“Misty wrote a letter to Sara?” I demand of the man in the theater.
“As you can see.”
Again I twist in my seat. It’s becoming increasingly difficult. My back is stiff. My head hurts. I can’t quite bring him into focus.
“Did they fight?”
He isn’t going to answer.
“Why can’t I read the letter? What happened?”
The man lifts his hand toward the screen. You’ll see.
“Was it Sara? Did she . . . ? Please, just tell me. I don’t want to watch. That would kill me all over again.”
“You can’t just pick and choose what you want to know, Garrett. And remember—you’re not dead yet.”
One Sunday afternoon in early October Misty threw a party. Most of the guests were parents of Misty’s dance students, and the gathering was a strange family-friendly event for both children and adults—a harvest festival complete with bobbing for apples, an open bar, and a hay ride through the neighborhood in the back of someone’s pickup. Misty cast it as a pre-maternity-leave farewell, though Dylan’s due date was nearly two months off and nothing would keep her away from that dance studio. She’d already decided to put him right on the bottle so she could get back to her meds as soon as possible. I suspect the emotional roller coaster was more trying on her than it was on me, because this time little Marina was in the picture. “She deserves better than this,” Misty would say in the valley days.
The shindig was a huge success. I watched from the sidelines, sitting on a great pumpkin with an Indian Wells beer, happy to see my wife so . . . happy.
The next day I was late getting home from work and unintentionally ruined a surprise candlelight dinner. Misty kicked me out of the house.
I made the ninety-minute drive up to the Rincon, which had made progress since the September purchase. The living room suite was still on back order, but the bedrooms were furnished and the window coverings had finally been installed. But a delay in the building permit for our new porch threatened to postpone the project until spring, and a retaining wall that collapsed two weeks after closing sucked at our budget and set us back further than I had hoped it would.
Still, it was our getaway home, and so I got away. I arrived after dark, restless and angry. The city planning meeting that had delayed me that evening wasn’t my fault. The LA traffic wasn’t my fault. Misty’s mean moodiness was not my fault. And yet everything in that beach house accused me of failure, mostly the intolerable silence that not even the surf could mask. If I was the right kind of man, the permit would have gone through on time, the wall wouldn’t have fallen down, the living room would have a sofa and chairs, and Misty’s happiness would last for more than twenty-four hours at a time. This weekend house—this was the thing that was supposed to prove what I could offer her. It was the thing to finally make her happy.
How far short it fell.
The ocean breeze was stiff and foretold a storm. It was too dark for a walk, too cold to sit outside. I called Sara, because I knew she would tell me what I wanted to hear. She would probably say it without me having to fish, because her heart was perceptive and generous.
I said, “I’m in town. Can I buy you dinner?”
She didn’t answer right away. I imagined her looking at the clock. After nine thirty. She said, “Jason?”
I was an idiot. “No, Garrett.”
“Garrett? What are you doing—”
“I need to get out of this house.”
She couldn’t have understood what I meant, but she laughed and said she did, then, “It’s too late for eating. Come here and I’ll fix you something warm to drink. If you’re starving I have . . . stale pretzels.”
On the way, I stopped in Carpinteria at a twenty-four-hour hole-in-the-wall for a spicy pollo asado burrito and my mood immediately improved, even though the rain started falling before I finished it off.
At the time, “here” was a studio apartment attached to Allegro, the State Street confectionery in Santa Barbara where Sara had done her apprenticeship and then become a full-time manager. In the parking lot at the rear I climbed a staircase with an unstable wrought-iron rail to the second floor and knocked on the green door as instructed. Sara confirmed me through the peephole before clicking through the locks and opening the door with a wide smile.
She was a chaos of flannel pajama bottoms, a T-shirt, and hair transformed by a recent shower into thick, limp strings. Her apartment was a disaster of genius proportions: furniture draped with cast-off clothing and baseboards littered with cast-off shoes. But she’d made an effort to clean up. I assumed that the mountain of clothing on the unmade daybed had just recently been relocated from the room’s only comfortable chair.
