WHILE I HAD BEEN GETTING LIGHT HEADED IN A BUNKER, GABBY LEFT A couple messages at the house. Our last conversation, when I’d called her after Mike’s funeral, had been bugging her, and she wanted to check on me. I hadn’t felt up to calling her back yet, but she caught me a few days after I got home, sleeping at six at night.
“I thought you might be dead,” she said dryly when I answered. “You’re usually more punctual about harassing me.”
“Yeah,” I said. That hollow flutter from being woken straight out of a deep sleep hadn’t left my chest yet. It mingled with a dark humor about how close Gabby was to being on the nose. “I’ve been off my game. I’ll try harder, I promise.”
“Even the other day,” Gabby said, still teasing aggressively. “You were acting so strangely. You didn’t insult anyone in our family. You didn’t insist on your rights. You’re slipping.”
Our family. That was a strange thing to hear her say. It hadn’t been ours for a long time. It was theirs. Even the phrase “our family” felt more like a postwar ruin than anything you’d put faith in, like the church or a middle class. But a crumbled edifice was still a structure, and I had at least helped set some of the foundation stones, for better or worse.
“No yelling, no insults,” I said. I needed a glass of water, three weeks’ sleep, some Xanax. My voice broke off the words in weak, dry chunks. “I don’t have it in me today. Really, I don’t.”
“Aw, but you sound terrible, and I’ve got you on the run. It’s a rare opportunity.”
“Sorry, I can’t—”
“You sick? Or just scared?”
“Gabby. Please.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll stop. But you do sound bad. Really. Are you okay? Ignore the tone of how I say it. I can’t help not taking you too seriously. But are you?”
I breathed heavily through my nose. “I doubt it,” I said lightly, “but I’ll manage.” It was too difficult to explain everything that had happened. It was too hard even to know what it meant to me, though I could feel the meaning in my gut, clear and articulate as a fist. I thought of Gabby in her small home in Eugene. I thought of Aracely, my little girl, and her apartment, a crib next to the bed. I thought of my grandson, whose name I didn’t know.
“Hey,” Gabby said when I hadn’t spoken in too long. “You still there?”
“Hm,” I said. That was about all I could manage.
“Come up.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come up,” she said again, with less fear and anticipated regret in her voice. That was meaningful, too. “No promises about seeing Aracely. But come stay on my couch a few days. At least it’d get you out of the house for a while. You forget how well I know you, and I know this voice. Haven’t heard it in a while, but I remember it. And Eugene’s nice right now. You might find it exceptionally difficult to shit on.”
I closed my eyes. “You sure?” I asked.
“Of course not,” she said, but her voice was easy on me in a way I hadn’t heard for years.
We agreed that I’d come up in a few weeks. There were a handful of things I needed to take care of around the house. A broken back window. Some stains on the carpet I’d pretend to try to remove by buying some caustic product and never applying it. I put the Nova back in the garage at my parents’ house and had a real estate agent meet me there.
By then I’d put off leaving long enough. There was one stop I needed to make along the way, but I’d been dragging my feet. I had reasons to wait, wanted to give her some time. But eventually I was out of reasons and out of time to kill. I packed the truck and headed north on the 405.
After the arid expanse of the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, where all three of the nation’s best and a few thousand other guys reenacted Normandy Beach invasions every fourth weekend, I pulled off the freeway in San Clemente. There were some regular buildings in the town, like the liquor store, but mostly I drove past mock Spanish Colonials built in the 1920s and ’30s and then the more recent and palatial ones from when we really hated Mexicans but wanted to pretend to live like españoles in prerevolutionary New Spain, down to the complexion of the household staff. Eventually I came to the hard-luck, mid-century shoebox on Elena Lane that had been subdivided, probably using cardboard and duct tape, into two apartments. I parked a few dozen yards down to wait with a view of the driveway.
