“I’m not saying there’s no chance,” he says. “But you can’t just have someone declared dead without... There would have to be investigations... You have paperwork that says she’s dead, Jackie.” He grips the wheel tightly.
He saw her from afar, those years ago, on their shared hill, but he doesn’t understand her the way I do. He doesn’t see how exactly like Willa this whole thing is. How much she valued her freedom. And though she always said she never wanted to leave her home, she changed the Sandcastle when she moved the shells that night. And it was no longer her home.
“You didn’t know her,” I say. “Not up close. She always wanted to fade away, so she did.”
“And you think Angela knew she was alive and planned this whole thing with her?”
“I don’t know.” I spread the map over the dashboard, but it billows and rattles from the wind rushing in our open windows, so I refold it.
“If she were alive all this time...”
“What?”
“Wouldn’t she have reached out to you?”
“Except she did reach out. She has.”
“Jackie...”
“There, down this road. One more mile.”
“When we get there, where do we go? Sit in a restaurant and just wait to see if she shows up? Go door to door?”
“I don’t know. Left there, by the lookout.”
He pulls in and stops in a small parking lot overlooking the beach.
“Jackie. I want you to be right. You don’t know how much.” He touches my knee. “But you need to prepare yourself to be wrong. There are a million possibilities that aren’t Willa, alive, prowling around for two months and playing games with your head... Where are you going?”
I’m out of the car, on the wedge-shaped overlook. Shaped, just as its name implies, like a spyglass. It juts out over the water, a long piece of land, slightly wider at the end. I lean against the guardrail and look out. It’s a foggy late afternoon, but the beach is crowded. Lots of surfers. Lots of kids. Couples, barbecuers, people walking their dogs.
Shane stands to my right, scanning the beach with me. But he’s fidgety, looking over at me often.
I stay there for a long time, as the shadows of the bodies on the beach get longer, and the sun drops close to the blue horizon.
Shane paces, rubbing his hair, and still I watch.
He kisses my shoulder, whispers, “Jackie.”
“Not yet,” I say. “Just a little more time.”
He asks if I want water, food. I shake my head and pull the lace bookmark from my pants pocket again so I can squeeze it. I always did need to occupy my hands when I was nervous. He retreats to the car to sit.
I watch the beach, and he watches me from the car. I can feel his eyes on me, feel the intensity of his worry from here. But my eyes don’t leave the beach. The day-trippers start to pack up their blankets and coolers, and there are just a few clusters of bodies on the sand here and there.
“Jackie,” Shane calls, when I’ve been staring for more than an hour. “It’s going to be dark soon.”
“Just a little longer.”
“Let’s go get some dinner. We can find a hotel down the highway and come back in the morning if you want. Look somewhere else nearby, or put up flyers? What do you say?”
“Half an hour more,” I say, disappointment bitter in my throat.
He hesitates. “Okay. I’ll walk to town and check things out.”
Maybe he senses that I need to be alone to let go. To let her die a second time, and to let my teenage self die with her. The way people in hospitals know to leave the room, because otherwise their loved one will cling to hope. To life.
The sound of Shane’s footsteps grows faint. The beach below is nearly empty.
And that’s when I see her.
She’s in the water, riding the waves. Her surfing form is as unmistakable as her voice. She’s part of the ocean, not fighting it, but always a breath ahead of it, intuiting its next move. It’s a rare thing to witness, that combination of confidence and humility. It’s matchless, a miracle.
“Willa!” In my head it’s a shout, but it comes out faint and raspy.
I take off, flying down the trail, my heart surging. I hold my breath around every switchback that forces me to take my eyes off of her; I’m relieved each time the blue sea comes into view again and she hasn’t vanished. By the time I’m on the sand, she’s still there. Yellow bikini bottom, white rash guard. Not even a half wet suit. It’s warmer here than in the waves of her girlhood. Long blond hair darkened only slightly by time. It’s her, could only be her, the bend of her body, the space between her toes and the nose of her board, the angle of her fingers to her wrist when they dip into the water, trailing across it casually, as if she’s strolling past a garden fountain. Instead of mastering millions of pounds of dangerous water, unpredictable nature.
You did master it, Willa. It couldn’t kill you, not when you loved it so much. And I’m sorry I ever believed you wanted to leave this earth, because you’re so at home in it.
“Willa!” I shout, but the wind steals my voice.
My shoes are soaked, my pant cuffs wet and heavy, but I walk fast through the waves, straight toward her. When I’m thirty feet away, nearly hip-deep, I stop.
This life has kept her miraculously young; she still looks seventeen as she straddles her board, peering out toward the setting sun for one more wave. Her body is lean and toned, her hair is long, wild. When it dries it’ll puff up into a cloud around her head.
She notices me at last. She smiles, paddles toward me. Drops her board on the sand, rips her Velcro board leash off her ankle and strolls over. Serene, casual. As if she’s not surprised to see me at all.
Willa has hazel eyes now. She’s two inches shorter.
“I knew you’d come,” she says. Her voice is completely different. Lower. Sharper.
