In 1907, the Ocean Shore Railroad was constructed along the shoreline from San Francisco to Tunitas Glen, south of Half Moon Bay. Developers had grand plans to turn Half Moon Bay and its environs into Atlantic City of the West. Plots were sold. Prices soared. Posters depicting bathers venturing into sky blue waters were printed. The developers imagined large hotels, splendid avenues, swank shops. But they hadn’t accounted for the freezing water and thick fog that covered the coast from June through August. No one came. Or if they came, they left hurriedly, shivering. Due to financial problems and the increasing popularity of the horseless carriage, the railroad ceased operation in 1920, the rails long ago ripped up and sold. Now all that remains are the broad streets laid out in large concentric circles facing the ocean in Jane’s town, Princeton-by-the-Sea. The avenues of Monterey pine trees planted to line those streets are now majestic, fulfilling the long-ago vision of a sophisticated playground for tourists, but underneath them are small rotting wood-frame cottages like Jane’s. The former train station is now a Chinese restaurant. It has a decent Mongolian beef, but do avoid the sweet-and-sour pork.
Who lives here? Who would choose this beautiful but remote spot? It isn’t easy to get to where the jobs are—either the long trek up Route 1 to San Francisco or the dangerous trip up and down the steep hill to Silicon Valley. Still, people do live here and are mostly content. There are the farmers, large and small, mostly organic these days. The shop owners, optimistic and typically disappointed by the clientele, who look but do not buy. These come and go. Some stay after their shops close. They like the fact that everyone pretty much knows everyone else by sight and that it’s a safe place to raise kids even though the schools are lousy. Water is scarce, so building new houses has been banned except for the Silicon Valley billionaires who buy up sections of the coastline and bribe the Coastal Commission for permits.
Take a walk now, down Main Street. See Marilyn Standish, the tough proprietor of the tiny coffee shop. She has had a mastectomy but without the reconstruction surgery. That would be vanity, she declared. She is a Seventh Day Adventist and doesn’t let her daughters celebrate their birthdays, although they secretly defy her and eat birthday cake and accept presents in the cafeteria at school. Keep going. See Bob Orlando, who owns Bogies, the grocery store. Downstairs is the usual food and produce. But upstairs, a trove of oddities. You can buy kissing nun salt-and-pepper shakers, authentic fisherman’s hats, books by local authors on the coastal flora and fauna. Everything jumbled in piles and seemingly forgotten for years. An Aladdin’s cave. Joan Acuesta is there now, sifting through the piles of extra-large flannel shirts and pillbox hats from the 1930s for a gift for her niece, whom she has raised from a baby. Unbeknown to Joan, her niece in seven months will give birth to a child of her own. She will refuse to name a father. Such things happen here frequently.
Go downstairs again and out the door. One block to the left, and you get to the Three Sisters Café. Run by three sisters, naturally: twins and their younger sibling. Opened only one year ago, and now the heart of the town. This is where you go to get the best coffee on the coast, the most flavorful artichoke soup, the freshest and most titillating gossip. You can’t see the walls of the café; they are covered with children’s drawings, notices of births and deaths, advertisements for the Coastal Players’ production of My Fair Lady, hot yoga classes by Martha, dog walking by Ian, and other essential services. You could spend a year reading those walls. By doing so, you don’t feel alone. You understand that life is pulsing around you, that even on Sunday nights, when Main Street is deserted and the fog shadows the streetlights, other hearts are beating around you. The wall brings comfort to Jonathan Hummer, who lost his wife to a sudden heart attack in February. He pulls off a paper tab containing a phone number for Ohlone Singles when he thinks no one is looking and puts it surreptitiously in his pocket. He will get a good one this time. He will get one who doesn’t blow cigarette smoke in his face, who can tolerate having dog hair on the living room furniture. He will.
