Other runners would match her stride in short spurts and gasp between words, “Which one are you training for?” She’d just thrust off the ball of her foot and burst ahead. Let them take that as her reply. Yes, she was in training. In training for the discipline to not run her car up the Highway 210 offramp, swerving across lanes to crash head-on into the first oncoming Lexus or Tesla. Or maybe on a cold February night, slip into the utility room and twist loose the furnace exhaust and flood the house with carbon monoxide. Yes, she ran with a purpose: to not commit murder-suicide.
Every day fired off at 4:50, waking a minute beforehand to tap the alarm cancel button so she wouldn’t wake Rob. Lycra tights, sleeveless tee, sheer merino socks, and Saucony Peregrine trail runners with the purchase date inked into the side of the midsole so she knew when to retire them. Next, pee and pull the hair into a twist with a scrunchie and enter the kitchen as the clock on the microwave turned to 4:57. A handful of almonds, followed by a double chug of Tropicana Pulp Free for the sugar jolt. Then out the laundry room door. Five sharp. No stretches, knee bends, or lunges, just directly into her stride down the block to Linda Vista, rarely a car to challenge her for possession of the street at this hour.
Other than in the heat of summer, she left the house chilled and underdressed. The splash of crisp air on her skin discouraged a lazy start, speeding her to the half-mile waypoint, where her core would start putting off enough heat to raise her body temperature for the duration of the run.
She passed the midcentury homes with their deep-set lawns, coiffed rose trees, and overhanging eaves that reminded her of film noir detectives, eyes hidden by the wide brims of their hats. After years in the neighborhood, she still couldn’t rid herself from feeling like a squatter in this “estate” neighborhood above the Rose Bowl. Rob’s parents had passed away eight years ago and left them the house on Laurel, a residence way above their FICO scores. But, owing to a loophole in the California tax code, they’d been grandfathered into his parents’ assessment rate, retro to their original 1976 purchase of the house. Since she and Rob moved from their Lego-block condo in Panorama City, they’d made no friends in the neighborhood, frozen out by the old-money gentry who knew they’d arrived on a free pass, an impression reinforced by Rob’s casual caretaking, the lawn scorched from broken sprinklers and tulip beds gone to quack grass and pigweed. Now, with the garage door frozen open, the disorder of file cabinets, broken furniture, mattresses, bikes, and scooters made her feel like they were exposed to the neighborhood in their underwear.
Over the past several years, she tried to convince Rob to sell the house and find something over in Altadena or La Crescenta at half the price, with cash set aside for the kids’ school and college. But Rob insisted that his parents had obviously intended them to live here. With the deed solely in his name, he had the final word. Even with the cut-rate tax and no mortgage, they struggled on her salary, with Rob content to assume the role of stay-at-home dad. He didn’t mind the shopping chores, which suited her, and turned the slow-cooker meal into an art form, a favorite with the kids.
Mature gum myrtles and horse chestnut trees formed a continuous archway down Linda Vista, with not a single date or king palm in sight, probably the neighborhood’s conscious gesture to disassociate Pasadena from Beverly Hills money.
She turned uphill onto Inverness, noting her time on the Apple Watch her kids had bought her for Christmas. She felt strong this morning, a full twenty seconds under her average time for this point in her run.
Actually, the watch had become another pinprick of discord with Rob. Charlotte, her oldest, had bought him a new transformer for his train set; Wyatt, plush Ugg slippers, and Ariel, a DVD collection of The Office. Later, while the kids were prepping side dishes for the holiday dinner, Rob self-isolated in the bedroom and went to Amazon, price-checking his gifts. That afternoon, he brought his surly gloom to the table, wounded that the kids had spent more on their mother’s gift, proof that they valued him less than their mom.
Like many couples, money was the fuse that lit the TNT of most of their arguments, which then shifted to the question of why she needed to replace perfectly good shoes every three or four months. He discounted the idea that the soles broke down after a number of miles. Just an upsell gimmick, he said. And how come such expensive shoes, when she could get Nikes or Skechers on sale at Big 5? She knew better than argue that her Sauconys were best suited to her slight pronation by accommodating her slightly wide forefoot. She got no traction on the fact that she ordered online, searching for overstock or closeouts. He mocked her attachment to her retired shoes, stacked two-high the full length of a shelf in their closet. She didn’t see it as a sentimental fetish but a journal of her running history, each pair representing four to five hundred miles of hard travel. She could pull down a pair of shoes, read the date, and document the slow decline of their marriage in the same way that glaciologists identify dust and volcanic ash from ice cores and calculate global warming. So then what was she to read from yesterday’s arrival home to find the shelf empty? Rob claimed that homeless people needed shoes and it was thoughtless to hoard when so many were walking the streets barefoot or in flip-flops. It was so like Rob, to twist his actions into a gesture of virtue while, in her mind, it was an act of calculated vandalism.
