Traffic is heavy along the darkened freeway, an undulating river of soft rubicund taillights carrying her along in its flow. She flicks on the radio, listening first to the news, then switching to music, trying not to think of the dead girl, of Tim, of the child growing inside her and what she’s going to tell people when she can hide it no longer. A song she loves comes on, one they hardly ever play on the radio—“I Came So Far for Beauty,” a Leonard Cohen song in the Jennifer Warnes version—and she tries to sing along, but the words tumble past her and after the second chorus she falls silent.
Her first stop is at the grocery in the lower village—after that big lunch she doesn’t need much: a piece of salmon (farmed, color added) and a bag of spinach to pop in the microwave—and then the video rental. It takes her a long while to pick something out, working her way through the current releases, most of which she and Tim saw in the theater when they came out, and then the comedies, which are uniformly puerile and funny by definition only, before finally drifting into the classics section and settling on an Ernst Lubitsch movie she’s seen at least twice or maybe three times but not recently. The idea—the theme of the evening—is to keep it light, a little distraction, that’s all, and then crawl up to bed and let the oblivion wash over her like a dark tide of nothing.
Fine. Super. But when she gets to the front door and inserts her key in the lock, she finds that it’s already open. Which is strange, because she’s not the sort of person who forgets to lock up. Not ever. For a moment, mentally retracing her steps from the time the alarm clock went off and she’d lurched out of bed in a panic till she left the house with a stale bagel smeared haphazardly with cream cheese, she tries to visualize herself at the door and turning the key in the lock, but the image won’t come. All at once, she’s afraid. There’s been a series of break-ins in the neighborhood recently, in one of which a woman on Olive Mill Road—not three blocks from here—was attacked on surprising the thieves while they were rearranging the furniture so as to get at her oriental carpets. Very slowly, silently, like a thief herself, she turns the knob and reaches in a hand to flick on the hallway light.
She’s poised on the doorstep, ready to bolt if need be, but when she gradually pushes the door open—all the way to the wall to be sure there’s no one flattened behind it—she sees nothing but the familiar entry hall, the table there piled with outerwear, umbrellas, unread magazines and the three purses she’s most tired of. “Hello?” she calls. “Anyone here?” And then, heart leaping, she thinks of Tim. He’s the one who can never remember to lock the door behind him—half the time he doesn’t even know where his keys are. “Tim?” she calls, already foreseeing a reunion, Tim come back to surprise her, and wouldn’t it be just like him to pop out of a dark corner and scare the wits out of her? “Tim, is that you?”
It isn’t until she’s inside, until she’s made her way through the kitchen and living room and into the bedroom, that she begins to understand. Tim has been here, but he’s here no longer. His things—everything, his bicycle, his books and video games, even his underwear and his T-shirt collection—are gone. Empty drawers, that’s what he’s left behind. Dust bunnies. An old pair of high-tops with broken laces and soles worn through at the heels.
She has an impulse to pick up the sneakers, to touch them, lift them to her face, but she can’t. Her legs go weak on her and she has to sit down right there where she is, on the corner of the bed. She folds her arms across her breasts and holds tight to her shoulders. She can’t seem to lift her head. After a while, her hair begins to slip loose, the force of gravity teasing it away from her ears strand by strand till her face is in shadow. How long she sits there in that posture, she doesn’t know, hopeless, slumped over, staring at her own two knees locked together in the navy blue twill of the suit she wore to court, the knees he stroked and caressed, the thighs, and where was he? He couldn’t even call? Leave a note? Anything? Anything to acknowledge that they meant something to each other, that they’d slept in the same bed for five years? It was obscene. A joke. And wrong, deeply wrong.
Later, much later, when she finally does push herself up from the bed, she wanders the rooms like a patient on the surgical ward, shuffling her feet, brushing her fingers idly over the tables and chairs, looking for some trace of him. The note is there, has been there all along—she finds it in the kitchen, pinned beneath the whetstone on the cutting board. A single sheet of paper, folded over once. Inside are two keys—his house key and the spare key to the Prius. The note consists of three sentences:
Alma:
I love you, I’ll always love you, but if you want to do this, you’re on your own. You can keep the car because I won’t be needing it—after the Farallones thing I’m thinking of going up north for the summer to work with this bird guy from the U. in Fairbanks. After that, we’ll see.
