“Yes, Dad. I love you, too.”
When Vince got to his mother’s house, she was putting out bowls for cereal. The girls were in their PJs and leapt up joyfully. “Daddy! We’re having Cap’n Crunch!” Jade cried.
“With Crunch Berries!” Hannah added, waving her spoon.
Natalie swung her feet, hair crazy all around her head. He smoothed it down. “What about you, Miss Scarlett?”
“I’m having toast. I’m not eating all that junk food.”
Judy snorted, banging a frying pan onto the stove. “Her Highness wants an egg.”
“I said I would have toast, Grandma!”
“But not with margarine,” Judy said, glaring at Vince.
Natalie flung her feet back and forth. “It’s not good for you.”
“Oh, brother!” Jade rolled her eyes. Even so early in the morning, she was well groomed, her hair brushed and tied back, her pajamas tidy. She woke up washed and pressed, just like her mother. He kissed her head, too.
“Not everybody likes the same things,” he said.
“I know.”
Sasha and Pedro were on the other side of the kitchen, on an area rug where they were banished while the girls were eating. Vince bent down to look closely at Pedro. “You tangled with a porcupine, huh?” There were a few little marks but nothing serious. “I guess we need to keep him in a fence or something.”
His mother slammed spoons down, yanked the door to the fridge open so hard that everything inside rattled. Vince finally realized she was furious with him. He stood up and put his hands on her arms. “Hey, hey, what’s up, Mom? Sit down, let me do that.”
“Don’t you what’s up me,” she said, and lowered her voice. “I saw your truck over at the hotel when we were coming back from the vet.”
Guilt slammed him. “Mom, it’s not like that—”
“No, not in front of the girls.” She shoved the spatula into his hand. “I’m going to take a shower. You finish their breakfasts and get them dressed.”
Chastened, Vince fried an egg for Natalie, poured cereal and milk for the other two girls, and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Grandma’s mad at you,” Jade said.
“No kidding.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Don’t be stupid, Jade! We would know,” Natalie said.
Vince wiped up a spill of milk. “I don’t have a girlfriend, Jade.”
“Why’d you stay out all night, then?”
“Sometimes grown-ups do things they don’t have to explain to kids.” Time for a change in subject. “What happened to Pedro? Did he have a lot of quills in his nose?”
“Lots!” Hannah said, and put her hands around her face as if drawing quills hanging off her nose and jaw and forehead. “And he said, ‘Mmm, mmm, mmm.’” She whined like a dog perfectly.
“That’s a good whine, Little Bit. Poor Pedro, though, huh?”
Natalie looked darkly at him. “He needs a fence, Daddy. It made me so sad that he got hurt!” Her eyes filled with tears. “What if he got killed?”
He covered her hand. “Shhh. I promise we’ll build a fence. Right away, okay? Don’t worry. He’s fine.”
“Vince!” his mother said from the other room.
“Finish up, girls, then go get dressed and get your stuff together.” He took his coffee with him and went to face the music.
Tessa went back to the hotel and took advantage of the free WiFi in the lobby to get online, hoping for a response from Mick, her boss, to the proposal for the tour. There wasn’t one. She looked up a couple of motels and found one that seemed reasonable that was just around the corner. She’d check it out when the rain let up, and probably go with that. Nice and easy.
But now she was very, very curious about her father’s dark hints. Flipping open her notebook, she looked up the names of the original founders of the commune, Robert and Jonathan Nathan, and Googled their names in conjunction with “Xander.”
A string of links popped up, including, to her surprise, a Wikipedia article. She clicked on the link and read the short paragraphs, which mostly reiterated what she already knew—the two were the highly successful owners of Green Gate Organic Farms, which grew out of an old commune where Alexander “Xander” McKenzie was shot and killed by an unknown assailant under mysterious circumstances. The Wikipedia entry for McKenzie was thin, but it did have a grainy black-and-white photograph of a lean man in his early thirties, wearing a handlebar mustache and the long hair of the seventies. Even in a very bad photograph with very bad styling, he was extraordinarily good-looking.
