Dedication
For Wyatt.
You are my everything.
Epigraph
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1.5.167–8)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
SOMETIMES THINGS CAN be perfect. Sometimes everything and everyone you know can just float around in a kind of eternal, blissful loop like nothing can ever change and the world will just keep spinning perfectly on its axis, giggling, delirious with each turn.
And sometimes it can all fall apart.
Just like that.
SMASH.
Shards everywhere, sharp like a room full of razors.
Faster than you can say “Wait, but I didn’t know it would go! Hold on! I didn’t know it could ever change” it does change. And by then it’s too late.
Here. I’ll show you.
Look over there. See that gray stone fence that looks like it’s been here since before Columbus discovered America? The one covered with vines? Under the vines, the gray stones peeking out, playing hide-and-seek. Okay, now through that gate, the black, wrought-iron one.
There, see the big thicket full of trees? Eucalyptus, Torrey pines, cypresses, and even some redwoods? Okay, now down that dirt road. Through the clover and watch out for the poison oak.
There’s the clearing.
The light coming through the edge of the trees.
This is the part where I always have to stop. To catch my breath. To take it in. To feel it again for the thousandth time just like the first time.
Look.
The grass meadow swooping down down down into the cliffs and there, beyond the cliffs, the crashing deep blue Pacific Ocean. Westward, young one. That’s the direction you face. If you were magic you could see all the way to Tokyo.
And there, just where the meadow starts to swoop upward, perched just before the cliffs, the old Victorian house that looks a lot like it’s haunted. Yes, people think it’s a haunted house, but I know it’s not because it’s my house.
I think it’s the spires that make it look like a natural ghost habitat. And the wraparound porch. And the turrets. And the tiny graveyard in the corner of the property. That usually clinches it for people. But it’s been there forever. I mean, what are we gonna do? Move it?
See that little boy there? On the steps of the porch, looking out at the ocean? Well, that little boy there with the dark hair and giant eyes . . . that’s Henry. My kid brother. And, if it were two months ago, my kid brother Henry would come running up to me, and we’d go play hide-and-seek, or leapfrog, or we’d build an ant farm, or fashion a kite out of sticks and leaves, or we’d race all the way down the craggy path to the tiny beach below and throw ourselves onto the sand, panting, trying to catch our breath.
But it’s not two months ago.
It’s now.
Two months after our parents died.
2
WHEN YOU SEE it in the newspaper it looks like this:
PROMINENT ENVIRONMENTALIST AND OCEANOGRAPHER DIE IN BOATING ACCIDENT
* * *
BIG SUR—Prominent environmentalist William Billings (43) and his oceanographer wife, Margo (39), died in a boating accident off the coast of Moss Landing. A police spokeswoman said the couple died when their boat turned over in the Portuguese Ledge State Marine Conservation area, during a sudden storm. William Billings was vice president of the Northern California Conservation Society and a board member of numerous environmental protection groups. He received the National Environmental Leadership Award for his work preserving the California coastline. Margo Billings, widely credited with the reinvigoration of Monterey Bay, was president of the Marine Mammal Preservation Cooperative. The couple leaves behind a twelve-year-old daughter and a ten-year-old son.
It doesn’t say I remember what she was wearing that day. She was wearing a navy-and-white-striped shirt and we joked around that she looked like a sailor and should be wearing a captain’s hat. It doesn’t say Henry thought they should bring sandwiches but Mom said she wasn’t hungry and so Henry made her just take some dried nectarines. It doesn’t say Dad had SPF 50 sunscreen all over his face and he looked like a ghost so I rubbed it in and he said “Boo!” and smiled and he tried to tickle me but I rolled my eyes and told him, Dad, I’m too old for tickling.
It says that I am twelve and that Henry is ten but it doesn’t say that Henry will be eleven in three months and we were already starting to plan his birthday party. It was going to be a spooky birthday party because Henry loves spooky things, especially skeleton pirates, and his birthday is October 26, so every year we have a “Spooky Birthday Party Spectacular” including a disco haunted house with glow sticks and a skull piñata.
It doesn’t say that now we will not be having that party because all Henry can do is sit on those steps and look out at the ocean and wait for my mom and my dad to come home.
And that would be a sad but peaceful thing to do, except . . .
“Would you kids stop making all that racket!”
That’s Terri. We call her “Terri the Terrible.”
Terri the Terrible is here to take care of us. Along with Claude, our uncle. We have also nicknamed Claude: “Claude the Clod.” So, between Terri the Terrible and Claude the Clod it’s a mouthful, but we kind of need it to get through, because, well, because they are jerk-faces. First class, grade A.
