21

EACH MORNING, I LEFT GUY ASLEEP AND SET OUT TO enjoy the cool, imperfect weather from the safety of the forest. I let Guy believe I was with Aster and the other women, and I let them believe I remained alone in the bungalow attempting to write. As soon as I crossed the barbed wire, I felt at ease.

I formed rituals for these walks without realizing. Upon entering the park, I ran fingertips across the new pink flesh of madrone trees and smiled at the live oaks. New paths emerged and old ones forked; arrows painted different colors marked the way. I bowed my head to the foxes I almost always saw slinking in groves of bay laurel, and rested my back against the furry trunk of eucalyptus, inhaling its woodsy blue-gray perfume. I was saying hello to my friends, the trees who blocked those winds of Bellinas that did their best to torment me with unanswerable questions every night. Here was where I greeted myself every morning, fingering the acorn in one pocket and my Anna Nováková paperback in the other. A tree whose leaves fall brown in summer and grow green in winter invites squirrels or bandits.

It took me some days to realize that there was very little wind on that side of the fence at any time of day or night. Occasionally I could see the tips of the tallest fir trees bend, but at their trunks, there were no gusts. No pushes. No presence always there, pawing, prodding. Alert and ready to sway me into a self I didn’t recognize. Among the trees, I felt alone to think for myself. I felt protected by them, and I learned all of their names. An encyclopedia of western trees appeared on the mantel above the fireplace. It was almost like magic, but I must be careful not to use that as a catchall for everything. I may simply have overlooked its presence before, however large a volume it is. That is, after all, the best description of magic I have yet to come across—acknowledging for the first time what has always been there.

There was the manzanita tree, sometimes called the “refrigerator tree” for the coolness of its bark. The bay laurel is called pepperwood for the sharp spice of its scent, and sometimes the headache tree, for either curing or causing them. Sitka willows and shining willows keep to themselves. Cottonwood trees like to gather near streams. But not a branch of juniper grew. According to Anna Nováková’s Book of Magic, witchcraft and magic cannot approach the bush with blue-green needles and indigo berries. Villagers in France and Prussia hung its boughs over their doors to bar unwanted magic from their homes, but the nature of California is impressive without its adornment.

The edge of prairie grass was dotted with lovely long gray stones, like storm clouds fallen to earth. Every step closer revealed splotches of verdigris lichen with rusty low vines at the edges. Poison oak in its autumnal shades induced in me a bliss that far outweighed its other effects. There were ferns cool and soft and lush and ancient-feeling. I saw large birds as blue as lapis lazuli and wearing pointed black hats. These followed me occasionally, expecting food, probably. There was never a trace of a bear or mountain lions, as Mia warned. Once I saw a long snake wearing wide black and white bands crossing the trail. A king snake. Her head lifted to look at me, and her forked tongue flickered toward my feet before she slithered into the prairie grass. In search of rattlesnakes to swallow whole.

Another day, I tripped and fell into a muddy pond, more a resort for mosquitoes really, and I sat letting them bite me, astounded at this sound, before so hated, that I had forgotten about since coming to Bellinas. I had not seen so much as a fruit fly here, and until I began to itch badly, which I welcomed less, I wondered what other small inconveniences I had forgotten. I plunged into a trail overgrown with the most beautiful poison oak in cascades of shining green, mottled reds, warm yellows, and bright orange, and emerged on a wide, flat plane of beach, where I watched a baby deer playing in the low tide. On her skinny legs and in her speckled white coat, she ran circles around her mother in the morning fog. Trotting down the beach, they left hoofprints in the wet sand. I followed them at a distance, and a cliff receded upon approach to reveal a waterfall, splashing right onto the beach and streaming into the sea.

A different trail skirted a steep drop to the rocky coast. At the trail’s end, for it was not a loop hike, as many of the others were, I sat on a bench dedicated to the memory of “My beloved wife gone too soon,” and I wondered if she had jumped from that very spot. I watched whales puff their hellos from a distance. Behind me, the thick of trees was only a few feet beyond the low, dusty chaparral. That was the word Guy had used on our honeymoon for what was not chaparral, but a mosaic of coastal prairie grass, coyote brush, and patches of ice-plant succulents and poison oak. Such a lovely word, though, it seems a shame to let it go to waste for his imprecision. Chaparral.

