Out of Breath Read online

  A novel by Blair Richmond

  www.AshlandCreekPress.com

  Out of Breath

  A novel by Blair Richmond

  Published by Ashland Creek Press

  www.ashlandcreekpress.com

  © 2011 Ashland Creek Press

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-0-9796475-7-4

  eISBN 978-0-9796475-8-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011930904

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and scenarios appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without written permission of the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. All paper products used to create this book are Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) Certified Sourcing. Cover and book design by John Yunker.

  Our wills and fates do so contrary run.

  — William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  Part One:

  Lithia, Again

  One

  They call it a runner’s high, a sensation of euphoria experienced after a certain distance, usually a very long distance. Some runners must travel six miles or more before feeling it. But me, I feel that high every moment my worn old running shoes touch the ground.

  Since I was eight years old I’ve been a runner. Not a jogger. A runner. I was always the fastest girl I knew and, during junior high, faster than any boy I knew. I ran cross-country at West Houston High, and I won state during my junior year. A scholarship to a major college seemed all but inevitable until my dad backed the car over my left foot the summer before my senior year. It’s funny how quickly dreams can be crushed. Just as easily as my left foot.

  The community college didn’t have a running team, not that it mattered. I was too busy waiting tables and tending bar to have the time anyway. My foot eventually grew strong again, and I ran on my own when I found the time, usually late at night. Running was the only thing that kept me sane and out of trouble. I wish I had been running during that last night in Houston.

  But because I wasn’t, I guess that’s why I’m running now. Though not in the conventional form. I’ve been on the run, moving from town to town, scrubbing floors at truck stop restrooms to pay for meals, sleeping in homeless shelters, keeping an eye open at all times. Never fully sleeping. Never relaxed.

  Being on the run is different from running. For one thing, on the run, there’s no such thing as a runner’s high.

  ~

  It is late in October when I arrive in Lithia. A woman in a huge white pickup truck with a white dog named Kitty on her lap gave me a ride north from Redding. She told me about the jerk who left her last month for a younger woman. She told me you can’t pump your own gas in Oregon, not that I’ll have to bother either way. She told me that people get lost in these parts; they pull over one day to check out the scenery and they never come back. She shoves ten dollars in my hand as I climb down from the cab.

  “Be careful, kiddo,” she says. “This town is full of crazies.”

  I watch her pull away and realize that I forgot to thank her. Her gift is the only money I have. Ten bucks won’t buy me a motel room, so I begin looking for a place to sleep for the night.

  I try to remember Lithia, searching the recesses of a child’s memory. The town is in southern Oregon, so small and so close to the state line that if you’re driving south on the interstate, you can miss it entirely and not realize it until you’re in California. A speck of a city clinging to the forested legs of a sprawling wilderness of trees. People call Lithia “quaint.” They come from all around to see shows at its theaters. But I have a different reason for coming here.

  I was only eight when I left Lithia, and maybe that’s why I have no memories of the town, or maybe it is just too dark tonight. There is no moon above, or if there is, it’s denied viewing by the low-hanging clouds. I can see the beginning of the hills behind the small town square. Houses rising up, growing more expansive as the hills stretch into the white mist.

  But the town square is well lit and lively with couples and young people milling about. Families, their little kids leashed to their hands; some older couples, retired and practically living at the theater. People my age, dressed in fatigues or batiks, hair knotted and dreadlocked, beards down to their chests, rings through their ears down to their shoulders. Music drifts down from the second floor of an old brick building. I sit on a bench and let the music calm me.

  People look at me as they pass. I don’t look like anyone here. I’m not quite a hippie, not a young mom, not a college student. I’m not one of the runners who comes here for training in the mountains; I’m not a theater buff. I don’t fit in, even though I’m probably one of the few people who was actually born here.

  There’s a pizza shop on the edge of the square, and I spend half my money on a slice and a large coffee. I don’t normally eat pizza but right now I’m so hungry I could order an entire pie. Yet I resist. I have to make the money last. Hunger is a fact of life now, and there’s nothing to do but ignore it.

  Same with the cold. When I left Houston, I didn’t have time to pack much. Working my way through community college, I didn’t own much anyway. And back then, there was no need for a jacket, not in the heat of the summer.

  I headed for Austin, where I lied my way into a bartending job, adding two years to my life and saying I was twenty-one. Drunk men staring at me in my requisite low-cut tank top and jean shorts was a small price to pay for tips. It was the tips that had kept me in school back in Houston, and I got over the indignity of flaunting what I had for strangers a long time ago. Not that I have much to flaunt, with a runner’s build, but I do have good legs.

  Austin was a paradise. The bar owner was a salty woman who had inherited the bar from her ex-husband after he died—“He forgot to change the will, bless his dumb old heart,” she said—and every night after closing she walked me back to my motel room, waiting till I was locked in safe before going home herself. I risked working there for a few weeks to save up money, but in the end it was still too close to Houston, so I moved on. I found a homeless shelter in Lubbock. Then one morning, after I woke up on my cot with a smelly man rolling back and forth on top of me, I left the state of Texas for good.

