Page 16 of The California Dreamers

15

My beautiful home

2002

The island

Day 2, afternoon

As we walked down the steep, thickly wooded terrain toward the ocean, which got louder by the second, I tried not to think of Pauline’s envelope in my backpack. Neither twin wanted to carry it, so Charlie ended up handing it back to me as we followed Mama to her “surprise.”

“A hot potato,” she’d said wryly as I took it. “I understand, though. Hard enough dealing with Cap being gone, without a reporter raking over your lives with him.”

With each step, my pack felt pounds heavier, somehow weighed down by a single envelope. I’d heard how crafty reporters could be. They put you at ease and you found yourself disclosing things you’d never planned to. Lou’s father had spoken to a newspaper reporter after a county meeting, about a farm-tax bill, then bitterly regretted it—and he was tough.

We’d hoped we could content Pauline with a sunny story to match the photograph. But her four-word question seemed to promise hundreds more.

“Tell me about the photo of you six,” she’d say. “Tell me how you felt when it spread…”

As I came around a bend, I glimpsed something on the sand below, and for a moment, it swept all thoughts of Pauline Cowley and her questions away.

The Gull was here. Just like Mama had said.

Out of boughs and branches, flowers and kelp, she and Dyl had made a replica van. They had built her secret project in a little cove, a cozy notch of the island protected from wind by steep, U-shaped cliffs. From a boat, you’d never know it was man-made. It would blend in with the trees and flowers behind it.

Mama beamed while we surrounded her, and Dyl ducked his head modestly as the twins clapped him on the shoulder.

Mag said, “So this is where we’ll do the paddle-out tomorrow morning. Out there, with the Gull II watching over us.”

A sweet idea.

“He would’ve liked it, Mama,” I said.

She nodded, gazing at us with shining eyes, then turned and walked toward the water’s edge, knee-deep in the lapping waves.

“It’s to scale,” Mag announced from the other side of the structure.

I paced the flower Gull out, the front and the side, to double-check—it was the same size as our real van, or close to it. Fourteen by seven feet. I fingered the rounds of dried willow mimicking wheels, the intricate braiding of a kelp strand over the bower’s “front window.” There were even wings made of reeds woven between branches.

Mama said the Gull was here, and it was. And this wretched interview? Maybe she was right not to worry about that, too. Cap had wanted us to talk to Pauline, here on a private island, even if he didn’t share the reason why.

I stepped inside the structure, which smelled like sea salt and ozone and orange blossom. In the doorway, I turned to Charlie, who was hesitating behind me. “She used to be a food truck, did you know that?”

She nodded, hanging back on the sand while the rest of us explored the interior. “I’ll leave you guys,” she said. “This is for family.”

“No, step in, Charlie,” I said. If it weren’t for her, we wouldn’t be here on this magical island. And she had helped my family when I’d left. Though I hated to think I was replaceable, I was grateful.

Mag sat on a stack of palm fronds—the driver’s seat. “Where to?” he asked her, looking up earnestly.

“Hmm… Can you take me to Haleakalā garden in Hawai’i?”

“No problem.”

“Shotgun.” Griff took the stack to Mag’s right.

Sitting on the sand in the center of the creation, Dyl observed me contentedly as I explored the inside. Our bunk was a ledge of dried willow, placed at the same height I remembered. Pale weeds dangling from the roof near the front hinted at our vanilla library, and the steering wheel was a daisy chain. “This must’ve taken you days, Dyl. It’s beautiful.”

We’d thought the Gull was beautiful, too, that rusty old white-and-gray Grumman Olson…no one else had.

“Fourteen by seven,” I said. “And all six of us lived here.” I shook my head.

“Remember how Cap only let us have one cookie tin each for our possessions?” I asked. To this day, I could name every item I had stored in my Deluxe Belgian Chocolate Biscuit Round. The things I treasured most were free, plucked from garbage, or, when I was small and it hadn’t been forbidden yet, bought in secret with stolen coins.

“‘Material goods weigh us down,’” Mag recited. “‘They are both bait and trap of a sick society.’”

“You were shocked when you saw my bunk in the Winnie, all my posters and clothes,” Charlie said.

“It was a pigsty,” Mag said.

“Hey, I’m neater now.” Charlie punched him.

Nobody spoke again for a long time. After a while, Charlie wandered out and over to the shoreline behind Mama, pretending to look out for boats. Giving us time alone in our Gull. In the eerie sunset light, we could pretend she was real.

“I wish…” Griff said. And that was all.

Dyl curled up in the back of the flower rectangle, and I settled next to him. Griff stretched out on the right side—facing forward—where his old bunk had been hinged. And Mag stood in the center, doing something I didn’t understand at first. Then I recognized his wide stance. He was sky surfing.

I swallowed back tears. When Griff had first come for me, back on the farm, I’d feared the truth about my past getting out. That while Lou would at least try to understand, most of the people in that life, people like my sons’ living grandfather, wouldn’t approve.

But maybe I also feared their reaction might change how I remembered it. If I had to talk about it, defend it out in the open. My secrecy had kept it sacred.

Yes, maybe outsiders would think my childhood was ugly. But they would see only the facts. When I let myself look for the beauty twined around them, when I could bear it, there was so much.

Like how it had felt to close my eyes in San Francisco and open them in San Diego. To know with one glance at a scallop of foam if the wind was offshore or onshore.

Our home had been an entire coast. The next wave. Home had been wherever the arrow-shaped seed pod fluttering from Mama’s delicate hand said we’d go next, and it was boundless.

Griff cleared his throat. “We’ll get her back,” he said confidently.

There was a long silence, broken at last by Dyl.

“Ronan?” he asked from next to me, his voice so serious I feared what was coming. “Why did you leave?”

This was my chance to tell them the truth. I knew I wouldn’t get a better one.

I looked at him, but his eyes were so wide, so trusting, I couldn’t bear it for long and stared straight ahead. “Oh, pride, I guess. I was a foolish seventeen-year-old who thought this…” I looked around, mentally replacing vines with metal, the circle of daisies with our sweat-stained and much-taped white vinyl steering wheel, sand with our old rust-colored shag rug. “I thought this would wait for me.”

But if I told them my secret, the weight of my betrayal would sink this island.

Because I’m the reason reporters want to talk to us.

I’m the reason that photo became a sensation.

The reason the life Cap wanted for us—private, peaceful, wholly unconnected from the world—disintegrated.

I took Dreamers .