by John Moore
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My mother left me a message to call her immediately,” he said. “She never asks me to do anything immediately. My parents are the two most laid-back people in laid-back Northern California.”
“Oh, Tom, call her now. See what’s wrong,” I said. My words were more of a reaction than a suggestion. Tom was already autodialing her number and placing her on speakerphone.
“Mom, what’s up?”
“Where are you? How fast can you come home? Tom, your brother Ethan . . .” she paused, crying uncontrollably.
“What, Mom? What!” Tom screamed.
“Your brother has been killed in a car accident,” she whispered, her voice holding all the horror of the news.
“Ethan killed in a car accident? Where, how?” he asked, his own voice breaking.
Tom went silent as he listened. I had not met any of his family yet, but I felt like I knew them from the stories Tom shared with me during our endless talks. Ethan and Tom grew up in Northern California. Their parents could be best described as aging hippies. Both were born in San Francisco in the mid-1940s. They were early adopters of the hippie lifestyle, participated in the Summer of Love, and moved to Northern California to get closer to nature. Were it not for their physical resemblance and shared genetic material, you’d never know their two boys came from the same parents.
Ethan was the older of the two. He attended Harvard Business School and Yale Law. He chose the corporate world and lived in Chicago. Ethan was a hard-driven career man, who only took one detour from his career path. While in undergraduate school he got a girl pregnant. Ethan didn’t want to take on the responsibility of a wife and a child. The pregnant girl, Sandy, and Ethan went their separate ways. Ethan didn’t hear from Sandy or the child until a year ago. Sandy called Ethan out of the blue telling him said she couldn’t deal with having a child anymore, especially a teenage daughter. Two days later, thirteen-year-old Constance Sanders showed up on his doorstep. He took her in, maybe driven by guilt, maybe because it was the right thing to do. Whatever the reason, he gave her a roof over her head and tried to be a father.
Ethan was ten years older than Tom, the age difference creating a chasm between them that they could never close. They had the same parents and last name, but that was about all they had in common. Ethan rarely participated in family gatherings, opting to forgo the warm and fuzzy side of family life. He wanted things, not people, in his life. Lots and lots of things. He had a Mercedes, a yacht, and a New York house in the Hamptons. He was a fabulous lawyer but not much of a family man.
“Mom, don’t worry about anything,” Tom said. “Where is Constance now? She’s on a flight to Sacramento? How did that happen? Okay, good. I’ll book a flight to Sacramento right away and call you with the details. I’ll take care of everything.”
“Oh my God, Alexandra,” Tom said, sobbing. “My brother is dead. I can’t believe it. He was so young! I know I’ve told you we weren’t close, but . . . he’s my brother. Was my brother.”
“I’m so sorry, honey.”
“Mom sounds devastated. They have a quiet, peaceful life. I’ve told you that neither are in the best of health, and they’re getting old. Ethan’s death will be more than they can deal with.”
“We should book a flight today and go straight to see your mom and dad,” I said.
“I have to check in with my job and let them know what’s happened. Alexandra, my parents are too old to deal with wrapping up Ethan’s affairs in Chicago. I’ll need to make funeral arrangements. His body will have to be brought back to California,” Tom said. His voice was on autopilot, the need to make lists and perform tasks to distract himself evident.
“Uh, Tom,” I said in the most sympathetic of voices I could muster. “What about your niece, Constance?”
“I don’t know. My parents can’t take on that responsibility. Maybe her mother has family who will step up. There are a great number of matters to get straight when we get to my parents’ house.”
He’d just said a mouthful. We already had too many irons in the fire. I had my own one-person public relations firm. I represented Superior Sugar. I was working on a stevia add campaign to determine if they could establish an alternative market to sugar. I also had my career as an investigative journalist to pursue. My blog had thousands of participants uncovering pesticide poisonings and murders in towns all over the world. I had to raise money for medical care for the women and children at Sarah’s House. As of yesterday, I had to help Charlotte with Mandy Morris. How was I going to manage all of this crap? Tom needed me too, so I just had to find a way.
