Jane relaxes and goes back to sleep.
But the next day brings more horror.
A three-year-old girl goes missing while her father is shopping at the Twice as Nice warehouse in Princeton-on-the-Sea. The alarm previously reserved for earthquakes, tsunamis, and other catastrophes wails through the towns of Princeton, Half Moon Bay, and Montara. Jane, at work at Smithson’s, chills when she hears it. All the customers in the nursery look to the staff for answers. They have none. People block the exits in their hurry to get out. Jane finds out later that parents froze in the street, grabbed the hands of their children, and crowded into the police station, the Moon News offices, and the Three Sisters, anywhere there were others, to get news and comfort.
When the child is later found a block away, behind a warehouse, playing in a mud puddle, the people in town don’t relax. They are reminded that they are in a war zone. Jane doesn’t sleep that night. Adrenaline pumping through her veins, she washes down the walls of the kitchen, scours the toilet, does anything to avoid her cold bed.
* * *
In many ways, Half Moon Bay is a strange place to live. Small but not small enough to be called neighborly. People know each other by sight. They know many names. But they can’t necessarily put them together. Instead, they identify each other by their jobs, the clubs they join, unique physical characteristics. The tall sixtyish man who plays sidekicks in the theater group productions. The woman who leads the coastal trail preservation group. A member of the poker club.
There are no jobs on the coast except service and retail. Professionals like scientists or engineers or accountants, even doctors and dentists, commute to San Francisco or Santa Cruz, Stanford, or Silicon Valley. So the sort of people whom Jane would previously have consorted with are gone from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., and tired when they are in town. They-who-work-over-the-hill. That’s how they are referred to. Jane is known as the redhead who works at Smithson’s Nursery. She is distressed by even this level of familiarity. Anonymity was and is her goal.
When Jane escaped Oklahoma for Berkeley at the age of seventeen, she discovered the amazing fact that things grew, actually flourished, in the soil. In Oklahoma, if they were lucky, tufts of crabgrass might appear in the field surrounding the truck stop before the summer heat parched the dirt into jigsaw puzzle pieces. But in Berkeley, between the cracks in the sidewalks on College Avenue or Shattuck grew gorgeous blue, pink, and yellow flowers. Jane began collecting them, pressing them between waxed paper in the pages of her chemistry textbook. Jane began learning their names. Checkerbloom (Sidalcea malviflora). Peppermint candy flower (Claytonia sibirica). Hummingbird sage (salvia spathacea). Her decrepit student rental house included someone’s long-ago garden grown out of control. She began spending her time outside, weeding and taking more specimens for her chemistry book. New delights every day. After her flowers were dry, she’d glue them to small white canvases bought at Utrecht Art on University Avenue and carefully label and frame them. Her own private gallery.
Then one day during class, Jane dropped her book, and out fell the dozen or so flowers she was currently pressing. Her professor noticed. She came down the aisle and helped Jane pick up the treasures. Then the professor said, You should take Professor Silbert’s class on native California plants, and added, and of course you’ve been to the university’s Botanical Gardens? Two sentences that changed Jane’s life. She felt like a new person. A new start to a new life. She thought she would feel the same moving to Half Moon Bay. But this time she was too laden with emotional baggage to make it work.
* * *
Alma hands Jane an avocado. This one should work. She is right. It is firm but gives slightly. When Jane slices it open, the pale green foamy interior smells musty, full of mysteries. She doesn’t do anything for a moment except marvel at it. Nothing that has been picked ever ripens for Jane. Yet it is perhaps a sign of her madness that she keeps hoping. She buys hard avocados, firm pears, hard peaches. She places them in a bowl on her kitchen table, where they inevitably go from hard to rotten, brown-spotted, smelling of fermented alcohol, festering with fruit flies. Inedible. Jane cuts off pale soft green slivers onto a plate, which Alma takes and shunts into the greens she has been washing. Two women preparing a meal. A man outside waiting to be fed. As traditional a suburban scene as you could get. Yet it feels like anything but. It isn’t safe. So why is Jane excited rather than frightened? Unsafe was generally toxic. Hadn’t she spent the last seven months attempting to build up a haven of safeness and predictability? A job with opening and closing hours? Limiting her contact to other flawed humans? Growing a thicker skin?
