Page 18 of The California Dreamers

17

Bitter and bright

2002

The island

Day 2, afternoon

All of us sat at the sunny picnic table back at camp, staring at Pauline’s envelope.

Secured between a solar lantern and our dry-bag of almonds, it fluttered cheerfully in the breeze.

Taunting me.

Pauline could soon sit us down and bombard us with all kinds of questions about Dreamers . It was the only reason people were interested in us. If the others found out I’d taken it, they’d never forgive me.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” Mag said. He’d repeated it three times. Because that was the absurd amount Pauline had offered as her “honorarium.”

Charlie had delivered this news a moment ago, after paying a visit to Pauline, and making an excuse for Mama’s declining to visit her as Pauline had requested. Mama had waved off the invitation:

“I don’t think it’s necessary, do you?” She’d taken my hand as we’d climbed back up the hill after our visit to her flower Gull. “This visitor is all that interests me at the moment.”

The compliment lifted my spirits in the moment, but didn’t exactly help us with the Pauline situation.

Charlie had told us that the cash was nothing to Pauline—she had family money. Then Charlie’d slipped off again, shooting an apologetic look my way, murmuring something about gathering island fox data.

“A bribe doesn’t sound very professional,” I said now as calmly as I could.

“That’s Pauline Cowley’s problem, not ours.” Mag still couldn’t take his eyes off of the white envelope.

Griff said, “Let’s settle this fast so we can focus on the paddle-out.”

Mama stood. “It feels like a storm, I’d better go check the water barrels. Why don’t you pull the chokecherry off the racks before it’s spoiled by rain? Goodness, if it’s not calm enough for our little ceremony tomorrow morning we might have to do it the next…”

We all glanced up—perfectly clear. But when we looked down, Mama was yards away, her mass of gold hair shining in the sun, disappearing into the woods.

“She hopes it storms because she doesn’t want to do the paddle-out,” Griff said quietly.

I already had a lump in my throat from Mama calling it a little ceremony . “She can’t even say the word.”

I understood her not wanting to say goodbye. But Mama had left us to handle this huge decision alone, as if we were simply choosing which break to surf.

“She’ll use any excuse to delay,” Griff said. “Weather. That.” He pointed at the white envelope encircled by our tin plates. Inside was the photo with Pauline’s question written on the back. “Maybe we should just rip it up and send her back to the mainland.”

The twins’ switch on the interview had me spinning. After a lifetime of blind fealty to Cap, Griff would ignore his final wish?

“I can’t rip up fifty thousand dollars.” Mag pocketed the envelope. “And that’s what the interview is now. You suddenly want to disobey him? Griff, you have no idea how that money could help. While you were pacing around outside Cap’s deathbed, some of us were handling the living.”

“What are you talking about?” Griff asked, looking up in surprise.

Mag glanced at Dyl, sitting on my right. Dyl had his field journal open in front of him, but since Charlie’s reappearance and her bombshell about the money, he’d only mindlessly traced yesterday’s sketch of an elephant seal, digging into the paper, piercing it. Dyl’s eyes, as he met Mag’s, seemed so sad, and now he gripped his worn charcoal pencil as if it was the only thing holding him here on the bench next to me.

What were he and Mag hiding?

“Nothing,” Mag said. “I just think fifty thousand dollars is pretty good for an hour’s work, that’s all. I don’t want to reject the idea outright. Come on.”

An hour’s work. As we trekked through the trees to the chokecherry-drying area, I thought of Cap’s stamped pennies and pesos. How he’d drilled that seagull shape in them, and then we decided it was an M and a wave, too. Cap’s symbols of defiance. They meant even on the job, he could make time his. Because even when our stovepipe had been hollow, we were rich enough to turn the world’s currency into a Merrick code, something entirely ours. Circles with pretty markings but no value.

Long after I left and became a parent, when I had to earn money, and budget on the farm, and it went so quickly—for roof repairs, my boys’ shoes, water bills—I’d realized that Cap’s defiance was actually denial that money was part of our lives, a fiction that deserved pity more than admiration. Perhaps he thought his garage gigs would humble him in our eyes if he didn’t come home with his special coin.

Money did matter. Even on this primitive island, it had found us.

After a twenty-minute walk we made it to Mama’s fruit-drying area, a sunny field banked by low Hosta plants with plate-sized leaves and, stretching from above and below, long sprays of white-and-purple flowers. The mashed chokecherry was spread out to dry on rounds of eucalyptus, the kind from the felled trees that were scattered all over the island. Non-native, invasive, I remembered Griff telling me as we’d passed piles of the wood discs. And Mama had put them to clever use.

We all got to work, peeling strips of dried chokecherry paste from the wood, setting them inside Mama’s old critter-proof tins, between layers of brown paper.

Mag perched the dreaded envelope on a stump lengthwise, bookended by two eucalyptus rounds, so it looked like a little sail, but the rest of us tried to ignore it. For a while the only sound was the rip , rip , rip of us working.

Sun shot through the coral-colored strips—one side was grainy, the other glossy as stained glass. The tart-sweet ribbons used to be a delicacy, the only thing close to candy that Cap allowed. Dyl offered me a morsel and I ate it. A strange flavor, bitter, then addictively bright, then, only after you’d swallowed, tinged with sweetness. Our childhood treat was an acquired taste.