The Beach Belly Dancers are meeting in the assembly room of the old First Methodist Church two blocks south of Three Sisters. They are mostly women of a certain age who would never wear two-piece bathing suits, who make love with the lights out, who buy their clothes on the Internet. Yet here they are, dressed in gaudy silk-like ballooning trousers and sparkling bras, exposing their pudding-like bellies to the world as they shake and whoop and stop to drink some wine or taste one of Janet Thimble’s homemade oatmeal cookies or plot a political coup on the town council. Together, they are a nation, and they are important. When they leave at 10:00 p.m., their shoulders are a little straighter, their steps a little faster. They return to their sleeping families feeling like army generals after a truce has been declared. What to do with all this energy? They sit at kitchen tables and write lengthy to-do lists and strident letters to the editor of the Moon News.
Darkness descends on Half Moon Bay. Fog mixed with smoke from wood stoves hovers above the houses. The surf pounds the sand, a full half-mile from Main Street, but the rhythm of the sea and its tantalizing scent permeate the porous window frames of the old wooden houses, soothing the inhabitants, luring them to their beds. They know they live in a bubble. They know that dark things, unimaginable things, wait in the wings for their turn to propagate and thrive. The Costanoa’s Coyote, the trickster, will ascend again, in more alluring form, in retribution for past sins. But for now, the town sleeps, content in its innocent ignorance.
* * *
That night, Jane can’t stop thinking about little Heidi. This is unusual. Jane has gotten good at not thinking. She has gotten very good about not feeling. She settles on her couch with a book, something a previous tenant left behind, the cover art portraying a bosomy sorceress fighting an army of horned beasts. But Jane can’t concentrate. She’s agitated. She thinks about the distraught parents. If she had sufficient generosity, she’d walk up the steep hill, offer to sit vigil with them. She’d tell her story. She’d reassure them that everything would almost certainly turn out all right. For them. And she’d be lying and secretly reveling in it. She considers the scenarios the parents are inevitably conjuring as they await news. Jane pictures Heidi as the little Swiss mountain girl in Angela’s version of the book by that name, snub-nosed with blond braids, puffed-out white sleeves, and an embroidered dress. Jane goes to bed and dreams of Heidi, safe on her mountain picking bluebells.
* * *
There is little talk of anything but Heidi at the Three Sisters Café, where Jane gets her coffee the next morning.
Have you heard? asks one of the young café owners as she refills Jane’s cup. Jane has finally gotten to where she can tell the sisters apart, they look so similar, even though only the two older ones are twins. They share a pale oval face with small dark eyes. They look like marmots, with their manes of dark hair caught up in ponytails, their large blue unblinking eyes. Somewhat feral, but nevertheless approachable. Sympathetic.
It is a closely knit community, and although this misfortune has hit outsider over-the-hill people, locals are feeling it deeply, Jane can tell. Voices are subdued. Children too young to be in school are being hugged close by their parents.
They’re organizing a search party, said the sister, her name is Margaret, on her next trip around the tables. Sign up at the sheriff’s office. Jane can’t—she has a job to do; she is, despite her fragile state, gainfully employed—but she leaves Margaret an extragenerous tip in recompense. People nod to her as she leaves. It’s that kind of place.
* * *
As it turns out, Heidi is dark-haired. She is not adorable. It is not an attractive photo that appears on the signs on the street, in the shop windows, in the Moon News. How can a five-year-old girl be so plain? Jane remembers Angela, her friends at that age, so heart-stoppingly lovely, the mothers universally convinced that strangers would be tempted to snatch them away if left unguarded for even a moment. So they weren’t. A generation of tiny prisoners.
/> * * *
Sometimes Jane walks, and talks, and acts as if she were still a mother, still a woman with a family, not a woman alone. A mother walks slower. She has much on her mind. Where is the daughter? Who is she with? What is she doing? And, most important, what could go wrong? A woman without a family is lighter on her feet, less distracted. She’s not thinking, Nearly dinnertime. What shall I feed her? Or see a dress in a window and stop and think, Wouldn’t she look cute in that? before reality sets in.
* * *
Two days pass. Three. People start shaking their heads in the Three Sisters Café. This will end in tears, Jane would tell Angela when, as a child, she played too roughly with her toy soldiers, her Barbie princesses, in an all-out war of the sexes, the pink bosomy Barbies overwhelming the small green plastic soldiers. Rick’s idea of bringing Angela up without gender biases. Jane walks past the photos of the singularly unattractive Heidi papering the windows of the stores along Main Street. This will end in tears.