She Googled his name and came up with a handful of articles. The rebellious but good-natured Xander was the oldest child of a Northeastern shipping family; he’d dropped out of Princeton and headed west on a painted bus. Tessa rolled her eyes. It was so hard to imagine living in a world where that wasn’t a joke, where it still represented revolution and excitement, a chance for a new life. She clicked on a photo of Xander in a group of six or seven others—men and women, all in their dewy early twenties, with flowing hair and flowing sleeves and bare feet. Was one of them her mother? She peered closely at the women, but none of them looked familiar.
None of the men was Sam, either. Tessa didn’t know exactly when her father had come to the commune. She knew he’d served in Vietnam, though he didn’t talk about his experiences there; they were brutal and still sometimes gave him nightmares. You didn’t wake Sam from a dead sleep, ever. He was an orphan who’d been on his own since the age of fifteen, from somewhere in the Deep South—Mississippi or Louisiana, she didn’t know. He was vague about it. Magic had been his hobby from the time he was a small boy, and at the commune he had a chance to develop it into a polished show.
How had she never realized before how little information she had about all of this? Why had she never thought to ask? It was highly disorienting.
She rubbed the bridge of her nose, where a slight headache had started. The article on Xander commented on his charisma and his troupe of willing followers who eventually settled in a group “marriage” in New Mexico, where they lived for seven or eight years before Xander was killed, likely by a jealous lover, though nothing was ever proven. Several women made paternity claims against his estate, but they were all soundly dismissed.
Sketchy, Tessa thought. It was all so sketchy. Checking the time, she saw that it was only early afternoon, and the rain was finally stopping. There was time to get to the library, and, on the way back, she’d look at the motel.
The library was housed in an old Carnegie-style building with pillars and enormous double-paned windows. It was surprisingly large for a small community, though there seemed to be only two people working in the whole place: a librarian and a desultory older Latino janitor, polishing the foyer floor.
The librarian, a Pueblo woman with long beaded earrings and her salt-and-pepper hair cut in a tidy pageboy, had to unlock the reference room for Tessa. “Microfiche readers over there,” she said. “The reels are filed in these drawers. Some papers are bound in books, too, so you can check those volumes over here.” She paused. “Looking for a particular event?”
“Well, sort of. I want to read about the commune.”
Her mouth tightened. “Just like everybody who comes through. You’d think all the rest of our history would matter.” She shook her head. “It’s over here.”
Tessa thanked her and settled in to read. At first, she found very little that she didn’t already know. It was fun to read about the reaction of the town to an invasion of hippies, who lit bonfires by the river and had wild parties. Orgies, even. The word was used in a letter to the editor from an outraged citizen of the valley.
She flipped through the pages, not really sure what she was looking for. There were few photos.
But wouldn’t Green Gate have some kind of archives from that time? She would go there next. In the meantime, she found the local account of Xander McKenzie’s death. A photo of a clean-shaven version of the
mustachioed man showed up, and this one was much less grainy. He had a high-bridged nose and exotic, long eyes, and she recognized him instantly. In a dizzy overlay, she saw the living face in memory, colored and animated, overlaying the black-and-white shot.
“Guinnevere had green eyes,” he sang, along with the album playing in the room, “like yours, milady, like yours…. ”
Tessa closed her eyes and let it come. Memories rushed in as if they were birds coming through the windows.
She saw him laughing, spinning a woman around, and then Tessa held up her arms—“now me, now me!”—and he sang that lyrical, lovely song to her. To her green eyes. She could see the room clearly, too: eight windows in a circle around the tower room, with beds tucked into the angles and the stereo on a table at the back. It was cold and snow fell outside.
And more:
She sat at a long table with other children, all of them eating sandwiches. A woman with her hair falling out from beneath a scarf gave them each an apple.