On the bench, I forgot about Bellinas and the Bohemian Club. It was not unusual to pass a hiker or a group of hikers, usually men, who huffed and puffed with those long, pointy poles in their fists, who jogged along wearing skintight leggings and boots like Manny’s. There were trailheads and park entrances many miles up the coast, outside of the secrecy of Bellinas. I would smile and they would nod, and we all would go about our own business. How I had missed strangers in my isolation. I encountered a park ranger once, but I kept my distance, unsure if I could trust him. I knew that most of the residents of Bellinas who stayed on were indebted to Manny in some way.

With nobody or nothing watching but the trees, I returned in the early afternoons to the guesthouse, fortified by the time to myself. I even slept in the stillness of the daylight and didn’t care about refusing invitations to join Guy and the Bohemian Club. If Guy noticed a change in me, he said little. He was staying at the Roses’ until two or three o’clock in the morning, chanting to that droning instrument that looked like a floor accordion and the cascading honks of Manny on the didgeridoo, and then slept until the fog had cleared the next day. Sometimes I joined my husband, afraid of being alone in the house on especially windy evenings, but even then I hung back. I was not the chanting type.

Guy was as engrossed as ever in the community. For his photography project, he’d begun to follow Manny around the compound with an old camera hanging from his neck. It was the only piece of technology I saw anywhere, our phones dead and left in a drawer. My laptop in its case beneath sheets of blank paper. Was it some spell hanging over Bellinas that kept me from missing the once-constant pings and the deluge of messages? Or simply that humans are that much better off free from the conditioning of our devices? Happier without the artificial surge of excitement at every notification and item of gossip? I would hate to admit, even grudgingly, that Manny was right about anything at all. I was afraid to reconnect with my old life. Avoiding things was becoming second nature. It was easy to blame my insomnia for my numbness, to cite the effects of sleeplessness for skipping club events, even after the healing, for lack of a better word, walks in the woods. If Manny began to lecture or fragrant tea was passed around, I excused myself for a moment alone on the porch, until the wind drove me back inside, the bamboo chimes clacking like an emergency siren.

One evening, Mia came out to offer me some tea, which I declined. After my tumble in the pond with the mosquitoes and my bath in the poison oak, a salve of arnica and witch hazel and who knows what else had appeared in a jar of her earthenware creations. I began to suspect Mia knew about my morning walks. To submit to comfort or to suffer the itch of integrity. Not wanting to answer any questions about my welts, which had started to ooze, I decided to risk slathering myself in the soothing mystery of her machinations and woke the next day with all bodily evidence of my excursion cured.

On the porch of Rose Manor, wrapped in one of the many sheepskins that adorned the corners and filled the closets of the houses on Rose Lane, this one a fleece of chicest camel, she looked, as she often did, half human and half something else. Her own wildness was an accessory like any other to play up or down as suited her surroundings. “Every day is the same here. It’s all so perfect.” I don’t know why I said it. In some way, I still wanted her to be my friend. Loneliness can make you do the strangest things.

“Tansy, that’s why people move here,” she said with a laugh, echoing Guy’s words.

“Perfect isn’t real,” I said.

“Maybe it is. Isn’t it what we deserve? You could have something perfect, you know, if you’d let yourself.”

I could not look at her. The sentiment was not far off from what my string of therapists had pointed out. I watched the legs of the bamboo chime wave in the winds.

“Here,” she said, taking my hand and placing something small and cool in my palm, attached to a long gold chain. “For you. It’s a necklace—abalone. The ears of the sea, they call it. To help you accept what’s already there.”

I had to protect what little felt like mine and mine alone, is what I told myself. Did my acceptance of her gift invite what happened next? The gleaming, pearly grays. The violets and greens. Beauty is a trap. “Let yourself belong, Tansy. You’re worthy of beautiful things,” said Mia, as if reading my mind.

