* * *
After the funeral, the mood remains heavy in town. There is no sign of progress from police. But then, two days after the funeral, something happens. Something that perks people up. A certain vibe. Jane hears the news when she stops in at the Rite Aid to pick up some aspirin. She’s been battling headaches lately, fierce ones that accompany nightmares. Not about Angela. And not about important things. In one, she loses her driver’s license. In another, her keys. She wakes up weeping from the grief of these losses. Other dreams have more weight. In one, she kills a sister. She often kills sisters in her dreams.
Jane gets the news waiting in line at the checkout counter at Rite Aid. She senses a certain buzz. Two women ahead of her have the scoop. Nancy Oster and Susan McLean. They talk about new arrivals in town. Interesting people. Not tourists. Not transients. They’ve got substance, says Nancy. A couple. She, an adjunct professor at Stanford. He, an environmental activist, setting up an office. YourBeaches.org. Jane listens. She senses excitement coming from the women, especially when they talk about the man.
The timing is unfortunate, but they don’t seem to be put off by it.
They’re staying in the Coastal Cottage B&B until they find a permanent place to live.
He seems like kind of a jerk, Susan says, but she says it like she possesses a secret. She smiles in a curious way.
He can check out my beaches anytime, says a woman in line behind Jane who, like her, has been eavesdropping. Open laughter. A women’s coffee klatch at the Rite Aid. The single man in line is looking down at his basket, pretending to tune out.
God knows we need a group like that to take interest in the overdevelopment.
This last is from Janet Holcomb, the mayor of Half Moon Bay. She is in the next line over. The owner of that rare thing, a successful clothing boutique on Main Street. A staunch opposer of new developments on the coast. The previous year, before Jane had arrived, some precious land adjacent to the surfer beach in Princeton-by-the-Sea had been developed into what the builders called an “aparthotel.” Before completion, the place was torched and burned to the ground twice, and rebuilt each time, the third time with twenty-four-hour security guards stationed around the perimeter. The authorities never found out who was behind the fires. Now, farther south, near Secret Beach, a much more grandiose development is being planned, against the wishes of the locals, but very much to the liking of San Mateo County due to expected tax revenues. To everyone’s surprise, the Coastal Commission signed off on it. There is much talk of money changing hands.
Jane listens to the chatter but feels only a great lethargy. Since the day of Heidi’s funeral, she has found it difficult to raise herself from her pillow in the morning. Sleep crusts her eyes, which still look red and puffy when she gets to work. Oddly enough, her plants are doing extraordinarily well. Helen and Adam and the other nursery workers exclaim. The young plants have exhibited unusual growth spurts for no reason. The more mature ones bloom early and luxuriantly. But Jane herself is in a state of dread. This is not over. The proverbial other shoe has not dropped. This will end in tears.
* * *
Sleepy. So sleepy. The heavy air of the nursery is casting a spell over Jane. She can barely keep her eyes open as she checks on her seedlings. The dusky, seductive smell of damp earth. If she’d owned a car, she would have taken a nap in the backseat, the way she’d seen Adam doing in his Volvo, his surfboard and wet suit in back. Adam. The man-child. Jane would have put his age at thirty or even younger, but was surprised when he told her he was thirty-eight. Just a year younger than she is. Still, she can’t help treating him like a younger brother. With affection but no edge. For Jane, attraction has to have an edge to it. Not that she is in any shape to feel attracted. That part of her died with Angela.
* * *
One week after Heidi’s funeral, Jane encounters unexpected traffic on her way home from work. Driving north on the usually empty Route 1, she pulls up behind a long line of cars stretching at least half a mile ahead. As she inches closer, she sees that a large crowd has gathered at Surfers Beach, one block west of Jane’s cottage. She has to wait ten minutes to turn onto her street, obstructed by gawkers as drivers pause to stare at whatever is causing the snarl. Jane gets a glimpse before she turns the corner. An astonishing sight. A whale has beached itself on the sand. People in official-looking emergency vests are gathered around it, with yellow police tape keeping the crowds at a distance from the huge gray mass. An alien in their midst.
