by Jill Barnett
It was dark and cool in the shadow of the door, and the air tasted salty with the water just a hundred feet away. Neon light from the beer signs in the front window fell onto the bricked street like brightly colored snakes. Along the beach, palm trees cast shadows that looked like giant forearms with splayed hands, and beyond, the water was cavern black out into the harbor, until the running lights flickered in a staggered chain from where the weekend boat traffic moored. The smell of the tide made it seem like summer, and it was warm for April, maybe sixty-five degrees.
There were no cars about, only the occasional electric hum of a golf cart or the clicking spokes of a bicycle. On a bench next to the sand, a couple made out. Jud lit a cigarette, took a drag, then remembered he was going to quit. He took another hit then crushed it out with his foot.
At the north point, where the street ended with the old casino, people spilled out from the movie theater. Ahead of the crowd, a girl walked faster than most, wearing a car coat, her hands shoved deep in the pockets. She had great legs. A group of kids sped past in two golf carts, shouting and waving as they passed by her. She waved and watched them disappear, then she shoved her hands back in her coat pockets and walked on, staring down at the ground as she passed under a streetlamp.
In the warm light, her brown hair brushed her shoulders; her face was distinct and familiar, because she looked so much like Jacqueline Bisset. It was Jailbait, and this was his chance to apologize, but he hesitated. The bar door swung open and almost clipped him, forcing him back and into the shadows. Jukebox music blared into the night and the UCSD guys stumbled out like a family of apes, laughing loudly and shoving one another around.
They began to giggle and took him back to those times when he acted like an asshole for fun. In a haze of mind-numbing tequila they turned and immediately zeroed in on Jailbait. She kept walking, sidestepping away from them and nearer the sand. To her credit she looked straight ahead as they surrounded her. “Excuse me,” she said too brightly and squeezed between two of them.
“Hey, there, sweet thing.” The group tightened their circle around her.
“Please. You’re drunk.” She tried to push through them.
“Come here.” One who looked like a linebacker roughly pulled her against him. His friends whistled and cheered.
“Stop it!” She pushed at his chest as the huge jerk tried to kiss her.
Jud stepped away from the building. “Let her go.”
“Please stop. Please . . . don’t!” She sounded terrified.
Jud gripped the guy’s shoulder. “You. Now. Leave the girl alone.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure thing, asshole.”
Jud grabbed his arm and jerked it away from her. She stumbled backward, out of the guy’s reach, and fell down.
Jud spun around . . . right into the guy’s fist.
“Get him.” His friends chanted. “Get him!” They formed a circle around Jud, who ducked a punch and looked for Jailbait. He threw wild punches and twisted out of their grip twice, then one of them pinned his arms back. “I got him! I got him!” It took two of them to keep him pinned while they punched him. Jud could taste the blood in his mouth. His eye hurt. He blinked, trying to see her, but the edges of his vision blurred. The linebacker walked straight toward him, laughing, fists up, and beat the hell out of him.
8
Laurel sank down next to her dreamboat as he lay unconscious on the pavement. One eye was already swelling. He had a cut on his cheek, and both his nose and mouth were bleeding. “Please wake up. Please.” The streets were empty, but she could hear the distant footsteps of the bullies, who ran away down a side street after she’d screamed for them to stop, then screamed over and over.
“Help! Someone help! Please . . .” She lifted his head off the hard brick into her lap. “Please wake up. Can’t you hear me?” Where was everyone? The doors to the bar were closed. They probably didn’t even know there had been a fight. It was eerie, such silence in the aftermath of something so terribly violent.
He groaned, then winced and slowly opened his eyes.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry. Can you move? How badly are you hurt? What can I do?” Her words all came out in a rush.
He grunted something she couldn’t understand, swore, then rolled out of her lap onto his hands and knees. Silent, his breathing labored, he shook his head and tried to get up.
“Here. Let me help you.”