Waiting was easy now—no rush for anything, no push or pull forward. I wasn’t looking for something to get pissed off about, wasn’t looking for that little adrenaline high of unrighteous indignation—any kind of distracting buzz at all. The last year had been a relapse, even if I’d never had a drink. I was back at meetings, a day or two a week, after years of swearing them off. Alcoholics, like pastors maybe, are never recovered but always recovering. It was a grim truth, and I didn’t like it. I hadn’t fallen into spraying crowds with holy water and preaching the end times, but something of that wretched and retching way of thinking had drifted in like an algae bloom in my brain. Now I was past it, waiting in the still water for whatever would come—no predictions, bitter or metaphysical, and no great hopes, but no certainty about their impossibility either. To wait around in my truck for a while was tedious in a way I could live with, was nothing.
The tedium evaporated like a marine layer when I saw her.
Emily’s hair was blonde now, pasted down with some kind of product, but of course it was her. She was carrying a blue foam surfboard, a seven-footer by the looks of it. She wore knee-length trunks, olive green, and a white rash guard. She stopped at the curb to check her pockets and looked down the street. I thought about ducking but didn’t, and she didn’t see me anyway. She wasn’t looking for me. She didn’t know I was still looking for her.
I let her walk away a full five minutes. Then I got out and walked after her. I knew her destination anyway. She wasn’t taking that board to catch a bus. It was only a few curving, downhill blocks before I passed the Beachcomber Motel and could see the pier below, silhouetted and looking like a zipper in the denim of the ocean. Emily was walking down the stairs to go under the train tracks. I waited on the bluff to see if she’d emerge on the other side and go north or south. She went north, disappearing in the shadow.
I followed under the tracks, where the puddles might be seawater or piss or both—the smell was all the same, putrid and sour but familiar in a way I liked. She was out in the water, so I sat in the sand and watched. The waves were knee-high, and she was, as she’d called it when I took her surfing before, getting hassled, if not surfing. She was still finding her legs, falling mostly before she stood up. That was partly the fault of the waves. They didn’t have enough push, and the board would founder, underpowered. But she was paddling more confidently, was seeing how to get around the break, get over or through waves. And even from this distance, I could see she was finding out that it could be fun.
By the time she rode into the thin, sandy gloss that squeegeed itself against the shore, the sun was low in the sky. It was a perfect kind of post-tourist and pre-autumn evening to be down here, all the blast and idiocy of the summer fading in memory. She wrapped the leash around the tail of the board and walked up the beach, a classic California profile in nearly full shadow, her features existing only in a burnished, golden shade, like the saints on Renaissance altarpieces that seemed to be inwardly self-illuminated. But Emily couldn’t be the surfer girl the Beach Boys sang about, the girl half the young (and not so young) men around her lusted for, laughing through evenings at bonfires and ukulele sing-alongs. That was just her darkened profile, a corresponding outline. And if she was in shadow, my face was catching the light, and she was coming my way.
“Emily,” I called.
If she was startled, she didn’t let it show. She brought her free hand up to wipe some salt water away from her eyes and blinked at me a few times. Then she laughed and shook her head, saying something quietly to herself, and walked over to me.
“Shaka,” I said, waving my hand with thumb and pinkie out like it was a faulty flip phone.
“Oh, fuck off,” she said, standing only a couple feet from me now. Her expression was stern.
“You’re getting better,” I said, motioning toward the waves.
“I’m getting shit,” she said, not taking her eyes from me for a second. “Maybe a tan.”
“It’s something.”
“Speaking of shit, you’re looking . . . well.” It wasn’t untrue, and the way she said it wasn’t unkind. I’d probably lost some weight since the last time I saw her, wasn’t shaving. I was still so exhausted my face felt numb most times, and my jaw ached. It had been over a year since we first met, but I looked like I’d aged five.
“You are what you eat,” I said.
That made her laugh, but it was bitter and she cut it short. “God damn it. I shouldn’t have gone to Angelo’s that day. I’d have been better off at Denny’s.”
“Not likely,” I said. “The geriatric Oceanside Chamber of Commerce surf team goes there for Grand Slams and games of waitress grab-ass. One of them would have lent the wrong kind of hand.”
She rolled her eyes, and her smile puckered like a jacaranda bloom a day after it’d fallen to the sidewalk. “Fine. I should have gone to the grocery store and bought myself a bag of salad, is that what I should have done?”
“I don’t regret getting you a burger.”
