I turned to face him but still couldn’t meet his eyes.
A panting older woman in a pink Ghirardelli Chocolate sweatshirt, the hood cinched tight around her face, glared at me behind J.B.’s back. Annoyed we were blocking the sidewalk. Realizing that I was crying, that J.B.’s arm on my shoulder wasn’t an embrace, she softened her eyes in pity, locking her gaze on mine for a minute before ascending the hill.
“Hey, slowpokes!” Casey shouted into the wind from the crest of the hill. “No making out in the street!”
* * *
When I walked inside Goofy Foot Surf & Coffee Shack, setting off the tinkling bell over the door, Casey and Sam were already sitting together at a window table like old friends, Casey sipping a tall whipped-cream-topped drink.
“We thought you’d been carried off by a sneaker wave,” Sam said.
I hugged him. He was so solid, so familiar, wearing the soft vintage Aloha shirt I’d given him for his sixty-fifth. He smelled like coffee and Big Red cinnamon gum.
When I finally let go he said to Casey, “What’s gotten into this one?”
“My mom cooked up this game to keep us occupied,” Casey said. “And we’re a little worn-out from it. My mom can do that to you.”
“I know what’ll perk her up,” Sam said. “Think she can handle one, Casey?”
“Maybe.”
Casey nudged me, looking out the window at J.B. He was sitting on a bench across the street, unmoving. “What’s up with him?”
“He wanted to see the view.”
“Right.” She scrutinized me. I’d made a hasty attempt to clean up outside, wiping my eyes and nose with my sleeve. But my face had to be a crumpled, blotchy mess. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Just tired.”
Sam patted my shoulder only once, then entertained Casey with surfing stories as he made me a drink like Casey’s, a new invention called a Gnarly Mocha. Three kinds of chocolate, cinnamon, and a little cayenne to give it a kick. I didn’t touch it.
I stared blankly at the poster on the wall in front of me. It was a big emerald green print, art deco, showing the inside of the baths in their glory days. People in old-fashioned bathing costumes swimming, swinging on ropes, descending slides under a massive glass ceiling. I’d often admired the intricate design.
At the bottom it said, “When the Sutro Baths complex was completed in 1896, it was the largest indoor swimming center in the world... The structure, long vacant, burned down in 1966.”
“Sam,” I said. “Is this right? The baths burned in ’66?”
“Yep. Must’ve been something to see.”
1966.
Alex was born in 1959. She’d said it all the time, how she was one of the last children of the fifties. I calculated.
Truthful postcards the silly shop sells; buy one so I can tell.
“I like this guy,” Casey said. “Guess you were right about the clue, Laura. My mom must have wanted me to meet Sam. Searched online or whatever, saw you designed for him?”
I nodded, though I knew for sure now that she was wrong, that Alex had another reason for sending us here.
“Sam. You have a postcard with this Sutro print, right?”
“That rack over there. Top.” He watched as I spun the postcard rack. “We only have one left.”
Sam would never know this ordinarily. He was terribly lax about inventory. So I wasn’t surprised when I flipped the card over and saw his handwriting:
Tucker, 8 p.m.
4 Ridge Farm Road.
I slapped the card on the table.
“Busted,” he said.
Casey sighed. “So you’ve met my mom. Is she in the back room with champagne or what?”
He shook his head. “She called today and asked me to write that. That’s all. Who’s Tucker?”
“Not who,” I said. “Where. A little town near where we grew up.”
* * *
J.B. didn’t speak on the drive back. Somewhere around Sacramento, Casey began snoring softly.
I had worked out one more fact:
The baths burned in 1966.
Alex was supposedly born in 1959.
But in the picture of her as a one-year-old the baths had already burned. If she was telling the truth about her age it would be way before 1966 in that picture. And the baths would still be standing.
So she’d lied about her age. Truthful postcards, Alex had written in the clue. I’d glossed over the word, thinking it was just filler, but truthful meant something here. And so I can tell didn’t mean “so I can tell that you went there.”
If my math was right, Alex couldn’t have been older than sixteen when she’d had Casey, not twenty-two like she’d said. Was that what she wanted to tell us? That she’d been really young when she got pregnant? And she had been too ashamed to say it all these years?
J.B. stared straight ahead, driving carefully. His hands clutched the steering wheel a little too tight. When he felt me watching him he glanced over, pressed his lips together in a tight, wan smile.
I was grateful for it, but it was sadder than if he’d wept.
48
Spring/Summer
When Alexandra came back to the house Katherine didn’t tell her about Daniel. She didn’t tell anyone.
He didn’t take her to the beach to replace the driftwood as he’d promised.
But he whispered that she was special, that he’d chosen her out of all the girls in the house. That it was beautiful, nothing to be ashamed of.
It became one more part of her new life, that secret hour at night. Sitting at the picnic table under the budding aspen tree, surrounded by her new family, she could almost forget it.
Katherine learned to carve. She practiced on soap until she could make simple items out of balsa wood: spoon rests, jewelry dishes with a graceful stalactite in the center for holding rings.
