Half Moon Bay

by Alice LaPlante

  Jane stops at the end of the road, right at the top of the cliffs. Sixty feet below, waves crash. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, but the wind is strong, blowing easterly from the ocean to the land. The sun is edging toward the horizon in the west—in this case, the blue line where the sea meets the sky. Jane notices this. She notices the gulls circling overhead, their raucous calls that echo across the expanse of water and sand below. Alma’s arms are still around her waist. So this is what it’s like to feel normal, Jane thinks. This is what other people experience every day.

  Cut across here! Alma shouts against the wind. She gestures to a footpath that meanders alongside the sea, along the top of the cliffs. A sign proclaims: NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES. DOGS MUST BE KEPT ON LEASHES.

  Jane points to the sign. I don’t want to get in trouble, she calls back.

  No one is here!

  I’m not good at breaking rules, Jane shouts over the wind and motor. By which she means that when she transgresses, she gets caught, always, and is punished accordingly. Angela being taken away from her was such a punishment. Jane had wondered why for nearly a year now. What had she done to deserve that? But today she knows. She had had the audacity to be happy. Not all the time. Not even most of the time. But she had experienced happiness in her life. And that was against God’s plan.

  Jane turns the motorbike off.

  So what if it’s against the rules? Alma asks. The words come out too loud in the sudden silence.

  The air is fresh and salty. The sky a dark blue. The sun is closer to the horizon, a big orange ball. Jane’s face and neck are cold from the breeze, but she is still warmed by Alma’s body.

  Come on, girl! shouts Alma suddenly. She presses her arms tighter around Jane’s waist. Jane turns the motorbike back on, lets out the clutch and steps on the gas, noses the front tire onto the paved path. First slowly, then faster. It is spectacular. They are so close to the edge of the sea that one missed curve would send them shooting out and down into the water, which is frigid this time of year. Jane feels the excitement deep in her belly.

  Faster!

  Jane obeys. She wishes she had her goggles on, her eyes are tearing up from the chill wind. But she doesn’t want to stop. She navigates around a rock, comes close to the edge of the cliff, then steers her way back to the pathway. Her heart is beating too fast, her breath is jagged.

  Then, trouble ahead. A lone pedestrian, accompanied by a small dog. Off leash, of course. No one obeys that rule. An elderly man, bundled up against the wind, shakes his finger at them as they race past, and they both laugh. Jane is laughing! She astonishes herself. The dog barks as they whoosh by.

  They cross a bridge over a ravine only to find the paved path ends. A bumpy dirt trail continues along the cliff tops. Jane slows to a stop, idles the engine. A grove of eucalyptus trees is bending almost double in the wind. A bench sits at the very edge of the cliff. It must have once been a safe distance back, but the cliffs have eroded, and a huge chunk of ground almost directly under the bench has recently fallen. The earth is still red and raw from where it shuddered off. Spidery cracks stretch out in the dirt from where the cement base of the bench was once solidly in the ground. One foot of the bench hovers over empty air, sixty feet above the water.

  A yellow tape printed with CAUTION DO NOT CROSS has been wound around the trees, blocking access to the bench. A small hand-lettered laminated sign says DANGER—ERODING CLIFFS.

  Come on, says Alma, and Jane doesn’t hesitate to obey her this time. They dismount from the bike. Alma leads the way to the edge of the cliff. She steps over the yellow tape and slowly, carefully, sidles over to the bench. Jane follows behind her, step by cautious step. Waves dash into rocks below. A child playing on a finger of beach gets angry at something, throws a handful of sand at another child, and runs away. Her voice as indistinguishable as the cry of the gulls.

  Jane hates Ferris wheels, roller coasters, anything that dangles her above empty space. Yet here she is. They climb onto the bench from the right side, from where it is still solidly planted in the earth. The back left foot is cemented into rock, giving Jane confidence. But the front left foot of the bench rests on nothing. Their feet hang unsupported in space. Jane can feel the updraft from the water sixty feet below cooling her ankles. Alma has her hand again.

