CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“I heard you up again in the night,” said my mother from the dining room.

She doesn’t mind holding a conversation with someone she can’t see. She’ll talk to a closed door, right at you, or through earphones. It was the next morning, after a night of bad dreams.

“I wake up a lot,” I said.

I was slicing a banana. The banana sections looked like primitive coins.

“Why are you eating it like that?” Mom demanded, bustling through the kitchen.

I said something about it being good practice in lab technique. She had a folder marked “Immigration Service” in her hand. An employee had been using the Social Security number of a deceased cousin. She would spend the morning selecting letter formats on her word-processing menu: Business Letter, Personal Letter, Death Warrant.

I had been wondering what role she would adopt: distant but still caring ex-wife, indifferent, nosy. She had opted this morning for the frantic, business-as-usual ploy she used when a cat has died or an unexpected envelope has arrived from the IRS. She said, as she hurried off to the Spartan shelves and drawers of her home office, “I forgot to tell you—there’s a postcard for you, from Georgia. Under the wooden fruit.”

A sweeping panorama, a beach with gigantic driftwood, the ocean-cured logs of the north coast. “Thinking of you, Egg Head!” she had written in her graceful, feminine hand.

“I called her last night and told her about your father,” Mom said.

I asked what Georgia had said.

“She’s worried about you,” Mom said. “She always said you and your father are like this,” she added, holding up two fingers side by side.

Georgia once said the pattern of seeds in a slice of banana look like a monkey’s face. My mom says the Man in the Moon looks like a rabbit eating cabbage. I had a piece of rye toast for breakfast, sliced banana, and a glass of pineapple juice.

I gave Rowan a call, knowing the Beals were probably gone for the weekend. But to my surprise Mrs. Beal answered, and said that they had heard about my father’s troubles and that they had every sympathy. That was the way she expressed it, making this all sound historical, the Time of the Troubles.

Mrs. Beal has the most wonderful voice on the phone, it melts all opposition. “But you have to come over,” she protested. Or maybe she has the gift, knowing what the caller needs to hear.

Mrs. Beal’s parents were always appearing in the society pages, fund raisers for the ballet. Mr. Beal’s family used to own a company that manufactured environment controls for airplanes—the mechanisms that allow aircraft flying through cold and lethally thin air to turn the atmosphere into warm, breathable gas. Mr. Beal’s scuffed hiking boots and loose-fitting plaid shirts were made to order, and their driveway always had brand new cars spattered with mud.

I wondered what they fed you Sunday morning in a county jail.

Mrs. Beal opened the door wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and showing a smile of perfect teeth, the kind you capture after years of orthodontia. She’s a size eight and buys clothes already faded, carefully tailored rips at the knee. “Bonnie!” she cried, and I was a survivor, home from a war.

“You’re just the one we need,” said Mr. Beal.

“I keep telling Dad you’re the most resilient person I know,” said Rowan, offering me a plate of corn muffins.

“Resilient,” I echoed. The Beal family doesn’t say you look “good.” They say you look “top-hole.”

Rowan at once lowered his eyes. For a bright, earnest guy he is easy to embarrass. “I mean—full of life,” he said.

“Is that what I’m full of?” I said, to laughter all around. Good old Bonnie, keeping her sense of humor. Sometimes I thought that despite their ever-warm welcome, Rowan’s parents preferred one of his other girlfriends, the mature sophisticate with long, glossy hair, off to Washington D.C. or Paris to visit her uncle the ambassador.

My dad likes Rowan, always showing him how to lay down a perfect bunt, choking up on the bat, and how to get loose before racket ball, stretching, getting those thigh muscles, the adductor longus, the adductor magnus, ready for action.

Rowan calls his father by his first name, Bill, and his Mom is called Bev by everyone, and while I played along, I was, privately, a little uncomfortable with this casual way of addressing parents.

“Are you ready, Miss Chamberlain?” said Mr. Beal. He had a manly little dimple in each cheek, Thomas Jefferson with short hair.

We drove in a Land Rover so new the gearshift knob had a plastic hood like a shower cap. Pigeon droppings already splotched the hood.

The Pacific rarely confronts broad, gentle beaches in Northern California. The land stretches, blackberry and tawny scruff grass. And then it ends, a cliff, a twenty-meter drop to rocky rubble, and the rinse and shrug of the surf.

I didn’t know what sort of trek we had in mind, carrying my part of the gear and the two thermoses—French roast and cranberry juice. Mr. Beal carried the nerve center of the sound equipment in a backpack, and Rowan and I scouted ahead with mike booms, a few lengths of aluminum poles that telescoped into each other. When a casual misstep had me lurching into Rowan, neither of us minded.

The wind tufted the dunes into brief scatterings of sand; the dune grass whispered in the breeze. The air was crisp, the sun warm, kneading through my sweatshirt. Rowan was going on about the charms of a den of coyote pups they had captured with the sort of shotgun mike spies use, and how you could hear each yip as the little teeth of the playful creatures took fun bites out of each other.

I could imagine my father’s voice, what he said on one of our visitations, as the divorce became final. We sat on lawn furniture in his new garden, before the white gravel and the bamboo, before the gardener whose tastes had been celebrated in Sunset Magazine. Georgia wandered among the stands of wild fennel, and if you didn’t know her you would think she wasn’t listening.

Dad’s landscape in those days had been dry dirt and milkweed, and a cord of firewood snaked over by morning glories. His new house was three stories, with a billiard room and four walk-in closets, a skylight in the master bedroom, and an armed-response security alarm.

Dad pointed out where his sand garden was going to be, a white empty expanse you could rake into different patterns. He showed me where the river gravel would shape a path through fluttering, decorative grasses.

“And we’ll put in a swimming pool,” he said, “with a hot tub, Jacuzzi, twelve-foot deep end.” He touched me, on my hand, the way he does when he is describing an intercepted pass, a wild throw from center field, trying to pass his enthusiasm like an electric current.

“What is happening now doesn’t change the way I feel about you,” he said. He turned, speaking toward the shifting, swaying stalks of fennel. “It alters nothing about my feelings for my two girls,” he said.

He touched my hand again, and rested his fingers there when he added, “It doesn’t change the two of us.”