SAN DIEGO
Present Day
The next morning, I pull my minivan into the absurdly long middle school drop-off line, behind the fleet of identical minivans. These minivan car dealers must lurk outside hospital delivery rooms, capturing new parents. “What’s going on today? Any tests?” I brake as two kids leap out in front of the car and scurry into the school. I turn up the music. The group’s name, The Naked and Famous, pops up in digital letters on the display. “Young Blood,” my favorite.
I flip down the visor mirror and put on a little lipstick, singing along. I look good, I think. No makeup, but my skin’s kind of glowing, no doubt thanks to the hijinks my husband initiated this morning. I flip my ponytail sassily and grin, showing most of my teeth. I even remembered to brush before we left. A pretty big accomplishment.
Chase shoots me a withering look and turns down the volume. “It should be illegal for a mother to listen to a band with a name like that.”
“Oh really? What about moms dancing to it?” I shake around in my seat, flailing my arms around, and he slides down as far as he can, pulling his hoodie over his eyes.
You can’t tell my children are one-quarter Japanese. Chase has light hazel eyes and curly light brown hair perpetually bleached blond by the sun. Quincy has hair that was full-on blond when she was little and turned to medium brown when she get older. Quincy and Chase are taller than I am—Quincy about five-ten, Chase already nearly six feet—and both are athletically built.
Perhaps they don’t look Asian because I don’t, either—I’ve got reddish brown hair and a smattering of freckles. My face turns red when I drink. I look more like my father’s side, of indeterminate Western European heritage.
I dance some more, not caring who sees.
In the past, I was that parent. The one who had no life outside of school. The too-into-it room mother who sends out thirty-page e-mails detailing class potlucks and craft projects. The one who takes carpool duty as seriously as military service.
And that’s who I wanted to be. I wanted my kids to have a CHILDHOOD: Now Without Traumatic Family Dynamics. To glance up from their timed math tests and know that somewhere, on campus, their mother hunched over a miniature table, cutting out eighty construction paper hearts for the first grade. To know in the very marrow of their bones that they’d come home to a hot dinner with a vegetable and a whole grain and a lean meat, and a father who’d play catch and never, ever tell a single lie to them.
My phone buzzes and I glance down. My daughter Quincy’s photo lights up the screen. Her engagement photo, to be precise. Got our proofs. A lovely picture, the afternoon light making her long light brown hair and skin glow as if candlelit. Her fiancé Ryan’s hair is shaved to the skin on the sides and back, the top left an inch long in a high-and-tight military haircut, wearing his dress blues.
Yes. There’s also this. As if there isn’t enough already happening. My twenty-year-old college student is getting married in June. Twenty. Yes, I said twenty. “Look.” I show the photo to Chase.
He nods absently, sighing at the carpool line. “Yup, that’s Quincy.”
I put the phone down.
Only two and a half years earlier, Quincy had yet to meet Ryan. She was looking at college brochures with me at the kitchen counter, her face alive with fresh dreams. She trailed her fingertips along the photos. “I’ve got it all planned out, Mom. I’m definitely going to do grad school. Maybe a double MBA/engineering. That’ll get me on the executive track.”
Her wide hazel eyes, today leaning more toward brown, as they did when she was in emotional disarray, waited for my approval. I felt the same way I had when she stood up to a playground bully twice her size in second grade. Plain old awe. I kissed her forehead. “I have no doubt you’ll achieve whatever you want.”
I can, of course, think of dozens of objections to her marriage. Any reasonable parent can. Her fiancé is only four years into his Navy career, still deciding whether or not to stay in for the full twenty years. “The world’s too uncertain to wait, Mother,” Quincy told me. “Have some optimism,” I told her. If you’re a cynical parent, you might as well give up and move to a bunker buried in a hillside. Then again, Ryan’s already been deployed, seen action. I could understand why Quincy feels he might not be around forever.
I have to keep my mouth shut. After all, what can I possibly say about her getting married? She’s doing what I did. Only better, because she’s already got two years of college behind her and she’s not even pregnant.
