The late-summer wildfires had scorched all the way to the beach, and the Santa Monica Mountains were bleeding soot. Winter Island was the only place that wasn’t on fire. And on my trips back and forth, I checked in on my father, whose hair was thinning, whose skin was not so tight. I’d bring green juices from LA health-food stores, force him to drink them, bring him dates and salad. The doctors told him he’d have to give up the hard stuff if he wanted to last much longer. So he cut back on the coke and focused on whiskey and joints.
Before I’d go back to my life on the mainland, he’d ask about my mother. He never stopped asking. There were postcards from Paris on his fridge.
“She’s gone again,” I said.
“I know it.”
We had a routine: he’d put the weed into my bag, Mary let me on the ferry, and I’d sell it as fast as I could in LA. I’d wait until I got to my room at the Sea Institute to unravel the Winter Wonderland. Charge those LA fuckers extra, a note said. I spent my mornings working in the lab, and afternoons selling Baggies of weed to students, faculty, and nearby Starbucks employees for cash. Within a few weeks, I’d get back on the ferry, my bag full of twenties, and chat with Mary about stars, Ferry Lands, cats, cows, fathers, disappointments, dinosaurs, and anything else we could think up.
What had my mother told me about forgiveness?
I shouldn’t have been surprised when Rook suddenly appeared at my door, disheveled and sweaty, and demanding that she’d have to stay in my room for a while. Her marriage to some French guy hadn’t worked out, and she’d been hiding on Winter Island for months while I’d believed she was wearing berets in Paris. I tucked away this small betrayal, the one about her not telling me she was home, but knew that our friendship had suffered plenty of time and distance already. She said she was restless on the island, and that my father convinced her to bring over another full bag of Wonderland. She unzipped the bag from my father, just as neatly packed as always, took a green pinch for herself, and sprinkled it into a small rolling paper.
I wanted to say: How is my father? I don’t want you to see him. I don’t want to see him, either. I don’t know why you came here.
My mother said it was impossible to forgive people. Because a betrayal happens to you right in the gut. That you can’t just forget the jellyfish that stopped your heart.
“You can’t smoke weed in here,” I said.
“Is this a real college?” she asked.
“I could really lose my job,” I said.
She lay on my bed, her feet up the wall, messing up my blankets, and kept saying things like, You’re so borrrriing now and Let’s fucking go ouuut. She danced around in my white lab coat, and opened and closed the flaps like she was flashing her tits. She put on lipstick in the tiny mirror of my shower caddy. She said she knew some guys in Hollywood; she said she’d promised Dad to show me how to get more money for the weed. I wanted to know how much time she’d spent with my father, if she loved him, if she knew whether everything would be all right.
Rook didn’t want to talk about her failed marriage. She didn’t want to talk about anything except how badly she needed a night out. How boring the island was.
“How can anyone live there for so long?” she said.
She looked young and beautiful, especially in lipstick, and it was so easy for me to love people who loved only themselves. She moved my things around and scribbled doodles on my lab worksheets. We sat on a bench in the courtyard and smoked cigarettes, and sipped whiskey from airplane bottles from her purse.
We toured the dolphins, the sea otters, the jellyfish, the swarming schools of silver fish, the aviary. She leaked a few tears at the flapping of wings, and she said it was the fact that they were caged that made her so sad. But her tears became deep stains of mascara and I knew there was more.
The thing about me and Rook was that we didn’t push each other to talk about the things we didn’t want to talk about, but in case we did, we knew we’d be there to listen. We pressed our backs into the great lawn of the Institute, and the sun was lost. It was dark enough, and I was buzzed enough, that I said we could smoke a J while we waited for the stars.
“I think I’m pregnant,” she said.
She said she wasn’t sure about the father, or whether she was keeping it, whether she was sure of anything. She still hadn’t decided, and she wanted to keep walking. She spoke as if she were consoling me.
She kissed me on the forehead, and we locked pinkies as we climbed to the top of a lighthouse. There was the top of Winter Island, like a man dead on his back, lying right in the water. We could see the whole island from end to end. She screamed out, a wild and wicked squeal, and laughed at the rumble of her echo. We slumped our backs against the concrete walls and cool tile floor, and the wind whipped.
She laughed until she cried again and put her head in her hands. I leaned my head against her shoulder. She took my hand to her belly and pressed it deep into her skin. We felt nothing.
We talked about being alone, its glory and its darkness, and then she said she’d been in love with another man for a long time. I said we could make an appointment and get it all fixed, that we’d have enough weed money to get rid of the baby, or keep it—whatever Rook needed to be happy.
“I just want to be here tonight,” she said.
“Okay.”
What had my mother told me about happiness?
When we got to Hollywood, we were both all black-and-red lips, with clunky tall shoes and bare legs. Rook’s friends got us into the bar through a back door, and she drank like she never wanted to wake up.
“Maybe I’ll move to the mountains,” she said.
I hated her for saying it.
Then there was broken glass and yelling, and it was Rook’s guys, and she pulled me out of that place so fast that it seemed the back of my neck was sore from being carried by a mother cat.
We wandered around Hollywood Boulevard and pretended we were brave. We couldn’t be lonely when we were together, even if we were just drunkenly selling too-cheap weed to homeless people and tourists.
A limo appeared in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and a drunk bachelor party filed out to take photos with fake celebrities and a less red, dingy version of Elmo. Soon, we were inside the limo, and a hand was up Rook’s skirt. Will it hurt the baby? I kept yelling in my head. I was asleep on a married man’s shoulder after I told him about intertidal ecology. When they dropped us off at the Institute, most of the weed was gone, and we couldn’t remember what we’d sold, given away, or smoked ourselves.
Rook and I squeezed into my dorm bed, and it was the first time I’d gone to sleep without the blue light of the TV.
In the morning, Rook was gone, and she’d left a note that said she’d taken the money back to Dad. I aimlessly wandered around the grounds that day—a Sunday, when most people were gone—and found myself following the sounds of birds singing mysteriously pleasant songs against netting woven together, which made an enormous cage.
My mother said that happiness was like flying.