I clutched the simple armrest of the bench. The bench, so carefully, lovingly made, where happiness had ended for me in one night. “Oh.”
A nonanswer, but it came out in a soft, sustained note that told her everything. I had been safe. I had been busy. I had been fortunate, and successful.
She nodded, reached across our jumble of artifacts to touch my knee. “I’m sorry.”
We sat quietly for a minute before I spoke. “But you have. And I’m glad.”
She smiled. Picked up the leaf from Raptor Rock and examined its glossy chartreuse surface. “Two clues to go. Then, what? My mom shows up with a cake? Better be one hell of a cake.”
“Good thing we’re almost done or we’d need a bigger bag.”
“Are you ready for? You know.” She hitched her chin toward my house. “Clue 7?”
“Later. After the city.”
“Sure,” Casey said. “So I don’t get ten. Why some tourist trap in San Francisco? You design their shirts, but still. It’s such a long drive, and it’s the only place on the list we never went together.”
I knew Clue 10 by heart:
Once glass, this glorious place,
This human aquarium by the sea
Is now burned and abandoned, rubble and ruin
A tourist’s curiosity
Truthful postcards the silly shop sells; buy one so I can tell
We had to get a postcard from a “silly shop” by the “rubble” of the “human aquarium by the sea.” Goofy Foot was near the remains of the Sutro Baths. Alex had obviously Googled my address and seen that the shop was my biggest client.
“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” I said. “My theory is she wants you to visit where I live, see my work?”
“Take this shindig out of Coeur-de-Lune, you mean?”
“Yeah. To make sure we stay friends. After.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Casey.”
“Hmm?”
“I want to stay friends after.”
She was working her left hand again, splaying and contracting her fingers, but she relaxed them and smiled. “Me, too.”
“I shouldn’t have stayed away so long. I didn’t mean to.”
“You’re here now.”
“I should’ve—”
“Don’t. You should’ve come back sooner. My mom should’ve been a grown-up. I shouldn’t have thrown the music box. It’s never ending. Life’s too short for if-onlys.”
The words hung in the air, more piercing than if she’d spoken them: especially for me.
“It’s rotten luck, Case.”
“My odds weren’t good. One in two.”
“I thought it was super rare.”
She shook her head. “There are two kinds of ALS. Random, that’s the most common. And familial. I have that. I inherited the gene from my father. Nice of him to leave me something, huh? My mom found out I’d inherited it when I was eighteen.”
“She’s known that long? How?”
She spoke slowly, kindly, teacher to pupil. “My dad died of it, and it ran in his family. She’d known that since I was little, but when I was seventeen she learned that she could have me tested. Senior year, remember when she started losing it? She was sure the test would say I didn’t have the gene, that I’d be on the lucky side. But...” She shrugged.
“So she brought you to the hospital for some DNA test and everyone lied about what it was for?”
Casey extended her left arm in front of her like a lazy ballerina. She turned her palm up, waited. And when I still didn’t understand, she pointed her right index finger and poked the flesh of her upper arm.
She waited patiently for me to catch up, waited for the whirring and clicking in my brain to stop.
Alex’s Blood Magick phase. Her kooky, random infatuation with the dark arts.
Not just another of Alex’s hobbies. Not kooky, not random. It was her way of finding out about Casey.
“Magic with a K,” I said.
“Magic with a K. It was just an excuse to test me without me realizing.”
Casey ran through the details—Alex getting this wild idea one day, reading a book about Blood Magick in the Moonshadow occult store, a gene called SOD1, autosomal dominant inheritance patterns, a man working in a lab near Stanford who was infatuated with Alex, like so many were.
I let the specifics wash over me, needing no more proof of Alex’s subterfuge than my memory of her attempts to get Casey’s blood, her odd excitement in this same garden when Casey finally gave in.
“The lab guy who helped her... Remember him? Gary Summerland, no. Summerling. He drove up a bunch of times. The bald guy with the silver Audi? Serious, not her type? He’s a genetic counselor she’d contacted to talk about my family history. She wasn’t planning to test me at first. She says. And if the witchcraft thing didn’t work she was going to try something else. Anyway, the lab guy still calls her, he’s obsessed...”
I nodded. I could picture the silver Audi, a slender man paying calls all the way from Palo Alto. Our confusion over the fact that Alex let him stick around for so long. “It’s so...extreme.”
“My reaction exactly, when she told me. There’s no way. But then I remembered. It’s Alexandra Shepherd.”
A vial secretly ferried from Coeur-de-Lune down to Palo Alto, Alex sweet-talking a smitten boyfriend in a lab coat.
It was extreme. But it was possible.
“She knew all this time and never said?”
Casey nodded.
“I can’t imagine. Knowing and not being able to tell anyone.”
“I’m glad she never told me. I’m glad I didn’t know.”
“But weren’t you mad?”
“At first. But... It was brave of her. Would you want to know? Have that stalking you your whole life?”
I thought about it. Not even a question: no way. I shook my head.
“And I’ve had so much. Elle, girlfriends, the trips, the store. I’m glad I didn’t know,” she repeated. Though her voice caught at the end.
