Race Across the Sky Read Free Page A

good.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIt’s a secret. I’m announcing it Sunday night. You’re gonna love it. Let’s get you iced.”
    He opened the door. Inside, a warm smell of root stew filled the open room. They climbed up creaking oak stairs to the second floor. In the bathroom was an old ceramic tub, which Mack filled with ice. Caleb felt a need to go to his room, sweep his hand under his futon on the floor, and determine if his memory of mailing the letter was a hallucination.
    But Mack took his arm and led him into his bath. Ice water rose to his waist. Time revved forward violently, then stopped like a navy jet landing on a carrier, and a seizure rose through him all the way to his lungs. Caleb lost his breath and sank into the tub. Mack leaned over and held him under his arms. And then Caleb blinked, and shuddered gently, and smiled.
    He had placed eighth at Leadville. At forty-three years old, after eleven years of work, he was ready to win a major ultramarathon. His next one would be the Hardrock 100, up and down thirteen peaks of the San Juan Mountains. His next months would be devoted to training for its dangers. He could have no distractions, nothing could threaten his focus.
    Somewhere outside, he heard June’s voice.

2
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    W hen Caleb’s letter came, Shane was out selling drugs.
    It was a stunning San Francisco afternoon. He could see the city behind the gleaming bay from his parking spot in Larkspur. Blue sparks fluttered between the shoreline trees like fairies, beckoning him someplace, he wasn’t sure where, perhaps to drown.
    Shane opened his trunk and peered down at the white cardboard boxes full of pills. Purple ones, blue ones, annular and elliptic. He balanced a stack on one knee, shut the trunk, and walked toward a flat, single-story building baking in the sun.
    He carried samples of two new drugs: Epherex, for anxiety, was in high demand. Solistan, for otolyrangological infection, however, was a dismal failure. The drug was under-performing in its clinical trials, with scripts running 20 percent below estimates. His mandate from Saint Louis was to reverse this trend, this quarter.
    There were four doctors in residence at Larkspur Internists. Three men and one woman; two Asian, two Caucasian. Pulling open the door, Shane went over his calculations. Male Caucasians were the most amenable, he had found, and female Asians were the toughest sell. It was telling that he had married one.
    Inside, the air was accented with redwoods.
    â€œHow’s the puppy, Anne?”
    The receptionist’s face lit up, pleased he had remembered. “Ate a box of Claritin last night. Have a seat, sweetheart, I’ll get you in.”
    As Shane waited beside three patients to see the doctor, he studied the Solistan logo, which had been created at great expense. Some of Shane’s high school friends had possessed a talent for band names; now he knew what they had done with their lives.
    These names and logos were worth the cost, because they worked. Patients walked into practices asking for them. In fact, sometimes Orco would develop a drug just to fit a particularly sticky name. “Confilox” had tested so well with adolescents that the company had reformulated a failing antidepressant by one molecule and created a thirty-million-dollar-a-year brand. Drugs, names, sales: for years Shane had felt that this cycle was a thing of beauty.
    Twenty minutes later, Shane followed a nurse down the hall. The air felt stuffy; germs, it seemed, might thrive. He passed examination rooms with color-coded charts on the doors. What was blue, versus red? Was his own chart colored in any specific code? Was Janelle’s?
    Shane possessed a round face; his eyes, the color of amber ale, were alive and welcoming. And yet their warmth was betrayed by the sly curve of his mouth,