Pasadena (70 page)

The filling-station window reflected the Gold Bug, and there was a sign on an iron post, but no one had even got around to painting it and the blank white rectangle swung in the wind.

“Mommy? You went to school here?”

They drove out through the lettuce fields, and on the outskirts of the village everything was as it had been for fifty years, and Lindy felt
the relief settle in her throat that something had stayed the same. The electricity poles ran along a distant ridge in a column, tilting toward one another, and the wires drooped in long cautious smiles. The red-leaf lettuce fields waited dormant for the first winter fog, the crumbling soil blowing about. They came upon Miss Winterbourne’s house, and the shades were drawn in the front windows, and Lindy thought she saw a finger peel back the corner of a shade. Maybe Miss Winterbourne would become Pal’s teacher and he would grow up reading Edmund’s books.

Lindy parked the car in the dooryard and told Sieglinde to wait. Lindy had never been inside Miss Winterbourne’s cottage—as far as she knew, no one ever had. The paint on the paneled door was peeling, and the knocker was dull with grime. When Lindy knocked, the entire door fell in, as lightly and quietly as if it were a model made of balsa. She stepped through the doorframe and the cottage was tidy but empty, nothing left inside but the roller shades and, on the mantel, a pair of cheap black-glass earrings, dusty and warm in Lindy’s palm.

“Mommy, when are we going home?”

Lindy and Sieglinde drove farther east, where the grasses grew in brown-and-gold carpets up the hills. The macadam ended and the car picked its way along the stony lane and Lindy felt the vibration in her cheeks. Yesterday, during the fever, Willis had come to her door, but Rosa had turned him away, telling him that his wife was resting with
the female business
. But Willis had persisted, knocking again and rattling the doorknob and pressing the door so hard that it trembled in its frame. Lindy was lying naked on her bed, ice in her fists and more ice melting atop her forehead and on her breasts and stomach, the cold water lurching between her thighs. The room was hot and the air was thick, and the open window brought no relief. Lindy felt trapped, as if she were being buried alive in a sludge of fever. Willis continued, now flinging himself at the door, and then the wood cracked, like the ice cracking behind her ears, but the door held, and from the other side Willis called, “Lindy, when will you come out?” She tried to mouth the words but nothing formed on her tongue, and so Rosa said again, “She’ll be better in a few hours. Let her rest.” In the evening, after her bath, Lindy had sat with Willis on the loggia. The moon was bright enough to reveal the burn-scar running up one of the far hills, and the swath of black burnout in the distant mountains. The fire had been contained within
three days; only a dozen houses had been lost, and a corral of roan-rumped mares. People liked to name the fires after women, and since this one came so close to devouring the orange ranch, the local firefighters and the onlookers with their collapsing nickel telescopes and the lovers backseat-kissing in the glow of forty-foot flames officially dubbed this fire “Valencia.” “But we grow navels here, not Valencias,” Willis had tried, unsuccessfully, to explain. Nonetheless, the fire entered the logs as “Valencia”: houses burned, 12; acres scorched, 4,400; stock killed, 9 mares; lives lost, just 1—a girl of nineteen or twenty burned so badly no one could identify her. There was speculation over who she was and how she had ended up in the fire’s path, but in the end no one knew and no one came forward to offer the girl’s story and she was remembered briefly as Valencia’s only victim—a
Star-News
picture of the perfect outline her body had preserved in the dry gold grass. A reporter wrote in his column that the girl was a runaway who had lived in an abandoned bobcat cave, but there was more speculation to that story than truth, and three or four people wrote the newspaper saying
Let the girl rest in peace
, and so Pasadena did just that, never thinking of her again.

The same dry gold grass covered the hills east of Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, and Lindy turned down a narrow lane and crested a hill and saw the glint in the field of an old rail line. She drove to the top of the hill, and where she had expected to find the glass-walled Cocoonery there was nothing but a giant water tank, shaped like an onion and painted with a sign:
WATER DEPT
.

“Mommy, what are we doing all the way out here?”

She didn’t know what she expected to find, but something told her she had to go out and look. Before the sixth fever, she had visited Dr. Freeman and he had asked how Willis was holding up and Lindy, knotting a pear-patterned scarf about her head, said, “Nothing gets to Willis.” The doctor had looked into her eyes with a penlight and kneaded the flesh in the pit of her arms and around her breasts and held his ruler against the gummy tumor. Expressionless, he told Lindy that he found her the same as before, neither healed nor in further decline; but she knew better. She lingered on the daybed, the fan blowing in her face, the fern limp in its pot, and after several minutes Dr. Freeman looked up from his desk and said, “Did you want something else, Mrs. Poore?” And then again: “Mrs. Poore?”

