This Place of Wonder (8)

I hope it is also forgotten. In the pale-pink light of dawn, I flip the mattress over to make sure there are no rodents nesting in it and open the window, located behind a woody shrub so no one can see it, to let the air into the room. Leaving my bag, I climb back up the stairs, cross the massive garage (someone had a car collection), and walk into the main house, up the stairs to the linen closet, where I find sheets and towels and a duvet, which I dump at the top of the stairs to take down with me.

At the doorway to the bedroom, I pause again, finding my heart squeezed in an iron fist. The bed has been stripped down. It’s so painful I nearly can’t catch my breath, and cling to the threshold on both sides until my vision clears.

Augustus, Augustus, Augustus.

I pick up one of his pillows off the bed, and although it’s been stripped of its case, it still smells of him. I clutch it to my chest. Who will sleep here now? Will Meadow claim it for herself? Or will Augustus’s daughter take it? I’ve never met her.

Back down in my hideaway, I carve out space for food I ferret from the kitchen—things that will keep, like crackers and almond butter and apples. Cans of tuna and salmon, which I hate after endless years of canned fish twelve different ways, but beggars can’t be choosers. Cases of San Pellegrino and Topo Chico are stacked in the garage, and who will even notice if I take some of them?

When I’m done, I survey my handiwork. The room is still cold and a bit dark, but it’s better than some places I’ve had to live.

Though, really, I thought these days were behind me. I thought I might finally be getting somewhere.

I shake it off. This is temporary, just until I can get enough cash to make my way back to Boston. I’ll find a job slinging hash or cocktails and it will take only a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’ll pick back up the work on my dissertation about Meadow. I don’t need her permission, and in fact maybe it’s better if I don’t bother. Then I won’t be trying to earn her love and I can write whatever I find.

There are still so many questions about her. About her past, and her life, and her secrets.

I sit down on the now-made bed and lean back into the pillows. It’s fine. It’s comfortable, actually. I’ve been so tired, and grief has hollowed me out. The smell of Augustus rises from the pillow I stole from the bed, and I close my eyes. Just for a minute.





Chapter Seven


Maya


My sister, Rory, picks me up from rehab in her truck. When she first greets me, we hug and hug and hug and hug, her arms so tight around me that I can barely breathe. Tears spill from her eyes to the hollow of my neck, and I realize with a shock that we have entirely different responses to the death of the man we both call Dad. “I am so wrecked about this,” she cries.

I hug her tightly, rubbing her back. “I know. I’m so sorry.” It makes me feel like a monster because I’m still not feeling that much.

Funny that the biological child is so chill and the adopted one is falling apart. It’s a mean thought, but I’ve discovered over these months in rehab that I have a pretty wide mean streak, one of the millions of things I drank to cover up.

We drive up the highway with the windows open to the mild air, her red hair escaping its artful messy bun to fly in tendrils around her lightly freckled face. Everything about her is like that, as if she’s starring in a lifestyle essay in a Stampington & Company magazine, all the time, at every second. She has an adorable hipster husband who makes distressed cabinetry and doors from rescued pieces he discovers up and down the coast, and two little girls who are as pretty as their parents, and they all live together in a cute little Craftsman cottage that was dated and awful when they found it. #winningatlife.

Except that she’s not that smug. She’s just pretty and nice and kind and good, and I feel irritated with myself that she’s come all the way out here to pick me up and I’m doing my usual cynical thing. “Thank you,” I say. “Meadow has a lot going on.”

“I really don’t mind, Maya. You don’t have to keep thanking me.” She signals properly and changes lanes. Through the window on her left is the Pacific, roiling and tossing against the rocky coast of central California, the sky a sunlit blue, as if to offer the perfect complement to that hair I’ve always envied. She glances at me. “I love you, you know.”

“I do know.” I shift my gaze to the sea, thinking I don’t deserve it. I’m prickly, snarky, cynical, a cactus. She’s a flower, and I’m not sure which one is better.

We don’t chitchat. There are too many big things going on for that. We sing along to the radio, and it’s not really very long before she’s on the twisting road to the top of the bluff where my father’s house stands, a Santa Barbara mission style built in the twenties by a Hollywood director. Rory and I spent most of our childhoods here after Augustus married Meadow. We ran up and down the tiled staircases, and played all day in the pool that overlooks the ocean, and slept outside on the balconies when the weather was hot.

Belle l’été. Beautiful Summer.

My father had three wives, none current, so the house came to me. I’m not sure whether he meant that to happen or if his usual lack of attention to detail meant he just never got around to changing his trust, but either way I am now full owner of not only the house but also the restaurant and every part of his empire.