Half Moon Bay

by Alice LaPlante

  She’s not yet thinking rationally, not yet sure what this all means. She is simply besotted, and the universe feels like a more exciting and dangerous place than it did the morning when she walked onto the pumpkin fields the day after the Pumpkin Festival. She watches an elderly couple eating their breakfast. They are taking it very seriously, carefully buttering their toast, salting their eggs, pouring cream and sugar into their coffee. Every movement deliberate. Was this from old age, or the early morning, or simply habit? The sun shines on the face of the woman. She is . . . what? Seventy? Seventy-five? Jane can’t tell ages very well. The woman’s hair is not yet completely gray, and in true Santa Cruz former hippie style, she wears it long and loose, over her shoulders, much like Jane’s is right now. Streaks of black among the gray. The lines carved into her face are beautiful; in the early-morning sun, she is glowing. Now she smiles at something the man—her husband? partner?—has said, puts down her coffee, and reaches out and strokes his face. A gesture of tenderness. He says something else, and she laughs, and you can see how lovely she once was, still is.

  It is nearly 7:00 a.m. when Jane stands up, pays her bill, and walks out into the early-morning sun. Her phone chirps, and she looks down to see that she has a text. It is from Edward. It merely says, When next? Words that make her shiver with joy.

  * * *

  They’re in the Three Sisters and have already drunk too much wine, but aren’t ready to stop. There’s Helen, and Jane, and there’s Adam, although of course he isn’t drinking alcohol, his body being a temple, etc. So there are two empty bottles of wine on the table in front of them, and one of those designer teapots, red-plated with an enameled handle. Adam has asked one of the twins, with his captivating smile, for the hot water to be refilled five times. She’s enamored, you can tell. Jane pulls her chair slightly away from Adam’s and pours some more wine. She will not enter into any ridiculous female competition. She has no need to. She has Edward, and there is no competition there. Alma is seemingly part of the package.

  Adam leans closer, and Jane catches a wisp of body odor. Not unpleasant, the scent of youth, Jane thinks. The sun hasn’t damaged his skin, but kissed it into a sort of glow that seems fed from within. He’s a good soul. You know that by looking at him. Jane is nicer to Adam these days. She is warmer. She can afford to be. He is nothing to her. She cannot see past the flames that have ignited in her life.

  * * *

  Amy has not yet been found. The mood in the city has darkened even further, if that were possible. It feels like a city under siege. Some families with young girls even leave town. Alibis are checked. Even Edward and Alma are questioned, although they arrived after little Heidi had been stolen, Edward tells Jane. Otherwise, no doubt we’d be in the suspicious pool along with everyone else.

  People are drinking too much, Margaret from the Three Sisters confides. They’ve sold twice as many alcoholic beverages since the disappearances as in previous months. At the time of year when business should be getting slower, it is getting busier. They’ve even hired a local high school girl to help Margaret wait on tables. Poor thing, she is shy, and doesn’t know how to serve the men, some of whom openly ogle her, all of whom flirt and tease.

  Angela’s budding sexuality. So painful to Jane. First the men, then the older boys, then the boys her age eyeing her in her too-short shorts and midriff-baring top. Only fourteen years old when she started giving boys blow jobs. Jane figured it out the first time because of a white stain on Angela’s cheek and the fact that she immediately brushed her teeth after coming in from a “date.” Which consisted of hanging out at the 7-Eleven with a group of other high schoolers, not necessarily bad kids; still, Jane, who had always been so studious, could not understand it. But then she remembered her own early teenage years, how everything shimmered in the heat of her budding but ignorant desires. Cars figured prominently in seductions in Big Cabin. The open plain offered little protection or privacy, and the parents mostly stayed in at night. In Berkeley, few of Angela’s friends had cars, but they all had houses patrolled ineptly by busy parents. The kids seemed to have an instinct where the unsupervised rooms were. It was a traveling party.

  The day Angela was killed, they’d had another fight, not a bad one. Normal. Just after Angela got home from summer school.

  Where are you going?

  Just over to Sally’s to hang out.

  Keep your phone on.

  Oh Mom! (roll of eyes).

