White Space Obsession

By Carolyn Straub

Tigre Strong is obsessed with writing. She becomes a reporter. Her controlling parents try to reclaim her. Tigre pursues the job, while the family shuns her at an airport. To them, with her odd and outstanding pursuit, she is a stranger.

Her parents die. Strong wants to build a new life in Alaska, but has never traveled 5,000 miles. To survive, she must break bonds with the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carolyn Straub
• Release date: Jan 31, 2010
• ISBN: 9781458183644

Carolyn Straub

Carolyn Straub is a native of the East Coast where she worked for newspapers and taught college for five years in the New York area. She relocated to Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1993 and was news assistant and youth writer for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and taught at University of Alaska.Carolyn has lived in northern California since 1997, and has worked as a copy editor and freelance writer, and is now retired.Carolyn is also a senior state park volunteer at Henry W. Coe State Park in northern California and a member of the Companions in Ignatian Service and Spirituality of Santa Clara University.She lives with her husband, Steve McHenry, a technical [e-mail]

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WHITE SPACE OBSESSION

by

Carolyn Straub

You have made known to me the paths of life.

(Acts 2:28, New Testament)

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Carolyn Straub on Smashwords

White Space Obsession

Copyright © 2009 by Carolyn Straub

All rights reserved

Cover image by Jerzy Strzelecki

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Prologue

The Radio

Why did I want to become a writer, and if that was so, why a newspaper writer?

I think it all began one night as I steered, hopped, and punched at my father’s 1965 Oldsmobile's radio. Jill, my sister, was puffing a cigarette. She was of course faking it, just putting the stalk inside her cheek. Rock music without a care soared from the car radio. The smell of washed dance clothes, our going-out attire, swam around our noses with the sounds of the tunes. We sang Bye, Bye Miss American Pie to the splatter of the pavement underneath the breath of the rain. The weepy scrolling of the windshield wipers beat a rhythmic accompaniment. It was 1972, the year before I joined a newspaper staff for the first time. We sailed over the rain-slicked pavement at 50 miles-per-hour. The signs said 30.

Puddles raced by, glinting in the dark moonlight around 9 p.m. We rolled down the car windows. The hand cranks wheezed as we twisted them to push the front windows down. Dad’s dress-up bow tie back at the house faded from memory as we sped. We still sang hesitantly. Jill wanted to move out in June after college graduation. I yearned to keep away from the relatives for the rest of my life, maybe become a famous writer. Weren’t writers noticed? Jill didn’t make a big deal out of it. She simply bought the latest counterculture records and played them by herself. For her, who cared? I went to a private college, not as hip as hers. That was a state college where normal people went. My nervous strum on the wheel, even as I popped the tune, showed how unsteady and insecure I was. For this, I hated Jill’s cool.

There was a celery stalk-like crackle from the silver trim glittering around the radio. I got a whiff of Jill’s breath as she opened her mouth slightly. She wasn't usually emotional. A loud command blasted our song, shattering the wailing lyrics of Pie.

Girls! Where are you? the voice hollered.

It stopped. My eyes were immobile. Jill’s awk cut off her singing. The radio was flashing weird blinks, alternating to a two-way radio. Dad – it was Dad – had finally broken through. I had suspected it, just knew it. He'd wired the house to the radio so it would switch tracks on command. Whenever his gizmo wished, it could lurch Dad’s voice into the Oldsmobile, breaking into the radio. Which then switched from a regular radio to a two-way machine. Was I paranoid, was this really happening? I don’t know. I wanted to write these stories, and here I am. Jill once said writing wasn’t a real occupation.

Anyway, Jill and I had noticed a radio-operating cube at the house. Or was it a stash closet for old wires and castaways? Of course, we didn’t admit it or pay close attention. Now the boring hum of the motor continued. The car radio was probably poised to call again. Jill’s behavior became atypical. Normally, she didn't get unnerved. Jill shook forward. Her face vibrated and her arms popped up and down, matching her head movement.

She stopped. Jill just wasn’t the nervous type. It was scary to watch her in those split seconds. Bu-bu-but…!she stammered, struggling to understand whatever we imagined had happened in the dashboard.

What on earth is going on, she said. An abnormal scream followed. She whirled her torso like a funny ape. I will never get to leave this jail, she said. Jill slammed her elbows into her stomach. Then there was silence. I hung on to the steering wheel because I knew Dad if there was an accident. Dad’s motions wouldn’t be at all like Jill’s phony cool and spasms. He would walk stiffly and resolutely out to the car to look. He’d spend hours peeking at the hulk, trying to spot our faults. He’d certainly be the opposite of unpredictable.

I suddenly thought of when a big yellow jacket had buzzed, angrily flying in the wrong direction right through my driver’s window, how car and I jumped together. My steering zigzagged now. The Olds slithered to the unpaved shoulder on side the highway. Wot!? I yelled, yanking back to the present. The glassy radio trim doubled and tripled in my sight. I wasn’t really sure what had happened. My eyes swam. Dad puzzled us. We usually heard his stern voice echoing in our heads, but it hadn’t happened over the radio, had it? Dad wasn’t even near us.

