Stray

by Stephanie Danler

  Laurel Canyon, California

  It sounds like rain on a cloudless day, a needling, then persistent tapping. It moves faster against the wall in my study. I look up and the Laurel Canyon hillside is coming down, dirt, uprooted agaves, and the boulders that made up part of a retaining wall. As the boulders roll toward the window, I think, Oh, fuck.

  I yell and they drop like thunder against the house. When things are still again, I go outside, peering up at the cliff above the cottage. I see the line of eucalyptus trees. Some of the roots are now exposed where the hillside has fallen away. Oh, fuck. The trees seem to sway.

  Those eucalyptuses, four of them, are completely dead, which is why their root systems aren’t holding the hillside in place. This I was told by a professional. My landlord says it sounds like a little debris, even when I send him photos of the entire section of wall that crashed against the house. I end up stopping a tree guy on my way home from the Country Store. He comes over to give me an estimate. Twenty thousand, he says. Five k for each tree. And he can’t even take the job for a month.

  The canyon keeps me in business. Drives me crazy though. It’s fucking impossible to get equipment up here. I’m reminded of what the fire chief said about the fires. The tree guy whistles looking up at the ridge. It’s not if, but when.

  I end up watching a “Classic Albums” documentary on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. At minute twenty-two, the camera reveals a black-and-white photograph of Christine and John McVie. They’re standing in my front window, which is the size of double doors and swings completely open. I get the chills, then start laughing. I’m alone but my bed feels crowded with ghosts. I wonder if they worried about the eucalyptus, about the houses built on stilts on top of them. I know Stevie did. People think Stevie Nicks wrote “Landslide” about her father. She actually wrote it during her first snowy winter in Aspen, before Mick Fleetwood called, when she was cleaning houses to support her and Lindsey Buckingham’s musical aspirations. Lindsey had left her to tour. She was alone and miserable, waiting for him to come home, wondering if she screamed would it cause an avalanche.

  * * *

  Carly insists I talk to her psychic. Visiting my mother, this push/pull of the Monster, the constant countdown until a decisive, exploded moment, has undermined my ability to be certain about anything. I miss all my turns. I don’t know how to grocery shop—I lose my cart, come out with nothing I needed and things that make no sense: three different kombuchas, some cheese, no crackers.

  I’m falling apart, I write the Monster. Please help me. He calls me dutifully and is silent. Say something.

  I need more time.

  This psychic has been in Carly’s life for years and accurately predicted major life events, like her second pregnancy. I’ve never trusted these telepathic types, and the idea of healing makes me cringe. I have a therapist, and when I tell her about the psychic, she stifles a laugh. And yet, I can’t stop crying the week I finally call Carly’s psychic. In the shower, in the car, running into the bathroom at coffee shops, at Carly’s house, crying. So why not?

  As I Skype in, I remember that I have seen a fortune-teller once before, when I was seventeen. On a boat, in Greece, outside Santorini. He was the captain and wore a turban that I’m thinking now might have been a costume. He said he saw a dark mark on me. He led me away from the group. He rubbed my palm and said that I had dreams but I would never achieve them the way I was going. Which, looking back, was true. He added at the last minute that I wouldn’t marry my true love. Which I haven’t thought of in over a decade and is a fucked-up thing to tell a girl.

  All I want to discuss is the Monster, but I want this psychic to read me. I feign nonchalance. Tell her there is nothing special that brought me to her.

  She says I am a conduit. I download massive amounts of information from the metaphysical realm.

  I’m a writer, I say. She responds with a smug smile.

  She sees me with a backpack. Maybe hiking, I say. I do walk a lot. I’ve walked all over the world, I even did a pilgrimage trail across Spain. She considers me.

  It was forty-three days of walking, I explain, as if that were crucial.

  Or it could be your baggage, she says. It appears to be a very heavy backpack. Your pain body that you carry with you at all times.

  Right, I say, thinking to myself, it’s not literal backpacking, you fucking moron.

