Page 13 of The California Dreamers

12

We manage to stand

1984

Pismo Beach, California

Fourteen years old

On the surface, life after the Quiver is no different from before. Long, golden days on the water, just us and our boards. We have our world of six, and don’t need anything more.

Cooking lunch in Pismo three days after we reunite, I dare a question of Mama: “Did you and Cap meet at the Quiver in Blue Beach?”

“Did someone say that?”

“Not exactly.”

“We met far from there, but not far from the beach. Now, let’s wash these apples…”

I comply, tamp my questions down. But I am frustrated by her riddles, the blankness that is Cap and Mama’s past, more than when I was younger.

And whenever I steal time alone, I take mental pictures.

Once I start, I can’t stop imagining all the photographs a person could shoot, mentally framing them, then saying click in my head. I realize it’s something I’ve done all the time, less consciously—trying to preserve bits of my life. Trying to grab hold of them to understand later. Painting stories for Dyl, Mama has always called it.

Now it becomes a tic, a physical ritual. I hold my hands up like two Ls facing each other, adjust them, closer together, farther apart, up, down until I like what’s inside my imaginary rectangle.

Then… click . I pretend to snap with an invisible camera. I do it just for me, to lock things in my memory.

Soon I’m taking pretend pictures everywhere. On my board, shooting the sky, the swell, an otter, a sandcastle behind foam. So much of surfing is waiting, watching, observing changes in water and light, and when I’m between waves I imagine what I look like from above. From land. I watch color spread on the water as the sun inches over my head to the horizon.

Click , I say in my head. Click. It’s just for fun—not against the rules.

My pictures make me feel powerful. Like someone who can erase every part of the world she doesn’t want to see, who can conjure frames around what matters most.

Someone who can stop time.

***

For a year, it is just us.

Then one warm midday in Santa Oro we come in after surfing and the light over the bluffs is a soft salmon color I’ve never seen. I frame the picture in my head. Clouds, sky…and then a glorious sight.

Wolves. Beautiful, bounding, acrylic-painted wolves.

“Ahoy, Merricks!” Charlie shouts from the Winnie’s roof. She’s in boxers and a cutoff top, her black hair whipping straight up. Bassett, broad and smiling next to the bumper, wears his favorite shirt and matching baggies with the green magnolia pattern.

I call over my shoulder, “Mama! Cap!”

They follow my gaze. Cap tips his salt-stained hat up and his eyes flash surprise, confusion. Then the crinkles around them deepen as he smiles his biggest smile.

“Coming in already?” Bass descends the steep dirt path, slow and clumsy, toting a green webbed beach chair. “You must be getting old!”

“I’ll know I’m old when I’m carting one of those around!” Playful Cap is a rare thrill.

In seconds Charlie scrambles down the hood of the RV and pulls on her black wet suit, grabs the battered, red-striped board she keeps in the Winnie. She helps her father the last few feet down the path, then runs to me, her board at her hip. “C’mon, this offshore’s not gonna last.”

The seven of us head back out together, Bass plopped contentedly on his beach chair to watch and sip Pacificos. Charlie’s laugh is so exhilarating, her hop-off so gleeful, they warm me inside. So does Mama on her board, a rare sight because she usually surfs alone. She and Dyl study kelp beds as much as the swell, but it feels right to have them near. We all watch as Cap ventures out farther than anyone. He’s fearless, all inimitable style and strength and focus. He’s thirty-seven but faster than a twenty-seven-year-old.

“Your father,” Charlie says, shaking her head to show her awe. Moments later she spots a woman on shore with a Polaroid camera and immediately swims far out of her view—though it’s nothing even Cap would mind. Just a mom taking pictures of her toddler daughter.

When there’s a lull between waves, I say, fiddling with my leash, “Thank you.”

I’m not sure she’s heard but she shrugs in response— it’s nothing. That’s our full acknowledgment of the Cap camera incident.

A minute later she spots a waist-high wave that could rightly belong to her or Griff or Cap because it’s an A-frame. All three compete for it, paddling in. But it’s a clean race, and Charlie, whose arms are nearly as fast as Cap’s, gets it. She carves a couple of times, bails as it turns to mush. Cap says a few words to her that make her smile, and I wish I could hear him.

I thought we’d never see her again, but now Charlie feels almost like one of us.

Not as if she’d never left. But because, in her reappearance, we can fully appreciate her.

