11

MIA’S HAND SLIPPED FROM MY FACE TO GLIDE BETWEEN the flickers of candlelight with a slithering that brought to mind the memory of a water snake gliding across a river. I could nearly see the scales glowing underneath her luminous cheekbones. Just as on a snake, their prominence a sign of venom to be admired from a distance greater than the neighboring chair. Resuming her role as hostess, she took control of the table once more, pouring thick, sweet wine into cups of amber glass for the men and cups of fragrant tea for the women. Everything was assembled with quick but unrushed flicks of her wrist and flirtatious, hooded glances at each recipient. Another cup of tea was poured for me, too. I’d had several in a row trying to stay warm against the wind and, perhaps without conscious thought, replacing my glass of watered-down wine with a cup of tea. Following Mia’s lead, acquiescing to Manny’s rules.

“What mysteries have the ladies been discussing?” Manny looked up at his wife but put his hand on my knee. She could not have missed the gesture, but continued to serve plates of dessert unbothered.

“This and that.” She put the tip of a thumb between her lips, presumably to lick away beads of spilled-over cream from the serving knife. “Women need to keep some secrets to themselves,” she added, sucking in her cheeks until satisfied. She picked up the knife once more and elaborated. “We’ve been talking about the Harvest Day festival.”

Guy was scraping his plate.

“Oh, I love festivals. Do you do fireworks or a parade?” I asked.

“Fireworks aren’t usually allowed around here, because of the fire season, but occasionally we can get away with it,” Mia explained.

For anyone other than Emanuel Rose, there would have been great consequence for any sort of fires during the wrong season, but either the fines were so little against his vast fortune or he could arrange it so that no one noticed. It was the same with the abalone. To protect their populations, long dwindling for the beauty of their shells and the sweet-salty richness of their taste, a strict limit was set for divers and counties. Except for the residents of Bellinas. The men went out nearly every day in their wetsuits with long, flat knives in hand for prying them from rocks.

“There’s a parade and a bunch of fun little events. A tug-of-war across the mouth of the inlet. Hayrides at Psalm Valley. A dance in the barn. Very charming.”

“There are so many cool celebration days around here, Tansy,” Manny said, taking over. “I know you’re gonna love them. The best festival day is the spring equinox. All the new mothers are celebrated by the whole town. They make flower crowns and get a party on the beach. Mothers are really honored here. The little kids make kites and fly them all day. That was always my favorite growing up. Not sure who started these festivals. There’s all kind of interesting groups around here. We used to sneak into this Druid temple near the Hidden Coast when we were teenagers. Dudes in robes would do rituals there. Or maybe they were Rosicrucians. The Synanon folks had a spot around here for a while. Jim Jones rented a cabin on the Mesa at some point. The Children of Thunder set up shop not far from us. You might wanna walk down to the museum in town one day to read up on the rad history. We’re at the epicenter of something special here.”

He stroked his wife’s hair for a moment, as if deliberating. “What do you think, moon goddesses? Is it time?”

“It’s a full moon tonight,” Mia said to me, as if that explained something.

“Lycanthropy part of the Bohemian Club?” I asked, only half teasing, but Manny gave a confused look. Guy again nudged my shin under the table.

“She’s asking if we’re werewolves.” Mia laughed, stroking her husband’s chest. “Not quite. It’s the surprise we mentioned before. Tonight is especially auspicious, the full moon in Capricorn, or what the Miwok natives here called the Strawberry Moon,” she mused in a singsong whisper. They were doing that always. Lauding what they called the traditions of Indigenous peoples, without much regard to history or the people themselves. “Right at the foot of the mountain, there’s an underwater hot spring that fills a large tidal pool like a bathtub where the ocean usually covers it. Once or twice a year, there’s a negative tide, when it goes out much farther than normal to expose the pool. You have to time it just right, though, so you don’t get caught as the tide changes again. Tonight, it all aligns perfectly.”

Guy, I could tell from his buoyancy and increasing volume, both of which grew with every glass of wine or beer, would want to go, if only because it’s what the group was doing. We were somewhat hostage. I turned to ask Mia if I should grab a bathing suit and hiking shoes, but she had been reabsorbed among plumes of flowy dresses and was tidying up the kitchen. I had a feeling that everything we could possibly need would appear suddenly, anyway, and it did sound like fun. Like a real adventure. I would have plenty of time later to reconnect with Guy. We’d have nothing but time here, I reasoned.

Our group began moving from the living room onto the porch and then outside into the dark. The children were left sleeping, watched over by the wind and who knows what else. I was still barefoot, as were all the women. We wandered across their lawn, through the misshapen statues, around the avocado trees, and across the bridge. The fox was long gone, though I remember looking for him. I have come to believe that the animals remain untouched by any magical manipulations in Bellinas. The ones on land at least. As Anna Nováková’s Book of Weather cautions, should the spray from a whale calf’s spout mix with the sound of thunder, ships finding themselves in the tentacled clutches of any giant squid will shortly drown. The only entry for a fox, upright with his back to the wind, predicts a blizzard or a birth.