I have to trust her. But another part of me worries we’ve messed up somehow. Overlooked some crucial parenting key, and Quincy now wants to escape our family the same way I’d wanted to escape mine.
Parenting. It’s not for the weak.
I peer at the sky above the middle school. Two more cars and we’re there. This takes up the biggest chunk of my morning by far. “Don’t forget your umbrella. It’s supposed to rain.” October is the month of strange weather. One day it will reach the nineties, with the desert blowing in hot Santa Ana winds. The next, a storm from up north might cause the temperature to drop twenty-five degrees and rain to fall. Clouds sit low over us today, thicker than the coastal fog that usually burns off by noon. We call this part of town inland, though it’s only fifteen minutes to the beach, in the middle of San Diego.
Chase puts his hand on the door, ready to jump out. “Mom. I play water polo in the rain all the time. I don’t need an umbrella.”
He’s got a point, but I don’t want to concede. I inch the car forward. “If you catch a cold, I’m going to be mad.”
“That’s not actually how you catch a cold,” Chase says. “You catch cold from a virus, not from actual cold air. Science, Mom.”
“Some things science doesn’t know. Mothers know.” I smile sweetly at my son.
“Um, okay, Mom. You are all knowing. Greater than science.” He rolls his eyes dramatically. I used to think only my girl would do that.
He leaps out with a shouted good-bye.
I pull forward. Now the kids are older, and I need something new to occupy me. Quincy sure won’t need me after next summer.
I can see the blank years unspooling themselves like a roll of new register tape. Once Chase graduates, I’ve got years before my husband can retire. Years I’ve got to fill. It’s terrifying and exhilarating. Like starting out fresh, as if I’m eighteen.
Except, yeah, I’m not eighteen. I’m thirty-eight.
Okay. Like starting out fresh, but WISER. That sounds much better. I’m wise, not old.
Besides, I’ve got everything I ever wanted. A fantastic, loving husband. Two healthy kids who make me laugh. A house to tinker with. What else do I need? I’ll figure out something. I always do.
• • •
I wave at a clutch of women standing on the lawn ahead of the drop-off zone, where the curb’s red. One of them, Susannah, stands out with her long flowing hair dyed flame-red, like a comic book heroine. She motions at me to roll down my window. “You going to help with the science club bake sale?” she calls.
I’m usually the one in Susannah’s place, shanghaiing the unsuspecting into service. But this time, with me preoccupied with my mother, the honor’s gone to her instead. I feel instantly guilty. “Sure thing. I can make, um, cupcakes with those gummy earthworms and Oreo cookie crumbs that look like dirt.”
“Fan-tastic.” Susannah hops over to the driver’s side and leans in through the window, so close I can smell traces of the cinnamon oatmeal she had for breakfast. I’ve known Susannah for fifteen years, since our older two were in kindergarten. Quincy and Sam. We always said their names sounded like a detective show. Now Sam, her son, is away at Berkeley. The last time I saw him with her, I didn’t know who he was. Susannah looks the same as she did fifteen years ago, but her son’s a man. In my memory he’s still about three feet tall. It’s like there was a blip in the space-time continuum.
We clasp hands briefly, my left in her left. “Your mom okay?”
I hesitate. I can’t get into details right here and now, in the carpool line. And even if I had the time, I’m reluctant to share all the gritty details of my family’s feud.
This morning, our family attorney, Laura, forwarded a cryptic note from my father, the latest in a year-plus battle to gain power of attorney from me. The battle that could actually go on forever, because my father’s sure not going to run out of money. If Rachel truly has her mother’s best interests at heart, she will do as I say. There are things Rachel doesn’t know about her mother. Ask Rachel if she’d rather keep Hikari safe, or if she’d rather keep the power of attorney.
“Do you have any idea what this means?” Laura had asked. “If you did, we could be prepared. But if he drops a bombshell during the hearing . . .” she trailed off. “I told his attorney we need more info, and he said he’d ask Killian at their meeting this afternoon.”