Tim
The smell of the salmon nauseates her but she forces herself to eat, the kitchen overlit, cheerless, absolutely still. Afterward, she puts on the movie to distract herself, but she can’t follow it. It’s just noise and motion. She hates Tim, that’s what it is—she’s just glad she found out what he’s really like before it’s too late. And she hates the baby inside her too—the embryo, the thing he implanted there, the life, always more life. She goes to bed when the clock tells her to but she can’t sleep. She can’t call her mother. She won’t call Tim.
In the morning, it’s worse. She must have dozed, must have dreamed, but all she can remember is lying flat on her back and staring at the ceiling while daylight came creeping into the room as if ashamed of itself. It’s a workday, Tuesday, but she isn’t going in to work. What she’s going to do—what she has to do—is force herself out of bed so she can evacuate her bladder, go through the morning ritual of vomiting, washing her face and brushing the sourness out of her mouth, then pull on her clothes and drive downtown. To the clinic. She’s twenty weeks pregnant, second trimester, and she hasn’t been to the clinic, hasn’t even driven past it, since Tim forced its existence on her back in November. She doesn’t even know when they open or if anybody there will see her. Or more to the point: if they perform late-term abortions. What she does know is that for an abortion at this stage—or procedure, as they call it—the fetus will have to be removed with instruments, with forceps, and then they’ll use the suction device and finally a curette to scrape the lining of the uterus to make sure all the remaining tissue is removed. Her uterus is stuffed full, that’s the problem, pressing at her abdomen, swelling it, pushing and puffing and shrinking her clothes, and they—whoever they are, somebody, a doctor in surgical scrubs—will empty it, make everything go away. That’s the point of the procedure. That’s the plan.
All she can think of as she swings out into traffic on the freeway is just that—making it all go away. She’s put nothing on her stomach, not even coffee or dry toast. The nausea is there, scratching at the back of her throat as if to claw its way out. Cars bristle around her. The morning is bright, charged with sun, and the rains have greened the vegetation along the roadway, but she hardly notices. She sees the concrete, the steel and chrome of the cars, exhaust rising poisonously as the traffic inevitably stalls and brake lights flash up and down the line. Trucks. Minivans. Trash strewn along the median. And then, just as she’s turning off the freeway, nature reasserts itself in the form of a gull sailing past toward the rippled brightness of the ocean, its wings as inevitable as the sea itself and the first creature that crawled out of it.
But the thing is, she can’t find the place. And where is it—on Haley? Ortega? Or no: Garden. It’s on Garden, isn’t it? Angry, frustrated—not tearful, not yet—she tugs at the wheel, stymied by one-way streets and lights that seem to change randomly as if the whole city were in league against her, bicyclists careening across her field of vision from every direction, pedestrians throwing up a wall of human flesh at one intersection after another. She goes too fast, then too slow. Someone honks behind her. She’s shuffling through her maps, none of which
seems to show downtown Santa Barbara, and at the same time trying to prise her cell phone from the side pocket of her purse—she’ll call them, that’s what she’ll do, call and ask directions, but she won’t give anything away, won’t ask for an appointment or to talk to the counselor she and Tim saw last time, just directions, that’s all—when a woman in a tiny silver car shaped like a hair dryer edges out of a driveway right in front of her and she finds herself rolling into her, softly, sweetly, their bumpers meeting as gently as two pool balls kissing in the middle of a green felt table.
There’s another honk behind her, a sudden startled screech of brakes. She snatches a look at the woman’s face, a woman not much different from her, a woman in her thirties on her way to work with her hair brushed out and her eyes freshly made up. They study each other for an instant, the woman’s expression running through its permutations from shock to embarrassment and then annoyance, anger and resignation, before they both simultaneously push open the doors of their cars and step out into the light. It is only then that Alma notices the two children in the backseat of the car—two small girls in school uniforms, belted in and craning their necks to see what the fuss is all about.
