The Secret of Everything

by O'Neal, Barbara

  The man who tried to steal Vita’s life had drifted into that joyful Boulder house with another man, the boyfriend of one of the other girls. Vita was sleeping with a philosophy student at CU, but one look at Jesse and she was lost, lost in his unholy, unwholesome beauty—eyes dark as a midnight dive, lips like slices of overripe melon, hands as lean and graceful as a musician’s to pluck the strings of a woman’s body.

  And God knew he could play. He could make love for hours, days, twining his spell tighter and tighter around her, until she could not move unless he pulled the strings. He followed work to Texas, then to Arizona, and Vita followed him, tugged along in his wake like a leashed dog.

  She lost herself so slowly, she was shocked to realize one morning that she had become a shell, something empty and echoey, filled only with reflections of Jesse and his cruelty. That, too, had begun so slowly she barely recognized it. A nip or a pinch, a sharp nudge, a criticism that stung and then was smoothed away by those sweet melon lips.

  People never understood how an abuser worked. It wasn’t all abuse, because who would ever put up with that?

  No, Jesse was masterful, alternating terrible cruelty with grand gestures, genuine remorse, and that mind-blowing sex. She always knew she was safe if he was making love to her.

  By the time she got away from him, she’d lost that woman who cooked so joyfully in a house in Boulder. She weighed less than one hundred pounds and had the marks of him all over her, in bones that had been broken, in scars where he’d broken the skin, in a thousand broken things in her psyche. She ran away from him after he killed her bird, and she had never quite forgiven herself for putting a helpless creature at risk. She ran under cover of night and didn’t stop driving until she came to Los Ladrones. She’d never heard of it and trusted that Jesse never had, either. The commune took her in.

  She’d started cooking again and running for simple, easy hours along the banks of the river. Slowly, she came back to herself. An egg and a smile, a hearty burp and the sizzle of onions in a pan, a gleaming sink and baking bread. It fixed her. Even after everything fell apart at the commune, she didn’t lose herself again. Vita came into town to cook for the hotel first, then to open 100 Breakfasts.

  Because breakfast was the secret to everything.

  And here, making breakfast, she could offer healing to other women.

  By five a.m., when her crew began to trickle in, she’d long since had her own breakfast—a hard-boiled egg and toast with butter and jam—and had baked casseroles, fresh and steaming, to serve to the customers who would file in the doors the minute she opened them at five-thirty sharp. Together, she and the line cooks and dishwashers and waitresses bustled around, starting pots of coffee, setting up stations for the cooks, measuring out pancake mix, and heating up waffle irons. Annie, the new girl, had her badly dyed hair pulled tightly away from her face, and Vita thought again that a little weight would do the woman a world of good. She was so thin you could see the bones in her arms, the ribs across the top of her chest.

  “Good morning,” Vita said. “Are you ready to handle the waffle station this morning?”

  “I guess. Am I ready?”

  Nancy, a sturdy woman in her fifties with the red-tipped nose of a long-term drinker, rasped, “Piece of cake, honey. Come on over here and stand by me and we’ll get you going. You can do the bacon, too.”

  Vita touched Nancy’s shoulder, quietly thanking her, and moved into the dining room to open the blinds, run a check to make sure it all looked clean and tidy. When she was satisfied, she headed for the front door. “Ready, gang?” she called.

  “All systems go,” someone called, and Vita turned the Closed sign to Open.

  Wednesday Breakfast Special

  Ham and Egg Casserole: This one sells out early, so don’t lollygag.

  VITA’S HAM AND EGG CASSEROLE

  3 T butter

  ½ cup diced red onions

  4 cups shredded potatoes

  1½ cups slivered organic ham

  1½ cups mixed shredded cheese, equal parts sharp cheddar, Jack, and Colby

  1 cup finely diced mild green chiles, roasted, skinned, and seeded

  8 eggs, beaten

  1½ cups heavy cream

  ½ tsp freshly ground pepper

  Melt the butter in a heavy skillet and cook onions until tender. In a large bowl, mix cooked onions, potatoes, ham, chiles, and cheese together, and spread in a 13′9-inch buttered baking dish. Beat together eggs, cream, and pepper, and pour over the potato mix. Bake for 45-50 minutes, or until a knife in the middle comes out clean. Serve with sliced tomatoes.