Jane decides to check it out. She parks her motorbike in front of her cottage and heads toward the beach. The crowd is growing by the minute as cars pull over to the side of the road and people pile out to stare. Two trucks with satellite dishes park in the bicycle lane. The media have arrived. Or perhaps they never left. Jane can just see the headline: ANOTHER DEATH ON THE COAST.
Jane picks her way carefully down the rocks to Surfers Beach. It’s not easy. No path exists, merely sharp-edged boulders piled on top of each other. You have to balance on odd surfaces to prevent yourself from falling. Surfers somehow manage it carrying six- and eight-foot boards, and look graceful to boot. Jane has always marveled at them.
Jane finally reaches the beach. In addition to the whale and the crowd, the water is full of surfers. It is a great day for the sport. The waves are perfect blue-green tunnels that roll in as if generated by a machine. The foam-topped water dotted with bobbing black bodies on boards. Otherwise the weather is mixed. The sun is shining through a low-hanging mist, too porous to be called a fog. It throws the entire scene into an unreal light.
The surfers come in and out of focus as they glide on top of the waves, the mist wafting around them. One especially is an object of beauty, his taut body in his black wet suit shining, his feet securely planted on the long surfboard. The mist is inseparable from the white of the breaking wave, so it looks as if he is magically gliding above the water. Then he tumbles and comes down with a splash twenty feet from where Jane is standing. He stands up in water that comes up to his waist and effortlessly hops onto his board again, lying on his stomach this time, paddling toward shore. Five feet out from the edge of the water, he slides off the board, tucks it under his arm, and strides toward the beach. With a shock, Jane recognizes Adam, his wet hair long and lank behind his ears. He sees her and cracks a wide smile. He comes splashing through the shallow water at an easy trot.
Jane realizes she is pleased to see him. His uncomplicated face shines. A good sprite. He rests his board on the sand.
Can you believe this? he asks, pointing to the whale. It towers over the heads of the people in the crowd. But as Jane and Adam walk closer, Jane can see that something isn’t right. On the whale’s side are splashes of color, lines, and loops of red, blue, and green.
Some asshole, says Adam. Last night. At first Jane isn’t sure what he’s talking about, but now she can see that WE’RE ALL FUCKED has been spray-painted on the whale’s enormous side. A majestic creature turned into a platform for obscenities. A smiley face has been added on the creature’s tail.
Who would have done such a thing? Jane asks. Adam shrugs. He seems to have taken it in his stride. She would have thought it would have insulted his sense of cosmic justice.
It’s worse than you think, he says. The whale was still alive. The rangers had put wet blankets on it and were coming regularly to hose it down. They hoped it would go out in the second tide today, which is going to be a high one. But whoever did this also poured water into the whale’s airhole. It drowned.
Jane hadn’t known whales could drown. How horrible, Jane says, and means it. So much killing, so much death. She shivers.
Do you think it’s related? she asks. Adam knows exactly what she’s talking about.
No, he says firmly. This is the work of kids. Rotten kids, but kids. That Heidi thing . . . that’s something else.
And yet Jane felt the desecration of the whale is associated with the dead child in some way. As Adam would say, Bad vibes. And
the wind chilling you through and through. Jane has never been as cold as when she first moved here, to the edge of the Pacific.
That last Christmas, in Hawaii, Angela had reluctantly agreed to go on a whale watching trip with Jane and Rick. At the age when parents were toxic. She sat sullenly on the other side of the boat from Jane and Rick, her back to them, staring moodily out to the horizon. No whales. Nothing to see. Rick enjoyed himself by making friends with a couple from Ohio, trading work stories, recalling the horrors of the midwestern winters of his youth. Jane, who could not be happy if her child was unhappy, sat with her back to the boat railing, keeping an eye on Angela without being obvious. Then, suddenly, a whale leaped out of the water. Right next to the boat, next to where Angela was sitting, a spectacular full breach in which it flung its body twelve feet into the air and flipped its massive weight head over tail. It was at most five feet away from the boat.
Jane’s first conscious thought was, She’s going overboard. For Angela had stood up and now appeared to be standing directly under the arc of the descending whale. Her arms were raised above her head. She waved them up and down, something she did when terribly excited as a toddler. Then, a miracle. She turned her glowing face away from the whale toward Jane, who saw the raw joy of the child Angela had once been. Angela opened her mouth and called, Look, Mom, look! Jane felt a pleasure so intense her chest hurt. Her girl.
