Cecily told her that San Francisco had a population of only two hundred before the first gold was discovered. Imagine! There were more parents than that in the volunteer database at Cecily’s school. It was not even a town; it was an outpost, the raw beginnings of something, that’s it. At the start of the gold rush, Cecily had said, the nuggets were so big and so blatant that gold seekers could pick them up right off the ground. Nora took a moment to imagine what that must have been like, gold more common, more easily located, than the insidious Marin dwarf flax. The promise and exhilaration of that!
Driving, driving, on her way to the Miller property, no big deal, just driving, a drive she’d made dozens of times when the home was on the market. The house had been a snap to sell. It had practically sold itself. The market had been on an uptick then. There was almost no inventory in Marin. She could have sold that home to at least a dozen families, it was simply her bad luck that it had gone to Loretta and Barry Miller, who, instead of being happy with what they got, wanted to expand. Go figure.
The moonlight dancing in San Rafael Bay was truly lovely. Nora should make a point to get out late at night more often. She should look at the water more often. She didn’t take the water here as seriously as she took the ocean in Rhode Island. She saw the water almost every day, either the bay or the majestic Pacific, but these weren’t real beaches; these weren’t places you could go with your friends and stick your toes in the sand and get a good old-fashioned sunburn while you drank soda (or beer poured into soda cans) and gossiped. If you were only halfway sane and a tremendously talented surfer you could go to Mavericks near Half Moon Bay, and certainly the view of the ocean lashing the cliffs was breathtaking. But if you were just a regular person, just a person who wanted to hang out at the beach, you were mostly out of luck. Water water everywhere and not a place to swim.
These thoughts occupied Nora for much of the short drive, but then her anxiety returned with renewed strength and vigor. She should turn back, she should forget this whole expedition, let fate run its course. Turn this wagon around, Gabe. Girls! We’re going back. No gold for us. If the Millers sued her, the Millers sued her. If they lost their home, they lost their home.
Okay. What if? So they’d sell their home, and live—where? And pay for Angela’s college tuition—how? They wouldn’t be able to. The Hawthornes would become one of those families you heard about who made one mistake and, kaput, there went their lives. People would say things about them like, They were doing so well! Why’d they go and risk it?
Or, worse, I always knew there was something about them. Don’t you think, in the end, they got what they deserved? They would become a cautionary tale, like the baseball manager with the doomed land investments or the brilliant businessman who bet it all on one horse.
Nora didn’t want to become a cautionary tale. She wanted to keep her regular life. She wanted to continue working for Arthur Sutton. She wanted to take care of her children and love her husband. (If he wasn’t having an affair with the intern and planning to divorce her. Although if he were having an affair and not planning to divorce her she’d have to divorce him once she found out, in the name of feminism and also because she couldn’t imagine ever sleeping with him again after he slept with someone else. Nora was monogamous to the core.) She wanted Angela to get into Harvard because it would make Angela and Gabe happy and would give them more reason to go east. She wanted to visit her mother and Marianne in the summer and take a day trip to Newport and eat a lobster roll at Monahan’s. Cecily loved the lobster rolls at Monahan’s, and Maya loved the mozzarella sticks.
And to keep all that, she needed to do this.
She took a deep breath, exhaled audibly. She found a classical station on the radio and was momentarily calmed by the music; her mother used to listen to classical music in the afternoons, and the sound brought to mind coming in the door after school, the hiss of an iron across white dress shirts, the sound of the oven door creaking open. Nora was too type A for listening to classical music at home. Or, for that matter, for ironing. They sent Gabe’s shirts out to the dry cleaner’s for pressing, and Nora herself favored clothes that tended not to wrinkle, or that wrinkled in such a way that the wrinkling seemed purposeful.
When Nora reached the Millers’ street she did something she hadn’t done since she was in high school, cruising toward the beach at Narragansett in Stuart Mobley’s old Buick: she turned off the headlights and coasted quietly to a stop.
She was dressed like a cat burglar, in all black: black yoga pants, never used for their expressed purpose, and a black turtleneck that called to mind either Steve Jobs or an East Village poet from the 1970s. Nora detested turtlenecks and had had to reach deep into the archives of her closet to recover this one.
She had with her a backpack with a flashlight and a small trowel she’d found in a mislabeled bin in the garage. She got out of the car on her little cat feet and headed around to the back—the Millers had no front fence, just the one along the back. No dog, which was a plus. Also, they weren’t home. They were in Hawaii, drinking cucumber and pineapple mojitos and eating farm-to-table vegetarian dip at the Ritz-Carlton on Maui. (Nora, in a fit of envy and curiosity, had looked the menu up online.)
I’m not doing this, she told herself. I am not. Doing. This.
And yet she was! She was doing it. Here she was, closing the car door softly, softly, so softly that she didn’t hear so much as the whisper of metal on metal. Here she was, sneaking around to the backyard. Here she was turning on her flashlight, shining it along the back fence. Here she was, looking, looking. Looking for the plant that was keeping the Millers from expanding their already-large home.
Except. Here she was, and here was the flashlight. But where was the plant?