  When I try to bring up the Monster, she’s bored. I’m careful about it. I say, I’m in a…well…it’s kind of…a bad thing…

  …With an unavailable man. I see it now. He is a shadow of you. In the shadow is everything you fear. He’s not real. You created him and you can free yourself from him.

  Okay, I say. Well. He is real. Technically. And I think he’s my…I don’t know, soul mate. I’m pretty sure that the rest of my life will be determined by whether or not he and I can get our shit together and love each other.

  No, she says. I don’t see you with him.

  A pause flies up between us. I wait for her to continue. She doesn’t.

  So. You just don’t see me with him.

  She shakes her head. He is a shadow. You are the light. She leans in closer to the screen. I do see you pregnant though. Are you pregnant?

  Um. Not really.

  Is there a possibility that you could become pregnant?

  Not really.

  Maybe you have something big coming in the spring? I can see that you’re full, and about to give birth.

  A book, I say, annoyed. Duh, the fucking book.

  The book is going to be a success, she says, smiling. I mimic her smile.

  I’m not sure I believe that, I say. Did I really Venmo a stranger in the Valley to tell me this?

  She stares at me through the computer. She squints.

  You disbelieve a lot. I see that you don’t believe in angels.

  No. I don’t. I sigh. How could you tell?

  The psychic sits back, satisfied. The angel sitting behind you just told me.

  * * *

  The Love Interest hands me white sage. Black sage. Yerba santa. California bay leaves. He points to the burned-out trees and references the fires that blackened them, he notices the way the foliage clings to the cliffsides in the micro canyons as we climb. He waves his hand at the view below us, understanding the layout of the roads, housing developments, as a function of topography, not the personal whims I imagined dictated this place. At the end of the day, I take off the flannel I’ve been wearing, and these crushed green things fall out of my pocket. I press them into my notebooks.

  “Stephanie,” the Love Interest says from the other room of the cottage. My heart swells and I’m mortified. What is wrong with me? I keep asking. I’ve lost all sense of proportion. How brutal is my other relationship that a man addressing me kindly by my full name makes me want to cry?

  As the Love Interest asks me to walk through California, these mountains I never knew, the muscle memory kicks in of walking with my father. When I can build a fire, get a car unstuck from an ice patch, or when I know to lock the food in the car when we camp, the Love Interest asks where I learned this stuff. My dad, I say, how about you? Did you camp as a child? Deflecting questions with other questions is waitressing 101.

  My father would be up at five a.m., blasting the classic rock station throughout the house, and I would moan, knowing that meant we were hiking. We ranged through Rocky Mountain National Park, up to glacier lakes, skirting the tree line, glimpsing bears, leaning into a quiet that I’ve never found again in my adult life. After my divorce, I walked across Spain and thought, this was his gift to me, this cure. I don’t look anything like my father, but when I walk, I’m his daughter.

  It occurs to me that the Love Interest would have enjoyed him. The way he used to be.

  If I was a different person, I would tell the Love Interest that when it was just the
three of us in the house, my mother and her girls, we never put on clothes and we danced all evening. We huddled together every morning and said, Yay team! before leaving the house to do battle in the world. We bathed together, singing songs my mother made up. She had a beautiful alto singing voice. I have a record of her singing “Fever” with her high school band that I would listen to obsessively, on repeat, before begging her to sing it again for us.

  When my father taught me to drive a stick, he let me throw the clutch out excessively and he laughed. That was a time he was patient. When he came home from those work trips, I hugged him, and I knew he had missed me. He would chase me with lobsters, or dead, iridescently plumed pheasants he shot, and I would jump and run. We could pass time silently in the mountains and I felt understood by him.

  All I say is: I did not erase the good to punish them. I erased it because it hurts me.