Her laugh was dismissive. “Maybe you should. Anyway. Sorry I fucked up your house.”
After the bunker and the hospital, once the paranoia and wish for meaning had faded, I could see there were enough clues that my ransacked house wasn’t done by Sammy’s people sending me a message. It wasn’t even clear if Sammy had people; it was more likely that he was someone else’s person, a tool in its own compartment in the toolbox. But someone had wanted me to think he did. Someone wanted me motivated to get Sammy locked up.
“Figured that was you,” I said. “No apology needed. Nothing there, nothing to fuck up, I mean. Only took a couple hours and some air freshener to put it to rights. The bed was maybe a little too far.”
“Maybe. But doing the fridge was fun.”
“My poor Tapatío.”
She smirked and looked down the beach in either direction, a trickle of water running from her hair down her cheek.
“No one else is here,” I assured her. “I haven’t told anyone.”
“Then what do you want?”
It was a fair question. I’d been thinking about this since the hospital. I never told the cops about Lambert giving Emily the money or how he’d lied about seeing her so recently. I’d wanted to ruin whatever he had, but when Tuitele told me to take out a new lease on life, I remembered finding the rental agreement in Daniella’s car. It had a San Clemente address, Elena Lane, Daniella’s name and signature in the right spots. It hadn’t meant anything at the time, but Elena stuck because of Ellen, my sister. Then, in the hospital, I saw it: Daniella claimed her life was the work she did at Canaan Hills and in the community around the border. She was getting married, doubling down on that whole life, the antithesis of the one she might have had if she and Emily had been united in their response to Lambert—a life that would be hard to live from a tiny apartment in San Clemente, an hour and a half away without traffic. The rental couldn’t have been for her new abode of marital bliss. I’d at least read those signs well.
And Emily had admitted to ransacking my house, likely figuring that if I thought Sammy was sending me a message, I’d have more of a fire lit under me. She’d read my signs well, too. At the end of the day, it got Sammy locked up. Emily was safer, living quietly up here. So what was it I wanted?
“To see you,” I said. “Just to see you.”
Emily laughed dismissively. Her nose creased at the bridge, and though I couldn’t see them from where I sat, I pictured the freckles that ran across her face, saw how they related to the ones on her mother’s face. “So you’re going to tell me,” she said scornfully, “that under all that you’re just another sentimental asshole?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Probably not. I just needed to see with my own eyes that you weren’t gone for good. That you hadn’t just up and vanished.”
“I don’t know, man. That seems like bullshit to me,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t want to know what was happening with Sammy? Why I was in Oceanside that day? What’s happening now? You’re good at playing quiet, but I bet you’re looking to meddle some more. It’s the dad in you.”
I took a breath and let it out. “I doubt it,” I said. “I was never much of a dad. And I could ask you a bunch of questions, but what would I get? The whole story? I don’t think so. Even if we spent the whole day talking, I wouldn’t know it all. I’ve got a decent sense, though. I can make some solid guesses, and maybe it’s better to leave it at that. San Diego’s a small town, and the evangelical scene is even smaller. After Lambert broke your heart, I can see how you would fall in with some people who’d eventually lead you to Sammy.”
She nodded confidently, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes now. “Sure, close enough.”
“Fine. Then you get hooked on whatever Sammy was selling. You start doing what you need to do. Maybe you trade sex for room and board. Maybe not.”
“Eh, not,” she said. “Sammy’s a big, stupid baby. He can barely look at his own dick, let alone get a girl to do much with his or anyone’s. He’s really not good at much of anything. I’m organized, can think ahead, keep track of things. I helped him get organized.”
“So everything I heard, from that kid Shaw and from Daniella, the forced prostitution, or at least using sex for—”
“That was my own shit,” she said. A wash of stale pain passed over her face, and she looked away, fixing her features to glare into the setting sun for a moment.
“Fine,” I said. I knew something of what she was feeling, that hard blade a person can wield against oneself. It was sharp, and unbreakable, and knew exactly which tender places to pierce, exactly how to maximize the pain it could render from the flesh and more than flesh. But I knew enough about what I didn’t know, too, and how foreign her life was from mine.
