“Oh…” I said, sort of startled.
“Whitman had questions. I guess she just fell, and that’s all. No more. I suppose that Drew and Ann will arrive at dawn and be asking questions, too.”
“Yeah. It was pretty awful.”
“Tell me.”
“Scary. Hard to know what to do—” I stopped, realizing that I needed to begin all over again. “We were riding in that meadow below the club. I was cantering, and Marguerite was telling me what I was doing wrong.”
He nodded. “Ah, yes. How very like her.”
I shook my head—it wasn’t like that. Why did he always have to turn everything into that? “Well, no,” I said. “I mean, she was just giving me a lesson. That’s what we always do. I ride in the meadow, and she makes suggestions. It’s not bad. I like it.”
“I see. She was helping you.”
“Yes. And then we trotted into the woods, where we take jumps over fallen trees. It’s not a big deal. I mean”—I gestured a distance of two to three feet with my hands—“trees that have fallen over. Just a few feet at the most. Nothing, really. It’s not like we were jumping over fences and hedges.”
“The woods beyond the meadow?” he asked. “I know that place. We used to set off cherry bombs there, so nobody could see us. When it was still a hotel. The old Arroyo. You set up jumps?”
“No. We jump over whatever’s there.”
He nodded. I looked at the carved wooden box on the table. The cigarettes were sitting inside, all lined up, cool and dry. I longed to open the box just to smell the sharp, unsmoked tobacco.
“And then?” he asked. “A tree fell?”
“No, it was a branch. Just a limb. I don’t know. And, really, I never saw it fall. We just heard a loud cracking sound over our heads, way, way up, and then a branch started to fall—and hit other branches—but I never saw it land. It might have gotten stuck in the tree. I’m not sure. But there was a loud snapping sound, and Chameleon bolted.”
“And Mother was thrown. Did you see that?”
“I think the girth was loose.”
“You said that at the hospital.”
“Did I?” I was looking down at the iron tabletop with its swirling pattern of leaves. The carved box had a different swirling-leaf pattern. My hand reached forward. “I’m going to have a cigarette now,” I said. “Okay?”
“Really? A cigarette?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”
I nodded and began talking again, partly as a distraction. “It was really so scary.” I lifted the lid off the box and set it down on the table.
“What was so scary?” my father asked. “Do you want me to light that?”
I nodded and bent my head with a cigarette in my lips as he struck a match. “She was just lying there next to a tree stump,” I said. It was easier to tell the story now—but I wasn’t sure why. “Chameleon dragged her, not that long, really. Her boot was stuck in the stirrup. And then she got slammed into this stump, and— All of a sudden it was so quiet. Everything was so quiet. And I could hear Chameleon galloping and galloping and getting farther away. And I looked down, and Marguerite was just a crumpled pile on the ground. She looked so tiny, just like a little girl. Except for her white hair. I could see her white hair against the dark earth.”
“Against the dark earth.”
I nodded.
“You thought she was dead.”
“Did I?” I blew out smoke. It was weird that I didn’t feel like crying. I didn’t really feel sad either. I felt almost nothing. “I don’t know what I thought. I guess I did. None of it seemed real.”
“Like a dream.”
“I don’t know. I guess so.”
“And you went for help.”
“Not right away.”
He raised his eyebrows. “No?”
“I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to leave. I mean, we were a mile from the club, or half a mile—I have no idea. I don’t have a good sense about distances and things like that. And I can get lost really easily. So I was afraid to leave. She looked so helpless and small. Leaving her seemed like a bad idea. All alone. What if she woke up? Chameleon was out there, galloping around. For all I knew, he was going to come back and trample her.”
“Unlikely.”
“Unlikely.” I nodded. “I finally decided that.”
He was still studying me. “You’re doing that all the time now?”
“What?”
“You hold that cigarette like a pro.”
I didn’t smile—or react. At first I thought he was trying to be funny, but then I could tell he wasn’t. “I’m not inhaling.”
“What are you doing with the smoke?”
