Sara vanishes midsentence. The room disappears, the vineyard is swept away. Still holding an image of my daughter at the front of my mind, I find myself suddenly outdoors on dry ground, standing next to the skeleton frame of a small car.
This scenery is familiar. I’m surrounded by oak trees that aren’t as mighty as the ones poets like to worship. These California live oaks that cover the foothills are scrubby and scrappy. They survive the rainless summers on their store of coastal fog. Through the twisted branches I see blue—not the sky or the sea but Lake Cachuma, the freshwater reservoir for Santa Barbara County. Sara and I passed it when she drove to the vineyard.
The car carcass matches the sapphire blue of the lake.
Pieces of the Porsche litter the ground. And by pieces I mean everything but the frame itself: the tires, their flashy wheels, the platinum-gray seats, the sleek blue door panels, the retractable black top. The lights, the stereo, the filters, the belts, the hoses. The engine, hanging from a portable hoist. Two of the men who disassembled the convertible are lifting it into the back of a nearby truck. I recognize them. They were the passengers who rode away in Sara’s car. A third has just placed something behind the driver’s seat and shut the door, summoning me with that slam. One more is scooping up fenders in his arms to load alongside the engine.
It’s a stretch to call them men, these four kids who have only a few years on Dylan, if that. One might even be younger, with a shadow of baby fat rather than hair on his cheeks. And they’re idiots too, doing this work when the sun is up. Road noises from the nearby highway float in through the trees. We’re hidden by a few short hills and not much else. I scan the area, and my eyes land on a third vehicle parked beside an oak.
It’s an old four-door sedan, and Jade is at the wheel. My daughter sits on the passenger seat. It doesn’t matter that her dark features are darker today, that they tell me with a glance she’d rather be anywhere but here. She’s frowning. She’s slouched and shrunken in the seat. She’s checking her watch. I don’t care. She’s here, with her, and I go ballistic.
“What the heck?” I shout and rush the car. “Are you out of your mind? Did you get stupid overnight?”
I smack the fender with both hands. “Marina! What are you thinking?”
She doesn’t hear a word of it. I hate this. I hate it, hate it, hate it. I grab the door handle and try to shake it in my impotent grip, but the only thing I rattle is my own teeth.
“How much longer?” she asks.
“Long as it takes,” Jade says. She puts a hand on the door. “If we help it’ll go faster.”
“I’m not a part of this.”
“You’re here, you’re a part of it.”
“Not a chance. You didn’t tell me what we were doing.”
“You just needed to see how easy it is.” Jade swings the door open and steps out. “Ditch the car, take it apart, leave the area, let someone else find the remains.”
“Five more minutes and I’m out of here.”
“Sure, you just go ahead and walk home. But me and two of those guys need a ride.”
“Maybe I’ll steal this car.”
“You’re funny, Miss Model Citizen.” But she leans in to take the keys out of the ignition before she goes.
“Never again,” Marina says. “Don’t you dare bring me up here ever again.”
That’s my beautiful girl.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Jade says in a baby voice, dragging her finger in an X across her sternum. “Trust me—they never chop a car in the same place twice.”
Marina glares at her, and I feel my blood pressure drop just enough to quiet the pounding in my ears. But the danger is far from over. My child needs help, however adult she may be. And I’m not completely powerless.
Jade slams her door and heads off for her twisted sense of adventure.
As it turns out I can’t fly, though I try, because it would be convenient. The good news is that I don’t have to worry up here in these oak-studded foothills about barriers like walls and doors to keep me from getting where I want to go. I find my bearings quickly enough. The blue lake is to my north. The road noises are to my south. This means the highway that I hear is the one Sara will use to drive home, if she didn’t already drive home this morning, or yesterday, or a week ago.
The chop-shop crew has brought their operation about a quarter mile off the nearest one-lane dirt road, which might be some kind of private reservoir access, and another quarter mile from the highway. When I reach it, I am strangely composed, not even breathless. My heart rate is easily lower than when I discovered Marina.
But it jumps at the sight of Sara’s rental car, which comes into view from the west not two deep breaths after I step out onto the road. The convertible’s top is still retracted. I take long strides to the center line.
She’s going to be on me in five, four, three seconds. There’s no time to plot. I’m thinking of electricity, of startling shocks, of tilting silver trays and throbbing hearts.
The car flies by, and I reach out to touch her without being struck by the windshield, the mirror, the headrest. I can’t close my eyes. I can’t afford to miss. I have to touch her. I aim for her brain and come in a bit low. My palm passes right through flesh, muscle, nerves, bone as if it’s nothing more than water. I feel the gasp in her windpipe, the stiffening in her spine, the electric messages roaring up into the base of her skull. Then I’m through, and my fingertips clip the metal rods of her headrest and I go spinning.
Just like Sara’s car. When my eyes come around to her again, I see she’s got the wheel in a death grip and both feet on the brakes, and she’s flung the tail of the convertible wide, counterclockwise in a corkscrew that spirals over the oncoming lane.
No, no, no.
The road is clear of cars. The steep rise on the north shoulder puts an end to the spinout. The passenger side of the convertible hits flat and hard, and the airbags deploy. They don’t hide the sight of her head flopping side to side. For long seconds after everything comes to rest, the still air is filled with the hissing of a deflating tire.
The airbags sag and Sara raises both hands to her ears.
My own head is still vibrating with the impossibility of the moment. It worked. I didn’t think it would.
Now what?
