This Place Had Other Plans
Dear Ray,
Willa and I have planned my birthday from sunrise to sunrise.
We’re waking up early and biking down to Glass Beach. Then we’re hiking up to the Triangle Point swing for a picnic lunch, just the two of us. Kate’s cooking an elaborate, mysterious dinner, and Willa’s hinted about “a little surprise” for me that I can’t open until campfire. And then, after we’ve eaten my cake and watched the stars come out and doused the flames, we’re driving Rip Van Winkle to an all-night disco down in Mendocino, where we’re dancing until the sun comes out...
I marked my place in the diary with the scrap of lace Willa had given me, my Super Special Bravery Award like Dylan’s cape, hid it in the treehouse, and went to bed.
Our day didn’t quite work out like that.
Or, as Willa put it in her airy-yet-mesmerizing way, “This place had other plans for you.”
We were coasting downhill on our brakeless bikes, bumping along the dirt trail to the beach like we’d done a hundred times. I’d never go as fast as Willa, but now that I’d memorized the most perilous bumps and turns—and identified a few handy, unofficial markers that reminded me where to duck or slow down—I’d become confident enough to relax and enjoy the ride. The wind whooshing up from the beach chilled my face, and it was so early that dew beaded the dark leaves.
There could be a song in that. The deep green leaves, how the sunlit drops clinging to them sparkled like stars. “Night for Day.” No. “Almost Like Stars.” I’d play around with the idea tomorrow night, alone in my quiet cabin, and if anything came of it I’d ask Willa to set the words to music. Today was for biking and surfing and dancing.
“Eighteen!” I shouted down to her.
“Eighteen!” came the reply, a few seconds later.
“Sing for an old lady!”
She obeyed, and I leaned forward to catch her voice over the birds. I’d told her that listening to her voice on the way to the beach kept me balanced, and the idea thrilled her. Really I just liked to hear it, now that she trusted me enough to share it.
Today she sang something new—a silly, personalized version of Joni’s “Circle Game”:
And nooow the girl is eighteen...
And her dancing is the best you ever seeeen...
I smiled to myself. Even Willa’s nonsense songs could stop your heart. Her voice was so pure when it trilled on a high C.
I was focusing on Willa’s impromptu song, and excited about my birthday, but I remembered to look for my safety markers. There, ahead of me, the shred of yellow nylon tied to a dying branch that reminded me to slow down ever-so-slightly on a gradual switchback. A few minutes later, on my right, the coast side—a trio of fat pine stumps right before the curve where a winter mudslide had made the trail uncomfortably narrow. A graceful lean to the left along that stretch and I was fine. I tilted and swerved, leaned and corrected like the Tour de France racers I’d seen on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, as if I’d done this for years. Like I belonged here.
And now the girl is eighteeeen.
She is our San Francisco queeeen...
She thinks Blondie is peachy-keeeeen...
“I love it!” I shouted down.
Her voice fluttered up the hillside: “Do you think it’ll be a hit?”
“Number one with a bullet!”
I could just catch her laughter over the birds and my whirring bike spokes.
My most important marker was coming up. It was nailed to a tree halfway down, about ten yards before a hairpin turn: a birdhouse.
It was wood, its roof studded with shells. Willa had made it when she was little, and though it was mossy and badly splitting—hardly a weatherproof shelter, which is why it was always unoccupied—the pearly shells that she had glued on when she was seven still stood out clearly against the dark umber bark.
Whenever I saw the birdhouse’s shell roof straight ahead, I knew it was time to drag my right toe on the ground in preparation for the sharpest left turn.
I was thinking about many things. The fact that I was now an adult. The fun day ahead. A new scheme I had concocted, to get Willa to perform at a nursing home or hospital to nudge her out of her stage loathing, as she called it.
Still, I remembered to look for that flash of white.
By the time I realized I should have seen it already, that something was wrong, it was too late.
One second I was safely in the middle of the trail.
The next I was in the woods. Desperately gripping the handlebars, crunching over ferns and juniper bushes. I missed a tree trunk by inches. I juttered down, out of control, my mouth bouncing off my handlebar. My front tire hit a log and the bike bucked me off. I was airborne, a bright green bed of ferns flying at my face. I could make out fringed edges, individual dewdrops. Sparkles. Stars. Stars Falling on Me. Another new song, I thought, before I closed my eyes in fear.
Go limp, I thought. Limp as a rag doll. Ancient wisdom retrieved from some girlhood riding lesson. I landed face-first in the wet fronds and rolled, tumbling downhill.
Panic, confusion, the drumming command go limp, go limp, go limp.
Pain came later.