“Sit, sit,” she said, pointing to the threadbare recliner as I shrugged out of my wet parka. She shook it out in the bathroom shower stall and then hung it on the clothes hook, over a robe.
“No problem is so big that hot chocolate can’t fix it,” she announced, gliding into the kitchen, which I could see in its entirety from where I sat.
Her tiny kitchen table bore a dangerous tower of cookbooks and thick file folders with Sara’s Sins written in her hasty handwriting across the front, her emerging business plans. Dirty dishes filled the sink, but a copper pot on the miniature gas range simmered with the scents of good memories.
Seconds later a steaming mug warmed my hands. Sara’s crazy notion of hot chocolate was bittersweet and topped with black pepper–crusted marshmallows that crunched even as they melted. It was the best thing I’d ever poured over my tongue. “This drink might introduce entirely new problems of its own,” I said, “like a rush on peppercorns. What’s the other flavor in it?”
“An almond syrup.”
“Mmm. Better than therapy.”
I sat and sipped and we listened to the rain, and she didn’t ask why I was there or what I needed. She probably guessed. She took a seat on the daybed, sat right on top of the clothes.
The muscles in my back and neck finally relaxed into the seat. “You serve this at the store?”
“I will when I open Sara’s Sins.”
“How’s that coming?”
“Big setbacks.” She shook her head and with her fingers lifted a sopping marshmallow to her mouth.
“What happened?”
“Wrecking ball took down the shop I was looking at.” She didn’t seem too broken up over this. In fact, she looked up at me through the steam of her cocoa and grinned as if it were all a stupid joke.
“What?”
“The owner neglected to tell his tenants the building had been condemned. Took off with their rent money first of October, and then the demolition crews showed up.”
“The tenants were still there? People were hurt?”
“Not physically. But they had to clear out, and the building went down yesterday.”
“Unbelievable. Tell me he didn’t have any of your money.”
“A ten-thousand-dollar check.”
“Ouch.”
“It was a deposit to be applied to the lease.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
I waited for her to explain.
“In more bad news, a San Francisco investor backpedaled on his promise last week, so my bank account is ten thousand dollars smaller than I had hoped it would be right now.”
“You mean you’re twenty thousand dollars in the hole?”
“Not at all.” She sipped. “Timing is everything. It’s the criminal landlord who’s going to find himself holding a bad check. As for me, well, I pretty much break even in this tangle.”
It took me a minute to sort out what she said, and by then she was laughing. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he came after me for it?” she asked. “I have this fantasy of turning him in.”
“Maybe there’ll be a reward in it for you.”
This tickled her own funny bone so hard that she had to hold her mug out over the carpet or risk slopping hot chocolate all over herself. I laughed because she was laughing. She clutched her stomach and tilted her head back, eyes closed, giggling, not at all behaving like a girl whose dreams might come to an end before she has a fair chance to prove herself.
The perfection of this moment gut-punched me. It did then and does again now, as I watch from a very distant place in time. That right there was all I ever wanted with Misty, to sit smack in the middle of life’s difficulties and laugh at them. I wanted nothing more than to be hemmed in by dirty laundry and the chaos of dreams and the close walls of our human limitations with someone who could help me see the humor in it.
Sara never looked more like Misty than she did then, though the women under the skin were completely different.
“A reward!” Tears leaked from the corners of her squinty eyes. “Can you imagine what my parents would say if that’s how I get my startup capital?” This scenario made Sara hoot again. “Daughter of upstanding citizens gets her lucky break by giving a criminal a rubber check.”
She was laughing too hard then, just far enough over the top so that I could see the real pain trying to punch up through the crust around her heart. The bit about the money was genuinely funny. The truth about her parents’ disapproval of her dreams was a drill in her heart that wouldn’t stop spinning.
I put my own cocoa on the lamp table between the daybed and the recliner. I leaned forward and reached for her cup too. She was going to burn herself. Already there was a spot of brown on the leg of her pajamas. She was holding the cup instead of the handle. My hand closed around hers and I grinned at her.