The following morning, on a whim, or perhaps it was not a whim, but Mia’s words, I retrieved the necklace with its charm of iridescent abalone and put it on. Clasping the ends together around my neck, I decided to walk the trail to the beach that day. Not to the sunny patch of beach where the Bohemian Club basked. Where the surfers and the seals played and the blue-eyed babies splashed happily with their mothers. Where the women in the Bohemian Club clapped and cheered after their husbands in the water. Where Mia smoothed my hair with her comb of abalone inlay. Where I had visions of feeding Guy’s apple-cheeked babies at my breast. I preferred to sit alone on the cliffside beaches of the Hidden Coast, where mountains of blue-green seawater crested in displays of seaweed coils or seal pups, as if behind glass, and then crashed in an eruption of salty white surf. What was it that Homer called the god of the sea? Poseidon, who raped Medusa in the temple of Athena? “The shaker of the earth.”

Over the fence, I spotted for the first time since the night of midsummer the white cat I discovered asleep in the bed of nasturtium vines. I wonder now if the cat lived in the painting, and came to life at Mia’s bidding. It would not be unheard of in literature. It appeared to me only twice, pulling me further into their world each time. With a remarkable gaze, one green eye and one blue, the white cat watched me underneath an awning of unfurled maidenhead ferns. She licked at her paw, dainty and raised like a woman holding a teacup, and then she turned to look at a path I had never noticed before. It was marked with a purple arrow, and as I was in no hurry, I followed her directions, happy to wander. I realized after a while that I was heading in the direction of the trail along the cliff’s edge that led to my bench, but from the east instead of south along the cliff, through a tunnel of cypress trees.

I heard them before I saw them. Singing, of course. Always singing! A song I didn’t recognize mixed with laughing and some claps, not unlike the singing I’d heard at a distance in the cave of Albion Bay that I remembered from the hot springs. As the cypress canopy opened, I stood no longer protected. The wind from the sea, cold and laced with sharp sand, landed as a slap on my cheeks, which I could feel reddening. The women of the Bohemian Club whirled and skipped in a dance, and the wind whirled and skipped in tandem. Mia and her three maids, Iris, Lily, and Aster. Joined by the hands and moving in a circle, they wore crowns of orange poppies, and their gowns billowed and swayed, opening and folding like flower petals. Again, they resembled the muses dancing on Mount Parnassus. How beautiful a scene, with the ocean smooth and glinting in the background, my bench barely visible at the false horizon of cliff against the gray-green expanse of dangerous water. Had they burst into a spell of “Ring Around the Rosie,” I would not have been surprised. There was a purity to their game, and a faintly audible chorus rose and fell with the wind. I had lost track of the time, but the weather of the park was free of the artifices that ruled the weather in Bellinas. Did I continue walking toward them, or did they notice me first? I cannot say. Like the coast, like the nature of California, they were a hypnotic sight. Is that what they looked like that midsummer evening, as they made me up in their image? A lovelier one than me at that moment, but they always were lovelier than me. I lose no pride in admitting that. I watched them muddy and mist-soaked while they frolicked with flowers in their hair.

My hair had grown far longer than I kept it before Bellinas. Had I last cut it on a waxing moon? I could not remember and never kept track of the moon’s phases, but here, they were daily on the lips of the residents. The words of my mother suddenly came back to me. I watched the women dance and fiddled with the knotted ends of my long brown curls, grown in like hers. “Never cut your hair when the moon is waning, Tansy. It will grow back slow and straight.” I had not thought of her advice in decades, and yet it was stored and waiting for me, riding in with the memory of her voice and the smell of her perfume. The right memories find us eventually. They are like books in that way.

“I told you not to come into the woods alone, but I am surprised it has taken you this long to find us,” Mia called to me, slightly breathless as she continued to dance. “Now that you are here, don’t just stand there. Come join us!”

I did as she beckoned, coming closer but stopping a few yards away, keeping the distance of a lifelong wallflower, if for no reason other than habit. “What are you doing?” I finally asked, mesmerized by the rhythm of their song in the air, their dresses, their dancing. Mia did not answer me, but soon enough, they raised their arms, clasped still at their hands, and skipped forward in a rush of laughter, letting go of their hands to clap. Aster and Lily tumbled lightly to the ground in a rustle of giggles and fabric. “We’re doing magic, darling,” she answered. “Worshipping the wind, asking him to carry out our wishes, that sort of thing.” Mia walked over to me.

“Like, tricks?” I asked, unsure if she was teasing me.

“I’ve never pulled a rabbit out of a top hat, but along those lines, yes. The wind is a conduit for our wishes, in a way.” Whether by coincidence or magic, a small and perfect rabbit of brindle brown with cottony tail emerged from behind a stone in the silvery prairie grass.

