made a cross with his fingers. “Sleeping with the enemy.”
“What do you mean?” she said testily.
“I’m not an enviro-freak, but you see the way they whack those trees”—Martin made a karate-type gesture and a sound like a B–9 bomber—“it’s like a battlefield.”
“I see. It’s okay to fish the waters to the point of extinction but thinning the forest so they can make the books you read is a crime?”
Lane showed her the palms of his hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just saying your honey ain’t too popular among certain types.”
“Whatever.” Miranda lowered the shade, put on her headphones, and buttoned the cardigan all the way to her neck. Let him look at someone else’s tits.