Late in the day, Griff’s got his eyes closed, trusting his ears to tell him when he needs to open them, trusting his distracted parent, the ocean, not to topple him from his water-cradle. Yawning, he asks Charlie what I’m dying to: “How long are you with us?”

“A whole month!” She sits up to a straddle and splashes, windmilling her arms next to her board. Then another wave catches her attention. “That’s yours, Ronan!”

***

We travel with Bassett and Charlie for three weeks, the pack of wolves airbrushed on the Winnebago wheezing, Bass jokes, as it tries to keep up with our swift little Gull. Bassett says if he pushes the Winnie more than forty, the wolves’ll go belly-up—meaning its engine is twenty years old but he can’t afford to replace it.

“Sorry you’re here?” Bass asks Charlie one day by the side of the road in Mendocino as he pours water in the Winnie so she won’t die crawling over a steep pass.

“You know I’m not, goof. You’re fishing for compliments.” Charlie punches his enormous shoulder.

“Wait’ll we break down in the desert in Barstow in 110-degree heat.”

These things still amaze me. The way they’re planning their upcoming Mexico travels, the pin-studded map taped over Charlie’s bed in the Winnie. She’s the one poking pins in—every stop her choice.

A convoy of two, we drive from San Francisco up to the Oregon coast, then Washington, which Charlie says is beautiful but freezing. She has to wear Bassett’s ancient, way-too-big full wet suit and hood and booties, and Bassett calls her Bassett’s Hound because of all the rolls in the neoprene, like the dog’s.

One sunless afternoon in Hummingbird Beach, Washington, when the waves are steady and inviting, she foregoes surfing and stays on the sand with me and Dyl, who rarely surfs more than once a day. I’ve neglected him for Charlie and I’m trying to make it up to him.

“You don’t want to get back in?” I ask.

She shrugs. “You two are more interesting.” She gestures at the lineup. Meaning the boys or the waves? I’m not sure.

Dyl leads us to a tide pool, and the quivering creatures’ jewel colors feel miraculous in such a gray place. He’s in his element, and Charlie’s genuinely interested in all he shows her. Spiny sea urchins, kelp wheels, lichen. He explains how he’ll sketch them, explaining even our family joke—how his kelp-patterned field journal says Mer on the cover so we call it his Mer rick journal.

He wanders off, and Charlie, kneeling close to the tide pool, asks, “Ever been to Canada? We’re so close.” The signs for BC ferries are everywhere.

I say it to the rippled image of her face in the water: “We don’t leave the US.”

“Of course, your parents don’t have real driver’s licenses. Otherwise you’d come to Mexico with us. I’m an idiot.”

She puts it all so matter-of-factly. Not hiding the truth in euphemisms, not acting like it’s disloyal to wonder about Cap’s choices for us. As if she understands exactly how Cap and Mama’s silence, the way I have to be satisfied with Griff’s sifted-down, incomplete explanations make me feel. I offer something in return: “If you were an idiot, I wouldn’t tell you one real thing.”

She gazes at my reflection, serious for a second. Her lips part, head cocks. “Is that a compliment, Ronan Merrick?”

I plunge my hand in the tide pool and flick a little water at her. “Don’t get vain.”

This becomes our routine. Charlie and I surf with the others in the morning and explore with Dyl in the afternoon. That day I assumed she would peel off with the twins seems so long ago now.

One afternoon I show Charlie the Port Angeles hotel, with its octagonal courtyard peopled by crumbling statues of sailors. Before I can stop him, Dyl explains how we once fished for change in the fountain of the enclosed courtyard. “And a hundred others.”

She runs her fingertips down a bas-relief design of fishing nets on the peach-colored stone wall. “Why’d you stop?”

“Cap didn’t like it. Even though Ro invented a family signal to keep us safe.” He explains about the code I invented when I was eight—how a Merrick-stamped penny on the southernmost point of a fountain meant one of us was hiding, waiting until the security guard left so it would be cleared for fishing. How a peso on top meant all clear . Other coin placements had other meanings— hide. Extra treasure . I’d dreamed up all of it, stretching our afternoons in those elegant courtyards when Mama was on a ramble and Dyl needed distraction.

Even the twins had become intrigued by our coin adventures and joined us, until Griff told Cap what we were doing and he made us stop.

“Ro was clever.” Charlie’s voice has a playful lilt. “She still is.”

Dyl wanders off to inspect a mossy wall and Charlie and I sit on the fountain’s edge. It’s warm, sun reflecting off all the stone, and she cups her hand and trickles water down the back of her neck.