Inverness climbed two miles in long switchbacks, a test piece for any serious runner. Once a road cyclist had surged forward to match her stride. “Training for the big race?” he asked, probably thinking of the upcoming L.A. Marathon. “That’s it,” she said, just to get him to move on and refocus her flow state. A former running partner had once urged her to sign up for one of the Southern California marathons, certain she’d easily make the qualifying time for Boston. Though she liked the idea of competing against herself, she never entered a race. Running against other people felt like a misappropriation of a pursuit that was personal and nobody’s business.
Approaching the second hairpin on Inverness, she veered to the curb for the Times deliveryman, his wife pitching rolled newspapers from the window of the fakey wood-paneled Cherokee. When she’d first run this loop, a fat loaf of rolled newspaper waited on every driveway. Now, the Cherokee slowed for only a couple deliveries on each block, the paper a slim baton. When Charlotte needed braces or Wyatt got admitted to music camp, she’d earned extra income writing book reviews for the Times. But with the paper shrinking and staff slashed, that went away. She raised a hand as the Cherokee passed, not so much a greeting but an acknowledgment of their shrinking world.
In the beginning, Rob was encouraging and liked the way his wife’s running sculpted off the extra pounds from her pregnancies. He also enjoyed solo time with the kids, preparing their breakfast and bagging lunches. Gradually, though, he became sulky that she was unavailable for sex in the morning, when his libido peaked and she woke up with the rigid peg of his cock pushing into her spine. She’d stopped birth control when she noticed that the pill dulled her spirit and added weight. Rob often talked about their having one more child, a wish she suspected was more about recapturing a time when they were allied in the expectation of a new life. But she hadn’t had her period in more than two years. Her doctor called the condition amenorrhea and agreed with Rob that she could use a couple more pounds and might consider dialing back her weekly miles.
More and more, Rob had been body shaming her, complaining that she no longer had any tits and a boy’s ass, preferring the more rounded and full features of their first years together. But in the quiet of late evenings, reclined in the soaker tub, she took satisfaction in her flat, pleated stomach, and tapered calves that people told her looked high-fashion in heels, though lately the only time she got to dress up was for a christening, funeral, or the girls’ soccer banquets.
Approaching Chevy Chase, she bent into the steeper grade, lunging off the balls of her feet. Her thighs complained, her ribcage restricted the expansion of lungs that strained to grasp more air. She could have eased the pace, but every time she came to this section, she pushed harder, embracing the discomfort. She’d learned that running pain is just a few synapses frightened that the organism was going to collapse. Over the years, she’d had endless conversations with those synapses. “Chill, brain. This hill isn’t going to kill us. I promise.”
Most people confuse comfort with happiness. She thought of Rob in his recliner, a bowl of pretzels in his lap, waiting for Jimmy Kimmel or the kickoff of his Seahawks game. But she saw it in reverse; the stress and discomfort of running gave her clarity. She didn’t resent Rob’s contentment with his teams, or scorekeeping at the girls’ soccer games. She remembered him as the man she’d first met at church group, up late, reviewing notes from his night classes at Citrus College, working to finish his certificate in sound engineering. When they first met, he’d burn her CDs of his favorite mixes and in fact proposed to her on a disk, fading out of a track of Luther Vandross’s “Always and Forever.” Now he listened to ESPN or Spotify playlists on his smart speaker.
Topping out at Chevy Chase, she was often greeted by the caress of the ridge-dancing breeze off the Pacific, cleansing and a gesture of approval for completing the long climb. She turned onto the bike lane, indifferent to the early-bird riders who regarded her as an intruder on their dedicated throughway, annoyed that they had to interrupt their cadence.
