by Meg Donohue
I wrenched my arm from his grip and went inside without responding.
Days went by. I hoped that Bear had decided to let go of the subject, but then Doctor Clark returned with a lawyer. Rei had a will. Years earlier, she had inherited money from her parents when they died. She had no living relatives. Her house was to be sold, and the money from the sale would be given to the Osha Conservation Fund. Her savings were to be divided among Bear and Amir and me. Amir and I would inherit the money when we were eighteen. Bear could collect his inheritance at intervals over the next couple of years so long as he was taking “good care” of us.
The lawyer frowned at Bear. “That’s a tricky thing, that part about taking ‘good care’ of your sister and your . . . ward. Rei didn’t specify what she meant by that.”
My heart hammered in my ears. I stole a glance at Bear. His face was impassive. I could not tell if he even understood what the lawyer was saying.
“But here’s where things get even trickier, I’m afraid,” the man continued. “There’s a small bank account with a bit of money in it, but her will states that she kept most of her inheritance at home in a box in her bedroom. When we checked the box, we found it empty.” He looked at Bear, waiting for his response. I was waiting for it, too, waiting for Bear to tell them that Amir had gone missing the very night Rei had died.
But my brother just gnashed his molars together and stared off into the distance.
“Money doesn’t disappear,” Doctor Clark said. “It will turn up as the house gets cleared out for the sale.”
I listened, afraid that if I spoke or even moved, Bear would break his silence.
“You keep looking,” Bear said. “We could use that money.”
The lawyer nodded. “Meantime, I’ll get your share of the money from the savings account over to you as soon as the estate has settled.”
Doctor Clark had me sit in the kitchen so he could take a look at my calf before he left. “Just about good as new,” he said, rolling my pant leg back down. “Amir’s out working again?”
I nodded. As he gathered his coat and left, I stared at the floor, wondering how long I could keep pretending that Amir was at Horseshoe Cliff. Where was he, anyway? For a moment, I entertained an elaborate fantasy of Amir and Rei strolling through the front door, laughing off my worst fears as a ridiculous misunderstanding.
Instead, as soon as the doctor’s car pulled away, Bear stormed into the kitchen. Before I knew what was happening, he upended my chair and I fell to the floor.
“Amir killed her, didn’t he?” Bear said, standing over me, his chest heaving.
My pulse immediately thundered in my ears. “No. No. Of course not.”
“‘Of course not,’” Bear mimicked, sneering. “I bet you never thought Amir would run away and leave you here all alone, did you? Looks like you didn’t know him as well as you thought you did. I knew who he was the second I saw him. Now you do, too. Wake up, Merrow. Amir is gone. Rei is dead. He killed her, and he took her money, and he ran.”
I opened my mouth to defend Amir, but my mind churned in darkness so thick I could not find the words. Had my actions pushed Amir to do something he never would have done in other circumstances? I had known that deep emotions boiled within him; in the face of Bear’s treatment he had grown angrier with each passing day. When I spent the night with the Langfords, Amir had to face Bear alone, and I’d returned to find him locked in the shed. What had that done to him? If he believed that I planned to leave Horseshoe Cliff without him, and that Rei encouraged me to do so, could his anger have pivoted toward her? Had I driven him to steal from her? To murder her? I did not want to believe this was possible, but I could not erase the memory of what I had seen that night at Rei’s house. The empty box. Rei’s awful, frozen fear.
Bear was watching me. His eyes narrowed. “You were there, weren’t you?”
I shook my head. I did not trust myself to speak.
“I need that money, Merrow. We need it. It’s ours.” Bear’s expression shifted, darkening. The air between us crackled with warning.
I crab-crawled away from him until my back hit the kitchen cabinet. “They’ll find the money. You heard Doctor Clark. It’ll turn up.”
“He also said Rei died in her sleep, and we both know that’s bullshit.”
He seemed as though he was going to walk away, but instead he suddenly crouched down and wrapped my shins in his huge hands. As he squeezed, I felt his fingernails through my pants.