They are at Edward and Alma’s rental house in Pescadero. It had surprised Jane. She’d driven past the huge iron gates twice before she saw the No. 12 on the side of the high wall surrounding the property. She had to push an intercom button and announce herself before a buzzer sounded and the gates swung slowly open. She drove up a long winding paved road to a pink stucco monstrosity. Even then she couldn’t believe she was at the right place until she saw the familiar silver Mercedes parked along the side and a nondescript beige foreign import compact car she’d never seen before parked next to it.
What is this place? Jane asks when she gets inside. It is furnished like a mausoleum, with heavy, ornate dark red and black furniture and fringed lamp shades. The sofa cushions are blocks of green foam that are stiff and don’t give when you sit down on them.
Alma greets her with a kiss on both cheeks, European style. Jane is at first surprised, then charmed. It is friendly but nonintrusive. Alma, dressed in a deep blue sari-like garment that sparkles when she moves, and black leggings and bare feet, laughs.
We had three requirements: clean, private, and no rats, she says. In other parts of the country, rats are a sign you’re doing something terribly wrong. There’s a stigma. If you have rats, you don’t mention it to anyone. Here everyone complains in the grocery store line about their rat problems.
Roof rats, Jane explains. A hazard of living in Northern California. Even the high-end places suffer.
I can’t stand them, Alma says, and shudders. She had called Jane the previous Thursday and asked her to come to Sunday brunch. Now they are standing in the kitchen of the rental house preparing the meal. Edward is writing a newsletter decrying the Dunes Resort hotel that had broken ground in the summer.
So how long have you been married? Jane says, to start conversation.
Three years, Edward, who has wandered into the kitchen, says. Six years, says Alma simultaneously. They turn their heads to look at each other and laugh.
So which is it?
Both. We’re each married—but to other people. This was Alma. She seems amused, not at all embarrassed. It depends what you call together. I’m counting from the moment I left my husband. He’s counting from the time we first got together.
What?
Neither of us had the confidence that our soul mate would come along. This was Edward. So we settled. Too soon. Then we found each other.
And we both paid the price. Alma.
Gradually the story came out. Alma was married to a prominent lawyer in New Orleans, mother of two small children, girls both, and a professor of physics at Tulane. She met Edward on a school trip she was chaperoning for her older daughter’s preschool to the local swamp. He gave a demonstration of how the acidity in the water was killing the native plants. He was married to a fellow environmental activist. She had left him a year previously, but they had never finalized a divorce.
He made a big impression, says Alma. On the kids. And on me.
The feeling was mutual, Edward says. Jane feels slightly embarrassed, but they are being very matter-of-fact. Jane senses, however, that below the matter-of-factness lies great emotion.
But, Jane says, what happened to your husband?
It wasn’t easy, Alma repeated.
You left him.
Eventually. It was pretty brutal.
But the children! What about the
m? Jane asks. She’s been distracted. How could she forget the children?
It was brutal, repeats Alma.
You left them? Her voice is louder than she intended. Then she stops. She doesn’t want to be insensitive, although Alma doesn’t seem upset.
It was necessary, says Alma. Her face now looks different to Jane. A face capable of things.
To lose your children . . .
Is something you understand quite well.
But to give them up. Voluntarily . . . I don’t get it. Jane’s voice comes out hard and flat.
You’re not expected to. Alma’s voice remains even. I would have lost them, anyway.
Jane considers Angela at thirteen, at fourteen. The yelling, the hatred, the vitriol.
Yes, she says. You would have.
I mean because of my husband. He was turning them against me. He was poisoning their minds with lies about me.
A moment of silence. Then: Enough of this! says Edward. This is supposed to be a celebration! We’ve captured Jane for lunch!
