2

GUY AND I WERE NEWLYWEDS THE AFTERNOON WE FIRST arrived in Bellinas, only a few short months ago, on the summer solstice. After a week spent in the lush forests of Northern California, Bellinas was the last stop on a delayed honeymoon. My husband’s only living relative, his cousin Mia, emailed us an invitation to her midsummer birthday celebration. She directed us to print a map along with her detailed, bulleted directions. There was no phone signal, she warned, writing, “You may not want to ever leave.” That is what had happened to her. She had fallen in love with the place.

The party was to meet at Psalm Valley Farm, the town’s oldest, which grew wheat for a century and had been converted into a flower farm with rows of blue dahlias, zinnias in an array of pinks, yellow-orange sunflowers, bloodred snapdragons, and many more whose names I do not know. You could hardly sneeze in Bellinas without coming across some kind of rainbow. Where Guy couldn’t wait to see his cousin, I found myself dragging my feet, reluctant to give up our solitude, to go back to the way things had been before. For the past week, Guy held my hand on muddy paths lined with bristly Douglas firs and Sitka spruces swollen with burls. I marveled at the height of coastal redwoods as he kissed my neck. Against a felled sequoia, its heartwood the warmest pink and its growth rings annotated in world events, my husband bowed to whisper reminders of the night before. “Remember when . . . ?” he asked, as my cheek pressed into the year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake: 1431. “And when we . . . ?” he continued, my lashes obscuring the discovery of electricity: 1752. I let the happiness I felt in that moment of renewed closeness grow taller than the forest of disappointments we had collected in the course of years together.

A winding two-lane highway led us to Bellinas. Holding hands over the armrest in the car, we emerged in mottled sunlight from a canopied temple into full blue sky over hills of alternating emerald green and canary yellow, not unlike the flower-shaped cluster of tiny stones singing their own brightness on the ring that had once belonged to Guy’s mother and was now mine. Roadside blooms swayed with such cheer I would not have been surprised to see smiling faces turn and wave their petals in friendly greeting.

“What’s that one?” I asked over and over. I knew Guy enjoyed having the answers, and I exaggerated only slightly for the fun of drawing out his amusement.

“The purple are lupine.”

“And the tall yellow ones?”

“Mustard. It’s an invasive species. Like you,” he said, winking at me in the rearview mirror.

He had moments of wittiness. Tansy, my namesake herb, was considered both a pernicious weed and a powerful medicine.

“The orange ones?”

“California poppy. It’s the state flower.”

“That figures.”

“What?”

“That the official state symbol is a hallucinogen.”

Guy laughed, and I thought I would die from happiness. “It’s not that kind of poppy.”

“I knew it was all too beautiful to be real. Am I hallucinating this whole place? This entire trip?”

My husband kept his eyes on the road, but I could tell by the pleats of skin fanning the edges of his sunglasses that he was as happy as I was then.

The highway carrying us away from our forested retreat reached a T in the road. Waiting for traffic to clear so that we could turn south onto the famous coastal highway, I marveled at how this kind of nature could belong to the same country I had grown up in. I’d lived in Charleston until college, and the coast of South Carolina was one of soft marshlands and warm seawater stirred occasionally by a hurricane. I was bewitched by the drama of the moody, indecisive landscape.

“Roll down the window,” Guy said. In no hurry, and without anyone behind us, he remained stopped at the intersection. “Do you hear it?”

I caught the distant ups and downs of sirens. After a decade in New York, I must have tuned it out. “Do you think there was an accident?” Guy made a face and rolled down my window. It was the cawing of seagulls. Were these hills so close to the water? The air no longer carried the earthy warmth of the redwoods, but filled the car with the cool sharpness of seaweed and eucalyptus.

“And?” he prompted.

I went from worried to spellbound, and in such a dazed state, I felt as if I could imagine any number of whispered conversations. The chatting blades of grass and the gossip of pert blue daylilies growing ditchside. The humming of pebbles in the shallow riverbed the road followed toward its release. The lazy yawns of pillowy clouds. Finally some dissonance broke through. The crash of water. The hairs on my neck stood, and my skin prickled as I listened to expanses both internal and outside. My eyes had been closed long enough to break the flirtatiousness we’d cultivated. I turned to find Guy giving me a curious look. He knew me well enough to see when something percolated beneath my stillness. He described my expressions as “unreadable” in equal instances of fascination and frustration as it suited him.

“Are we that close to the ocean already?” I smiled, both in confusion and to please him with a question he could answer.

