Author’s Note

While inspired by true events, this book is a work of fiction. Certain timelines and details have been modified and dialogue consistent with the character or nature of the person speaking has been supplemented. The names of some individuals have been changed to respect their privacy.

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

Viktor Frankl

One

Amarillo, Texas

1999

Tess

            I awoke fast, sucked from black into light: blinding and gauzy. Ten years old, and well acquainted with the smell of my own blood. One cheek resting on a white sheet. The tapping of metal jarring me forward. Then a hailstorm of chatter: “Blood pressure. Stat. Clamp, now! Shit – she’s awake!” The black swallowed me again. I fell into a memory. Swept back in time five years to a diner on Interstate 40.

***

            After my mother had ordered me a grilled cheese, I noticed our waitress’ bewildered gaze. Her name badge read “Lyndy” and although she appeared to be a woman who’d seen it all, she was flummoxed at the sight of me. I was small for my age. Very small.

            “Ma’am, is that grilled cheese for her?” Lyndy barked, aiming her pencil in my direction. “How’s she gonna eat that? That baby needs a bottle.”

            I was nestled beside my mother on a Naugahyde bench in a booth we shared with my father and brother. I slid to the edge of my seat to let my crimson cowgirl boots dangle as I straightened my spine and hoisted my shoulders toward my ears, willing myself taller.

            My father glanced up from his menu. “Tess, show her your teeth.” Dutifully, I thrust my towhead upward and pulled my lips back like a trained chimpanzee exposing a complete set of gleaming chompers. 

            “Believe it or not, she’s in kindergarten. And the boy and I want waffles,” he dryly added.

            Lyndy wrinkled her brow, shrugged, and disappeared into the kitchen. My mother gently tugged at the top of my boot and whispered, “There’s nothin’ wrong with being little, Tess. Remember, in nature it’s often the smallest bird that weathers the storm.” 

New York City

2012

Thirteen years later

Naomi

            It was a late June morning, and lower Manhattan was already set on a slow boil. As was our custom, we were in one hell of a hurry, moving faster than gossip in a church parking lot. My daughter, Tess Marshall, and I were on a forced march through the narrow twists and deep shadows of the cramped neighborhood encompassing Wall Street. She was on a mission and running late. Nothing was going to come between her and the salad bar café we had discovered a few days before on our first weekend in the city. I was trying to keep pace and found it useful to match my feet with the breakneck click-clack tempo of Tess’s three-inch heels hammering the sidewalk. Each step was a staccato snare drumbeat, bouncing off the gleaming marble-clad skyscrapers and canopies of scaffolding.  

            We were strangers in a strange land. The tallest building in our hometown stands thirty-two stories if you count the basement. It is not only the tallest building in Amarillo, Texas, it is the tallest building within hundreds of miles in every direction: Las Vegas to the west and Oklahoma City to the east; Denver north and to the south, Austin. The Amarillo chamber of commerce combines the words “slow” and “pace” as a top ten attraction. Trees are rare, patches of yellow stubble blanket the terrain, and the nearly constant wind has been known to rip tumbleweeds the size of Toyotas from the hard scrabble and send them scrambling every which way, indiscriminately burying vehicles and blocking highways. The land is flat as a Frisbee, leaving little room between a person and the horizon. Old-timers jest that they can see all the way to Canada merely by standing atop a tuna can.

            It is the part of the United States people on both coasts dismiss as “fly-over country,” a term that tends to infuriate locals, who argue the place has a unique beauty beckoning anyone who stays long enough to wear out a pair of boots.

            In contrast, everyone in Manhattan seemed rushed and so… tightly packed. I was suddenly aware of my own breathing. More accurately, the lack thereof. Have I been breathing? My claustrophobia was kicking in. Buildings appeared to bend toward us on the street below, all that steel and stone leaving me precious little headspace. I kept my eyes on the sidewalk ahead to avoid the sense of being trapped and concentrated on sucking in what seemed to be a dwindling supply of stale oxygen. My head throbbed to the beat of my racing pulse, and my earlobes started to burn. I heard the whoosh of blood coursing through my skull and fought to maintain a calm exterior as a full-blown panic attack threatened to erupt all over the innocent civilians cramming the sidewalk. Do I tell Tess that we please need to slow things down? Has that ever worked before with her?

            I am all too familiar with this mode of her being. She was hangry, and she had absolutely no patience for my various neuroses. I kept quiet. My mission that day was about her, not me. She had just graduated from college and was moving from Texas to Manhattan, come hell or high water. I was only there to help.

            At noon, a sea of pinstriped analysts, investment bankers, and brokers spilled from every skyscraper past tourists taking selfies at a famous statue: a life-sized bull, its bronze head lowered, nostrils flared, ready to charge. A few blocks away, Tess and I wedged our way into the packed restaurant and began to communicate with each other via hand signals, the only way to combat the chaos of a hundred New Yorkers shouting their food orders. As an amoeba encircles its prey, the crowd compressed and expanded, pulsating closer to the service counter in one fluid movement.

            Daily specials were posted high on the back wall. We moved in lockstep, focusing on the menu and sign that read “order here.” But when I turned my attention to the spot where Tess had been only moments before, she was nowhere in sight. Swallowed amid the crush, every head in the room towered above hers. At twenty-two years old, Tess weighed sixty-seven pounds and stood 4’3.” She was a person in miniature. Her shoulders might reach the top of an average kitchen countertop where she could peer over — but just barely. Think of rescuing your favorite wool sweater from a hot dryer – same shape just really small.

            “Tess?” I called out into the mob.

            She could apparently still see me, and, within moments, I could hear her voice rise above the crush of people. “I’m down here, Goddamn it! I’m down here!”

            At this sudden outburst, the cacophony hushed as if in shame and the crowd gave way, allowing her to emerge from the forest of strangers just as I reached the front of the line. Tess stomped toward me, clearing her path to the counter by throwing a shoulder here and an occasional sharp elbow there, making contact deep into at least one stranger’s thigh before stepping in front of me. That probably left a mark.  

            “What would you like?” the woman behind the counter asked, looking over the top of Tess’ s head, addressing her question to me. 

            Before I could respond, Tess glanced back over her shoulder at me and growled. “Let’s get the hell outta here, I can’t do this.”

            Tess has always been — as she describes it — “straightforward and blunt.” That’s why she loves New York City: “If I say, ‘You’re standing in the doorway. No one can get passed.’ people in Manhattan will say, ‘Oh, sorry.’ She explains. “If I treat people in small town Texas like that, they get offended.”

            Regardless of my daughter’s disposition, I held my ground, determined to eat lunch. Restaurants were scarce in the immediate vicinity, and I felt certain they would all be crowded this time of day.

            “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you,” the woman said, looking down at Tess and then back up at me. “We have a children’s menu. Would you like to see it?” 

            “I’ll have the salmon salad,” Tess interrupted. “I’m twenty-two. I don’t need a toy with my meal for fuck’s sake.”