* * *
The people in Three Sisters are subdued by little Heidi’s murder, but not so subdued that they can’t talk about the new people in town. The woman, the physicist, seen purchasing tampons at the Rite Aid, the man, the environmentalist, at the hardware store purchasing a hammer, other tools. Exciting sightings, as of some fabulous creatures. Jane was curious about how they could make such a stir. Why?
They’re something, Margaret, the youngest of the Three Sisters tells Jane. The couple had stopped by one morning right before official opening hours. She’d let them in early and served them black coffee, the only thing ready at the time. The man, he was impatient, she says. But it was okay. I didn’t mind. She paused. Then she said, They were beautiful. Just so beautiful.
* * *
Jane continues to see Angela everywhere. On the street, in the grocery store. In the pages of magazines. Jane sees her as a baby being rolled down Main Street in her stroller. As a toddler, on the verge of falling as she staggers, naked, across the loose sand of the beach. Jane sees her as a teen, chattering on her cell phone, driving a car badly. As the adult she never became—a doctor at the clinic, a young mother with two squalling children. Jane talks to Angela constantly, as she used to keep up the running commentary when Angela was a baby riding on her right hip. And now we buy some lettuce for our lunch! And here we look from left to right and back to left before we cross the street!
But if this is madness, Jane is a high-functioning madwoman. She goes to work and plants seedlings of elegant Brodiaea, and she talks sense to colleagues, and she eats and she drinks and she jogs every morning as if nothing has changed. As if everything hadn’t changed forever. But inside the darkness is devouring her, cell by cell.
* * *
Time passes. Then two weeks after Heidi’s funeral, a second child goes missing. Another girl. Older than Heidi but still young. Just eight years old. Heartbreakingly, she had disappeared on her birthday. While her mother was out picking up the cake. She’d begged to be allowed to stay home by herself for the thirty minutes. This time it is a little farther south, but still on the coast, in Aptos, a well-heeled beach community beyond Santa Cruz. The mother is interviewed by the Moon News. She pleads. She is already using the past tense. She was my baby.
* * *
She was mine. Who can fully understand the impact of those words, spoken in the past tense? No one who has not had a child. No one who has not been inflamed by the fever of mother love. No one who has not stroked the silken skin of a tiny hand and thought she belongs to me. To hold a small head to your breast and feel the pull of hungry lips. Jane had marveled at her own ability to give sustenance from a place she thought could produce only bile. When her child was born, for the first time in her life Jane felt that she truly belonged on this planet. Did not this child finally make her a member of the human race? And to have this taken away from her! But not right away. The child had lived, was destined to grow and thrive for many years. And each day Jane had with her fed a hunger of Jane’s own, one that could not be satisfied. She wished for the child’s immortality. For she knew that if anything happened to her child, she would not survive.
The cruelest thing that God wrought is that Jane did.
* * *
The FBI finally arrives. Men and women in suits—unusual in Half Moon Bay—descend on the town. Jane gets stopped on the street multiple times. You’re Jane O’Malley, right? Then a nod and they continue walking. She has been profiled.
* * *
The second missing child, Rose, is on everyone’s mind. The FBI have established an office in an empty storefront that used to be called Pleasant Things, full of local handicrafts and food. It had lasted about two years before the owner ran out of cash, as with so many of the interchangeable Main Street shops. The strange men and women are everywhere, as well as the T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing journalists who have established camp. All the area hotels, B&Bs, and Airbnbs are full. Bloggers are driving down from accommodations in San Francisco to get a piece of the action. That’s how Jane thinks about it. When Angela died, the fuss was on a much smaller scale. Much less drama, although the end was the same: the death of a child. Although Angela was sixteen, nearing the end of childhood. The age of innocence had been over for her for some time, and the manner of her death was much less spectacular. The only mystery about it, the only suspense, was whether the wealthy and well-connected driver who mangled Angela’s body would get off. She did. End of story.