  * * *

  Back in the early 1900s when my cottage was a hunting cottage connected to the trails, the Laurel Canyon Country Store was a lodge for the deer hunters that saturated these hills. It’s still a refuge in a community that feels commercially isolated, though Sunset Boulevard and West Hollywood are technically a minute away. My writing days revolve around the Country Store. I walk there in the morning for coffee at Lily’s cart, another walk in the early evening for whatever pantry supply or mediocre bottle of Pinot Grigio I’m in desperate need of. The Los Angeles cliché notwithstanding, with the mood I’m in I haven’t used a car in a while.

  I don’t know where these people come from who hang out at the Country Store all day, from the time I get my coffee in the morning to the time I come back in the late afternoon. They are all older than fifty, wearing the same outfits day to day. They look like people who live in their cars. They have nicknames for each other. They’ve lived in the canyon for ages. Hippies that time forgot, buffered from having to create income by some lucky scheme or real estate break.

  Lily, who runs the coffee cart, is nice enough to me, but doesn’t remember my order from one day to the next. I’m not her people. I’m too reticent and buttoned up. My clothes were bought new. My decade back East has wired my brain against these drifters and burnouts, and I ask myself, Why doesn’t anyone work? But then, what am I doing here? I’m struggling with the idea that I could work by writing. Everyone on the patio looks so at ease, I want whatever drugs they’re on. I reason that they are calmer because they probably don’t have smartphones.

  As I’m leaving, Sam waves me over. He’s “a doctor,” “an analyst,” “a playwright,” “a movie producer,” and an asshole. Though he’s in his sixties, and not attractive, he’s decided that he’s going to date me. Thus he’s my only friend at the Country Store. When I sit with him, he asks me how it’s going, but before I can answer he’s regaling me with exaggerated stories or just lies, waxing on about the fifteen acres he owns up near Mulholland (I’m not sure there are fifteen free acres in these hills, but I let it go). He’s building an artists’ retreat there. He’ll let me apply to participate in the inaugural group. There will be a sign at the gate that says ALL MEN OF REASON MAY ENTER HERE. It’s John Stuart Mill, he says (it’s not), and he says with a wink, All the women have to use another entrance. He also once told me that women are just horny little bitches, and that Margaret Mead invited him to lecture at Columbia, but all she wanted to do was fuck.

  The Love Interest hates him, based on the two times they met when we walked up to Lily’s for breakfast. And I don’t know why I humor Sam, or do I? He’s obviously unbalanced, manic, and a grotesque misogynist. Still I get sucked into his rants, nodding, thanking him for unsolicited advice, placating him. He’s always surrounded by a group of pals, making me feel as if I’m the certifiably insane one. He brought me a bound copy of his one-man play with two roles: the actor—himself presumably—will play MAN and MAN’S EGO who fight to the death. I read two pages and it was, indeed, terrible, despite Sam being one of the leading experts in the world on Freud. He says he’s able to make art because he once assisted the former Shah of Iran on a thirteen-billion-dollar deal, and he lives off the generated interest. One day he tells me there’s an epidemic of women in the streets, women way past their prime that still think they’re hot shit, and he looks me up and down.

  It becomes clear, when he claps for himself after he recites a poem that he wrote on the spot and then sang for me, that I’m nice to him because bits of him remind me of my parents. In his monologues I’ve learned he has a daughter who won’t speak to him (shocking) and though he thinks he wants to fuck me, I know that with whatever antipsychotics he favors, he hasn’t had an erection in a decade. I sit with him because I find his loneliness so familiar. He never asks what I do, and that’s all right because I wouldn’t know how to answer that anyway.

  Nowhere

  The first disappearance came when I was three. The original marker in my ongoing, never-ending anxiety about safety.

  The scattered, inconsistent, and infrequent visitations. The times he was supposed to have one but canceled at the last second, my mother furious, but also vindicated.

  Every time, on one of those rare visits, that he took the money my mother had given us for candy and bought a six-pack of beer to finish on the drive from Long Beach to San Pedro, I would be certain, my arm across my sister like an extra seat belt, that he’d forgotten he had children.