“I want to be there when you tell them.”
Sometimes when watching a movie, I’ll shout at the lead character as if he can hear me: Don’t go into that house alone, you idiot! The killer’s hiding in the closet! Don’t steal that money! You’ll lose your soul!
Don’t kiss that woman. It’ll kill your wife.
I know he can’t hear me. I don’t try to stop him because it’s already happened, and I don’t want to relive it. This time, I look away.
In her own home, Sara enters from the garage. She passes the laundry basket that I once fell into—or thought I fell into—then comes into the kitchen with her purse. She drops it on one of the counter-side chairs, then heads across the house to kick off her shoes and change upstairs. She gets as far as the living room. Marina and Jade are sitting side by side on her sofa reading magazines, exactly as they’d been positioned the day Sara saw them driving away from her vandalized car. The scene instantly reconstructs itself in her mind, knocking her speechless.
This works to Marina’s advantage. She’s still angry about Dylan’s trip to the vineyard, so she jumps into the confrontation first by laying out her expectations. She wants to be told about plans to take Dylan away from the house. Sara knows nothing about sneaky teenage boys, Marina accuses, and even less about sneaky teenage boys with anxiety disorders.
I hate seeing my daughter in this mood. But I don’t know what to think of Sara right now.
Sara half listens. She knows Dylan is fine. Great, even. She’s trying to think of what to do about the girls’ involvement in the destruction of her Porsche.
Nothing, for now.
Pandora is in Jade’s lap, purring.
Sara apologizes for the miscommunication, though that’s not how Marina has characterized Dylan’s disappearance for the day. She promises to keep Marina in the loop. As she lowers herself into a chair opposite the two friends, Marina and Jade rise like a seesaw. Pandora mews and leaps away.
“I can tell you how Dylan and I spent the day.” Sara is so earnest.
“Maybe later.”
“Okay.”
Marina puts a hand on Jade’s arm to direct her toward the door.
“Wait,” Sara says. Then she rushes to her purse, withdraws her checkbook, and hesitates. What on earth does it take to run a family these days? It must have some similarities to running a business. She writes a check and carries it to Marina, holding it out face-first, nervous about her own ignorance. The girls turn, Marina already gripping that tall, vertical door pull. When she sees the five-digit check—made out to her—her rebel act sputters and stalls. She stares at it. Her hand comes off the door handle but she won’t reach for the money.
It would solve so many problems.
It would complicate everything Marina is learning about this would-be mother of hers.
Sara worries about Marina’s hesitation. “Let me know if that’s not enough for a month or so. Mortgage, utilities, credit card bill. Food.”
Marina stares at the slip of paper, so tempted. Jade snatches it out of the air at the same moment Sara lets go.
“Don’t be stupid,” Jade hisses to my daughter.
The girls and the check are gone in seconds. It’s much more efficient than chopping a car.
Sara watches them leave, feeling less satisfied with her generosity than she had hoped. She returns to the living room, trying to remember what she meant to do before she discovered the girls.
A bookcase from her downstairs office peeks at her through the open door. On the bottom shelf, Sara can see the thin spines of her old high school yearbooks. They’ve been pushed all the way to the back of the shelf, and their misalignment with the other books catches her eye. She must have jostled them when she pulled out her senior book the night before. The one Misty marked up. If Marina and Friend are going to be popping in unannounced, Sara thinks, it’s probably unwise to keep these books out in the open. How long will it be before Marina sees through Sara’s paper-thin story? She just hopes for enough time to make amends. That’s the most she can wish for.
Sara carries the three volumes up to her room, where she fishes out the fourth yearbook from her ocean of sheets, then proceeds to the attic. She finds a space for them next to some tilting cookbooks. She almost doesn’t stop to look at my letters, but the china cabinet is right there, and she wonders if there might be something in my own hand that she can show to my children. Proof of our partnership, maybe.