Branches cracked, something thudded. Me, I realized. When at last I stopped rolling and the world became quiet again, my first clear thought was that I’d been betrayed. The trail, and this land I’d grown so tender toward, had turned on me. Like it wanted to let me know that I didn’t belong here after all.
My second thought was that my father and Patricia would hear of my accident from across the Atlantic, blame Graham, and make me leave early.
“Jackie!” Willa’s voice. Strange. It came from above me, up the hill. It seemed impossible that I’d overtaken her. Had I fallen that far, that fast? I opened my eyes to the marigold ruffle of her skirt hem floating above me; she was frantically checking my legs.
“Oh my god are you okay does that hurt don’t move your head’s bleeding. Did you break anything? Don’t move, you’re not supposed to move.”
Her face hovered over mine, eyes huge with worry.
“Hey,” I said. “I finally beat you.”
She didn’t find this funny. She pulled off her sweater and wadded it gently under my head, tucked her beach towel over my body. “Don’t move, I’m getting help.” She ran uphill.
“Willa!”
“What?”
“Don’t tell my father,” I called weakly. Then the forest went black.
When I woke I saw green and blue. Evergreen branches framing sky. Then, eventually, the green and blue of Graham’s soft plaid shirt.
Blood was trickling down my forehead and we didn’t know how bad it was yet, but as he cradled me and picked me up, as if I weighed no more than the bough of a baby fir, he said, “I guess this place doesn’t want you to leave, Lady Sunshine.”
“The birdhouse disappeared.”
Though he couldn’t have understood what this meant, he said knowingly, “Ahh, child. Isn’t that always the way?”
Later, after Willa went back to retrieve my bike—the contents of my basket had scattered far and wide, and my glass tube of Strawberry Kissing Potion was nestled in a branch six feet off the ground—she reported that the birdhouse had fallen off of its peg. Age and rot. Nothing insidious.
My injuries could have been much worse. Three sprained fingers, a gash above my right ear, a cut inside my lower lip, from when my face slammed against my bike bell. It left me with a permanent, private thickness that I’d run my tongue along whenever I was nervous.
I most likely had a mild concussion, according to the doctor half a mile up the highway. But he didn’t think a scan was necessary. He shaved the two-inch strip above my scalp himself—apologizing because his nurse was off—gave me seven tidy stitches and a bottle of Vicodin, and made Graham and Willa swear they’d wake me every two hours.
“Better still if she doesn’t fall asleep at all tonight,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Graham said, mockingly, and I thought of insubordinate draftees from anti-Vietnam movies. But he added, looking at me: “We’ll keep her entertained, Doctor.”
I was bandaged, babied, rather enjoying the attention.
On the long van ride home—Graham driving, Angela in the passenger seat, me flat on the bed with Willa by my side—I asked Willa how my hair looked.
“It looks fine! Really punk!” But her eyes were still clouded by fear.
“I’m okay, Wills.”
Angela made me wash the Vicodin down the kitchen sink drain. She offered me grass instead, something misty and gentle, for healing. Kate installed me in Willa’s waterbed, with Willa on the floor. Angela put her cool hand on my forehead and promised she’d only write to my father if I got worse. All day people came bearing gifts. Records, pillows, magazines (new ones for a change). Liam presented a half-melted pint of custard. The kids clubbed together and gave me a lunch sack full of scratch-and-sniff stickers.
That night, Graham carried me to the top of the campfire ring and set me down next to him at his place of honor, decreeing that the entire community should stay awake with me.
What followed was an all-night campaign of carousing, improv, smoking, singing—some beautiful, some shockingly bad. A Decameron’s worth of entertainment crammed into one night.
I remember Willa’s face at my right, aglow from the crackling campfire. She gave me a signed Blondie 45, a UK pressing from 1976 with “In the Flesh” on the A side and “X Offender” on the B side.
“Oh, Wills,” I said, wiping my eyes, though the fire’s plume was nowhere near me.
“It’s nothing. Just wait for my dad’s gift.”
Near two in the morning, Graham handed me a small package. It was the gadget someone had sent him from Japan, the one that made music sound like “an underwater kazoo”—a Sony Walkman. I was glad to have it, but puzzled. Willa’s excitement didn’t seem to match this gift, expensive as it was.
Then Graham stood.
“And now my real birthday present,” he said. “I told you today after your wee spill that this place didn’t want you to go. And we don’t want you to, either.”
I held my breath, afraid to hope.
“Your father wrote back. He said you can stay here through the school year.”
Most people can go their whole lives without feeling so loved.
I had sixty days of perfect happiness. Sixty consecutive days. I was needed, I was wanted, I was accepted. I was loved. I wonder if I appreciated these things more than any other visitor that passed through their gates. I was so hungry for it.
How ironic, if the person responsible for destroying their Eden had the only true taste of it.