  EIGHT

  Tessa made it over to Green Gate Farms on Thursday morning. After the hike to the lake, her foot needed some coddling, and she gave it without question, lazing around the pool, reading, and watching a movie in the cool depths of the Chief Theater, which was hung with old velvet drapes, the walls painted with murals of the Old West.

  According to Google, Green Gate Farms was just on the other side of the river, but the bridge was nearly five miles north of town. It was a cloudy morning, for which Tessa was grateful, since she had managed to get sunburned reading a ghost story she picked up poolside yesterday. High-altitude sunlight was nothing to mess with.

  Right after she crossed the bridge there was a sign, with the main portion carved in exuberant, colorful script:

  Green Gate Organic Farms

  Fresh produce

  Café

  Retreats and cabins

  Green Gate Vegetarian Cooking School

  Vegetables and flowers were painted on the sign. Her father’s elegant hand could have provided the pattern for the carved lettering, and she definitely felt his spirit here. Following the road beneath a stand of thick pines, she noticed that the landscape rose steeply to her right. The road curved and then opened into a wide green clearing that overlooked the river, the valley with the town of Los Ladrones lined up in rows and, farther north, the San Juan Mountains. It looked like something that could be drawn on a label for luscious, healthy food, for sure. Breathtaking.

  She heard herself humming and took a moment to listen. Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Guinnevere.” She frowned. Odd choice for her brain to make. Maybe she’d heard it without realizing it.

  A cluster of modern buildings sat beside a gravel parking lot, with wooden signs on a post pointing visitors toward the cabins, the produce stands, the farms, the cooking school, and the main building. Vegetable plants and herbs grew in all the whiskey barrels and vined around signposts. As she stepped out of the car, Tessa smelled thyme.

  Pushing her sunglasses on top of her head, she gathered a few long shots of the river running silver through the middle of fertile fields, the rustic-looking buildings, the trees and mountains.

  None of it looked familiar. Nothing made all the jumbled pieces of memory suddenly align themselves. Which she supposed she had been expecting.

  “Hello,” said a young woman in a pair of loose, vibrantly printed trousers and a simple white T-shirt. Her dark hair was cropped close, and a pair of delicate silver earrings hung in her lobes. “Can I help you find something?”

  “I was just admiring the view,” she said.

  “Are you the one who’s here from Rambling Tours?”

  “Yes, actually.” She stuck out her hand. “Tessa Harlow.”

  “Jessica Cunningham. I’m interning here. They sent me down to meet you. Some crisis in the greenhouse this morning.” She gestured toward the café. “Let’s get a cup of tea and you can ask me some questions while we wait for Cherry.”

  “Sounds good.” She wanted to continue shooting the area, but that would wait. From the big shoulder bag she carried, she pulled out a stenographer’s pad and a pen instead. “What kind of intern are you?”

  “I’m on the farm side.” They stepped onto a deep porch furnished with rocking chairs overlooking the view, and Jessica pulled open the wooden screen door. “Organic systems. I’m taking a degree at Colorado St
ate University.”

  Tessa ducked inside the café. A blast of exotic scents hit her—ginseng and cinnamon and something else. “Is that tea? Smells fantastic.”

  “Our own secret recipe. You can buy it in bulk, of course.” She pointed to small bags lined up along the counter, each with a stylized, beautiful label bearing the name Green Gate Farms. “Would you like to try it?”

  “Absolutely.” Eyeing the bakery offerings in the case, she asked, “What else should I try? What’s your favorite?”

  “The carrot muffins, hands down.” She pointed to caramel-orange-colored muffins studded with pineapple. “Give us a big pot of tea and a couple of muffins, will you, Andrew?”

