by Doug Lawson
I pull on the latex gloves and get her to let me open up her jacket.
It’s much worse than I expected. I can’t tell what happened—she got hit with something from the explosion? But much of her right side looks caved in. I’m surprised there’s not more blood. It’s probably all internal. Frankly, I’m scared. I’m not trained for this.
I stand up and pull the gloves off. “Rochi, we’re getting you to the hospital right now. This is way out of my league.”
She watches me for a long minute. Then she pulls off the oxygen mask and pushes herself to her feet.
I reach out to steady her, but she brushes me off and I’m startled to see there’s a black diver’s knife in her hand. I don’t know where that came from.
“I’m sorry, Beth—I can’t do that.” She waves the knife in our general direction. I can feel the blood drain out of my face. I wonder if it’s the same knife from T-Bob’s, the one she cut the Rasta chick with.
“Oh my God,” says Hope, taking a step back.
“Fuck,” whispers Rory. “Fuckety-fuck-fuck.”
“You’re going to stab me now?” I say. “Come on, Rochi.”
“I need the van, Beth.”
“That,” says Hope, “is so not going to happen.”
I hear the hiss of the oxygen from the mask on the floor, the hum of the refrigerator kicking on in the next room. A Cal Fire helicopter passes low overhead—I can tell by the sound of the engine, fast deep whumps like the sound of my heartbeat.
“There’s a lot you don’t know, Beth,” she says. “I’m sorry about this. I really am. I just really need those keys.”
It’s now, of course, that Noah decides to slide down the stairs.
He isn’t exactly walking yet, but he can climb out of his Pack ’n Play. Rory’s carpeted stairs are one of his favorite things. He slides down them one at a time and comes to rest at Hope’s feet. Then he pulls himself up by the hem of her robe. He stares drowsily at Rochelle, at all of us, and we stare back at him.
“Oh my God,” whispers Rochi.
Noah is in his tie-dyed pajamas that are at least a size too small and his dark hair is all matted from the pillow, and I know exactly who she sees. Suddenly, it’s that awful night again when Nate was pulled away from us, only recast. Different house, different faces.
But again, she’s holding a knife. She lowers it a bit. “Hey, little buddy,” Rochi says. “I’m a friend of your mom’s. Sorry if I look a little scary right now.”
I know what I need to do.
“Noah,” I say. “Come here.”
Noah considers me from the safety of Hope’s robe, then looks up at Hope. He wobbles a little on his feet, and Hope picks him up. “Beth?” Hope says. “The hell?”
“It’s OK,” I say. “Rochi? It’s OK, right?”
She nods without looking at me. She can’t take her eyes off him.
Hope hands me Noah.
“This is Rochi,” I tell him. “She’s an old friend of mine. She’s a surfer too. And she can do tricks like I can.”
Noah considers her. Then, surprising all of us, he makes his grabby gesture at her, the one he uses when he wants to be picked up.
Nate used to do the same thing.
Hope says, “Tell me you’re not going to hand our child over to the meth-head with the knife, Beth.”
“It’s OK,” Rochelle says. “It’s OK.” She looks at me. The knife in her hand trembles. I take a step closer. Noah yawns, then studies Rochelle’s face intently. He reaches out toward the bruise on her cheek.
“Jesus Christ,” Rochelle whispers. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“I know,” I say. It’s a lot for me, too. “But you’ve got to give me the knife.”
She nods. She hands it over. I give the knife to Hope.
And then I turn and hit Rochi, a pretty solid left hook to the jaw. I’m off balance from Noah’s weight, but given Rochi’s condition, it’s more than enough to do the job.
“You really should have seen that coming,” I tell her later.
It’s December. We’re living at Hope’s dad’s. Rochelle is in a Santa Cruz home now—half rehab, half temporary housing back in the warehouse district north of Route 1. I visit sometimes, and bring Noah. Hope comes too, though it took a lot of initial persuading.
“Tell me about it,” Rochi says. “That kid of yours is a natural, you know.” She smiles at Noah, who raises a Hot Wheels car in her direction.
