Born to Run (3 page)

Gripping the back of a chair, she tried to stop herself swaying, and struggled to visualise her father’s photo. His face… his calming eyes… his…

“You okay?” the broker asked, concerned and reaching for a glass of water to give her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, blinking open her eyes. “It’s a… a sudden migraine,” she lied, and rushed for the ladies room to wait out her ghosts.

ISABEL was hunched over in the toilet stall pressing a wet napkin against her eyes. Her other hand was flicking nervously at the old scar that crossed her throat.

At her feet was an empty
Clip’n’Drip
pack. Thank God for her husband Ed’s miracle drug delivery device, she thought yet again. The brilliant, under-skin implant always
kicked in the relaxant much faster than any pill or liquid could, and it was less risky than a syringe, which would really get people talking if anyone saw it. Sure,
Clip’n’Drip
hadn’t yet got government approval, so this was her and Ed’s little secret. Or one of them.

So far, no one had seriously objected that she suffered occasional migraines. The research helped. It wasn’t just the 25 percent of women who got them at least once, yet still lived a
normal life. It was more Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Thomas Jefferson, both Robert E. Lee
and
Ulysses S. Grant, and John F. Kennedy… all extraordinary leaders, despite their migraines.
If they could, so could she.

Even if hers weren’t really migraines at all.

Fortunately, glass didn’t shatter around her too often in public places, though she always carried several
Clip’n’Drips
in her purse just in case. But tonight, with her
being so dog-tired her normally strong resistance was low, and the sound of the smash had shot deep, like a shard of memory shrapnel.

Years ago she had seen a shrink, but the treatment didn’t do much for her and she backed off when she started thinking about going into politics, worried that her depressive tendencies
could kill her chances stone cold if they leaked out. Instead, she taught herself some quick-acting meditation tricks which usually worked but, when they didn’t like tonight, a private jab
from a
Clip’n’Drip
did the job.

The episodes were monotonously the same… if horror could ever be monotonous…
She is back in the grim trailer her mother rented
…

Isabel had long suspected her mother paid their rent by offering “favours”, though it took two decades to admit that tasteless morsel of her family history to herself. And
she’d never revealed it to anyone else; not even to her husband.

Ed Loane knew about the rape, though only the fact, not the details. Before they married, she had confided that it was why she could never have kids. He also knew about her dad’s photo and
how much comfort she got from it, since it sat on her bedside table no matter where she was. But he knew little about her mother; only that she’d been poor, a widow and Bolivian.

Isabel had never quite grasped why her mother soaked her once sweet soul with that sleazy swamp of “boyfriends” and bottles. Poverty was an easy yet unsatisfactory answer since most
of Isabel’s trailer-park friends’ mothers, even the single ones, lived quite differently. None of them had Isabel’s daily chore of tidying up and stacking their mother’s
empties outside, flanking their trailer like a glass wailing wall, a kaleidoscope stabbing green, bronze and yellow-white needles into her sad green eyes. It drove Isabel’s determination that
never, ever would she be her mother’s daughter. For starters, she didn’t touch alcohol.

I
SABEL’S HEAD FINALLY hit her hotel pillow. It was close to midnight in Chicago, especially late since she always got up at 5 AM local time,
no matter what. Waking early was ingrained, a habit from years of working the breakfast and every other shift. But it wasn’t just that; the memories that washed over her every morning were a
refreshing ritual she liked to take time over. Whether they were to remind her of who she really was, or because she couldn’t forget, she could never fathom.

BY the time she had arrived at Half Moon Bay as a broken fifteen-year-old, the roadhouse diner’s once bold, optimistic paisley swirls had been washed out by the torpor of
year after harsh year of the Californian sun and the flagging energy of the couple who “ran” the place, Annette and George Hicks.

Originally called Big Bad Burgers, later rechristened by her as BBB, the restaurant was a tottering pillar of the second law of thermodynamics, the rule of inevitable decay that her physics
teacher had once explained was why iron rusts and old eggs stink. But to Isabel, then so fragile, this tawdry diner was paradise.

The air had been languid that day, she recalled, so thick she could still lick it. The morning hung as lazily as the brown pelicans drifting on the bay’s flat waters. A straggle of flies
lurked around the plastic doorway ribbons, once a rainbow but now so drab and limp they couldn’t even pretend to defend the entrance.

Isabel had prodded the door open with her walking cane. The sticky odour the flies had been soaking up glugged over her, sour though not quite rancid, like fat that had fried too many tomatoes.
Yet strangely, even that had welcomed her.

The battered girl didn’t know it then, nor did the Hickses, but their shabby 24-seat Cabrillo Highway ex-speakeasy would be the seed of the successful nationwide chain that the three of
them, though mostly Isabel, would build up and sell almost thirty years later, reaping a fortune of over a quarter of a billion dollars.

A few days earlier, the old spinster sharing her hospital room had winkled out of Isabel her unspeakable story and, with the girl only just walking again, the long-retired librarian slapped a
Greyhound bus ticket and fifty dollars into her shaky hand, urging her to flee as far away as she could, even with her limp and her cane.

Isabel had bussed west from New Mexico, not caring where she was headed so long as the Cactus Flower Trailer Park and her mami’s sleazy boyfriends, especially that one with the wolf
tattoo… and the broken bottle… shrank deep into distant memory.

THE white sheet pulled away from Isabel’s olive skin as she leant over to the bedside table and wondered what the public or the media would say if they knew.
“
Candidate Wacko
–
keeps shrine to dead dad on nightstand
,” popped into her head before she could dismiss it.

Her husband Ed accepted it. War veterans had their own sacraments to the past and respected others for theirs, no matter how weird. George Hicks, effectively her adoptive father, he knew. His
wife Annette also, but she was long gone.