“I’m afraid to inhale. I tried once, and I coughed and felt weird. Plus, it’s better for me, right? It’s not going in my lungs.”
“You’re just keeping the smoke in your mouth?”
I nodded.
“So you stayed with Mother for a while, hoping somebody might come along,” he said. “Sort of a passive stance. The Prince Charming scenario. By the way, I’m not sure that’s any healthier—keeping the smoke in your mouth and blowing it out. The nicotine is still being absorbed on a cellular level.”
I shrugged, waiting to tell the story. I wanted to get through it. “I dismounted, tied Picasso to a tree, and sat on the ground next to Marguerite. I don’t know how long. She was out cold. But I told myself that it was normal. Of course she’d be unconscious. She’d hit her head. I just needed to wait for her to wake up. No blood or anything. She was so still. I could feel her pulse on her wrist. I kept saying her name, and then I kind of touched her face—slapped it lightly, like they do in the movies—but she didn’t move. Then I stood up and called for help a few times. Kind of circled the area around us, keeping an eye on Marguerite and yelling out for help. But I could tell that nobody was around. It was so quiet, except for the bugs. I kept hearing the flies or bees buzzing and birds flying off. Then I decided that I needed to ride back to the club and get help.”
“You doped it out.”
“What? Right. Yes.” He knew. He seemed to know. Doped it out. I felt my heart race a little. Maybe he smelled the Thai smoke in my hair when he hugged me. Maybe he could tell by the way I was acting. “So I rode to the barn and got Mrs. Lemon and Paco. Chameleon was already there—he’d come back with Marguerite’s saddle slipped all the way down, under his belly, so they knew there’d been an accident.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They were weirded out,” I said, “like, right off Mrs. Lemon made a comment about how old Marguerite was—‘too old to be riding,’ something like that. ‘I knew this would happen’ kind of thing. Like they wanted to go right into blaming her—”
He nodded, still quiet.
“—and they called an ambulance, but I don’t think they’d really thought it out very carefully. They were sort of panicked. How were they planning to get an ambulance into the woods?”
“Doesn’t the club have rescue people on horses who…?”
I shook my head. “They tried to drive part of the way, until the ambulance got stuck. Then they carried a stretcher. Anyhow, I wasn’t there for any of that. I rode ahead with Mrs. Lemon, and we were with Marguerite. We kept waiting for her to wake up any minute, but she didn’t.”
I had prayed, actually. Quietly, to myself. I looked up at the trees and sky and tried to feel that feeling again, of being with the woods and the earth and the clouds and everything moving together, very slowly, everything breathing and growing at the same time, and I went to the place inside me where I felt a part of that, and I asked God to make Marguerite wake up. But I could tell that nobody was listening. I knew—I could feel that it wasn’t going to happen. I was knocking on the door of an empty room. My request would be denied. That’s how it felt. But I wasn’t going to tell my father any of that. He was sitting there in that hobo coat looking a little crazy, like he was about to explode.
&nb
sp; “I could tell there was something wrong with her leg,” I said. “It was lying in a funny position, kind of an unnatural angle. Like it wasn’t attached to her body anymore. You know what I mean? Like it was rubber.”
He was very quiet, looking down at the table, almost in a daze, almost the way he looked when he played flamenco. A trance of some kind.
“You know what’s funny?”
“What?” he said without looking up.
“I had this really bad feeling when we started out. There was something about her that didn’t seem right. She was so tired and looked so pale and old. When I met her at the barn, I was kind of startled.”
“Very important,” he said, still in his trance and gazing down. “Important to pay attention to those things. Whispers. The whispers inside your head. Can’t ignore them. Always a mistake. You’ll know that next time.”
His eyes began to brim up a little. I kept quiet, didn’t want to interrupt him. He’d never been that way about Marguerite before. Usually he made an aside or irritated complaint. But the strain was gone. I looked away, at the tabletop, then at the crisscrossing bricks on the veranda floor. Marguerite might die—still impossible to absorb. She might have had a stroke, and that was why she fell, not the girth, and her leg had been crushed to powder, and her head. My father wiped his face with his fingers.
