20

THE SILENCE DRIVING BACK WAS UNLIKE HIM—IT WAS more like me. I knew he didn’t love me anymore, but I also knew that he couldn’t say to me the truth of what he was feeling, just as I couldn’t to him. I wanted to be out of the car, in the woods behind the cabin, back in the cave, far away from him. But I also desperately needed to know what he was thinking.

“Are you going to say anything?” I may as well have been asking the road, its winding asphalt lit only by our headlights. “Maybe you would rather I had drowned back there.” My anger eased the sting of my raw, open fingertips. Why did it happen this way? And what was I going to do?

“I’m just trying to drive, Constance.”

“What if I told you something about Manny? I don’t think he’s as nice as you think.”

“I just said not now.”

For something to do, I picked up the newspaper I’d grabbed as we left the restaurant at lunch. The weather mapped across the state displayed how abnormal, how anomalous, Bellinas really was. All cloud and cold or fire and haze, except for one square of sun—drawn smiling by an art department. I ruffled open the soft sheet of newsprint; its bumpy edges made me happy for only a moment. “Historic Wildfires Continue to Ravage Northern California” read a headline above a photograph of forest in flames. “Evacuation Orders Expected.” Tolemas and Willow Beach were under an evacuation advisory. Bellinas, between the two, was not labeled on the map. On the opposite page, there was an ad for the Harvest Day festival. The whole county celebrated, apparently.

As Guy drove through the grid of the Big Mesa on the way to Rose Lane, I noticed a sign tacked to a eucalyptus tree: “REMINDER: By ordinance 34, absolutely no vacation rentals! Keep tourists out of Bellinas! Huge fine! If you suspect a short-term rental, report immediately.”

“That’s weird.”

“What about it?” asked Guy, already defensive, if you ask me.

“Well, it doesn’t seem very ‘high vibe’ to nail plastic into trees.”

Guy made a face, but I continued undeterred.

“Also the general message. Not very community-minded.” I was trying to provoke him, of course.

“So they don’t want it to turn into a party town, what’s the problem?”

It was one of the few visible and literal signs as to the true character of the good townspeople of Bellinas. All the lore about stealing the road signs to confuse travelers had seemed like colorful small-town kitsch before. Now it was more sinister. I thought of the ash falling onto the beach. Of the photograph of trees blackened and burning. Of how close we were to disaster, and how nobody ever talked about it.

“The tone or something. It’s uptight, I guess.”

“It’s not uptight, Constance. Don’t be so judgmental.”

“No, you’re right, it’s not uptight. It’s elitist.”

“Says the woman who speaks Ancient Greek and brags about some pathetic award she won in college. Why can’t you just relax and let yourself have good things? Please stop spewing your negativity everywhere.”

“You mean my opinions? Or the truth?” I couldn’t stop once I started. “What about the others they mentioned, Guy? Aren’t you curious at all why they ‘didn’t work out’? Isn’t it weird that everyone looks exactly the same? And nobody’s allowed to use the internet? I’m sure that he has some secret underground lair where your dear leader—excuse me, Father M—can get online to check his email. And the fires everywhere? Our phones don’t work. How would we even know to evacuate?”

“Mia said not to worry about the fires, Constance. And the other stuff isn’t our business.”

“That’s not what she said. She said it was protected—”

“So what are you complaining about?”

As he drove past the homes of first Lily and Richard, then Wyatt and Iris, and finally Aster and Aldus, I realized he wanted to see if their lights were on or if the group was still convened at the Manor. The houses down here were certainly more modest than Rose Manor, but still projected their glassy affluence like an electric fence.

At a corner stop sign, a loud thud hit the windshield. I jumped and let out a yelp. A plum, plucked surely from some backyard paradise, had landed in a hard splatter on the windshield. Had it been thrown at us? I don’t know how it would have otherwise reached the car with such force. Guy, instead of the raging or misplaced anger he would have expelled before, merely sprayed the window with soapy fluid with a flick of his thumb and turned the windshield wipers on for a moment before continuing.