“Don’t you see any improvement, Dr. Freeman? Can’t you tell?”

In the afternoon, Lindy and Sieglinde returned to Condor’s Nest. As the Kissel made its way down the dirt lane there was no evidence of Bruder’s return, but Lindy sensed something and she knew he was there. In the dooryard she called, but only the wind mounting the bluff greeted her. In the barn a horse sneezed and a cow groaned, udder-sore and craving salt. The bantams had pecked the yard clean of grass, and the breeze threw dirt and sand around her ankles. Lindy and Sieglinde went to the door of Dieter’s old cottage but, as before, it was locked. Through the windowpane she found everything as it once was: the mantel carved with pilot whales, the shelves tidy with Dieter’s books, the gold stamping on the three spines of Gibbon catching the light. Next, Lindy checked the cottage where Valencia had made her kitchen. It too was locked, and Lindy pressed her face against the window above the sink and saw that nothing had changed in there either: the oilcloth on the table, the shelves of dishes neatly stacked, a hunk of cheese on a plate, humid and ripe. It was as if the farm had held back the fists of time. Sieglinde’s hand was sticky in hers, and the girl rubbed her eyes with her thumb and her dull dark hair blew wildly about her face.

Lindy led her daughter to the third cottage, and at the plank door Lindy said that
this was where Mommy grew up
. Again, Sieglinde’s face screwed up:
here?
The door was locked, and the two stood on the stoop, and the chilies hanging from the post were red and fresh, and when Lindy leaned in against the window a cold fear raced through her and she dropped her daughter’s hand to cover her own mouth. Inside the cottage the two beds remained, the balding horsehair blankets tucked tightly beneath the mattress. The hand-colored etchings of Germany’s cathedrals were tacked to the walls, and Siegmund’s old stocking cap was planted on the post of his bed. In his old pillow was the ghost impression of someone’s head. And on Lindy’s old bed—not Lindy’s but Linda’s, but not really Linda’s either; no, Sieglinde’s—on the bed that once belonged to Sieglinde Stumpf lay Dieter, his arms folded funereally across his chest and his ankles tied to the bedstead with what appeared to be clear silk trolling line.

Lindy banged on the window crying,
Papa! Papa!
, but her father didn’t move. His eyelids were closed and everything in the cottage was still and time ran forward and out of Lindy’s grasp; she was panting, the palm of her hand rapping the window, banging the door. The window
was too high for Sieglinde to see in and she said, “Mommy? What is it, Mommy?” And Lindy’s face twisted in what must have been a horrible fashion, for Sieglinde’s lip began to quiver and her eyes spilled over with tears and she too screamed, an icy child’s scream rising above the ocean roar and piercing the ears of the hovering gulls and filling the remaining ten and a half acres of Condor’s Nest. But nothing stirred, and Dieter lay motionless on the bed, his ankles turned awkwardly, his legs spread unnaturally, the silk line like a gossamer chain, and Lindy and Sieglinde stumbled into the kitchen yard and looked up into the glare. They held each other at the edge of the bluff and looked out to the beach at low tide, the beds of green surfgrass limp against the rocks.

“Why are we crying, Mommy?” Sieglinde thought to ask, but Lindy didn’t answer. Sieglinde’s face cleared, as if she thought that perhaps this was a game, and she began to skip in circles round her mother, singing the song Lindy had taught her:
O, she was born in the Ocean, and died in the Sea!
Sieglinde didn’t remember the rest and she repeated the first line over and over and Lindy stood in the flash of sunlight for what could have been a minute or an hour, she didn’t know, but it was long enough for her to sense the sun shift, the tide inch forward, and the afternoon make its first gestures of closing down.

She was still standing at the bluff when the cottage door opened and there was Lolly, pushing Dieter in a wheelchair onto the porch. “Lindy? What are you doing here?”

Lindy was so startled that she couldn’t answer, and hadn’t she seen, as plain as the rays of sun, the trolling line looped cruelly about Dieter’s ankles? And the lifeless waxiness of his forehead? Lindy couldn’t explain any of it, and she felt the grip of fear tighten about her heart. She didn’t believe that her eyes had deceived her; no, Lindy wasn’t capable of believing that. Deception would come from anywhere, but not from within—this Lindy knew: she would fatally cling to it. “Lolly, what did you do to him?”

Lolly began sweeping the porch around Dieter, and she had an empty look to her, her blue eyes milky and unfocused. She giggled and said, “What are you talking about, Lindy?”

Lindy said she’d seen it with her own eyes, Dieter’s legs turned in a funny way and the trolling line wrapped about his feet and anchoring him to the bed.