* * *
Jane is not a believer in Dr. Kübler-Ross. The five stages of grief do not exist. Or rather, they are not stages. Or rather, they are not grief. They are madnesses. Jane accepts the fact that denial, anger, bargaining, and depression are now her life. Acceptance is not, nor will it ever be. Always a maker of lists, Jane has created an Excel spreadsheet on her laptop. She checks off the madnesses as they engulf her minute by minute, day by day, on a scale of 1 to 10. Is what her shrink calls the intensity dissipating? Jane’s shrink says yes; her spreadsheet says no.
Kübler-Ross missed some of the most important madnesses. Shame. Guilt. Hope. And yes, ecstasy. Sleep can bestow glorious gifts, as when Angela arises, whole and unmangled, acting as though nothing has happened. What’s for dinner? she asks. Or, Can I have the car? Or, worse, just a plain inquiring Mom? Then Jane wakes, and it is like hearing the news for the first time.
* * *
How do you define loss? Jane has posted Merriam-Webster’s definition on her bedroom mirror. Deprivation. She has been grievously deprived.
* * *
Here’s what Jane remembers. Heat. Even for July, it had been unusual. All the climatologists saying Get used to it. A hotter world. An increasingly inhospitable planet. Berkeley was certainly hostile that summer, if Jane remembers properly, if she is not fantasizing, if she is not transforming emotions into facts, as her shrink often accuses her of doing. You are the unreliable narrator of your own life. Yet surely it is true that at that time, the garbagemen are on strike, and stinking refuse is piling up on the street, overflowing onto sidewalks. Fans sell out at the hardware stores, as do rat traps. People stop picking up their dogs’ poop. The homeless, who refuse to shed their layers of clothing no matter how hot the temperature, are passing out from heatstroke and dehydration. The university lets them bathe in the fountains, an unusual concession of humanity. And then there is that night, when Jane sits in her living room waiting and worrying. No, she is not psychic. This is simply what she does when Angela is out at night. Where does this fear come from? She had grown up in a middle-class family in a safe middle-class town. Was the word fear? No. Terror. She waits, terrified, night after night.
When the police car pulls up in front of the house—of course, her curtains are open, of course, she makes sure she had a clear view of the street and sidewalk—you could say she was prepared. Jane had anticipated this day from the moment of Angela’s birth sixteen years ago. She hadn’t known what the details would be, of course. There were so many possibilities! But the two uniformed men who tread heavily up to Jane’s door fit in well enough with her fantasies. Yes. It could happen like this. Yes, it could. And then the knock on the door.
* * *
It is 2:00 p.m. at Smithson’s Nursery, and no one has taken lunch yet. Mid-August, time to start gearing up for the annual Pumpkin Festival, the biggest weekend in Half Moon Bay, when people come from all over the state to get lost in corn mazes, drink local designer wines, and pick out their pumpkins for Halloween. Children choose their own pumpkins from the piles of small pumpkins. Parents look for the biggest and most symmetrical to carve into leering faces. At the end of the weekend, they drive home, a pumpkin nestled below each pair of feet like a small pet. Smithson’s doesn’t sell pumpkins, but from experience knows that tourists will also swoop on any plants that flower in autumn. There has been talk of canceling the Pumpkin Festival because little Heidi has not been found. But the talk is not serious. The Pumpkin Festival is essential to the health of the local economy.
Jane likes watching her colleague Adam as he digs up tiny shoots of pepperweed (Lepidium lasiocarpum) from a seedling tray. He is pleasant to look at, his fingers brushing dirt off the leaves, deftly inserting the tiny plants into the larger plastic pots. He’s got one earpiece in, listening to dreamy neo-hippie music that would put Jane to sleep in a moment. Even half hearing it, combined with the somnolent humidity of the greenhouse, makes her drowsy. Adam’s long body is bent over the rough wooden table, over the plants he has nurtured from seeds, his longish blondish hair brushing the green tops. They’re among Smithson’s best-selling ground cover. Suddenly he stands up straight. Dirt falls from his fingers. His eyes are wide. He presses the earpiece closer. The Big Kahuna! he says. Surf’s up! He’s already got one hand out to grab his jacket off the back of the chair and the other hand starting to unbutton his shirt.