Maybe things could have ended differently. I could have yelled louder and not been so hesitant, or I could have paid attention to the whispers and not ridden at all—instead of going along with the plan. When you were stoned, it always seemed like your mind was making important discoveries about the world, poignant important discoveries, but they were temporary and not important in the end, and only the surface of the world was glittering and seducing you, the sunlight and patterns and colors, as distracting as a big circus show. My father would understand that if I told him.
“Dad—”
“You’ll need,” he interrupted, his voice distant again, “to call Justine sometime tomorrow. In the morning, if you can.” He raised his eyebrows.
“Justine?”
“To tell her how you’re doing, how everything is. She was asking about you—” And then he stopped abruptly. “She—” His eyes searched the dark garden as if looking for a few words or ideas to hang on to. “She and I have come to a decision.”
“About what?”
“Well, it’s time to move on. I know you’ll want to say good-bye. You’re old enough to appreciate that, right?”
He didn’t want too much from his mother’s house. He asked me to make a list of things that I might like later on, saying he’d keep them for me. It wasn’t easy. Almost like trying to pick clothes from Justine’s closet—it required a kind of foresight and imagination that I lacked. What sort of life would I be having? What would I need? When I said that I wanted Marguerite’s canopy bed, he convinced me that it was ugly and old-fashioned and that I would be sorry that I’d taken it. (“You’ll be dragging that awful thing around for the rest of your life.”) When I said that I liked the portrait of the Ruin guy over the mantel in the library, he laughed out loud. I settled on some silver, some riding things, an etching of the Alhambra, and a clock. Not the grandfather clock. We all knew that Uncle Drew had his eye on that.
My father was in San Benito quite often in those days—attending to things, meeting with attorneys, meeting with his sisters. I figured out a lot then. I heard things, overheard things. I gained some wisdom and perspective. People seemed to have changed toward me, treated me differently, as if I weren’t really Inez anymore. Maybe they just resented me for being with Marguerite when she fell. Or maybe they felt that she shouldn’t have been riding at all—that she’d taken too big a risk in order to preside over my youth. She’d taken me in, made special arrangements to be with me. We’d had a bond. I saw that very clearly now. And this was hard for everybody else. When Shelley and I were stopped by San Benito police—they thought we were breaking into Marguerite’s house one afternoon, when we were just hunting around for the hidden key—my relatives were oddly unsympathetic. Even good-natured Uncle Drew seemed to suspect me of something. That’s how it felt anyway.
Whitman didn’t come home from Madagascar for the funeral, or see Marguerite in her coffin as I did, with that awful coral-colored lipstick on her frozen face, or stand by her grave in the small churchyard in San Gabriel and throw handfuls of dirt and sing “Amazing Grace” while choked up, blubbering, as the rest of us did. Nobody seemed to miss Whitman either, but me. Nobody but me seemed to think it was wrong that he didn’t come. Without him I felt more alone and more grown up. I felt more vulnerable and more noticeable. I felt different about my place in the family, and my father’s place, uncertain about where we stood or who we were, as though a huge wave had crashed down and scattered and rearranged everything, and we were in flux, or floating, all driftwood—moving forward and back on a new tide. Maybe everybody felt like that. Maybe we were all lost. Amanda complained that Whitman was listed as a secondary heir in Marguerite’s will, “when he’s already rich enough.” There was a fight over a punch bowl—an ornate, heavy thing, sterling—how much it was worth, who had appraised it, and who was going to wind up with it, a fight that was never resolved. Aunt Julia and Aunt Ann stopped speaking. And everything became much harder after that. The grand house in San Benito sold instantly for an unimaginably modest price, because my father wanted the whole thing settled and the real estate market was at an all-time low. The house in Laguna was kept by Aunt Ann and Uncle Drew—and that only brought additional resentments. I wasn’t sure how much money Marguerite had left, but my father insisted that the sum after taxes was negligible. Whatever the amount, he’d been dismissive. “Things weren’t what they seemed,” my father said. “I’ve ordered a bigger oven for the kitchen at Wolfback, and maybe I’ll buy a new car.” He was going to invest the rest of the money in a business that a couple of his former students had started, a company called Apple Computers. “Don’t count on anything,” he said to me. He repeated this line many times over the ensuing years, like a mantra. You shouldn’t count on inheriting things, particularly money. “It’s a bad idea,” he always said, “and a bad way to live.”