Slotted behind scratched glass inside its battered tin frame, the glossy print was possibly the most travelled photo in the country. The zip pocket in her leather satchel protected it, keeping
it in much the same condition as when she’d swiped it out of her mother’s bedside table drawer. She could easily have replaced the frame or the glass as Ed had suggested many times, but
that would have been a sacrilege. This was her greatest treasure, despite all her wealth. It was her only physical memento of the man who had kissed her only in her dreams: her long-dead
father.

Without needing to look, though she did, she knew every striking contour of her father’s face and cherished the differences from her own as much as the similarities. Was he tall, as she
was? From this head-shot there was no way to know, but her mother had filled in the blanks, holding her hand way above her own short head, saying he towered above her “
like a Bolivian
jacaranda.
” Perhaps that was where Isabel had got her own five-foot-ten. His charisma was “
as vivid as clusters of lilac blossoms
” of the same native tree. Maybe,
Isabel wondered, she’d inherited her people skills from him; her mother’s were certainly nothing to emulate. She briefly shuddered just thinking about her. Though the photo was
black-and-white, it lent her father’s skin a moody tone, which long ago she decided meant it was olive, surely, and velvety. Just like hers. And when she touched her own cheek, as she did
now, she sometimes imagined it was his.

Hernandes Diaz. She loved the ring and the metre of his name, how the syllables and the Ds tapped out on her tongue. She could even smell the Brylcreem on the comb he would have brushed his
shiny black hair back off his forehead with, hair blacker and thicker than her own very practical bob.

His bedroom eyes, black and soulful, locked right onto hers as though she were the only person in his gaze. Since her mother’s eyes were brown, Isabel had always been curious about why her
own were green.

Hernandes had died just before she was born so he never laid those eyes on her.

Of course, he never saw her scar, either. Thankfully. Her finger traced itself along the familiar track across her neck. She couldn’t help it. Often, just visualising this photograph
helped Isabel fend off her dark spells… and if it didn’t, she always had what was in her purse.

E
D LOANE’S EYES were bleak after three sleepless nights. It was lucky Isabel was away campaigning and fund-raising. On a good night, Ed could
look out from his floor-to-ceiling office window and see his own reflection lit up in the brassy Trump Tower opposite him on Fifth Avenue, New York. But not now, with the midnight downpour
outside.

He turned and stepped over the scatter of files he had earlier hurled across the rug, patterned with a subtle but patriotic motif of white five-pointed stars.

At ease, the former general commanded himself. His sixty-plus years had seen it way tougher than this. The last ten were here at the helm of a global Fortune 500 corporation, but the decades
before were in active service… from ’Nam, Grenada, Nicaragua, to the Gulf. Heck, his epaulettes hadn’t got their four stars from Special Operations Command just for spreading
hummus on Saddam Hussein’s samoon bread.

Yet Ed’s most important work was today, helping to airlift his wife into the White House. Sometimes he campaigned with her and other times, like this week, his business kept him off the
stage.

She’d be president, and he’d be right there behind her. Some in the media, the liberals among them especially, were scaremongering how Ed would be the ventriloquist behind his dummy.
“Elect her, but get him,” they agitated, though because Isabel had such a strong persona, the polls said the public wasn’t buying it.

He suppressed a smile.

Opening his beechwood closet, Ed shuddered at his weary image in the mirror. Thankfully, he sighed, his appearance on
Meet the Press
was last week, otherwise what would Fabio or
Jason—whatever that fag TV make-up artist’s name was—say now? Before the show, the little squirt had tut-tutted how Ed’s dark gun-slits for eyes made him look cheerless,
offering a dab of lightener to lift them. But Ed’s aloof self-confidence was as much a part of him as his Medal of Honour, and no pillow-biter was going to fiddle with that. No sir, no way.
Ed had said nothing, just clenched his square, jutting jaw. It was a subtle, practised move that made even the toughest adversary worry his face might get smashed in. Fabio got the message,
dropping his cotton puff back onto his tray and backing out of the room, claiming he suddenly had an urgent make-up call elsewhere.

Ed’s fingers prodded the bags slung under his eyes… As bad as his worst passport photo from his years in military intelligence. Not the American passport, nor the British. More the
tattered old crimson Soviet one… Yuri Something-opov. What was that Ruski name? Instinctively, he scratched his scalp where the fur astrakhan had warmed it that long ago winter. To Ed, his
long-standing buzz cut was a salute to his military career. He kept it so short that people could only guess his hair was grey, though his moustache gave a better hint of that. It was pencilled
over a mouth pursed so tight they joked, if they dared, that Ed didn’t eat his food, he sucked it. People trod warily round him. You didn’t even need to talk to him to know: his jaw or,
if he was simulating warmth, the crush of his hand, said it all.

He grabbed a tissue to wipe the annoying drip from his nose as he twisted his head, squinting out of the corner of his eye to remind himself where his left ear had been sewn back on, after
Operation Urgent Fury in ’83. His men had joked he’d had a lobe-otomy. In just twenty horrific seconds, three birds had gone down. Debris and rotor blades flew through the air, one
fragment slicing off Ed’s left ear and another his left pinkie as he raised his hand to stem the blood flow. He’d been lucky. If his hand…

It was mayhem. Others were wounded far worse. Three killed. For these men, the tropical island of Grenada was no paradise.

Ed tugged at his ear, marvelling yet again at the cosmetic surgeon’s work. Hardly a blemish.

On three separate occasions, he had delicately tried to press Isabel into getting the same doctor’s magic to fix the scar that carved across her throat, but she always put up a brick
wall.

“It’s my memory,” she’d say simply, then change the subject.