brisk breeze, a wind that chilled through his suit when he looked at the tinted back windows.
He could almost make out a shape inside, hovering ghost-like within: a hint of red hair, eyes that floated, shifting color in the shadowy interior, something hanging from the inside ceiling, vine-like. Frowning, Mason walked around the limo, seeing his own reflection: haggard and stretched, and had the sudden feeling like he was looking into the depths of a fairy-tale onyx mirror, one stumbled upon in the depths of a dark wood. Who’s not the fairest one of all?
He pulled his eyes away, shaking his head and blinking until a sense of nausea passed. End of the line, he thought suddenly for some reason, predicting that this event—claiming this reward, would be it, the seminal event of his life. Nowhere to go from here but down. Retirement and years of sitting on the couch, pushing Lauren around in her chair; spending his free moments staring at the 24-hour weather channel, trying to second-guess his successors. Living just for the accomplishments of his children.
Or at least, the one he still had hopes for, and praying the other didn’t embarrass him further.
Mason fought off the deepening chill that seemed to radiate in waves from the limousine. Forcing heat back into his legs, he turned to climb the stairs and enter the hotel, where the blast of air conditioning felt like a welcoming breath of some fairy goddess.
O O O
Past the lobby, into the conference room, with its sparse population of fellow newscasters, weather-prognosticators, and a smattering of journalists, Mason offered weak smiles and even weaker handshakes as he made his way to the front, to the shining woman in a shinier wheelchair. Tilted at an angle that gave him the impression he was walking down the proverbial aisle, he experienced a momentary flashback to their wedding, only with the roles reversed and she was up there this time, waiting impatiently, fighting the tears of joy at seeing him coming toward her.
He moved even quicker than she did that day, and in moments was at her side, bending down, planting a big kiss across her dry lips. Lauren’s warm hands gripped his head, pinning him close with a mischievous lip-lock. “Way to go, hero,” she said at last. She grinned, then ruffled and smoothed back his thinning grey hair. She had a camera in her lap, and her face was brimming with excitement.
Mason assumed Shelby had something to do with that. He stood up, and she came from the blind spot behind Lauren’s chair, a blur in an almost too snug green dress, and Mason had a flashback to one of her tap-dancing classes when she was only six when she had worn a similar colored dress and bounded into his arms after the performance.
Such innocence, all lost the instant the family car did a three-sixty and tumbled off the road.
“Daddy!” Her speech was still a bit awkward, but every time she said that magical word, it was the most wonderful sound he could imagine; its beauty was expressed by its mere presence instead of what could have been, instead of the silence of its absence.
His fingers and hand motions a blur after years of practice, he signed back to her: Hon, you didn’t have to come all the way back across the Pond for this! It’s too much.
“I sure did,” she said, then continued with her fingers moving almost too fast: especially when your producer’s paying for it. First class.
Shelby was always one for comfort, for luxury. Such the opposite of her brother. Gabriel would sooner ride with the caged animals in cargo than up with what he would call “white-collar criminals and earth-polluting, resource-raping pigs.”
A promising (and expensive) education pissed away, as far as Mason was concerned. Two semesters at Berkeley, and all Mason got for his return was a freethinking son who hated everything and everyone, his father included, for their purported crimes against nature. They hadn’t spoken since Gabriel’s junior year, after the call from the police that Mason had been dreading: Gabe had been arrested in a logging district in Washington State, along with fifteen of his classmates. After the police had to cut him loose from the trunk of a redwood, he then attacked the officers with those same chains.
Another twenty thousand in legal fees, just to get his ungrateful son off with no jail time, and the first week out Gabriel pulls an even bigger stunt: firebombing a Hummer dealership