“Stop,” I gasped. “Let go of me!” I thrashed on the ground and tried to push him away, to kick him away, but his hands were clamped tight. It was like the eight years when Amir had been the focus of his violence had never even happened; his rage winnowed on me. I’d nearly forgotten how it felt to be so terrified. This was how Amir had felt, alone with Bear while I had slept in comfort with the Langfords.
My hands were free. Bear’s hands were tight around my legs.
I stuck my thumbs into his eyes. He howled, but when his hand rose to hit me it froze in the air. I scrambled into the corner. He came after me.
I kicked out wildly. He threw my legs to the side. He could do anything he wanted—there was no one for miles in any direction. This was how it would be from now on.
“I hate you!” I screamed.
His face was inches from mine. When he spoke, spittle flew at me. “You better not run,” he said. “If you run, I’ll know you’re meeting him. I’ll know you helped him do it, and I’ll tell.”
Then he stood. His shoulders heaved; he was out of breath. He grabbed a six-pack of beer from the fridge and slammed his bedroom door behind him.
I stared after him. The only reason he hadn’t hit me in the face was that he wanted Rei’s money and the lawyer had said he was going to check on us. But it didn’t matter whether or not I stayed; the most Bear would ever see of Rei’s money was the amount in her bank account. Amir had taken the rest. Bear’s rage would only grow.
I stood, shakily, and packed the bag that Rosalie had given me. I walked out the front door. I kept walking all the way down the driveway. When I reached the road, I looked over my shoulder. From a distance, our little cottage was a solitary light in a sea of black, a home at the edge of the world.
If I left, how would Amir ever find me?
The sea was invisible in the night, but I could hear it still. I could not imagine a life without this sound, its murmur and its roar, its perpetual reminder of everything I feared and everything I loved.
I turned onto the road and kept walking. Eventually a truck approached and I hitched a ride into town. I used the phone in the café to call the number Rosalie had given me. When she picked up, I felt a rush of relief at the sound of her voice.
“Please help me,” I said.
RONNIE WAS THE only true friend that I made in college. She was more than enough. We became roommates and, with Ronnie leading the way, I began to embrace San Francisco, exploring its neighborhoods, trying cuisines from around the world at new restaurants, dancing on sticky floors to live bands, and huddling together, laughing, on overcrowded buses that sped too quickly over the city’s steep hills. At night, the sky was a dull gray haze pierced by the lights of office buildings. After many months of anxiously wondering when Bear would follow through on his threat to tell someone that Amir and I had played a role in Rei’s death, I slowly began to allow myself to enjoy my new life.
Ronnie and I studied together, we went to coffee shops and art museums and movies, and even—rarely, but sometimes—went on double dates. To her exasperation, I could never bring myself to go on more than one date with the same boy. Each boy, however different from Amir, would reveal some small trait that made me think of him. One held his fork tightly as though it might jump from his hand. Another widened his eyes when he listened to me. A fellow English major’s living room contained neat piles of hardcover novels, and I could think only of the stones that Amir had always managed to stack so high on the beach.
“Whoev
er he was,” Ronnie announced one morning after I’d described another miserable date, “you need to forget him.”
“Who?”
“The guy who broke your heart.”
I was surprised, but of course she was right. Amir had broken my heart. I could not believe that he had left me, that he had disappeared without a word. Most of the time, I could not bring myself to believe that he’d had anything to do with Rei’s death. But there were nights when I lay awake and thought of the indented pillow I’d seen beside Rei. The look of terror on her face. The empty box on the floor. The many years of violence and humiliation that Amir had experienced at the hands of Bear.
What frightened me perhaps most of all was that in those moments when I forced myself to consider what Amir might have done to Rei, I loved him anyway.
RONNIE VOLUNTEERED WITH Learning Together, a nonprofit organization that offered a free after-school enrichment program for elementary school children. Many of the children lived in low-income housing, and some lived in shelters. I joined Ronnie one afternoon and was assigned to help two second-grade girls with their homework. One of the girls, Keira, was amiable and talkative. The other, Marty, did not say a word to me. She pushed out her lips and glared at me each time I tried to talk to her about her homework.