Rip, rip, rip. Little shreds of my heart. I was just beginning to feel close to my family again, and Pauline Cowley could ruin everything if she asked too many questions about Dreamers . Or—the realization was sickening—what if she somehow knew already that I’d taken it?

Mag had given up all pretense of working and leaned against a tree in the shade. Then Griff stopped, too. He paced, un-doing his ponytail, running his hands through his hair, securing it in the leather band again. Only Dyl and I continued to work steadily. Rip, rip, rip.

And then another sound: the flap-flap-flap of Pauline’s envelope in the wind.

I crossed to the other side of the field, hoping that there I wouldn’t hear the envelope’s rattle. On the ground, in the shade, was a knee-high container, one of Mama’s old ones. I uncapped it and found at least two gallons of the jam-like liquid, ready for drying. Mama had boiled enough fruit to last months. Did she hope to stay here? Yet another worry. What a mess things had become. And I couldn’t leave her now, add to her heartbreak. I felt trapped. Flap-flap. Flap-flap-flap. No use—the envelope was still taunting me, even from over here.

I returned to the others and got to work again, but tore at the dried fruit recklessly, until my hands hurt and the sticky bands folded in on themselves, balling into clumps.

“Are you all right, Ro?” Dyl asked.

I smiled at him quickly and turned away. I had to calm myself, to focus. “I’m a great lavender picker, but I guess I’m out of practice at this.”

“You’re doing fine.”

“Dyl.” I hesitated. “This island, it’s beautiful. I wish it could be all yours. You and Mama seem happy here. But. She understands you can’t stay, right?”

“Did you know we’re only twenty miles from the real island, San Nicolas, where the real Karana lived alone for eighteen years?”

“So you do remember.” In spite of everything, his admission warmed my heart.

Dyl nodded shyly. “Her name was Juana Maria. I was camping in Santa Barbara a couple of years ago and I found her burial place in this big mission when I went to fill up my water jug. The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, they called her. The mission was a beautiful place, I guess. But not…” He looked up at the dome of blue sky, empty except for a solitary gull.

“Not like this,” I said.

He shook his head.

“So she ended up on the mainland,” I said softly. “I wonder how that felt, after living alone on a place like this for so long.”

“The plaque at the mission where they brought her was awful. They said she was rescued .”

“Dragged off it by missionaries, more like.”

I knew from Dyl’s pained expression that he was picturing this, same as I was. He switched to a happier topic: “What’re your sons’ favorite parts of the book?”

I smiled. “Jack’s is where Karana makes a skirt of yucca reeds, in the spring. And Bear’s is where she sees the devilfish in the sea cave. And they both love the part where the birds swoop down and take Rontu’s fur to build their nests.

“I wonder what happened to my stuffed-animal Rontu. Remember how we named her after Karana’s wild dog?”

“Rontu-bank-dog,” Dyl said with a secret smile. Remembering Rontu, I guessed. “You missed her, Ro?”

“I—I missed everything.” I looked down at his tousled hair, his charcoal-stained fingertips. Over at the twins sitting on either side of the same tree trunk, their long legs bent at identical angles even as they fumed at each other silently. I thought of Mama, down on some beach, overcome with her love for Cap. The real Gull, and the one she’d painstakingly constructed of branches and reeds and flowers. Charlie’s bright eyes, the wisdom and concern in her voice then and now.

My next words came out raspy. “When I read Island to my sons, Dyl, their imaginations are so beautiful.” I stopped myself before saying Just like yours was.

It was wrong to confide in him like this when so much hurt lurked around the corner…or on the other side of our island. It would shatter Dyl to learn that I’d taken the picture that caused so much trouble for him.

We were finished; the drying racks were empty, and Dyl and I crossed over toward the water tub to wash our hands.

“I’d like to meet them sometime,” Dyl said. “And ZBoy.”

“I’d like that, too. Maybe when… We’ll figure it out.” I was ashamed of my feeble answer. I had no clue how I could knit my old and new families together. If Pauline outed me as the Dreamers photographer, Dyl and the rest of the Merricks might never want to see me again.

“Close your eyes,” Dyl said, reaching into his pack.

I obeyed, and soon felt something silky and soft in my hands.

Rontu, my old stuffed-animal dog; Dyl had retrieved her from the Gull. I nuzzled the ratty old dog, whose paws had elongated from stuffing that had migrated to the tips. I felt the Velcro seam in her midsection to check what she held in her belly.

The film I’d secreted away when I left the Gull was still there.

Rontu had been pregnant with my secrets for a long time.

Did Dyl know that? He’d vowed as a little boy that he’d never open her up again. But we all make silly promises when we’re young.

Anxious, I cradled Rontu to my chest, but Dyl’s warm smile told me he had no idea what she concealed.

“I didn’t want her to stay in the junkyard all alone,” he said.

“Oh, Dyl. Thank you.” I settled the dog on my lap. “Remember what Rontu means?”

“Fox eyes. She names Rontu when she decides she can trust her.”

I touched the toy dog’s silky fur. I was so glad Dyl hadn’t hardened over the years. But maybe he was only opening himself to more pain. Surely his heart had scars, rows and rows of wave-shaped scars, from how I’d abandoned him. But he’d let me back in, here.

If he found out I’d taken the picture, hidden the truth for so long, would he ever trust anyone again?