“Lindy, you must be seeing things. Why would I tie Dieter to the
bed?” She spoke without looking at Lindy; Lolly’s head tilted toward the sand on the porch’s planks and she continued sweeping the same spot over and over, dreamily embracing the broom handle. Lindy asked if Lolly was all right, if something was wrong. “I’m fine, Lindy. It’s you I’m worried about. You don’t look well, Lindy.”

“Where is he, Lolly?”

“Who?” Lolly moved to the porch corner, bending to reach the dirt beneath the bench. Lindy asked again and Lolly said nothing, humming to herself, and in profile Lindy could see how thin she was—she could disappear behind the porch post. Lindy peered through the open cottage door and saw the bed, delicately dented with the outline of Dieter’s body, but she didn’t find any fishing line. Under the mattress? Beneath the pillow? Nothing; had she imagined it? But the snarls of line had been there: colorless but identifiable, like a jelly floating in a wave. Lolly took up a rake and was sweeping the yard and she ignored Lindy altogether.

“I saw him there,” said Lindy.

“Lindy, you might want to visit the doctor. You’re clearly seeing things. You sound like you’re going mad.”

But Lindy was healthier than she’d been in months, maybe even years, and she knew what she knew; she knew what she’d seen … but did she?

Lindy and Sieglinde climbed into the arroyo and down to the beach. They removed their shoes and stockings and rested them atop a rock. The ocean was bath-warm and gentle across their feet and they walked along the lip of the tide, into the glare, Sieglinde running up ahead and back, like a dog. As Lindy hurried down the beach the years fell away, and the only thing to remind her of who she was now was her daughter; if Sieglinde hadn’t been there, Lindy would have slipped trancelike into the past, tracing the tide’s sash, reverting to the days when the world began and ended in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. Yet Sieglinde kept snagging Lindy out of her nostalgic reverie.
Mommy! Mommy!
“Where are we going, Mommy?” To find him, said Lindy. “Who, Mommy, who? Daddy? Is Daddy here?”

They rounded the blueschist bend and then crossed Jelly Beach and reached Cathedral Cove. He was where she expected to find him, standing in the tide in trousers, and shirtless, a fishing line cast into the surf. The water beaded on his chest and the hairs across his stomach
were damp and limp like the surfgrass and he was shaking water out of his eyes. Lindy believed that he was waiting for her, and at once she became vain in that old way of hers and she wondered how she looked and the fear returned cold-fingered about her heart: Would he recognize her, had she strayed that far?

“What is Lolly doing to him?” Lindy called. She stood at the edge of the tide, her skirt in her fists, and she kept jumping back as the waves ran toward her. She yelled again and again: “I saw him with my own eyes!”

Bruder was ten feet into the surf, the waves passing through him at waist level, his line tight as it angled into the ocean. As a wave swept out she moved closer to him, but then she back-stepped with the next. This continued for a minute or more, Bruder’s back, quilted with muscle, facing her. She said it again: “What are you doing with my father?”

“I brought him home. That’s all.” He didn’t turn. He continued jerking his cork-gripped rod and adjusting the quadruple reel. She watched the nearly invisible line for a tug, and she thought how long it had been since she had set bait into the ocean.

“Will you come out of the water?” Lindy called. Bruder said he couldn’t, he had a line out, and she should be the first person to understand that.

“I’ve come to see you.”

“I thought you came to see your father.”

Then Lindy realized that Sieglinde was no longer at her side and a quick panic entered her, but it fell away when she saw the girl crawling around at the mouth of the cave. “Be careful,” Lindy called. The voice emerging from her throat didn’t sound like her.

But if Bruder wouldn’t come to Lindy, she would go to him. She stepped farther into the tide and watched the stain of water creep up her skirt and Lindy pressed on, the water taking her in like the baths Rosa prepared. The beach was rocky and the stones were sharp to the arch of her foot and the water reached up her thigh and touched the tumor—a mound no bigger than an infant’s fist, no uglier than an old red rose, no deadlier than the deadliest blue shark in the ocean’s grave—and she was next to Bruder, everything about her wet and warm. The waves sloshed her and she reached to him for balance and even with her fingers around his arm he didn’t stop adjusting the reel, turning the bone handle, pulling up on the rod’s tip. Her skirt was spread about her,
floating on the water’s surface, and Bruder said,
“Her clothes spread wide; and mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up,”
and Lindy said, “What are you talking about now?” Bruder jerked his chin and told her to forget it. A wave cut through them, and their bodies rose together as if two great hands from above had plucked them and pulled them up and then, after the wave passed, their feet were returned to the ocean floor and something sharp cut into Lindy’s toe.