There isn’t anything wrong, Jill said, regaining her composure. Tigre, cut it out. Keep on driving, she said. Her face lengthened and froze without a smile. I heard his voice, I said. Oh, what are we going to do? Trapped again by Dad’s control. Oh, shut up! Jill said. You’re always worrying about nothing.

I looked hard at the radio. It sat there blamelessly finishing the playing of Miss American Pie. The disc jockey babbled away with an ad for Colgate toothpaste.

Did you really hear him? Jill said, pointing her finger straight at my eyes without waiting for an answer. She touched again on her post-graduate plan to get married to somebody and then get a master’s degree to teach special ed. Jill considered herself smarter than Mom, Dad, and me, all who didn’t know anything. Jill perked her head back up, bent it slightly forward, and gently eased her shoulders down into the seat. Keep on driving, she said, wearily falling back into the headrest.

In the distance, a city bus hummed. The sound grew louder as it touched our back bumper. I glanced out the rear view mirror. A large, black shadow loomed over us. I stepped quickly on the gas pedal. The Olds spurted away from the ghostly shape. Then the rain poured down, sounding like clapping after a show. The pounding filled my head. There was an overpowering shout:

GIRLS, answer me!

The crackle crunched loudly and the voice stopped instantly, waiting. I grabbed Jill’s cig out of her mouth. The harsh taste attacked me. I didn’t smoke because I refused to inhale the acrid fumes. The taste was bitter, and now it did not help. Va-roooom went the pedal. I pressed it nearly through the floor, attempting to reach The Place before the onslaught of the storm, our nightclub destination. Thunder rattled behind us and the bus disappeared. I squashed the cig in the small drawer under the magical radio. Jill shot me a withering look. There was a crackle of static and a loud blast:

Girls! I said answer me.

Jill screwed her face into a tight knot. I spat loudly back at the awful radio. We were exasperated. (Were we crazy?) I gritted my teeth and pulled the wheel around a sharp bend. We were driving near an open stretch of an old portion of a canal. Patches of water glared out at us. Radio static flickered and faded in and out.

We inched our fingers around the radio’s cold surface and felt for the button that turned it into a two-way radio. We pushed our index fingers all around, but it was dark and the button was unlit. It wasn’t there.

Ahead was a stretch of road without street lights. I aimed, but the right side of the car bumped and got lower. There was a weightlessness as the Olds drove on air and stopped moving forward. Its front hood dropped from sight and the rear-wheel ends flew up and down. Jill’s side tilted down and mine stood up in the air so that it threw me over to her. Jill plowed into the door handle on her side. It was jammed. Dad had once warned us to keep the doors locked at night while driving. We did. Now it was deadly. There was no guardrail around the open canal because it was abandoned. There was no safety lighting either, nothing but dark space to our sides with rippling water, which had been the only signal of an oncoming open cavern from the road. The Olds rolled slowly into the seepage and muck of the stagnant canal water. It floated for about three minutes as Jill and I huddled wordlessly into the disappearing front seat. She tugged at the lock, and then flailed at the handle and rolled down her window just before the Olds submerged. The door shoved slowly like a coffin as she popped

the lock. I froze.

Come on, she said.

I was stuck in my shock as the Olds went down another inch into the watery murk. It was pitch dark and seeing around was impossible. Black, cold water rushed in as her door loosened. The cuff of my raincoat caught in the door handle as my side pushed against a wall of sudden pressure. The door refused to let me go. I punched at it mercilessly. I twisted and wriggled through a liquid cylinder. My hands wavered back and forth and finally touched the murky, suffocating route, which led out through the broken passenger-side window. I hollered over the eerie quiet of the empty canal land. I clawed my way toward Jill’s splashing. She threw her head up about 500 feet from me. There was no current in the isolated basin. We swam straight to the muddy bank.

A patch of steam bubbled up from the middle of the water. It was certainly the Olds. We clambered up the slippery bank in the blackness, soaked with smelly water and drained of our makeup. I primped my face and hair, and worried how I looked. I stumbled up and stood above. Jill clambered up and stood, too. She shivered violently, and suddenly without a word wound away from me, leaving me to follow. Jill pumped her arms vigorously in the direction of a remote phone booth. She sputtered alone about the idiocy of Dad and the meaninglessness of life at the house.

Jill’s incoherent bursts matched my own broken talk. Neither of us could understand anything that had just gone on. Suppose we had imagined it all? (Were we nuts?) Why do you think he did this? Jill said, looking down on me. Humph? A radio that tracked us. The voice echoed in our heads ending up in the car flip. We couldn’t even escape for a night out dancing.

I don’t know, I said. This is so bad. I coughed. There was canal grit on my tongue. We looked odd. We had sticky hair and our clothing hung like wallpaper. A tall, vertical shadow soon loomed in front of us. It was the phone booth. Jill grunted around and wrung her hands, discovering she’d lost her wallet in the drowned Olds. I felt itchy, awkward, and my legs quivered because they were freezing. We were drenched. The warm, wet night air was beginning to go cold on us now. Jill in spite of it