Disappointment is a vise around my heart. It’s not her.
“I knew it,” the strange girl says. “I knew it would work. It’s nice to meet you, Jackie.” She laughs, delighted.
Cruel, cruel girl. A fan, just like Shane’s worst fear. A groupie who read up on Graham’s family. A twisted soul who doesn’t care who she hurts.
“It was you,” I say slowly. “You were the one...”
She nods, still smiling. As if she hasn’t just shattered my heart into a million fragments, pieces smaller than the shell dust by the waterfall trail.
“Why? Why would you—”
“Mom!” the girl yells over my shoulder.
I turn.
Down the beach, there’s a woman. She has short red hair, and a little boy. She hasn’t heard her daughter over the wind.
She’s so good with the little boy, so gentle and unhurried, crouching to show him shells or sand crabs. Or a piece of sea glass...
“Mom!”
The woman looks happy. That’s my last thought before she glances up and sees me. Freezes.
Her happy expression vanishes. Replaced by shock. She straightens.
Then she walks toward me slowly. When she’s a few feet away she stops.
Lines around her round blue eyes. Freckles on her shoulders, from a life in the sun. The shallowest of creases above her kneecaps.
“She’s been visiting me,” I manage, fidgeting with the lace in my hand. “Your daughter. She’s been lurking around the Sandcastle this summer. She put a song called ‘Spyglass’ in my old diary and left it in the treehouse so I could find you.”
“Did she?” Her voice is the same. Hoarse from shock, but still rich and musical. Still young. “I didn’t know. Not about that part.”
“But you knew other parts?”
“I knew my mom left you the Sandcastle. Because I asked her to. And I knew there’d be an album with some of our music in with his. Because that was my
idea, too. I wrote our old songs in the notebook, a few months before my mom died.”
“But me finding you. That wasn’t your idea.”
Willa looks over at her daughter, who’s watching us from afar, and shakes her head no.
“So then...” I take this in for a minute before I can dare ask, my voice raspy from fear of her answer. “Are you sorry I’m here?”
She doesn’t answer.
She doesn’t want me here. She wants me to go, and forget I ever saw her again. Pretend she’s just a woman with red hair, a stranger I passed on the beach.
She never wanted to see me again. Her daughter lured me here without Willa’s permission and now she’s upset.
Then all thought is obliterated inside the force of her hug.
42
Tilting a Galaxy
That evening
“We’re going on a campout,” Willa announces to everyone near their van, which is parked in a quiet, tree-shrouded spot on a hill overlooking the beach. She says this to Liam, who she loves, and who helped her vanish twenty years ago. To their four children.
Willa has three boys, including the one I saw with her on the sand. Eighteen, seventeen, and seven.
And a daughter. An untamed daughter named Avery who’s fifteen, and looks exactly like Willa used to except for her eye color. A daughter who is every bit as clever and imaginative and skilled at schemes as Willa and I were.
Willa is alive. Willa has four children, and lives in a van. They move it often. Whenever they have to, if they get tickets or people they don’t trust ask too many questions.
I glimpse the inside of the van, as she’s packing a rucksack for us, and it’s orderly, for such a cramped space. I repeat these facts in my head as she introduces me to her children, as Liam (thicker, rougher-skinned, still kind, still shy, still besotted with Willa) hugs me.
Willa is alive, and has four children, and has been living in a van, traveling up and down the sands of western North America, for two decades. They are beach nomads. They have no phones, no television, no mortgage or internet service or formal school schedule.
They make money mostly by giving surf lessons. Just enough money is enough for them.
They’re happy.
“You’ll be okay?” I ask Shane, who’s sitting in a camping chair talking to Liam.
“Yes. I’ll get a hotel or I’ll wait here and sleep in the car or... I don’t know. Just, go, go!” He kisses me, hugs me tight. His eyes shine for me, showing a joy that I can’t feel yet. None of this feels real.
“Thank you,” I whisper into his ear.
I’m steps away, following Willa as she heads uphill into the trees, when he says, “Wait!” He fumbles in his backpack, pulls out a small tape player. “In case you two want some music tonight. Tape’s in it.”
“It’s what I think?”
He nods. “The quality’s not so great, a rush copy job. But when the music works that shouldn’t matter. Don’t tell me if you hate it. Go, have fun.”
I smile, tuck it in my bag.
Willa and I hike north on the beach for half an hour, carrying our heavy bags full of supplies, listening to the gulls and the waves and our breathing, the soft thuds of our footsteps in the sand. I’m grateful for this time to think.
She leads me to a small, protected stretch of beach against a tall dune. Far enough from the beach access road that there aren’t any people around.
We roll out our sleeping bags, set out our water bottles. Collect dry wood for our fire.
We build it together, halfway between our beds and the water, kneeling close to tend it.
“I discovered this spot about ten years ago,” she says, settling back onto the sand once the flames are snapping.
I sit next to her. Not too close.
“The surfing’s poor because of those rocks out there,” she says. “See, those shapes? But it’s my favorite place to camp alone when we’re staying nearby. I come here when I need a little quiet.”