When we found out they were coming to take care of us we practically hurled ourselves off the cliff.
I know, I know, I’m supposed to be nice. But listen to this. The first day Terri the Terrible came in here, the first thing she did was move all the mahogany and cherrywood furniture up to the attic and replace it with a bunch of fake-royal, gold-gilded garbage that my mom would have thrown in the
Dumpster before feeling guilty and then giving it to Goodwill. I’m serious. Everything in here is gold now and it makes no sense. This is a hundred-and-sixty-year-old house with wood everywhere and creaky stairs and now everything in here looks like it belongs on some kind of game show or reality TV program about housewives.
Terri wasn’t even nice about it. And she was mean to the guys. The guys moving it. She didn’t even treat them like people.
That’s the other thing.
Mom and Dad were always super nice to anyone who came in to do anything here in our place. As long as I can remember they would drill into us that everybody was equal and that we should treat everyone with respect, see what we could learn from those around us, and ask questions. It was common decency, Mom said. And if someone needed something, we should bend over backward to help them.
Helping other people was an opportunity to be a better person, Dad told us.
Their philosophy was simple, really. Their philosophy was kindness.
Not Terri’s.
She didn’t even look at the movers when she told them where to put all her horrible stuff. She just barked.
She even saw me looking at her in disbelief. You know how she replied?
“Oh, honey. I know it seems harsh; you can’t let these people take advantage of you.”
These people.
I think I know what she means by that.
Anyone else would have been mortified, but Terri didn’t seem to care. She just kept on barking orders and checking herself in that gold-gilded mirror and clinking the ice in her glass.
That’s something she’s really good at. Ice-clinking. Pouring lots and lots of liquid into a glass, swirling and clinking that ice in that glass some more.
And the worst part? She smokes.
I told her no one is allowed to smoke in our one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old house because it’s a fire hazard and, also, it’s gross, but she said, “There’s new rules now, sweetie.” And that was that.
And Claude the Clod? Well, he’s here but he’s not here. He’s never really anywhere. He’s kind of got his phone, or his Bluetooth, constantly glued to his ear and there is always an important phone call and he always has to get it no matter what. He has so many important phone calls you’d think he was the president of the world.
It’s always blah blah blah land deal or yadda yadda leases or whoop de doo tenants or permits or condos. Yep, he’s a real go-getter. If you want to engage him, better talk about real estate, because that’s all he cares about. One time he talked to me for an hour about the rise in market value of a Taco Bell near the Ontario airport.
Claude, I get the feeling, is the kind of person who could be vacationing in Rome and gaze up at the most beautiful cathedral, temple, or museum on earth and he would just say, “I wonder how much this place goes for?”
In case you are wondering, we do have another uncle . . . a long-lost uncle named Finn. Nobody has seen him for years because he’s too busy hiking the Himalayas or living among the Inuit people of the Arctic Circle or something. There’s a picture of him on the fireplace mantle, his face sunburned and lips chapped, smiling a toothy grin next to a Sherpa on the second base camp of Mount Everest. Although I have high hopes for him as a person of fascination and intrigue, I have zero hopes for him as someone who could actually take care of me and Henry in this particular domestic situation. Other than this photo, I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of Uncle Finn throughout the twelve years of my life thus far.
So, well . . . he’s out of the question.
We’re left with Clod and Terrible.
I can’t wrap my head around it. My mom and dad were so busy thinking about the oceans rising and the sun blazing, but somehow they never thought of this. A plan for us. Right here at home. In case something horrible happened. And then something horrible happened.
Sometimes I look at Terri and Claude and I think, Maybe Mom and Dad knew something we didn’t. Maybe they’re not so bad after all?
“Why do you kids insist on making so much noise?”
There she goes again. Standing in front of me and Henry on the stairs, she turns to me.
“Sweetie, you should really dye that hair. You look like a mouse! But the good news is mouse-brown hair goes to blond so easy. Just look at me!”
Henry looks at me and I try to freeze my face.
I do not say, “You mean, I would be pretty like you if I had banana-yellow hair and black roots and jewelry all over the place and makeup that looks like I’ve been applying and reapplying it for five hours straight?”
Everything about Terri feels so . . . fake. Right down to the baubles she has dangling on every available limb.
That’s the other thing. My mom never really wore jewelry. I mean, if it was a night out, she’d put on maybe a bracelet. But it would be an embroidered bracelet. From Istanbul. The kind of thing you wouldn’t notice at first and then you would notice it and realize it was the most intricate thing you ever saw. She didn’t care about diamonds or sparkly things that cost a zillion dollars because the things she thought were beautiful were things that came splashing out of the sea, things that played in the wake of a boat and talked to each other in whistles and clicks and underwater songs.