Rochi got off relatively easy. The lab wasn’t hers, someone else confessed to running the whole thing, and while there will be a ton of lawsuits, she’s only being called as a witness. Hope and I didn’t mention the knife, under the condition that she makes rehab stick. So far, it seems, that’s working.
We talk about things she’s planning to do. Get an apartment soon in Aptos or Soquel. She’s looking for a job, maybe something in retail to get her on her feet. She says she’s even thinking about librarian school. I don’t know how much of that to believe, to be honest, but the fact that she is at least thinking of options is progress.
And she talks about Nathan, too, something neither of us had been able to do with anyone else. “I never admitted how much that little guy meant to me,” she says, loosely holding a cigarette, and staring out the dirty window of her room into the gray December fog. “How much that whole time meant. How much I missed it.”
Later on, I tell Hope I know what Rochi means—how things that happened so long ago can still be riding along on your board with you.
“So this is where someone else would hug you,” Hope says. “And say we’re never going to leave you, that you can open up and trust us and be yourself and see the kid who’s actually in front of you and everything will be just great.”
“But not you,” I say.
“I’m going to tell you to woman the fuck up and get over it,” she says, grinning. “Now pour me some wine.”
I pour the wine. We’re on the beach in Capitola, around the corner from where most of the tourists hang out. I’ve brought the longboards. They survived the fire, though most of the house did not, and at Rory’s I’ve stripped them down and revarnished them so the grain pops.
Hope’s not a surfer yet. Maybe she never will be. But we sit there together on the boards with Noah, away from her dad and all of our other dramas, and today we drink wine and tell him stories. His favorite is about the superhero Surfer Kid. That kid, we tell him, is the best surfer in the world. He rides waves that are as big as buildings, with one foot on the back of a seal and the other on the back of a dolphin. He’s got smoke in his hair and sand between his toes and all around him the gulls cheer him on.
And then we put down our glasses and all three of us get up on the boards, to practice our moves. We take turns calling them out, and then together we all do them.
“Tail-slide!” I tell them. “Kick-out!”
We all move around on the boards.
“Floater!” says Hope.
“Pig-dog!” says Noah, in his little-kid voice that only we can understand.
“You think we’re ready yet?” Hope asks, from down on her hands and knees. We’re all hanging on to the front of our boards, as if for dear life. “I think I want to know what it feels like out there for real.”
For real? It feels just like all of this, I want to tell her. It feels just like flying.
HOUSE ON BEAR MOUNTAIN
AFTER ALEC WAS buried, the issue of the lake house remained. The long, squat box of painted cinderblock with a low, flat roof, was rumored to have been purchased by Alec’s father in 1949 for a hundred dollars. Built by an admirer of a man named Frank Stick, who’d started his own development back east in the Outer Banks in a place he named Southern Shores, the “flattop” house had stood alone in the middle of a lakeside wilderness, reached only by a long drive through pine trees and across a stretch of rock-strewn road right on the shore. Lake birds glided up from the long stretch of blue water and nested underneath the front porch. Wild deer roamed t
hrough the backyard. Alec and his brother Bill caught fish, and lost themselves in labyrinths filled with stunted, twisted trees and shallows where marsh grass towered over their blond heads. They chased each other rock to rock across submerged glacial boulders. They tried to rope fauns with old pieces of twine.
True, the house had technically gone to Alec, who was the oldest, had the most artistic nature, and had used the house for writing. But Bill and Mrs. Bill had actually used it more frequently, at least according to Mrs. Bill. Granted, the leaks in the roofline made it a bit damp for Bill’s fragile lungs, and the décor wasn’t what Mrs. Bill would have selected if she’d been given a chance—the carpeting in particular unsettled her stomach! And who would have dreamed of those lamps being anywhere outside of a thrift store? But there they were, weekend after weekend, driving up from Saratoga, working to keep the old place in shape. It was all terribly out of date and yet it was so romantic, such a piece of the family. The mere fact Alec hadn’t left a will (and who really was surprised, Alec being the free spirit?) shouldn’t allow the fate of such a key piece of history to be determined by some impersonal piece of outdated inheritance law. Why, Alec had hardly been married to that. . . well, to that girl for very long before he’d gone overseas. He’d certainly have wanted it to remain in the family.