“Then maybe you figured you’d had enough,” I said, “or felt backed into a corner. Maybe you just couldn’t shake your feelings for Daniella. You’d buried them deep, but they kept growing anyway, without water or light. You had to see, now that you were both adults, if there was something still there. So you left Sammy and tried her. But I talked to Daniella. I got a good sense of her take on what happened between you, and she was engaged, so you got hurt all over again.”
Now Emily set her board down next to me and sat on it. She curled her toes again and again in the sand and looked out at the piddly waves that had crossed half an ocean to do their next to nothing against the shore and then recede. She kneaded one palm with the other hand’s fingers, and I thought about the cartoon she’d left on my patio—the ad for fate line plastic surgery. They weren’t her hands she’d drawn, I saw now. They were Daniella’s. A joke, a wish, something more complex.
“So then you figure it’s a good time to leave town,” I said, quieter now that she was next to me. “Maybe you end up having a little too much fun first. Some habits are hard to kick, and you’d talked a good chunk of change out of Lambert.” She scoffed under her breath but not in a way to stop me. “Somehow your money’s gone before you can split. Maybe you never really wanted to get to the Space Needle.”
She smiled thinly. “I just don’t look good in flannel.”
“Sure,” I said, glancing at her. “Maybe that.” She was rubbing her knees where they’d been scuffed red by the wax on her board. She was beautiful, and beside me, but I felt nothing but an aching tenderness for her now. No, I had to admit, even then some of the attraction that had mingled with paternal affection still lingered. Nothing goes away completely. But some things can fade for so long they might as well have, and others you’re just too tired to be ashamed of, when you know they’re too weak to act.
“I thought I could start a new life,” she said. “But then none of them sounded good. No version seemed worth the hassle.”
“So then back to Sammy’s?”
She nodded, pursing her lips. “That wasn’t worth it either.” She picked up a small blade of kelp with one dangling bulb and fidgeted with it. “But I couldn’t think of where else to go, and I couldn’t keep staying with you. I could see the way you were looking at me. I knew where that was going. The way every other one had gone.”
My heart stuttered a beat, and I felt pierced, accused. It was true, of course. It was no use hiding from the fact. There was a new kind of pressure inside me. A dislocated sense of shame, like fog, settled over everything. She was right, and that was all. I’d tried to help, but still I was there, part of the lineup of figures that fit what she’d learned to expect from men. Maybe only a shadow of it, among the longer shadows cast by those others. I hated feeling on the hook for it. But on the hook was where I needed to be, like a fish, and always.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If I did or said anything—if I could have said or done anything different, so that you would have stayed. So that I could have helped you.”
“Forget it,” she said firmly, popping the kelp bulb between her fingers and tearing it from the blade. “You were low grade, compared to . . . you know. But I couldn’t handle the halfway, the not-knowing—”
“The decent enough.”
“Right.” She threw the blade of kelp, which caught in the early evening breeze and landed a couple feet away in the sand. “At least I knew the way shit went down at Sammy’s. I wasn’t going to slip up and get the rug pulled out from under me.”
“Unlike Lambert.”
“You have no fucking idea.”
There wasn’t anything to say to that. We sat together in silence, or at least next to each other in it—it’s hard to tell the difference. I would accept either.
“But still, for some reason Daniella started to help you,” I said softly.
Emily laughed derisively. “I made her.”
“Blackmail?” I asked, without thinking.
“Fuck you,” she said, facing me. She held a fistful of sand—not to throw at me, I think. She’d just grabbed for something when the anger hit. I could understand that. “What Eddie did to me, what he’s done to her? That’s fucking blackmail. With the fate of your eternal soul as the price, for fuck’s sake. I’m not like that.”
I held my hands up defensively. “I didn’t mean—”
“You meant what you meant. Don’t get all fucking holy and judgmental on me.”
“That’s not what I’m doing. It just came out.”
“Exactly,” she said.
I tried to touch her shoulder but stopped myself when she flinched away. “I don’t need to know,” I said. “Like I said, I just want to know you’re okay.”
