by Amy Meyerson
I sat behind the desk, staring at the screen. Could this really be it? Billy’s quest undone by one purchase? That would have been a major oversight, and Billy was nothing if not meticulous. Even if he’d been willfully ignorant when it came to the finances of Prospero Books, he wouldn’t have left anything in this journey to chance. He wouldn’t have allowed the quest to unravel that easily.
We had three copies of The Grapes of Wrath in Classics, so I started there. No notes in the used copy. No love letters. Not even an old lunch receipt. Nothing in the mass-market copy, either. The centennial edition—published on what would have been Steinbeck’s one hundredth birthday—fell naturally to chapter twenty-nine.
The chapter began with the clouds, how they rolled in from the ocean, trailed by the wind, which brought the trees to life and carried the clouds farther onto the lands. Then the rain came, erratic at first until it found its rhythm, cutting in on the sun and claiming the afternoon. Steinbeck continued to describe the rains that grew heavier and heavier, soaking the earth until it had had its fill. Then the water flooded the orchards, the highways, the car engines, carrying sickness and hunger to the migrants who waited out the deluge. Two pages into the chapter, a single word was circled. When the coroners arrived to take away the bodies of those who had not survived the storm: dead. And a page later, circled again: died.
And then the rain stopped. The fields were flooded. There would be no jobs for three months, and everyone was scared. Soon the men’s fear morphed into anger, and the women trusted that anger because as long as the men could still grow angry, they weren’t beaten. Then, a couple of days later, everything began to turn green again.
I remembered the drought in The Grapes of Wrath, not the flood, not the hopeful undercurrents at the end of the novel. Yet, Billy hadn’t highlighted those hopeful passages. He hadn’t highlighted anything. Only those two words were circled: dead and died. So sober. So unadorned.
I flipped through the rest of the novel. Nothing was marked, no notecards or envelopes tucked in its pages, nothing to guide me to the next person in the journey. Still, those circled words weren’t random. They were Billy’s markings, guiding me toward Evelyn, toward her death.
I reread the chapter, possessed by its simple beauty, frightened by its death. I searched the other copies of the novel to see if I’d missed something. They were untouched. As I shut the mass-market copy, I noticed pencil markings on the inside cover, so light I almost overlooked them again. Two numbers followed by a decimal point, four more numbers. The letter N, followed by two more numbers, a decimal, four digits, the series ending with a W. I checked the used copy, and the same sequence of numbers and letters was written there, too. It had to be the code I’d seen in Billy’s recommended copy, a secret language that Malcolm had said was Billy’s with the novels he’d salvaged from thrift shops. It was Billy’s secret language, all right, just not with the books.
I looked the numbers up in Booklog. It wasn’t an ISBN. A Dewey Decimal classification. It wasn’t anything that our inventory system recognized. I typed the numbers and letters into Google instead. When nothing matched my search, Google asked if I meant the same numbers and letters with degree signs and periods. In that configuration, N stood not for new but for north. W not for worn but for west. The coordinates aligned in an area called Fawnskin, just north of Big Bear Lake.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Big Bear was a two-hour drive, inland and east from LA. On Google Earth, I’d located a house in Fawnskin that sat at the coordinates from The Grapes of Wrath, a dark wood cabin surrounded by brown grass thirsty for rain. I couldn’t imagine what Billy wanted me to find in that house, what it had to do with wild rains, what it had to do with death, either.
Unable to sleep, I left at dawn, hoping to beat rush hour. Even at 6:00 a.m. cars crawled along the 210. Pasadena slowly retreated in the rearview window, then traffic thinned around Pomona, slowing down again in San Bernadino. At seven, Charlie would have arrived at the store with three boxes of muffins. By the time he had the chairs down, the coffee roasted, Malcolm would have strolled in. He would have checked the voice mail and email, before heading upstairs to the storage closet to unlock the safe and count out enough change for the day. Would he have glanced at my closed door, realizing I’d normally emerged by then? By the time he switched the sign on the front door to Open, would he have asked Charlie if he’d seen me? Would he be thinking how soon all the days at Prospero Books would be free of me? And would that prospect bring him relief or regret?