And besides, Mrs. Bill whispered confidentially to her friends over lunch, after tennis—while of course she didn’t want to speak poorly of the girl after all she’d been through—and it was terrible and shouldn’t happen to anyone, should it? And she was a pretty little thing, wasn’t she? Hardly even showed when she was carrying. But really, just how much of a wife could she have been for Alec, if Alec had decided to pick up and go thousands of miles away? Right into a war zone? Alone? And it certainly wasn’t the first time he’d done something like that. Her Bill would never have had a reason to do anything of the kind.
But despite April’s lack of real interest—it was the last thing she wanted to think about on a long list of items that were more worth avoiding—the house did belong to April, as April’s lawyer confirmed. Cut and dried, no questions about it, no room for casual debate, much less argument. If she didn’t want to use it, he said, it could be managed as a rental and held in trust for Claire.
April ran her fingers through her short, tight curls and sighed. The Starbucks was busy, the espresso machine droned and coughed somewhere behind her, and the air filled with the smell of caffeinated desperation. Claire slept in the umbrella stroller she was too big for now, her small right hand holding her earlobe, her left arm tucked around her blue stuffed dog.
April’s lawyer was short and eager, a few years younger, and his bright red hair and pale, freckled intensity left afterimages on the inside of her eyelids. He affected a flat, Midwestern accent, but the speed of his words and redness of his face betrayed him as true Silicon Valley stock. He spun and vibrated on the tall stool, and she worried it might collapse, spilling him across the terracotta tile floor like warm milk foam.
April hadn’t seen the house, but she’d heard descriptions. It sounded awful—what would Claire want with a crumbly, damp, moldy place, even if it was right on the lake? Even if it had been her father’s? She had never heard of Bear Mountain Lake, or any of those distant, alpine places. Lake Tahoe, nearby, was a place where people went to ski and drive expensive boats, neither of which she had an interest in: a place between places where people actually lived, all for the purpose of recreation. A tiny house all by itself, close to where the land ended, and right where all of that snow piled up year after year—it made her entirely suspicious. She was nervous even here in San Jose. The few stretches of offices downtown felt like a light façade over land so recently used for growing prunes and apricots. As a child, April had been surrounded by a Manhattan apartment complex, one of a collection of edifices leaning over her like a pack of giant animals, blocking out the terrible sky, herded by a series of majestic doormen intent on keeping her protected.
“Don’t think of it that way,” the short lawyer told her. His hands left traces in the air like a pair of sparklers, and behind his excitement she realized he was thinking of how he might hit on her without seeming crass. “Tahoe has seen a huge amount of development in the past twenty years! Bear Mountain is right behind it. There are paved roads now, April. Long lines of terrific mansions all the way up into the mountains.”
He sat back in his chair and spread his warm hands wide. Electricity jumped between his fingers. The structure itself was irrelevant, he said. A teardown. The land alone was worth upwards of a million today; developed it would be much, much more. It was a regular source of income. A college education. A retirement plan. It was, he said, quite simply a unique opportunity, and he was pleased to be representing her. Completely confident of the outcome.
He offered her one fiery palm. It hung over the small round table between them like a neon sign, his fingers pointed in five different directions, and April looked at it, thinking that none of them were in the direction of her heart.
She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to drive Alec’s car. She didn’t even like to drive, really—why didn’t people leave that sort of thing to the professionals? But her own car was intransigent and stubborn, large and boxy and slow, like an old dog that just wanted some sleep. And despite the lawyer’s assurances, she gathered from the real estate people that she would actually need to drive on the shore itself to get up to the house. Her car would balk. It would sink like an anchor.