“You want to trade with me?” asked a girl next to her. Rhiannon. She had green eyes, too.
That was it. Feeling shaky and somehow demolished, Tessa put everything away and went back to the hotel.
Breakfast #16
Biscuits and Gravy: One of the great comfort foods—Vita’s fresh organic sausage, crumbled and cooked to perfection, served in a silky cream gravy over hot, tender Southern-style biscuits. With orange slices and cubed watermelon (in season).
BREAKFAST SAUSAGE
Makes 5 lbs.
People are often intimidated by making sausage, but it’s really very simple and creative—a mixture of fresh meat, herbs, sometimes fruit or vegetables, and whatever flavorings you want to experiment with. Play! This is a traditionally flavored breakfast sausage everyone enjoys.
5 lbs. ground pork from humanely raised hogs
2 T kosher salt
1½ T sage
1½ tsp thyme
½ tsp ginger
¾ tsp nutmeg
½ tsp white pepper
¼ tsp chile powder
½ cup water
Grind the meat into a bowl that’s sitting in a bowl of ice. Mix all ingredients together and stuff into sheep casings. Or simply form into patties and cook through.
EIGHTEEN
On the way back to the hotel, Tessa checked out the motel and found it well below her comfort level. Just as well that she’d kept the room at Los Padres, because, when she got up to her room, there was an envelope on the table beneath the window, and even from ten feet away she could identify her father’s calligraphic hand. The envelope was decorated with a gauzy photo of a puppy, all soulful eyes and adorability, and Tessa had to grin even through the anxiety that fluttered in her throat. He still chose pictures to appeal to the twelve-year-old she once was.
Felix fell on the floor in a heap, as if completely exhausted, and Tessa carried the envelope out to the balcony. Sunlight was breaking through the clouds, glittering on wet cottonwood leaves. The tourists were just beginning to come back out.
She didn’t open the letter immediately but sat with it in her hand, aware that things would shift the minute she began to read. And, really, was that what she wanted? Her life was good. Real. Satisfying.
Except, a whole adult embraced her life, warts and all. The disaster in Montana had dredged up things she had never thought about. She had to face both her childhood and Lisa’s death and her own responsibility for it. Even letting that thought in trebled the sense of airlessness the letter had brought.
As if he sensed her subtle upset, Felix got up and came over, putting his foot delicately on her knee. Tessa tapped the envelope.
What could you do once the lid was flung open on Pandora’s box? The memories had begun to surface.
Taking a deep breath, she slid her thumb under the flap of the envelope and broke the seal.
It began:
Dear Princess Tessa,
You should take this letter and go sit down someplace. There are some things I have kept hidden about your life, and I reckon it’s time it all came out. Just remember, it was all for you.
I have never claimed to be a particularly good man. I’d venture to say there are plenty who think I’m absolutely not. Mostly, I’ve just squandered my time here on earth, and there are a few things I reckon God’ll punish me for. But I hope He’ll take into consideration how hard I’ve tried to give you a good life.
One bad thing I did was when I came back from Vietnam, pissed off and doing more drugs than I could probably name now. I got mixed up with a hard-drugging crowd and we ended up at the commune. That’s where I met you.
That’s right. Met you. I’m not your natural dad.
Tessa heard herself gasp. Noise buzzed around the bridge of her nose. For a long minute she looked up, feeling her throat close tighter and tighter. Not her father.
Not her father??
Damn, kiddo, you were the greatest little girl! Smart and cute as a bug and with that pretty voice. Nobody like you in the world, and I hated it that you were living like that in that fucking commune. No running water half the time, toilets a hole in the ground, practically wearing nothing but rags most of the time. It’s one thing for adults to choose a life like that, but you kids all deserved better.
Children of the tribe—what bullshit!
