The Running Girl

 It wasn’t unusual for the phone call to come in the middle of the night; the kinds of people who dialed my father’s number weren’t the type to calculate the time difference with regard to whatever side of the world they were in.

To be fair, my father didn’t care much about it, either. I was awake seconds before he opened the door, turned the lights on, and pulled the covers off my bed.

“Up and running, son. We’ve got a new job.”

I shielded my eyes with a hand as I rolled over to look at my alarm clock. It was three-forty-seven am. I picked it up and thrust it in the direction of my father as far as the cord allowed.

“Do they know how to tell time?” I demanded, but he was out of the room before I could finish my overused joke. I continued holding the alarm clock in the direction of the empty doorway for a long moment before cracking it back down on my nightstand with more force than necessary, knocking several library books to the floor.

“What is my life?” I muttered under my breath as I pulled a shirt on and dragged my feet to my father’s office. He was already sitting on a stool next to the office chair, placing the graphing calculator next to the mousepad by the time I appeared. I crossed the room to take my seat in front of the desktop, where Google Maps was already opened.

“Can this be considered a chore?” I yawned as I turned the calculator on and positioned my hands on top of the keyboard, “Like, a paid chore?”

“30 Redondo Street, San Francisco,” my father ignored the provocation, “California, 94016.”

I tapped the address into Google Maps with tired fingers, lazily tapping at the backspace key when I made a typo. My dad’s suggested search topics were discounted car parts, camouflage clothing, and cheap laundry detergent. I imagined the look on his face if he could see my suggested search topics: The Lord of the Rings PDF, Game of Thronesonline free, Blade Runner 2 release date…

“Escape vehicle?” I asked, cringing inwardly.

“Honda CBR motorcycle.”

I scrolled through search results with more data about the motorcycle: year, top speed, mileage, fuel efficiency…

“How full was the tank?”

“He didn’t know.”

I made an irritated sound through my nose, dragging the radius of the circle I’d calculated around 30 Redondo Street on Google Maps wider, “So he can’t tell time and he’s stupid.” I paused to rub my eyes before asking, “Other locations visited?”

I searched the locations my dad listed on Google Maps again. After calculating the distances from the original address, I input the numbers into the calculator and then readjusted the radius of the circle again.

“Friends? Motivation? Habits?” I repeated the same process with the data he read off his phone, slowly narrowing down the possible current locations given all the variables I was asking for. You’d think my father, college graduate, veteran, and militarily strategist, could have plugged a bunch of numbers into a machine himself, but I guess there was nothing like making your eighteen year old son calculate the probability of a criminal’s whereabouts in the middle of the night.

“Name?”

“Marissa Hail.”

I snorted as I clicked print in the top left corner of the screen, “Hah. Fake.”

My dad leaned closer, serious, “How do you know? Is it a common name? Do her initials mean something?”

“I don’t know,” I laughed, retreating the printed map with seven pinpointed locations around the circumference of the circle, “Marissa Hail? Sounds like a name on a fake ID.” I rolled my chair towards the desktop again, x-ing out of the open tabs, “What did this chick do, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

For a long minute, I didn’t recognize the significance of his words. Then I froze, finger hovering above the desktop’s power button, “Wait, what?” When I received no response, I turned to face him, “What do you mean, you don’t know what she did?”

My father stood by the doorway, staring intently at the map. Intently not staring at me.

“I mean, I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.”

“Charlie didn’t tell you what crime the criminal he’s asking you to track down committed?” I demanded. Charlie worked for the San Francisco Police Department. He and my dad were military friends. When the SFPD was particularly pressed on a case, Charlie would call my dad, and then reward him for a job well done. A criminal well caught. All off the record, of course. My future college tuition was being financed by midnight phone calls.

“It wasn’t Charlie,” he finally replied.

“Oh.”

Around one time a year, the voice at the other end of the line was just a person who wanted something done; a person who knew my father could get it done. But nevertheless there was usually a decent amount of moral screening: who we were hunting, why, what would be done to them after we handed them over…

“I’m going to head out now,” he said gruffly.

“Now?” I demanded, “It’s the middle of the night.”

“One of these places is Saratoga– that’s just ten minutes away. She’s probably not there anyways, so I’ll just take it off the list and save us some time for tomorrow.”

My heart sank at the word us but he’d already begun to walk out.

“Dad,” I called him back. He paused. “How much?” I asked softly. He replied something incoherent. “What?”

He turned around, raising his voice, “I said one million, son.”

One million. I tried to calculate how many times one million could send me to college. How many times it could send both me and my younger sister to college, and pay off the rest of our house’s mortgage.

“Oh.”

My father left the room. I went to bed.

