Route 1 is empty, as before. They run across it and behind the fruit stand to the car. Alma gets in the driver’s seat, turns the car on. They wait.
What is going on? Jane asks.
You’ll see. Alma reaches out and takes Jane’s hand. They sit, hand in hand, waiting. Suddenly Edward is there, falling into the backseat.
Go.
Alma floors it, taking off south on Route 1 toward Pescadero. They pass no one before they get to the turnoff to the house. Looking back, Jane sees a red glow coming from the construction site.
What have you done?
You mean we, Edward says. Alma takes her hand off the wheel, reaches over, and takes Jane’s hand again. You’re implicated in this. If we go down, you go down. He’s laughing as he says this, but Jane knows he’s serious.
They heard a loud explosion and through the back window see a spectacular burst of flame from the direction of the site.
The bulldozer, Edward says. One final fuck you to the developers.
* * *
Naturally, the first person the police came to about the fire is Edward. All of Edward’s staff have iron-tight alibis—he must have warned them—and Edward had Alma to say he was asleep in bed all night. The police couldn’t prove anything, but they are suspicious. They search the offices, pore over Edward’s email. Find nothing.
* * *
After the bulldozer episode, Jane is more in love than ever. It is like nothing she has ever experienced before. The sky is spinning. It’s not that she forgets about Angela. Angela will always be with her. But now there is music, some counterpoint, in Jane’s life. She is doing what she has to do.
Jane is jealous of all the women who cast glances at Edward—of whom there are quite a few.
Except Alma. Alma is different. Alma is somehow part of it. Jane loves both of them. She wants to sleep with Edward, but she craves Alma’s presence as well. The two together are magic. When she is with them both, she is satiated.
Night and day she yearns to be with them. They complete her. They understand her pain, they don’t make it go away, but they make it acceptable somehow. She wants Alma as much as she wants Edward, but in a different way. On nights Edward doesn’t visit, she lies there unsatisfied, the weight in her chest heavy. But when he does come! She is blissed out. And when she is with both of them together, she feels whole again.
* * *
A friend of Jane’s from college suffered from a mild form of bipolar mood swings. Jane used to envy her friend her manic phases. She was under medical supervision, and on medication, but she still had her glorious ups. She would sing in the shower—you could hear her all the way down the dorm floor. She’d effortlessly study for and ace her tests, and was so charming and full of life that everyone warmed to her. Of course, there were the matching lows, when she would emerge right before dinner, pasty-faced, from her room, having missed breakfast and all her classes. For Jane, always middle of the road, she envied the wildness in the girl’s moods. In the manic phases, she had magic at her fingertips.
Magical. That’s how Jane feels these days. She not only smiles, she laughs. The first time she did so at work, she startled Helen and Adam. They were closing up the shop after a busy Saturday, putting the plants and flowers in order after they had been moved around by careless customers who changed their minds and left succulents in the rose room and chrysanthemums in the hummingbird garden. Adam was sitting cross-legged on the ground in the butterfly garden sorting out the pots when a gorgeous blue-throated hummingbird came up and nipped his ear. Adam’s shriek and look of outraged puzzlement caused Jane to ripple with laughter, and when Adam recovered, he joined in with so much generous delight on his face that even Helen, who smiled often but rarely laughed, broke out too.
Oh, Janey, you know how to laugh! Adam says when he catches his breath.
Janey? Where did he get that from? Jane hasn’t been called that since she was an undergraduate. A carryover from her youth. She finds she likes it. She gives him a hand to help him off the floor and nearly collapses on top of him, she is still giggling so hard. When it finally subsides, she realizes she is still clasping his hand. She lets go but with reluctance, she finds. How did she live so long without love? It nearly killed her. Now she is alive again.
* * *
Jane awakens alone. She is not bothered by this. She revels in her tangled sheets, stretches her naked limbs. Postcoital satisfaction.
