Connie does more than just let me follow her over to the hospital. She walks me in and takes me straight to the HR department. I don’t know if she can tell that the fear of actually going and applying for this job is almost overwhelming, but Connie is very encouraging and calming in her quiet way. I feel like such an imposter, and I’m afraid it will show on me, the dingy stains from the well water in Bushton. Will they see what I come from? Will they know I won’t be a good employee, that I will end up like my mother, making her mistakes, living like some reincarnation of her bad decisions?
Connie introduces me as her roommate, and I feel her calm, like an arm around my shoulder, and let her claim me. Bushton is too far away to show on me here. The realization feels like a weight lifting, and I feel my back straightening. I let my history slip off and away, not mine any longer. I can make a different life. Even if I told people where I come from, they wouldn’t know what it means.
I fill out the application, with a clipboard on my lap, using my best handwriting so they can read every letter, hoping that my answers won’t show my true colors. I leave the application with the charge nurse, with the phone number to the apartment, or condo, as the girls call it. I don’t know what the difference between an apartment and a condo is, but they are pretty insistent that theirs is a condo.
The world is shining and beautiful when I come out into the day. The sky is aquamarine, so clear and bright. Not a single cloud crosses that vast space, and I catch myself skipping through the parking lot and out to Little Red. Palm trees line Ted Williams Parkway, and I merge into the traffic. The old me would have been too intimidated, too insecure, to even walk into the hospital and ask for an application, but it all happened so fast there was no time. There is no knot in the pit of my stomach; there is no sense of impending doom.
I am free. I can be anybody I want to be. I can work in a hospital, I can train for a marathon, I can do anything, and there is nobody to tell me I can’t. I sing along with the radio, loud and clear and not caring at all that somebody may hear me through my open windows. Nobody knows anything about me here. Nobody except Cici, and she isn’t going to tell about where we’ve been. We will only talk about where we are going, just like we did at Life House. I am a chameleon, and I can change my colors. I turn left onto Pomerado Parkway and let the traffic move me from stop light to stop light feeling the shackles of my life coming off of my wrists, sliding down along the edges of my fingers, and floating out through open window. I am heady with the power of it when I park in the Annabelle parking lot. I stand in the middle of the lot, feeling the sun on my face, feeling the air whispering along my neck, and I let myself imagine my life created here.
There are mountains, rising up toward the clear skies. I know the mountains are to the east, because I drove through them to get back into the valleys of Southern California. I want to keep going! The thought sings through my blood when I didn’t even know I was seeking an answer. I have come all these miles, over two thousand miles from our trailer in Bushton and I think I have to go to the edge of the country to know that I don’t have to run any farther. That I have not gone far enough.
California moves faster than the Midwest, but I’m not going to let that stop me. I can go as fast as they can, and there is nobody to tell me I can’t. I recognize the beginning of a motto, a theme. Nobody to tell me I can’t. When I catch a sign in the distance that reads “Del Mar,” relief washes over me. I know Cici mentioned Del Mar in her second letter, when she talked about going to the beach and the movies with a man she had met and was thinking about dating.
The interstate dumps out, and I head south. I reach the Coast Highway, and my breath stops in my throat in a little shudder-gasp as the wide expanse of blue ocean melds into blue sky. I park in the first space I see because I want only to get to the sea, to feel that water, to smell it. I do smell it, even from here on the road, with my windows open, and it is the scent of salt . . . and something more, but what the “more” is, I don’t know. I climb over a guardrail, leaving my car parked and locked, the keys stowed in my pocket.
The water crashes, and I see people bobbing up and down on the water. They are on longboards, surfers, sitting casual and relaxed as the water lifts them and lowers them as the look out to the horizon for some wave that is yet to come. I can’t get my shoes off fast enough, and when I finally do, I leave them right there and make off across the sand. I am not alone on the beach; there are people to the right throwing a Frisbee, and down to my left, there are several kites rising and swooping above the coast.
I stop and roll the legs of my jeans, which I had changed into back at the condo, up to my knees, feeling the warmth of the sand on the soles of my feet. I see the ugly scars that crosshatch my feet and feel the small well of shame in my stomach, but I look back out to the sea and the shame dissolves. I stand upright and let my shoulders draw down and back, releasing the tension of the past weeks, the past months, the past years, letting it melt as the surf rises and falls. I let the tension of my life drop onto the sand. The air moves slow and soft around me, picking at strands of my ponytail and drawing them around in front of my face.
I reach a point where the sand goes from loose to packed, from warm to cool, where the waves seem to reach before slipping back, rolling under. I close my eyes and listen to the roar, the hiss of the water, like a whisper, words almost spoken but not quite said. I feel them, and my heart’s rhythm slows and calms until the blood pumping through my veins is the rhythm of the water undulating toward me. When the water crashes around my ankles, it takes my breath away, like an electric jolt. I had expected the water to be cold, like the wet sand, but it isn’t. It is warm, not quite like a bath, but not cold.
I open my eyes and watch where my feet disappear into the water, until the water ebbs and slips away. In its wake, a small, orange starfish is left behind, prickly, with each of its five legs quaking at the loss of its environment. I am frozen, unsure if I should pick it up and walk it back into the sea. Is a starfish like a baby bird—if a human touches it, will the mother abandon it? Do starfish have mothers? What is a starfish? I don’t know, but I kneel down to peer closely at it, all the prickles on its fat little legs stretching in the air. When the water rushes forward again I jerk upright, pulling the ends of my ponytail out of the surf, and watch as the starfish is overtaken, disappearing in the roil. When the water subsides, the little creature is gone.
I raise my arms over my head and shout, “Yes!” I am exultant. It was right not to touch the starfish, to let nature handle its own, and the little animal has gone back to where it needs to be. I don’t care that I am the crazy girl, cheering on the beach. I don’t know that there is anybody even aware. I am invisible. I am a chameleon, and I have just shifted to match the sand and the sea.