by Meg Donohue
Rei laughed. There was a sound then, as loud as a person walking through dry grass, at the side of the house. My heart jumped. I worried that it was Bear, eavesdropping, but immediately dismissed the thought; it would have taken too much work for him to have walked out the front door and crept around the side of the house when he could have just stood in the kitchen and listened.
Rei and I had both turned our heads toward the noise. For a moment, all was quiet, and then a red bird landed on the railing. It was smaller than a cardinal, as bright as a ripe strawberry.
“Oh!” I should have remained still, but instead I sprang to my feet.
The bird flew away.
I felt exultant. It was a sign. I was right to embrace Rosalie’s offer. It was time to leave Horseshoe Cliff. I looked back at Rei. “My father always said that a red bird represents a visiting spirit.”
Rei gave me a puzzled look.
“The red bird! Didn’t you see it? It landed right there on the railing.”
She sighed. “My eyesight has never been as sharp as my mind. The gap seems to be widening.”
“But it was right there!”
“If you saw it, it was there, Merrow, and it was there for you.” As I sat down again, her expression narrowed into the worried look I knew best. “What about Amir?”
“Rosalie said she would help him, too.”
“He doesn’t have his GED.”
“I know, but we’ll think of something. Maybe he can find work for a year and try for his GED again.”
“He’s sixteen. Where is he going to work?”
“I don’t know, but Rosalie said she would help him. She promised.”
Rei looked skeptical.
I was beginning to feel agitated. “I won’t leave without Amir.”
“It might be best if you went without him. You are ready for something more than this life. You have been given an opportunity—a gift. You should be free to accept it, wholly, without anything, or anyone, holding you back.”
“Amir’s not—”
“Listen to me, Merrow. I will look after him. You know how I care for Amir.”
“You don’t understand.” I leaped from my seat and paced the length of the porch. My words rushed from me, a familiar sense of shame heating my body as they did. “I won’t leave without Amir. I can’t. It would be like leaving a part of myself behind, a part of myself that I need to survive, to breathe. I’m in love with him, Rei!” I stopped and faced her, my cheeks burning with the confession, a secret thrill spinning within my chest. I’d said it! I’d said it. I was in love with Amir. There was nothing that could have made me take the words back. “I’m in love with him! I won’t leave him.”
I would never forget how Rei looked at me in that moment—her expression shocked, her skin drained of color. My declaration left me raw; I could not stand to feel her stunned eyes on me. I ran into the house, slamming the back door behind me. Inside, I grabbed the sandwiches I’d made and ran out the front door toward the orchard.
But Amir was not there.
I wandered through first the orchard and then the grove, calling his name. Eventually I left the sandwiches nestled in the roots of a tree and ran to the shed. Its door swung open easily. He wasn’t inside. I walked through the garden, around the chicken coop, and through the horse paddock. I peered up at the empty roof of the lean-to. I scanned the bluffs and down the coast, the wind roaring in my ears. I stood at the edge of the cliff and looked out. I walked down the path to the beach and called Amir’s name into the caves. My own voice returned to me, a solitary sound.
When I trudged back to the cottage, Rei was gone. I sat on the back porch and looked out at the sea. There were countless places at Horseshoe Cliff to hide, and I knew them all. Where was he?
The television fell silent. I heard the fridge door open and close. Bear walked out on the porch.
“I can’t find Amir,” I told him.
“Good riddance,” Bear said, but if I hadn’t known better I would have sworn he scanned the land around the cottage before he took a slug of his beer and walked back inside. I wondered why he’d come to that side of the cottage at all. He hated the back porch, with its view of the cliffs.
I looked out toward the sea until the sun began to lower. Still, even then for a time, I looked to the horizon, waiting. Finally, when the sun was so low that it threatened to blind me, I closed my eyes.
IT WAS DARK when I awoke. I looked around the porch, disoriented and hungry. I straightened, rubbing my eyes so hard that red spots appeared behind my eyelids.