We booked our flight from New Orleans to Sacramento, California, an hour later. The earliest flight we could find left at 6:00 a.m. the next morning. We packed for every possible circumstance having no idea how long we’d be gone. Tom and I sat in the rear of the plane just like we’d done on our flight home from Mexico. The reality of his brother’s death started to sink in. Tom was somber, his cornflower-blue eyes fighting back tears. Still, he wanted to talk. He told me about the good times he and his brother had growing up in California. They were both on their Little League all-star team. Ethan got serious about life in his junior year of high school. He decided the simple life wasn’t for him and he wanted to make it big in the corporate world. Tom went the other direction. He wanted to make a difference for our planet, and by the time Ethan graduated from college, the brothers barely spoke.
“I don’t even know my niece,” Tom said. “She showed up at Ethan’s home in Chicago a year ago. I’ve never even seen Constance in person. Ethan sent me some photos of her, but I’m not sure I’d recognize her.”
Tom brought up the photos of Constance on his phone to show me. She was a thin adolescent with punked-out, multi-colored hair. I counted five colors. She had no visible tattoos but did have a nose ring. I wondered if her tongue was pierced. Tongue piercing was a fad that made no sense to me at all. How could a person with a pierced tongue speak? How could they eat? I guess their reasons had more to do with other skills the tongue could acquire to make life more sharable.
After pensively rubbing his brow, Tom said, “Constance will be with my parents by the time we arrive. I’ll have to go to Chicago to wind up Ethan’s affairs and then back to Cali. We’ll have to send her to boarding school or something like that. Constance has to get a good education. What do you do with a teenage girl anyway?”
“We’ll have to meet her first. Maybe her mother kept her in school. She may be a good student,” I said.
Most of what I said to comfort Tom was wishful thinking. It didn’t sound like Constance had had a very stable life. There must be some reason why her mother sent her to live with her father, then disappeared. That was just weird. Constance must have been devastated by her mother’s rejection.
Tom looked more bewildered than I’d ever seen him. Obviously, he was saddened by his brother’s death—and probably shocked as well. You just don’t expect someone that young to die. He was worried about his parents. He had a career he was serious about, and now, his brother’s affairs to wind up. I understood his feeling of overwhelm. I’d just been through something similar. After Sarah was killed, I had to settle her affairs while balancing my career’s demands. Overwhelmed or not, we had to deal with this.
Our flight to Sacramento was broken up by a plane change in Dallas. Tom and I chose to walk the airport corridors during our layover. Walking had a meditative effect on us both. Tom seemed to relax a little, and he talked to me the entire time about his hopes and dreams, maybe because he realized how short life could be.
“Alexandra, for the next ten years, I want to continue working for companies able to teach me about plant and animal marine life. Not only in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, but in all of the seven seas of the world,” Tom said. “Then, one day, I would like to have my own ship, just like the fam
ous French explorers, Jacques and Philippe Cousteau. Like them, my dream is to make documentary films to teach the world how to protect and preserve our oceans.”
“Wow, Tom, what a wonderful ambition. I remember the Cousteaus’ documentaries. I thought it was so cool how they’d go down in the depths of the ocean, showing us this world that was like another planet. Didn’t he write books as well?”
“Yes, they used all forms of media to help people understand the oceans. Imagine how much more powerful the message would be today with the Internet, social media, and YouTube.”
“It would be amazing,” I said, seeing his vision in my mind.
Talking about his plans transported Tom away from his grief over the loss of his brother and his apprehension of his parents’ future care, seeming to bring him great comfort. But I noticed that he didn’t mention settling down, getting married, and having children. Not that I was ready to have children now. After all, I had my own career to pursue. I loved the adventurous life Tom and I were living. But someday I would want to settle down and have a family of my own. Did Tom want that too?
Today was not the day to worry about those plans though. Tom needed me by his side.