Here, search parties are being formed. Volunteers are being directed by police to trawl through the marshes and on top of the cliffs overlooking the sea. They’re also putting up signs as far north as Pacifica and as far south as Santa Cruz.
You know, you are free to take part in any of these search parties, Jane’s boss at the nursery, Helen, tells her. If you feel you need to help out in some way, I’d understand. We could get by.
But it’s your busiest time! Jane protests. She realizes that what she’s feeling is resentment. She does not want to search for Rose, put up posters, or bring coffee to hard-working cops. No one did that for her. Why the fuss over this one life? What was one life worth?
* * *
Jane is careless. She is always losing things. Her comb, her keys, her lipstick. She long ago cultivated the habit of keeping multiple copies of important things. An extra set of keys in the motorbike saddlebag. A second toothbrush in her bathroom cabinet. But Angela was one of a kind. No heir and a spare. Jane had wanted another child, specifically, another daughter. She and Rick had talked about it, had calculated the funds for day care, for medical insurance and braces and broken arms, and college. They had almost agreed to do it. Then Jane was flattened by influenza. It lasted more than four weeks. Thirty-two days before she got out of bed. In the midst of her illness, everything aching, it hurting even to blink, she thought, I can’t do it. Even though Rick was watching Angela, he couldn’t keep her out of the bedroom, couldn’t keep her from snuggling up to Jane shivering with chills in the sickbed. No, I can’t do it, she murmured out loud. On the third day back on her feet, Jane went to her gynecologist and had an IUD fitted. Enough was enough.
* * *
With this latest disappearance, the town closes into itself. The mood on the street, in the stores and restaurants, goes past uneasy to unstable. Neighbors pass on the street without saying hello. Arguments break out among the kitchen staffs at restaurants. The air has a burned, bitter smell. Heavy clouds sink to blanket the tops of the hills, turning the entire San Mateo coast into a dank, unwelcoming cave.
Jane takes long walks on the beach at dusk.
She drinks in the darkening air. Signs admonish: MIND THE SURF—MANY PEOPLE HAVE DIED IN THESE DANGEROUS WATERS. But the current mood of the sea is not one of anger but grimness. The ocean a gray plate of water reaching out to infinity. Flat. This is what despair looks like. This is hopelessness. The horizon erased, the sea the same color as the sky. Jane remembers that the sea itself is dying, as degree by degree its temperature rises, killing off everything that lives in it. But before it goes, it will have its revenge. Jane imagines the ocean rising up, engulfing the harbor, Route 1, and eventually her cottage. She once clicked on an interactive map on the Internet that showed what different parts of the world would look like in ten, twenty, thirty years as humans continued to ruin the planet. In Angela’s would-be lifetime, Half Moon Bay would no longer exist.
Jane is bundled up against the wind, the hood of her jacket over her hair. Still, some strands have escaped and blow behind her like a bright red scarf. Her face is visibly raw from the salt in the brutal breeze. She likes being the only one intrepid enough to be out on the beach in this weather, is resentful to see another figure farther down the beach, walking toward her. Unisex at this distance, but as she gets closer, she sees that it is male—the height and something about the way he carries himself, a superior swing of the leg forward before planting his foot confidently on the sand and the next leg following. A solid straight trunk. She thinks of Neptune, how his torso is always massively developed, his abdomen muscles tight and visible, his shoulders broad. Jane could desire a man like that. The man comes closer. Jane believes she is sexless in her garb and imitates his aggressive walk so as to pass him without notice. She doesn’t want to be a woman to this man; that feels dangerous in these conditions. The sea so flat and nonresponsive, an impassive witness. The wind invasive and the sand soft and sinking underfoot with no one in sight for the miles of beach that stretched in either direction. But at the last moment, her hood blows off and her hair streams out behind her in the wind. Still she strides resolutely past the man. She sees him nod. Then he pulls down the scarf covering his mouth and chin. She doesn’t look straight at him but has a sense of a naked visage, one that is open to the universe, a lovely face. He shouts through the wind, Do you know how beautiful you are? without stopping or slowing down. Jane keeps going, but her mind whispers an exhilarated how beautiful, how beautiful as she continues to walk. An unexpected gift.
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