I was also more than ready to experience a semester of school where I wasn’t shoe-horning my classes into a week that also included thirty hours of teaching English to Chinese students online and handling the cooking and cleaning and laundry for the household because both my parents drove for Uber after work and on the weekends.
I resented having to work while my friends headed to Jerry’s Deli for afterschool snacks or went home to a house that someone else had cleaned.
I told myself I was lucky. Most of the kids in my classes were already caffeine addicts who lived out of the backpacks they carried, as they shuttled back and forth between their moms and their dads.
I tried to cultivate an attitude of gratitude about the move. Mom had eventually stopped objecting to the move when she saw pictures of the house we’d be living in. so as far as Dad was concerned, it was all good. But I was worried about school. I was going to be a senior in twelfth grade at Macgregor Hall and I had been looking forward to the perks of being a senior. I really wasn’t looking forward to being the “new kid,” especially not at a private school where everybody already knew everybody.
I’d only ever gone to one school. My father had taught history and world civilization at Macgregor Hall, a private school in Studio City attended by child actors and celebrity spawn. It was an excellent school that went all the way from pre-K to twelfth grade and was, as my father would say, “respected.” Educating me for free was part of my father’s compensation package and it was a hell of a perk. It cost three thousand dollars just to enroll at Macgregor, and tuition for the upper grades was forty-seven thousand dollars. A year.
In Stony Point, you could buy a house for forty-seven thousand dollars and still have money left over to landscape the yard. I’d checked the Craigslist postings.
Forty-seven thousand dollars is more than a lot of people make in a year. I often wondered if there were times my father would have preferred taking the tuition money as part of his salary and letting me take my chances in the L.A. public school system.
*
We arrived in Stony Point in late August when daylight lingered until nearly ten o’clock.
I’d never seen my Uncle Ned’s house, and though we’d been sent pictures that showed it was pretty, the pictures didn’t do the place justice. I fell in love with our house at once. It was a beautifully restored two-story Craftsman painted a dark slate gray with white trimming and a brick red chimney and door. The living room had a wood-burning fireplace—hence the chimney—and big windows looking out into a yard filled with cut-leaf maple, oak and birch trees. There were three bedrooms upstairs and one down that Uncle Ned had turned into a library slash media room with comfy, squashy leather chairs and a flat screen television the size of a picture window.
Ned had left all the home furnishings to my dad as well. His taste had run to minimalist and high end, and so while our own furniture—carefully curated yard sale finds and Habitat for Humanity purchases—fit into the space, which was approximately ten times the size of our former apartment, everything looked kind of shabby.
That made me sad. I liked our eclectic collection of stuff, especially the iron bedframe my mother had found all rusted out in a dump and hauled home in a friend’s pick-up. She’d worked for a month to fix it up and I loved its curlicues and rosettes. Sleeping in it always made me feel like a princess.
I loved having my own bathroom, even if it was downstairs. It had one of those old-fashioned clawfoot tubs. I’d always wanted one of those, although I soon learned that holding a shower sprayer in one hand while trying to wash your hair was not as easy as it looks.
“Pretend you’re in Paris,” my mom said, and I did—turning the room into my version of a Parisian flat I’d seen on Craigslist Paris, an adorable little studio on Rue du Dragon that had a view of the city’s rooftops and was in walking distance of the Sorbonne.
I’ve wanted to spend a year in Paris since I’d devoured the Madeline books in second grade. I still had all of them, and sometimes pulled them out and re-read them. Until my dream of playing Parisienne came true, I was thrilled to have my bathroom.
Even the kitchen was an inviting space. For one thing, it was huge. Uncle Ned had knocked two rooms together and installed a massive six-burner stove. I was relieved to see it was a gas stove. I hated cooking on electric stoves. All his spices were still in the cupboards, custom blends from places like Penzey’s in Portland and dozens of bottles of different hot sauces and jars of curry mixtures. Ned had been a foodie.
My mother was an organizational ninja and had everything unpacked and in its proper place within a week of our arrival, which gave us a whole week to just chill before my dad and I had to start school. I could tell she still wasn’t happy about the move, but once she discovered the weekly farmer’s market held in the shell of the old railroad station downtown, she perked up considerably. She went there nearly every day, bringing home treasures like bright yellow, tear-shaped lemon drop plums and fat bundles of purple asparagus. One day she came home with ten apples, all different varieties she’d never seen before, and we spent the afternoon doing an apple taste test, cleansing our palate with squares of cheese and home-made crackers.
I’d liked the Pacific Rose apples the best. They tasted like Envy apples, only sweeter.
Things were still a little tense between my parents, but I could tell both of them were trying. And they left me alone to explore my new hometown.
*
My father spent a lot of time huddled up with my uncle’s lawyers and it was soon clear that in addition to the house he’d inherited money.
A lot of money. Eight-figure money.
Dad told me Ned had also set up a trust for me, with payouts on my eighteenth, twenty-first, and thirtieth birthdays. I’d never met my uncle, only knew him only from the few family pictures my father had, so that had been a surprise.