The second leg of our journey to Sacramento was pleasant. The weather was nice, and I slept with my head on Tom’s shoulder. I was almost sorry to arrive—and face Tom’s grieving parents.
They greeted us at baggage claim. They could have been a postcard for aging hippies. Tom’s mother, Rose, had long gray hair in a ponytail down to her mid back. She was slim-figured for her age and rather tall. Tom’s father, James, was an older version of Tom. He still had hair, also ponytailed, just not quite as long as Rose’s. He was built like Tom, tall and slim, but clearly frail, only a shell of what he must have been in his youth. I could see Rose had been crying, but James looked like the stoic type. Both were friendly, but restrained.
After we claimed our luggage, we headed to their car. I fully expected them to have a flower power painted VW van. Instead, they drove a blue Grand Caravan minivan. I guess it was the newer version of a hippie mobile. We crowded our luggage in the rear and headed for their house located outside of Red Bluff, California.
“We feel like we already know you, Alexandra,” Rose said. “Tom’s told us all about you.”
“Just the good parts, I hope,” I joked.
“According to him, it’s all good,” James chimed in.
After the mandatory getting-to-know-you exchange, we addressed the real subject that was on all of our minds: Tom’s brother’s death and his daughter, Constance. James’s voice quavered slightly, and Rose teared up as they shared more details than we cared to know about the accident. Thankfully, Ethan didn’t suffer. When the subject turned to Constance, the mood in the minivan changed.
James broached the subject first. “Constance is a handful, always fooling with that damn computer phone.”
Rose interrupted to correct her husband, “James, she doesn’t like to be called Constance or Connie. She goes by Piper.”
“Piper,” Tom repeated. “That’s not a name. That’s a musician. And what do you mean she’s a handful?”
Before James could answer, we pulled up to their house, and there was Piper, sitting on the front steps in all her multi-colored glory. She was a small girl with a big presence—I could see that immediately. Just like James said, she was tethered to her cell phone, feverishly pecking away on the phone’s virtual keyboard.
A cross-generational, divergent, culture clash explosion was about to happen.
Chapter Five:
California Dreaming
Piper tore her eyes away from her cell phone to look us over as we stepped from the minivan. She reminded me of a pro golfer surveying a difficult putt on the 18th green. No details were lost to her keen eyes as she sized up each of us. Her innate caution, no doubt a survival skill she’d picked up in her short life, kept her from saying a word.
Rose spoke first, “Connie, uh, I mean Piper, I’m happy to see you’ve gotten out of bed. Your uncle and his girlfriend are here.”
Piper assayed Tom, then me, without speaking. She maintained her perch on the front steps, clutching her phone as we approached the house.
“Did you find something to eat?” Rose asked.
Before Piper had a chance to answer, James added, “Almost two o’clock. You should have eaten breakfast and lunch by now. Couldn’t eat anything if you were still in bed or had your head stuck in that phone all day.”
Piper didn’t react except by slightly raising one eyebrow, effortlessly dismissing James’s comment.
Tom stood in front of his niece for the first time, his eyes searching her face for signs of his lineage. Apparently satisfied, he said, “Constance, I am Tom, your uncle.” He consciously avoided using his name paired with “uncle.” Wise, I thought, not to introduce himself as “Uncle Tom” to a suspicious teenager. Not the image you’d want to create at a first meeting.
Without expressing any emotion, she turned her eyes to me and said, “Who’s she?”
“She is my girlfriend, Alexandra,” Tom answered, clearly annoyed by Piper’s lack of respect.
I watched the tense scene unfold without adding to the drama. Here was this fourteen-year-old girl, abandoned by her mother, having just lost her father to a violent death, meeting family members who were really total strangers. How could they think she would just jump up and hug them all? None of us knew anything about her or what her fourteen years of life had been like. What I did know was she had been abandoned by her mother and sent to live with a father with whom she had no connection. Now she was orphaned, having to deal with the expectations of unknown relatives and the cruel hard world. I understood her caution. I’d lost my mother when I was a year older than she. My father’s mind, eaten away by dementia, had long since left my mom and me to fend for ourselves. Being vulnerable made a person cautious. I could relate immediately.