  Just breathe, Alma says, and Jane obeys again. In. Out. In. Out. She realizes she is doing this in sync with the breaking of the waves below. They are too high for the spray to reach them, but the noise is deafening.

  That’s good! says Alma. Keep it up. She reaches her left arm up and around Jane’s shoulder. Jane feels herself leaning forward, drawn toward the hypnotic whitecaps below.

  The reason Jane hates heights is that they rob her of her free will. She is strangely drawn to edges. She knows she would throw herself off bridges, jump off cliffs, step off narrow paths on steep mountains if she let herself get too close. It would be irresistible. So she usually stays away. More than that, she grows dizzy with fear when near a precipice. Too much temptation. She feels that now. The inexorable draw. The tingle in her fingers and toes. She moves an inch forward on the bench. Now her knees are over the abyss. Alma removes her arm from Jane’s shoulders. She places her hand flat against Jane’s neck. It is slight, but it is pressure. It would be so easy. So easy. Another half-inch forward. Jane wiggles her toes. Her right shoe, always a little loose, comes away at the heel. She wiggles her foot some more. Now the only things holding her shoe on are her toes. She gives a little kick and the shoe falls. She counts one two three four five six before she sees it bounce off a rock into the foamy water below. The kick has somehow unbalanced her, and the pressure against her neck continues. She is on the edge. She is wavering. What should she do? Her now-naked foot is cold, sending shivers up her leg. She feels something like arousal. This is foreplay. This is nothing compared to what the real thing will feel like.

  Hey!

  Both Jane and Alma turn their heads. A man is standing by the scooter. He is wearing a uniform. A badge on his chest. He has a pad in one hand and a pencil in the other. A ticket. Jane is getting a ticket. Busted again.

  Get down from there this instant! Don’t you know how dangerous these cliffs are? We lost a kid last month who went too near the edge. It collapsed under him.

  Alma edges off the bench first, then, when she is on solid ground, holds out a hand to Jane, who gingerly slides over. She feels like she has woken from a trance. What had she been thinking? She looks back at the bench, at its front left foot hovering in air, and shudders. She walks, unsteadily because of her missing shoe, over to the ranger.

  He is silent as they approach. Jane imagines they must appear a strange couple, their hair in disarray from the wind and the ride. She knows her face must show how high she is, how pumped up on adrenaline, almost beyond endurance. She needs to scream, to let something out, but somehow holds it in.

  Officer, we’re sorry, Jane says finally, not because she is, but to break the silence. She is vaguely conscious that there is going to be a scene, a script to be followed. She must get a grip.

  “Have you been drinking?” the ranger asks. He is young, younger than either of them. He is extremely serious. He is not acting as if he caught them with an off-leash dog. Jane herself isn’t sure what just transpired. The ranger steps forward and looks straight into her eyes. He is sniffing, for some trace of alcohol or pot, she supposes.

  We’re sober, she says, although she knows her eyes tell a different story. The ranger looks at her for a moment, hesitating.

  I should take you in for a sobriety test, he says finally.

  For being crazy? Alma speaks up. She is composed, even smiling.

  The ranger looks at Alma, at her glowing face, and his official face relaxes a little. He reluctantly smiles back. I should, he says. But the moment for punishment has somehow passed. They’re going to get away with it. He puts his pen and pad back in his pocket.

  Still, I’m interested, he says. Why?


  My friend here was trying to satisfy her curiosity about something, says Alma, and takes Jane’s arm. Jane feels warm at the words my friend. Then, secondarily, a sense of relief. So that’s what she’d been doing! Nothing that bad. Just satisfying her curiosity. It sounded wholesome, even, like something you could earn a Girl Scout badge for.

  So she sits on the edge of an eroding cliff? the ranger asks. Right. That makes perfect sense.

  Sometimes it’s necessary to force a decision, says Alma.

  Do you agree? asks the ranger, turning to Jane.

  Jane thinks back. The wind on her naked foot. The tingle of arousal. Alma’s hand pressuring her neck forward.

  You came at an opportune time, Jane says finally.