Across the highway, a waxy patch of ivy and small, sturdy flowers stood out against a thick gray cloud obscuring the horizon, as if the green and pink were painted stage props. The Pacific lay in front of me, but I could not see it for the curtain of fog. I suddenly felt very high up, which made the water I heard, but couldn’t yet see, feel more dangerous than familiar. One. Two. Three. Four, I counted, as I was taught to do by a psychiatrist in moments like this, when the spiraling and falling of vertigo pounced. I noticed a line of seagulls gliding toward the car window—a wind that carries dizziness and four white birds precedes an ambush, says Anna Nováková’s Book of Weather. When I look back, her work makes everything clear. She has become my most trusted advisor.

Guy leaned over for a kiss, with an expression like that of a magician who is about to pull a quarter from behind the ear of a child. I craned my neck to meet him, despite my accelerating vertigo. Just as I felt his breath reach my lips, a car horn erupted from behind us. I jumped, and my chin hit the bridge of Guy’s nose. His hand flew up, and as more blasts started coming, I heard a muffled “Fuck, Tansy.”

Blood slipped between his fingers, cupped over his nose, and sputtered across his shirt. The waiting driver blared the horn again.

“All right, Christ,” Guy mumbled, smashing the emergency blinkers on and reaching out the window to wave for the other drivers to go around us. “You’re so clumsy sometimes, Constance. Would it kill you to be careful once in a while?” He used my full name, the one I preferred, when he was angry or annoyed with me.

I offered a handful of tissues, keeping my eyes on my feet. I should let his accusation go, I thought. He was angry and bleeding, and I was the only one around to blame, after all. Had I spoken up, maybe an actual fight would have flared. Maybe we would have turned around right then to reconcile or divorce in New York. Maybe I would not be locked in this schoolhouse recording what really happened between me and Guy that night.

I looked behind us to make sure there was no more traffic and noticed for the first time a blue road sign with a white wave cresting under the words “Tsunami Evacuation Zone.” Guy examined his nose in the rearview mirror, poking tenderly at his cheeks. I can’t say that I don’t think he was acting like a baby. He had stopped bleeding and was pink from embarrassment and temper more than swelling, with only a small lump emerging where my chin had hit. He handed me his bloody tissues. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

I tried to give him a reassuring smile as we headed south. Outside my window, the ocean was still hidden behind the fog. In trying to seem occupied with something other than my husband, I shuffled through the pile of brochures I had picked up at our hotel in the redwoods. On top was a single leaf of postcard-thick paper bearing a blue-and-white illustration of a stick figure running from the hook of a cresting wave. “Never turn your back to the ocean,” read bold black print. On the back, the same figure, a very unlucky fellow, fell from a crumbling bluff toward rocky surf. A leering shark waited below. “Erosion kills,” read that side.

To our left, slabs of rock and dirt in gradient pastels held a sheen of salty mist. Out of cracks in the rock grew shaggy, sturdy succulents, in shades of gray and green with pops of orange and violet so bright they might have been left behind by a vibrant sunset. Coyotes and rabbits appeared in the thickets of ivy. The tips of their orange and brown ears stuck out of the green before they leapt into grassy hills. Stalks of what Guy identified as yucca loomed from a base of spiking leaves, like sentries on alert. “Like the mustard flowers. All left behind by the Spanish,” said my husband.

Finally the milky froth of coastal fog cleared to reveal the ocean, a tropical turquoise, under a blue sky. Growing up by the Atlantic, I swam alongside dolphins at dawn and waded between dusk-soaked waves in winter water nearly as comfortable as that of June. I always thought of the sea as a cleansing realm, but I have reconsidered this position during my time in Bellinas. That midsummer afternoon, the shifting blue-green shimmer and faintly scored ripples looked as dragon scales might. No wonder explorers painted monsters onto their maps. The ocean is just another creature of earth that croons and charms mates or prey as it pleases. Is it better to know you are about to be eaten alive or tricked into death?

My stomach leapt as we hit a dip in the road. We were suddenly at sea level, my first glimpse of sandy beach to my right. It appeared as in pictures I had seen, but much wilder in feeling. Whole trees had been carried downstream and deposited by the river onto the beach, coated in yellow-gray foam blown off the surf. Shelters of smooth driftwood stood stacked against the wind, and house-size boulders collected sea spray as the gulls I’d heard earlier perched on their crags. Another sign appeared. “Warning: Entering Tsunami Zone,” I read aloud.

“Scared?” Guy teased me, seeming to have recovered his humor, though he looked somewhat menacing with blood stains across his neck and shirt. Red flecks had dried on his forearms. At least calm had returned to the car, and I no longer feared catching his eye.

“I think I am,” I said. I wanted to recover the earlier lightheartedness by letting him feel he could protect me, but I was scared, I realized. I put my hand on his thigh.

“Geez, Tanse, are you shaking?”

“I think it’s from earlier.” I looked away. “I shouldn’t have been reading that flyer on such a winding drive. I feel a little sick.”