And makeup wasn’t at the top of her to-do list, either. Well, maybe if she felt like it, but even then just a little lipstick and mascara. Something subtle but not too committed. She would ask my dad, “Does this lipstick make me look like I’m trying too hard and everyone should fall in love with me because I’m pathetically desperate?” And my dad would shake his head.
Wow. Did he love her. She was always so strange, and her train of thought always went off in the funniest directions, and you couldn’t help but laugh at the weird, goofy, absurd paths her brain would take.
But makeup was never the focus of those strange musings.
So, you see, she was basically the opposite of Terri the Terrible.
I have a funny memory of my dad and mom having a “discussion” about having to spend Thanksgiving with Uncle Claude and Aunt Terri one year. It went something like this:
“Honey, husband, love of my life. I know that family is a priority, but maybe you could just send your brother and his girlfriend a fruit basket and we can go to West Marin? I mean, it’s not like you ever see him. Or talk to him. Or go bicycling with him down the coast and have a picnic and start singing that song from The Sound of Music in rounds with each other.”
“Margo, I understand that you’re not excited to go down to Orange County for Thanksgiving, but—”
“William Alexander Billings. It’s not that I’m not excited. It’s that I think I would rather slather myself in meat and frosting and throw myself in a great white shark breeding ground at sunset.”
“Why at sunset?”
“Feeding time.”
He nods.
“Margo Elizabeth Billings, maiden name Burke. If you slathered yourself in meat and frosting and went into a great white shark breeding ground at sunset then I would slather myself in even more meat and frosting and jump in before you. So, fine. We won’t go.”
“YAY! Let’s take the kids to West Marin, but don’t tell them, let’s keep it a surprise!”
She was always doing that. Surprises. It filled her with glee. Silly things. Ugly Christmas sweaters. A spooky bounce house. A Cinco de Mayo party in the middle of March, because March is so boring. After-dinner Mexican Loteria. A Chinese firework display on a random Wednesday night. A piñata for no apparent reason. She loved that stuff. Celebrations. Decorations. Surprises.
But the last surprise was not a happy surprise.
That would have really irked her.
At night, lying awake with the moon coming in through the blinds’ wooden slats, I see her. My mother, floating down down down into the sea, the moonlight in shards streaking through the water, her hair floating up above her, swaying gently back and forth, in the current, and around her, all around her, they come. The dolphins. And the wha
les. And the seals and sea otters. They all come to thank her. To honor her for honoring them. And they escort her, gently, gently down to her bed at the bottom of the sea. And they tuck her in, a blanket of silt, and surround her in a quiet prayer. We will protect you. We will comfort you. We will watch over you. And I wake up from this dream, each time, and look over at my little brother, because I have to make sure he can’t hear me cry.
3
TONIGHT IS TERRI the Terrible’s big night. She is hosting her first soiree. It will be her big opportunity to show everyone the new kid in town—herself!
Henry and I are in charge of greeting her guests and getting their coats.
Marisol, our part-of-the-family-and-ever-beloved nanny, is supposed to relieve us of our coat-getting duty and then ferret us away so we can’t ruin the party. Because Terri says she doesn’t want a bunch of “screaming kids” around.
As if.
Fun fact: Marisol is the only one left around here who cares about us. She tucks us into bed and reads us stories and plays with us and helps us with our school projects and last night we even made homemade playdough. She told us you could even eat it, if you were hungry. But it would mostly just taste like eating purple.
Marisolita Ana Maria Zeron, aka Marisol, is from Guatemala and we basically all speak Spanglish to each other. My dad speaks . . . spoke fluent Spanish, from all this research he did in South America before he met my mom, so he and Marisol could talk and talk. He loved it. My mom used to tease him and call him a show-off, but I think she just wished she could speak it, too.
Henry and I know a few songs she taught us. “La Itzi Bitzi Araña” (“The Itsy Bitsy Spider”) and “La Cucaracha” (“The Cockroach”) and “Mariquita Mariquita” (“Ladybug, Ladybug”).
Come to think of it, all the songs are insect related. Is that weird?
But, yeah, we know some Español. We couldn’t have a conversation about the meaning of life, or supply-side economics, or anything. But we get by.
Marisol is really pretty, you know. She has giant brown eyes and a round face and long black hair that just goes straight no matter what. But what makes her really pretty is that she kind of just shines. Like there’s this glow around her. Made of kindness or something. And she loves us. She really does.
Henry & Eva and the Castle on the Cliff Page 1