One day a girl stole a bag of music-box workings from a craft store in Humboldt. She stuffed it down the back of her jeans along with a pouch of imitation opals. Everyone pounced on the opals but nobody knew what to do with the music boxes. Sometimes they played games with them at the table, trying to get the music to start at exactly the same time.
They were cheap things, the kind that would go in a child’s ballerina jewelry box. Most played “Greensleeves” or “Beautiful Dreamer.”
But one played another tune. Nobody at the table could identify it—a frustrating snippet that seemed to end too abruptly, on a down note. Long after the others got bored with the music boxes, Katherine played this one. She didn’t know why she liked its song.
“Maybe you heard it before,” Alexandra said one morning in June. She was covered in a lacy pattern of shade from the aspen tree’s thin branches, on which green, spade-shaped leaves hung in delicate clusters. She was expertly wrapping wire around a piece of white sea glass for a pendant; these could fetch five or six dollars. They handed all the cash from the farmer’s markets over to Daniel.
“I don’t think so.” When the music box finished playing, Katherine picked it up and examined the cylinder spiraled with Braille-like markings, the miniature crank, then returned to her work. She’d learned to make earrings, though they were tedious compared with carving. She made one pair—imitation opals dangling from chains of cheap silver jump rings—before she put down the jewelry supplies and started to play the song again.
Everyone groaned; the pockmarked boy named Bryan snatched up the music box and pretended he might drop it down the umbrella hole in the table.
Seeing her alarm, he handed it back.
Katherine wandered away cradling it, as if it was a newborn she wanted to cuddle in private.
* * *
At night she would lie next to Alexandra waiting for the creak of Daniel’s bathroom door. Her signal to come to him. He would give he
r one of the new pills, sometimes two, so what happened in the bed was soft-edged as a dream. He told her that he wouldn’t let anyone take her from him. Everyone else had been stolen away, everyone he’d loved in his little hometown. But she’d never leave, would she? They were the same, he told her. Making a new family to replace what had been lost. He carried her back to bed after, tucked her in.
One morning in July, before the others woke, she retrieved the pieces of broken driftwood from beneath Daniel’s bed and brought them to the picnic table. She cut and shaped and sanded them. Experimented with hinges and the jewelry glue that was so strong some of the kids sniffed it. Whittled out nooks so the tiny cranks could be turned. The driftwood became two cleverly concealed music boxes.
Her plan was to sell them at the farmer’s market for ten dollars apiece.
She sat on the blanket with the open music boxes and two sea-glass pendants she’d made. A little boy of five or six with berry-stained lips picked up one of the music boxes, and she showed him how to turn the crank, to play the song she loved. His distracted mother, arms loaded down with a baby, tote bags spilling over with produce, tried to buy it.
“I’ll give you five dollars,” she said, digging in her purse.
But Katherine didn’t like the way the boy handled the music box. He’d lose interest before he got home, and the case would soon be broken under a pile of abandoned action figures and trucks.
“I changed my mind,” she said, handing the mom back her crumpled bills.
“I’m not giving you more money.”
“I don’t want more money.”
Alexandra, sitting a few feet away selling candles, smiled at her, watching the woman stalk off with the wailing boy.
Alexandra didn’t smile as much now, and when she did it only made her eyes look old, because they didn’t match the smile. That was the only way Katherine could describe it.
Katherine returned the smile, grateful.
They didn’t see each other as much as they used to, even though they lived in the same house. Alexandra didn’t always sleep in the bed with her; she drifted to other rooms in the house, or slept during the day. She was no longer the bold girl who was going to act, sing, paint.
Katherine kept one music box for herself and gave the other to Alexandra, to make her smile again.
49
Weathr-All
2016
Sunday, early evening
I did Clue 7 alone.
J.B. and Casey waited in the truck, in the driveway of my old house.
I walked over to the little clearing in the side yard, up a slight hill. When I was a girl, it was my favorite place to sketch or stare out at the lake. I liked it because it was quiet, and far from the house, but I could still see my father working in his shed.
I was sure the bench would be ruined. I’d never asked anyone to take care of it.
But the lines were still true, the wood still pretty. Someone had cared for it. They’d rubbed every inch with varnish, on the schedule recommended on the Weathr-All or EvR-Seal can. They’d carried it inside in winter. It was almost as beautiful as when my dad first gave it to me.
I sat and gripped the armrest. “I miss you, Daddy,” I whispered.
I wished, more than anything, that he was there. To wink at me, cheer me up. Even if he couldn’t tell me what was going on.
I wished we could have another week together. I wasn’t greedy—I wasn’t asking for months or years.
I only wanted a week, a plain, uneventful, joking-around week, the way we always were together. To undo the last week we really got. Six days of shame and silence.
I’d forgiven myself for hiding the truth about the parties. But I hadn’t forgiven myself for not trying harder to talk to him after that night. Maybe, if I hadn’t given up so easily, I could have pushed through our mutual embarrassment and disappointment.
I took the photo quickly. A blurry, tilting shot with only my fingertip visible in the cutout of the moon, to prove I’d actually been sitting there.