  And if I hadn’t come?

  A decision would have been made, Jane says.

  The ranger looks at her.

  As you can see, I’m not going to write a ticket, he says. But I’m going to recommend very strongly that you get some help.

  Jane links arms even more tightly with Alma, drawing strength from the other woman’s solidity and the feel of warm flesh on her own.

  Thank you for your concern, she says. But I think I have all the help I need.

  * * *

  We know what we are, but not what we might be. Jane’s favorite quote from Hamlet when she was an undergraduate, because she found it so apropos of her life. She’d be going off in one direction, then suddenly shift due to nothing more than chance or whim. Jane frequently never knew what she might be from day to day. Her relationship with Rick before he left, a case in point. Her relationship with Angela, another. Was she a good wife? A good mother? A bad one? Yes, and yes, and no. Depending on the hour, even the minute, the category she fell into changed. And now Alma and Edward. What lay ahead? Who would she be? Jane didn’t know.

  * * *

  I. Source: A. L. Kroeber. “The Origin of Death.” Indian Myths of South Central California (1907). http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ca/scc/scc11.htm. Accessed December 26, 2016.

  PART II

  TRESPASSES

  Adam drinks his caffeine-free tea like the connoisseur he is. He buys it in a specialty vegan store down in Santa Cruz. No animals have been harmed in the making of this tea. No humans have been exploited. He keeps it in a special tin in the break room. It looks like a child’s tiny treasure chest: dark blue with rockets and spaceships and planets on it in glorious reds and yellows and greens. The tea itself comes in individually wrapped cloth bags, like those in jewelry shops. He always pours the hot water into his cup first, then dips the tea into it. He wouldn’t despoil it with milk or sugar. He sips at it all morning, it must be stone cold by noon when he takes in the last dregs, but the expression on his face as he swallows the last of it is as ecstatic as with the first taste.

  Adam’s been trying to get Jane’s attention all day. He’s been walking by her station in the back greenhouse, offering her, in sequence, some of his foul tea, a banana, a handful of raisins, and the last wild bluebell of the season. The flowers apparently blanket the ground to the rear of the warehouse every summer, under the live oaks, he says. He paces back and forth in front of her station in the greenhouse. He’s like a dog spoiling for a walk. What is it? Jane finally asks. He’s silent for a moment, standing in the doorway of the greenhouse, his blond hair sparkling in the filtered sunlight. He looks like a holy innocent. Nothing, man, really, he says. You look nice today.

  Adam is in superb shape, his hair is thick and bleached by the sun, and he wears it down to his shoulders, typically in a ponytail but sometimes loose. He uses tons of sunscreen so he doesn’t have any lines on his face.

  Madonna and Jesus, Helen liked to call them, and indeed, Jane felt toward Adam matronly in a safe way. He was male, and he was younger and not particularly vulnerable so he didn’t suck her in, he triggered no emotions except a mild distant fondness. He was very safe.

  Come here, he says. Smell this. And she sniffs at the leaves of the flower he is holding. Delight! Calmness!

  Aromatherapy, Adam says. It’s very real.

  * * *

  Jane had sought all the details of what exactly had happened to Angela that day last July. She had to know. Because Angela was her baby. There had been a time when Angela couldn’t poop without Jane’s awareness. No rash appeared on that tender flesh that Jane didn’t rush to apply lotion to or call the doctor about, even.

  Angela used to get what Jane figured were medium-bad headaches and would lie in her bed with a cold towel over her forehead, moaning. Don’t be a drama queen, Jane would tell her. Jane wondered how Angela had handled real pain when it arrived. She had to wonder because she would never know.

  Jane’s shrink, Dr. Blanes—one of a long line of shrinks, Jane was crunching them up as if they were candy—told her to get out of her head, to go through the motions, that the mental would follow the physical. Jane had to stand in front of the mirror every morning and smile. Stretch her lips upward and crinkle her eyes and smile warmly in the mirror. She was forced to watch a YouTube video on the power of smiling, in which a twentysomething who had absolutely nothing on his mind except the millions of dollars his start-up was going to make threw stats at the audience. Smiling boosts your immune system. You work harder to frown than to smile. Jane gets up this morning and tries smiling in the mirror. She looks hideous. She does not feel happier.