  They carried a tray to a table by a window that overlooked the fields. Tessa made notes—the café was small, wouldn’t serve more than ten at a time, but it had a cozy feeling, like headquarters for a summer camp. The wood was rough-hewn, the tables made by hand, each individually wrought of twigs and planks and knotty pine. She rubbed her hand over the tabletop. “Beautiful.”

  Jessica poured tea from a utilitarian steel pot, releasing the fresh fragrance into the air immediately above the table. Tessa leaned in and breathed it, a tickle of memory moving over her brain, then slipping away. She broke apart one of the muffins to examine the crumb. “I noticed that The 100 Breakfasts Café uses a lot of baked goods from Green Gate. Is this the bakery, here?”

  She shook her head. “It used to be. We’ve moved everything to the cooking-school building. It’s brand-new, state-of-the-art everything.”

  “And everything is organic and vegetarian?”

  “It is—and we go with as much local food as we can. Obviously we can’t grow everything—wheat doesn’t do well in this location, for example—but the honey is from our hives, the carrots from our gardens, and the eggs from our coops.”

  “I’m not always a fan of the granola-groovy world,” Tessa said, “but the grain in this muffin is gorgeous.” Pinching a chunk out of the middle, she found it moist to the touch, tender and sweet in her mouth. She widened her eyes in approval. “Mmm!”

  “I think you’ll find the food here is all that good.”

  “So can I get some background from you while we’re waiting?”

  “Yep. That’s why I’m here.”

  Tessa asked a lot of questions she pretty much knew the answers to: the basics of the farm, the numbers of people who lived here year-round, the kind of tourism they were already hosting.

  “Not a lot,” Jessica said. “The cooking school is the brainchild of Cherry’s mother, Paula, who did the research and organized staff and brought in the whole team. She was one of the original members of the commune here—the tea is her invention.” She pointed at Tessa’s cup, which Tessa had not yet tasted.

  Tessa held up a finger to pause the conversation and picked up her mug in both hands. The scent rushed into her sinuses, and the tea struck her mouth—swirled over her tongue and her palate and hit the back of her throat, and she tasted sunshine hot on high grasses and bees buzzing in the distance and—

  —she closed her eyes, seeing a field and herself running through grass well above her head. She was laughing, being tickled, splashing somebody in a baby pool, completely naked. She saw herself tucking a doll into a shoe-box bed—

  Jolted by the sudden blast of memories, Tessa put the cup down and shook her head slightly, as if the tea was the source of her reaction. “Wow,” she said.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  Tessa nodded. “Tell me a little more history. It started as a commune, right?”

  Jessica reiterated what Tessa knew from both her research and her own father. The commune was started in 1969 by a handful of serious counterculturists dropping out and turning on. “They grew a lot of pot, and some of them lived in tepees, the whole nine yards,” Jessica said. “There was an old Victorian house, but it was in pretty bad shape.”

  “Is it still there?”

  “Yes, and it’s been updated. They use it for retreats and things like that. Kind of big and drafty, hard to heat, so it’s closed through the winter.”

  A quickening told her that she wanted to see the house if she could get a look at it. In the meantime, her boss would want some facts and figures, a way to sell the farm to his customers, who wouldn’t be impressed by the ancient hippie-commune angle. Erecting a wall between herself and the past, she donned a business hat and gathered facts, figures, and possibilities, like the professional she was.

  After they drank their tea at Green Gate Café, Jessica gave Tessa a tour of the grounds and main buildings. “How many of the original commune members are still here?” Tessa asked as they walked along a field that had just been turned under.

  “Not many, I don’t think. Paula, who invented the tea, is one of them. Her daughter was raised here.” Jessica smiled. “Can you imagine what a great life that would have been?”

  Tessa raised an eyebrow noncommittally “Anyone besides Paula?”

  “Sure. The guys who run the fields, Jonathan and Robert, are brothers and they were raised on a farm in the central valley in California—and the midwife, Anna. They’re all old now, like in their sixties. Some of them have grandchildren working here. It’s mostly the middle group, the kids, who’ve managed to get the systems working—getting the produce to market, establishing the retreat center, making the website.” She stopped at the greenhouse. “A lot of the original members of the commune are Luddites. They really don’t want anything to do with computers.”