When we got back to the house on Rose Lane, Guy said nothing but walked away, leaving me in the car. I knew he was returning the car keys to Mia, and I also knew that he would stay there for what was left of their Sunday gathering, where he would no doubt confess to the group his mounting concerns for my sanity. Even though the wind was whipping by then, I walked back to the bungalow. I needed to be alone, even in the house I had come to fear so much. I filled a large wooden bowl with water. I took a match and slid it across the rough line of the matchbox. Sulfur and a touch of bay laurel erupted in a spark and a puff of smoke. I lit a candle—handmade by Mia—and I poured the drops of melted wax into the water. An upside-down man. A circle. I sighed in relief, and the force of my breath blew and cracked the wax in half. Each sphere floated to the other side of the bowl, cracking into bits the figure of a man. The shards of cool wax then floated together, and the wax man was standing on a rock holding a trident.

I remembered with undeniable clarity what I’d recalled in the cave. The singing. The laughing. I couldn’t see them, but they were nearby. All of them. And me, behind the wobbling edges of a large rock. My vision blurring, my heart melting. My chest was so warm, but everything else was cold. The stone against my head and back, and the icy wind from the north gusting and biting. Manny’s face above my own, diving still lower onto my lips and into my hair. On top of me, as the wind howled and screamed and the other members sang and splashed in the hot springs under the full moon just out of sight. Forgive my use of such an obvious adage, but—where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

I left the bowl and went to bed, listening all night to the wind. My mind skated between denial and memory. The bruises on my back the next day. Violence left behind in purple shadows. The invasion of my body, which I could not bear to remember. Transformed into panic and sleeplessness. Had my attacker presented himself in the form of a swan, the event could hardly have been more classical. Heaven knows my cousin-in-law thought himself some sort of divine being. What was the phrase he used so often? “Ascended master.” Well, I haven’t studied the Classics for nothing. I join the ranks of Cassandra, of Io. Of Persephone and of Demeter, her mother. Of Medusa herself, the most feared woman in literature, transformed into a Gorgon for the crime of letting herself be raped by Poseidon, however ambiguously Ovid might have put it. In the words of Philomela, raped by Tereus, her brother-in-law, “My revenge shall take its proper time.” If only I had as much!

The afternoon begins to wane, and Mia must be readying her attack. The equinox falls this evening. This history will have to serve as my tapestry, depicting the truth of what happened in Bellinas.

Had Guy known what was happening just out of sight? Did the other men? Surely, all of the women knew. I wondered at their babies with their too-blue eyes and the caresses I’d observed at dinners. I heard Guy come in and listened to him snore until dawn. In the morning, the fire was lit and the bowl filled with water and wax was gone. A new bathrobe, exactly like the one I had thrown to the flames, was in my closet. I’d left my coveted loaves of real bread from the afternoon before, soft and sweet and laced with cinnamon and chocolate, in Mia’s car. The only things that did not return to me by the morning.

The thought of telling Guy that I was pregnant hours after he told me he didn’t want a child was too much. The question of whose child it was became my new tormentor. And every night the wind witnessed my suffering begin again as I questioned and begged the universe. What if it isn’t Guy’s? Please let it be my husband’s. Don’t let it be his . . .

At dawn, the slow gray light was hauled up by birdsong, and I fell in and out of sleep until the church bells rang in another perfect day. I had slept enough to dream of seashells, the smooth folds of whelks and conchs. Blood-covered hands against seaside rocks. A rolling fire that burned underwater. A series of wooden spikes parting and braiding the flames. Mia’s comb. It then glided through long waves of my dark hair. Symbols flashed in scrolling, glowing scripts across the iridescent eye of abalone. A yellow bird in a cage, a symbol whose meaning is incontrovertible according to Anna Nováková’s dream dictionary.

The Book of Dreams by Anna Nováková records that to dream of brushing your hair means you will soon be contacted by a relative, while brushing someone else’s hair means that nightmares will plague your sleep. A goldfinch in a cage indicates a longing for freedom. An uncanny oracle! A rival of Cassandra herself. If only there were some prophetesses in Bellinas, as in the time of Herodotus, but as always, wives are left to figure everything out for themselves. Cassandra suffered doubly for the knowledge of what would happen to her before Agamemnon came to town. How close to her I feel. Cursed by the sun, Apollo himself, to a lifetime of having her visions of the future disbelieved. And for what else but refusing his advances. The plans of women have been called plots, schemes, murders, but if we do not claim the future as our bodies are claimed by men, then both are gobbled up by husbands and historians. Like ordinary women back to antiquity, I was stuck in a cycle of charm and fear. Of apology and cruelty. Of dismissal and bouquets. Of needing his approval and fearing his loss when he took it away. I had given both of them, Guy and Manny, control. A prison more permanent than the schoolhouse. Here at least, there are graham crackers, however stale.