Here she was, looking harder, looking more. She had thought it would be easy. But she’d neglected to consider something obvious. The Marin dwarf flax was a flowering plant. Flowering plants didn’t flower all year long, at least that’s how it worked in the botanical world that Nora imagined, though she knew little about it herself.
She had thought that under the light of the (nearly) full moon, with the pinky-white flowers glowing against the fence, it would be easy to pick them out. Loretta Miller had said there were only a few plants, three or four; she had told Amanda that it was astonishing and irritating that such a small number of plants—a smattering of weeds, really—should keep them from expanding. This job should be easy. Easy peasy lemon squeezie!
But the goddamn plants weren’t flowering. It was November, not the middle of summer. Nora shined her flashlight along the edge of the fence. What did the dwarf flax look like when it wasn’t flowering? She should have brought her iPhone in her backpack so she could take a quick look, but she’d left it in the car. Not worth going back for: too risky, even though the Millers were on vacation.
An anomaly, Loretta Miller had told Amanda. Just our house, and the house next door. So maybe the plants were right on the border with the neighbor’s yard. But which neighbor? There was a house on either side. Nora crept to one side of the yard and shined the flashlight at the corner of the fence. She was too warm in her turtleneck. How did Steve Jobs stand it? Of course, he had a total of zero body fat. Lot of good that did him, in the end. Don’t be uncharitable, Nora. Just focus on the task at hand.
Well, she’d just have to pull up anything that looked like a possibility.
The back door opened. The outdoor lights came on, illuminating the pool, illuminating the chaise lounge chairs that (Nora knew) the Millers had purchased from the sellers for a very good price, illuminating the palm trees that stood sentry around the pool, and illuminating (Nora was certain) Nora herself, standing in her cat-burglar suit, holding a trowel and her ten-year-old’s backpack.
And then a voice spoke: a strident, possibly frightened female voice, a voice that did not belong to Loretta Miller.
“Hey!” said the voice. “Hey! Is someone out there?”
What was Nora suppo
sed to do? Answer, not answer? She was, of course, out there.
“I’m calling the police,” said the voice. “Don’t you dare come any closer. I’m calling the police.”
Housesitter, thought Nora. Of course. Typical. Loretta Miller wasn’t going to leave her house unattended during a vacation. At the same time she thought, Police! How formal. In Rhode Island people would say cops. And at the same time she was thinking all of that she thought, Don’t just stand there, Nora-Bora, you idiot. Run!
But she couldn’t run. Her feet were frozen; her legs were paralyzed. And from a great distance a mind that didn’t seem to belong entirely to her wondered, Is this what it feels like to die of shame?
CHAPTER 32
ANGELA
After the team warm-up, a slow jog out on the course for a little more than a mile and then back again, checking out some of the more ominous hills, the team split up, each to his or her own particular pre-race routine, gum chewing or water sipping or a final anxiety-laden trip to the trio of porta potties along the edge of the woods. Angela liked to stay near the school banner, which was held up by two rusting metal poles that the coach screwed into the ground.
Twenty minutes until race time.
Angela started with a little Mumford & Sons for relaxation, while she was working on her hamstrings, laying her jacket on the cold ground and stretching herself out on top of it. She rolled out her tweaky left calf with her massage stick. At that point she switched over to a little Lumineers, then some Avett Brothers, music that she did not always listen to at home, due to the fact that her parents also listened to it, and that made it faintly embarrassing, but which she liked anyway. She pulled up her socks, exchanged her regular running shoes for cross-country spikes, tied them. She checked to make sure the laces were even with each other, and that each loop was the same size as each other loop. An acceptable quirk, or a sign of a touch of OCD? She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure it mattered. At this point. She double-knotted them, then triple. Many a cross-country runner had been undone by an untied shoelace, and she didn’t want to be that guy. (Remember Angela Hawthorne? Class of 2014? She was a star cross-country runner, and then there was that one time she didn’t tie her shoelace tightly right before that big regional meet and she face-planted into a tree root, had to have three different surgeries on her front teeth? Didn’t get into college? Yeah, that girl. You don’t want to be that girl.)
She put her hair into a ponytail that was not too high (swung too much), nor too low (made her neck sweat), and she wrapped the elastic three times. Not two, not four. Three.
Ten minutes to race time.
She flipped through her iTunes library and upped the ante: Katy Perry. Roar.
A shadow crossed in front of her. Angela tried to ignore it, but then the shadow sat down next to her and resolved itself into Henrietta Faulkner. Angela glanced at her watch. Eight minutes to go. Runners were gathering near the line. Two incredibly tall, incredibly skinny girls in green uniforms were doing strides across the grass. They looked as fresh as a couple of daisies. Cliché.
You held me down but I got up…
“Hey,” said Henrietta. Angela pulled the earbuds from her ears. Seven minutes.
“Hey,” said Angela. She didn’t like to talk before races. Everybody knew that. Everybody.
“Senior year, huh, I can’t believe it. Can you believe it? Last meet of the season. Last meet ever, for high school.” Henrietta Faulkner was nervous; she was terrified. And when Henrietta was terrified she wanted to talk. Angela, who was also terrified, wanted to curl up into a little ball.