It’s 3:00 a.m. Jane is restless, the cottage is too small, it can’t contain how large and expansive she feels. She doesn’t want the sea tonight. It would be too much, her ardor, her euphoria, would dissipate. The greenhouse, with its heat and humidity and growing things, beckons her. She would get some work done.
She has never been in the greenhouse at night. The eucalyptus trees wave overhead in the wind, which has picked up. The warmth is a shock after the coolness of the night. She breathes in deeply. The earthy smells excite her. She does not think of the way she spent the previous hours. Such delights. She wants to save them, savor them over time.
She gets to work, pulls up a stool, and sits down. She takes off her shoes and is barefoot on the cement floor. She rubs her bare foot against the weathered oak of the stool and curls her toes in pleasure.
So engrossed is she in placing each tender shoot in a plastic container, gently cupping the soil around its slender stalk, she doesn’t hear the door to the greenhouse open. She doesn’t hear the footsteps come up behind her. She doesn’t see the shadow that falls across her body and is insensible to another’s presence until a hand is placed on her shoulder.
Jane starts so violently that the stool slips out from beneath her. It falls with a bang. Half the tray of seedlings goes with it. Jane barely catches herself from falling too.
I’m so sorry, says Adam. I thought you’d heard me come in. He’s holding the hand he touched her with a little away from her, as if it has been burned.
No, says Jane, she is panting slightly. Her heart is still racing.
I’m really sorry, Adam repeats. He is still holding his hand out awkwardly. Then he reaches out again and touches Jane on her shoulder in the same spot, as if it were home in a children’s game of tag. He rubs his palm on its curve.
I heard a noise, he says. I couldn’t figure out who would be here at four a.m.
What are you doing here? Jane asks. She tolerates the warmth of his hand on her. It steadies her. This surprises her. She thought she would eschew all touch now except from Edward or Alma. She finds that Adam doesn’t cause her to forget Edward’s caresses as much as prove to her how much they matter. She is touchable again.
I sometimes crash here. It depends on what’s happening with the tides and my buddies, Adam says. I keep a sleeping bag in the car and camp out in the break room, on the sofa.
I didn’t see your car, says Jane. The chain was up across the entrance to the parking lot. I had to unlock it.
Adam’s grin is a little ashamed. Yeah, I’m not sure Helen would approve. So I park behind the winery next door.
Jane can still feel the warmth of his hand on her shoulder.
And you? he asks.
Couldn’t sleep, Jane says shortly. She finds she wants to blurt everything out. She knows that would be a mistake with Adam. She is more convinced because he keeps his hand on her shoulder and moves closer.
You look so beautiful. In the dark like this.
Jane knows she has to diffuse this situation, quickly. She moves slightly away, but he doesn’t relinquish his hold on her.
Yeah, in the dark, she tries to joke. When you can’t see me.
No, I mean the half-light. Like a sort of Madonna. Your hair down and straight. The way you were concentrating on your plants. The expression on your face. Like Mary just having been visited by an angel.
He’s using language she doesn’t associate with him. She has to remind herself that he got a J.D., then a Ph.D., from Santa Cruz, is a lapsed Catholic like her. They’d laughed and compared notes abo
ut it. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. On Ash Wednesday, he’d anointed himself with dirt and left the smudge on his forehead all day. A private joke between them.
I certainly don’t feel like that, she says, forcing herself to laugh. I came here to calm down. I was agitated.
He finally takes his hand away. Seemingly reluctantly, he places both hands in his jeans pockets. Do you want to talk about it? His voice is kind, patient. He has done what she wanted, which is to put his own agenda about her, whatever that is, on the back burner. So why is she disappointed?
She is bursting to talk. She finds she wants to tell it all: her loneliness, her guilt, her having been found by Edward and Alma, and then the gift of tonight. But she stays mum.
Just stuff, she says.
Well, let me help you with these, he says, and he pulls up a stool, and together they work until the sun’s rays penetrate the windows. So there, companionably up to her elbows in damp earth, with Adam at her side, Jane finds the tranquillity she had been seeking.
