Just Breathe

Doreen beamed like a proud parent. “My first. It’s a Cooper S convertible—rare as hen’s teeth. I’m sure it’s promised to the top person on the waiting list but…gee…I just can’t seem to find that list, and I’d hate to bother someone at the dinner hour.”

They exchanged conspiratorial smiles. The little British-made car was adorable, like a windup toy. She could just hear Jack now, laughing and pointing out all the reasons a Mini Cooper wasn’t practical or safe. It was a passing trend, overpriced, prone to breakdowns, he would say.

“It’s perfect,” Sarah told Doreen. “But I have to ask, why did she trade it in?”

“Right after she bought it, she found out she was expecting her third child. You can probably fit a family of four in a Mini, but five would be stretching it.”

Plenty of room for me and my fax machine, Sarah thought.

“It’s got autolock, which is an antitheft feature. It doesn’t have OnStar, though,” Doreen admitted.

“That’s okay. I’ve never locked my keys in the car before, and I don’t plan to start. I don’t need a GPS, either. I know where I’m going.” An hour later, she drove it off the lot. The car was crowded to the rear with her stuff, and the sound system didn’t disappoint. She headed to the highway, darting up the on-ramp and merging into the stream of traffic headed west. In the middle lane, she suddenly found herself flanked by a pair of semis rising like steel walls and looming in close, ready to crush her. A terrible fear squeezed her heart. What the hell am I doing?

Sarah set her jaw and eased back on the accelerator, letting the trucks pull ahead. Then she turned up the radio and burst into song, “Shut Up and Drive” by Rihanna. She sang with a crushing sense of loss that mingled oddly with a terrifying exhilaration. She sang for the things she’d left behind. For a marriage she used to believe in, but didn’t anymore. For the hope of having a baby, which was now as dead as her love for Jack. For the anonymous woman who had ordered the Mini and then traded it in when she realized her life was about to change radically.

Sarah found the first of a series of cheap roadside motels and lay staring at the blank ceiling of her room and listening to the sound of the highway. This felt like someone else’s life, she thought, someone she didn’t recognize at all.

Sarah drove west, her new car like a tiny bluebottle fly, flashing across the prairies, past endless seas of alfalfa and dried corn and deep emerald-green winter rye. By the time she reached North Platte, Nebraska, she made a terrible admission to herself. She had not been happy in a long while. This was not sour grapes. Humbly grateful for Jack’s recovery, she had been afraid to voice her discontent. It would have seemed so petty and ungrateful. Instead, she had existed in a state that passed for happiness. Jack was well, they were financially comfortable, they lived in a lovely home in a nice neighborhood, they were trying to start a family to prove to the world that all was well. But happy?

That was the trouble with the human spirit, she realized as she drove the Mini across the mountains and finally to the edge of California. You could pretend all you wanted that you were happy, but discontent was bound to manifest itself. For Jack, it was in the arms of another woman. For Sarah, it was her dogged determination to get pregnant.

“So far, not so good,” she said, her eyes fastened on the horizon.

On her final day on the road, she woke up at dawn and drove the final leg of the journey, along Papermill Creek through the murky, uninhabited forest of Samuel P. Taylor State Park, where the tall, thickly branched trees arched over the winding road, creating a canopy of shadows. Finally she reached the tiny hamlet of Glenmuir, on the western edge of Marin County, remote and nearly forgotten, surrounded by a wilderness so spectacular that it was protected by an act of Congress.

Emerging from a green tunnel of gloom, she passed rolling green hills dotted with dairy farms and ranches, through misty valleys to the gray-shrouded bay, where old dock pilings pierced through the fog. It was about as far as she could get from Jack without actually leaving the continent.

At the end of the journey, she found herself in a place she had not lived since heading off to college. She passed the dock where she used to stand, a pale shadow watching the world go by. Then she pulled up the drive and parked. She walked into the house by the bay where she had grown up, feeling the ache and fatigue of her marathon drive in her neck and shoulders. “I left Jack,” she told her father.

“I know. He called me.”

“He was screwing around.”

“I know that, too.”

“He told you?”

Her father didn’t answer. He gave her an awkward hug—things were always awkward between them—and then she went to bed and slept for twenty-four hours straight.

Chapter Four

If she didn’t know better, Sarah would have thought it was a bad idea to hire a divorce lawyer named Birdie. Birdie Bonner Shafter, to be exact. It sounded more like a porn star than an attorney.

She did know better, though she wondered if Birdie would remember her from high school. Probably not. Three years ahead of Sarah, Birdie had been too busy running the show—student council president, Girls State, volleyball team captain and Key Club were just a few of her roles—to spare a thought for lesser beings. The fact that she had been the meanest girl in the school was actually an asset now.

Sarah had been invisible to everyone who mattered in high school. Come to think of it, she had been invisible all her life, until she met Jack. Now she remembered why. It was safer to fly below the radar. She should have stayed that way—unnoticed, watching the world go by, drawing her private observations, making fun of the things she secretly envied. But no. She had to go and plunge into life—and into love—as though she belonged there. As though it was her right.

She got up and went to the window of the outer office, sending the receptionist a nervous smile.

“Can I get you something to drink?” the receptionist offered.

“No, thank you,” said Sarah. “I’m fine.”

“Ms. Shafter should only be a few minutes longer.”