The Anubis, out of Santa Barbara, a thirty-seven-foot fiberglass cabin cruiser with twin Volvo diesel engines capable of doing fifty-two miles an hour on a flat sea, was purchased new in 2005 by a local couple trading up. Todd and Laurie Gilfoy, both in their late twenties, were experienced boaters, Todd having spent his summers aboard his father’s boat, the Dreamweaver, for as far back as he could remember. They’d married on graduating from UCSB, he with a degree in business and she in elementary education, and he’d been co-managing his father’s GMC dealership ever since, while she taught second grade at a private school in Hope Ranch. They had no children and liked to spend their weekends on the water, often in the company of other young couples. Santa Cruz Island was one of their favorite destinations, particularly the south shore, where there were fewer boaters to spoil the scenery. Both liked to drink. And when they drank, they often fell into a kind of competition for attention that could make things uncomfortable for their guests, particularly when those guests were trapped on a boat in the middle of the channel with nowhere to go.
On a clear Saturday in September, just a month after they’d purchased the boat and renamed it the Anubis (Laurie’s idea—she was a devotee of Egyptian mythology and hoped someday to visit the great pyramids along the Nile), they invited two other couples to spend the weekend with them at Coches Prietos. Jonas and Sylvie Ryerson were close friends from their undergraduate days; Ed and Lucinda Cherwin, who were ten years older and lived next door to Jonas and Sylvie, were new acquaintances. They met at the marina at ten in the morning, the day perfect, temperatures in the mid-seventies with a light to moderate offshore breeze and swells of two to three feet. Laurie was there at the gate in a leopard-print bikini and pink Crocs to lead them to the boat, where Todd, wearing only a pair of cargo shorts, was waiting with a pitcher of margaritas. “Hey, you lubbers,” he shouted. “I thought you’d never fucking get here. Come on, what are you waiting for?”
Before they were out of the harbor, Todd was pouring a second round of drinks, and when Lucinda Cherwin demurred with a smile, pointing out that it was only ten-fifteen in the morning and they had all day—and night, for that matter—Todd’s face darkened. “Pussy,” he snapped. And then, for the benefit of the group: “All pussies and lubbers go below. Right?” He leaned into Jonas, grinning tightly. “Am I right?”
What can be forgiven and what cannot? By the time they were five miles offshore, all four guests were in the cabin and Todd and Laurie were on deck in the cockpit, which was open to the sun, the canvas sides and hardtop having been stowed away, and they were arguing about something. Loudly. Violently. There was a punishing thump from the deck above and then Laurie came down the steps to the cabin, bleeding at the corner of her mouth. She was crying—at least Sylvie Ryserson claimed she was, but that was in retrospect—and she went into the head and locked the door and wouldn’t let anyone in. In the meanwhile, Todd was gunning the boat, swerving tightly to port and then jagging to starboard for no reason except that he felt like it, and things started to rattle in the lockers and slide across the cabin floor. Lucinda Cherwin began to feel nauseous and her husband, Jonas at his side, went up on deck to try to reason with Todd, but Todd just sat at the helm, his face frozen, ignoring them.
“Will you listen to me?” The veins stood out in Ed’s neck. He was a contractor, used to giving orders. “I tell you this is bullshit and I don’t care what’s going on between you and your wife but I want you to turn this thing around and take us back. Lucinda’s sick. We’re all sick. Do you hear me?”
Todd never even looked up. He just jerked at the wheel as if he were towing a water skier and threw them both against the rail.
“Todd, come on, man, this isn’t right,” Jonas pleaded, fighting for balance. They were old friends. He was trying to be reasonable. “You know it isn’t. Now you’re going to have to either straighten out or take us back—I mean, you’ve got Lucinda terrified—”
The upshot was that Todd finally did nose the boat around—at speed, in a savage looping turn that very nearly swamped them—and he didn’t say a word all the way back to the marina. When they’d unloaded their bags, the engines running, the air blistered with the reek of diesel and the boat still rocking on its dying wake, Jonas, who was furious at this point, stepped off the boat and shouted up at him, “You can be a real fucking jerk, man, you know that?” Todd looked up from the console then—he had a drink in his hand, another drink—and gave them all the finger. “You’re pussies,” he roared so that people on neighboring boats swung round to stare at him, “pussies, that’s all. All of you!”
