Page 24 of The California Dreamers

23

Shelter

2002

The island

Day 3, 12:30 a.m.

“It’s not letting up, Ronan,” Charlie said.

It was after midnight. Officially my third day on this island.

I’d been alert to any change in the weather, hoping the drops would subside, but if anything, the rain pounded harder on our overturned-raft roof, making sleep impossible.

Not that my nerves would have let me.

Mama, sweet-natured and trusting, could be telling Pauline anything in their shelter. At least she didn’t know about Dyl’s troubles, or our debt.

I filled Charlie in on that now, and her face showed that she was heartbroken, imagining Dyl in jail, the Gull in the junkyard.

“Mag knows I have student loans,” she said. “But I wish he’d told me. I have a spare room in my apartment.”

“They wouldn’t take it. You know that.” I peered out, soaking my cheek, and yes, there was still a lamp on in Mama and Pauline’s shelter. There was a glow from the twins’, too. “I’m going to check on everyone.”

Charlie raised her eyebrows—she could tell I was more restless than interested in everyone’s comfort—but she didn’t argue, silently passing me her brown anorak. I pulled it on and crept out, dashing across wet sand to the boys’ lean-to.

I crawled under the opening and found them in the center of it, sitting back-to-back like they had as kids. The crowns of their heads touched the orange rubber ceiling, as if they were a double pillar keeping their makeshift roof aloft. They each had a flashlight on the ground; Mag was whittling something with a small block of balsa wood and Griff was reading a slim yellow Yeats book. Cap’s favorite volume.

Griff directed his flashlight at me. “Are you all right? You’re holding your right arm funny.”

“Oh, it just looks that way because Charlie’s work jacket is so huge. Can you get that out of my eyes? Do you think Dyl’s okay?”

Mag turned and leaned forward to peek out the drippy entrance, which faced inland, as if he could see Dyl in the rainy blackness. “He’s probably built a whalebone hut worthy of your Karana by now.”

I scooched in close to them. “So what did you and Pauline talk about while you were carrying her?”

“She’s a strange one,” Griff said. “She asked where our favorite places to surf in Southern California were, so I asked her if she knew the area, and she said, ‘Sure. I kind of feel like I do.’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know. So then I asked where she’d surfed, and she said, ‘This is the closest I’ve ever come to a surfboard until now. The picture of your family is the second-closest.’ And then I asked her what she meant and she said, ‘Oh, I’m just tired and punchy. I don’t know what I’m saying.’”

The three of us sat listening to the drumming rain, watching the water stream down in a glassy oval around us, puzzling over Pauline’s words.

Then Mag slapped the rubber raft edge above his head. “I wonder. When she said she ‘kind of’ lived in San Diego. Do you think she went to college there?”

Griff jumped in. “You mean maybe it wasn’t that boy who took Dreamers. I always thought it was odd he’d come back after Cap spooked him. Pauline’s a little old to have been a student back when it first appeared in the Triton . But she could have been a graduate student, or—”

“It would explain a lot,” Mag said. “She feels guilty about the photo, she came clean to Cap, and she wants to pay us to make up for it!”

I swallowed at the coincidence. “I’m going to check on her and Mama, wish me luck.”

I darted out, leaving my brothers to their wild theories. But instead of hurrying over to the third lean-to, I stood on the wet sand, heedless of the rain pouring on me.

I’d felt so together with my siblings, strategizing about the interview. But that would change the second they found out the truth. No, boys, nice try, but I’m positive Pauline didn’t take Dreamers…

How can you be so certain, Ro?

Ro. They were calling me Ro again. Accepting me as a Merrick.

Because I happen to know the photographer very well. You’re looking at her!

Talk about punchy. I hadn’t slept more than seven or eight hours since I’d left the farm. The wisest thing to do would be to skulk back under my shelter and rest for the interview.

Instead I tiptoed outside Mama and Pauline’s lean-to to eavesdrop, to collect whatever information might prepare me for what was to come.

They were utterly silent. But when I inched closer, I saw that Pauline was showing Mama something by flashlight. What?

I crept as close as I dared, holding my breath, rain dripping down the inside of Charlie’s jacket collar. Was it Dreamers they were examining?

Mama, still with her back to me, said, “Hello, Little Seal.” A voice so serene and low I could barely hear it over the rain.

I crawled in, feeling foolish. “I was just checking to make sure you were warm enough.”

“We’re fine.” Mama touched my arm. “Is your arm better?”

“It’s nothing.”

A little pause. Disbelieving? I guessed so.

“Pauline was just showing me some snapshots from her wallet to pass the time.” She held up the one I’d glimpsed. Not Dreamers . Just a picture of a big, pale house with black shutters. It was hard to make out in the darkness, but it suited Pauline.

“Oh. That’s nice. Is that your house, Pauline?”

I glanced at Pauline, whose expression was shadowed in darkness. She gave me a slight nod.

I looked back at Mama: sweet smile, beautiful, distracted eyes.

Mama and Pauline seemed so focused on each other; I felt like an intruder. Reluctantly, I said, “Well, sleep well, you two.”

“You, too, Little Seal.”

***

“Mama and Pauline looked quite chummy, which is just lovely,” I told Charlie, crawling under our upturned raft next to her. “And in other news, I’m officially losing it. I’ve begun to see Dreamers everywhere.” I told her about Pauline sharing her wallet snapshots with Mama.

“So you still hate that picture.”