“Four children, Willa. Four.”
She smiles at me, her face glowing from the flickering fire. “I know.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Thank you. Li doesn’t need to get away from them, ever. I need to a few times a year.”
“And no one’s ever recognized you, not in all that time?”
“It’s easier than you think, disappearing. Liam never had any family...not any family who’d search for him...”
“I remember.”
“And this helps.” She touches her red hair. “Henna,” she says, making a face. “I’m so used to it, I don’t remember what my natural color is anymore.”
“It’s their color. The kids’. But this is pretty, too.” Her dyed hair has a slight crown of frizz around the top. Her aura, I used to call it. I wish I could touch it, to reassure myself that she’s real, but I keep my hand in my lap.
I have so many questions for her. Did she ever think about coming back? How long had she been in contact with Angela? Does she ever miss her old home and does she worry about the kids getting taken by social services and what about all those people who were sure she’d drowned in Rosarito, and who wrote the song “Spyglass, California” that Avery put in my diary under stickers, her or Avery? And me... Did she ever want to reach out to me?
But all of those questions can wait. The important thing is Willa is alive, and well, and here next to me.
“So you did go through with it,” I say. “The shells.”
She nods. “How did you—”
I explain about Shane. Our fan club of one, who secretly moved the shells back in place, to hide what he thought Angela had done.
“What did you think when you saw the shells had been moved back that night?” I ask.
“I didn’t see them. I never went up there to move them back.”
“But—”
“I came to the treehouse to tell you I’d lost him, Jackie, that I’d screwed up and I’d been out all night looking and I was worried it had gone too far. I followed him as long as I could into the trees and then I lost him.”
“And you would have told me, in the treehouse, but I came rushing up saying how wonderful it was that you’d changed your mind. Oh, Wills. I’m so sorry. I wish I’d known.” I’m crying, the tears streaming, warm and constant, down my cheeks.
“I thought if you knew I’d gone through with it, you’d hate me,” she says softly. “You were so sure I hadn’t done it. I hated myself, for a long time. That’s why I left...”
“I don’t hate you, I never could. And it was my idea, Wills. I’m so sorry that you’ve had to carry that by yourself this whole time.”
We sit watching the fire until I’ve stopped crying.
“And Mexico?” I ask, wiping my nose on my sleeve.
“I didn’t plan it. Li and I weren’t even in Baja that month. We’d left Rosarito way before that drowning theory started. But I’d left my backpack behind in a port locker because we were rushing for our ferry. It had my insulin in it.
“And I guess a piece of someone else’s board washed up nearby, and some fisherman said he’d seen a bunch of bummy-looking kids surfing too far out that day, so the lazy private detective my mom had hired decided it was probably mine. When Li and I read about it in the paper...”
“You let everyone think you’d drowned.” Even Angela. Even me. This is unfathomable, still. But I won’t hurt her more by saying it aloud.
“I know how it seems, Jackie. But it was the only way I could live. Does that make any sense at all?”
The only way she could live—letting the girl who’d moved the shells die. I would try to understand it.
“I know this. That you’d never hurt anybody unless you had no other choice. Not then and not now.”
“My mom said almost the same thing, the first time I visit
ed her. After the shock wore off.”
“So you—”
“I started visiting her at Arbor View a year ago,” Willa says. “When I heard she was sick.”
“And you told her all of it? About that night?”
She shakes her head no again. “I considered it. But we didn’t have much time left, and she wanted to talk about the future, not the past. I think hoping the album might happen, with our songs on it, allowed her to hang on a little longer.”
“And your daughter?”
“She doesn’t know about that night, either. She just thinks ‘Spyglass’ is a song about the way the stars look from here.”
Before we left the family at the van, Avery insisted to both of us that she hadn’t planned the diary part of their scheme, that it had been a last-minute impulse because she “only wanted to help.” Her words were contrite; her face was gleeful.
“Okay,” I say, trying to get my head around it all. “You wrote our lyrics into Graham’s notebook because you wanted the album to happen. Then, Avery secretly wrote your song about where you guys were staying this summer in my diary to bring you and me together? Am I getting it right?”
“Those are the highlights.”
“Well. So you’re writing lyrics now, not just music? You’ve replaced me.” I say this lightly, trying to get her to smile, but maybe it comes out wrong because she only shakes her head no again.
“Now tell me a story.” I reach for her hand. “Tell me the story about everything that’s happened since you were seventeen.”
This makes her smile. “Let’s see. How would you start? Did I ever tell you about the time I hid my old life inside a Belgian cookie tin?”
I settle in.
* * *
What’s most remarkable about the first eighteen years of the story is how steady its overarching theme is. The theme is contentment.
Willa’s life hasn’t been perfect, not entirely free of longing, homesickness, deprivation, cravings for comfort. But Liam and Willa have been happy with their choices, as their family has moved and grown, as they’ve raised their children in freedom. They wanted a different kind of life, and they created it. Out of little more than their talents and decency and faith that they could do it. And their love for each other.
Lady Sunshine Page 28
