“Why?” I insisted, stomping my foot.
“What if you’re in a car accident and you don’t have underwear on?” you said, utterly serious. “You don’t want that to happen.”
I smile into the night. See, Mom? I did as I was told.
Uncontrollably, my eyes drop shut, and I hear a crackle and burst. When I open them again, I see a streak of red shooting into the sky like a glorious celebration. My ears ring, and smoke fills the sky and swallows the moon.
When I wake again, the dark sea still pounds beside me, except this time someone is holding me. A warm hand rests on my shoulder, and my head is lying on a man’s thick, wet thigh that smells of seaweed. My Neptune. I hear sirens—not mermaids but the screaming peals of an ambulance. I force myself up on one arm and see my ugly, hairless, naked plastic doll in the sand.
“Help has arrived.” The man gestures up the hill as I scramble to my hands and knees, digging a hole as fast as I can, my whole body hurting. I shove her down, twisting her legs and arms, her head like a shiny ball bobbing to the surface. I dig deeper, cover her in sand.
The man watches. “What do you have in there?”
“Drugs.”
“Ah.”
I sit back, and he puts out an arm for me to lean against. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Blue lights flash above me on Bixby Bridge. The sirens quiet, and I hear doors slamming and voices.
“Who are you?” I ask, wishing I could rest against this man’s arm all night. “Why did you come from the sea?”
“I’m a marine biologist,” he says. “Sam.”
So, not a god, just Sam the Scientist. Maybe he will still love me, I think. I need someone to love me.
But Sam is gone, and I’m laid out on a stretcher. This makes me laugh out loud. How many stretchers have there been in our lives? How stupid of us all to need them. Suicide. Murder. Accident. And what about Josepha? I see her split-open face, her split-open legs. She never had the luxury of a stretcher, but rape doesn’t count as a death.
It should. Women die countless deaths at the hands of abusive men. Parts of you die off. That counts. How many deaths did you die, Mom?
Thick straps hold down my chest and legs. My neck is held by a brace as the men on either end jostle and tilt and carry me up the hill.
I am so tired, but it’s too bright inside the ambulance to sleep. Besides, the EMT’s hands are touching my face, which stings.
“Ow,” I cry and blink up at a man with toffee-colored skin and light brown eyes flecked with specks of gold. Turns out I’m no longer in the ambulance but on a hard bed in a bright hospital room.
“Sorry.” He pulls his hand away, pinching a small shard of glass between silver tipped tweezers. “We have to get this glass out of your face. Do you need another painkiller?”
“How about the whole bottle?” I say, and he smiles. It’s the sweetest, softest smile I have ever seen.
“Well, then, we’d have to pump your stomach, and that’s a messy business. Let’s stick to getting this glass out. I’m Julian.”
“Nina.”
“Nice to meet you, Nina. I’ll do this carefully so there won’t be any scars.”
He puts a hand under my chin and lifts my face to the light. I close my eyes, seeing Julian’s smile behind my lids while his fingertips, soft and light as cotton balls, rest against my chin as he delicately removes each tiny piece of glass from my face.
He is my real hero, only I don’t know this yet.
* * *
After the hospital, I have nowhere to go but back to my redwood tree where my Labrador puppy, Bilbo, waits for me. I have never had a pet before. He showed up the first night Delia and I slept in this tree three months ago, and he’s been here ever since. When he sees me, he licks my face and whines, and I give him the package of ham I bought at the only grocery store in Ventana.
I wanted to return to work at Nepenthe once I was released from the Carmel Hospital, but my manager took one look at the cuts all over my face and told me to stay home until I had healed. He’d heard about the accident, everyone in Big Sur had. No one could believe all I’d sustained were cuts and bruises or that Bret left the hospital to hitchhike up to San Francisco.
“Your job’s not going anywhere,” my manager reassured me, his thin, muscular arm around my shoulder. “Have that mother of yours look after you until you’re healed up, okay?” When I applied for the job, I lied and said I lived with my mother on Partington Ridge.