“You know what?” I told her. “I’m going to wait for you to ask for help if you need it. I’m working on being patient. It’s hard for me. But I’m going to try, okay? At the end of our time together, you can let me know how I did.”
For a moment, surprise registered on Marty’s face. Then she shrugged and hunched over her worksheet, shielding it from me.
Keira talked enough for both of them. She told me about her friends, her favorite teacher, her school’s awful lunches. I had to bring her focus back to her homework repeatedly, but her openness charmed me. Though Marty was silent on my other side, I sensed her listening to our conversation. After twenty minutes, she tapped my arm and asked me how to spell the word daughter. I told her, and she returned to her work. I saw that her letters were small and neat. When another volunteer came to collect the girls for an art project in the studio, Marty stopped on her way out of the room. She turned to me with a very serious expression and said, “Ms. Shawe, you’re doing fine.”
Her words caused me to experience a rush of joy that I had not felt in years.
I signed up to volunteer three afternoons each week. I never missed a day; I wanted those students to know that they could depend on me. Sometimes I read to them, but more often I told them stories. I told them about children who turned into butterflies each time they entered a forest thick with fog. I told them about the adventures of a family of whales traveling from Alaska to Baja. I told them the story of a boy who crawled deep into a cave and heard the voices of his ancestors. I told them about a mermaid who was so powerful that her songs caused the ocean to crash against the land and change its shape forever.
For all its flaws, what I remembered most from my childhood was the abundance of magic; it was a gift that I longed to share.
WHEN I FIRST left Horseshoe Cliff, Rosalie Langford had given me a phone, and every so often she would call and invite me to lunch. Sometimes we ate at a restaurant and sometimes at her home, which I preferred because it allowed me to imagine, for a couple of hours, that I was a member of the family. It also meant that I would see Emma, who was just as sweet as she entered her teenage years as she had been at ten years old. Emma and I also swam together every few weeks at Baker Beach. Afterward we would wrap ourselves in huge towels and stare out at the sea. Neither of us liked to go too long without putting our feet in the sand.
These were my closest friends: a fourteen-year-old girl and a twenty-two-year-old college classmate and a woman in her fifties.
Rosalie frequently asked me about my work with Learning Together. One day, I walked into the center and learned from my boss that she had donated such a large sum to the organization that they would be able to double the number of children it served.
When I graduated from college, I was offered a full-time role at the center. Rosalie insisted on throwing a dinner party to celebrate. It would just be the family, she said, but if I wanted to invite a friend, I could. I invited Ronnie, who was curious to finally meet the famous Langfords, whom she enjoyed referring to as “the Benefactors” in an overarticulated English accent. She knew bits and pieces of how we had met—but not, of course, the entire story.
When we rang the doorbell at the Langfords’ home, a caterer greeted us with glasses of champagne and told us we were expected in the living room.
“Fancy,” Ronnie whispered, excited.
I was surprised to see Will Langford sitting in the living room alone. Rosalie had said the family would attend, but I had not seen Will once in the four years that I’d been visiting Rosalie and Emma and Wayne, and it had not occurred to me that he might be there. He traveled frequently, Rosalie had told me, for business and for pleasure. He’s become something of an adventurer, she’d said, and the way she’d emphasized the word had let me know that she approved.
It was possible that he was even more handsome than I’d remembered. I felt myself blush deeply, and when I managed to greet him my voice sounded strange.
“It’s nice to see you, Will. This is my friend, Ronnie.”
“Hello,” Ronnie said. She turned to me with eyes that brimmed with delight and mouthed the words hubba hubba in plain view of Will.
I shook my head sharply, but it was impossible not to laugh.
Will smiled. “Nice to meet you, Ronnie. And it’s good to see you, Merrow. How is your leg after all these years?”
