Page 2 of The California Dreamers

1

Ava LeClair

2002

LeClair Family Lavender Farm, Oregon

Thirty-two years old

I saw it the morning before the boys left for camp.

A flash of light on the edge of the old copper birdbath. From the grassy clearing, it begged me to come closer—to see if it was only a drop of water kicked up by a bird, or a coin winking at me in the sun.

Standing on our farmhouse’s white-pillared, slightly sagging front porch, I had to slow my breathing. For a second, I was no longer Ava LeClair, farmer, mother, PTA vice president. Expert at filling sachets and tying them with purple satin ribbon to sell in the gift shop.

But Ronan Merrick. The wild girl I’d been.

Barry burst out the door and joined me on the porch, tugging me back to the present. “Are you sad?” my son asked, clutching my leg, looking up at me with round blue eyes. He’d posed the same question for days in the run-up to his and his brother’s departure for camp, meaning Are you sad we’re leaving you behind? He had always been an empathetic child, attuned to everyone’s emotions, and especially mine. But he could not possibly have guessed at the layers of my sadness now.

I turned my back to the birdbath and knelt, smiling and holding my son close. “Hey, little Bear. I was only thinking about your packing list.”

“You can come with us,” he whispered. “There’s lots to do in Seaside besides swim.”

Lou, his father, followed him out the screen door, a syrup bottle in his hand, our other son, Jack, at his heels. “Yes, come, Prairie Girl.”

I smiled even brighter and rose. “ZBoy and I have big plans here this week,” I said, and started tussling with our placid yellow Lab. “Boys, tell me again about the tricks you’ll be learning…”

For the rest of the day, I resisted the birdbath’s glint. As long as I didn’t get closer, I didn’t have to give up hope. I weeded in the fields behind the house. I helped my sons pack, chased them around upstairs. I tried to give them all of myself, but they sensed my heart’s distance, as kids always do.

It wasn’t fair to them.

So in a stolen moment before dinner, I sneaked out to the birdbath to prove to myself there was no coin, that it had only been wishful thinking.

But there it was, on the ledge, a bright penny with our Merrick-family mark. An M and a seagull and a wave, all at once.

Hand shaking, I covered it with the coin I always carried with me. A thousand-peso piece, my only bit of flotsam from a different life. I lined it up neatly, de la Cruz’s profile over Lincoln’s. The childish code returning as naturally as a first language:

I’m here.

When everyone was asleep, I grabbed a flannel shirt from the peg by the front door and pulled it over my T-shirt as I crossed the grass to the birdbath, where the water reflected the crescent moon.

Both coins were gone now. I touched the spot where they had been, as if the cold, green-patinaed copper was a doorbell. I knew who I was summoning, and my heart ached to see them. But I didn’t know what door I was opening.

“Are you there?” I whispered into the misty night. The little cherub on the rim of the birdbath looked so carefree in the moonlight, pouring his urn into the bowl as if nothing momentous had happened on his watch.

A twig cracked low behind me and I whirled. A rush of wings, haughty chirrups—only a quail.

“They’re asleep, it’s okay,” I tried again.

After a few moments, there was another crackle in the dry leaves. Higher, louder. Not a quail’s. I held my breath.

My brother Griffin stepped into the clearing.

***

He stood silently for a long time. Tense, hesitant. And maybe this was for the best. I had to get used to him being here first. The fact of him, tangible proof of my old life, here in my new one.

Griff pulled the thousand-peso piece I’d left for him from his pocket and held it up, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing, that the old family code still worked. He clinked the coin on the birdbath rim— tinnng . “Copper on copper,” he finally said. His smile was sad, rueful, here and gone fast. His voice was the same, and he was still thin as a whip, but there was an adult’s caution, a weight to his movements now.

I wondered how different I seemed to my big brother. Ronan Avery Merrick, the sister he’d known, had curly blond hair as wind-tossed and sandy as the beachside hiding places our family had called home. Ava LeClair’s hair was dyed brown and flattened, cut to a sensible shoulder length. Her life was as deeply rooted as a lavender stalk, as upright as the 150-year-old farmhouse behind her.

He held out his hand, dropping the thousand-peso coin into mine, and I slipped it back into my pocket.

“Hey, Griff.”

“Hey, Ronan.” He surveyed the dark fields past the house. “Beautiful farm. It looks just like the postcard.”

I cleared my throat. “We’ve bought the neighbor’s acreage since.” When I’d sent the postcard fifteen years ago, I’d only wanted them to know I was all right. I’d been certain I wouldn’t be here for more than a month or two. I’d written only, “I’m fine. I’m happy, and I hope you will be, too.” But this place had become my new world.

“I thought I should give you a little warning, in case you didn’t feel like reliving old times in front of…” He gestured limply at the house. “How much do they know?”

“They know Ava LeClair.”

“Nothing, then.”

“No,” I admitted. Ava, a twist on my middle name, was the only hint of my past. I was grateful that Griff had guessed about my secrecy, but ashamed.

Griff dipped his hand into the birdbath and we watched ripples break the moon’s reflection into quivery slices.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. My big brother wouldn’t have come here after a decade and a half without a serious reason. “Griff. You have news, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“Is it Mama?” Red-haired, gentle Mama. Warm and loving. She’d named me. Taught me. Seen me…though she hadn’t seen everything.

I kept myself perfectly still, not knowing if I was ready for the answer.