“I don’t mind waiting.” The tall casement window was surrounded by gingerbread molding. Some of the glass panes were original, judging by their slightly brittle, wavy quality. Birdie’s law office occupied one of the historic buildings of downtown Glenmuir. Since Sarah had moved away, the main square had barely changed. It was a cluster of Victorian and carpenter Gothic wood frame buildings, some original, some knockoffs, the old ones built by nineteenth-century settlers who had come to fish the abundant waters of the secluded bay. A few local B and Bs attracted tourists from the Bay area, including May’s Cottage, a private beach retreat that belonged to Sarah’s great-aunt. The snug white bungalow was so popular as a vacation rental that it booked up months in advance. Most tourists, however, found the town remote and strange, hanging on the edge of nowhere, and they let the locals be.

When not festooned in fog, the area around Tomales Bay had a clarity of light she had never seen anywhere else in the world. The intense blue of the sky was reflected in the water. The placid water in turn mirrored the wooded wilderness that surrounded the bay. It looked exactly as it had five hundred years ago, when Sir Francis Drake had sailed in on his soon-to-be-legendary Golden Hind, to be greeted by painted members of the Miwok tribe.

Sarah smoothed her hands down her tailored blazer, feeling overdressed in her Chicago outfit. People around here tended to dress in organic fibers and homely, supremely comfortable shoes. She didn’t really own anything like that anymore. Jack liked her to dress like a Neiman Marcus catalog model, even when she protested that she worked at home, alone.

When they were first married, she liked to draw at her drafting table wearing a faded University of Chicago sweat suit and thick wool socks, her hair held back with a clip. “It helps me be creative,” she had once told him.

“You can be creative in a sweater and slacks,” he replied, and gave her a three-hundred-dollar cashmere cardigan set to make his point.

She gritted her teeth and focused on the bay in the distance. A seaplane came in for a landing, the lawn-mower whine of its engine briefly filling the air. Sometimes the aircraft brought tourists to town but most of them came to pick up fresh oysters and transport them, still alive, to big-city restaurants. There was a boat out today, its full sails pulling it toward the horizon. Closer in, she could see the harvest skiffs her father used to take out three hundred sixty-four days a year, until he’d handed the business over to his son. Sarah’s brother Kyle was as conventional as she was odd, and he’d been perfectly content to take over the family business. Meanwhile, their father had traded his cultivation trays for a 1965 poppy-red Mustang GT convertible in dire need of restoration. He lavished attention on the car, which seemed to occupy a permanent berth in Glenn Mounger’s auto body garage.

A woman came in, breathless, and headed straight for the water cooler. Her athletic body was encased in gleaming black-and-yellow spandex. The chest-hugging top was covered with sponsors’ logos. The stripe up the side of her skintight shorts read Trek. She wore an aerodynamic helmet and wraparound shades. In cup-heeled cycling shoes, her walk was stiff-legged, the toes pointing up.

She drank six cone-shaped cups at the water cooler and finally turned to Sarah. “Sorry about that. I used up my hydration pack.”

“Oh.” Sarah was at a loss. “I hate when that happens.”

“Birdie Shafter,” the woman said, taking off the helmet and shades. A riot of black hair and a supermodel face were revealed. “You’re Sarah Moon.”

Sarah covered her surprise. Somehow, she’d expected Birdie to have changed more from high school. “That’s right.”

“I’m training for a triathlon, so my schedule is pretty crazy these days.” She held open a door marked with the nameplate Bernadette Bonner Shafter, Attorney at Law.

Sarah stepped into the office.

“Give me two minutes,” Birdie said.

“Take five,” Sarah offered.

“You’re a peach.” She ducked through a side door. Sarah heard the sound of running water.

Despite Birdie’s unconventional appearance, the law office was all business. The array of framed diplomas and certificates did its job of instilling confidence in the client. Birdie had earned her bachelor’s at USC and her law degree from San Diego State. She had numerous credentials displayed, and gold embossed stickers designated her a summa graduate from both schools. The State of California Bar Association empowered her as a member in good standing.

Dark wooden built-in shelves provided a wall of fame. Either Birdie was star-struck or she ran in exalted circles. She had pictures of herself with the Governator and Diane Feinstein, Lance Armstrong and Brandi Chastain. There was a shot of her with Francis Ford Coppola in front of his winery and another with Robin Williams with the Coast highway in the background.

The photographs propped on the big tiger oak desk were more personal. There were shots of the Bonner Flower Farm, which Sarah recalled had been founded by Birdie’s counterculture parents. Another photo showed Birdie and her husband, Ellison Shafter, whom Sarah’s father said was a pilot for United.

There was also a picture of Birdie’s brother, Will. Either it was an old photo, or he hadn’t changed a bit. In Sarah’s head, Shirl’s voice asked, Why should you change if you’re already perfect?

Of all the people Sarah remembered from high school, she remembered Will Bonner best. This was ironic, since he had probably never known her name. The framed photo triggered a flood of memories she didn’t know she had. Standing there in the unfamiliar office, the antique pine plank floor creaking beneath her feet, she was surprised to discover old resentments festering in secret beneath the surface. Her life with Jack had formed a gloss over the past. Maybe that was why she’d married him. He took her away from people like this.

Now that he was out of the picture, there was nothing standing between her and old memories, and she fell into the past like Alice down the rabbit hole, grasping at stray roots on her way to the bottom.