  “Or iPods or capitalism,” said a woman with dark hair cut into a crisp and shimmering bob to her jawline. “Or even electricity, some of them,” she added with a grin.

  “I know a guy like that,” Tessa said.

  “You must be Tessa.” The woman, around Tessa’s age, stuck out her hand. “I’m Cherry. Sorry to keep you waiting. Had an emergency in the greenhouse.”

  “No problem.”

  Jessica said, “I’ve gotta get to the barns.”

  “Thanks for your help,” Cherry said, and turned, gesturing for Tessa to come with her along a path cutting through an open field bounded on three sides by the rising mountain and forest. “This is the meadow. It was one of the original settlement sites. They had tepees and tents here before they fixed the house.” She pointed as they rounded the edge of the trees.

  Tessa halted, almost without realizing it, slammed by recognition. The house stood against the dark day, three stories of rambling Victorian, eccentrically decorated with gingerbread and a tower rising like a Russian dome above the pines surrounding it. A wide porch wrapped around the front and both sides, facing the river and the town on the other side and the ridge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains behind Los Ladrones. It was painted the wrong colors, she thought, very clearly.

  “Are you all right?” Cherry asked.

  “Fine. I just—” She shrugged. “Déjà vu or something.”

  Cherry nodded. “We can’t go in right now, because there’s a conference going on. Psychologists, I think.”

  “So there are meeting rooms? Bedrooms? How does that work?”

  “It can accommodate a small conference, maybe up to twenty. Otherwise, we use the cabins, which will hold up to a hundred fifty. They were built in the early seventies. It was a thriving commune at the time. More than two hundred people lived here for nearly a decade.”

  “Really? Two hundred? What happened?”

  “Officially?” Cherry stopped, eyeing the house. “Officially it was a feud between two camps of the original followers. One group wanted to leave it natural—live without electricity and all that—but the others wanted to start coming into the modern world.”

  “And unofficially?” Tessa asked.

  “One of the leaders was killed. Shot to death. Details have never really become all that clear. There was a writer out here a few years ago trying to piece it all together, but nobody talked.” She eyed the house. “They’ll take the story to their graves.”

 
“You lived here then?”

  “Yeah, but I was only two. I don’t remember anything about it.” She rolled her eyes. “A lot of the students around here think it would have been so great to grow up here, but believe me it got old.”

  Tessa touched her chest ironically. “Hi, my name is Tessa, and my dad was a magician for Renaissance festivals until I was thirteen.”

  Cherry laughed, a robust sound. “So you get it.”

  “I get it. I adore my dad, don’t get me wrong, I do. But I was really glad to go to a normal school and wear pink T-shirts and glitter fingernails.”

  “I would have killed for that.” Her eyes showed raw longing. “Eventually I talked my mom into letting me go to normal high school, but by then I was already a weirdo kid from the commune and it wasn’t that easy to break into the cliques.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Cherry waved a hand. “Let’s keep walking. Where’s your dad?”

  “Santa Cruz. He’s a surfer now. Runs a drinks shack on the beach.” Looking briefly over her shoulder at the house, Tessa said, “You must like it here if you stayed all this time.”

  “Are you kidding? I got out of here the minute I turned eighteen. I have to admit that the commune educated me brilliantly, so I landed a great scholarship to CU Boulder, mass comm. Never looked back.” She raised a finger. “Until my mother got breast cancer last summer. I came back to make sure she had the help she needed through chemo.”

  Tessa thought of the woman with no eyebrows. “She works the farmers’ market, right?”

  “Yeah. She’s doing great, actually, in complete remission, so she’ll be fine.” Cherry smiled fondly. “Funny, though, now I don’t want to live away from her anymore. I grew up and noticed that she’s this incredibly amazing person. I’m divorced, and newspapers are dying, so I’m doing the PR and Web marketing for the farms. Thanks to the demand for organic vegetables, the place is booming.”

  “I can see that.”