“Prospero,” Malcolm said as he answered the phone.
“It’s Miranda.”
“Why are you calling from upstairs?”
I wanted to joke, You really think I’m that lazy? “I’m out,” I explained. “I won’t be back today.”
“Are you asking my permission?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll see you when you’re back, then.” His tone was so even, so devoid of emotion, that I wondered if I’d merely imagined we were in some tense, unspoken fight.
The ski mountain stood behind Big Bear Lake, strips of fir and pine trees delineating its snowless trails. The woods continued beyond the ski resort, across the mountain range and onto the flatlands that skirted the lake. Motorboats tugged inner tubes across the still water. Kayaks lined the beach beside North Shore Drive where tourists steadied themselves on bright paddleboards as they rowed away from the shore. The summer season would last until mid-October when the weather cooled and the leaves began to change. Big Bear was one of the few places in Southern California where the leaves turned, cloaking the mountains in crimson and sienna. Fall in Philadelphia was equally magnificent. Brilliant colors against the Schuylkill River. Vibrant leaves littering the stone walkways across campus. By the time the leaves fell, I’d be two months into the first trimester of the school year. By the time the leaves fell, Prospero Books would belong to someone else, if it belonged to anyone at all. By the time the trees were barren, everything would have changed. Everything except my life, back to Jay and our apartment—assuming it was still ours—back to my classroom with Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman on the walls, the same as it had been before.
I turned into Fawnskin, toward the house that matched the coordinates, thinking about the fall, the packs of students eating lunch on the slate benches outside the cafeteria, the lessons I’d taught so many times I could recite them from memory. Teaching was a little like saying your favorite word over and over again. Fuchsia or effervescent or luminous. At first, it felt like butter on your tongue, soft and silky, then as you kept repeating it, it began to sound strange. Fuchsia was bleached of its brightness. Effervescent fell flat. Luminous became dull. I’d explain to my students Patrick Henry’s famous speech to the Virginia House of Burgess, and suddenly I could no longer understand what was so important about it, if he’d actually been able to persuade his peers to revolt with a few measly words that no one had even bothered to transcribe, the speech living on only in memory. I never thought history could become bleached or flat. I never imagined it could dull. Teaching did that. The students who were needy. Others I had to chase after. Those who only cared about their grades and those who didn’t care at all. I thought about Prospero Books, how much money we still needed to earn, the tickets for the gala we still had to sell, the donations that had been promised but had yet to materialize—somehow, the idea of that work didn’t weigh me down the way my life did.
I parked at the coordinates. The house looked worse in person than it did on the internet. Posts were missing from the porch railing. The front yard was mostly dirt, brown grass sprouting like uneven patches of hair. A woman in an apron answered the door. Behind her, children’s shouts echoed through the house. Her hair was frizzy, her apron speckled with flour.
“Yes?” The shouts turned shrill and she looked back into the dark house. “Jonathan, don’t you dare touch that oven.” Several children gi
ggled. She returned to me, expectant.
“I’m not sure if I’m at the right place. My name is Miranda Brooks. I think my uncle, Billy Silver, sent me here to talk to you.”
“Who?” She turned again. “Jonathan, what did I just say?” The children squealed again.
“Should I come back?”
“Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.” She started to shut the door.
“Please, I’m wondering if you knew my uncle, Billy Silver?”
Something banged behind her. “Sorry, I can’t help you.”
She shut the door, blocking the sound, all the life inside. I leaned against the banister, retracing my steps. I must have read the code wrong. It must not have been coordinates. Or I’d plugged the numbers in incorrectly. I entered them into my phone again, and they still led here. My finger caught a splinter on the banister. I winced in pain as a drop of blood formed on my fingertip. I pinched it with my thumb to stop the bleeding. The entire banister was splintered, the paint chipped, revealing the rotten wood below. The column that held up the roof appeared on the verge of collapse. Most of its paint was long stripped away, but white had collected in a carving of a heart, etched into the soft wood. Inside the heart were two unmistakable initials: B & E.