Captured. What a strange word, thinks Jane. And yet, she realizes, it’s true. Only the word she would use is captivated. Yet despite Edward’s words, Alma persists in carrying on the conversation.
Haven’t you ever done something . . . unacceptable . . . in the eyes of the world?
Jane thinks back. She remembers slapping her father, hard, across the cheek when she was fourteen. They were in the middle of one of their fights. She had been waitressing to save money for college, and every night when she came home, he demanded that she turn over her tips. I’m paying for your everyday living. You owe me. It’s my money.
Her father’s face was close to hers, looking smug. He thought he was in control. He thought he had the power. At that point, he was still taller than she was. Weighed considerably more than she did. Was less inhibited than she was. She slapped him but couldn’t bear to do it hard. She could feel the whiskers on his cheek from the day’s growth of beard. It was more like a caress, she realized later with shame.
He threw her down the stairs. Nothing was broken. No permanent damage done physically. But something switched in her. She would kill him one day. She would. She actually thought of how she would do it. Put ground glass in his wine. Push him down the stairs when he mounted them, heavily, soused and unstable one night. But she never did anything. She’d never acted. She’d felt that way about Angela on occasion. Only then it was more passive. I wish she would die. Then she thought of the woman who had killed Angela. Jane was a murderer, in thought if not in deed.
There are things I’m not proud of, Jane says finally. What an understatement.
But they were things you had to do.
At the time, yes.
And there were things you thought about but didn’t act on.
Yes.
Do you wish you had? Acted?
Yes, says Jane. I wish I’d had the nerve.
We did. Have the nerve. We did it.
But what about the children? Jane persists. Does your husband have them?
He does and he doesn’t, Alma says, oddly. They’ll always belong to me. She says this without any emotion.
But think of what they’ll think when they get older. Think of what your husband will tell them?
No. They are mine. Her voice was clear: conversation was over.
* * *
It’s the last Tuesday in September. At 10:30 p.m., the half-full moon is bright. Although the fog is hovering offshore, it hasn’t made landfall yet, so Jane can see the stars as she walks down her street, across Route 1, and toward the beach. Princeton-by-the-Sea is little more than a scattering of small houses and a sort of peninsula that juts out into the ocean, forming a natural harbor. There are a handful of seafood restaurants, a brewery-restaurant, and some industrial buildings. Everything is closed and quiet. The peninsula culminates with a tall hill on which a navy station once stood. A huge structure that looks like a giant golf ball sits on top, surrounded by twelve-foot-high barbed wire fencing. Signs are posted warning people away. You can either skirt the bottom of the hill to walk around and see the now-famous Mavericks Beach, or climb the hill and walk around the barbed wire to the bluffs that tower a hundred feet above the breakers. Jane decides to walk to Mavericks. As usual, she ignores the sign that announces it closed at sundown and makes her way around the base of the cliffs. Although she brought a flashlight, she doesn’t need it; the moonlight is enough for now. All is silent except the foghorn that bursts out with its mournful four-syllable song every three minutes exactly. Be-care-ful-boats. Be-care-ful-boats. Two enormous raccoons waddle past, their eyes shining as they catch the light of the moon. They ignore Jane, who lets them pass in respectful silence. This is their time, their space. She is here on their tolerance.
She walks around the stone labyrinth that someone started building years ago, and to which everyone who passes contributes. Large rocks spiral out in concentric circles on a ridge of land that juts out over the water. She walks the circular path in the moonlight, the deep silence broken only by the foghorn. She reminds herself what the woman at the New Moon bookstore says of the labyrinth: it is walking meditation, a path of prayer. It has only one path. There are no tricks to it and no dead ends. Unlike a maze where you lose your way, the labyrinth helps you find one, the woman had said. New Age nonsense. Still, Jane walks along the stones until she reaches the center, then reverses her steps until she is out of the labyrinth, free. She clicks off her flashlight. It is very dark. She cannot even see her feet on the ground.