  I headed north and then drifted west. As summer slipped into fall, I picked up a sweatshirt in Colorado Springs, a hoodie in Reno.

  I didn’t realize it at first, but from the very beginning, I was headed home. To Lithia.

  So here I am, and though I’m wearing every piece of clothing I own right now, still I’m frozen through. I move to a spot that’s close to a flamethrower—a woman with a baton burning at both ends. She’s wearing a long, gauzy skirt, and I worry about it catching fire until I see a fire extinguisher next to her tip jar. I look at it with longing, all those bills and coins, but there’s a guy sitting really close, and I’m not sure I could steal from her anyway.

  The flames don’t offer enough heat to keep me warm, so I stand and start walking again. I enter a park just off the town square and walk past a duck pond. I hear a creek running. A couple, hand in hand, pass me, and then I’m alone in the darkness, invisible. But I welcome it. I’m tired of the eyes that seem to judge me, take pity on me. Or worse. This is why I used to run at night, in spite of the warnings against it. Nobody could catch me anyway, I always believed. And I was right—nobody ever did.

  I find a bench and consider making this my bed for the night. There’s a public bathroom just beyond. Maybe I can withstand the cold. Maybe. Then I notice the sign on the bathroom building.

  WARNING

  Recent bear attacks

  Proceed with caution
<
br />   Avoid park after dark

  My stomach clenches, triggered by a childhood memory I’m not expecting yet always dreading. I quickly turn around and escape the darkness of the park.

  I return to the pizza shop and spend the rest of my money on pizza so that I can sit in the warmth, with all the good smells of pizza bread and the familiar smell of spilled beer. I take a table next to the window so I can watch people pass.

  I’ll have to leave eventually—then what? Even if I find a homeless shelter, I don’t want to spend the night there. I’m tired of shelters and their rules and the men who inevitably sneak into the women’s dorms. I don’t like bunk beds, and I get claustrophobic when I’m lying in a room full of cots, listening to everybody breathe around me. Lately I’ve been looking for hiding places to sleep, places tucked away and warm, where nobody can find me or bother me. Where I can be alone.

  The pizza shop closes, and I’m back on the street, now much emptier, quieter. I keep walking and find myself in a crowd of people, hundreds of them streaming from wide-open doors.

  It’s a theater, and I bask in the warmth of the crowds, probably the only person here who doesn’t mind getting shoved around, bumped into.

  I push against the current and into the theater. People everywhere, coming and going and talking and cleaning up. I work my way down a flight of stairs, then another, seeking out the quieter areas. One door leads to a dark room, a closet. I wait. It’s warm here, and I sit on my fingers to warm them up. Soon I’m able to move my toes again.

  An hour passes, or maybe more. When I finally open the door again, all is quiet, and I venture out. I wander through the dark hallways, guiding myself along by feeling the walls stretch out in front of me, until they curve around and up and I find myself in the theater, tripping over a row of seats and looking down on the stage, barely lit by little floor lights.

  The stage is made to look like a bedroom, and I walk down the steps, pausing every so often to make sure I’m still alone. I step up onto the stage and stand above the bed. It’s real—it has a soft mattress and a bedspread, even if there aren’t any sheets underneath. I look around. Still alone. There’s a fake window that’s darkened out, a nightstand, a mirror. When I look into it, I see a pale face, a ghost of a girl. Her hair is in a mussed-up blonde ponytail and she looks hunched over and worn out and grubby.

  But she is smiling, even if it looks as though she’s forgotten how. She knows she’s about to get the first good night’s sleep she’s had in months.

  Two

  Hey. You. Wake up!”

  I open my eyes and, squinting in the bright light, see a man standing above me, his face red with anger. I blink and realize I am in bed, on a stage. The lights in the theater are on. And there is a man in a janitor’s uniform yelling at me.

  “Who are you?” he demands.

  “I’m sorry.” I scramble out of bed as fast as I can, grabbing my shoes and backpack off the floor in one quick motion. Then I hop off the stage and start up the aisle. I can hear him shouting after me.

  “Stop her!”

  I pick up speed until I’m running. I follow the Exit signs and make my way outside, and I keep running until I’m back in the square. I don’t know what time it is, but I can tell it’s early because most of the shops are still closed, even the pizza place.

  My stomach reminds me that I’m hungry. But I have no money left. When I walk past the park, I see a homeless person holding a cardboard sign. I don’t want to infringe on his territory, so I leave the square and head up Main Street.

  As a rule, I try to avoid begging, but I can’t claim never to have done it. I’ve always worked and saved and gotten by on as little as I could, but there were a few times when I had no choice. Like that afternoon in Colorado, when I stood outside a supermarket with a sign, a lot like the one the guy in the park has, handwritten and crumpled and asking for something, anything. Sometimes people look at you as if you need to get off your lazy butt and get a job already. They don’t understand that it’s not laziness that brought you there. Sometimes people are kind. In Boulder, they were very kind, and I ate that night.