As we watch Dyl, I murmur, “We didn’t need our code. I just liked the idea. And it kept Dyl entertained for hours. I’d even make up dangers. An undercover hotel inspector we had to outsmart. Fairies and birds to help us.”

“I was an atrocious babysitter.” Charlie laughs. “Not creative like you.”

“It wasn’t babysitting,” I say a little too quickly, defensive about how Cap and Mama delegated Dyl to me.

“Oh, I know. I only meant Dyl’s lucky, that’s all.”

***

Outside the hotel, Charlie presents Dyl with a dripping bicentennial quarter. “Nobody told me I couldn’t fish.”

Dyl pays her back in Ruby Beach. Cutting through an alley, he shows her one of our regular bins, lifting the bag of leftover crushed peanuts they toss out from the ice cream shop at closing. When he offers it to Charlie, I’m so embarrassed I can’t look at her. Coins are one thing. Dumpster diving—Mag told me long ago that’s what it’s called—that’s another.

“You don’t have to eat that,” I say.

“It’s evil to waste food.” She unknots the plastic and tips gold peanut flecks into her mouth. “Yummm.”

Secret by secret, Charlie has entered our lives.

***

Charlie’s gotten into tricks since we last saw each other, and we’re trying to surf two on a board. Not to be outdone, the twins race to master it before us. For days, it’s all we work on, using a pair of Cap’s old longboards.

Because I’m smaller, I have to be in front, so I can’t see Charlie. I have to imagine her hair, her smile, the beads of water on her smooth neck. But it frees your tongue, not having to show your face.

As we’re scouting waves, I turn to the right so she can hear me. “Charlie?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Do you miss your mother?”

“I do. But she’s not like yours. She’s always watching me. And she wishes I was different.”

“How?”

“She tried to schedule me into being a proper lady. Comportment lessons and ikebana lessons and wholesome outings with eligible boys.”

“And none of that interested you?”

“Flower arranging was okay.” She laughs. “Let’s take that one.”

We paddle too late and miss the pocket, as I’d known we would. Charlie, usually so direct, has tried to change the subject, but this is a new and intriguing peek into her heart.

“Was your mother always like that? I can’t picture Bass with someone proper .”

“My aunties and everyone live practically on the same street. And they’re traditional—they never liked Bass. I don’t know. I guess after they split, she was afraid I’d become like him.”

“She lets you visit him for, what, fourteen weeks a year?”

“Now that I’m practically an adult. And only because I threatened to move here full-time if she didn’t.”

I didn’t think I could admire Charlie more, but after this glimpse into her home life—her other home life—I want to hug her. Doing so would topple us, and make her think I pity her, when really, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude that she’s opened up.

Resting in a calm stretch of sea, we watch the twins. They’re twenty yards north, straddling their shared board, backs to shore. Mag in front, Griff behind. Horsing around, Griff falls in. Mag paddles off as if he’s going to leave him, but paddles back fast and offers him a hand up.

Behind me, Charlie laughs. “They don’t even seem stable when they’re sitting. We’ll beat them to a stand for sure.”

“We just need something rideable.”

“You’re so lucky to have your pack,” Charlie says wistfully. “I mean, most of the time. Don’t you ever— Never mind.”

“Don’t I ever what?”

“Want privacy in the Gull?”

“Sometimes I’d like a bathroom of my own, like yours in the Winnie,” I admit. “But just once in a while, I’m not asking you to feel sorry for—”

“I don’t!”

“I know!”

We talk over each other, then go quiet, the only sound waves lapping over our board.

Charlie breaks the silence. “Use mine anytime. And anything in it. Shampoo or whatever.”

For a horrifying second I wonder if my hair smells bad to her. I wash it as much as I can. I stiffen and she quickly adds, “I didn’t mean you’re dirty. You’re cleaner than me, Ro. You smell like your mom’s potions. I want the orange-clove soap.”

“Okay.”

“I just meant what’s mine is yours. Ugh.” She drops forward, leaning against my back, and I shiver at the contact. “Maybe no more talking. Here’s a decent one, let’s show your brothers what’s what.”

We race for the wave, paddling in sync. We manage to stand for a few seconds only, but the feeling is sweet.

***

One week before her Mexico trip, I finally find the right moment, when no one else is around, to invite Charlie inside the Gull. She kicks off her huaraches, brushes sand from her feet, and climbs the broad metal steps below her right wing, entering my home.