“We still have track in the spring,” said Angela.
The music was coming through the earbuds even though they weren’t in Angela’s ears anymore. Henrietta’s face lit up. “I love that song,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Angela. Everybody loved that song. Angela was so unoriginal.
I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roaaaaaar…
“But track,” Henrietta said. “That’s not the same as this. Not for us. We’re cross-country girls, you and me.”
Angela thought, You and I. But she nodded, looking over the line of trees, looking at the path that led to the first hill.
Five minutes. She stood up, stretched her calf. She didn’t want to agree too heartily with Henrietta Faulkner, although of course she was right. They were so much alike, the two of them. Good students. Fast runners. Cross-country girls. Even their ponytails hung from the same part of their heads. That’s why they had been friends, way back when. If she squinted she could still see the old Henrietta, the eleven-year-old with the striped bathing suit whose strap tied in a thick knot around her neck, hair tangled from the water slide, face smeared with blue frosting from the Raging Birthday Cookie-Cake.
“Yeah,” Angela said finally. “I guess you’re right.”
Henrietta stood along with Angela, and mimicked her quad stretch. After she released her foot she leaned toward Angela and said, “I heard something.”
“Yeah?”
“I heard that the Harvard coach is here today.”
“You did?”
“I did. I don’t know who he’s watching, there’s a girl from Novato who’s applying too and also I think one from Redwood, then of course there’s us”—here she delivered a friendly-ish punch to Angela’s upper arm—“but I’m so nervous I could just throw up, aren’t you?”
“Well, now I am,” said Angela. She’d had her usual pre-race breakfast, a slice of whole-wheat toast spread with almond butter, but she could feel it churning around. Why hadn’t Henrietta kept that to herself? God.
But once said, the words could not be unsaid. They were out there, and now Angela was scanning the crowd of spectators, wondering which one he could be.
“I’m sorry,” said Henrietta. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. Should I not have told you?” Henrietta was looking at Angela uncertainly. She looked almost like she was going to cry. When had Henrietta become such a bundle of nerves? She used to be tougher than nails, able to hold her own in any situation; she used to ooze confidence. At the infamous eleventh birthday party she’d been the only one out of all of them to go down the Triple Slammer Flume, and she hadn’t blinked. Some adults went up there and freaked out and had to go backward down the ladder to get out of it. Not Henrietta. She’d just hopped on her rubber mat and she’d gone.
“Well,” said Angela. “Yeah, I guess I wish I didn’t know. But I know now. So…whatever.”
They both scrutinized the crowd standing past the starting line. They were looking for—what? A man in a crimson jacket that said COACH on the back? A man with a clipboard and a fountain pen? A man with his palm out, holding their fates? All of the spectators simply looked like parents: a little excited, a little nervous, a little grumpy, a little chilly. Most of them held take-out coffee cups and they stamped their feet on the ground like horses at the Kentucky Derby.
“I’m sure he’s not here for me,” said Henrietta. She was talking really fast now, like her words were racing one another. “If either of us is getting in it’s you. I’m mostly applying to get my parents off my back. It’s a super-big deal to them.”
Instead of saying “Mine too,” Angela said, “Don’t be ridiculous,” too sharply. More gently she said, “You have as much of a chance as I have.” Though, of course, obviously, she didn’t believe that. They wouldn’t both get in early, would they? And if only one of them was to get in, well, it would have to be Angela. Right? She was valedictorian. She was the better runner. She was team co-captain. She was smarter.
Four minutes. Angela turned off the iPod, put it in her bag, stripped off her final layer of warm-ups. She was wearing the bun huggers, which looked and felt like underwear. Henrietta was wearing shorts. Personally Angela thought everyone should wear the bun huggers in a big race like this. They were more legit. They made Angela feel invincible, like she was Katy Perry herself, flying through the jungle, painting the elephant’s toenails, palling around w
ith the monkey.
Time to line up. They all moved toward the starting line: girls from Tamalpais, Redwood High, Novato. Girls with fishtail braids or ponytails or hair cut super-short to show off their fierce expressions and their hard bright eyes. Some of them bounced on their toes but others remained very still, poised at the starting line. If Angela looked too closely at any of the runners’ faces she saw her own emotions reflected too well in their faces. They were all pale, slender, nervously intense, not blinking. Breathing audibly already.
You had to get out hard. That was key on this course—any course, really, but especially this one, because half of it was single track. Once they got into the single track it was hard to pass. Impossible. Plus Angela’s specialty was going out hard, freaking out everybody else in the race, and then surprising them by not dying. It was part nature and part art.
Two minutes.
“Two minutes!” called the official. The tension increased by a notch, two notches, three. Angela’s coach stood on the sidelines with the rest of the coaches, blowing into his hands and rubbing them together, exchanging a word or two with the men or women beside him. He knew better than to give instruction at this point, especially to Angela. He knew she had a good chance of winning the whole thing if she kept her head in the game, though neither of them had said that out loud, not since the beginning of the season. He knew that Angela, like all good runners, was fifty percent steel and fifty percent crazy and that on any given day one could overtake the other. Did he know about the Harvard coach?
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