The woman’s impatience bordered on anger when she found me at her door, knocking again.
“Sorry to bother you.” I pointed to the initials on the column. “Do you know who carved this?”
“What?” She didn’t even bother to look at the carving.
“I’m looking for the past owners. Did you know them?”
“My parents have owned this house for the last twenty-five years.” She began to shut the door.
“Please,” I said. “I really need to know who they bought it from.”
Half her face peeked out from the edge of the door. “It was on the market for a while. Past owners died during the storm.”
“The storm?” Steinbeck’s words came to me in images. I saw the wind swirling the rain. The flooding. The death. “Did they both die during a storm?”
“The wife, maybe. My mom never told me the whole story. I didn’t want to know, frankly.” Inside, something crashed. Children gasped, then erupted in laughter. “I have to get back.”
“Is there anyone who might know what happened to them?”
“Try Dotty at the library,” she said as she shut the door. “If there’s anyone who’d know what happened, it’s Dotty.”
* * *
The Big Bear Lake Library was surrounded by starving grass and dying brush. Inside, people worked at carrels. A man with a ponytail filed books. The large, single room carried the mildew of all libraries, so different than the smell of Prospero Books.
A librarian was reading behind the reference desk. She had curled white hair. I figured she’d been here long enough to remember a tragedy almost thirty years past.
I explained to her that I was looking for information on an accident that had happened in the mid-’80s. I still didn’t know exactly when Evelyn died, sometime between 1984 and 1986.
“I don’t remember anyone dying on the mountain,” the librarian said. “There were accidents, sure. Nothing serious. Did you try the hospital? They probably won’t release records to you, though, even if the person is dead.”
“It wasn’t on the mountain. It was at a house. A woman died in a storm?”
Her face grew still. “I remember.” She used both arms to lift herself out of the chair and led me to an old microfiche scanner. I waited as she sorted through several archival boxes. “We don’t keep copies of the paper that far back.” She handed me a binder of negatives. “I don’t remember when it happened. It was during a snowstorm. A bad one. So, you can rule out May through October.” She started to walk away. “Actually, you might want to check October, just to be safe. Winter was longer back then. May, too.”
There was a reason microfiche had gone out of fashion. No easy way to search unless you knew precisely what you were looking for. I had to go through each day’s paper, one at a time. Fortunately, the paper was short, a handful of local stories added to the ones from the Associated Press. I started with January 1984. While there were lots of snowstorms, none had a death toll. Nothing in February or March. I breezed through the rest of the year into the next ski season, the start of 1985. There was steady snow that winter, nothing monumental. No recording-breaking storms. Nothing that mirrored the power of Steinbeck’s downpour. In April, someone had died in a car accident in the hail, an older gentleman who had driven into a tree. I skipped June, July, August, September. When I didn’t find anything in October, I got nervous and looked back over those dry, hot months. The chapter in The Grapes of Wrath was about rain, not snow. The librarian may have been mistaken when she said it was during a snowstorm. But there was no rain that summer. The drought lasted through the fall, one of the worst in years. In November, when the snow should have started, it was still dry, threatening the chances of a good ski season. In December, it finally began to snow. Every accumulated inch was allotted a few hundred hopeful words that this was the beginning of the snow they desperately needed. The storms remained small. Fleeting. At the end of the month when the snow really arrived, it was too much at once. The ski mountain had to close. The road was blocked off. Flakes the size of dimes quickly amassed into a whiteout in the early hours of December 30, 1985, the day of my birth.
