“She’s not our mom,” Dylan says, repeating Marina’s announcement. They’re standing in the upstairs hallway that cuts between their bedrooms. Night has fallen. The house is dark except for the light from Dylan’s computers and Marina’s desklamp, spilling out of the open doors.
“I think you knew,” Marina says gently. “Didn’t you? All the signs were there.”
Dylan leans his back against the wall and crosses his ankles. He’s flipping through Sara’s strange little Christmas photo album, the one of their night together at the candy shop, the night of their mother’s death. They’re in the hall outside the bedrooms, and Dylan isn’t really interested in the snapshots that are mainly of his sister.
“The first time I saw her she tried to tell me the truth,” Dylan said. “I guess I wanted something else.” At the back of the album Marina has inserted a paper photocopy of the picture in Wasson’s evidence: newborn Dylan getting a kiss from his big sister, their mother looking at the camera, tired but outwardly happy. He stares at it a long time. Then he takes it out of the sleeve and hands the book back to Marina.
“They look like twins,” he says. “’Cept for the hair.”
“It almost wouldn’t have mattered, would it?”
“What do you mean?”
“That she wasn’t exactly Mom. We could have pretended. She cared. She wanted to help. Isn’t that what a mom does?”
“There’s a chance she had something to do with Mom’s death.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Why not?”
“She wouldn’t have tried to help us.”
“Guilt makes people do all kinds of strange things. She was here at the house the night Mom disappeared.”
“So was Dad.”
“Dylan, c’mon.”
“So were you. So was I.”
Marina turns toward her bedroom. “I’m going to bed now. You should too.”
“I’ll go when I want,” he says. She doesn’t miss the challenge in his voice. “You’re not my mom either,” he says. “I guess that makes you guilty of something.”
He takes the photo into the room with him and slams the door.
The scene changes. My anxiety and fear are rising. I punch the seat in front of me and it bounces on springs. My fist feels nothing.
On the screen Sara is in a small room with a barred window and a table flanked by two chairs. A paper cup full of weak, oily coffee that probably tastes like wax scraped off of Dylan’s surfboard. The steam makes a curlicue under Sara’s drooping eyes. She looks older, more tired than she has before now.
It’s late for a visitor, nothing outside the window but night, fallen.
Ian comes in and she stands, runs a hand through her short hair, which slopes where her hand has supported her sleepless head. He looks around.
“I hope you weren’t expecting the Biltmore,” she says lightly.
“I could teach them a thing or two about hospitality,” Ian responds. “But they wouldn’t let me bring you a toothbrush.”
She indicates that he should take a seat. The chair’s legs scrape the floor.
“They found my fingerprints on that fondue fork,” Sara announces. “The one with Misty’s blood on it.”
“Can you explain it?”
“To their satisfaction? I doubt it. Like I said, Garrett and I used the set a couple of times. I could have been the last one to touch them.”
“Have they charged you yet?”
“For killing my cousin with a fondue fork?” She bites her lip apologetically, then says, “No. The deputy said they can hold me for forty-eight hours before they have to charge me. I’d guess they’re looking at everything all over again. Or running the new information by the DA. I don’t know exactly how it works.”
“I can recommend a good attorney.”
“I might need one.” She swirls the coffee in her cup. “Is that why you came by? To wish me luck?”
“No.”
“Because I don’t know what happened to Misty, but that probably doesn’t matter. For all these years I’ve believed that her death was my fault. Everyone in my family said so—if I hadn’t let myself fall into an affair with Garrett, Misty wouldn’t have gone over the edge. Even Garrett believed that. He never contradicted them. They cut me out forever with a check. Can you believe that? ‘Severance,’ my father called it. Enough money that I shouldn’t have to ask them for anything ever again.”
“That’s how you launched Sara’s Sins.”
“That’s right. With my cousin’s blood money. I told you it was a good name.” She lifts a finger in the air and smiles sadly. “You know, they even asked me to change my last name from Rochester to something else, but I never got around to that.”
“If they really believed you killed her, why didn’t they have you prosecuted?”
“They didn’t think I was guilty of murder, Ian. But even I agree that I destroyed a family. It was embarrassment they wanted to be spared. Scandal. A Rochester committed suicide—why? The public scrutiny would have been unbearable on top of their loss. In their eyes my affair with Garrett was practically incestuous. And I was a chambermaid to Misty’s royalty. Imagine that story being told in their social circles. They cover up their reputation the way they covered up Misty’s illness. And if it can’t be covered up, they pay for it to go away.” She looks up at him. “Why did you side with Marina?”
“There aren’t any sides. She found Misty’s letter to you. She asked me for help sorting it out. One thing led to another.”
“That’s how it happens, isn’t it?” she says. “One thing leads to another. I loved Garrett as much as he loved Misty. Those kids. I still do. It was selfish love, I know that, so maybe it wasn’t love at all.”
Sara takes a deep breath.
“Why are you here, Ian? We’re colleagues. There’s no reason for you to keep coming around.”