Now, three days later, I sit on my bunched-up sleeping bag with Bilbo asleep at my feet. I lean back against the smooth tree trunk reading The Lord of the Rings by the light streaming through an opening in the trunk that is large enough to walk through.
A knock against the trunk startles me, and a man sticks his head in. “Nina Martinez?” His face is in shadow, and I can’t make it out. “It’s Julian, from the hospital.”
“Oh.” I lower my book. Bilbo raises his head, looks at him and settles his head back on his paws.
“Not a very good watchdog.”
“He’s a stray who love strangers because they feed him.”
“May I come in?”
“It’s a five-dollar entry fee. I like to think of my tree as a tourist attraction.”
“How about homemade empanadas instead?” He ducks inside, then straightens to survey the redwood walls encircling him, the trunk wrinkled with age. He runs his hand along it. “This is far out. It’s so big.” He whistles and drops in front of me to sit on his knees in the dirt, patting Bilbo on the head. “You don’t have a roommate?”
He’s joking, but I say, “I did, actually. She went back to LA a few weeks ago. This is her summer home.”
Julian laughs, his whole face angled so it’s lit with the light streaming into the tree. He untangles his arm from the backpack that’s been hanging over one shoulder and takes out a paper plate wrapped in a linen dishcloth. Inside are a pile of golden fried empanadas.
“My mother’s,” he says proudly. “I told her about you, and she asked me where you lived, and I said I didn’t know. Then she asked who picked you up from the hospital, and I said you left on foot. Then she told me I was a fool to let you go with no one to take care of you. That I was to find you and feed you.”
“So you’re here because of your mother?” I tease.
Julian smiles, and it’s the same soft smile he gave me while picking glass from my face. “My mother likes to say that she is only helping along a thing already set in motion. Good or bad, so no blame either way. She plays it safe.”
“Is this good or bad?” I take the plate he’s holding out to me.
“Good.” Julian nods, confident. “It was bad,” he looks pointedly at my face, “but already you are healing. So now—” he gestures at our surroundings “—it is good.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
“Big Sur is small. Not too hard to find a girl living alone in a redwood tree.”
I pick up a still–slightly warm empanada. “These look amazing. Thank you. I’ve been living on saltines and peanut butter.”
“I dig peanut butter.”
“Me, too. Where do you live?” I take a bite, and the crust flakes away to a center stuffed with spiced beef, paprika and cumin so strong the scent fills my earthy room.
“At Packard Ranch.”
“Packard...as in Hewlett-Packard?”
“My father is a caretaker for the ranch. Mr. Packard built a home for us when we moved from Krenkel Corner. I live there with my older sister Rosita, my older brother Miguel and my twin brother Juan.”
“Twins?”
“Identical, born on Halloween.” Julian wiggles his eyebrows up and down. “My mother used to say the devil did it. Oh, did we raise hell growing up. The stories I could tell you.” He laughs with his
entire belly. “And where do you hail from, madame? You were not born in this tree, were you?”
I shake my head. “I was born in New York City to a mother who is dead and a father I see very little of.”
Julian looks down at his feet, as if this truth is hard to comprehend. “Do you have any other family?”
I hesitate, thinking of how I left Grandmother Maria without telling her where I was going or saying goodbye. “A grandmother,” I finally say.
“That’s family.” He sets the plate on the earth floor between us and takes an empanada for himself.
We eat in comfortable silence. When Julian finishes, he wipes his hands on his pants and looks at me. “When I was fifteen, I left home for two months without telling anyone. I hitchhiked up the coast and slept on the beach and ate food from tin cans. I wanted to see what it was like not to be attached to my brother, not to have to help anyone or do what anyone else told me. What I discovered was that I was lonely, and it felt good to be needed. When I returned home, my father sat me down and said that family is not a choice. They are our bones and our blood, our past and our future. ‘It’s not always good,’ he told me, ‘but it’s always important. Pain and love and laughter and anger go together.’” Julian picks up a stone and jiggles it in his palm. “My father thinks he is very wise.” He smiles, standing up. Bilbo stands with him, wagging his tail against Julian’s pant leg.