  In fact, Jane had surreptitiously installed a phone-tracker app on Angela’s phone, so she knew exactly where she was at any time. That didn’t tell her what Angela was doing or whom she was doing it with, but Jane’s guess was that it wasn’t too dangerous, as no cars were involved. She had purchased a big box of condoms and taken Angela to Planned Parenthood to have birth control implanted in her arm. It would be good for two years, until Angela was eighteen and about to graduate from high school. She never made it that far, of course. After the death, Jane found the box of condoms in Angela’s desk, unopened. Sometimes she had smelled liquor on Angela’s breath and sometimes pot on her clothes, but that wasn’t what worried her. No. What did, then?

  This is what it was: all the people Angela was trusting who didn’t love her the way Jane loved her. Couldn’t Angela see that Jane was trying to keep her safe? But people without her best interests were giving her advice. Feeding her attitudes. She was smashing the bonds capable of keeping her secure, leaving her vulnerable, leaving Jane bleeding inside.

  Jane’s shrink at the time was not particularly helpful.

  How rebellious was she when she was two years old? Three?

  Not at all. No terrible twos. She remained affectionate and cheerful.

  Then this is perfectly normal. They need to establish themselves, their boundaries. If they don’t do it young, they do it all the more later.

  But the sex! She’s growing up so fast!

  Yes, they do, today.

  Jane sometimes cried taking Angela to school. She cried picking her up. She dreamed about Angela servicing boys, on her knees. Mortifying! Oh, Angela!

  It’s not something your generation understands.

  I sure don’t. Jane doesn’t know where her rage comes from. Her disgust. Her feeling that her darling has been despoiled. Wasn’t she the same Angela who could turn sweet and loving, and bring her coffee and her favorite muffin on Mother’s Day, who could peer at her face when she got home from work and say, You look tired, Mom, and take her side against Rick’s in one of their rare fights?

  Rick was no help. He aged considerably the last two difficult years with Angela. Not that this showed on the outside of the family. What a lovely girl! they would say, seeing her playing her flute in the school orchestra or helping tutor disadvantaged youths in math.

  What a lovely girl you’ve raised, Jane! And Jane would nod. Sometimes she and Angela, after one of their fights, would collapse, exhausted onto the bed and just hold each other.

  I don’t want to hurt you, Mom, Angela would say, and Jane would pat her on the back and say, I know, sweetheart.

  Jane tried grounding her, but Angela turned sullen and hostile and wouldn’t talk. She wouldn’t do her homework and just stayed in her room and talked and texted with her phone. Then the minute she was free, she would be up to her old tricks, which were God knows what.

  What was Jane’s complaint? She supposed it was the sex. She supposed it was the lack of any one special boy, although one’s name came up more often than those of others. Stephen. Stephen this, Stephen that. Jane didn’t believe in easy girls. She didn’t believe in what they called it now, slut shaming. But she had to admit: her daughter, the straight-A student, was abysmally promiscuous. Jane took her to the doctor to test for disease. She could not get pregnant, but there were so many other bad things! Jane had her inoculated against HPV. She took Angela to a shrink of her own, an adolescent specialist, but the two closed ranks against her, and so she ended up writing large monthly checks to someone she felt w
as encouraging Angela to rebel against her, Jane.

  Jane tried putting herself in Angela’s shoes. After all, her virginity had been a mere technicality by the time she went away to college, having done nearly everything possible with her high school boyfriend except the ultimate act. But that seemed so innocent compared to what she convinced herself to think of as Angela’s explorations. Having the incomplete evidence of course made it worse. It didn’t seem to change Angela’s standing at school. She had the same friends she’d had from elementary and middle school. And there were times when the girls were all in Jane’s living room watching The Music Man, eating popcorn, and laughing at the dancing scenes, when she thought she was mistaken, when she thought she was overreacting.

  But then would come a night when Angela would come home drunk at 3:00 a.m., her clothes disheveled, her underpants crushed into a ball in her coat pocket, her socks missing, and Jane would despair.