“Okay?” she said, voice rising, tears coming to the brinks of her eyelids but refusing to spill. “What does that even mean to someone like you? How do you define it? Is okay getting clean? Fine. I’m in a program here. I’m getting clean. Is okay never speaking to my parents again? Okay for me, but maybe not for a guy like you. I don’t give a fuck. They made that bed. And what about mine? I get Daniella here with me a couple days a month. I’m getting what I always wanted, right? The other twenty-eight days a month she’s off singing worship songs and planning her wedding. But she’s thinking about me. She’s thinking about my lips when she kisses his. I can fucking live with that. But does it fit your definition of okay? Because I never thought she would admit to feeling anything for me again. But she did. Dealing with those twenty-eight days a month? I can do that. That’s okay. For me. And she can deal with it, too.”
I regretted making her so mad. But I couldn’t undo it, couldn’t go back. All I could do was try to untangle it. It wasn’t blackmail, but still I could sense there was some pleasure in there, in making Daniella’s life harder, in hurting her by driving her to admit her love. “So when you say you made her, you meant . . .”
“I just kept showing up.” Emily was speaking emphatically now. This was a narrative she’d been playing and refining in her mind often enough, running rehearsals at least twenty-eight days a month, a way of justifying herself. “I kept writing her letters after I went back to Sammy’s. Kept pushing her. Kept reminding her of who she was, of what we’d felt. Maybe I just liked making things weird for her. She needed a little more weird. Then you, you fucking moron, you show up at Sammy’s. But it was my chance, too. I’d been thinking about taking his money. I was the one handling the books anyway. I’d gotten the laptop ready, and when that didn’t work, I could get Daniella to help me, and then you’d get Sammy locked up, and then I’d be free. I thought that was what I wanted. I hid out in the garage underground for a few days, until the cops cleared out. Then I went to Daniella, and something had changed. She’d changed.”
“But she’s only changing about as often as a full moon,” I said.
She stared hard at the horizon, felt about that far away from me. “I’m not going to explain it. But who she is down there”—she pointed to the south, to San Diego and Canaan Hills—“is who she is, too, as much as when we’re together in my apartment here. It’s not supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be this hard. And she’s reminding me of some things, too. I thought I’d be getting free after I left Sammy’s, but freedom doesn’t look the same now. We’re not going to change our beliefs because of who we are. We aren’t going to turn our backs on God like that.”
“We?” Now I was starting to understand, when it was too late to wish I didn’t. This was two-way ventriloquism, then: Emily had coaxed another voice out of Daniella, but now I was hearing Daniella’s words come out of Emily’s mouth. “You can’t even go to the church. Who’s the we?”
“Fine. Daniella. It’s who she is. Can I change that? It’s in her heart as much as I am. They’re all part of the person who’s helping me, the one who’s looking out for me when no one else does. So fuck you if you think I’m the first person to do this to herself for love. That is love. Compromising yourself for someone more important than you. I’m ready to do that. Daniella is.”
I looked at the people on the pier, couples and families and teenagers throwing french fries to the seagulls. It gave Emily what little privacy I could while she fought back her emotions. I heard her stifle a sound in her throat—a guttural, heart-wrenching sound. She didn’t think anyone understood her. I don’t think I got it all—who does?—but I got the gist. It wasn’t all good, and it wasn’t easy, but who was I to judge whether or not this ground would prove fertile, for now, maybe for longer. She was making a go of things in the only way that seemed available to her, in the only terms that were real as she understood them. Even if I wouldn’t take that leap, she was convinced it was worth the risk. I hoped that willingness to place her heart in another’s chest—the risk, if not the reward—would be good for her, but I hoped, too, that her feet would find purchase and not air.
In the late light, a fisherman on the pier reeled in his line. A stingray squirmed in the open air among the pylons, water rushing from its back. “This is what you want?” I asked Emily, without looking at her yet.
“It’s what I want now anyway,” she said. Her voice was small, fragile, childlike, still a little petulant, a little lost.
“Then all I have to say is good luck.” I stood, still looking out for a minute, letting my peripheral vision linger on the form of her next to me. “And go easy on yourself, if you can.” Then I turned and held out my hand for her to shake. Goodbyes should be formal.