Whoa there, cowboy, says Helen Smithson, the owner of the nursery, but she’s laughing like the rest of the staff. Adam keeps his wet suit and surfboard in the back of his aging Volvo wagon, and he changes into it by semicrouching in the parking lot. If you think, as many of the staff do, that Adam looks good in his jeans and T-shirt, you should see him in his wet suit. You should see him out of his wet suit. He’s oblivious to the attention.
Adam has been making noises lately that he wants to be friends with Jane. She hasn’t decided if she’s ready to let anyone into her life, especially someone as sunny and seemingly uncomplicated as Adam.
* * *
They find little Heidi McCready eight days after she disappeared. Her body discovered by the side of Route 1 just south of Montara, in a field of late-blooming tiger stripes (Coreopsis tinctoria).
She had been carefully, even lovingly, wrapped in a woven Indian-style blanket, the kind they sell at the San Gregorio Store and a thousand other places in the Bay Area. Nothing unique about it. Her black hair had been combed and tied back with a pink ribbon. Most disturbingly, her eyes were open, and she had been made up expertly with foundation, rouge, and lipstick, nothing excessive, but enough to make her appear still alive and blooming to the teenagers who’d found her. According to the Moon News, they’d tramped through the field on their way to a grove of Monterey pines that was a popular high school party site and literally stumbled across her, a small figure lying flat, peacefully contemplating the night sky.
* * *
What? Why? Who? There are nothing but questions. The town is horror-struck. But Jane welcomes a sort of equilibrium: for once, the atmosphere in the external world mirrors her internal darkness. The weather cooperates, serving up wind and fog and pelting rain that feels like tiny bullets to the face. For the first time in more than a year, Jane feels human again, connected to others of her species by a common grief.
* * *
The loss goes forward as well as back. The loss of what would have been in addition to mourning what was lost. Today Angela would have been seventeen. She would have started her senior year in high school, would have been applying to college. Jane is looking ahead at grim milestones of this kind for decades. By now, Angela would be graduating from college. By now, advancing in her career. What would she have done? Jane would have bet on a scientist. Angela, underneath her teenage rebellion and emotionalism, possessed a fact-centric personality. Jane would never have dared to make an argument without backing it up with numbers. A data-driven girl.
• The average teenage hours per day spent goofing off: 5.81. (See! I’m not weird!)<
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• The most valued or essential relationship for high school students: their mother (47 percent). (Angela hated that one.)
• Percentage of high schoolers who have had sex: 41.2 percent. (So there.)
• Twenty-nine percent of teens have posted mean info, embarrassing photos, or spread rumors about someone on Facebook. (That doesn’t make me feel any better.)
Not that any of this helped much in the combative teenage years. But it held out hope for the future. A future that didn’t exist anymore.
* * *
The Moon News says the police are not releasing the cause of death, but the buzz at Three Sisters, always on the money, is that there weren’t any apparent wounds or injuries. Nothing that marred Heidi’s appearance, as unprepossessing in death as it had been in life.
That poor kid, says Helen to Jane quietly the morning the news broke. That poor poor family. Already, a shrine has appeared, a large one, with a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and hundreds of bouquets of flowers strewn at her feet alongside Route 1 near the field where little Heidi was found. Half Moon Bay has never experienced a child abduction, much less a child murder, in anyone’s living memory.
Jane is conflicted. She should be ashamed to feel joy in someone else’s misfortune, yet the inevitable schadenfreude has raised its ugly head. I told you so. The madnesses descend, one by one. Jane takes out her spreadsheet, and with shaking fingers, types 10s in all the cells. She calls her shrink for an unsatisfactory session of hand-holding. But the madnesses have taken over her world.
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