The rolling span of Chevy Chase let her lengthen her stride. In the gloamy half-light of near-dawn, the sun not yet breaching the crests of the San Gabriels, cars still passed with their low beams, folks headed for their jobs. She counted herself lucky, able to work from home, only occasionally called over the hill to Burbank for meetings. While still in college, paying her way unit by unit, she’d gotten a lead that she could pick up side money reading scripts for Hollywood production companies. The plan was to keep working toward her teaching credential but when she exhumed a gem from the heap of submissions that turned into a blockbuster, she was recruited by an A-list producer. Newly married, and with Charlotte on the way, the story department was fine letting her work from home. Over the years, she declined a regular studio position with better compensation to be home to supervise the kids’ homework, enforce music lessons, and strong-arm them to classes at ArtCenter. Rob dropped out of Citrus, a couple credits short of his certificate. As the head of household, he said, somebody needed to make real money. He tried his hand as a financial planner, management trainee, and assistant manager at Applebee’s, usually ending in some kind of tiff with his supervisors. On the other hand, he didn’t mind carpooling, shuttling to swim and gymnastics lessons, and even fashioning the kids’ Halloween costumes. They agreed, he was best suited as a house dad and they could get by on her salary.
She took up running about the time Ariel, her youngest, started preschool. The mother of one of Charlotte’s classmates invited her to join their running group on their morning “social” jogs. She’d been a swimmer in high school but, other than occasional dance classes, hadn’t been active since college.
The first time out, in cotton sweats and casual canvas lace-ups, she stopped every hundred yards and cried when she felt she was holding up the group. But the women were encouraging, steering her toward a more practical running shoe, and within the first month she was keeping up with the slower group. What she didn’t realize was that she was experiencing a progression of aerobic adaptations at the cellular level, the body adding capillaries and alveoli, making her more efficient and building endurance. These changes were going on in her body while a similar process was transforming her thinking.
One by one, the mothers opted out due to injuries, pregnancies, and family commitments. By her second year, she was also running on the off days, adding speed and distance, not contained by the more casual pace of the group. The best part was that the running saved her marriage, at least in the short term. The long, demanding runs provided perspective and calm and gave her the sustenance to put up with one more week, one more month, one more year.
A half-mile farther on Chevy Chase, she turned into Descanso Gardens. Exiting the courtyard, she tacked through the camellia forest, the winter blooms shed and the bushes severely pruned into compact balls to survive the summer heat. Circling the native oak grove, she turned up one of the chaparral washes to the unpaved trails that gave her the tactile feedback of the earth. She loved the granular, shifting, and often unpredictable surface that demanded heightened attention to watch for the teetering slab, ball-bearing gravel, slash of unruly brush, or pothole of standing water. Then there was always the chance of a sudden encounter with something wild. Turning a corner or reaching a crest, she might abruptly come upon a mule deer, both startled and halted for a moment. She’d been followed by coyotes, though they rarely frightened her. Sometimes she even spoke to them as companions. Once, a silky female, her golden eye slits focused ahead, ran beside her for a distance, maybe just for the bond of companionship, before dipping into a seam in the nettles and milk thistle. On east-facing trails, she’d sometimes come across rattlers warming in the early sun. They were usually slow to react and she would hurdle over them or sidestep around, having learned they were reluctant to strike anything that wasn’t prey. Other mornings, she felt an edgy tension, the prickle of eyes upon her. In the narrow band of wilderness in the Verdugo hills, a number of big cats managed to survive and even thrive. Rather than feeling threatened, she sensed she was being shadowed by a guardian, a mother cat protecting another endangered species.
She never felt in physical jeopardy from Rob. In some regards, she had the distinct feeling that he feared her and that they stood on opposite sides of a fault line that might at any moment fracture and create an unbridgeable chasm. Maybe Rob had instincts that she didn’t give him credit for. Ever since the Christmas Apple Watch, she knew she had to leave the marriage, but not before she knew the kids were on their feet. By now, she’d gotten Charlotte and Wyatt into their first-choice universities, leveraging a mix of scholarships, savings, and summer jobs. The bigger obstacle, though, was Rob’s indifference and his assertion that the kids would do fine on student loans at state schools. But their youngest, Ariel, was already working on differential equations and her high school math teacher was urging them to enroll her for advanced math at Caltech. But Rob balked. It would needlessly pressure Ariel and cheat her out of her “carefree” teen years, he said, though more accurately, he didn’t want to spend the money.
Rising out of the curated gardens of Descanso, she turned onto the sandy hiking trail, reaching out to a lavender bush to snatch a few blossoms. She mashed the calyx in her palm and rubbed the residue into her bare arms. The surface moisture on her skin mixed with the crushed blooms and released a floral balm. The trail rose in a succession of terraces and she wound through the poppies, fuchsia, blackberry, and penstemon that had been hijacked from the gardens by wind, beak, or wing. The fugitive blooms were a metaphor, right? Seeds that could escape the nourished enclosure of the gardens to thrive on their own.
