14

THE TRAILS OF BELLINAS CRISSCROSS THROUGH THE neighborhoods and the woods. They go up and down the beaches and rise and fall along the cliffs. These walking paths were among the primary features that attracted Manny back to Bellinas to create his utopia, apparently, and they contributed to a feeling of being away at a summer camp—but one for wealthy adults. I could see how the men would think camp an ideal way to live, but I would bet all the abalone in the sea that none of them, especially not Manny, had ever worked at one before.

The main path was obvious. I had walked much of the wide, dusty artery the previous night en route to the hot springs. Heading for the museum, I walked past the church whose bells I’d heard that morning, though I do not know who or what rings them each day. The general store with a wooden sign above the entrance advising customers to follow their bliss, which I let myself see as a synchronicity at one time, but have since reevaluated as the nonsense of those prone to irrational rationalizations or worse. The bulletin board with community announcements between the library—or what was the library—and the bar that served kombucha on tap. Victorian houses with their lacy trim painted white against the peaches and yellows and teals of clapboard siding. These were occupied by the few older residents remaining, who ran the scant block of commerce and asked no questions about the artistic couples on the Mesa, and especially not about what went on at Rose Manor. People like Wyatt’s father, who ran the bar and the general store, and the handful of older couples who needed Manny’s benevolence or felt indebted to him.

The Bellinas Museum occupied the smallest Victorian. One story and painted white. A sign in a window was flipped to “Open.” A small bell jingled as I pushed the door open, though nobody came to meet me. Being something of a history enthusiast, I was especially interested in learning more about the area’s past. A few feet beyond the threshold stood a tall, narrow display printed with an overlarge silhouette of a bearded man wearing a neck ruffle. The English explorer Francis Drake, who landed at the Bellinas lagoon in 1579. After a voyage around the world, it must have seemed as if he were landing on the moon.

There were framed black-and-white photographs and old newspaper clippings along the walls. A few oil portraits whose identities I’ve since forgotten. The first exhibit was an ancient mariner’s map, complete with dragons of crimson and mermaids of turquoise with musical notes around their heads. A galleon sat on what I could barely recognize as the Pacific Coast of North America. Wind ballooned the sails of the ship from the cheeks of a cloud painted with a beautiful woman’s face. “The map used by Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe, 1579,” noted a small plaque. How did they get that? I wondered at first, thinking that such an object of historical importance belonged in the British Museum or the Met.

Next came another small exhibit, on the Mission in Bellinas. Again, a part of American history of which I was woefully underinformed. California had seemed too new for important history to the citizens of Charleston, whose past I was taught to consider above that of other coasts. Two hundred years after Drake’s landing, the Spanish, having claimed Mexico in spite of its existing residents and civilizations, built a trail of stucco and terra-cotta cathedrals and forts, leaving behind invasive mustard seed flowering yellow to mark their path. The Mission trail ended at the Bellinas Mission, left incomplete and turned into the very schoolhouse I occupy presently.

A rendering of what I recognized as the plateau of the Big Mesa was painted with a few wooden shacks and tents where glassy modern bungalows stood now. A few deeds of settlement. Grainy photographs of fishing boats. Some fossils plastered to plaques. Sharks’ teeth. Ancient sand dollars. A wide, chalky stone indented by the shadow of a large fish. “Coelacanth,” read the label. A display of abalone shells with a notice of their endangerment and the strict licensing and harvesting limitations enacted by the state. None of those were followed by the members of the Bohemian Club, but I suspect their brazen flouting of the law was a result of Manny’s wealth.

Here, a cluster of black-and-white photographs capturing homes in heaps of rubble after the earthquake at the turn of the last century. There, another handful of newer photographs, some in muted colors. “The Lagoon Fire, 1963.” I recognized Psalm Valley Farm and a blackened patch of grass and ruins around a lone brick chimney. One photograph of firefighters standing on the beach spraying water onto coastal sage grass and cliffside succulents. At least once, the town had burned. The coast did not seem to protect Bellinas, I saw, unlike what Mia had told me.

At the back of the room was a glass case displaying shards of pottery and a historical papier-mâché rendering of an Indigenous community that would have been found here, before, as the plaque concluded, “the Miwok Native Americans of the area eventually moved inland.” Just one of the many fabrications and palatable reinventions of the good townspeople, who took their liberties in claiming names, bodies, and land that were not theirs. I shudder to think of the crimes gone undocumented against anyone who stood in the way of Bellinas. Beside the side-door exit, a plaque thanked the generous donation of the Roses for funding the museum’s recent refurbishment. That explained the map.

I walked again the length of Main Street in the direction of Rose Lane, encountering not a soul. There was no mention of Manny’s Druids, or any of the other communities he had brought up. I stopped only once, to observe what had been posted on the community board. Something felt off about the history of the town. Left out. So much, naturally, would not have been recorded. Did nothing of significance happen in the decades between the fire and the Roses coming to town? And why would Mia say the town was protected when it was not? Part of me was reaching for answers another part knew. I was trying to remember the previous night at the hot springs. There were images and words that lay atop one another, blurring like the swirls of an Impressionist painting. I knew something was missing. Refocusing on what was in front of me, I read the notices pinned to the corkboard.