“You’re a witch.” The words came out of my mouth as if they had been conjured. Who believes such things to be real?

“All women are witches,” she said, plucking from a vine snaking around the rock what looked like the bud of a flower twisted shut. Lifting it to her mouth, she blew softly, and I watched as each petal stretched and opened. What was only a hank of green and white became a large bloom with a star in the middle.

“Moonflower,” she said, handing it to me. “It usually only opens after dusk.”

“My grandmother called it hell’s bells,” I said, taking the stem. A beautiful poison if brewed, but not what makes their fragrant tea electric and woozy.

“Haven’t you wished for something and had it appear? Made a tea of chamomile and lemon balm for sleep, or one of peppermint or ginger for digestion. Women are always performing acts of magic. Really, magic is just a sort of listening, which women are best at.” As she spoke, I could not help but think of my parents and the accident.

“Think about those games of childhood,” Mia went on. “Think of every time you’ve thought of someone who then calls you up.”

Even as she said it, my mind was going over all the small acts of magic—of witchcraft, my cousin would have me believe—I had accomplished. My mother’s rule for cutting hair so timely recalled. The teas made from her garden, for sleep, for health, for love. My grandmother’s Bibles and the crosses she wore on dainty gold chains around her neck. Weren’t they simple talismans of protection? I thought of the acorn and book in my pocket. Those games Mia cited. I had played them all. Light as a feather. Calling on bloody spirits in mirrors, and via cardboard and plastic game boards. Dropping wax in water to divine the future. What had prompted my return to the dark arts of girlhood after the cave? Not a need for comfort, but proximity to magic.

As if reading my mind—perhaps she could, as it seemed that Aster did—Mia offered some clarity. “Witchcraft is only a collaboration with Nature,” said Mia the witch who claimed that I was one too.

“Is that why you warned us not to come in the woods? You didn’t want to be found out?” As confused as I was, I did not feel the anxiety that had plagued me since moving to Bellinas. For all my life, really. I did not find myself counting slowly, breathing deeply. For all the improbabilities of the situation, it felt realer somehow than everything else that had happened over the last few months.

“Not exactly. Manny doesn’t like when he can’t keep track of everyone. The park here is the only place for miles that’s not his, and despite his protestations, my husband keeps a phone handy for his business. I find that it interferes with our work. Our magic works best under an open sky, away from computers and phones. Nearer to the ocean, the wind picks up faster. Bellinas is one of those places, those portals between worlds, I’ve come to believe.”

“Is that why you came here?”

“Just a happy coincidence,” she said with a laugh and a flick of her wrist. “Manny told me all about the special pull of his hometown, and I knew it would be perfect.” She continued to dance. “We talk to the wind. We don’t control it, exactly. We only speak our wishes and wants and hearts’ desires, and then trust the wind to carry them forward. I think of our words as spiders’ silk, those glinting lines that float invisible until just the right angle of sun hits them. They’ve found spiders floating on their lines of silk a thousand miles out to sea, you know.”

It made an appealing sort of sense. Maybe magic could exist in that same in-between realm as a name, a word, a memory, an idea just out of reach but so close you know it to be there. How could the sounds of our words, spells if you want, not shape the world? A tempting delusion, and I had not slept a night through in months.

“Why are you telling me this now? We’ve been here for over two months.” I looked toward my friend Aster, who radiated happiness. For all my stunned indignation—it is the surprise that lets you accept the unbelievable—I still wanted what she had. What all these women seemed to have. To be happy.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

It was not. I must have looked dumbstruck, or at the very least oblivious, to what was apparent to the others. Perhaps a hand moved to my abdomen, or to the abalone I wore around my neck that glinted teal and violet.

“It is true that I thought you would join us much earlier, but we mustn’t rush Nature’s process. You found us when you were ready. I know everything that happens in Bellinas, Tansy. Who is happy, who is not. The dalliances. The affections that wax and wane. Who is blossoming, who is wilting. If you know how to read the signs—”

“You know what happened to me.” I stopped her, even as she was confessing to me. “Do they all know?” I knew the answer before I finished asking. They had all felt his breath on their necks. Been left with the shape of his hands on their backs in shades of green and purple, just like their abalone. “Was it a test then? Or an initiation?”

