On Wonderland Avenue, the blacktop becomes slick as always. It’s good to be back in the shade. Water rolls down the hill where the stream is forced to make the road its bed, and a new knot in my stomach begins again. My fear of where I’ll end up if Isabel’s gone. I hear the echo of hammers. New construction on the hill face and a fear that she’ll not be here, or here. Her books and paintings, her photos from the top of Angel Falls. The chance to tread lighter, learn integrity.
“Eighty-seven twenty-nine,” I say through the hand-smutched plastic that divides me and the back of the driver’s Yankees cap. The strange house numbering scheme; short streets numbered in the thousands. “Leave me at the bridge,” I add, fishing for my wallet, searching for signs of Isabel. The meter’s reached sixty-four dollars.
The pair of retrievers from next door greets me, wagging their fat golden bodies on the damp maple leaves that carpet the driveway at this time of year. Golden as the dogs and the day. The rattle of my bag rolling up the bricks behind me. The same bag I rolled to the curb at LAX just a fortnight ago, her reluctant hug good-bye. It feels like a minute and a year. If a story could be retold: a boy in a sandpit, his watchful parents on veranda chaises, the mother reading something light, maybe Mapp and Lucia, the father drinking a beer in the afternoon, reaching over for the mother’s hand. The boy waves at them, smiling. Who grew up and drove like a normal person, kissed his girlfriend good-bye at the airport, telephoned her every day.
The big stucco house where my landlady actress chants. Her Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō and old white-tired Mercedes left in the garage. My red Jeep is parked beside it. I pass the big shuttered windows and turn up the path to the guesthouse, its ledge of geraniums and louvered windows opening into the vines and chaparral, cottonwood. Succulents in their pots, here all along, watered by the rain. My eyes are dry, sore from stale air and uncertainty, but the top of the stable door is slightly open, and in the breeze a dress hangs from a sycamore, the cream linen one she’d have worn at Esalen, pinned with old-fashioned cardboard luggage tags. Like the dresses clipped with prayers in the tree above Big Sur. A prayer of my own as I lay my bags down and reach for the door.
Wedding Bush Road Page 21
