Race Across the Sky by Derek Sherman Page B

from it, to run.
    â€œWhere are you from?” he asked.
    â€œI live in Taos, but I’m from Arizona. Outside Phoenix. Not a lot of anything, you know, kinetic, going on there. My parents were always in and out of work. My stepbrothers, they were big into crystal, Xanax, shooting guns. I started running to get away from it.
    â€œI did some 5ks, then tens. Then I started to get super into it. At a 15k I met a woman, she was from Taos. She told me it was mystical. And that word stayed with me,
mystical
, for like a year. In my mind it meant that Taos had like unicorns and castles, you know?” she laughed.
    Caleb listened as if her words were rare fabric brushing his cheek.
    â€œAfter I saved enough for a good start, I drove there in my beater. You know what? I never ran into that woman, anywhere. And Taos is small.”
    â€œWhat did you do there?” he asked, so unused to this expulsion of breath while moving. But June had no concern or issues with talking and running.
    â€œLet’s see, I worked in a ski shop, a dying travel agency, I mean who uses travel agents anymore? I house sat. And then I started as a server at the Gorge. It’s a bar, near the mountain. A year later I graduated to daytime bartending, and then I got some of the good après-ski shifts. Which is where I met Todd.”
    â€œHe worked there?”
    â€œWhen he wasn’t working on mountain crews. He was super thin, with this beard, and this super-wiry energy. People like him. Being with him, it came with a whole circle of friends, and stuff to do, and I wasn’t lonely anymore. I ran for a couple of hours every morning, in the open fields and trails. Todd, with his cigarettes and drinking, he was never encouraging. He came to the finish line when I did my first marathon, but that was it. Three years ago, I signed up for the Jemez Fifty, down in Los Alamos?”
    â€œDid he come to that one?”
    â€œTodd wouldn’t even drive me. He said running fifty miles was crazy. But there was a bus of locals going, and the ride was actually so much more fun than I was expecting. People were singing and whatnot and being goofy. I finished way in the back, but I was totally excited that I made it. I rode back with my arms wrapped around strangers. At home, Todd was smoking his Newports, staring at the computer. I told him I finished, and he just mumbled something and left for the Gorge.”
    â€œNot everyone understands,” Caleb offered.
    June was silent for a spell. They turned up to the top of the road, where Rocky Mountain National Park sloped west. A titian sliver slipped into the sky, and they plunged straight into the trails.
    â€œI got pregnant by accident. Todd, he told me to stop running. He was really worried about all the jostling. But having this life inside of me, it made me want to run more. I stayed away from rocky trails, but I kept going out every morning.
    â€œâ€˜You’re going to kill that baby,’ he’d shout at me, finger in my face.
    â€œAnd then in my third trimester, the snow and the tourists hit, and I got kind of super clingy with him. I kept waking him up at night, and calling him at work. And he said he needed to move out, just so he could sleep. But he never came back.”
    Caleb said nothing. The park was humid; mosquitoes swarmed. He wondered at how well she was running.
    â€œNow, I wonder if Todd was right. Maybe all that running while I was pregnant, like, dislodged something? Or sent some adrenaline into me that did something to Lily?”
    â€œI don’t see how it could.” He hesitated. “Did she always breathe like this?”
    June nodded, “Oh yeah, since the first day. They sent me home from the hospital with this machine called a nebulizer, this stuff called prednisone. I had to force a plastic mask over her face. Her bones were so soft they didn’t even seem finished, I thought each time they were going to break. I put this