I’d asked my mother about the trust, and she’d scowled. “It’s the least he could do after what he did to your father.” Naturally, that’s all she said, which only fueled my curiosity. We weren’t far from the Stony Point library, one of those cool old. original Carnegie libraries. I wondered if they had microfiches of the local paper. One way or another, I was going to get to the bottom of that mystery.
A week after we arrived, there was a memorial service for Uncle Ned and that’s when things got really weird. Mom had insisted we make the drive to Seattle to go shopping for clothes. She’d spent the equivalent of a month’s worth of expenses—including rent—to outfit us in what she called “appropriate attire.” Coming from someone who wore scrubs to her job as an X-ray technician and spent the rest of her life in yoga pants and t-shirts, it came as a surprise to find out she was a secret fashionista.
For her, “proper attire” meant a pair of Yuul Yie angle-wedge pumps and a severe coat and dress ensemble that looked like something a First Lady might wear at an Inaugural Parade. For me she chose a navy-blue sheath dress with cap sleeves. She wanted to buy me a pair of patent leather slingback pumps but I’m not good in heels and convinced her that the kitten-heeled dress shoes I’d bought at DSW would suffice.
I felt uneasy about the purchases. We’d studied Thoreau the year before and one of the quotes that had stuck with me was his advice to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”
I wondered who my mother was trying to impress, especially when she bought my father anew suit too—an ink-black Dries Van Noten ensemble she paid for with a brand-new platinum credit card.
At the service, though, I saw why she’d bothered. My uncle had clearly been an important guy in Stony Point, and everyone who attended was dressed to kill.
After the festivities, people came up to express their condolences and press the flesh. Everyone was oddly formal and deferential with my father.
There were so many people I gave up trying to keep track of them. But I couldn’t forget Alma Harrison, a regal black woman wearing a formal skirt suit with embellished lapels on the jack
et. In her Christian Louboutins, she towered over my father.
“Will,” she said, bending to kiss his cheek.
“Alma,” he said warmly. “It’s good to see you again.”
I suspect you’ll soon be seeing so much of me soon you’ll wish you were back in California.” My father smiled at that, but I thought it was an odd thing to say. Next in line was a pretty blue-eyed brunette my father greeted as “Alicia.”
She nodded back but did not smile. “Lewis sends his regrets,” she said, without a scrap of apology in her tone.
My father looked irritated. “I’ll give him a call later this week,” he said.
“I’ll tell him to expect your call,” Alicia said and moved on. It took me a minute to realize she hadn’t offered any form of condolence in her brief interaction.
More people queued up for a word with my father; some dignified, some reserved, and one—a second cousin, according to my mother—an emotional mess. He was crying as he took Dad’s hand in both of his and brought it to his lips to kiss, like he was the Pope or the Godfather or something.
What. The. Hell?
I thought the cousin’s actions were strange enough, but even stranger was my father’s reaction to all the attention. He not only acted as if this was nothing unusual, he acted like it was expected. Like it was some kind of tribute that was due to him. I’d never seen that side of my father before and I didn’t like it very much.
Just as we were about to leave, a beautiful pregnant woman in a dark green coat dress entered the hall. She looked around until she saw Dad but did not approach. After shaking the last hand in the receiving line, he went over to her and said a few words. When he came back, his face was closed and hard.
“Let’s go,” he said and headed for the door without looking to see if Mom and I were following.
He didn’t speak all the way home and when we arrived at the house, he told us he needed to go out again for a meeting with his lawyer.
“It’s eight o’clock,” Mom protested.
“He’s paid to be available 24/7,” Dad said, and that careless-of-anyone-else arrogance was new too. He drove off without saying anything else.
Claiming a headache, Mom went up to their bedroom, leaving me to eat dinner by myself. I didn’t mind. Uncle Ned had subscribed to all the streaming channels and I was working my way through seasons of shows I’d never seen because we’d only had basic cable back in L.A. Game of Thrones was awesome.
*
One thing I’d noticed about Stony Point right away was there was an almost electric feel to the air, like that prickly feeling you get just before a thunderstorm, except that the air felt like that all the time. I finally asked my father if we lived near a nuclear waste dump or something that would explain the tingle.
My mother and father had exchanged significant looks when I asked the question and again, I got that feeling they were keeping some sort of secret from me. “You’re just used to Los Angeles air,” Mom finally said. “This is what real air is supposed to smell like.”
I didn’t feel like arguing, but seriously, if my mother thought I was buying that, she was mistaken. Still, I’d checked online. We were almost 160 miles from the notorious Hanford Site, so if there was radiation leaking into the air, it was coming from somewhere else.
By the weekend before school started, the excitement of the move had begun to wear off and I found myself at loose ends and more than a little lonely. I was still getting texts from my friends, and getting tagged on their social media posts, but I could tell they were already absorbed by classes and their local life. School had already started for them, but Wixsted Academy’s school year didn’t start until September fourteenth.
