Fractured from the Fall

Memory Lane

Lily treated herself to a first class ticket courtesy of her husband's credit card. He had yet to remove her from the account, another bi-product of his guilt, she assumed. She treated herself to a few vodka sodas as well. Flying filled her with anxiety and the alcohol helped to calm her nerves. She used to have Richard for that. He may have been a lot of things: an adulterer, a workaholic, not present, but he was great when he was around, at least in the beginning. On numerous occasions he had surprised her with trips to exotic locations and he had been patient with her as she clung to his arm during take-off and turbulence. One time, he even got a rash from her nervous clammy hands clinging to his upper arm, but he never made her feel bad about it. He would kiss her on the forehead and tell her everything was going to be fine.

Now all Lily had to comfort her was the glass of vodka she held, and possibly the man in seat 3A who had been staring at her unabashedly since the moment she sat down. Unfortunately for him, there weren't enough vodka sodas in the world for her to even consider getting involved with someone right now. Love, or even a fling, was the furthest thing from her mind.

The plane ride was short, just an hour and a half, which she normally would have welcomed, but today she was in no rush to reach her final destination. For the first time in her life she let everyone else deplane before she even got up from her seat. She took her time walking to the baggage claim. She stopped at the restroom and spent an unusually long time using the bathroom and checking her reflection in the mirror. Once she had finally made her way to the baggage carousel and gathered her Louis Vuitton suitcases, she searched the crowd for her driver. He was a portly fellow, holding a handmade sign in which he had spelled her last name wrong. She was used to this by now yet it never ceased to amaze her, especially when she had spelled it over the phone to the company. Adler, 'er' she would say, and they would always acknowledge it, yet rarely actually spell it correctly.

As the driver pulled out of the airport, the limo passed a sign, which read, "Welcome to Utah!" More like "Welcome to my own personal hell" Lily mumbled under her breath.

"What's that?" her driver asked.

"Nothing," she replied, irritated that he still hadn't rolled up the partition. Limo drivers in Orange County knew better than that. They understood that their clientele had little desire to interact with those that were "beneath them." It may have seemed callous, but it was the truth. Things in Utah were different though, in more ways than one. The people in Utah were friendly, unusually so. They went out of their way to talk and wave hello to strangers on the street. In California, people actually looked down when they were approaching Lily. It was a harsh reality she learned when she first moved to the city. She was out jogging that first week and said hello to a woman as she ran past. The woman looked at Lily like something was wrong with her and then looked in the other direction. It had offended Lily at first, but she adjusted quickly, learning the art of pretending those you passed on the street didn't actually exist. Much like the jogger, Lily flipped through the apps on her phone acting as if she were looking at something that she wasn't, in hopes that the driver would get the hint and stop talking, but her blatant attempt at ignoring him was lost on the naïve young man. This place was too nice for people to even know when someone was being rude.

"Shouldn't be long," he said. "Traffic's not too bad."

"Uh huh," she nodded without looking up from her phone.

The car sped down the road, I-15 then up the canyon via I-80. As they wound their way through Parley's Canyon the brown hills quickly faded into majestic green mountains. It was her favorite time of year, when the earth was still green from the winter runoff and the mountains had yet to shrivel up and turn brown from the dry summer heat. The inversion lay heavy over the valley but as they rose above 5,000 feet, the smog gave way to a cloudless bluebird sky. The sun shone bright and Lily pulled out her giant Dolce and Gabbana glasses to protect her eyes and hopefully give her some sense of privacy from her driver.

The car climbed up the steepest incline of the drive and headed towards the peak. Having reached the top of the canyon, the car now made its decent, heading towards Kimball Junction. Lily was amazed by how much Park City had grown over the years. It seemed like every time she came back, which wasn't often, there were new buildings being constructed and new restaurants being opened. In some ways she was impressed with the growth, but in others, it saddened her to see this sleepy little mountain town upended by urban sprawl and America's constant need for expansion. She wasn't sure why she felt so sentimental for a place she had been avoiding like the plague. There was something about the change in this place that saddened her. This quaint little town was a mere shell of what it used to be, but then again, so was she.

They passed Mountain Dell Golf Course and Summit Park, where she used to go sledding as a child. She and Violet would tie their inner tubes together so that the extra weight of two versus one, would pull them down the hill faster. She remembered screaming with joy at her sister's infectious laughter. Her giggling was contagious and she couldn't help but laugh once Violet got started. Of course, those were the days before her sister became a paranoid, straight-laced, no-fun, pain in her ass.

The driver turned on his blinker and headed onto Highway 40. Lily felt the pit in her stomach grow. She had been anxious all day. At first she thought it was just about flying, but she knew in the back of her mind that it was much more than that. She would have to face some ugly ghosts this week, ghosts she had been running from for quite some time. The next few days had the potential to be some of the worst of her life, but since she was pretty much already at rock bottom, she figured she didn't have much further to fall.