When I see he plans to leave, there’s an ache in my chest. I don’t want him to go. He’s right: it is lonely.
Squatting, Julian takes a pen from his backpack, tears off an edge of the paper plate and writes something down on it. When he presses the torn paper into my hand, his touch is soft and lingering, and the pressure sets my skin tingling. “If you need anything.” He drops my hand with a tone so carefree and easy that I want to get up and follow him to whatever untroubled place he comes from.
Leaning out from the archway of my tree, I watch him pass more redwoods so tall and mighty that he becomes as small as an insect in the distance.
“Bye,” I call out.
“Later, Nina.”
I like that he says this instead of goodbye. And when I look down at the torn paper, I see his name, Julian Lopez, written above a Big Sur address.
I lie that night with the note tucked inside my pants pocket picturing Julian’s clear eyes and uncomplicated smile as I snuggle up against Bilbo and wonder what it would be like to run a hand over that boy’s honey-colored skin. Tonight, my hollow tree feels sad and lonely. Besides, it’s damn cold in my sleeping bag. It will only get colder, I think, aware that I cannot stay here all winter. Julian’s visit, his gesture of kindness, bringing me food from his mother who has never even met me, has made me feel sorry I left my grandmother all alone.
In a month, I will hitchhike back to her, back to the pleasure of a hot shower, television, sherbet ice cream and a bed with clean sheets. Grandmother Maria will place papery hands on my cheeks and kiss me, welcoming Bilbo and me into her small home with tears of gratitude.
But before that happens, I find a way to say goodbye.
After the car accident, when I saw you in the sky and felt your arms around me, when I was certain you were the one who had set me gently on the sand away from the car and I heard you say I am right here, Nina. I have not gone anywhere, I knew I couldn’t go through the rest of my life expecting you to save me. I had to let you go.
Only, I am not ready to let go. In Big Sur, with no drugs or boyfriends, just Bilbo who asks very little of me, I am finally able to be alone with you. You sit with me on the dirt floor of my tree while I eat sliced bread from the bag, you stand in the gas-station bathroom looking bemused as I wash out my clothes, and you rest silently with me on the beach and lay your head on my shoulder and don’t ask any questions. You are with me while I crush eucalyptus leaves between my fingers and press them to my nose, and there every morning as I walk to the water and watch the fog burn off to sunshine, lifting my face to it, waiting for the sand and rocks to heat up so we can lie in it together and gather its warmth. I learn to be with you without needing you, and this shakes something awake deep down inside me where I’ve shoved all the Incidents, your death abutting my abusive stepfather, the absence of a real one, the rape of a cousin and the drug-numbed loss of my teen years. And so, I reach for them, pull them out and lay them open on the beach.
For each Incident, for my father and Josepha and you and Alfonso and Che, I place a piece of driftwood upright in the sand. I sit wrapped in my sleeping bag on the hard-packed, stony beach; the sea smells sharp and fishy in my nose. There are mountains of cumulus clouds on the horizon. I stay for a long time watching the tide come in, the waves lapping toward my towers of wood and memory, the pieces falling and sliding toward the mouth of the sea. Some get stuck and lie helpless until the waves return to lift them away, and as the Incidents of our past grow to dark specks on the ocean’s surface, doubt runs through me. I am washing away our story.
Stricken, I drop my sleeping bag and run barefoot into the waves, my jeans rolled to my knees. I want to sink into the water, to cover my eyes and weep, but I hear a voice, sharp and clear. Nina, it says, you cannot grow small anymore, and I understand that it isn’t your voice I hear this time but my own. So, I widen my arms, force them out into the air, lift my full face to the sky and scream. I scream and scream until my throat is raw, my face hot and wet with spray. The sand and salt and seaweed sting my calves and ankles, and my feet are numb, but something soars out of me, and I am left weak and relieved.