I knew what Laura meant. We’d lose. “I have no idea,” I’d said, my stomach dropping. Of course there’s a secret. Everything our parents do revolves around secrets. Keeping things hidden. Unspoken. It could just as well be an empty threat.
When my mother first got diagnosed, when her doctor said she was still able to understand the consequences, Mom gave me instead of Killian power of attorney, enabling me to make decisions about her care and well-being.
In truth, I wanted to say no. Just the thought of how my father would react, his cold eyes boring into me, made my stomach turn. “What do you think Dad will do when he finds out?” I asked Mom. “Why not Drew? He gets along with her.”
“I know you won’t go along with what he wants.” Mom gripped my arm and told me the name of the home Dad had chosen for her. “I saw the paperwork,” she whispered. “It’s a cheap home. He’s done with me. He’ll throw me away.”
I checked out the assisted living home my father wanted. It smelled of dirty diapers and moldy apples. The disheveled residents stared at blank walls; the staff were brusque and distracted. I wished that I could rescue every single one of those people. I stood in that lobby imagining my mother living there, unable to speak up for herself. Of my father sitting on his pile of wealth like Scrooge McDuck. Mom deserves better.
I know it’s the loss of control, not the money, that bothers my father. The fact that his disowned daughter has popped back up to prove him wrong. That’s what he doesn’t like. He’s been fighting me, saying I coerced Mom into signing.
I glance down at my steering wheel, then back into Susannah’s sympathetic, deep blue eyes. I shrug. “Mom’s spending the day checking out hot surfers and eating cookies. There are worse ways to live out the end of a life, I guess.”
She squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry, hon. Let me know if you need anything.”
I nod mutely, appreciative. Knowing I’ll never ask.
Somebody honks, and I salute Susannah and drive away from the school, thinking about when I’ll have time to make those complicated treats. I don’t even know when the bake sale is. The truth is, I’m going to forget about it all by this afternoon.
• • •
Drew pulls up just as the heavy black Mercedes backs out of the driveway and accelerates down the quiet residential street. Her father’s gray head is visible above the driver’s seat. Eighty-nine, still driving, with shot reflexes and eyes scarred from imperfect cataract surgery. The last time he failed a behind-the-wheel test, he just went up to the DMV in Palm Springs and took it there, where they were much more sympathetic to the AARP crowd. Drew hadn’t been surprised. Her father always finds the right angle to get what he wants, even if just to prove that he can.
Darn it. Drew slumps down so he doesn’t see her. It would have been simpler if her father was home and Drew could have walked in alone and looked for the book. She doubts he’d care a bit if she took it.
Drew’s not exactly close with her father, but she’s not at war with him, either. Drew once heard a radio therapist advise people on how to get along with difficult family members: Just pretend that you get along. Don’t engage them. Let everything slide right off. That’s what Drew’s done her entire life, and she didn’t need a radio personality to tell her that.
After Drew left for college, she rarely spoke to her parents, calling occasionally out of a sense of duty. They never contacted her, leaving Drew to wonder if they’d even notice if she stopped calling. It didn’t occur to Drew how strange this was until she mentioned it to her roommate, Brenda. “My mother calls me every week if I don’t call,” Brenda said. Brenda received care packages full of fresh apples from Washington state, her home. “Your family’s kind of messed up.”
Drew hadn’t said anything to this. To her, it was just how her family was.
So, during sophomore year, Drew had conducted an experiment. She hadn’t called them for the entire fall semester, just to see if they’d notice. She figured her mother was glad to be rid of her, secretly relieved that Drew wasn’t calling. After Rachel left, they hadn’t gotten along. It was passive-aggressive of Drew, perhaps, but Drew was only nineteen.
Finally, in December, just when Drew figured she’d spend her holiday break in a near-empty dorm like Ebenezer Scrooge in his memory of Christmas Past, her mother phoned her and asked if Drew was coming home. But her mother, rather than sounding like she wanted Drew home, sounded irritated. “You cannot just ignore us. You owe us some respect. We’re your parents. You need to call us.”