  Angela was a beautiful girl, with her red curly hair—she got the color from Jane, the curls from Rick—and her big dark eyes, and the cheekbones, also from Rick. Striking. A striking girl. Tall and willowy, she was a heartbreaker, Jane’s friends would say from when she was very small. A heartbreaker. That Angela’s heart was never broken—at least that Jane could see—was both a relief and a worry. Sometimes Jane felt that she had given birth to a different species altogether, a tall, Amazon-like creature with the sensibility and intelligence of a Renaissance woman and the language of a sailor.

  Fuck that. Isn’t that the most acrimonious shit you’ve ever heard?

  It was the most motherfucking exquisite rendition of St. Matthew’s Passion ever, Mom. Fucking out of this world.

  And what was there to say about Rick? Jane had met him while in graduate school, he, pursuing a doctorate in music. Now he made an extraordinarily good living writing mini soundtracks for video games. Snippets of suspense. Buildups of excitement. He had his own company, but had handed management over to someone else so he could concentrate on the creative. Always the creative. They had run out of things to say to each other before what Jane characterized as “the troubles” with Angela had started. Spending more time apart, Rick with his music—so Jane supposed—and Jane at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens, where the drought had created a lot of her attention for her native plants’ environments. There were obviously native plants that were naturally drought-resistant, that flourished in the Central Valley, but others that were from coastal or wetlands regions that required more water than the university could spare. It took a careful balancing of resources to keep these things alive. Jane was often there on weekends, from dawn until the sun went down. She knew she was in hiding. But she didn’t think of it that way at the time, not until she lost it all.

  * * *

  Six a.m. The sun barely risen. Adam and Jane are the only ones in the greenhouse. The doors don’t open to the public until 10:00 a.m. Adam is there because he’d originally intended to go surfing, but a shark sighting by one of his surfer buddies scared everyone out of the water.

  I’m bummed, he’d said when he saw Jane. It’s the warming water. We’re seeing more of the bastards. Last summer, a surfer had lost a leg below the knee to a shark a little farther down the coast, at Secret Beach. Adam had been sitting on his board nearby when the victim got pulled under. Adam had beaten off the shark with his fist. If the other surfers hadn’t witnessed it and told the Moon News, Adam wouldn’t have mentioned it. An unsung hero.

  A bloody sport for a pacifist, Jane says, meaning to tease him, but he takes it seriously.

  We’re all in this world together, man, he says, and goes to brew some of his foul tea.

  Jane’s tending to the hummingbird garden. Helen’s idea. Today Jane is moving in the western redbud shrubs she’s been nurturing in the west greenhouse. When fully grown they will be twenty feet high and fifteen feet across. A magical flowering bush with dangling winter seed pods that look like small embryonic sacs. Fairies might well come out of them.

  They’ve already attracted a fair number of hummingbirds, so much so that the brawls between the tiny winged creatures have been written up in the Moon News. Since hummingbirds have to eat twice their body weight in nectar and insects each day, they’re protective of their good food sources in the garden and will fight aggressively to defend them. They like red flowers—not for any aesthetic reason, but because bees avoid red flowers and the lack of bees means that there is usually better nectar quantity and quality. Jane had done a lot of research on them when she first moved to Berkeley, there being no hummingbirds in Oklahoma. She was enchanted to find out they got their name from the humming sound created by their beating wings, flapping at high frequencies audible to humans, around fifty times per second.

  At their house in Berkeley, they had a small backyard full of red monkey flowers. A hummingbird’s garden of delights. Angela was six before she stopped believing that the garden was full of fairies, and at the age of fifteen she swore that an exquisite iridescent redheaded Anna’s hummingbird came back year after year. It was possible, Jane had conceded. Hummingbirds can live for more than a decade. They can fly forty miles per hour for five hundred miles without rest. The day after Angela died, Jane and Rick sat in the garden. The Anna’s hummingbird—which Angela had imaginatively named “Anna,” although it was male—pulled a strand of Jane’s red hair, hard. She knew it did. She knew it was a sign.

  Hummingbirds visit between a thousand and two thousand flowers every day. They drink from each flower two to three times per day. So a yard needs between four hundred and a thousand flowers to support one bird. Adam, with Jane’s help, had planted enough flowering bushes to attract at least fifty birds to the back of the nursery, where the garden was situated. Standing in the middle of it was like being in the middle of a beehive. Adam planted Penstemon rattanii, Arctostaphylos species, manzanita Diplacus species, and monkey flowers of all colors. Jane planted dudleyas in Angela’s honor. The name means live forever.