Perhaps I had only spooked myself. A lack of sleep might induce waking nightmares. I still could not face what my trance and recovered memories in the cave meant for my marriage and for my future in Bellinas. “But you should have left right away!” I can practically hear the pleading. I myself am leading the chorus. Among those readers asking, “Why didn’t she leave?” I did not fear for my life just then. Not exactly.

I felt at the time more disturbed by my impulse to return to that game lost to girlhood, to drop wax onto water. I remembered seeing my mother do it once. The girls in my classes at school did it at birthday parties. Like placing fingers around the body of a friend and chanting to evoke flight, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” Another sleepover game. Was I invoking a need for trustworthy friends by returning to a game of childhood? Or was there some cosmic consciousness, as Manny would put it, that guided my hand to light the candle and pour the wax. I have only had my fortune told once, and such tools as tarot cards were banned from the house of Constance the Elder when I was a child. “These old houses are full up enough with ghosts already without y’all inviting in strays,” she once told me and a friend, after we smuggled in a Ouija board to play at receiving the musings and directions of any spirits so inclined for our company, one letter at a time in our mismatched pajamas and retainers. Floating in and out of my room in her lace-trimmed silk nightgown and matching magnolia-print robe, Constance the Elder set the game on our front porch for the night until it could return to my friend’s house. Before locking the front door behind her, she swirled back inside for a black leather-bound book with gilt-edge pages—a spare Bible she kept by the front door for supernatural emergencies such as sleepover games and inquiring Mormons—and laid it on top of the suspicious box.

She returned a few minutes later with mugs of warm tea—chamomile or peppermint from the backyard garden—and a stack of flyers sketched with feather-haired Jesuses in sky blue robes above the Lord’s Prayer in slanting calligraphy. If only I could ask her what she would think of the good town of Bellinas and what I should do . . . I wonder now if the simple, household magic that came so naturally to her was not just a little studied. It is not only ornate jewels or gilded Bibles that can be imbued with protective power. A talisman is a talisman. Then again, I am no expert, and if you are truly interested, there are others of good authority with whom to consult. Anna Nováková suggests that to dream of acorns requires the dreamer keep one in a pocket at all times for protection.

As I watched the edges of the firs peek into the bedroom from the skylight, black-green and politely inquiring against the vast nothingness of white fog, I had the urge to get closer to them. They gave me some comfort. How old were they, I wondered? Had they seen Francis Drake land at the lagoon in 1579? Had they watched Junipero Serra slash a path of so-called progress between the verdant hills? Surely these trees had seen the earthquake of 1906. They must have felt the heat from the Lagoon Fire of 1963 and watched a friend or two suffer the charred fate of common tinder. What knowledge and memories were encoded in the bark of Douglas firs? Of live oaks, coastal and canyon? Of bay laurels and buckeyes? If only my Anna Nováková had written an edition on trees and their meanings. What one mistook for their secrets might have been knowledge freely offered, if only I had asked. Instead I listened, my intuition clouded by intermittent seething and fragrant tea. I was not so bad a wife, I think. People imagine that others are capable only of the outright evils and terrible acts they would themselves commit, when the truth is usually far more generous.

Watching the gray sky one morning, after another sleepless night, I recalled Mia’s words from our welcome to Rose Manor, warning us not to enter the woods of the Hidden Coast alone. What had been only a fleeting whim became a decision. It was barely dawn; I had at least a few hours before the church bells signaled the menacing perfection of another sunny day in Bellinas. I would be concealed by the fog, I thought, and my spirits rose for the first time since my fingers were tearing into the warm swirls of bread at the bakery a few days earlier.

Gravity and whatever invisible hands lit the fire and washed our sheets fought me as I pulled, with difficulty, one sock on and, unrolling another pair, a mismatched mate. It was an effort to complete the act of dressing, one that had my heart skipping beats and resting just too long before sputtering back into rhythm. I moved slowly. I was so very tired. Everything is heaviest upon rising without having slept. My eyes took just a second too long to focus. A walk in the fresh air would wake me up.

