need.”
“If Paige is coming, like you say,” his father adds, “we’ll sit down
together when she gets here, talk this out, try to understand what’s
happening. Their voices are vaguely patronizing, as if they are talking
to an intelligent and perceptive child but a child nonetheless.
“Shut up! Just shut up!” He pulls his hand free of his mother’s grasp
and leaps up from the sofa, shaking with frustration.
The window. Falling snow. The street. No BMW. But soon.
He turns away from the window, faces his parents.
His mother sits on the edge of the sofa, her face buried in her hands,
shoulders hunched, in a posture of grief or despair.
He needs to make them understand. He is consumed by that need and
frustrated by his inability to get even the fundamentals of the
situation across to them.
His father rises from the chair. Stands indecisively. Arms at his
sides. “Marty, you came to us for help, and we want to help, God knows
we do, but we can’t help if you won’t let us.”
Lowering her hands from her face, with tears on her cheeks now, his
mother says, “Please, Marty. Please.”
“Everyone makes mistakes now and then,” his father says.
“If it’s drugs,” his mother says, through tears, speaking as much to his
father as to him, “we can cope with that, honey, we can handle that, we
can find treatment for that.”
His glass-encased world–beautiful, peaceful, timeless–in which he’s
been living during the precious minutes since his mother opened her arms
to him at the front door, now abruptly fractures.
An ugly, jagged crack scars the smooth curve of crystal. The sweet,
clean atmosphere of that paradise escapes with a whoosh, admitting the
poisonous air of the hateful world in which existence requires an
unending struggle against hopelessness, loneliness, rejection.
“Don’t do this to me,” he pleads. “Don’t betray me. How can you do
this to me? How can you turn against me? I am your child.”
Frustration turns to anger. “Your only child.” Anger turns to hatred.
“I need. I need. Can’t you see?” He is trembling with rage. “Don’t
you care? Are you heartless? How can you be so awful to me, so cruel?
How could you let it come to this?”
At a service station in Bishop, they stopped long enough to buy snow
chains and to pay extra to have them buckled to the wheels of the BMW.
The California Highway Patrol was recommending but not yet requiring
that all vehicles heading into the Sierra Nevadas be equipped with
chains.
Route 395 became a divided highway west of Bishop, and in spite of the
dramatically rising elevation, they made good time past Rovanna and
Crowley Lake, past McGee Creek and Convict Lake, exiting 395 onto Route
203 slightly south of Casa Diablo Hot Springs.
Casa Diablo. House of the Devil.
The meaning of the name had never impinged upon Marty before.
Now everything was an omen.
Snow began falling before they reached Mammoth Lakes.
The fat flakes were almost as loosely woven as cheap lace. They fell in
such plenitude that it seemed more than half the volume of the air
between land and sky was occupied by snow. It immediately began to
stick, trimming the landscape in faux ermine.
Paige drove through Mammoth Lakes without stopping and turned south
toward Lake Mary. In the back seat, Charlotte and Emily were so
entranced by the snowfall that, for the time being, they did not need to
be entertained.
East of the mountains, the sky had been gray-black and churning.
Here, in the wintry heart of the Sierras, it was like a Cyclopean eye
sheathed in a milky cataract.
The turn-off from Route 203 was marked by a copse of pines in which the
tallest specimen bore scars from a decade-old lightning strike. The
bolt had not merely damaged the pine but had encouraged it into mutant
patterns of growth, until it had become a gnarled and malignant tower.
The snowflakes were smaller than before, falling harder, driven by the
northwest wind. After a playful debut, the storm was turning serious.
Cutting through mountain meadows and forests–increasingly more of the
latter and fewer of the former–the upsloping road eventually passed a