Would you want to know?
Would you want to know, if you were her?
“Casey,” I said. And I almost couldn’t get the rest out, because the realization was so awful. “Are you sure she never told anyone else?”
“No. I’m grateful to her. I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Not in a million. I’ve thought about it, with Elle in my life now, how hard it would be...” She went on, saying all the things she’d wanted to share with me, everything she’d kept pent up.
I sat next to her, holding her hand, staring at the cutout of the mermaid and ocean waves in the faded wood. I listened.
But I was also outside the garden, just beyond the gate. Eavesdropping in the dark the night after my dad’s funeral. And even over Casey’s voice, and the roaring in my head, I could hear, clear as anything:
She can’t find out.
Can’t you see? She’ll tell Casey. I have to protect Casey.
Would you want to know, if you were her?
46
May
Alexandra went with the group driving to the craft fair up the coast. They’d be gone Saturday night; they’d sleep in the truck bed, at the ocean under the stars. Daniel asked her to stay, to keep him company. She had a little cough he was worried about and he didn’t think she should sleep outdoors. He was protective that way.
There was nobody else upstairs that night. They stayed up late, talking. He gave Katherine a pill with a star stamped on it.
It seemed the easiest, most natural thing in the world to sleep in Daniel’s bed with him. She was so tired, and his caress on her shoulders was so warm and gentle. He didn’t insist. She would focus on this detail, in the weeks to come. He didn’t insist. His hands traveled down her shirt, and he leaned clos
e to kiss her gently, whispering, “Only if you want to.”
She woke in the night. It was dark, and Daniel slept soundly beside her. There was an ache between her legs, a sticky cold spot on the sheet under her thighs.
She looked up at the driftwood secured to the headboard. The good-luck horseshoe, just visible in the moonlight from the open window.
She pulled at it, fumbled with the wire coiled around the center, scraping her palm. She pulled again until it split into two pieces. The middle had always been more porous and weak than the ends, even before the wire had been wrapped tight around it. One half dropped behind the headboard to the floor.
She held the other piece in her hand, confused, running her hands on the splintered edge where it had broken off. She couldn’t remember why she’d freed it from the wire, if she’d wanted it as a weapon or for luck. She cried out; she’d broken it, broken the moon itself, and couldn’t remember why.
Daniel stirred, cradled her in his arms. He pulled the wood from her with one hand and let it drop to the floor with the other. “What’ve you done?” he said, laughing. “Don’t worry. I’ll take you to the beach tomorrow and you’ll find one just like it.”
Her tongue was swollen; the words wouldn’t come. I won’t. I never will.
“You’re the only one,” he whispered. “My special girl.”
47
Fog
2016
Sunday, midday
I sat in the front passenger seat of J.B.’s truck, the goody bag on my lap. We’d be finished today. One postcard, one more picture. Done.
Casey had secured the goody bag with one of Elle’s ponytail holders. Purple, with sparkly stars on the end. I squeezed the bag until the stars jabbed into my palm.
Casey sat in back, the oversized denim shirt she’d brought in lieu of a jacket bunched up against the window for her pillow. But she didn’t nap. Nobody napped.
Nobody talked, either.
Not until we were half an hour out of Coeur-de-Lune and J.B. couldn’t handle the silence anymore. “Everything okay?” he said, eyes darting from Casey’s reflection in the rearview mirror to me.
“I told her,” she said. “About me being sick. She’s a little bummed out.”
“Oh.” J.B. glanced at me.
I twitched one side of my mouth sideways in a facsimile of a smile and stared out the window.
A little bummed out.
Yes. Just a little, Casey.
I concentrated on the shades of green whipping past the window. Trees that got blurrier as my eyes filled. I wiped them with my sleeve, trying to be discreet.
“Laur, don’t,” Casey said. “We’re going to have a good day.”
“I’m fine.” I cleared my throat, flicked on the radio. News. Some guy analyzing Hillary Clinton’s smile again. Maybe we could go to the same smile coach, a former pageant queen with a special protractor for measuring lip angles down to the arc second; I needed to work on my forced smile, too.
I flipped to a jazz station, turning it low so I could think.
She’ll tell Casey. I have to protect Casey.
Would you want to know, if you were her?
J.B. tapped my knee. You all right? he mouthed.
I nodded, rested my cheek against the cold glass.
“I can’t wait to see the beach,” Casey yawned out, and after a few minutes I knew without turning that she was asleep.
Casey was sick. And I’d gotten something wrong in the garden years before.
Those two facts were clear. But nothing else was.
I stared out the window as the forested mountains of my childhood gave way to beige farmland, gray industrial towns, the blue of the bay. All the way to the foggy coast of San Francisco, I tried to knit images, clues, memories together into one piece that made sense.
* * *
We pulled up at the Ocean Beach scenic lookout after two. It was damp and cold; the sightseers on the narrow esplanade beside the highway were shivering in their shorts.
Refreshed from her nap, unburdened of her secret, Casey was in high spirits. She fed quarters into a coin-operated silver binocular stand, pivoting it back and forth eagerly. “I think I see a seal,” she shouted. “Or maybe it’s a rock, but let’s pretend it’s a seal.”