“Tell her we don’t have to pay her tuition. It’s not required,” Drew heard Killian say in a petulant voice. “She should be thanking us, not the other way around. Tell her that good daughters call their parents and only good daughters get their education paid for.”
Drew’s heart constricted. Her mind flew to what she’d do if he didn’t pay tuition. “I’m sorry. I was busy,” she said lamely. “I have to practice a lot.”
Hikari sighed. “Just come. Two hours on Christmas. Your father will be happy.”
What about you? Drew had wanted to ask, but was afraid to. She might not like the answer.
So Drew had gone over there, figuring a couple of hours making small talk with Killian and Hikari was better than forgoing a degree. After college, she continued to come home at Christmas, without fail. It wouldn’t kill her, she thought every year.
“You don’t have to go every time,” her ex-boyfriend Jonah said to her once a few years ago. “They’re your parents, but look at how they treat you. You don’t owe them anything.”
Drew thought about it, how Jonah blew off his family because he’d gotten a more fun vacation offer, or thought his uber-conservative mother talked politics too much (though, Drew pointed out to him, his mother tolerated his liberal views without kicking him out). After she was out of college, she had no compelling tangible reason to go. “They’re my family,” was all she could think of to say. “I’m here and alive. Don’t I owe them something?”
Drew taps her hands on the steering wheel. She tried all night to think of what book Rachel could be talking about, but she had no memory of it. Now the curiosity’s eating away at her.
This home of Drew and Rachel’s childhood is on a hill in La Jolla, a wealthy community north of San Diego, the houses on this hillside large and worth millions. This was not a separate city from San Diego, though the residents have tried to secede several times. Across the street, the trees that once blocked the house’s ocean view have been cut down. The trees were Torrey pines, a rare and protected type of tree that grows only in certain coastal areas. The trees must have become diseased—it’s the only way to have them legally cut down. That was another thing her father tried to do for years: have those “infernal trees removed.” Drew wouldn’t be surprised if her father had planted some kind of destructive beetle on them, just so he could claim the trees were compromised.
Killian has been known to skirt the law to get what he wants. During one Christmas visit, Killian told Drew to go in his office and get his checkbook, so he could write her the gift check. On top of a stack of letters, she’d seen a notice from Killian’s lawyer regarding the FCC investigating a company called Himalaya Telecommunications, which was owned by a company that was owned by a trust, which was owned by Killian. Drew stopped breathing—she’d seen Himalaya on the news—they’d roped phone subscribers into illegal contracts, charging them exorbitant fees. The upshot was that Killian had protected himself with layers of trusts and shell companies, enabling him to keep his money while preventing people from collecting.
If it wasn’t cloudy, even at four o’clock, Drew would be able to see the ocean. October is actually a great time of year to go to the beach in San Diego—few tourists, warm water.
Liza’s big message to Drew was that her cruise was taking longer than she thought. Drew asked her if she was okay, if she needed any help, and finally, bluntly, “You know there’s not enough to cover rent.”
Liza shrugged, or Drew imagined she shrugged. Drew couldn’t see her through the phone, obviously. “You know what, the business hasn’t been profitable for a while. Give the keys back to the owner. I’ll mail you your last check.”
And then Drew should have shouted at Liza, told her off for being so flippant with someone else’s life. It shouldn’t have surprised Drew. An employer who made Drew look like a sensible far-thinking thrifty person was definitely not someone Drew should have trusted. Berating Liza wasn’t worth it—she’d just hang up. Drew’s got enough in the bank, thanks to a few music jobs, to cover herself for a couple of weeks. And she could always ask her father for money. She hates doing that—has eaten ramen for days and sold her television to avoid it in the past—but the reality is that her father doesn’t miss it any more than she’d miss pocket lint.