  * * *

  For the sake of little Amy Cross, for the first time, Jane agrees to join a party to search for a missing girl. She feels that her abstaining from them has set her apart. People at Three Sisters are beginning to look at her questioningly, she feels.

  So she puts on thick pants, heavy hiking boots, and a sweatshirt. She gets to the meeting place at the coastal path by 9:45. A sizable crowd has already assembled. She sees many familiar faces. The day is beautiful, clear, and cold. Jane is assigned to a team of six—four women and two men—none of whom she knows. Out-of-towners, drawn by . . . the drama? A sincere desire to help? Jane isn’t sure. They introduce themselves, but she promptly forgets their names. They are assigned to search the fields directly south of the Birch Street parking area, the ones that overlook the ocean from the top of the eroding cliffs, on which is perched a forest of live oak trees. Other teams will search the beach itself, fifty feet below, and the fields to the north of the parking lot.

  One way or another, we’ll find her, says the leader, grimly.

  Jane’s group starts in a line at the top of the parking lot, spread six feet apart, and slowly walks to the cliff’s edge. They move south and repeat it, carefully moving over every inch of terrain. Nothing escapes their gazes: candy wrappers, bits of discarded plastic, even, surprisingly, any number of pennies. As they walk, they pick up this trash and put it in plastic bags that someone has thoughtfully brought along. They go fairly quickly at first, as the terrain is flat here, with mostly short dried grasses and knee-high nettles. But then they hit a steep ravine into which the ocean extends a finger of water.

  What’s that? asks one of the guys, a large man with a handlebar mustache. He points. He has a competent air about him. Jane wonders why he’s free on a weekday morning. Unemployed? He seems too self-assured for that. Retired? Too young, although you never know today with all the Silicon Valley stock options. A seasonal worker? Self-employed? California was strange that way. In Oklahoma, everyone had a profession and an easily defined pla
ce, even if it was simply loser. But here he could be a trust-fund baby, for all that his looks would give away. He is pointing to a red object at the bottom of the ravine, half in the creek. It takes one of the women, a fit-looking blonde in her early thirties, to climb down and pick it up. She stands looking at it, then looks back at us. She shakes her head and shouts something.

  What did she say? asks another woman, who has somehow been designated the leader by mutual agreement. She is in her forties, Jane estimates, with dark hair that is starting to gray gracefully. She has a natural air of command that made the group bow to her when she assigned them to segments of the field. It was a nice kind of authority; no one minded, not even the men.

  A shoe, says the large man.

  He cups his hands around his mouth and shouts back down. What size?

  Faint words, Too big and high heels come back.

  Jane exhales noisily. She hadn’t realized she’s been holding her breath. The group starts moving again, skirting the edge of the ravine and moving into the next field, which is thick with live oak and eucalyptus trees. They slow down. Some of the branches of the oaks are large enough for a full-grown man to sleep on.

  I’d have loved this for a fort growing up, the mustached man observes to no one in particular, pointing to the massive trunks and limbs of the trees, any one of which would have supported a substantial fort or tree house.

  Jane falls behind the rest of the seekers. She has decided to let them be the finders of the horror she somehow knows is ahead. She walks slowly on the soft ground carpeted with leaves. She has a brief flash of well-being. The silent woods. The majestic trees. A Jane before Angela enjoyed such things. Could not a post-Angela Jane enjoy them too? She closes her eyes briefly, listens to the sound of the waves beating the rocks below.

  The hand. That’s what she sees first. It appears to be disembodied, hanging in midair from one of the large oak trees. Small and pink. Jane moves closer. She sees that it is attached to an arm clothed in a green sleeve that blends into the leaves of the tree. The arm is attached to a tiny torso wearing a green sweatshirt imprinted with a line of ducks. The head is turned to the side, cheek against the branch, you can only see the edge of an ear and blond hair. Little Amy is lying on one of the limbs of a gracious oak, positioned cleverly in the cleft of two branches. She looks like she is sleeping. Her eyes are closed. At first, Jane thinks she is sleeping. A cute kid.