She opens the drawer, finds the yellow-and-white box. Inside, the bundle is tied up in a piece of gold elastic from one of her old chocolate boxes. She carries it to the window seat where the light is fading and loses herself for an hour, reading words I should never have written to anyone but Misty.
This is how we all die: the first wheel of our lives slips off the pavement on the day we learn how to lie to ourselves. The second wheel goes when we discover that lying gives us something we need, even if only for a little while. And then we are destabilized. From there we fall and fall, like my truck headed for the belly of the earth.
Now I see it clearly.
The first lie I told myself was that Sara and I needed each other’s laughter to survive. Laughing with another human being is always good, never harmful. Laughing heals.
Misty figured it out on a Saturday afternoon in November, after more than a month of secret meetings with Sara and shortly before Dylan’s due date. She called my cell phone, excited. She was having contractions, but she didn’t want to take Marina with her to the hospital, and the family scheduled to take Marina when the baby was born was out of town. She needed me to come home. I should have been thirty minutes away at my Los Angeles office, trying to tame a project that was over budget and behind schedule, when really I was an hour and a half up the coast in Sara’s tiny apartment, waiting for her to get off work.
“Can you take Marina to your friend’s house?” I asked, snatching my keys and running out Sara’s door.
“Which friend? Can’t you just come get us?”
“The one from the party. The one with the little girl Marina’s age.”
“Anna?”
I had no idea what the woman’s name was. Maybe Anna was the daughter. “Yeah, her.”
“Just come home. I can wait. Traffic won’t be so bad right now.”
I hurried down the wobbly iron steps outside of Sara’s place, behind the shop, ransacking my mind for an excuse. “Look, Misty, I’m up at the Rincon house. I’m working on something—it was supposed to be a secret.”
“I thought everything was done that could be done for now. When we were up last weekend—”
“There was just one more thing. I wanted it for you and the baby, so it had to wait until I knew you wouldn’t be up again. I’m on my way right now, but it’ll take longer than a half hour.”
Misty was silent. I had no idea what kind of a surprise I’d need to come up with to cover this fib. I slammed the door of my truck and turned the ignition over with as much clatter as possible so she could hear, to prove myself a truth teller.
“Take Marina to Anna’s and go to the ER. I’ll drive straight there.”
Her silence was the kind that sits on the edge of a knife. It might fall either way, into manic fury or pleasant surprise. The blade might slice it in half: angry tears and laughing accusations.
“I’m on the freeway right now. Are you okay?”
“Sure,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her.
“When was your last contraction?”
“A few minutes ago.” All the excitement was gone, replaced by something new that I couldn’t name.
“Maybe you shouldn’t drive. I’m going to get off the phone and call an ambulance for you. Then I’ll call back until—”
“I got it, Garrett. It’s okay.” Already I knew that it wasn’t okay.
“No, wait. Is Marina there? Turn on the speaker phone and we’ll—”
“See you when you get here.”
“Fast as I can,” I said, but she was already gone.
My hands on the steering wheel felt cold and unsteady. I wondered if Misty suspected anything before now, which lie had a hole in it large enough for her to see through. I doubted it. Her mood had been too bright. She might have noticed last weekend, when we rescheduled our missed dinner with Sara, but there was nothing to notice. Sara and I avoided eye contact, hardly spoke to each other, didn’t even touch. Misty was at the center of my attention. Marina was at the center of Sara’s.
Everything could be explained. Everything that looked like an affair could be explained as something else. My relationship with Sara was still young enough to be cast in a completely innocent light. All I had to do was end it and stay close to home.
I didn’t want to, but I would. For Marina, for Misty, and for Dylan. Sara would understand. She would understand my rejection of her the way she understood her family’s. I hated myself then. I never stopped hating myself after that. Even then my life was in a tumbling truck plummeting into a pit.
I rolled down the windows and turned up the radio. I spent the rest of the trip trying to think of some surprise to install at the beach house. Something that Misty didn’t already have. Something that would thrill her. My mind was blank.
I didn’t call Sara to explain. I didn’t call Sara for another month.