  * * *

  Jane has ways of coping. Xanax. Clonazepam. Other substances she gets through a Canadian online pharmacy. They have the desired effect—they dull her senses, dull the pain—anything to not feel.

  * * *

  It was nothing, really. Just an old garden trowel. Old being the operative word. Jane had had it since she was an undergraduate intern at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens. Slightly larger than a standard hand trowel, with a wooden handle that had worn away to fit Jane’s right hand precisely over the years. It had an edge to it that plunged into the earth at exactly the right angle. She kept it sharp, taking it to the local hardware store for sharpening at least once a season. Originally green, the metal had faded and chipped and scratched and rusted so that it was now an indeterminate color. Jane kept it in her cubbyhole at work, along with her gloves and hand lotion and other miscellaneous items.

  Then one day it is gone. Jane of course thinks she must have left it somewhere in the nursery, although she’s a rather rigid everything-in-its-place kind of person. But she can’t find it anywhere. No one understands why she can’t go into the back room and pick from virtually every type of garden implement that existed. Jane tries, she really does.

  She goes around asking everyone if they’d seen it. She even attempts to draw a picture of it and pins it to the employee bulletin board. She remembers a book Angela had loved when she was small, when a baby duck wandered around asking various objects Are you my mother? Angela loved it when the duck asked a power shovel the question. No, I am not your mother, I’m a SNORT, it said.

  Have you seen my trowel? Jane feels like an infant, but she is lost without it. No one has.

  Her anxiety grows. She goes to the Feed and Grain to look for another and finds one that is somewhat similar, but it isn’t old and it doesn’t fit her hand well. A trowel is an intimate tool. She imagines that doctors might feel the same way about their instruments. You use it to plunge down into earth, soft or hard, to dig out the little holes to contain the tiny plants, to pat over the earth on top or around the stems.

  Nothing goes right. She overwaters her California lilac (Ceanothus) and they are wilting; she isn’t sure if they can be saved. She forgets to fertilize the succulents, and they are refusing to grow. What else can go wrong?

  The days that follow grow worse and worse. The nursery becomes a different place. Less safe. Jane starts putting her stuff in her motorbike bag and taking it home at night. She finds herself looking over her shoulder. She feels violated. Panicky. What else will be taken from her? She takes to locking her cottage. Why would the loss of a trowel unsettle her so
much? Because of course she is already unsettled. It will take very little to go from unsettled to unhinged.

  She goes out for a motorbike ride to clear her head. She rides up to the top of the hill to the cemetery and sits on the promontory that looks down over the coast. You can see the entire coast. When she scattered her daughter’s ashes, Angela’s best friends had insisted on coming along and helping. Jane gave them the urn and watched them running up and down the beach, throwing handfuls of Angela into the bay. Rick was there of course, in body. He exerted a great deal of effort not meeting Jane’s eyes. His new girlfriend, Clara, was also there, looking defiant. Jane would have liked a hand to hold, even one so ambivalent as Rick’s. But she had no one.

  Coming back, she parks next to Adam’s Volvo. She can see his wet suit and his towel and the surfboard through the back window. Then Jane does a double take: next to his wet suit is her trowel. No doubt about it. Lying there, still with some earth on it, on its side. Not even hidden from view.

  Jane opens the rear hatchback—Adam never locks it—and steals it back. She is so angry!

  What was this about? She confronts Adam in the back room.

  He flushes a deep red that contrasts sharply with his blond hair.

  Jane. Jane. I’m so sorry.

  I asked you if you’d seen it! You said no!

  I know, I know.

  Again, Adam: What was this about? He can’t meet her eyes. This is not the Adam she knows.

  I wanted something of yours.

  Something of mine?

  Something you’d touched. Something that had your vibe on it.

  This should have softened her, but instead it makes her angrier. She is tired of things being taken from her. Things she values. Things she loves.