Life Sentences by Alice Blanchard Page B

overcrowded. As the suitcases with matching
totes came flying through the trapdoor in the ceiling, Daisy instantly
recognized her ugly yellow suitcase, the one she'd dragged around with
her from college to graduate school to her internship at Berhoffer . She'd always been embarrassed by that cheap,
cheese-colored vinyl, which had never failed to give away her lowly status
as a scholarship student who knew nothing about cotillions or summers
in East Hampton, and who'd never set foot inside a country club. She'd
made the mistake of attending a liberal-arts school for spoiled rich
girls whose doting dads bought them Thoroughbred horses to be stabled
nearby, whereas Daisy had been brought up on her mother's accounting
salary. It'd never occurred to her how poor the Hubbards were until she'd gone away to college.
    Now the baggage handlers tossed
Daisy's suitcases down the chute as if they were trying to see how far
they could throw. The wheeled Pullman landed with a crack on the terminal,
its lid popping open, her unmentionables spilling out.
    "Idiots," she grumbled,
snapping it shut. She couldn't help feeling small and insignificant as
she wheeled her bags over to a plastic bench molded to fit the contours of
something-not the human body, that was for sure. She sat in exhausted silence
while people became pinpoints. The airport was so huge and impersonal
she dissolved into apathy. Banks of fluorescent lights made a constant
hum, like a dull chorus. So this was how Los Angeles swallowed you whole?
Right away, before you'd even set foot outside the airport gates.
    She leaned against the cement
wall until the back of her head began to throb. She swore she could feel
the earth's motion somewhere underneath her breathing. Conflicting
noises washed over her like dust disturbed by a fan. Anna's missing . She didn't want to think about it. Fear was paralyzing.
Fear was immobilizing. She stood up, determined to keep moving, and
dragged her luggage across the lobby and through the sliding glass doors,
where she was hit by a torrid blast of muggy air.
    She swam through this soup down
the gritty sidewalk toward the taxi stand. The cabdriver was tall and gaunt
and reminded her of an aging character actor. He deposited her luggage
into the roomy trunk of the cab while she slid into the backseat. All
around them, concrete terminals stood in beams of washed-out light.
    "Where y'all from?" the
driver asked in a southern drawl that reminded her of Truett.
    "Boston," she said, feeling
suddenly nostalgic for everything she'd left behind.
    " Beantown ,
huh? Miracle City?" He glanced at her through the rearview, tires
squealing as they swerved away from the curb. He drove past monolithic
buildings and dark alleyways-was the city always this desolate?
"Remember Dukakis riding around in that tank, looking like an idiot?"
he said. "And then his campaign tanked, remember? Miracle City,
ha. That was some miracle."
    She didn't know what he was talking
about. She leaned against the sticky vinyl seat, the pain milling aimlessly
around inside her head now. They drove past a series of squat, empty-looking
buildings, then took an entrance ramp onto the freeway. The sky was filled
with millions of stars struggling to penetrate through the smog layer.
It was hard to believe that, thousands of years ago, there had actually
been glaciers in Hollywood instead of palm trees.
    "I'm from Alabama originally,"
the cabdriver said, turning around briefly to look at her. His nose began
with a broad bridge and grew vigorously from his face before ending abruptly
in a pair of deeply grooved nostrils. "Me and the missus moved here
twenty-five years ago and never regretted it for a second. Nossir . There's plenty of advantages to living in the
second-largest city in America, you know? Out here, you've got more of
everything. Out here, everybody has their own set of wheels. Well,
that's not exactly an advantage for me, heh ."
    And it was true, the driveways were
crowded with