No one looked back. If they had, they would have seen that Laurie was out on deck and that she was flying at him, cursing, her hair cartwheeling in the air and her fists drumming at his naked shoulder with its tattoo of a cartoon skunk wrapped round it, even as he shoved her away. What the point of contention was, no one ever knew. But the Anubis, on autopilot, went aground at China Beach ninety minutes later with no one aboard. Speculation has it that at some point in the crossing the violence escalated and the couple, locked together in a rage, tumbled overboard, while the boat, under speed, receded in the distance. The husband’s body, without a mark on it aside from abrasions on both forearms, was recovered that evening in the vicinity of where the couple was presumed to have gone overboard. The wife wasn’t found until the following winter, when her body, face up and still clad in the bikini, washed ashore at Prisoners’ Harbor.
Alma would have missed the story, but for her mother. Her mother found it on the Internet, printed it out and mailed it to her without comment, the headline—Body Found at Santa Cruz Island—underlined in red.
Winter lingered through the end of March, but the rain fell off abruptly and the snowpack wound up being just eighty percent of normal, which meant water woes down the road. Meteorologists talked of the effects of global warming, as if any one season was reflective of anything other than itself, and the Press Citizen ran a number of alarmist articles about the shrinking polar caps, the rising sea level in the Seychelles and the threat of tsunami along the California coast—and all to the good if it got people thinking. Then it was April, a steady swelling sun climbing higher each day, and though Alma knew she should be praying for a last good soaking storm, she couldn’t help feeling uplifted by the opportunity to walk the beach and get some sun on her face and legs. It felt especially good after the grimness of the winter and all she’d been through, the court business over with now, dissolved like a tablet in water, as if it had never been there at all. Maria Campos had proven true to her word—the judge dismissed all charges, not only against her but Frazier, Clive and A.P. too. And why? Because they had no merit, because they weren’t real, and the district attorney saw that, knew that, and declined to prosecute.
April was followed
by a gray May, and now, in the first week of June, the sun has vanished and the real gloom has set in. June gloom. That’s the prevailing weather pattern this time of year, the marine layer lingering throughout the day, sometimes clearing in late afternoon, sometimes not at all. It’s the time of seasonal affective disorders for people living along the coast, and she can relate to that, absolutely. This is a La Niña year, so the water is colder than usual, which results in a thicker soup hanging over the condo and the beach and most of downtown, not to mention her office and all of Ventura and Oxnard. The way she’s dealing with it is to get out of the office as much as she possibly can, and for that the island has become her refuge—especially the main ranch, which gets more sun than Scorpion.
She’s there now, lying down in the back room at the field station, trying to close her eyes. Just for a minute. It’s six-thirty in the evening and dinner is about ready, judging from the inescapable scent of sizzling garlic, ginger and green onions arising from the kitchen where the two remaining fox girls—Marguerite and Allison—are concocting a tofu and rockfish stir-fry. She can hear the murmur of voices in the main room, laughter, somebody strumming a guitar. There’ll be a dozen or so for dinner—Frazier, Annabelle, an assortment of hunters (pig boys and fox girls, they’ve been pairing off for the past year now and who could blame them?), the odd biologist, archaeologist, maintenance man, the whole thing very collegial, catch as catch can, tonight you cook, tomorrow I cook.
They’ll be drinking wine. Wine is the sacrament here, and after tramping the backcountry all day, it’s a necessary sacrament. She can picture them there, sprawled around the room, tipping the bottle over a makeshift assortment of glasses, joking, buzzing, gossiping, talking field biology, talking politics and scandal and sex and anything else that comes into their heads in the absence of TV and cell phones. Her friends. Her family. The people who’ve worked with her and under her to pursue rigorous lines of scientific inquiry and not coincidentally eliminate 5,036 feral pigs in just fifteen months, with no sign of a single survivor detectable anywhere on the island. In a minute, she’ll push herself up and go out to join them. She’ll eat—she can’t remember ever having been so ravenous as she’s been the past few weeks—but she won’t join them in a glass of wine, not even the smallest most innocuous little drop.