“No!” He jerked his arm away from her and stumbled to his feet, weaving slightly. “No.”
“Please. You’re hurt because you tried to help me.”
His face was beaten and flushed and he looked like he might fall down. “I’m fine.” He spit blood, then swiped at his mouth and stared down at the blood on his hand with a disgusted look.
“You need a doctor.”
“What?” He looked up again, scowling at her from the one eye that wasn’t swelling.
“I’ll call a doctor.”
He turned away like someone embarrassed. There were leaves and dirt on his back, so she brushed of his shoulder. “Jesus,” he scowled at her. “Just go home. You shouldn’t be out walking around town this late. You’re asking for trouble.”
“I was walking home.”
He pressed his hand to the cut on his mouth and stepped away from her. “Then go home.”
“This wasn’t my fault. You can’t blame me.”
“Go—home.”
She didn’t move.
“Go home where you belong,” he yelled at her. “Go home, little girl, and leave me the hell alone!”
His harsh expression turned blurry from her tears, and she ran—her face hot and flaming—around the corner and down the street into the small plaza by her mother’s studio and pottery shop. Laurel stood there, directionless. In front of her was the dark shop with its Closed sign hanging in the door. That sign seemed to say everything. One word that defined her life: closed. She sat down on the edge of a tiled fountain, where water spilled into a shallow pool.
Again he’d made her feel young and foolish, like some thirteen-year-old with a silly crush making a pest of herself. He called her a little girl to put her down for being seventeen—as if she could change the year she was born. And no one wanted to be twenty-one more than she did, instead of stuck in some kind of hinterland between a teenager and an adult. She didn’t belong anywhere: on this island, with those girls, in Seattle; even her age was undefined. There was a time when she could have talked about what she felt with high school friends. Now, whenever she spoke with them, scattered as they all were in colleges all over the country, there were more long silences than meaningful words. None of them knew what to say to one another anymore.
Things would have been easier, maybe, if her father were alive. Somehow she knew he could have given her the answers she needed during the moments when living became so hard and ugly. Without a dad, she felt as if she were hobbling through life on one leg, when most other people had two.
Her grandmother Julia claimed her dad had been a star and made Laurel promise to never forget. It was important to her grandmother, the star thing. At first Laurel had been too young to understand the difference between a music star and a star in the sky. To children, stars were stars. Confused, she’d asked her aunt, Evie, what stars were, one night when they were standing together outside and the night sky was filled with them. Her aunt had told her that the stars were magical things, other worlds so far away that sometimes it was impossible to believe they really existed. Laurel had been probably seven at the time, an age when she had blind faith in magical things and grew up trying to believe in fathers who were never there.
He was an image in a faded photograph, a name on a record that hung on the wall of her room. He was a star—something impossible for her to believe ever existed. And now, as she sat there feeling inconsequential, she looked up in the sky and searched those stars, wanting them to magically spell out the answers to all her most important questions, like why did people have to die? Why did
life move so slowly? What was real love like? Why was she so lonely? She felt as if she were in a different dimension than everyone else and destined to watch life from outside.
Sitting on the edge of the fountain, she could see copper and silver coins sparkling back at her, the water and lights making them seem bigger than they actually were. There must have been close to a thousand forgotten wishes in the bottom of the fountain. When you didn’t believe in magical things like wishes, you never set yourself up for disappointment. You understood that all too often things looked bigger than they really were.
Laurel pulled a couple of pennies out of her pocket. Two cents. There was a joke in that somewhere. She turned her back to the fountain and closed her eyes, then tossed the pennies over her shoulder and made a wish for someone to love her.
Kathryn could hear the night frogs in the side garden through an open window in the living room, so she sat down in there with a book. It was almost eleven when Laurel came in the front door and hung up her coat. “Hi, Mom.” Exhaustion was in her voice, her shoulders sloped in defeat.
“How was the movie?”
Laurel shrugged.