The next day I was standing by the window facing our driveway when he finally drove in from Gilroy, which he’d driven to after San Jose, which he’d driven to after Campbell, which he’d driven to after Los Gatos, the city he’d driven to after Saratoga. I held out a mug of coffee for him when he walked through the front door, even though it was five-eighteen p.m. He eyed the bags I’d already packed and the camo pants and shirt I wore before trading the coffee for the print out of the map. He’d crossed off the five locations with a green sharpie.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Half Moon Bay.”

The drive was an hour and the travel mugs were emptied within the first twenty minutes.

“Double check our supplies,” my dad said as he parked the pickup in front of the small motel whose coordinates had been spit out by my algorithm last night, “I’ll go inside and talk to the manager.”

“Okay,” I replied, mournfully eying the book I’d hidden beneath my feet. I opened the passenger door and was greeted by a chilled humid embrace. I pulled up the collar of my jacket as I circled to the back of the car, climbing into the trunk of the pick-up. The sky was overcast grey and the earth was shadowed noir beneath the giant redwood trees as I dug through the two duffel bags I’d packed, their zippers slippery with frost.

Rope, nets, binoculars… I always told myself that if we were ever searched, most of our supplies could be mistaken for fishing gear. Except for the firearms, but today they were loaded with low duty sedatives, so maybe we could have gotten away with those, too.

I picked up a tranquilizer gun, the handle feeling as awkward and heavy as it had my first time two years ago. What is my life?

I released a shallow breath, and as I continued to rummage through the bag, checking the supplies off the list in my head, my fingers happened upon a folded piece of paper. Wondering if maybe my father had printed a second copy of the map, I pulled it out and unfolded it to find the woman that was likely not called Marissa Hail staring at me from a mugshot.

My first instinct was to stuff it back into the bag. I hated looking at pictures of the people we hunted. It was harder to trap green eyes that could stare through a photograph than chase the distant form of a fleeing man. But I couldn’t help my curiosity. With unsteady fingers I lifted the paper closer to the pale light of the sky. The girl in the picture had long blond hair, but the dark roots that mingled with the pale and the chestnut eyebrows screamed that the color was as fake as her name. I couldn’t tell what color her eyes were; the flash of the camera had reflected oddly off her pupils, turning them into two bright white disks. Her face was heart-shaped, almost childishly round, and I wondered if the flash had also bleached the spray of freckles I imagined starring her cheekbones.

A voice in my head whispered the crown of one million dollars upon her lovely head, and suddenly I couldn’t bear to look at the picture anymore. As I folded it back into the bag, I meditated on whether the hunted could ever be as tired as the hunter.

I almost fell backwards out of the trunk when my dad appeared behind me: “She was here,” he said, pulling the nearest bag to him.

“She– she was?” I stuttered, the words pulling me back down to earth. “How is that possible? We’ve only visited six places, and I haven’t even readjusted the function to consider the time since last night, the probability that–”

“Son.” My father pressed a tranquilizer gun into my hand, “They recognized her picture. Her room is upstairs.”

We stood like that for a long moment–the gun pressed against my open palms, my fingers yet uncurled around the handle. I stared at the weapon, inhaled, exhaled, then accepted it into my grasp.

My father had just slapped my arm in what he must have considered an encouraging manner when we heard the back door slam and I watched a white-clad figure streak into the forest over his shoulder.

“Dad–” I started, my breath hitched, but he’d already leapt into the car and roared the pickup to life.

“Hold on!” he yelled at me through the open window. I dropped to my knees and barely grasped the side of the trunk before he screeched out of the parking lot, tearing up the carefully manicured lawn as we crashed over the parking blocks and tore across the field stretching before the first line of trees of the redwood forest.

It was unfair, really, the fact that we had four wheels and a beastly engine beneath our asses, while all she had was the skin of her bare feet to play this game of chase. We closed in on her fast, but the car couldn’t follow her into the arms of the trees. My father swerved to the left and I caught the binoculars before they could fly out of the trunk. Throwing the neck strap over my head, I pressed them to my eye sockets and found her within seconds: it was hard to hide white and blond in a forest of emerald and bronze.

For a moment, it almost seemed like we were racing each other, one on either side of the tree line. I tracked her running figure, watched as she pushed past a bush that dug its thorns into the material of her white dress, dragging the torn fabric down to her bruised ankles.  I imagined how easy it would have been to wrap a finger around the unruly string and pluck it off the stitched border of her garment. She glanced over her shoulder at us, and for a moment I fooled myself into thinking we’d made eye contact.

But then she was gone, swerving to her right to break away from this race to nowhere. My father turned right to follow her, driving as far as the car’s frame could fit between the trees, then slammed on the brakes so we could follow on foot. I’d leapt out of the trunk, the tranquilizer gun swinging from the strap around my shoulder, before the car had even come to a full stop, dug up earth from the skidding tires staining the back of my legs. I hit the ground running, tearing through the greenery after the white figure already fleeing leagues ahead of us. I heard the car door slam and knew my father would be on our heels in seconds. For a moment I forgot who was the hunter and who was being hunted.