His house was finished early the next year. He and Ooee named it Wolfback after the ridge where it stood. By the time I saw it, my father had been living there for two months already. It was a clear, windy day in April, and huge white clouds hung dramatically over the Golden Gate as we crossed the bridge to Sausalito. He’d come alone to the airport, stood by my arrival gate looking gaunt and deflated before he saw me and then smiled so hugely when he did, blooming as though the sight of me had brought him back to life.
We entered the long, low tunnel underneath the Headlands. He turned off Highway 101 and took a winding road up into the green hills. I could see Rodeo Beach beyond, a line of waves breaking in the distance, and then the brown shoreline quickly disappeared as the car took several turns until we faced a dirt road with a heavy steel gate, almost agricultural-looking, like something for horses or cattle. The MG stopped.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“My gate,” my father said, reaching to open the car door. “Low-tech. I used a farm gate to fake people out.”
He walked to the gate, unhooking a small chain in the back that was attached to a weight—and it swung open. He got back in the car, drove through, then stopped again to close the gate behind us.
“Kind of a hassle, isn’t it?” I asked.
“It’s subterfuge,” he said. “It keeps people away. I don’t want it to look like anybody’s living behind here.”
“Can’t you get some kind of remote control? So you don’t have to get out of the car?”
“Oh, Inez,” he sighed. “You’re so like Mother.”
“It just seems like a pain,” I carried on. He didn’t intimidate me anymore. And being compared to Marguerite was a compliment, whether he thought so or not. He drove on, over a smooth dirt road that, once we turned a co
rner, was paved. “Getting in. Getting out. Getting in again. Having to move the gate yourself. It seems inconve—”
“It’s what I want,” he interrupted.
“Just a suggestion.”
The car rounded another easy turn.
“It was just an idea I had. Sorry.”
He pulled into a turnaround that was edged in flat paving stones. Small plants were dotted behind the stones, sage and lavender and catmint. I could tell they’d been recently planted—there was a damp ring circling each small plant where it had just been watered.
“I’d really prefer if you said ‘I’m sorry’—rather than just ‘Sorry.’ If you say ‘Sorry’ without putting ‘I’m’ in front, it’s almost like you’re kidding or being sarcastic. You know, like ‘So-rry.’ It doesn’t sound very nice. Do you know what I mean?”
I took a deep breath, trying not to exhale so loudly that it would sound like a huff, but it might have anyway.
“However, you have a point about the gate,” he continued, sort of warming up again. “I could attach an electrical wire to the pulley, I guess. And there would have to be some kind of small motor. It would be neat, very neat. Maybe you’re onto something, Inez. Maybe I was being too sensitive. I’m a little sensitive these days, particularly about the house, so you might be careful what you say.”
“Okay,” I said. Lately everybody was talking about sensitivity and being sensitive, or oversensitive. But Whitman didn’t have to come home from his surf hut for the funeral. He wasn’t “into ceremony,” he said, and he’d be with Marguerite “in spirit.” Was he with me and my father in spirit? Did he care about us? What was the point of being sensitive if you couldn’t bother with things like that?
My father led me to a small bridge over a dry creek of pebbles. We walked to a simple wooden door that opened onto a glassy atrium. There was a ceramic bowl of water there, with an orange goldfish swimming in it. There were some beautiful plants and river rocks, too, and from inside I could see various rooms of the house, almost like stage sets or boxes. Inside each glass box, the sun shone down from skylights and lit up the floor in long rectangles of light.
The Ruins of California Page 20