Griff shook his head. “No. No, it’s Cap, Ronan. He died. Three weeks ago.”

I clutched the edge of the birdbath. Cap.

Our father. Everyone thought he was immortal.

I pictured him as I’d last seen him, riding a perfect dawn swell at San Onofre. Fearless, free from the modern world, at peace.

“I’m sorry.” Griff touched my arm in comfort but it was quick as a button push, a strange, nervous tap. “Mitral heart valve irregularity, they said. Whatever that is. He’d slowed way down this year but wouldn’t say why. He must’ve realized something was wrong, but he hid it until it was too late.”

Cap hadn’t believed in doctors. His formula for long life was salt water, fresh air, freedom, and his special date-and-coconut cereal for breakfast every morning.

“How is everyone?” I wandered over to a barbera bush, its flat maroon leaves black in the pale moonlight, and picked dead leaves from its spikes. Cap is gone. Impossible.

Griff hesitated. “It’s been rough. Mama… She took it hard, that first week. But she seems better now.”

“She’s all right, really? And Dyl and Mag?” Now that the floodgates were open, the questions that had swum in my head for more than a decade rushed out. Had the boys struck out on their own? Was the Gull still their home, still running?

“You care, then,” Griff said.

“Of course I care,” I whispered, facing him.

We stood for a minute, spent by this little sputtering of honesty.

Then I turned and walked over to a maple, caressing its rough bark. “Have they had it yet?”

“Not yet. Soon.”

“Where will it be, that break at SO?”

“No…not too far from there,” Griff said.

This was a small comfort. I would know where it happened. The paddle-out—the ceremony in which the ash that was left of the dear one was poured into the ocean to say goodbye. Because this was how it was always done when a king of the old days, a god of the waves, died. Everyone in his family, biological and aquatic, paddled out to a calm expanse of sea at sunset or sunrise. They straddled their boards to form a ring and took turns speaking. And they tossed flowers and mementos into the center. I’d attended two such ceremonies, for Cap’s friends, when I was a girl. Both times, Cap had led the proceedings.

Now it would be his ceremony.

“Will you come?” Griff asked.

I stiffened; I was afraid he’d ask that.

“I borrowed a truck,” Griff said. “I’ll take you.”

I tried to envision this. Driving down to California, seeing the others. Their faces as I fumbled to explain what happened the day I left and never came back. The truth wasn’t an option.

It had taken courage just to meet Griff here in the dark, in my own garden.

“You were good to come all the way up here to tell me in person, Griff,” I said quietly to the tree trunk.

“That’s your answer?”

I turned to him slowly, speaking to a point in the air midway between us. “You can sleep in the old drying shed behind the gift shop tonight. There’s a bunk, it’s comfortable. I’ll sneak in the house and get fresh sheets for you, and—”

“Ronan.”

“I’ll bring you some food. And coffee? It’s the least I—”

“Are you coming back with me to our father’s funeral or not, Ronan?”

“I can’t, Griff,” I whispered. “But I can give you some beautiful lavender to bring back with you. And I’ll write Mama a letter. And I can give her a little money, if she’ll take it.”

“Money.” Even from ten feet away, I could see that Griff’s expression reflected what I knew already: I was a coward.

“Griff grins,” we’d always said. Now it should be “Griff is gruff.”

But it was good to see him, however changed he was. I missed the Merricks, every one of them, even more than I missed the water. I had longed to know they were all right, but this… I couldn’t risk more heartbreak. The possibility that once I went back to my old life it would be impossible to continue in this one, with every tear and fracture raw again. I’d worked hard the last fifteen years to patch a new one together.

“They’ve been okay without me for this long, haven’t they?” I pleaded.

“Is that what you tell yourself, Ava LeClair ?” He pronounced my alias with great effort, as if doing so pained him.

“Well. Then they can’t hate me any more than they do. I’m sorry you drove all this way. I should go, my family might hear us.” I headed toward the house, crossing the glade, through the prickly bushes, the trees.

“Wait.” Griff ran after me and grabbed my sleeve. “I’m sorry.”

I shook my head and pulled my arm from him, walking faster. At the crunch of gravel I pictured the three LeClairs, my loved ones, sleeping obliviously upstairs with open windows, and stepped off the walkway that led to our front porch steps. “They’ll wake up,” I whispered.

Griff lowered his voice to a murmur and avoided the gravel, but stayed on my heels. “Coming here, seeing you… I didn’t want it to be like this. Let’s start over? They need you. And I need you. To help me with them, just for the paddle-out, help get them through it. You and I were always the grown-ups, remember?”

I stopped, staring down at a baseball mitt one of the boys had left on the lawn.

“Ronan. Please. Mama’s convinced you are what will help most right now. One good thing, ‘a little brightness,’ she said. ‘Go get our girl, of course she’ll want to come.’ I told her it was a waste of time, but she said, ‘She’ll come,’ so I promised I’d try. At least think about it? You can do this last thing for your family, for her.”

“Griff, no .” I realized too late how harsh it sounded. “I…”

But when I turned to face him, Griff had already vanished into the darkness.

I made my way back to the house in a daze, closing my eyes as I sank onto the top porch step, gripping the cold wood under me on either side. Ours was the biggest, oldest place in the county. What would Cap have said about such a house? Once, the whole Pacific had been my home…

Go get our girl.

Of course she’ll want to come.

She’ll come.