* * *
One day at the nursery when Jane is using Helen’s computer in her office to do some research on a pest that had infested her Heteromeles arbutifolia, she decides to look up YourBeaches.org. A page comes up. Edward is a senior director, and it is based in San Diego, with offices in Charleston, San Luis Obispo, and Boston. It seems to be doing good work: a number of impressive beach saves are listed.
From there Jane googles Alma’s name: Dr. Alma Godwin. To her surprise, a vast number of hits immediately return.
Tulane Professor Suffers Immense Loss
Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Claims Two Small Victims
Prominent Attorney Loses Children in Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Incident
Carbon Monoxide Deaths Deemed Accidental
Photos of Alma, some smiling professional shots, others showing her disheveled and tearstained, obviously in extreme distress. Others of a blond man, so bland you would overlook him in a crowd, presumably the husband. Two children, one fair, the smaller one as dark as Alma.
Carbon Monoxide Fumes Kill Two New Orleans Children
NEW ORLEANS—Gregory Bixby, noted attorney and arts patron, put his children in his car in the garage at his home at 116 W. Oak, then ran back inside to retrieve his cell phone. While inside, he got in a prolonged argument with his wife, Tulane professor of physics Dr. Alma Godwin, that distracted him. The older child, aged five, got out of her car seat and switched on the car. Both children died of carbon monoxide inhalation. The deaths have been ruled accidental by local authorities. No charges have been filed. Funeral arrangements are private.
Jane is in shock. Surely it couldn’t be! But the many stories that she scrolls through convince her.
She is shaking. She is able to do nothing the rest of the day except attend to the plants in the outer field. She pulls viciously at the weeds, throws them on the ground. Sometimes she pulls up a plant too. She doesn’t care. That evening after work, Jane goes over to Edward and Alma’s house.
She doesn’t call Alma and Edward to tell them she’s coming. She doesn’t knock on the door. She finds them hunched over a map spread out on the kitchen table, two half-full glasses of wine, some cheese and crackers. They look up simultaneously. It’s the first time Jane has received anything but pure warm welcome, pure happiness, at seeing her. What she sees in their faces she’s not sure. What’s showing in her face? Confusion and fear and rage. Don’t forget the rage.
Hello, Jane. Alma’s voice is flat.
I know about the children.
Of course you do. It was only a matter of time. Edward’s voice is soothing. His face is impassive.
How could you not tell me? Why tell me you’d left them?
Because I had. I’d left them for Edward. Greg was going to win custody—the divorce rules in Louisiana are archaic—that was it. I wasn’t going to raise them. I wasn’t going to be a real parent, not with visitation rights only twice a month.
Lots of people are good parents on weekends.
It wasn’t going to work for me. We were planning to leave town anyway. They were already dead to me.
But this happened so recently! Just before you came here!
Two months after the deaths, we left.
But how can you hold it together? It’s been more than a year for me, and I’m still a mess.
The grieving had happened earlier. It was over. I was done. Don’t you understand? I don’t wallow. I move on.
No, Jane does not understand. Not at all. But she finds she can’t judge Alma. She is that enmeshed.
* * *
Despite the shock of the discovery, Jane finds herself spending more and more time with Alma. She sees her more than she sees Edward, in fact.
Jane doesn’t sleep with Alma, but she doesn’t have to. Her physical desire is all for Edward, but she finds herself yearning night and day for Alma. Alma’s smile, her capacity for deep understanding of small things. As they walk down Main Street, passing a group of teenage girls that Angela would have fit into, Jane gets a stab of guilt and is pulled temporarily into a fit of despair. How could she have forgotten? She is not aware that a muscle in her body or face changed, but she suddenly feels a warm arm around her shoulder and a hug that bears so much affection and understanding that it brings tears to Jane’s eyes. She immediately calms down and returns to the joyous, satiated state. Yes, that is the word. Satiated. Jane is getting what she needs, and even more. She is full. Any more would be too much. It is almost unbearable.