A trail ran along the road, merging with others that led to the homes on the Big Mesa, and down to the little point of town where the lagoon and the ocean met. In the other direction, the paths merged with the official trails of the Hidden Coast State Park, emptying into true wilderness where the landscape was too rugged for the building of actual roads. Our route emerged at the beach after a few minutes, and we continued on wet sand for what seemed like forever. Without the precision of an afternoon rainbow, perception of time is so dependent on mood. I was colder and more anxious walking along the shore. “Never turn your back to the ocean.” One. Two. Three. Four. This beach was fairly wide, and its bowing length looked to continue as far south as San Francisco. The moonlight was bright, its path of luminous violet connecting the sand of the beach to the horizon.

We passed the lights of Willow Beach, a strip of vacation homes at the foot of the mountain in the distance that sat empty most of the year. Even in the summer, their lights rarely flickered on. Men like Manny bought them up as investments and left them unoccupied for all but a handful of days each summer. The happy chattering fell quiet as we neared our destination and began a short, steep climb across the rocks. “Be careful of shells,” I heard someone say, but my bare feet, though freezing by now, managed the rough texture better than I’d have imagined.

Even now, these memories feel slippery and disjointed. The foamy seawater swirling around the rock pool of hot springs. The cool mist on my face. It was as if I were under the heavy influence of more than my anxiety. As if I were drugged. Every sip of their fragrant tea topping up an unfamiliar euphoria in my chest. I painted colors across the rocks with every movement of my hands. I could have sworn I heard a voice declare the value of ocean fog to the complexion. “The lithium in the spring does wonders for fertility,” said another. Mia’s voice, I think. “The magnesium will have you relaxed before you know it.”

Dresses were lifted by the nimble fingers of the wind itself, over the heads of my new family—these strangers, my new friends—so they could enter the warm water naked as Mia in her portrait over the hearth. My jeans and shirt peeled away from my body again before these people, but here I did not protest. What could I say to the wind, in any case? I found myself naked on the rocks and then slipping into the warm pool of spring water that had appeared from the side of the mountain just for us. My memories grow more jarring and hazier from here. The men disrobed, too. I do recall them all in the water with arms up to receive their wives, except I also have a dim flash of Manny on a rock above us, naked and holding a trident with hands that are also somehow on my face, in my hair, against my back.

“The body comes alive for Mother Nature.” I can hear his voice but not quite place him. Are the words muffled and muted by the wind, or by my hair as they’re whispered into my neck? “Don’t be afraid of your power, Tansy. Don’t be afraid to use your body.” Manny’s voice, or my husband’s?

There’s the light of the full moon on the ocean waves just a few feet away. A cold wind from the north invading my body. That first shock of searing heat on icy toes, and Guy taking my hand underwater. Couples entwined and groping unapologetically on either side of us, and more underwater fumbling at my body that I assumed were Guy’s advances. They might have been, but my husband’s hands were not alone on my body. There’s music, but I’m not sure from where. Singing. And the spray of ocean against nearby rocks that bursts into sparks of color. Bright greens and blues. I am surrounded by color in the air and music on my skin. There’s the heat and the cold at once. Everything is back and forth. Perhaps a faint touch of nausea, or was it only the butterflies of thrilling newness? There is laughing and spinning. Pulling away and then seeking out. The rocks against my back, but I can’t move. Remembering and forgetting. The sensation of earth shaking. The foggy night sky spinning. The smell of bay laurel and dandelion wine. I must have had more wine than I realized, I remember thinking, as everything around me spun.

Then I was wrapped in a towel, and we were trekking down the rocks and across the sand. We were led up a different trail, one that cuts through the downtown, all quiet in this, the middle of the night. We passed the bar, the general store, the museum, the former library.

“How did we get here?” I asked in a sleepy daze, perhaps even blushing like the new bride that I was. Was I doing it right? Surrendering to the role of wife? The night was hazy and magical, for lack of a better word. Not all magic is good, warns Anna Nováková. The cold was bringing me back to reality. Who lives this way? Between hilltop manors and lithium-laced hot springs? And these women and their names! What flower would Manny have called me, if not for the botanical coincidence of my name?

“Everything has changed so fast. It’s all different all of a sudden,” I muttered, slurring perhaps.

“As fast as the weather changes in Bellinas,” Mia replied with a friendly smile I suspect was a smirk in disguise. In my memory, it’s almost as if I can hear the whole town laughing, when I hear her continue. “They say the winds of Bellinas have driven some to madness.” The gentle caress of a cool, invisible hand to seduce and deny, as if to say, “Not I.” What is more coy or fickle than the wind, but the Scythian goddesses of Herodotus and the changing winds of history? “That’s what happened to the others,” she said.

We walked home, watching the fog roll in just before dawn, the ragged white tendrils binding us to this place. I found myself wondering whether the whole evening had actually happened. Trying to recover the details, between counting breaths. One. Two. Three. Four. My body began to panic, but why? I couldn’t fully remember then. Guy pawed at my waist and breathed sweet nothings into my ear between the hot springs and our new house. His affections made me so happy, and I could not bear to trust myself. Still, I knew that something was wrong. Whatever my right mind found disturbing was soon obscured by the fog coming in from the ocean until we were completely surrounded by white clouds that had only a few moments before been above the Pacific. Once we were warm in our bungalow after showering with the most luxurious of oils and ocean sponges, everything was simply salt and dawning sunlight and that strange coiling echo of a bird’s call in sheets of ocean air. Everything seemed as perfect as I had imagined with Guy asleep and curled into me. Any misgivings could be let go, I thought. Let go and carried off by the wind that brought with it a hint of smoke.