I thought of the red bird I’d seen. Rei had said it was just for me. I thought that it was a sign that I was doing the right thing. But what if it had been a sign of something else? I remembered the sounds I’d heard just before I saw the bird, when I’d wondered if Bear had crept around the side of the house.
Amir. Had he stood just out of view, listening?
I thought back, trying to remember what he would have heard. At the point when I heard the noises on the side of the house, I was telling Rei how Rosalie wanted to help me go to college. If Amir had been listening, would he have thought that I planned to leave without him? If he had left then, he would not have heard me tell Rei that I loved him.
I needed Rei. She would help me find Amir.
I hurried inside. The house was empty. On the front porch, Bear drank a beer and tore fist-sized hunks of bread from the loaf that Rei had brought. He didn’t turn to look in my direction even when the screen door slammed.
“Can you take me to Rei’s?” I asked.
He took a drink of his beer and wiped his lips with the back of his hand before tearing off another piece of bread.
“Please,” I said. “It’s important. I’m worried about Amir. It’s getting darker and I don’t know where he is.”
“Did you check the shed?” Bear’s laugh was hard and mean. He had a glint in his eye that told me he was itching for a fight. He hadn’t really hurt me since Amir had arrived, but now Amir was gone, and it was just the two of us.
I turned and went inside. I waited a beat, ready to sprint for the back door if Bear followed me. He didn’t. I looked around the kitchen, trying to decide what to do, and saw that Bear’s jacket hung from the back of a chair. I sunk my hand into its pockets and fished out the keys to the truck. I hadn’t driven since my father used to give me lessons on our long driveway. I hoped I remembered enough to get me to Rei’s house.
I went out the back door and snuck around the side of the house. The truck was parked in plain view of Bear. There was nothing to do but run.
I had my hand on the door handle when Bear grabbed me around my waist. I managed to wriggle free and shove him away. I was stronger than I’d ever been when we used to fight, and he was drunker. I was halfway into the cab when he grabbed my leg. He fingers dug into the wound on my calf. I screamed, kicking at him again and again. I managed to get him far enough away from me that I could slam the door shut. I locked it.
He pounded on the window. “Merrow!” he roared. “Get out of my truck!”
I jammed the key in the ignition and turned it. The truck sped down the driveway toward the road, and I didn’t lift my foot from the gas pedal until Bear was finally small in the rearview mirror.
Chapter Fourteen
When I arrived at Rei’s house, I was relieved to see that her car was in the driveway. There was a glow of light beyond the living room curtains.
But when I knocked on the door, she did not answer. I knocked again and called her name. I waited a few moments and tried again. I picked my way through the plants in front of her house and knocked on the living room window. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled her name.
I walked around to the back of the house. Her bathroom window was dark. I knocked on it but heard no response. The window was once again unlocked, and I felt a pang of guilt for not warning Rei, years earlier, of how easy it was to break into her house.
“Rei?” I stepped into the
bathroom. An inexplicable sensation of dread passed over my skin like a cold wind. “It’s me, Merrow!”
I walked from the bathroom into the bedroom and flipped on the light. Rei lay on top of her covers, asleep.
My relief quickly changed as I ran to the bed. Rei did not move, and she was not asleep. Her eyes were open. Her face was frozen in an expression I had never seen her wear—she looked as though she were staring at something that terrified her. Her lips formed a thin, immovable circle. Her black eyes were still and unseeing. Nausea roiled my stomach. I sunk to my knees at the side of the bed. “Rei,” I cried. My voice did not sound like my own. “Rei!”
I would never know how much time passed as I knelt beside her. The bones in my body dissolved in response to my grief; I could not move.
I had just seen her. We had just spoken. It was not possible that she was gone.
I thought of how tired she had seemed as we sat together on the porch. I thought of how dismayed she’d become when I expressed my love for Amir. I had run away from her, leaving her alone and frail with shock.