My body behaves like it still moves among the living. I shout her name. I run to her car. I stare at her lovely face. The bridge of her nose is flaming red where the airbag struck. Slowly, she takes her hands off her head and takes the wheel in her grip again. Her breath is ragged and her arms are visibly trembling.
“Are you okay?”
Her inability to hear my voice pains me.
I look back at the short stretch where the shoulder widens and the dirt access road emerges from behind the hill. Sara’s spinout has turned her to face it directly.
Her rental is still running. The engine sounds like it came through okay. But she’s still getting her bearings and the airbag is in her way. The car sits lopsided on the uneven ground.
A lone car flies by and doesn’t notice her trouble. Jerk. Wish I could reach through windows and zap him out of his air-conditioned oblivion.
I’m still looking after the bad Samaritan when the convertible lurches forward and comes away from the hillside with a crude scraping sound. The front fender knocks me aside, and I drop to my knees.
“You’ve got a flat,” I try to tell her, but it takes twenty yards of telltale thumping for her to realize this herself. This time she puts the car into park and shuts off the engine. She exits the car and circles it until she sees the flat, and the worse damage to the side panels.
“Maybe it’s time to hire a driver,” she mutters.
She has pulled her purse off the backseat and set it on the trunk, and now she’s digging through it all, looking for her phone. A mist of sweat glows at her hairline. She swipes at her temple with still-quivering fingers.
“I’m sorry for doing that,” I say. “But my daughter needs you right now.”
She’s scrolling through her contacts, zipping all the way up to the top, when the truck carrying her Porsche in pieces noses out from the dirt road. A tarp covers the heaping mound of parts. It flaps around as carelessly as they secured it. Sara glances up, and her finger hesitates over the link to AAA Road Service as her eyes process the sight.
The truck turns left in front of her as she stares, as invisible to Jade’s friends as another rock in the dirt.
A gust lifts the tarp one more time and reveals the door that Sara herself has opened hundreds of times. The custom-designed advertisement painted on the panel in delicate white lettering is the irrefutable proof: Sara’s Sins, A Fine-Chocolates Café, Santa Barbara.
She thinks to turn on the phone’s camera and snap a photo. It’s blurry and of questionable value. But her quick mind catches what the camera couldn’t. She repeats aloud the numbers and letters of the truck’s California plates until she can type them into her phone’s notes screen.
As Sara toggles back to her dial screen and hits the number nine, Jade’s car appears on the dirt road, but this time Marina’s the one driving. Jade’s beside her, and the other two mechanics, if that’s what they are, are in the back. One of the Boxter’s bumpers sticks out of the trunk between the elastic of some bungee cords.
My take-charge girl probably thinks driving is the best way to get straight home without further detours. I doubt she’s considered that transporting three criminals from the scene of the crime might make her even more of an accomplice than she was before.
She signals a left turn and looks left, right, left before pulling out. As the sedan rolls into the road, Sara and Marina notice each other the way a person catches sight of herself in a mirror she didn’t know was there.
I believe the similarities these two see in each other have little to do with their physical appearances. More than the intractable but naturally pretty black hair, more than the right-sided dimple in their smiles, more than the elegant fingers and dense Audrey Hepburn brows, they recognize the history that ties them together. The tangled ropes of family history.
Well, in a poem it might be that way. In a ballad.
Silently I beg Marina to pull over and get out of that car. Let Jade take the wheel again. Let Sara take the load off her shoulders. Maybe I should have screamed.
They both blink and the moment passes.
“They were young, early twenties,” Sara says to the police officer who found the discarded skeleton frame of her Porsche not far from the road. He’s hardly old enough to grow a beard himself. “One of them might have been a teenager.” She shakes her head, doubting her memory. “I’ve never been good at guessing ages.”
“You didn’t get the plates for the car?” he asks for the third or fourth time.
Sara crosses her arms protectively. “Just the truck, sorry. I guess I was distracted—my car in pieces, you know.”
He raises an eyebrow at the broken-down rental behind her. “Not a good day for you.”
She twists to look at it. “Not all bad. What are the chances I’d blow a tire right here, right where my stolen car would be found?”
“If there was more of your car to find, I would call you lucky.”
This deflates Sara a little bit.
He gives her a card. “You can call this number if you have questions or think of other details. We’ll find the truck, but I don’t know if we’ll find anything in it.”
Sara studies the card and shakes her head. “They’re just kids. Aren’t they supposed to be toilet-papering houses and sleeping until noon, that kind of thing?”
The young officer tries to hide his amusement. “That what you did when you were a kid?”
“I attended more classes outdoors than in, if that’s what you mean.”
“My job would be easier if that’s the worst they did.”
“What do you mean—this is normal?”
“The average age of first-time felons has been dropping since you were a teenager,” he says.
“Well, that’s just wrong. Where are their parents?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.” He looks at his watch. “It’s eleven o’clock—do you know where your kids are?”
Sara laughs uneasily. “I don’t have any. How do you think I could afford that Porsche?”
“See, there’s our answer: all the great parents never had children.”
“You’re a cynical one.”
“Kids left to their own devices can find trouble faster than water runs downhill. I’m experienced, not cynical.” He nods a good-bye to her. “Hope this all works out for you.”
He returns to his squad car with his report, and Sara bends his card into a gentle arch between her fingers as she waits for the roadside service to finish changing her tire. I see her mind racing away while her body is parked, speeding downhill, chasing water, running after my daughter and son, who’ve been left to their own devices. And I know she won’t stop until she catches them.
I go to them too. I run.