Near the top of the grade, she passed beneath the arch where the manzanita shrubs had bent, the upper branches braided to form a portal. This was the only part of the run she resisted, the joined boughs too similar to a bridal arch and raising the memory of her own wedding in a parish hall, three months pregnant.
With trail running, there were fast moments, slow moments, stressful moments, and moments of joy. The only rule was to keep moving forward. Still not feeling fatigued or dehydrated, she reached the far end of the loop at an overlook above the merging of the 2 and 210 freeways. Feeling blessed that she was not part of that drive-time crush, she turned south to return to the felty contouring of the foothills.
She had no illusions about what would happen when Ariel went off to college and she finally made it clear to Rob that she was leaving. Though she’d raised her kids as independent thinkers and to question norms, they still operated on the base assumption that a father, mother, and home were their entitlement. They could only go forward with the safety net of that basic triad, a refuge from the sting of fledgling setbacks and first-crush disasters. Rob checked all the boxes of the expectations of a dad. He carpooled to tumbling practice, hung twinkle lights from the eaves at Christmas, heaped their breakfast plates with pancakes and waffles, patched tubes on their bikes. He was a great dad but, by his thinking, that was all it took to fulfill his obligations as a husband. Now the kids had no idea that one leg of their inviolable triad was about to be kicked out from under them and they would probably hate her for shattering that balance. Time would hopefully reshape their perspective, but she could expect months and maybe years of tumult and anger. Still, she’d had enough of angry men.
This past weekend, she’d discovered a piece of mail in the trash addressed to Rob at a post office box. He eventually admitted he’d taken out a loan against the property. Yesterday, when he chaperoned Ariel and friends on a class trip to Catalina, she found the key. With access to the box, she calculated he’d taken out multiple loans that were now due. Even if she accepted the open offer of the studio job, there was no way she could pay food, utilities, car, and school expenses while also covering the overdue debt. It was only a matter of time until they’d take possession of the house. And knowing Rob, if they separated, he’d feel entitled to alimony.
She turned uphill at the hub of several trails and into a low forest of toyon brush. Beyond, she hoped to catch the rare second blossom of desert mallow, given another life by unseasonal late May rains. The trail narrowed to a single track, twisting in a series of bends and double-backs created by erosion channels carved by winter storms. The first alarm was a sudden displacement of air, then a metallic shriek and a pneumatic humph. A mountain bike and its hulking rider appeared from the curtain of a blind, uphill twist, coming down on her.
“Move outta the—!” The rider only got out the partial alarm before he drove her off the trail. All she remembered was a florid red-and-yellow jersey on the plunging bike. He skidded to a stop a dozen yards farther on.
“Don’t you know this is a bike trail?” The armored rider spun the question into an accusation. “Coulda gotten us both really fucked up.”
She was down, stunned but alert, no sign of open wounds. The rider steadied himself on one foot, the other on the raised pedal, impatient to move on. Any hint of concern or responsibility stayed concealed behind the full helmet and wraparound glasses.
She threw a hand at him; it would’ve been a rock if she’d had one within reach. “Just go. Get out. Don’t bother yourself.”
With a tug on the handlebars and a stomp on the crank, he vanished around the next twist of the toyon brush.
She rubbed the sand from one elbow, leveled her butt and planted both palms on the dirt to rise. Then as she shifted her weight forward, a bolt of pain fired from her heel to her hip. Fuck. She was a fool to have sent off the rider solely out of misplaced pride. Or maybe she didn’t want another man to see her cry. It was one more in a series of questionable choices, like leaving without her phone, though that had been something of a conscious decision, rejecting any tether to home.
Leaning head-on into the pain, she pulled one end of the lace to loosen the shoe, then collapsed back on the dirt shoulder, praying the chain lightning of enflamed neurons would ease soon. In time, the casual morning hikers would come out. Somebody would help her down to the garden plaza and a phone. Hopefully, she’d reach Ariel before she left for school and tell her to find the car keys to come get her. For now, she couldn’t face Rob’s put-on furrow of concern and condolence. He’d be pleased as hell, knowing that at least for a while she’d have to surrender some of her independence to him. Just as it had been in the beginning.
With her ankle lopped out awkwardly off its normal axis, she read the date inked on the insole: two weeks past their end-of-life date.
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