She was fast, and she didn’t leave a trail. Branches reached out to tear at my clothes, and I imagined trees crashing down yesterday to stall my chase today. The immense redwoods were auburn pillars lining a hall of packed earth. The thick shrubs I trampled were viridescent offerings at the foot of wooden gods.

I raced after the trails of her dress without concept of time or space or reason, without noticing that the light patching the ground had turned golden and that the air was now salty in my lungs and on my skin. I forgot the reason for this chase, but I didn’t stop.

Only when she breached the end of the forest did she slow, did I slow, though I remained in the shadow of the trees. I forgot to wonder why she stopped, why I stopped, too.

I watched, chest heaving, her still figure upon a stretch of tall grass bathed in the brilliant glow of a sun after a storm. I grabbed my father’s arm before he could blow past me and into my dream.

He scrambled to a stop, a hand braced against the trunk of a redwood, and for a long moment we both stared as she stood.

I had to squint, now, to focus on her figure silhouetted by the orange sky. The stark outline of her thin shoulders rose up and down like beating wings, and I imagined the wheezing of her defeated breath as she regarded the cliff drop just thirty yards away from where her toes currently dug into the long grass. Still clinging to my father’s arm, I suddenly wondered what we’d do if she turned around and began to chase us. What would she do with a million dollars? What would I do for a million dollars? What could she have possibly done to deserve the crown?

The sun began to sink, lengthening the shadow beneath her heels. Soon the sun would pass beyond the outline of the cliff, plunging itself into the ocean and this side of the world into darkness. The grasses turned emerald and the stretch of grass before us was bathed in the kind of light that rounded corners and softened sharp edges. My father and I still stood in the darkness.

Finally, she moved. Just her head, slowly, to turn and look behind her, the outline of her brow and nose and lips lined in gold as she rotated towards us.

I was so concentrated on fighting the light to discern the shadows on her face that I didn’t notice the slight shift of weight from her heels to her toes. I didn’t notice the creases that formed in the back of her right knee as she lifted her foot to take a step forward, or how her left hand arched by her side to match her stride as she turned away one last time. Only when I saw the cuts on the bottom of her left foot rising towards a second step, her ankle still tangled in the loose thread from her dress, did I realize her intentions.

“Dad.” It felt like I hadn’t spoken in years. “Dad, she’s going to–”

I was cut off by the earsplitting gunshot of his tranquilizer gun. He braced his back against the tree, “Go,” he yelled, aiming again, “That’s a million dollars about to take a fucking death plunge! Go!”

My first running stride hit the ground at the same moment that his second gunshot cracked through the air, as if the breach of my movement had cracked the intentions of fate. This time I followed her into heavenly territory, but I already knew that all I could do was chase her shadows.

The sun sank lower with every shot that whizzed past my ear and missed the running figure. The distant horizon rose from behind the outline of the cliff, rising to embrace the plummeting star. Another shot rang out and I couldn’t tell if my dad was aiming at the running girl or the sun.

I pushed forward, blind from the glare, deaf from the gunshots, numb from the wind, desperate to run somewhere, anywhere, as fast as she was now.

She was so close. Five yards. Four yards.

Three.

Two.

Her final step, an eternity.

Her last stride, the wingspread of an eagle. The crest of a wave.

I could almost feel the vibrations of the earth in my veins from the last impact of her heel… the ball of her foot… the tips of her toes… and she launched herself over the edge of the cliff.

My father knocked me out from behind, throwing us to the ground. My face slammed into the earth, but I pushed myself up to see the running girl finally meet the sun.

I blinked. She sailed through the air, not yet taken by gravity. The back of her dress began to rip. Something began to bloom through the tangles of the hair whipping between her shoulder blades. She threw her arms back and tilted her face towards the heavens as her back arched and two brilliant white forms tore through the loose material of her dress. I was suspended with her in that moment, watching as her magnificent wings unfolded to paint over the horizon.

She beat them once: a motion so broad and powerful that I thought I could feel the wind it stirred loosen the dirt now mixed in my eyelashes. The bruised orange light silhouetted every feather fanning from her wings in brilliant gold.

She beat them twice; I watched her fly into the arms of the dying sun, and disappear.

I blinked. My father, already on his feet, grabbed the tranquilizer gun that had been stuck between us and heaved me up by the strap still hugging my chest. I stood, passing a hand over my face to scrub at the dirt still clinging to my cheeks in a disoriented manner. Then, with my father’s hand wrapped tightly around my arm, we approached the cliff. A couple of feet away, we dropped to our knees and crawled to the edge. I wrapped my fingers around the very inch of earth her toes touched last and dragged myself the remaining distance to curl my chin around it and look down the length of the rock wall.

The body lay shattered on the rocks far below, her white dress mingling with the foam of the ocean.