“Only a beautiful act in a beautiful place. What’s a few moments of unwanted attention, if he is left with an illusion of control, and we are left in peace to practice. Every woman grows used to enduring men.” She spoke with the lucidity and poise of one familiar with the spotlight. Had each of these women suffered as I had? Looking at them, I could not believe it. They broke from their frolicking to nurse their babies on a bed of wildflowers. They bore no marks of unhappiness that I could see. They looked as perfect as ever.

“Aster?” I asked quietly. My friend to whom I’d spoken so plainly about my troubles knew what had happened. She had endured the same, she had said . . .

“It was only a moment, Tansy,” she said, reading my thoughts as usual. “And now I have all this.” Did I imagine her chin tilting toward the infant cooing and clutching at the golden chains glinting above her breast? I recalled the waver in her wrist that interrupted the smooth lines of her weaving. That I know I did not imagine. The evidence was in the single wobbling thread across the cloth.

“We are not his followers,” continued Mia. “We let him think that. We let the men see what they want. I can tell what you think of them. You’re a scholar of history. Isn’t marriage supposed to be an arrangement? A trading of resources,” she said.

“I thought marriage was an expression of love,” I said, but I could feel that I did not believe my own words. I was embarrassed at how naive I sounded.

“We get the pleasure of sharing each other and this place, but answering only to Nature. In a way, we’re using them as men have used us for the whole of history. Our emotions are what make our magic. Don’t hide yourself, Tansy, embrace what’s happening in you, and Nature will give you everything.”

Did she mean my walks or the baby? I must remember to ask her.

“I see you doubting. Denial makes no difference to the truth. Did you know that sailors seek us out? They have come to witches for centuries to buy the winds they need to safeguard their journeys. If I want to, I can blow any kind of wind into knots along rope or thread, even a simple handkerchief or a bracelet.”

She pulled at the golden twists of a tassel hanging from the neck of her dress. As a loop loosened and fell limp at her throat, a gentle ocean breeze ran fingers through my hair, which was gnarled and matted from the hike. “Your magic would work better if you took better care of yourself, Tansy,” she said again, as if reading my mind. I suppose that mind reading is not outside the realm of possibilities. “I knew from the first that you could be quite a good witch. You’re an excellent listener.”

“So this is part of the Bohemian Club? Does everyone do magic?”

“Of course not, darling. Men are terrible listeners. Like I said, his little group is all for show—well, not for him. Not for any of the men, I suppose. They are dears, really. For the most part. We put up with it, so that we are freer to perform our magic. We’re the ones in control of what happens in Bellinas. The men can have credit for whatever they like. Who needs credit? Men do. And what do they go and do with it? Mess everything up. Wouldn’t you rather live your life, do your art, raise a family all in a beautiful place? Credit is a life well-lived, I think.”

That is not how I recall the axiom, but it was hardly the time to nitpick. I stood there stunned, as I’m sure most would. The sky was cloudless, but the smell of wildfire smoke drew tears to my eyes. Beware the wind that brings fire to a shipwreck, says Anna Nováková. Who knows how many ships lie at the ocean floor, dragged under by the reefs and rocks below the cliffs.

“You’re like us, Tansy. Special,” said Aster over her shoulder, and all the women nodded. Gathered on the bed of wildflowers, mounds of red and orange poppies rested on their skirts. Iris and Lily, always together, perhaps not in need of any husbands, I think now. Iris brushed the bangs from her friend’s face. A loving gesture, free of possession or expectation. Aster lay down her milk-drunk infant, and the other two women turned toward her long golden hair. In no time, her waist-length curls became a crown of braids laced with purple morning glory and poppies.

That could be me, I thought, looking at how calm, how beautiful, how happy Aster looked. Iris’s hands fell to her stomach. She looked as slim as ever to me, but she certainly had a glow about her. Would I start to glow like that? She closed her eyes, looking for something, and opened them to reach for the hands of her friends. Her baby must have moved. The three women laughed and embraced one another, and I noticed what looked like confetti in the air around them. The white puffs of dandelion seeds rose in slow, pinwheeling orbs, as if the earth were laughing with them. For the first time, I felt only excitement about my pregnancy. That could be me, I thought again.