I DIDN’T WANT anybody to know what I was doing, so easily might I have been dissuaded. Least of all did I wish for company. I rarely caught sight of anybody strolling the grounds before the fog lifted, but I thought better of walking the gravel driveway toward the trails leading to Main Street and the beach. Why follow a trail at all, though, when the Hidden Coast State Park began right behind our bungalow? One of the few things Manny hadn’t yet managed to buy from the “socialists” and “environmentalists,” I heard him once complain. “Wouldn’t a private owner, like, take better care of his property than the state?” he asked no one in particular every now and then. The park looked very well taken care of to me.

I needed to go into the woods, just as I needed to go into the cave. It was unbearable, the thought of running into anyone, of having to talk at all, much less explain what I was doing or how our trip of a few days ago had gone. To act grateful for use of the Roses’ car, all while knowing Guy would have already told everything about my fugue at the cave to the members of his beloved club. Possibly, he had portrayed me as some kind of lunatic. The women of the Bohemian Club would comfort him in predictable ways.

Lacing my hiking boots into knots, I grabbed the skeleton key Manny had given me from the back of a drawer and walked down the stairs, past the fire already lit, and toward the front door. Unlocked, it yawned softly across the tile in the gray morning light, but the act did not fool me. Hugging the side of the house, I made it to the edge of the forest in only a breath. The rusting spikes of barbed wire swayed in welcoming waves. Surely a trail would find me. I had faith in the woods. I lifted the wire and climbed through to the other side.

For a while, I let myself lie there beneath the trees. The box elders with their leaves splashed in jagged white against green and their blue-tinted twigs. The bay laurels, dark and tough and smelling of pepper. The live oaks I had been so heartened to see on our honeymoon journey, dripping in their gray shades of beloved, familiar Spanish moss. The oaks I recognized by smell before I saw them. Like vanilla and brown butter. I looked behind me and noticed the bobbing wire separating the kept lawn of my hosts from the discarded leaves of the woods. The fog was already clearing, and I could see the sunlight at the edges of their perfectly shorn grass. As with our bed that made itself daily with fresh linens and the walls that washed themselves of avocado and egg, everything seemed to take care of itself. I suppose it is possible that hired help or lesser members of their club were tasked with the grunt work of a large estate. As so often happens in these kinds of stories, what I thought to be supernatural might turn out to be only subservience.

A bed of moss, velvety soft and emerald green, had caught me on the forbidden side of the fence. The greens were brighter for the still-overcast sky. I lay encircled by redwoods, in what a child would call a fairy ring. Lifting a dirt-smudged palm, I saw an acorn and pocketed it immediately with a sigh of relief. A gift from the trees. Instantly, I felt protected.

I looked around for the oaks that I smelled. In my eagerness for familiarity, I thought I saw the peeling legs of a crape myrtle tree, like the ones I grew up with, but the bark smoldered crimson behind strips of brown. A madrone tree. I traced its flushed skin all the way up to the sky, a perfect blue emerging from clouds—it would be about nine o’clock, then—like swirls on marbled paper that push and pull one another, the colors trading prominence. Moving, dancing, curling.

At the sight of the blue sky, my jaw grew tighter, and tears dropped from the corners of my eyes into my ears, making me feel even more ridiculous. I hated this stupid weather. I wanted a storm. The anticipation of anything changing. The smallest disorder in the clear daylight. A season passing. I already felt as if I were losing track of the weeks and months. September was starting. How to distinguish between the days, the seasons, the years if they are all the same? It occurred to me then how far away I was from everything I knew to look to for reassurance. Natural cycles felt nonexistent here. There would be no autumn this year, because there were only the two seasons. The dry season and the wet season. The season of fire and the season of flood. I would not experience even that distinction in Bellinas, where the only season is temperate perfection. At this thought, I grew gloomy, or rather, I noticed fully the melancholy that I’d almost caught flickering, skittering across my attention, as one nearly sees something move from the side of your vision, or in a darkened corner, but never catches outright. Its invisible presence—like that of a mouse, a dust bunny, a memory, or a ghost—had become pervasive and easy to overlook.