“You look so pretty,” Kathryn said brightly. “I bet you turned some heads tonight.”
Her daughter looked at her as if she’d slapped her, then ran out of the room sobbing and slammed her bedroom door closed.
“What did I say wrong now?” Kathryn said to the empty room. Everything had been so much easier when Laurel only worried about a Halloween costume or a book report or if she performed some complicated ballet position correctly. In those days, Kathryn had all the right answers.
She tapped lightly on Laurel’s door. “It’s me.”
“Just leave me alone, Mom. Please.”
A blank white door stood between them, a wall of Kathryn’s wrong words and wrong choices. She heard Laurel’s muffled cries and reached for the doorknob, but a voice in her head said, Don’t barge in. She understood self-pity and despair, feeling helpless, confused, and frustrated—apparently the normal state for a mother with a teenage daughter. She sagged down into an overstuffed chair and stared at the empty hallway as if she could divine answers from there, a thread and needle for the worn and unraveling seams of their relationship.
The awful truth was that the move here had made Laurel miserable. Laurel was miserable, but Kathryn wasn’t. She liked living in Evie’s house. It was well over sixty years old, with a small floor plan, tall ceilings, crown molding, and hardwood floors. Lazy beach furniture filled the rooms—Victorian wicker, an antique French daybed, rattan—so different from Julia’s formal white furniture. There had been little color in Kathryn’s life except her own blue bedroom.
Evie had painted every room a different color. The place was all spring and sunshine, yellows and pinks. It felt like a woman’s house. Here she wanted to drink tea from a flowered mug instead of a three-hundred-year-old tea service, her mother-in-law serving her without ever asking whether she wanted the lemon and sugar.
Moving to Catalina had freed Kathryn’s spirit. But her freedom came at a price, one Laurel had paid.
Kathryn waited for the sound of crying to stop. This time she didn’t knock. Inside, a muted hanging lamp and sandalwood candles lit the room. In the corner, flat on the floor, sat Laurel’s bed, covered with an ethnic print throw and mirror-trimmed pillows from India. Evie was right. George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and the Hare Krishna who stuck carnations in your face at the airport would feel right at home in this bedroom.
But the candles flickered softly against the walls, where Jimmy’s guitar hung beside his records, some photos, awards, and framed copies of his handwritten music. Beneath this shrine to her father, Laurel lay curled in a lump on her bed, facing the wall and leaving no doubt that Jimmy’s daughter still belonged to the day he died.
Kathryn sank down beside her. “You want to tell me what’s wrong?”
“No.” Laurel gave a sharp, caustic laugh.
She’s too young to be so bitter. It’s by my example. Her mouth was dry when she asked, “Do you want me to leave?”
“No.” It was a while before Laurel spoke. “I want someone to think I’m special and beautiful and wonderful.”
“I think you’re special and beautiful and wonderful.” Her daughter wasn’t rude enough to say, Big deal, but the words hung there in her silence. “I don’t know what I can do to make you happy.”
Laurel reached out and touched her hand. “Look, Mom. It’s not your fault. Sometimes, like tonight, you just say the wrong thing.”
“What did I say?”
“It’s a long and miserable story.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I have hours and hours.” She settled back against a couple of those gaudy pillows. It took a moment before Laurel started talking, and once she did, everything spilled out of her in a rush of emotion—the boy on the boat, the kids necking in the theater, the fistfight—all told with that double-edged intensity of youth.
Laurel looked at her. “I feel like I’m completely invisible.”
Kathryn had watched her grow up and felt so proud, and so scared. One day, not that long ago, she turned around and no longer had a child for a daughter. The years had turned into a white blur while her daughter became a beautiful young woman. She wanted to tell her she was far from invisible, but Laurel wouldn’t believe her. Kathryn pointed to a black-and-white photograph of Jimmy onstage with his guitar. To anyone who looked at the shot, it appeared as if he were looking at the audience. “See this photograph of your father?”