I wore a green silk dress that Rosalie had given me on my last birthday and gold leather sandals I had found at Goodwill. I turned and showed him my bare calf. A series of small, pale scars formed a rough circle. Since they were on the back of my leg, I almost never thought of them, but there were times when, out of the blue, my calf would throb. I always thought of my brother, not Rosalie’s dog, when this happened. I felt Bear’s hand encircling my leg, his fingers clawing at the wound on that last day I’d spent at Horseshoe Cliff. I would shiver then and feel glad to be far away from him. In four years, he had not contacted me, but it did not mean that I felt free.
“Well,” Will said. He seemed uncertain how to respond. “I’m glad it healed.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m glad your parents put me through college.”
He burst into a surprised laugh. “I suppose it was the least they could do.”
At the sound of his laughter, I felt myself relax. “Where are they, anyway?”
“Emma is in the kitchen—”
“She loves to cook.”
“Yes, she does. Wayne is running late, as usual. And Mom—last time I saw her, she was working on a toast.”
“A toast?”
“You don’t know? Rosalie Langford is famous for her toasts. Emma’s middle school graduation was really something special. And I’ve been the honoree a few times myself.” I knew from Rosalie that Will had graduated from law school and was working downtown.
“She takes no prisoners with these toasts,” he continued, warning me. “There won’t be a dry eye in the house.”
“Oh boy,” said Ronnie. “I didn’t wear waterproof mascara.”
“Shame,” said Will, catching my eye and smiling.
LATER, AFTER ROSALIE and Wayne and Emma made their entrances and I introduced them to Ronnie, I walked my friend over to the window to show her the impressive view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay. Neither of us could keep our gaze in the direction of the windows for long.
“Ugh,” Ronnie whispered. “Underneath all that . . .”—she nodded in Will’s direction—“hotness, he must be awful.” She was on her second glass of champagne, and her cheeks were pink. “I bet he’s totally full of himself. I bet he doesn’t read novels . . . or ever eat dessert before dinner . . . or date short women. No one that handsome is a good person.”
&n
bsp; “I think he is, actually,” I said. I had never forgotten that he had been the one who convinced his mother to invite me inside their home after her dog had bitten me. Rosalie had become a sort of fairy godmother in my life, but it was Will who had persuaded her to feel that first pang of empathy. I remembered, quite suddenly, how Will had lifted me into his arms and carried me inside. “I think he’s very kind and a little reserved and—”
“Oh my god.” Ronnie’s left dimple deepened to the point that you could have rested a tack in it without injuring her. “That’s him, isn’t it? That’s the guy you’ve been pining for all these years?”
“What?” I said. “No.” I was saved from saying anything more by Rosalie’s announcement that dinner was ready.
“WHEN I MET Merrow she was a girl—a rather terrifyingly scrappy and articulate sixteen-year-old girl,” said Rosalie, standing at the head of the table with a champagne glass in her hand. “She stood fearlessly on the edge of soaring cliffs, she killed chickens with her bare hands when duty called, and she scaled very, very high walls around strangers’ private property because she was curious about how other people lived.” Rosalie raised her eyebrows in my direction.
“She also loved reading novels. And she was a writer. She spoke of the sea, of her home, in the way that a poet writes about love. She had a bright light within her, and she was unafraid to let it shine.”
Rosalie paused, glancing at the slip of paper in her hand. I was astonished to see that her eyes glistened. I had known her to be compassionate, protective, and frequently droll, but I had never seen her as sentimental.
Don’t cry, Bear growled in my ear.
I clenched my teeth together. He’s not here, I reminded myself. My memory of him loomed so large that it cast me, momentarily, in shadow.
“The light within Merrow,” Rosalie continued, “has only grown brighter as she has become an adult. She has chosen to shine this light on others. As she continues to embrace her position as a role model and friend to our city’s youth, I am comforted to know that so many lives will change for the better, as mine has, thanks to her unique spirit.” Rosalie held up her glass. “Merrow, as you graduate from college and embark on the start of a new and exciting time in your life, I want to say congratulations on all your hard work. I am so very proud of you.”