Other markers of time remained absent as well. There was no denying my condition anymore. It had been more than two months since my last period. My breasts felt heavy and tender. Wasn’t a baby what I wanted most in the world? This was not how it was supposed to feel. I’d come as close as I ever had to leaving Guy, only to realize that I was finally pregnant.

Lying on the moss, I wept. To be expected, I suppose. All the crying. I wished my mother were alive, so that I could ask her what else I might expect. I was too afraid to ask Aster or any of the women yet. That would mean staying. It would mean telling Guy. I had spent so much time over the years imagining myself as a mother that it took no effort at all to feel the squirming of a newborn against my chest. To smell her milk-sweet breath. To see tiny fingers with perfect fingernails coiled around my own. I was about to have everything I had dreamed of and was unsure if I wanted it any longer.

Perhaps Guy would come around. My husband was nothing if not a follower. And he used to want a family. I know I did not imagine his agreeing to start a family in Bellinas. Or how he held me when we were first in love, as students after his mother and my grandmother died. He told me every night that he wanted our children to have my eyes. “They’re so boring and brown,” I would say to him. “They see the good things in me,” he replied. How could I forget that, I wondered, looking at the moss. I should have been asking why it was so easy for him to forget.

I had to sit up against the trunk of a redwood to keep my ears from flooding. Tears fell instead onto the green moss and fallen oak leaves, my desire for rain tumbling from my body in a squall. No matter what I remembered—no matter what I knew to have happened—Guy said he didn’t want a child anymore. Alone, I felt more myself than I had since we came here. Perhaps since I was married. Alone with the truth of Guy and our marriage and Bellinas. About what happened that night at the hot springs. The truth that I really was pregnant. Were they tears of relief, then? I hardly knew. Relief. Fear. Grief and exhaustion. Mostly they were angry tears, I think. How to leave such a perfect place and explain that all my dreams were coming true, and it felt terribly, terribly wrong? I would be deemed an unfit mother to leave behind a new marriage and the splendor and beauty of Bellinas to return to New York to raise a child alone in the noise and congestion of a city.

Wrapping my arms around my shins, I squeezed my small remaining self. I remembered all the things I had listened to and tolerated from the Roses and their Bohemian Club. Their “sphere of consciousness.” How could I have thought them, their cult, into being? I thought with no guilt at all how utterly stupid their advice was. How cavalier and absent the most basic logic and empathy they were, and I could admit it freely without fear of reproach. The trees always believed me. I knew that if I told Guy about Manny, about the night at the hot springs, he would not believe me. Unfurling, I pulled from my pocket the skeleton key and threw it into the rotting oak leaves.

I cried until I was too tired to cry any longer, even under the looming weight of the hateful, perfect blue sky. There was never any release here. Did the ground quake and crack open for catharsis, or out of boredom? How much easier a storm than an earthquake to rebalance. There was no natural ebb and flow, but for the ocean, which was cold and dangerous. Just last week a man from Willow Beach had drowned. Abalone diving, they said. Is that what happened to others who had washed up at the surfing beach? As the Roses had suggested, divers could have been snatched by a current or a shark. Or maybe they had simply turned their backs to the ocean and been swept out to sea by a rogue wave. It is hard to be sure of anything in Bellinas.

With a sigh, I stood. The darkness of the forest, its grays and greens, its shade and leafy shadows, seemed like heaven to me, though the smell of smoke was much stronger on this side of the fence. I noticed a trail a few yards ahead, as if the forest were inviting me in a certain direction. Just like I knew it would. The trail itself was lit in waving speckles of light, with streamers of fog passing between treetops. Under the canopy of eucalyptus and manzanita, Douglas firs and sequoia trees, I could breathe, and I followed the fog as it moved forward. The paralyzing blue was behind me, on the other side of the fence. As I walked, I passed my fingertips over every tree trunk. At an old oak, I startled a rabbit, whose jump made a soft crunch on scattered brown leaves. The fog looked almost like smoke, I thought. For the first time, I laid a hand on my lower belly, trying to feel if there was someone in there. I walked the trails for hours alone and was back by the three-o’clock rainbow. No one seemed to have noticed I was gone.