All my Macgregor Hall friends were already making plans for college, having been accepted at Stanford and Northwestern, and Duke. Mikayla was pushing for me to apply to Berkeley. I’d always thought I’d end up getting my degree at an inexpensive community college, but now thanks to Uncle Ned, there was money for college. Any college I could get accepted to. Even the Sorbonne if I wanted. The sense of possibility was intoxicating.
Unfortunately, I still hadn’t figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. My parents weren’t pressuring me, so I figured I’d take a year off and then re-evaluate. In the weeks since we’d moved, I’d spent a lot of time thinking about my future as I wandered around Stony Point.
I marked out places I hoped would become “my” places—a funky little bakery that sold bite-size marionberry muffins and tiny single-size cheesecakes; a used bookstore that had a whole floor devoted to science fiction and fantasy; a nail salon that offered Chinese-style foot massages for the price of a Starbucks latte. On Main Street, there were dozens of antique shops and from chatting up the owners, I learned that in summer, tourists would descend just to check out their wares. It was fun to window shop, but I didn’t bother going into any of the shops until a ring in one window caught my eye. It was a piece from the Victorian era, a band of rose gold set with seed pearls, garnets, and turquoise. I’m not a jewelry person, normally, but for some reason, I wanted a closer look at that ring.
Inside, the shop smelled like oranges and rose petals, a nice change from the patchouli and old dust fragrance you find in a lot of Los Angeles antique stores.
The place was called “Witch Tree Wonders” and the woman behind the counter looked like an ex-rocker chick. She was maybe forty, a curvy beauty with wild Stevie Nicks hair. Hello,” she said with a smile as I stepped in.
“Hi,” I said. “I was wondering if I could see the ring in the window.”
“That’s one of my favorites,” she said, moving out from behind the counter to unlock the display window.
She held the ring out to me. “This ring is a very special piece. It once belonged to Ophelia Wixsted,” she said. I could tell from the way she said it that she thought I should know who that was. I just nodded. It’s a bad Los Angeles habit of mine—pretending to know stuff I don’t.
“Poor girl,” she said. “She came to such a tragic end.”
“Being named Ophelia probably doomed her,” I said, because Ophelia is the most annoying character in all of Shakespeare. Except maybe for Falstaff. I am not a fan of Falstaff.
The ring was light in my hand, and despite being more than a hundred years old, looked brand new. I couldn’t resist slipping it on. Of course, it fit perfectly.
I admired it a moment and then reluctantly took it off. I wants it my precious, I thought, chiding myself for the pang of regret I’d felt as I slid the bauble from my finger. I’ve long known the difference between need and want, and usually was good at quashing my desire to buy things just because they were pretty. But I was also super conscious of the hundred-dollar bill my father had given me that morning as he left for a faculty meeting at Wixsted Academy. “Lunch is on me,” he’d said.
I handed the ring back to the shop keeper.
“It’s on sale,” she said. “End of summer special.”
Even marked down, the ring had to be worth a couple of hundred dollars. I had a long-standing rule that I couldn’t buy anything that cost more than I made in an hour. Even though we now lived in a different tax bracket, I wanted to hold onto my frugal habits. Living in L.A., I saw a lot of actors who got lucky with a gig on a television show and then ended up managing a gym or slinging coffee a month after the show was cancelled because they hadn’t saved any of that money.
I smiled and shook my head. “Thanks, I’m really just looking.”
She put the ring down on the counter. “Let me show you something,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said, starting to edge toward the door. She wasn’t being pushy, but I’d broken my self-imposed rule of never touching anything I couldn’t afford to buy, and I didn’t want to get into an embarrassing situation.
She read my reluctance correctly. “It’s just a photograph of Ophelia. I think you’ll find it interesting.”
I relaxed a little. “Oh sure,” I said.
“This was taken in 1897,” she said. “Ophelia would have been sixteen.”
The sepia-toned picture was sharp and clear, a full-length pose of Ophelia in what must have been a suit of traveling clothes, a coat with a nipped-in waist, a long striped skirt and a complicated hat perched atop a mass of light-colored hair.
Except for the antique clothing, Ophelia Wixsted was a dead ringer for me.
2
More Questions than Answers
“Wow,” I said, staring down at the picture of my doppelganger.
The woman was still smiling at me, but I sensed something a little “off” about her, a “gotcha” kind of micro-expression that hadn’t been there a moment before.
“All of us in town are related to the Wixsteds,” she said, “one way or another.”
“Huh,” I said, handing the picture back to her. “Thanks for showing it to me.”
“You’re welcome, Laine,” she said.
I was out of the store and halfway down the block before I wondered how she knew my name.
I mentioned the episode to my parents at dinner that night.
“It’s a small town,” my father commented, as if that explained everything, then he left for another round of meetings with his lawyer.
My mother opened a bottle of wine and went out to the back porch to sit and drink it. I sat on the steps and looked over the yard. The rose bushes were full of blooms, so fabulously fragrant, I could smell them from where I was sitting.
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