Laurel nodded.
“It was taken one night when he was playing in Hollywood, at this club on the Sunset Strip. I can’t remember the name. You were maybe three at the time. This was right after his third record went number one. He was about to start the final song and looked down at us. We were in the front row. He took off his guitar and came down to us, then stepped back on stage with you in his arms, set you down, picked up his guitar, and said, ‘You wanna help me sing, little girl?’
“When you said, ‘Sure, Daddy,’ the place went crazy. They calmed down when he began to play and you stood there in front of hundreds of people, completely fearless. You couldn’t have cared less who watched. You sang with him just like you always did at home. Didn’t miss a single note.”
Kathryn handed the photo to Laurel. “You had no idea, but everyone in that place, including your father, was looking at you and thinking how very wonderful you were.”
Laurel sat cross-legged on the bed with the photo, then curled up with it as Kathryn stood. “Thanks, Mom,” she said in a small voice, already half asleep.
But Kathryn didn’t go to sleep that easily. She tossed and turned, haunted by images of fiery car crashes and slashed canvases, and woke with the sheets twisted around her legs, her pillow damp, and Jimmy’s face in her mind. There were moments over the years when Laurel looked so much like him that Kathryn found herself imagining the worst: a mind-numbing fear that her daughter might follow her father’s path to a fateful, early death. Kathryn had to fight her innate and desperate need to overprotect. She didn’t want to be like Julia, who had taught her what it was like to live inside your child’s life.
None of those fears ever materialized. Still, Kathryn hadn’t had nightmares in years. She put on her robe and left the room, then made cup after cup of tea. When the eastern skies turned purple and gold and the sparrows and robins began to sing, she still stood at her living room window, no better off really than she had been. Laurel was so very young, and she desperately didn’t want to be. She still believed and trusted the world that lay before her. Her daughter had no haunting consequences to keep her from running headlong down the wrong road.
But Kathryn was overwhelmed by an uneasy terror as she watched the day break and sipped tea, which had a sudden, bitter taste. It needed lemon and sugar. She walked into the kitchen, doctored her tea, drank it, and went into her bedroom.
She still tossed and turned, staring at the yello
w walls, and told herself she was being silly, overreacting. Of course, fate had better things to do than to follow the Peyton women around, just to create havoc in two small lives.
9
It was two in the afternoon when Cale unlocked the door to the Catalina house. “Hey! I’m here! Jud?” He dropped his bag on the floor and headed for the kitchen, tossing the newspaper and some magazines on the dining table as he beelined for the refrigerator. Leaning on the open door, he guzzled half a carton of milk—one of four inside. Jud had done the shopping: eggs, bread, lunch meat, cheese, steaks, potatoes, salad stuff; and fruit, even a jug of orange juice. There were probably new boxes of cereal lined up neatly in the overhead cabinet. Cale counted off Cheerios, shredded wheat, and corn flakes, pancake mix, syrup, coffee, creamer, sugar. The kitchen had everything needed for three squares a day. His brother—the poster boy for good nutrition. Hell, he even ate perfectly.
Cale tossed the lid from a container of spaghetti toward the sink like a Frisbee, missed, and grabbed a fork. Shoveling cold spaghetti into his mouth, he headed for the sliding glass doors to the deck. The beach lay a hundred feet away, and beyond, the glassy water of a slumbering cove. At the edge of the deck, hanging off the end of a lounge chair, were two really big and bony bare feet.
Jud lay in the sun, his arm slung over his face. He was snoring. Cale kicked his brother’s feet. “Wake up, you lazy bastard, and say hello to your little brother.”
Jud groaned, then mumbled into his arm, “Little my ass. You’re two inches taller than I am.”
“And twice as good-looking, too.”
“Normally I’d argue that point, but I don’t think I can today.” Jud pulled his arm away. His face was a black-and-blue mess.