Jane takes off her jacket, she is so heated, and moves to the edge of the cliff to let the spray hitting the rocks below refresh her. She then continues her walk. She has done this so often her feet know the way almost by touch.
She finally reaches the breakwater and turns the corner. This is where the water from the bay and ocean meet. At high tide, there’s barely enough sand to walk on. Crabs scuttle out of Jane’s way. The air always smells fresher here, and the headache that has been hovering all day dissipates. Jane breathes deeply. She has to proceed carefully, not to trip. She doesn’t turn on her flashlight, instead embracing the darkness around her. She reaches the end of the beach and sits down on one of the boulders, careful to stay out of the reach of the waves. The breakers aren’t that high tonight, perhaps four or five feet, but she’s seen the Mavericks superwave—the one that reaches seventy, eighty feet in height. Local surfers used to have this beach to themselves, and Jane liked sitting on the sand watching them navigate the monster breakers and rocks that populate the shallows. But then word got out. Like everything. Everything gets spoiled sooner or later. Now there’s the international surfing contest every winter, and fifty thousand people descend on Princeton-by-the-Sea to watch. Last year the police had to set up roadblocks to keep the crowds from the beach, forcing people to watch the contest on huge video screens set up in the local bars and restaurants. Hundreds of pounds of food and thousands of gallons of beverages were consumed. Silly memorabilia were purchased. The people of Half Moon Bay cashing in on the Mavericks craze. You can’t blame them. What else did they have? Pumpkins.
Jane picks up her flashlight, but again without turning it on, gets up, and starts to walk back toward the harbor. When she reaches the corner where the beach meets the breakwater, and beyond that the dirt path, she first senses rather than sees movement. About a hundred feet ahead. It’s too large to be an animal, at least a safe animal. As she fumbles with the switch of her flashlight, the moon emerges slightly from behind the inevitable fog, and a shape can be distinguished from the darkness. A man, by the figure and gait, approaching slowly but steadily. Jane can’t make out the face yet. Friend or foe? By now the man is fifty feet away, heading directly toward her. Jane freaks out, drops her flashlight, bends down, picks it up, now gritty with sand, and finally gets it turned on. She shines it on the face of the man—for it is a man—who is now just ten feet away. Edward. It’s Edward. Jane exhales and sits down on a nearby rock, weak with reli
ef.
You scared the shit out of me.
Sorry. Can you turn that off? The flashlight is still trained on his face. His eyes glitter like an animal’s.
Jane complies. They are facing each other, but it’s so dark now she doubts that he can see her.
What are you doing here? Jane finally thinks to ask.
Looking for you, he says, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You weren’t at your house, so I took a chance you’d be here.
Some chance, Jane says. I could have gone in any number of directions. Had he been watching her? Followed her here?
How did you know my address? she asks.
Jane, you’re listed online, Edward says. Don’t be paranoid. And no, you wouldn’t have gone anywhere else but here. For a night walk, Mavericks is clearly the only show in town.
Why were you looking for me? Jane finally asks. Away from the protection of the cliffs, the wind is chilling. She should have worn a warmer coat. She’s afraid to hear what he will say, she realizes. It feels dangerous to have asked.
Edward doesn’t answer right away. He walks over to where she’s sitting and crouches down next to her. It is way too intimate—Jane, with her knees up from sitting on the low rock, Edward, leaning in, his head slightly higher than hers. She can see his lips clearly in the moonlight and wonders that she’d ever thought them womanly.
Because I wanted to see you, he says. This terrifies Jane. She instinctively moves away from Edward. He slowly rises and, with a deliberate step, closes the narrow gap between them. Then he squats again. His eyes, always dark, look black in the fog-veiled moonlight. Jane finds it impossible to read his expression. Her heart is pounding so hard in her chest she wonders that it doesn’t scare the seagulls roosting nearby on the sand. She fears she will lose control of her bladder. All she can think is Go, go, go, but she can’t move from the rock she’s sitting on.
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