“Spoken like a woman who thinks all of us agree with her parents.”
Ian leans onto his hip and takes his wallet out of his opposite pocket. He unfolds it to a photo in a plastic sleeve and hands it out to her. “My wife,” he says. “Gemina.”
Sara takes the wallet gently. Gemina is young and fair, with Denica’s fine red locks, and freckled wings dotting her cheekbones. She wears a green scarf pulled up over her head and wrapped around her throat, like a Hollywood starlet from another generation.
“She’s beautiful,” Sara says.
“I killed her when I fell asleep at the wheel,” Ian says.
“I’m truly sorry, Ian.”
“I can’t undo it.”
“Of course you can’t.”
“So I don’t keep trying.”
Sara hands the photo back to him.
Ian’s gaze lingers on Gemina’s portrait. “You can’t bring back Marina and Dylan’s mother.”
“But continuing to try seems like the right punishment. The very lightest sentence, in fact.”
“Sisyphus, rolling his rock uphill.”
“I guess.”
“Sara, irreversible sins aren’t unforgivable.” Ian puts away his wallet, then leans forward, propping his elbows on the table. “I don’t know what happened to your cousin, but I don’t need to. It’s enough that you believe you’re to blame. But maybe you’ll let me tell you something I learned after Gemina died.”
He doesn’t go on until she nods.
“I used to think that the only way out from under the weight of her death was to get pardon from everyone hurt by her dying. But a lot of those folks don’t have the capacity for that. Not even after all these years. It’s one of the reasons I left Ireland.”
“But you just said that irreversible choices aren’t unforgivable.”
“Well, they are if you expect people to forgive you. Because you don’t have any say in what they decide to do.”
“So what did you mean? That you look to God for forgiveness?”
Ian stands up and puts his hands in his pockets, jingles some loose change. He turns sideways and looks up at the blank cinder-block wall. “Gemina and I used to argue about God a lot. She believed, I didn’t. She used to say, ‘God’s perfect. It’s our ideas of him that are wrecked.’ I would say, ‘Then he can’t be perfect, because that idea would be wrecked too.’ ”
Sara smiles.
“And she would get right in my face”—Ian holds his hand right in front of his eyes—“and put her arms around my middle, and she’d say, ‘Nothing’s mightier than loving someone and expecting nothing in return. No fool human could have come up with an idea like that.’ ”
“Was she saying that you never loved her back?”
Ian laughs. “No. The first time she said it she was talking about our children. But she said it often of other people. In time I came to agree with her.”
“So you believe God has forgiven you?”
“I believe God has given me a thousand chances to look at people and see what I might give them instead of what they might give me. They don’t exist to forgive me. I exist to love them.”
Sara swirls the coffee in her cup. “I don’t know what I think of God.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to stay open.”
“Maybe not.”
“Do you still love Marina and Dylan?”
“Yes.”
“Will you love them if they never forgive you?”
“How could I hold that against them?”
“Then whatever it is you think you did or should have done—keep loving them without expecting them to redeem you, Sara. God will find you there.”
I’ve heard enough. This man is full of hot air. God never found me, after all.
“Shut it off,” I demand, waving at the screen. But my protest is as weak as I have become.
“You expected your children to save you too,” my companion says as if he can read my thoughts. “Only God can save.”
“I don’t want to see anymore.”
“That’s what you said when all this first happened. Now you don’t get a say in what you have to face.” He pulls the beret down over his eyes and tips his head back against the chair.
The film rolls on.
The dream again. The nightmare:
Young Marina, the open ocean, the tiny raft. A storm is kicking up and she’s holding on, scared and tired of having been here so many times.
Already, a lashing on the raft snaps and cuts her across the cheek. It’s giving way so soon. The wind is merely a howl. It hasn’t even started screeching yet. She remembers that her float is made of her brother’s bones and it’s her job to hold them together in spite of the odds. But she can’t. She’s not big enough, old enough, strong enough. This is what she’s guilty of, she thinks: of not being enough. Of never being enough for her brother or me to make up for her mother’s absence. Tonight this makes her angry. Angry at her mother for leaving, at me for neither living nor dying, for abandoning her to my debts, my own inadequate efforts to create a mother for her out of material things.
I wish I had told you before now, Marina, how well you’ve done with what you were given—and with what I couldn’t give. I am so proud of you.
Anger doesn’t do any good in dreams. Or in comas. It doesn’t hold a raft together. It will probably hasten her drowning.
Salt water washes over her face and she sputters. She lies on her belly, spread-eagled, her fingers cold and achy, and closes her eyes. I muster the end of my strength, rise from this red velvet seat, and walk to the screen. I raise my hands and try to touch her. The projector turns my hands into shadows and her back lies over my fingers. I know I can’t protect her. I can’t even really be with her.
The swells are engorged now. Whitecaps spill down watery hills in all directions, the avalanches of oceans. For just a little while longer, seconds at most, she can pretend she’s in a rocking cradle. Then the lullaby will turn violent and she’ll flip. If she’s lucky she’ll wake up before she breathes death in.
