Opening pages from Chapter One
June 21, 1990
The freeway had always symbolized people who knew where they were going as if the mere act of hurtling down the freeway at 70 miles per hour created destiny. Screeching brakes echoed off the cement wall. Sapphire clenched the cold concrete railing on the overpass and watched a yellow sedan fishtail on the heels of a Volkswagen van. Such a delicate dance, driving on the freeway, like a watercolor, one wrong stroke and the balance was ruined. A car, a painting, a parent. Each could be lost in an instant.
Her hair blew into her mouth and she pulled it back with one hand as she stared at the traffic below. A semi truck slowed for the turn at the foot of Portero Hill and the staccato rumble of the engine brakes vibrated through the empty space he had left in her chest. The sun was shining here, but she could see the bank of fog on Bernal Heights waiting to drop down into the Inner Mission and muffle the constant roar of the freeway or her plans. Her future was stuck in the smoldering remnants of his life like the Avenues were stuck in fog. A miasma, she had come to realize, that would never be lifted until she confronted him and found out what was so terribly wrong with her that he would abandon his only child.
A pack of motorcycles rumbled past and the stench of burning oil rose through the warm afternoon. Mesmerized by the traffic and the many ways her future could unfold, she almost chickened out – it seemed easier to paint her dreams than to bring them to life, but that only buried the problem under oil and minerals.
Last year, she had painted this freeway at night: blurred lights curving towards the illuminated San Francisco skyscrapers. The painting hung in the Boho Café on Sixteenth Street for months before a tourist from Nebraska bought it for an even hundred. One of five paintings sold since she graduated from college three years ago and embarked on the lackluster existence of a struggling artist: forever trying to find time and space to paint while working two-bit jobs like the human billboard gig from which she had been canned three days ago.
Afraid that if she stayed here much longer, she would chicken out, she ran two blocks up the hill, then turned right and slowed her pace until she landed at the foot of the ten moss-stained and chipped granite steps leading to her mother’s front yard. Rolling back her shoulders, she climbed the stairs, unlocked the front door and walked in hoping that Mom was by herself or maybe not there at all. “Mom?”
The house was quiet. She peeked into the kitchen and then wandered out into the backyard. Her mother’s garden jumbled full of roses and eggplant and white sage growing along the path towards the towering oak tree that still held the frayed ropes from the ladder to her tree house overlooking the bay. That oak had been her confidant when she had been on restriction or needed to tell someone about her first kiss.
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Copyright 1999 - 2009 Karin E Zirk
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