“Hi, Piper, I’m Alexandra. I love your hair,” I said.
As hard as she tried to fight it, a smile cracked her sullen face, exposing her perfect white teeth, her dainty upturned nose moving with her smile, animating her face.
Our eyes locked. She said, “Thank you,” in a soft, easy voice.
James, apparently not much for lengthy conversations, said, “I’m hungry. Let’s eat,” as he took long strides into the house.
“Me too,” Tom added.
“Hope everyone likes Mexican food,” Rose said as she shuffled to the kitchen.
Tom and I croaked, “Hell yeah,” at exactly the same time, bringing a huge smile to Rose’s face. She could tell in the short time she’d seen us together that we were in sync.
It was the first time I’d noticed how Tom and my cadences echoed each other’s. Rose seemed to approve of the chemistry between us, which made me like her. We both offered to help her cook, but she turned us down, telling us it was her kitchen, and she certainly knew her way around it.
Tom’s parents’ home revealed details of his childhood. The furniture was traditional, circa 1980, sporting a couch and recliner. No art decorated the walls. There were scads of photos of Tom and his brother documenting their progression from birth to high school graduation.
After stashing our luggage in one of the two spare bedrooms, Tom and I sat in the family room with James and Constance. James had made us each a drink. I saw Constance studying Tom and me. It looked as though she was trying to make sense of our relationship but she couldn’t quite figure it out. The awkward silence in the room made Tom uncomfortable, something I’d never seen in him. Here he was sitting in a room with the niece he’d just met, quietly saying nothing, and that made no sense to me. Maybe he needed to talk to his father about Ethan and didn’t feel comfortable discussing it with Constance present. I decided to stop referring to her as Constance. By God, if she wanted to be called Piper, then, I’d call her Piper from
here on. My curiosity was getting the better of me, so I decided to unleash my inner Lois Lane. I put down my glass.
“Piper. I need to stretch my legs. Let’s take a walk around the neighborhood.”
“Not much of a neighborhood,” she said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
She was right. The Sanders’s home was on the outskirts of Red Bluff. Still, I wanted to see the town. I’d never been this far west. “We won’t be long,” I assured the others, and we took off.
The air outdoors was clean and fresh, evergreen fir trees growing everywhere, their green needles reaching for the sky, a sea of Christmas trees, making the town seem festive. Humidity was nonexistent, making the air easy to walk through. In the Big Easy, sometimes the humidity was so bad you could swim through the air. But not here; the air was light, yet full of oxygen, not water. Piper and I began our walk around Red Bluff, population 14,000.
“This is my first time in California,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
“I guess,” Piper said.
“I was born in a small town in Indiana. My parents had a corn farm. I couldn’t wait to leave,” I said. “Where were you born?”
“My birth certificate says Los Angeles. We traveled around some,” Piper said.
“I love your name, Piper. It’s beautiful and matches your hair,” I said. “Who did your hair for you?”
“Me,” she said.
She looked at me and laughed. I could tell that she hadn’t done much laughing in her life. Her eyes were those of an old soul. There was much more to Piper than her outward appearance revealed. She was intelligent and quick-witted, but she tried to hide behind her quirky looks and habits. It was her eyes that gave her away, revealing a much deeper intellect than her exterior displayed. Something about this wild child I really liked. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something.
We walked for a short while around neighborhoods of similar homes, and then circled back to the house. Surely the food was ready by now, and we weren’t disappointed. Rose was ready to serve chicken fajitas, complete with onions, sour cream, and guacamole. Delicious could only begin to describe it. James brought out some Mexican beer, and I ate and drank till I couldn’t move. Piper ate the chicken and cheese but pushed the tortilla aside.