She grabbed my hand and pulled herself up instead, then held it past when she was on her feet. Her eyes were raw rimmed, her lips red and chewed. She lowered her head to watch me in that cautious, canine way she had. “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I was trying to help, too. It didn’t go the way I wanted it to, and I don’t think I did you much good. But I wanted to. And thank you for that.”
She let go of my hand. A chilly onshore had come up, another premonition of fall. She folded her arms across her chest, and I felt how cold the rash guard must be growing. “I know, man,” she said. “If it helps, I don’t know if I could have made the jump if you hadn’t shown up at Sammy’s. Maybe you didn’t mean to, but you gave me the push.”
It was a kind thing to say, but I wasn’t so sure. I nodded, though, feeling neither good nor bad about it. There was no way for me to know if any of this was good or bad for her—no way to know anything. But she wasn’t being tossed around by other people, wasn’t being hassled by her life. She knew how the swells came in, and from where. She knew the break, how it shaped the waves. She knew where she’d chosen to paddle out, and what wave she’d caught, even if there was time left for surprises in the unraveling. She was riding it, come hell or high water—had found the nerve, in fact, to paddle back out after the last one and ride it again.
Emily shivered and held herself tighter. Her smirk settled into a tight, wary grin.
“You’re cold,” I said finally. “Go have a hot shower. I’m going to stay down here a little longer, and then I’m out of your hair forever.”
“What hair?” she said, running her fingers through the short, blonde strands. The water in them sprayed into the air, and I felt a few drops dash against my face and lips. My soul groaned, or the array of misfiring neurons that made up the respiration of my mind, what the Greeks called the anime, or breath, and what I called a goddamn diagnosable condition. Then she picked up the board and turned to go. With the board in one arm, her gait was functional and solid. Her hips chugged linearly, and the muscles across her back flexed every time the wind blew against the length of her board and threatened to turn her. She moved like she had a purpose and no room for wasted gestures, like the flirtatious ones she’d used on me in Angelo’s.
She stopped a few yards away and turned back. “Hey,” she called. “Give it a few weeks. Let things cool down a bit more. But then stop by. I still need to get you back for that hamburger.”
I nodded solemnly, and she smiled. It was a dark smile, a mouthful of sadness framed by sarcasm. The setting sun was now full on her face. Her eyes were rose hued. The freckles on her damp cheeks showed like the dim stars you sometimes see at dawn, the ones that aren’t stars but planets, reflecting. It was strange to see her mother in her face, her father, too, and to know how in the dark they’d remain. I wanted to ask about them, but it was too late and it would have done no good. I’d been wanting to ask if Aracely still carried anything good of me from her childhood. Probably not. Probably lost years ago. And this was Emily’s darkness to dole out. The wind dragged at her board, causing her to twist at the waist. She let it pull, turned with it, and then was walking away again.
I sat back in the sand. My brain hummed wordlessly. Everything my eyes chanced on was rendered in sharp lines, vivid colors. The marbling swirls where the water thinned against the sand. The divots in this surface where sandpipers goose-stepped and dipped their beaks. The lamps on the pier flickering to life. Surfers bobbing in the break like otters. The old, wiry-haired woman in the Lycra sports bra and bicycle shorts doing some kind of earth goddess dance to the setting sun, for fuck’s sake. I laughed. I was alive. That’s what had filled my mind over these last days, cloud-like and blocking the light of all the usual nonsense of my passing, familiar life. And so was Emily. And that was good. Good enough.
The sand I sat on retained the day’s heat, even as the air grew colder. It was almost time to leave. Gabby was expecting me. Maybe Aracely, maybe even my daughter’s son. I didn’t know. I hadn’t brought myself to ask. It was better not to know. But even the prospect meant more than I could say. That there were people who expected something of me, and not only insignificant things, and not only hurt. The world could work a person over until he stopped asking anything of it. But the expectations in my power to meet, I would meet them. I would try. The drive was fifteen hours along dark highway. But on the other end, maybe by the next evening, three faces would be there for me to see: one who knew me well, one who’d needed me once, and one I would recognize without ever having seen it before.
The light went from bright to golden to orange. The sun sank behind the horizon. No mythic green flash, just there, there, there, and then not there. I waited for the blues to settle onto the surface of things. Then I got back on the road.