Had I done this to her?
I lowered my forehead to the bed and sobbed. Rei was more than my father’s friend. She was more than my teacher, more than my thankless benefactor. I loved her. After so many years of laughing when she worried over me, now I cried at the thought of my life without her in it. Would I have longed to see the world without Rei’s stories of her childhood in Japan? Would I have loved art the way that I did? She had affected me in ways for which I rarely paused to give her credit.
I cried for her forgiveness.
Through the window, the moon was a bright eye watching me. What was I supposed to do? I decided I should find Doctor Clark and tell him how I’d come to discover Rei.
As I stood shakily to my feet, my gaze fell on the trunk across the room. It was open. On the floor, Rei’s box—the beautiful box covered in shells from our beach—lay ajar. I walked over to it, my heart hammering in my ears.
It was empty.
I looked back at Rei, my understanding shifting. Had someone done this to her? Had someone killed her and stolen her money?
The pillow beside her was indented, as though an invisible hand pressed it. I thought of spirits, of the red bird on the porch railing, of Amir believing that I planned to leave Horseshoe Cliff without him.
The last time I had left Amir alone with Bear, he had ended up locked in the shed.
But Amir would not do this to Rei.
I thought of the way his face had transformed that day when I returned from my stay with the Langfords, how I had hardly recognized the Amir whom I loved within the storm of violence that had spun in his eyes.
I did not want to think what I was thinking.
I did not want to do what I did, but I did it anyway: I closed the empty box and returned it to the trunk.
“Forgive me,” I whispered to Rei.
I remembered the light that was on in the living room. I hurried down the hall and there, on the shelf that held the carvings that my father and Amir had made, one carving was missing. I remembered the one that had been in that spot. It was the first tiny house that Amir had created. My father had helped him with it, teaching him; they’d made it together.
I thought suddenly of Rosalie’s words, how there were moments in life when you realize that everything has changed.
I stared at the empty spot, feeling my world shift.
Amir was gone.
Part Two
Chapter Fifteen
Finally! Someone who knows the value of a dollar,” said the girl as she slid into the seat beside me. I was startled. In nearly a year of classes at San Francisco State University, few of my classmates had spoken to me. The girl registered my confused look and gestured toward the students who were filling in the rows of the lecture hall behind us. “It’s like no one has explained to them that the best seats in the house cost the same as the worst ones.”
She had a point. In many classes, I found that I was the only student who sat in the front row. I preferred it this way. When I raised my hand to speak, which was frequently, it was easy for me to pretend that I was simply conversing with my professor, and not being silently judged and scowled at by my less-eager peers. I had not made any friends, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I was there to learn.
I was acutely aware of how different I was from my classmates. I was younger than everyone I met, I had only a passing knowledge of pop culture, and I had little experience with making new friends. I knew that my classmates thought me strange. A toxic mixture of guilt and grief and homesickness roiled within me—but I did not cry. I was skittish, half expecting that at any moment I would hear Bear’s voice in my ear and turn to see him looming over me with knives in his eyes. Fear had turned me into a dry-eyed recluse.
College was not what I’d thought it would be. I was not who I’d thought I’d be.
I had thrown myself into my studies. I wrote stories, and in them the sea always appeared. It was perpetually on my mind, tugging at me as insistently as an actual tide. I was sure that I could hear the sea even when it was miles away. I held the stone Amir had sent to me at the Langfords’ in my left hand as I wrote, longhand, in my notebook.
“Veronica Quilici,” the girl beside me said.
I set down my pencil and shook her hand. “Merrow Shawe.”
“Merrow? That’s pretty.” Veronica had shoulder-length brown hair that she’d pulled back in a twisted red bandanna. Her face was round, her cheeks dimpled, and her front teeth were crowded and bulging as though elbowing each other out of the way. “You can call me Ronnie,” she said. I had the distinct sense it was the first time she was trying out this nickname. “Did you start any of the books?”