The paper wasn’t printed on the thirtieth on account of the storm. The edition from the thirty-first was longer than usual, filled with photographs. Stills of the restaurants along Big Bear Boulevard with closed signs on their doors, roofs and walkways buried in snow. A pixilated print of a family pushing a car out of a snowbank. A man walking along the sidewalk, his legs buried past his knees, his face masked by a scarf, dark against the white terrain. The caption for the picture read “Man walking down Big Bear Boulevard.”
Articles detailed the fire department’s efforts to clear the roads. The front page listed the injuries and fatalities from the storm. Six people had died; several others were being treated for hypothermia and frostbite.
The article included one short paragraph per death. Some were listed by age, others by gender or occupation. A forty-three-year-old man had been killed when a tree fell on his mobile home. A retired teacher suffered cardiac arrest while shoveling snow. A marathon runner was hit by a car while training. Honeymooners from Bakersfield were killed when their car skidded off the road. A pregnant woman died of suspected carbon monoxide poisoning. Her husband and newborn were in critical condition.
The article continued to list the car accidents that hadn’t killed their passengers. A police officer had broken his leg when his car collided with a truck. A local girl on a sled, hit by an elderly couple trying to make it home. My eyes drifted back to the paragraph about the pregnant woman. It was two sentences long.
Thirty-four-year-old woman dies of suspected carbon monoxide poisoning. Husband, an earthquake scientist, and newborn girl in critical condition.
I had little evidence that the thirty-four-year-old pregnant woman was Evelyn, yet I was certain it was. I had little reason to believe the husband was Billy, only I was positive that he was the man listed in the paragraph, too. And I had absolutely no reason to believe that the baby was me, but I saw the date and knew for certain that when Burt had said, “Evelyn and the child,” he’d meant me, that he wasn’t as delusional as I’d thought.
I read the paragraph over and over again, hunting for details that weren’t there, something I’d read wrong, some indication that the wife wasn’t Evelyn. That the husband was significantly older or that he was an engineer, anything other than a seismologist. That the newborn was a boy. That he had died. All the details checked out. Evelyn would have been thirty-four, the same age Mom was when I was born. Billy was an earthquake scientist. The baby was a girl, born on my birthday.
A numbing concoction of fear and intuition seized me as I scanned my memory for a sign that I should have known all along. Had I ever seen my birth certificate? Wasn’t I born at UCLA? Didn’t Mom tell me she was in labor for thirty-three hours? Didn’t she say that the first time she took me in her arms she felt a sense of completeness that she’d never known before? I wanted to call Mom, to ask her about my birth certificate, about the hospital where I was born, about my first breaths, then another truth came crashing down on me. Mom wasn’t my mom. My life as I’d known it had been a lie.
I walked out of the library in a strange haze, an impossible calm that couldn’t last. I didn’t feel anger toward Mom and Dad. Only sadness. A profound loss. It felt like the ground beneath me was slowly collapsing. I didn’t try to fight it. I just let myself fall.
“Dear!” the librarian called as she ran outside with a book. “Is your name Miranda?”
Was my name Miranda? Was I named after The Tempest, Evelyn’s—my mother’s—favorite play? And if I weren’t Miranda, who else could I possibly be?
The librarian handed me Bridge to Terabithia.
“Our library read,” she explained. “Katherine Paterson wrote it to help her son cope with his best friend’s senseless death. Poor girl was struck by lightning.”
“I don’t want it.” I tried to give the novel back to her.
The librarian shook her head, refusing to accept the copy. “I’ve been holding this for you for over a year. Stipulation in funding the library read was that I get you this copy.” She tapped the cover of Paterson’s novel. “It’s an important lesson on grief for us all.”
After she disappeared inside, I threw the novel into the trash can. Whatever clue it held, wherever Billy wanted to lead me, I didn’t want to follow anymore.
By late afternoon, the heat was still strong. I waited for it all to make sense, some peculiar look the Conrads, our neighbors and my parents’ oldest friends, had given me, some cryptic comment Billy or Mom had made, some way I’d always felt out of place in my own skin. But I felt the same. I still felt like me. The me I’d always been.