A light cuts across her face, like a door to a bright hall opening onto a midnight bedroom. The brightness stabs. Even though her eyes are closed, she squeezes them shut more tightly.
The light passes by again, sweeping over her squint, golden and warm. And again. She looks.
Tonight there is a dark shadow sitting on the water, long and lumpy. A jetty or an island, and at the end, a lighthouse. Never before has there been a lighthouse in her dream. Under the weight of nighttime it’s impossible to see the building itself, only the yellow orb turning. The beam passes over Marina and then illuminates the deadly rocks at the base of the land mass, the sharp teeth of a slobbering giant. Child, teeth. Life, death. The storm is pushing my daughter toward the inevitable.
Then, a surprise. The earth rumbles. The revolving light rises into the sky like a moon on its arc, and at the peak it pauses, swinging through thick clouds. What appeared to be a lighthouse is now a lantern, a light in a box, dangling from a human hand by a wire handle. The long, lumpy jetty is now a long, slender arm lifting the light, seeking, searching, scanning the ocean. A rescue mission.
Marina watches it, rising to her elbows. The wake created by the shifting earth pushes her raft away from the rocks, stronger than the stormy swells.
That light—spinning, swinging, sweeping, stabbing—circles the world once before passing over her upturned face and catching her eyes. The gentle glint changes everything. The lantern jerks into reverse. The metal handle rattles. The arm descends until the golden light shines like a sun on my daughter’s sopping, shivering body.
But it isn’t a sun. Or a lighthouse or lantern or even a simple light bulb. It’s a glass Christmas globe, dangling from a ribbon and lit from within. It sends out shoots of copper and silver and yellow warmth, held by slender and feminine fingers. Then another identical hand comes from the sky down into the water and scoops up the battered child and fragile raft before a wave dashes them both on the unforgiving rocks. Not a single bone is lost.
Dylan does not.
The night watch answers the intercom when Sara pushes the button.
“May I make a call?” Sara asks.
“It’s four in the morning.”
“I know.”
“I’ll bring a phone.”
“I don’t know the number.” Sara wraps both hands around her cold coffee. “Would you look it up for me? A Monterey number.”
Dylan rises when it’s still dark, bothered by something in one of the photographs, but he can’t remember what. Something that made him pause before moving on. Though he’s forgotten what it was, the thing won’t let him rest. He tosses and turns. He finally gives up.
He’s not sure where Marina put the little photo book. He grabs a flashlight from the drawer in his nightstand and crosses the hall into her room, passing the beam of light over the pink-and-white perfection of her space. The very opposite of his: clean, controlled. The strangest room in the house. Calm in the storm. Christmas in summertime. A glint of gold foil catches the rays of the light.
The album sits on the desk, her cell phone on top of it, both squared with the edge. When he moves to pick it up, he’s struck by that feeling in his chest that is so familiar “out there” but never here, within the secure walls of his home. He catches his breath. His heart races and then, suddenly, slows to a walk. A sweat breaks out on his forehead and then, as quickly as it came, returns to normal.
His sister is sleeping so hard that when his light crosses her face she doesn’t even stir. Her breathing is as measured as artificial swells in a wave pool. Spread out on the bedspread next to her is a copy of the sheriff’s report, which Wasson gave to Marina. She’d have had to put in a formal request for the report from the Monterey County sheriff, which would have more details about the discovery of Misty’s car, and the interviews with her parents and extended family. Dylan takes these pages to read for himself.
Downstairs in the kitchen he pulls a Pepsi out of the fridge and pops the top. His hand is shaking even before he takes a sip of caffeine. So he drinks it standing in front of the window over the sink, staring out at the black ocean, holding on to the lip of the counter.
He doesn’t have to see the water to know it’s flat. It’s a terrible morning for surfing. But it’s a good morning for the gulls. They fly low, already looking for fish that only they can see.
Maybe she died out there after all.
Why not? The glassy surface hides so much from the human eye. Danger and depth and everything that Denica is afraid of. Maybe even poisonous spiders and dead mothers sucked into bottomless trenches. Because who really knows? Who can say they’ve seen it all?
Safe on the water, safe at home. Everything else is a potential threat. Why? In a blink Dylan understands that I was the ocean that covered our house in a flood of secrets, and now that I am receding, everything will be exposed.
We could have pretended, he said to his sister just the night before. Pretended that Sara was his mother, that there were no unanswered questions, that all was well in the world. We could keep pretending.
We tried that, I murmur. We did. That’s exactly what I did. I pretended that I knew what was best, that I could raise my children without answering their most important questions, questions they didn’t even know how to ask.
A new kind of fear presses in on my son. He’s never been afraid of his own house before.
He drinks the soda slowly, waiting for it to give him boldness before he studies the photos he only glanced at last night. Something about the images is pricking at his lungs, threatening to pop them like balloons. He can’t put his finger on the problem.
I can’t either.
And then Denica’s voice jabs over his right shoulder, demanding, Are we going or not? Dylan sits down at the counter and opens the book.