But Alec’s old Subaru was too much like Alec to sink. Rough and eager, maybe a little too energetic. Not entirely clean, yet with a sort of practical (if disheveled) dignity underneath the cracked mud flaps and the dented front bumper. The interior was a journalist’s chaos of scribbled notes on colored post-its stuck to the dash and the visors, folded into cup holders and the nook that had held his sunglasses. The storage area in back had a tent and a sleeping bag that still smelled like him rolled up there, along with packages of ramen noodles, empty boxes of film, and a package of small, unopened Moleskine notebooks.
She cleaned it out and left his things in boxes in the dining room, which he’d used as his study. She felt again like he might be back for them. There was his guitar, his squat wooden statue of a Thai dragon, his work boots from L.L.Bean, and the unopened packages of belongings the military had sent back to them, without a note. She sat down in the middle of it all and sighed. The music on NPR paused, and outside on the street there was the sound of a car horn. Indistinct voices of passing SJSU students ebbed. A cloud slid off the sun and the front room brightened. It was time to get out, to go somewhere else for a while.
“We’re going to the lake,” April told Claire. A couple of weeks might help, she thought. Maybe longer. Claire fed herself Cheerios and played silently on the couch with her blue dog. She looked up from underneath a wild cascade of light-brown curls. “We’re going to see the mountains. The mountains are like the mountains where we get the Christmas trees, only much, much bigger.”
Claire regarded her with speculation, and held up her two hands vertically about a foot apart.
“Bigger, sweetie.”
Claire held her arms out as far as she could reach, and looked at her.
“Even bigger than that,” April said. She got up onto the couch, and drew Claire into her lap. “It’s so big, you can’t even see to the top of it.” Though Alec had, she bet. He’d made a life of seeing over immovable obstacles.
She brushed the hair back from the stuffed dog’s face. It was a colorful thing with a long nose and clumsy feet, decorated in an oriental style with a diamond pattern down the back and legs and flecks of color that looked like gemstones. It had a fluffy blue mane like a lion. Alec had brought it back for Claire on his very last visit with them, his last stop on the way to the desert that would claim him.
Claire tapped the dog’s head, and looked expectantly up at April. “Oh, Claire,” April sighed. “Again?” Claire nodded and tapped the dog.
> And so April told her the story Alec had when he gave her the dog—it was a story about a dog family: a mama dog, a papa dog, and a little girl dog. All the dogs lived in a faraway place where they had a big house in the forest. Every day the papa dog would try to teach the little girl dog to bark. They’d bark at the bears, at the squirrels, and at the tiny little deer that lived in the forest. And when they were done barking, they sat down at their dog table and had grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch.
If Claire’s toys were all in place, if she had a bag of something to feed herself and enough leg room and if the straps of the car seat were not too tight or too loose and if the Little Mermaid music wasn’t too loud or too quiet and was started precisely when the car initially set into motion (not too soon and not too late), then April might get her to sleep on a drive.
Successful for once, April let her thoughts drift with her down the interstate, thinking about an addition to next year’s Design II syllabus: a new textbook on the dining-room table waiting to be evaluated. She tried not to think of the last few months, the endless video echoes of Alec’s last, terrible moments posted on that website and then on television screens around the world. It was impossible to think about, and equally impossible to think how they would ever get past that legacy. How could she? How could Claire?
She’d had the phone turned off and the cable disconnected, and she’d unplugged the computer. She’d done the necessary number of interviews and was careful to be contrite and soft-spoken and uncontroversial enough to let it all pass over. She was waiting for the grace she’d heard memory could bestow, covering things over and wrapping Alec up in a flag of goodness; she willed herself to take at face value everything good that was said about him in the media after his awful, senseless death, when in reality Alec had been just as flawed as the rest of them. Yes, he’d been a tremendous father, a concerned, influential writer, a generous and charismatic person. Yes, he’d made it his life’s work to draw the world’s attention to places it did not want to go. At home, April had envied the simple, easy way he and Claire interacted, and the sheer devotion she saw bloom in their daughter made her both happy and envious. Alec had been a good parent; somehow, like magic, there had been an instant bond, a secret language between the two of them.