* * *
When I returned to the truck J.B. held his finger to his lips; Casey was curled up on the back seat, asleep again.
Let’s let her sleep, he mouthed.
Quietly, he opened the door and climbed out, and we both winced when it shut, fearing the thunk would wake Casey. But she only sighed and shifted a leg.
J.B. and I sat cross-legged under a cluster of pines by the driveway, looking up at my house. I’d had the shutters painted the previous summer. An inoffensive dove gray chosen by the property manager, a color that screamed rental. There was a pot of yellow-and-purple pansies by the front door, but even those felt too tidy, staged. The house needed a pile of shoes on the porch, a tacky kid’s sticker in a window, to look like a family lived there.
“Who took care of the bench?”
“We all did,” he said. “All three of us.”
“Thank you.”
“I might not have helped much the first few years.” He smiled ruefully.
“You thought I just bailed. No goodbye, no real explanation.”
“Alex said you only needed time. That you’d come back. Even when your mom moved, that October after you left, we all hoped...” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to be mad at you. How can you be mad at someone when she’s lost her father?”
“Because she broke up with you in a three-line email...” I pulled up a hank of grass, sifted it onto my knees. “And vanished. You must’ve hated me.” I plucked at more grass, a habit from when I was a girl.
J.B. reached over and touched my cheek, waited for me to still my hands, meet his eyes.
“I didn’t hate you,” he said softly. “And I don’t hate you now. I just wish you’d told me what was in your head.”
He leaned closer, unblinking, not letting me look away even though he had to see that in a second I’d be crying again, at the waste of it.
“J.B., what’s this game about?” I asked, barely able to form the words.
He sighed, shook his head.
“Is it something to do with Alex lying about her age? She had Casey young, really young. And she finally wants us to know?”
He hesitated, so I knew before he spoke what his answer would be: “Yes.”
I grabbed his hand. “But that photo, you saw it years ago. Why didn’t you tell us back then? Tell me what’s going on.”
I could sense by the pained way he squinted that he was torn. But then the words came, slowly at first. Halting, as he measured whatever loyalty he had to Alex, whatever promise he had made to keep her secrets, against my plea. And my desperate grip on his hand. “Her lying about her age, that old picture by the stairs...that was what first got me thinking. I knew she was hiding something.”
And then he spoke more rapidly. “I watched her, the way she looked at you. You’d told me you fantasized that she was your mother, and I started to think maybe she could be. Or your sister, another relative.”
“Is she, is that—”
“No. I was wrong about that. You’re not related, Laur.”
He paused, waiting for this to sink in.
“That summer they moved into The Shipwreck, when I was delivering for Ollie, I noticed a loose floorboard in her studio. I was trying to fix it so her sawhorses would sit level. And I saw something hidden under it. I thought it belonged to the Colliers, so I left it without saying anything. It felt wrong to disturb it.”
“What was under there? Papers, pictures?”
“Something...small. Something...unusual. It wasn’t a big deal. But I remembered it a few years later, when you showed me another one almost exactly like it. Something that opened. Something you’d always kept close—”
“My music box,” I said softly.
He nodded a fraction of an inch.
I’d tried not to think about i
t over the years. It made me sad to picture it, silently drowning, disintegrating.
I had a small upright piano in the city, and I let myself pick out the notes to “Love is Blue” once a year, on the morning of my birthday. A ritual to help contain the sadness. Control it. At least, that’s how I’d justified it to myself.
“I wish like hell I’d never pushed her to explain.” He breathed deep, went on, the words pouring out now. “But I did push her. One night, that last summer, maybe a week after you showed me your music box, I got her alone and told her what I’d been thinking. How you fantasized she was your mother, even your crazy theory about your feet being identical. Except it didn’t seem so crazy anymore... She tried to laugh it off. But something was off, I knew I’d rattled her. So a couple weeks later, when you and Casey were late getting back from Tahoe, I pulled up the floorboard in the studio again to show her the music box, forced her to talk. That’s when she finally told me everything. And then your dad... And then you were gone, Laur.”
Another music box.
J.B. had said my wildest fantasy wasn’t true; Alex wasn’t a relative. But she knew something about my birth mother.
“Tell me,” I said. “What is the everything?”
J.B. flinched. I’d squeezed his hand so hard my fingernails had dug into his skin, almost piercing the flesh. I ran my finger along the chain of tiny red crescents on his wrist. “Please, J.B. I’ve been a good sport. I’ve gone along with everything. So has Casey. But we’ve had enough. What does Alex know?”
He pulled me to him. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his lips humming against my temple. “The rest is for her to tell you. And she will soon, I promise.” He kissed me near my hairline. Then again on my cheek, just as softly, but longer this time.
He hugged me tight until I relaxed for the first time in days, letting my body soften against his warm chest.
50
In August, Daniel dropped a glass. He ignored the shards on the kitchen floor and immediately poured another drink. When the bottle slipped and a lake of amber liquor spread on the counter, dripping over the edge, he threw the bottle at the wall.
The Summer List Page 30