Jane wonders what Alma does on the evenings that Edward is with her, Jane. She imagines her sitting in the living room on one of the hard black-cushioned chairs, perhaps a blanket around her knees, as it is getting cool in the evenings. Grading papers. Reading a scientific journal perhaps. She does not detect any loneliness or regret in Alma when they are together. Just serenity and patience. Jane imagines that Alma would be a good teacher. Patient. Wanting to pull the best out of each student. She would be a good mother too. Jane still doesn’t understand how Alma can deal with a loss that extreme. Losing her two girls. Is it buried? Is it processed, the way Jane’s shrink used to say she needed to process things?
She feels toward Alma as she did at the age of seven with her best friend, Jenny, tied together with a blood vow on the playground after school. Safe in a world of their own. Even Edward was superfluous to this bond.
To Jane, Alma’s best features are her hands. Expressive, they weave phrases of their own even when Alma is silent. Pale with long slender fingers, they are the hands of a musician or an artist. Alma laughs when Jane tells her this.
One evening they ride Jane’s motorbike to San Gregorio Beach, like that time before, when they hardly knew each other. A long, long time ago. They sit on the edge of the cliff and watch the offshore fog roll in. Jane keeps a blanket in her saddlebag, and they huddle under it as the tide comes in, the waves heaving up and over and crashing onto the rocks.
Don’t you think of your girls? Jane is amazed she is actually asking this question.
Alma is silent.
I mean on an evening like this. I always think, What would Angela be doing if she were here? But it doesn’t hurt as much to think that as it used to. Jane is surprised to find out that this is true.
I miss them every day, every minute, Alma says. I can never let go. I try to imagine what they would be like now, nearly a year older. I can’t. I see them as they were.
Her eyes close momentarily. Jane tentatively puts a hand over Alma’s. Previously, Alma always instigated any touching. That seemed to be the unspoken rule. Jane feels the long elegant fingers tense and experiences a little thrill of panic. What has she done? Then Alma’s fingers relax, and Jane gets pressure back. So Jane is now giving as well as receiving. She needs to know that. After being a mother, after suddenly having no one to give sustenance to, that was the hardest thing. No one to hug, to pick up, to kiss a knee or a finger and make it all better. Mother’s magic touch.
Touching. So importa
nt. So many different ways to touch. Edward’s touches evoke desire, wake up feelings and sensations. Alma’s tamp them down, make the hurt go away, almost like the way a spider injects a fly with anesthetic to dull the pain before killing it. What a strange metaphor. What made Jane think of spiders and killing on this sunset over the beach? Alma’s head is bowed, her eyes closed. Jane keeps her hand clasped tight around Alma’s.
Minutes pass. Seabirds call. The surf rolls ever closer below. The sun is below the horizon now, but a glow suffuses everything with a gentle light.
Alma slowly comes back to life. First, her head raises and her eyes open. They are dry. Her mouth is a little tightened, making unfamiliar lines on her face. Is she resolute or angry about something? Jane involuntarily lifts her hand, pulls away. She knows the signs of pending violence from her father. But this is different, she reminds herself. This is Alma. And I’m a grown-up. She is embarrassed that she has to remind herself of that. Sometimes she worries that she has grown infantile, her dependence on Alma and Edward. A sort of cult-like dependence. She dismisses these thoughts.
There are some places you don’t want to go, says Alma. It is unclear whether she is referring to herself or Jane.
PART IV
CHOICES
Soup was a mainstay of Jane’s childhood. Her father wanting to be in the kitchen, because according to his ethics, you kept the bottles in the kitchen cabinet. You never brought them into the living room where the television was. Which involved a lot of getting up and down, and Jane’s father was essentially lazy. So he made soup instead. To be nearer the cabinet and the bottles. Made soup, and poured and sipped, and sipped and poured, and made soup. The soups were pretty good, as soups go, but Jane hates soup. She’d rather eat mud.
He eventually quit drinking, was sober for nearly a decade before he died, yet the soup habit persisted. Somewhere along the way, he acquired a ferret, a little furry bandit of a fellow that sat on his shoulder and bit him gently on the neck if anyone else got too close.
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