  Coming back from a class trip to Greece, one of the many outlandish features of this private high school, I got really sick on the plane. A fever, a rash, vomiting most of the flight home. All of the parents waited at the gate, excited to have their children home, hear their stories. He wasn’t at the airport. He didn’t answer his phone. My best friend’s mother insisted I come home with them, where she nursed me, and I slept for two days without leaving the guest room. He eventually came and got me. He said I had told him the wrong date.

  There were countless times at the Hygiene house when I wouldn’t know he was gone for work. I’d wake in the morning and notice his un-mussed sheets. If I texted him, he was usually in China. One time stands out because it was winter, and he had taken my car and left me his truck—which had no heat. He had also forgotten to leave the house key where we usually hid it. I got home from my shift at the café and had to sleep in the truck inside the garage, returning to school the next day in the same clothes, raising alarm in my teachers. I stayed with my best friend the rest of the week. He finally texted me that he had been in Japan. He was angry that I hadn’t watered the houseplants.

  Another time he was dropping me off for my junior-year semester abroad in Rome and his gout flared up on the plane. When we landed, his ankle was elephantine and he could barely walk. He made me go from pharmacy to pharmacy begging for Vicodin in a language I didn’t speak or understand. He bought a cane, limped around. We ate with Carly—who would be my roommate in Rome—and her mother. My father skipped out on the bill for lunch. He went out for a smoke and didn’t come back. Carly’s mom said, knowingly, Your dad’s an alcoholic, right?

  Two days later I came downstairs early for breakfast and he was at the front desk with his suitcases and the walking cane, checking out. He was needed in Switzerland immediately, he told me. He left and hadn’t paid for my room.

  Though he flew in to see my mother when she was in a coma at Long Beach Memorial hospital, he left within forty-eight hours. I’m not sure if we exchanged a word, but I remember hugging him and being glad he came. His appearance of health made him seem stable.

  The way my father sold a story, these absences were only signs of his importance in the world. A god on loan from Olympus. Then came our cross-country drive to my senior year of college. But that was already at the end of this story and the beginning of the next.

  Hygiene, Colorado

  The Hygiene house pulsed red on the humid August night that I pulled into the driveway after sixteen hours straight through from Los Angeles. Three years ear
lier, for my freshman year of college, my father and I had driven from Colorado to Ohio. We’d had fun, stopped in St. Louis and had a big steakhouse dinner. He got a distinct pride from my university, Kenyon, modeled on Oxford, where he had gone himself.

  We were repeating that drive for my senior year. That morning I had left California with my sister crying and my mother in the hands of the nurse. My sister’s tears: I didn’t know until I started driving that I was abandoning her. But I knew it every hour I got farther from California: I wasn’t ever going back. I would keep going east. After I graduated, I was going to live in New York City.

  I hadn’t seen my father since Nancy’s coma, and before that, since his odd disappearance in Rome. After an emotionally draining summer, watching my mother advance, then regress, listening to her murmur that she wanted to die while I sat with her in the sun, watching her dive headfirst back into the tequila she had hidden under the kitchen sink, I was looking forward to being with him.

  Red light was the heat lamps he left on in the kitchen, and yellow light came from his bedroom. It was past midnight, and I was surprised he was still awake. When I turned off the car, there was only the hum of mosquitos and the cows’ mournful callings, that Colorado symphony.

  I came into the house, which reeked of cigarette smoke, never a habit of my father’s. The floors creaked upstairs where I could hear him walking. I called out, Stephen, I’m here.

  Sweetheart. I’m just finishing up some work.

  My father had been laid off in the spring, the story convoluted, but I had been in Rome and I hadn’t asked any questions in the middle of my mother’s coma. I wondered what work he was doing. Maybe he had already found a job. I turned off the red lights in the kitchen. The fridge was jarringly empty. I crouched to a cupboard, found a Clif bar I had left four years ago, and ate it as I climbed the stairs.