“Mama and Cap sleep behind those books. Griff here, Mag here. Dyl and I in back, here. That window looks tiny but it lets in a lot of cross draft.” I tap the bubble window in the ceiling over our bunk. “Our beds are really comfortable, they don’t bounce too much when we’re driving because of those special hinges. Cap made these straps from old seat belts. And—”

A gentle hand on my wrist.

“What?”

“I love it, Ro. It’s wonderful.”

I look down at the rust-colored shag that covers up all of the ridges and bolts from the Gull’s former life, before she was our home.

“I’ve never had anyone in here before.”

She says quietly, “I know.”

I hesitate. “Okay, then. When Mag was twelve and I was ten and a half, and he wanted to make me mad, he’d say this was the Gull’s guts .” I give the carpet a little brush with my bare foot. “Because of the color.”

“That boy.” Charlie waits patiently for me to go on.

“I was born on this rug. We all were.”

“And this is Rontu-dog.” I hand her my cherished stuffed animal, who in my nervousness I’d ignored a moment ago. “I found her in a parking lot behind a Crocker Bank in Bodega Bay when I was nine. They had a giveaway for opening five-hundred-dollar accounts, Crocker Spaniels from Crocker Bank, but someone didn’t want theirs, I guess. Rontu is a little miracle. I’d seen those stuffed animals in the window, and I wanted one so bad.”

Charlie smiles, scratching Rontu-dog’s ears. “Rontu, from the dog in Island ?”

I nod, so grateful I almost tell her more. That Rontu’s stomach has a Velcro opening, and inside, behind a cheap little stuffed heart that says Highest CD Rates in Town!, I dug hiding places. That her plush paws and ears once held fountain coins, before Cap forbade taking them.

Now Rontu holds only her heart. I promised a tiny Dyl that I’d never open her again; he thought it hurt her.

The Gull has another, bigger hiding place, in one of the twin rear doors that we never use because Cap attached our bunk to them, bisecting the vertical line where they join. That sturdy right rear wall is double, and there’s an opening in the inner layer of metal, where a handle once was. Anything secreted inside must be affixed to an old shoelace, the other end knotted on a bolt, because it’s a steep drop down to the bottom.

Rontu is empty, but the door holds something now, a secret no one else knows about.

Something stops me from telling Charlie about it, even as she traces waves under our bunk with a soft smile.

“And this is our school.” I lead her to the vanilla library, explaining how Cap approves our books. How he taught the twins and they taught me—Griff in charge of humanities and Mag math and science. “And I taught Dyl, until he outgrew me.”

She bites her lip for a moment. “The lessons you pass down to each other. Cap to the twins to you to Dyl. Does that go for everything?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what do you tell Dyl when he asks why you live how you do?”

She wants to understand why we live how we do.

I’ve ached to know. Not why this life is better than citizen life—that I understand. But what Mama and Cap’s past homes were like. What first sent them away, onto the road.

Except just asking the question has always felt disloyal.

When I was little and first read Oliver Twist , I’d asked Griff if our parents were beaten as children. He’d said, “Of course not. They wanted something better than the SSNs, that’s all.”

But I knew that. What I didn’t have—still don’t have—is a picture of their other life, before.

So I asked sideways questions, hoping to get at the truth from other angles. Once, when there was a half inch of white-gold hair in Mama’s part, between the red, I asked her why she hid it. It’s naturally blond like mine, under her SunDrops Henna.

“Don’t you want to match the rest of us?” I’d asked.

Mama had whispered, “I like secretly matching, don’t you?”

Another time, a little older: “Do you ever miss your family, Mama?”

She’d squeezed me and said, “This is my family.”

Or Mama would say silly things. Like “Before? I was a mermaid.” Or “We were grunion and I wanted five baby grunions so Cap and I made you.”

Mama was good at that—changing the subject, redirecting. I’m good at it, too, I realize now—I do it with Dyl all the time. I learned from the best.

“Ro?” Charlie asks now, sitting on the rust-colored rug, resting her back on the cupboard Cap built below Mag’s bunk. “I’m prying. I’m sorry. I love your home.”

I sit under Griff’s bunk, facing her, twisting fronds of shag rug in both hands.

As we got older, I became aware of the flicker of hurt in Mama’s eyes when I probed her, and the message was clear. It pained her to talk about before . Eventually I asked only rarely, when I couldn’t resist.

“Dyl’s never asked that question. I guess he stored away what he’s overheard, the answers Mama gave me when I asked. But…”

Charlie leans close.

“But if he did, I’d tell him the only part that matters. Mama and Cap ran away together because they were unhappy living like everyone else.”