THE RESERVOIR, filled to capacity for so long, now tapped, empties of all the words Helen’s held hostage.
It turns every walk home into an aria.
Each afternoon, from the schoolyard to the bottom of the hill that leads to their bungalow, the little girl serenades him with a steady outflow of eight-year-old chinwaggery, like some midget castrato AM radio talk show host on Red Bull: Barbie, Ariel the mermaid, puppies, unicorns, musicals, playground etiquette, the magnificence of Miss Healy (best second-grade teacher ever), peanut butter vs. Nutella (close call, but only one comes in crunchy), Jenny Humbert’s hair (all the way down to here), ocelots, the possible extinction of the narwhal, clips vs. scrunchies, green-tea ice cream (how weird is that?), Charlotte’s Web (it’s true, animals can talk to one another and we don’t understand them), why there are words that sound the same but mean different things, triangles, counting by threes, Movies I Know I’d Like if Mommy Ginger Would Let Me See Them, Arlo the Shaky Kid’s struggle with quiet time, ponies and horses, good cat names, state capitals, mysterious possible barf under the play structure, favorite food (Chinese chicken salad), and why the Chumash people ate grunions. Every afternoon Jay and Helen take their downtown Avalon loop through the cool winter shadows of the bay-facing businesses. Water slaps against the seawall, sailboat riggings rattle, and Helen talks.
“—I’ve always wanted to live in a village like Belle and have all the villagers say hello and sing and I’d walk to school instead of going there in the car, so, yeah, like this place, I guess, except it’s not really where we live, is it? In the place where I used to live it wasn’t a village, really, it was apartments and not so many trees, bigger and kind of scary and I couldn’t go outside because of the bad kids and mean dogs and stuff. But Mommy says nothing is like a cartoon, and I know that, everyone tells me it’s not real, but it could be, couldn’t it?”
Jay doesn’t disagree.
“And there could be magical animals and spoons that can talk. And there could be a Santa Claus even if he doesn’t come to my house. And my friend Jenny who I don’t know anymore was nice and gave me a hair band that had real jewels but I lost it. The jewels weren’t actually real, just real for me, but. I don’t miss her. Jenny. Sometimes she was mean.”
The maze her mind runs never fails to enthrall him; eight years old, the same age as was Jay when his life disassembled. They never talk about why she quit talking, or whether she’s who has a secret the Feds want to protect, and not Ginger.
No one follows them.
The busboys have left the island, evidently their cooling out completed, and the Wednesday game has been bolstered by new faces: a pale, frightened, hair-challenged man who says little and does nothing but jack up long shots that rarely hit; a short young woman who must’ve played in college and trash-talks the Conservancy interns until they’re crippled with laughter; a Fed, Jay can tell he’s a Fed, who works out of the island bank and fouls hard.
“But shouldn’t everyone have, like, a village, and friends, and magic?” Helen is asking. “And there wouldn’t have to be some guy with a flute like in the Pied Piper we’re doing, luring the children off into caves because the mommies and daddies won’t give him his money. A safe place for a family. Because kids have to be safe so they won’t mind how tough things are, later, when they get older, because they’re sort of like, I don’t know, they get real, real . . . well, tired? for one thing.” Sometimes she loses the thread. “So they don’t give a hoot? And need to take a nap and then, when they get up, they can have a Harvey Wallhanger or something and then kick back and forgetaboutit!” She cracks herself up, and laughs too hard, and they have to stop, and Jay waits for her to calm down, pretending he’s found something interesting in the dusty antiques store window that reflects their mirror images back at them.
Behind Jay, a spectral Catalina ferryboat idles out at the transparent jetty, taunting him, as always, with escape and freedom. If that’s what he still wants.
“—I’m just being silly.” Helen catches her breath.
Jay says, “Harvey Wallbanger, not—”
“My old daddy liked them,” the girl says absently, leaking something from that private part of herself without even realizing it. “I think they taste like cough syrup.”
“Old daddy?”
Helen frowns then, made cautious, and doesn’t answer him, as if two worlds have collided and canceled each other out. “Nothing,” she decides finally.
“What was he like? What did he do?”
“I don’t know,” Helen says too quickly. “They’re not for kids,” she observes. “Harvey whatevers. Are they?”
“No.”
“I’m only ever talking to you,” she reminds Jay gravely. “Nobody else.”
“Only ever. That sounds like a long time. Why? Why not your mommy, or—”
“Mean,” Helen says out of nowhere, and it takes Jay a moment to understand what she’s talking about: the old daddy. “He was really really mean.” She stares up at Jay, in the window, abruptly saddened, and then goes completely expressionless. She’s learned to turn her emotions on and off; at the age of eight Jay found the off switch but had a more difficult time finding the on. “Everything is hard to understand.”
“You’re not wrong,” Jay says.