“Men are simple creatures,” said Mia. She had been watching her friends, too. Or her followers, her coven—whatever they are. “They’re so easy to control. Appeal to their vanity and give them what they want, and they believe that they are in charge. But it’s all an illusion. In every household, it’s always the women who control everything, down to which way the wind is blowing and what blessings or curses it carries. In a marriage, if the display of our bodies for our husbands, and to impress their friends, distracts them from noticing what we are doing, then it is worth it. Secrecy is essential. If they knew, who knows what they would ask us to do with our power? They think they are the winners in our marital arrangements, but we are the ones who use sex. It’s a distraction. A tool like any other.”

My hands recalled the bruises on my back and hugged my ribs. A blurry memory of Manny on top of me brought a spell of vertigo.

“You’ve all been with him, then.” I needed to say it again. “What about your husbands?” I asked.

“He’s given the community a way to live free of the toxic outside world and its demands,” said Aster, wisps from her braids making a shimmering halo behind her head. “This way, we can join Mia in creating everything in Bellinas. Our husbands don’t mind us, because we don’t mind them.”

I hated to think of myself as prudish or unprogressive, but to hear their arrangement confirmed was something of a shock, even if the suspicion had formed in me from their first dinner party. I let the expectations of Guy’s voice in my head derail what I knew I saw. The touches at the dinner table. Manny’s proposition at my desk. Their children with his too-blue eyes. Mia’s portrait hanging above their stylish, yet timeless, modern hearth for all to see and to admire, maybe even to admire Manny’s possession of such a coveted beauty rather than Mia’s own body. They were daughters of Nyssia, I understood. What answers cannot be found in the Classics? Nyssia, the queen of Lydia, the famous kingdom of antiquity, home to Troy and the homeland of money and the shopping mall, says the Father of History. King Candaules thought his bride, Nyssia, beautiful beyond belief, but he needed the envy of another man to feel his own luck. He ordered his bodyguard to spy on his wife and confirm that Nyssia was the most beautiful of women. So the bodyguard hid and watched his queen as she undressed and prepared for bed. As all wives know what happens in their homes, she knew her husband’s plan, and she took the bodyguard for a lover. Together, they murdered the lecherous, scheming Candaules, and the queen’s lover became king. As Herodotus tells us himself, “Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.” Well, who rules circumstances? These witches who control the winds.

“Don’t think us wicked, darling. We’re witches to keep some control in our lives. To have space of our own. I think you know something about that.” Neither solitude nor autonomy was a concept untouched by women seeking more. Was their magic then a product of their affluence? It was easy to succumb to the notions of their cult, and I needed something to be easy. I was by then desperate for anything that could save my fantasy of life in Bellinas. What did I have to lose . . .

“Submit to your nature as a magical creature, Tansy, and everything will be much easier for you. If nothing else, it will make you a better wife.”

I was still most afraid of losing Guy, of losing my marriage, even though I knew it was already lost. Why did I still want someone who would not believe me if I told him about the hot springs? Guy was the only family I had left, besides the Roses. I was willing to do anything to hope that our marriage could last.

“What do I have to do? Drink the blood of a baby or fly around on a broom?”

“Darling, don’t be ridiculous.” She plucked another bud from the vine of sleeping moon flowers. “Just be yourself. And join us here in the mornings for our little spells and dances for Mother Earth. Let go of your expectations. Let go of any judgments you have of Guy. I’m sure he deserves them, of course, but he’s only a man. Let him think he’s in charge, and then talk to the wind to make your wishes come true.”

“What about the other couple? The one who disappeared?”

“I had nothing to do with that,” she said.

I must have looked doubtful, or at least somewhat pained, at her advice.

“It doesn’t matter if you believe or not. As I said, all women are witches by nature, and you are no exception.”

She brought the yet-to-blossom flower up to my lips. I blew, and its petals uncoiled in a bloom of fragrance from its starburst center. That only my breath, my wishes, my imagination could create magic, I hardly believed it. What did I have to lose? I could give up on trying to convince Guy of what I already knew, and just use magic to have the marriage I wanted. And if these women had each endured the attentions of Manny, maybe I was overreacting. If Mia could protect Bellinas from the flames of wildfires, magic could protect me from myself. Here is where I confess that I freely joined a cult, but not the one I originally thought. Guy might have been proud of me for joining in something, I think now, but I never told him.