  Today, I’m as desperate as I was back in Boulder, but I’m determined not to beg. I continue up Main Street and watch the stores begin coming to life. Merchants start to set up tables out front, prop open doors, and put out water dishes for passing dogs. Despite their busyness, everyone smiles at me or says hello. I’m reminded of what a nice town it is—maybe I’m also remembering that my life back then was nice, too—and I don’t want to leave. But I don’t know how in the world I can stay.

  I find a wooden bench and sit, watching people. A block away, a man has begun strumming an acoustic guitar, and I feel like closing my eyes. I always hear better with my eyes closed. With the music and the sun shining on my face, I feel lucky to be here, to be free. I try to force thoughts of the future from my mind. Right here, right now, I am content. And that counts for something.

  I spend the morning wandering from bench to bench, seeking sun and music, both easy to find on one of the fall’s last warm days. For a while I sit near a woman playing the flute and watch her with interest. She can’t be much older than I am, and she’s wearing a crown of flowers in her hair and a green dress that’s all raggedy at the bottom, as if she lives in a forest. Her music lulls me into something like peace.

  Finally my growling stomach wins out, and I feel lightheaded as I begin to walk again, wondering what I can do for money, for food. I have no instrument, no talents other than running. And right now I’m too weak even for that.

  I ask a stranger for the time, if for no other reason than to interact with someone. He is friendly and tells me it is two o’clock, much later than I thought. I need to eat.

  I turn off Main Street and make my way away from the high hills behind me to the flatter part of town. The houses here are smaller than the ones along the hill, and older, even though some of them have been renovated to look brand-new. The street comes to an end at a set of railroad tracks. Two empty railroad cars wait idly on the tracks, as if they might run again someday.

  I follow the tracks to a small shopping plaza, jammed with cars and people. A sign reads Lithia Food Co-Op, and another beggar stands near the parking lot entrance. I walk into the store. I don’t know why, since I have no money, but maybe they’ll have some samples.

  Inside, everything smells fresh, from the vegetables stacked high in wooden crates to the simmering foods in the take-out area. I wander through the produce section, plucking a few organic grapes when no one is looking. Past the cheese shop are the bulk-food bins—rice and beans and lentils and other things I can’t nibble on, but also nuts and dates and candied ginger. I slip my hands into the bins as often as I dare, but none of it is enough. It seems as though these little bites of food are only waking up my hunger, and I can hear my stomach literally groaning.

  I pick up a bottle of orange juice and walk around the store, wondering if I can drink it and deposit the bottle someplace without being seen. Employees are rushing around, busy. But I’m not a thief. I put the juice back.

  As I do, I glimpse a tofu sandwich, wrapped in plastic and ready to eat. It was made yesterday and is on sale, half off, only three dollars, which of course I don’t have. I pace back and forth in front of the prepared-foods refrigerator. I hate myself right now, for what I’m about to do. But I do it anyway.

  I pass the fridge one last time, reaching over and sliding the sandwich into the left pocket of my hoodie. I step toward the door as slowly and nonchalantly as I can, blood rushing to my head because I feel as though everyone is staring at me. I try to walk out but realize that I’m trying to exit through an entrance-only door, so I have to turn back. More self-conscious than ever, I pretend to shop some more. It gives me a chance to make sure nobody’s following me. When I glance over my shoulder, I see only a woman with a toddler behind me.

  I’m pretending to peruse the selection of pineapples when I get an opportunity. The toddler be
gins to cry as his mother leads him out through the automatic doors. Then he starts to scream, digging in his heels and refusing to take another step. I thank the universe for unruly children as I start past them. A screaming child always commands more attention than a small young woman slipping out the door. Even if her pocket is bulging with stolen food.

  Outside, I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m about to turn the corner and quicken my pace when I feel a strong hand on my arm.

  “Hold it right there.”

  I turn to face one of the co-op clerks. He’s young, like me, and his thin, goateed face has a serious look on it.

  “What is it?” I ask, trying to look innocent.

  “You have something that belongs to the store. Something you did not pay for.”

  I look around for the fastest escape route. It’s a habit I’ve been able to perfect over the years, finding the quickest way out of a bar, or a motel, or a shelter dormitory. I feel my legs tensing, ready to propel me like a deer from this parking lot and through the alley, to take me out of this town for good, once and for all.

  “I think you’re mistaken,” I say.

  “Then what’s that in your pocket? And don’t say you’re just happy to see me.” He is smiling now, the serious look gone. Even though his joke is really lame, I feel my body relaxing. Is he going to let me off the hook?

  “Please don’t call the cops,” I say, still uncertain. “I’m out of money and I’m really hungry. I’ll return it. I haven’t even touched it, see?” I reach inside my pocket and remove the sandwich.

  “Tofu sandwiches pair well with our organic orange juice,” he says. “I see that you and I have a similar palate.”

  So he saw me with the juice, too. “I didn’t take that juice.” I hold up my arms, as if inviting him to search my pockets. “I promise.”