Was my body sensing what lay ahead? A force pulling us inescapably toward the wide-open mouth of a predator camouflaged as wonderful and deserved hedonism. We both would arrive in Bellinas marked in his blood. My body was telling me to run even then. I should have listened. Women are taught to listen to everyone except themselves. Then again, that’s the thing about warnings. If all premonitions are heeded, then what stories remain to tell?

And so we arrived in Bellinas looking like a happy couple. We were happy enough sometimes. Guy parked the rental car beside the wooden sign painted with flowers, “Psalm Valley Farm,” and unclicked his seat belt. I followed him slowly, navigating that strange feeling of continuing to race forward at a high speed even after coming to a stop. The illusion of self-motion, it is called.

A small group of attractive, artistic-looking couples sat in a circle on the grass nearby. They were there, like us, to celebrate Mia’s birthday and appeared to have already decorated—tastefully, of course—a former barn that was now a gallery for the influential artists of Bellinas to show and sell their art to a select list of invitees. All wealthy. Mostly young. All men, the investors and the artists. The women, only slightly less influential, sold their crafts instead to boutiques in coastal cities.

Guy had not noticed my hand reach for his when he came around the car to my side. I was no longer the only subject of his attention, and I admit that I wilted at how easily he seemed to forget me. An old complaint, newly felt amid this collection of the beautiful and artistic, the wealthy and free-spirited, the residents of Bellinas. The couples on the grass had hands filled with either cherubic small children or opulent flower bouquets. The women were all lovely and lithe and practically sparkling in the sunshine, almost as if they had stepped out of that painting of the muses on Mount Parnassus. Never had I felt so small, not even against the heartwood of the giant felled redwood.

I HAD MET Mia only once before, not long after meeting Guy in college, and I hoped to create a good impression on his only relative now that we were married. The hood of the car burned my palms, but I kept them there as tears began to fill my eyes. I pressed myself harder into the scorching hood as Guy stepped forward to greet her, his perfect human relative, and she grabbed his outstretched hands in hers. “My long-lost cousin!” said one or both of them.

Mia was as tall as Guy, an inch above six feet, with features sharp and smooth. An air of pious serenity accentuated the extravagance of her clothing. A sheer paisley-print dress in billowing pinks and purples with braided, artfully knotted tassels that laced up her torso in loose X’s. She bothered with no bra underneath, and I could see, as I was undoubtedly meant to, the nip of her tiny waist and jutting hip bones atop long, thin legs. She was barefoot—the other women were, too—and wore a wide-brim gardening hat of woven straw that veiled her face and neck in cool shadow down to a pile of gold necklaces and glinting charms of iridescent seashell. Her blond hair glittered down her back, glossy and slick and straight as a Roman road. If she had described herself as from another planet, I would not have doubted. In fact, it might have eased my mind to hear that she had used some alien technology to create a human form that embodied the prevailing image of a perfect female body.

Mia and Guy continued their reunion, looking each other up and down and laughing with obvious affection. I remained by the car, wishing suddenly that I could get back inside and drive away, or at the very least disappear into the shining paint of the hood that had by then burned my palms zinnia pink.

Mia pulled back to hold Guy at sinewy arms’ length. “Enough about you,” she said, and turned to me. “I want to welcome the newest member of our family.”

She slid her arm around Guy’s shoulders and pivoted in a single long stride so they were both beside me. Raising my hands with thumbs and index fingers, she spread them wide and high, clucking in apparent pleasure, before spinning me around by a fingertip, as if I were a plastic ballerina in a music box. “You’re exactly what we’ve all been hoping for,” she said. I knew nothing yet of her beliefs, though I remember thinking of Hansel and Gretel and the innumerable fairy tales where unwary children are eaten alive. “Manny especially is very big on family,” she leaned over to whisper to Guy, pointing out her husband as if we wouldn’t have recognized him. “He’s over there with the men and is dying to meet you.”

I was swept up in a strong and bony embrace, her long arms coiling around my shoulders and waist, and then she walked me across the grass. I turned to wave at Guy, who was already in conversation with a small group of bearded men, all wearing topknots or knitted caps, in spite of the pleasant heat, except for the one man with hair cropped short whom I recognized already, wearing a sarong and a basketball T-shirt with hiking boots. A tangle of elegant, willowy arms suddenly pulled me forward. At first, I thought they must have been playing some unfamiliar game, where one person is encircled by the other players. Was I victor or captive?

A rainbow arched in unusual definition across a cloudless blue sky. Possibly it boasted an extra band of color—an extraordinary sight that distracted me from the many-limbed creature in whose clutches I found my body ensnared. Now, of course, I see these rainbows daily. Like all the residents of Bellinas, I have grown immune to the wonders of such rarities. On some days, like today, I don’t appreciate the perfection at all.