I nodded.
The class was Contemporary Women Writers, and the reading list that the professor had circulated two weeks prior to the start of the semester was comprised of seven novels. I had immediately signed all seven books out of the library and had finished reading the last one on the list the night before the first class.
“I read them all,” Ronnie announced. “I couldn’t wait.”
I could not help but smile. “I read them all, too.”
She looked at me in surprise and, I thought, relief. I guessed that she was thinking what I was thinking: Here, at last, was a kindred spirit. A fervent reader of books. An unapologetic front-row seat taker. Someone who looked in need of a friend.
As the professor opened the classroom door and headed toward the lectern, Ronnie leaned toward me and asked if I wanted to get coffee after class. I answered, as casually as I could, “Sure.” I was seventeen years old and I had never had a cup of coffee.
It was hard to concentrate on the lecture. Ronnie’s offer of friendship was not a small thing for me. I had spent the last year so immersed in grief that I could not imagine my way out. Rosalie had fulfilled her promise to me, helping me file for emancipation and supporting me financially as I applied for and received various scholarships. Still, I felt alone. For the first time in many years, I remembered how lonely I had been before Amir had arrived at Horseshoe Cliff. I felt returned to that place of friendlessness, except now it was exacerbated by Rei’s death, Amir’s disappearance, and how disorienting it felt to be so far from anyone or anything familiar. I walked along San Francisco’s beaches as often as I could and let the sound of the waves calm me. I had what I’d always wanted—the chance to go to college, to live in a big city, to see more of the world than one crumbling cliff—but it was not at all how I’d envisioned it.
I was not sleeping well. In my dreams, Amir and Rei stared at me and would not speak. I could not read their expressions.
I had not gone to the police or even to Doctor Clark that night a year earlier when I found Rei dead and her money gone. I drove Bear’s truck home. His bedroom door was shut when I arrived. I put his keys back in the pocket of his jacket that still hung from a chair. I went to my room and lay awake all night. The next day, Bear
didn’t say anything about how I had taken his truck. I guessed alcohol had made his memory of the night hazy—or perhaps that he would rather forget the embarrassment of his little sister stealing his truck. I did not say a word all morning. There was work to be done around the farm, but I did not do it. I sat on the porch and watched the driveway, hoping that Amir would return and knowing in my heart that he would not.
Late in the afternoon, Doctor Clark arrived. I supposed I’d been waiting for him, too. Bear came out to the porch.
The doctor asked if Amir was around. “I’m afraid I have news that he should hear, too.”
“He’s working in the orchard.” The lie came easily, but I looked off into the distance to avoid meeting his eye.
Doctor Clark gave a weary sigh. “Well, you’ll tell him then, when you see him.” He explained that after Rei had not answered his calls all day, he’d checked on her and discovered that she had died in her sleep over the night.
“She wasn’t in pain, Merrow. She fell asleep and didn’t wake up. It was peaceful.”
I pressed my lips together to keep myself from crying out the truth. I had seen Rei’s face. She had not died in peace. She had died in terror.
Doctor Clark went on. It seemed to me he was speaking as much to himself as he was to us. “When I ran into her at the co-op earlier in the week, she mentioned she’d been feeling short of breath. Dizzy. She didn’t look particularly well. I told her to go to the hospital, but she waved me off. She said it was age, pure and simple. I called on her a couple of days ago, just to check. She said she was feeling better.” He looked off in the direction of the orchard and his hangdog eyes swam. “I should have driven her to the hospital myself.”
His anguish pained me. “You did what you could,” I whispered, my voice catching on the words.
Doctor Clark returned to his car. Beside me, Bear smelled like he hadn’t bathed in a week. When the doctor’s car was halfway to the road, my brother’s fingers squeezed my wrist.
“So Rei is dead and Amir is nowhere to be found, but you’re in a big hurry to tell Doctor Clark that Amir is working in the orchard.”