Drew still has a key to his house. She could just walk in without Rachel and look for the book. Her mother, still legally married to Killian Snow, has the right to get her stuff out of the house, does she not? Especially because Rachel has power of attorney.
Drew shifts on the leather seat, her backside sticking uncomfortably to the upholstery. Power of attorney is number fifty or so on a long laundry list of the reasons why Rachel and Killian are still bitter toward each other.
To outsiders, Killian Snow seemed like a genial, gentle man. With his cheerful baritone and big teddy-bear build, Killian charmed everyone who met him. He’d played high school football and skipped college, starting a business providing window glass to high rises, as well as many other investments they didn’t really know the details about, like that telecommunications company. He was one of those guys who could sit down with a stranger in a bar and come away invited to the family reunion. Someone people didn’t believe could do any wrong. “Your dad’s so charming,” Drew’s friends would tell her. “That’s because he’s a white-collar grifter,” she always wanted to reply, but of course did not. To his family, he was someone else. It was like he erected a new and happy public face every day that slowly crumbled into dust by the time he got home, revealing his true nature.
The earliest memory Drew has of her father is from when she was maybe three years old. Rachel was seven. Drew asked her father if Santa would bring her Spanish Barbie, a doll with a swirling red flamenco skirt and long brown curls.
“Nah. Santa’s going to bring you a lump of coal,” Killian said, his eyes twinkling.
Drew began to cry. Back then, she’d believed everything her father told her. “I don’t want coal.”
Killian turned the page of his newspaper. “Well, that’s all you’re going to get. A big lump of coal.”
Drew tried to remember what she’d done that was so bad. She couldn’t think of anything. “But I’ve been good.”
Now Killian was unable to back away from the narrative he’d started. Never, not at anyone’s expense, could her father cut his own pride. Never could he admit he was wrong. “That’s how Santa works, Drew. What can I tell you?”
Her big sister, Rachel, reading a book across the room, put her book down. “That’s mean,” Rachel said quietly. “You shouldn’t make her cry.”
Killian looked at Rachel, his forehead wrinkling in surprise. “I’m just teasing her. I always say: hope for the best but expect the worst.”
Rachel curled her upper lip and Drew put a couch cushion in front of her, bracing herself. “That’s not telling her to hope,” Rachel said. “That’s just being mean.”
Drew looked around for their mother, but she was in the kitchen, out of sight. Drew heard her banging a pan in there. Besides, even if they told their mother, she couldn’t do anything.
Annoyance settled over Killian’s face. He ground his teeth lightly. “Well. Maybe you’ll get a lump of coal, too, my smart little Rachel.” Back then Rachel was Killian’s favorite. And Drew did find Spanish Barbie, wrapped up under the tree in white tissue paper that looked like it’d been pulled out of an old gift bag. She doesn’t remember what Rachel got.
Drew’s lesson from that was to keep low, out of her father’s mind as much as possible. Be compliant. Let harsh words roll into one ear and out the other, the way you do if you’re an Army private and a sergeant’s yelling at you at boot camp. She never cried again at anything her father did.
Instead, she retreated into her music, staying in her room or at school to practice for hours on end. She ought to thank her father for giving her that discipline. That’s how she got so good.
Rachel was another story. Rachel hadn’t ever learned to keep to herself well. She’d always step in, tell Killian he was wrong, or do the things he told her not to do—and that was just like dangling a goat in front of a tiger. She pushed him too far.
Still, Drew thinks that Rachel should have gotten over their childhood by now. Sure, their father’s kind of a sociopath. Sure, he was intelligent enough to know better, but it was just his personality. He couldn’t harm Drew or Rachel.
Rachel’s almost forty, a full-grown woman with a loving, devoted husband and two smart, capable children. Her sister has so much more than most.
She turns up her stereo, tuned to her iPod, to her current favorite song. “Time Won’t Let Me Go,” by The Bravery. They could make a musical out of her life and this song would be playing right now, she thinks, then laughs at her own melodrama. But still.
Drew shuts off the music.