We joined the tourists trudging up the hill toward the Cliff House, a boxy restaurant teetering on the edge of a rocky cliff. Sometimes Sam and I sat side by side at a window table there, sipping extra-spicy Bloody Marys. If you stared at the water long enough, hard enough, the murmurs and clinks of the bustling dining area receded until it almost felt like you were sailing out to sea.
“Lands End,” Casey said thoughtfully, pausing by a sign. “What’s that?”
“We’re there,” I said. “This whole place is called Lands End. You never came here that year you lived in the city?”
“Never. Poor, deprived me.”
We wandered past the restaurant to the ruins of the Sutro Baths. I’d never thought the ruins were much to look at. Just some sad, burnt stone foundations, the eroded remains of stairwells in the sand. Puddles where there had once been massive saltwater swimming pools.
But Casey was entranced, marveling at how close we were to the ocean. She ran past the Keep Off, Dangerous Waves sign and climbed onto a broad rock, staring at the endless expanse of white-capped teal waves. Leaning into the wind, she pulled the flapping tails of her unbuttoned denim shirt taut around her stomach for warmth, revealing the too-lean curve of her back, her jutting shoulder blades.
I wondered if the stark beauty of this place made her sad, knowing what the future held. Was every second of happiness now a trap, ending in quick, devastating calculations? How many more waves will I count? How many more rocks will I climb on?
But when she turned from the sea her face was calm.
* * *
Casey led us from the rocks to a grassy area where a woman was singing for a knot of tourists.
“Sunshine, go away today...”
The busker grinned up at the leaden sky, hamming, and got a laugh from her audience. Casey pushed forward to drop a bill into her guitar case.
“She was a wreck at first,” J.B. murmured. “Only got out of bed because of Elle.”
“I’d still be in bed.”
“It’s moving slowly.”
“So she said. I guess she’s supposed to celebrate because of that?” My voice, though low, was cracked, ugly. “And that’s why Alex wanted us to reunite now. Because Casey’s sick?”
He paused before answering. “Yes.”
I hesitated. Saying it out loud would make my mistake real. But I had to know. I spoke quickly, rushing to get my question out before Casey came back. “J.B. You and Alex never—”
Casey returned and we smiled wide. Too wide. “Nice try. I know you’re talking about me. Laur, where’s your friend’s place?”
“That blue building up the road.” I pointed. “You can’t miss it.”
“Good. I’m starving.”
J.B. and I followed her out of the ruins and up the steep sidewalk toward Sam’s until a woman asked us to take a picture of her family. Casey walked ahead while J.B. stopped and accepted the iPhone.
The family posed, the little girl in her dad’s arms, the ocean behind them. J.B. framed the shot carefully. “Say...beach.”
But the kid wouldn’t cooperate. A curly-haired girl of about four in a tiny black Star Wars sweatshirt, she was red-faced, writhing and wailing. The parents gave up and apologized for holding us up. “Nap time,” the dad said and laughed.
J.B. took my hand, rubbed it between his. “You’re freezing. And Casey’s way up there, we should catch up.”
I walked up the hill backward. Slowly, taking one last look at the ruins from above. Sand, pools of mucky green water, rubbly outlines of foundation. Families posi
ng for pictures.
Pictures.
“J.B., wait.” I turned and grabbed his hand.
“Tired? I could use a coffee myself, and maybe—”
“That picture of Alex you used to stare at,” I said. “From when she was a toddler. It was taken by the ruins. That’s why she put this place on the list. I thought it was because of my work but that’s not it, is it? This one is about Alex.”
“You’ll have to talk to Alex about that.” He strode on, up the hill, breaking free of my grasp. Suddenly desperate for his espresso.
“And...” I chased after him. “And you never slept with her. Did you?”
That stopped him cold. I was aware of bodies passing us, aware that we were making a scene, blocking the sidewalk.
“I thought you didn’t,” I said softly, coming closer to where he stood. “I thought maybe I’d been wrong about that.”
He turned, eyes wide with shock. “You actually—”
“I know it’s not true. Now.”
“Me and Alex? Why would you think that?”
“I heard you talking about keeping something from me. In the garden. The night after my dad’s service. I was sure you were talking about how you’d been together. I thought you still wanted to be together. But that wasn’t it. Was it?”
“Jesus.” He closed his eyes, ran his hands through his hair, as if he could mess it up any more than the wind had already. So many filaments of silver in with the black now.
“You were talking about Casey,” I said. “How she’d get sick.”
He nodded. The weary pedestrians parted around us. When J.B. opened his eyes they were so sad and disbelieving I had to look away.
It was the disbelief that hurt most. He couldn’t believe how utterly foolish I’d been. Foolish, and vain, assuming their conversation had to be only about me. It disgusted me to see all that reflected in him.
I stared downhill at the ocean, at the distant line where the water disappeared into a wall of fog.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said after a minute.
“I was a wreck.” My eyes were streaming, the ocean before me a misty layer of color, grays over blues.
“But...to just leave. To leave, without... Look at me!” He shook my shoulder.
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