Papers in elaborately scrolled and emboldened fonts offered a variety of esoteric knowledge ranging from the seemingly harmless to the extravagantly foolish and everything in between. There were reminders of a weekly course on transcendental meditation at “the old library” and daily yoga classes. A warning against mind-control drugs, like fluoride, in the municipal tap water and toothpaste. Was this where Guy picked up that idea? Not long into our relocation, he would stop brushing his teeth with either, preferring instead to chew on tablets created by some startup Manny had invested in and peddled in neat rows at the general store. Someone advertised a workshop entitled “Women: Control You’re Chaos.” Whatever that was supposed to mean. Sic erat scriptum, I should add in the interest of pride and posterity. “IUD Self-Removal: This Saturday // Goddesses! Have the fingers of the patriarchy inserted themselves into your womb? The truth is that metal and plastic common to IUDs cause weight gain, irritability, infertility, insomnia, unintended pregnancies, depression, and more! Learn about your natural cycles and Big Pharma’s plot to suppress your power.”

I so wanted to be a tolerant person. What time and effort I wasted seething in polite quietness, pushing down my own good sense every time I passed that stupid board. My uneasy, but nonetheless silent, acquiescence to the misinformation favored by the good townspeople of Bellinas made me complicit in their conspiracies disguised as high vibrational truths. As I look back on the choices I made under the spell of Bellinian perfection, I can only say that I was too eager to please both my husband and my new friends. Our new friends. Live and let live. Let go and let God. Platitudes seem designed less as vehicles for wisdom than as excuses to let grown men off the hook.

From that first day, Guy had chosen his preference, and it was for the community, not his wife. I knew this about him, that he chose others over me, but it was harder to let go now that I was alone in a remote wilderness. However scenic, it was an alien place. I don’t think they realized Guy was so weak, if I am being honest. Maybe all that mattered was that they had manifested two new members happy to—I was going to say join, but it didn’t happen that way. There was no oath-taking or card-carrying or T-shirt-wearing. I suppose the hot springs was an initiation of sorts, but it took me some time to remember what had happened that night. I recalled no swearing-in, despite the bracelet Guy took to wearing. The abalone shimmering from the necks of the women.

Thinking of Guy, I decided to turn around and head back to our new house. The three-o’clock rainbow appeared as I passed the plateau of the Mesa, where the rest of the club lived. Several flat acres leading to some cliffs that overlooked town. From there it was only a few minutes until the trail turned onto Rose Lane. An entire day had passed somehow, I remember thinking, as I walked over the short bridge where I again passed the gray fox.

I hesitated at the door to our bungalow. Already I was afraid of being alone in the house. I could tell that Guy was out, and I thought about turning around again to wander more through town. The wind whispered in my ears, pinched my fingertips, pressed the bruises on my back. From leaning against the rocks in the springs, I reasoned, or a forgotten tumble. My hesitation at the door must have lasted longer than I realized, and the wind blew in the warm, beautiful menace of dusk. My body began to shake. I could feel my palms sweating, my breath quickening. Shadows at the cliff’s edge of recollection jumped out and hid again. Standing at the door, I twisted my neck to the side, as if to catch a shadow behind me, a hand going to the resulting kink. Instead of an unwelcome apparition, it was my husband walking down the path behind me with a bouquet of flowers. Was I about to remember when he appeared?

“I didn’t expect you back so soon,” I said.

“I picked them from the farm. Roses and zinnias, I think. Some tansy flowers too.”

“You guys had a good day, then?” I asked as he arrived at my side, handing me the bouquet.

“Great. Full steam ahead on the photo book for Manny. The flowers were his idea. I’m sorry about this morning. I shouldn’t have been so reactive,” he said.

“I’m sorry, too. I don’t know what happened.” As I said it, the wind lifted the hair around my face and an ache in my neck flared.

“You acted like I’d hit you or something. You see why that would make me act so weird, right?”

I held the bouquet, dollops of pink and orange and yellow just like the sunset enveloping us, to my nose and nodded. I see it now, of course, but I must give you the truth, however embarrassed I become at the apologies I offered and how I accepted his own, so quickly retracted. At what I accepted as acceptable. In all relationships, there are many beginnings, just as there are many endings. The door opened for us. Did Guy assume it was me who led the way? Probably. Just as I denied what I saw with my own eyes—the handle moving, the threshold appearing, the sound of wood against wood as the door shut behind us. We began our time in Bellinas again, though neither of us reached for the other as the wind howled all night.

From that second evening, a few quiet days passed in our new home. Only the faintest uneasiness about the hot springs disturbed my intermittent restlessness. I tried on and let go of possible routines. I walked the trails through town. I wrote, or pretended to write, alone at the desk. I stayed in bed to read The Book of Weather. To see a bird fly from east to west with a red worm in its mouth means that an enemy will appear as a friend. I watched so many birds fly across the skylight, it seems likely that at least one would have a juicy red worm in its beak. All we needed was a child for my fantasy to have come to life, but I had yet to understand the omens from Anna Nováková. A cloud in the shape of a rabbit, blown across the sky by a southerly wind.

I would watch the trees and wait for Guy, who bloomed like a flower himself amid the camp-like activities and all the high vibrations. When he was not out capturing the characteristic perfection of Bellinas, he joined the men in surfing and diving for abalone. Alone, he gave smiles and pleasantries, but never touches. I cannot blame him for a retreat that was mutual. Lysistrata would have to do no convincing in our household. There is nothing so suffocating as politeness in a marriage. He didn’t touch me in our bed of lovely linens, in our bedroom with its windows filled with sea and sky. I did not seek him out either, and he slept soundly, as I fought the crawling of my skin with every gust of wind. With my hands over my ears, I listened as the wind brought with it things I was not ready to hear. I didn’t know what had made me leap away from him that first morning, but I could feel the fear in my limbs at the shadow of memory and so tried not to think about it.