Instead of flying off into the ocean, I simply give over to it. In a way, I have been hollowed out and emptied and washed up on shore because I know that everything will be different. I can keep you inside me and let you go. My story will not be your story. I am the sole narrator now, and I do not need to follow the Brets of the world when I can seek the Julians.
I touch his note in my pocket, safe and dry and filled with possibility. I don’t need center stage, or any larger-than-life moments. I can hold your memory but not be swallowed by it. My life can be simple and beautiful. It can be whatever I choose to make it.
Epilogue
* * *
Big Sur, 1997
When the writer comes, I am an old woman with Julian and the sea by my side.
I do not know that the girl is a writer when she steps through the door with her mother. I don’t think she knows she is a writer, yet.
I am unprepared for the visit. The washing machine is broken, and the needed part won’t be in until next week, which means there’s laundry piled in the bathroom, and I have absolutely nothing clean to wear. Julian went to work with the same shirt on he wore yesterday.
“That’s filthy,” I said earlier this morning, propped on one elbow in bed watching him button his cuffs.
“I don’t think the fence post I’m fixing will mind,” he said, smiling at me as he tucked his shirt into his jeans and secured his belt. “What are you doing awake so early, anyway?”
I flopped back down. “The wind woke me.”
“It’ll blow off the fog.” Julian leaned over me with both hands on the bed. “You know how I like to kiss you goodbye in your sleep.”
I closed my eyes and smiled. “There. Asleep.”
Julian pressed his lips to mine and whispered “Love you” before picking up his boots and slipping out of the bedroom.
Even on Saturdays, Julian is up and out first thing. He and his twin brother have taken over caretaking the Packard property for their father, and they’re usually at it before the sun rises. Julian is a hard worker and loyal as the day is long. No matter how early he leaves, he never forgets to kiss me goodbye. I always pretend to be asleep, but I almost never am. A few years back I woke to a silent house and was filled with dread at the thought that he’d left without that kiss, but then I heard the toilet flush and realized I’d just slept through his morning routine.
Julian and I live in the same house where he and his siblings grew up. The road to the house winds down off Route 1 and ends on a twisted cliff overlooking the sea. It’s small, with dark-paneled walls and tiny windows. The older Lopez siblings live in town, but I wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else. From the kitchen window I can see the ocean far below, undulating like a breathing body, the sound of the surf a constant surging in my veins. Its moods, I think, are no different than humans’, placid and tranquil or mighty with rage, depending on the weather.
When the coffee is brewed, dark and sweet, I sit at the round kitchen table and watch the sky lighten to a washed-out gray. This early hour is my favorite time of day. The night requires sleep, the day action, but the crack of time separating the two requires absolutely nothing. It is a pause and an inhale, the breath between movement and stillness. It is my remembering hour. Today, my mother is more vivid in my mind than she has been in years. I see her dancing with her sister Danita in a whitewashed living room in Guanajay as the sky outside my window in Big Sur sheds its gray and burns a vibrant blue. A Cuban blue, I think. One my mother would have loved.
Later, kneeling in the hallway repotting my jade plant, my sister-in-law Rosita comes banging through the front door. “Yoo-hoo, Nina.” She shifts her bag of groceries to her other hip so she can lean down and give me a one-armed hug. “I’ve brought muffins from Deetjen’s,” she says, heading to the kitchen, the smell of freshly baked pastries trailing her.
I pat down the dirt around my newly arranged plant and heave myself to my feet with some difficulty. My knees are not what they used to be, and this annoys me to no end.
In the kitchen, Rosita is arranging the muffins on a plate.
“Raisin-walnut?” I ask, washing my hands in the sink.
“And blueberry with lemon poppy seed.” Rosita crumples the paper bag and tosses it into the garbage. “I hope it’s all right, but an old childhood friend and her daughter are coming to visit. She lived in this house with us for a spell when we were kids and wanted to see it again.”
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