And I don’t mean to disrespect the dead, but your mama was a real piece of work. They called her Winnie, for Winnie-the-Pooh, but she was hardly a gentle little bear. My ass. She was beautiful, spoiled rotten by her hoity-toity parents back in Maine, and strung out like nobody’s business. She was also completely obsessed with a dude who had a lot of other women. Xander. Probably your dad, though he didn’t claim a one of y’all. His story is a good one, but I don’t have time to tell it here. He had a whole harem of women, and they were all living together in that house, and there were drugs all the time and sex right in the living room in front of the kids, and it just made me crazy. It wasn’t like I grew up in some fancy house like a lotta them did, but I knew better than that. When my buddies moved on, I stuck around to look out for you.
And maybe that sounds unnatural, that I loved you so much, but it was like I’d been born to be your dad. It made me sober, Tessa, that’s God’s own truth. Wanting to be a better person, a good example for you in all that craziness, made me better.
Anyhow, your mama went off her rocker one night and killed Xander, then tried to drown you and herself, like La Llorona or something. She managed to kill herself, but I got you in time.
So there you were, orphaned, and I wasn’t about to leave you in that goddamned commune.
And you were kinda messed up by it, too. The whole thing broke your heart in two. It was so sad when you woke up and couldn’t remember anything. In the end, it seemed better to let you forget it all. Get a clean start. That’s when I started telling you the princess story.
No way to make this any better, so I’ll just say it: I took you. There was no adoption, but since you were born out there, there wasn’t any birth certificate, either. Maybe it wasn’t strictly “right” in the way the law would see it, but there’s a higher right than law.
You are a princess, you know. You’re my princess, and you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. Don’t be mad.
You know most of the rest, but there’s a couple things I need to be looking at your face to tell you. Give me a call.
Love,
Your dad
P.S. You were six when it happened, not four. So you’re actually now thirty-nine. Sorry about that, too.
For a long, long time, Tessa stared into the middle distance, holding the paper loosely in her hand. Everything in her was hushed. Astonished.
Sam was not her father.
Not her father.
Tears rose in her throat, rushed through her sinuses, welled in her eyes, and then—they didn’t fall.
As if her father—not!—was linked to her by some invisible cord, the cell on the table spun in a
circle, flashing Sam’s number. Coldly, she watched it spin and spin until it stopped.
There’s a couple things I need to be looking at your face to tell you, he’d said.
She didn’t want to know any more right now. In swift and sudden decision, she rose and tugged a hat down on her head. Cramming the letter and her cell phone into her pocket, she grabbed her backpack and whistled for Felix to come with her. She had to walk.
Tessa walked and walked and walked, following trails that looped through the foothills surrounding the town, up and down hills and along low ridges.
And this was exactly why she walked: It moved her out of her head and into her body. Every time some angle of the past came up—the far distant past she still couldn’t remember; the more recent past where she was responsible for the death of another person; or the past of this afternoon—she shoved it away and focused on her feet. One foot in front of the other, firmly planted on the earth.
And it worked its magic. The fresh air and the trails and the pleasure and relief of getting slightly sweaty brought her back to herself. Tessa Harlow, alive in the early twenty-first century, who seemed to now own a dog who happily walked along beside her. He was excellent company.
He was her pack now.
When she felt she had some semblance of peace, she headed back toward town. The trail she’d been following looped over the trailhead to the pilgrimage site, and Tessa wandered into the garden of the church and sat on a bench. She gave Felix some water, and he slurped up a hefty portion, then fell against the wall in the shade. His happy collapse, his happy drinking, his happy walking made her laugh. Dogs were such creatures of joy.
“Hello again.”
Tessa looked up to find the young priest, dressed in jeans and a collared shirt, kneeling amid the corn. “Hello. It’s Father Timothy, right?”
“Yes. And you are …?”
“That is the question of the day,” she said wryly, then shook her head. “I’m Tessa Harlow.”
The Secret of Everything Page 23