“Does that mean I’m right?” This cheers her; she announces, “The rule from now on is there always has to be a mommy and a daddy.”
Jay doesn’t know what to say to this.
“I decree. In my land. It’s like if you have food on your plate, you have to eat it. And you’re the daddy, right?”
He looks at her reflection, shimmery in the glass, angled, slightly set back from him, in the shade, with the sunlight bright behind her. The ferry is heading back to San Pedro, a slurring slash of white in the window-glass bluescape.
A man who looks a lot like Sam Dunn stands on the pier with a new boat-kiosk guy, both with arms akimbo, legs wide, like cardboard cutouts. Dunn should be on his plane, making his afternoon mail run, Jay thinks absently. Is it not a daily flight? He files this away, with the other bits and pieces he’s collecting: the Realtor’s unused golf cart, the coming and going of delivery trucks from the north island, the faces of locals who pay too much attention to him and tourists who return with regularity but no firm purpose, the slow relaxing of federal vigilance that he’s felt more than observed.
“You’re the daddy. That’s what Mommy said,” Helen adds to fill the silence, less sure of herself.
“I’m not, though,” Jay says, so regretful that it surprises him. “Not really.”
“Yes, you are.” In Helen’s tone he hears Ginger’s familiar Don’t contradict me. “You are,” Helen repeats. “That’s what you are now, and Mommy’s Mommy and I’m . . . me. Helen.”
“It’s parts in a musical, isn’t it? Just for the show. You can’t make something so just by saying it is.”
Helen looks at him fiercely, with a small child’s intractable conviction. “You can if you want to.”
“And if I don’t?”
“What?”
“If I don’t want to make something so just by saying it is.”
Helen is quiet. Then, in a pretty good eight-year-old’s imitation of Jay: “Yeah, well, but once you get past that—”
Jay laughs. “—Clouds?”
Helen nods, solemn but pleased: “Clouds.”
Behind them, the sun is, in fact, curtained by a cloud and the light level dips and their reflections dissolve and now Jay can clearly see the baroque cerise velvet chaise longue featured prominently in the front display. He muses: Who on this island would buy that? He thinks: If everyone here is like me, hiding, holding back, trawling through the murky waters of their past for memories someone else needs, and tending to pointless businesses existing only to give legitimacy to the lie—
—how is that different from real life?
The ferryboat horn bleats a faint, last good-bye as it clears the speed buoys, its dark, departing shape barely a punctuation on the seam between the sea and mainland. Dunn and the boat-rental guy have gone into the kiosk.
Helen steps up next to Jay, and takes his hand and presses her nose against the window and makes a low animal noise in her throat.
“Why did you tell me Ginger wasn’t your mom?” Jay asks, fishing. “The other day?”
“I don’t know.” Helen probes her nostril with a wiggling finger, and then gestures royally to the chaise with the other hand. “That’s pretty. It’s, like, for a princess, from a castle. I’d want to have it in my room and lie on it. But not be Sleeping Beauty. And I don’t like the color. Do you think it can talk?”
Jay is still back with her reveal: “What did you mean, Ginger’s not your mom?”
“What?”
“Helen—”
“I don’t know. I just said it.”
“Who’s your real mommy?”
Helen takes her hand away, won’t look at him. She breathes out and fogs the glass and draws a circle with two dots and cat ears before the condensation evaporates. “You don’t want to be my dad?”
Jay no longer has an answer for this, everything has become so involute. So layered and confusing.
Gold-brocade curtains cascade around either edge of the chaise. A neon sign that tilts down overhead past the awning from the second-floor hotel spells VACANCY backward and gleams and trembles in the pair of filigree mirrors bookending the chaise.
After a while, Jay wonders aloud what color Helen thinks it should be. Helen says she doesn’t know, but suggests pink, her color default.
Jay frowns at the chaise. “That is pink.”
“No. It’s just light red.” Bored: “Can we go now? I think Mommy’s making cookies.”
“Ginger?”
“Mommy.” She looks at him, challenging him to deny her this. He won’t.
The sun behind them blazes again, cloud-free, and Helen, as if quoting (Ginger, probably), turns away, declaring: “Family is everything.” She walks out into the sunlight and away down the street.
Jay stays for a moment, staring at his reflection, which seems, suddenly, a stranger to him. By the time he moves, Helen is marching off, small, happy again, singing at the top of her lungs and tunelessly: “Family is everything,” with the chorus, “that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“You got it all figured out,” Jay says.
“Yep.” Helen skips ahead, turns, and walks backward, facing him, smiling. “It was really really really hard. But you know what? It doesn’t even matter what I say, because things just are what they are,” she sings, making up her own musical, “and they’re not what they’re not—that’s what I say so it’s so,” after which she launches into another monologue about good Jenny and bad Jenny that takes them all the way to the end of the street and around the corner.