“What’s to like?” I stopped up a leak in our shelter with a wedge of Styrofoam. “I don’t think I could’ve survived eighteen years here alone like Juana Maria. She’s the one who should be on T-shirts. Not me. She was heroic.”

“Confession. I own a drawer full of those shirts.”

“No!” I turned in surprise.

Charlie nodded. “And two posters. Hey, my first love is an icon. Who else can say that?”

Love. She’d never used the word back then, and it almost hurt to hear it now. I’d dated other girls, other boys. Then men and women. Not many, but enough to measure everything I felt against the intensity of my love for Charlie. Even when I’d dated Violet, a singer/potter on the picking circuit, for five months, and even when Lou and I got pregnant and impulsively married, I’d loved Charlie.

But I’d been convinced she’d never felt real love for me, after how we’d parted.

“Anyway,” Charlie hurried on. “You didn’t exactly leave me with a photo of yourself. It’s a beautiful picture. And you’re the most beautiful of all in it.”

“Charlie.”

She wouldn’t let me stop her. “You look serene but full of life and…” Charlie seemed to fumble, embarrassed. “And it’s mainly how you’re looking to the side. I know you. Knew you. And I’m mesmerized by this girl. What is she thinking? Is she happy? Is she thinking how lucky she is to be one of those unearthly creatures? ”

“You, of all people, know I wasn’t thinking that.”

She didn’t answer, but I felt her yearning to.

“What? Say it.”

“It’s like you’ve rewritten over everything, Ronan. The good parts. You’re frantically trying to list safe things to talk about with Pauline, like if you don’t, you won’t remember the good parts at all. But that picture. It isn’t all a lie, is it?”

“An hour ago you said acknowledging the bad parts would be healing.”

“That’s no different. It’s allowing yourself to really look. Without a cheat sheet, without being afraid of what you might see. Or remember.”

I squeezed rain from my shorts hem, letting this sink in, seeing Dreamers as clearly as if it was plastered to the bottom of the boat above me. For a second I imagined I was back in the Gull on a rainy night, as we sped to the next beach. Rain drumming on the snug roof.

“Oh, Ronan. I don’t have a clue what it was like to be the only girl growing up in that van. And I haven’t forgotten the bad parts, the little bits you shared, anyway, what I could piece together. So whatever you had to forget to run away, and stay away, it wasn’t wrong.

“If you had to make it all bad, or forget, in order to break away… I understand that, because maybe I’d’ve had to, too. Back then, I always envied your big family. And how much your parents loved each other.”

I pictured Mama and Cap, images from my life with them. Secret glances, soft smiles, the comforting glow of their reading lamp from behind the vanilla wall. “They did love each other. Too much, maybe? Too much to see what they were doing to us. I don’t know.”

We were quiet for a minute, listening to the raindrops patter above us.

“Ro.”

It was the first time Charlie had called me that since before.

That was how I thought of my life. Before I left, and after I left. Before Ava LeClair and after.

I shifted onto my back, staring up, and murmured, “Every time I’ve come across that photo, there’s a second before I realize who it is. I see the boards and the water and there’s a…a breath of feeling good, basking in something I lost. There were days when I didn’t want to leave the van, ever, and felt sorry for anyone who didn’t live how we did. There were so many of those.”

Charlie lay back next to me. Water was sheeting all around our little shelter, and everyone else felt far away.

“I do remember the good things, Charlie. You. You were one of the best things.” My heart was beating hard.

Charlie swept her thumb across my cheek gently, completely, then looked down at her hand glistening like my tear was a precious thing she had to hold for safekeeping.

“Tell me about one perfect day,” she said.

The rain had slowed a little, the drumming on our roof steady but no longer angry. I could hear the ocean again, and its friendly roar brought image after image of good days. Perfect days. It wasn’t hard to find one to appease Charlie. I had hundreds. But I told her about one I still cherished, in spite of everything. The ordinary surfing day when I was fifteen, and secretly took Dreamers as we all ran in the water.

I don’t mention that part. But I described the rest. Every color, every sound.

Pink sky, five dark silhouettes on boards, a deep feeling of peace.

***

After I described my perfect day to Charlie, the one I secretly captured in the picture, we were both quiet for a long time.

“You see,” I said. “I didn’t obliterate everything good about the van. So don’t feel sorry for me.”

“No. Never.”

“Charlie?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Will you tell me about one perfect day when you were younger? One you want back so bad it hurts?”

That’s how it always was with her. We’d never poured our hearts out to each other for hours and hours, even as teenagers. We’d tipped them out, a bit at a time. A little pain sloshing over the edges here and there, when we got careless.

We lay side by side, on our backs, under the overturned boat. The right side of my body touching her left—there wasn’t room for safe distances here.

Charlie took a deep breath and I could feel her chest expand. When she exhaled, sort of sadly, I felt the warmth as the sigh left her body, floated up to our makeshift roof and back down to us.

“Here’s one.” Charlie turned onto her side and faced me, propping herself up on her elbow, head in her hand, and I did the same. It was dark in our shelter, but I could still see the wistful smile that passed over her face.

“I’m seventeen and I’m in Santa Barbara,” she said. “And I wake up super early, but you and Cap and all three boys are out surfing somewhere. So I go to the fancy hotel and put a coin on the fountain for you so you’ll know I’m there and I haven’t seen the security guard.”

My breath caught. But there was no room in here for that. She’d feel it—the slightest change in the atmosphere. I tried to breathe normally as she went on. We were killing time until the storm passed. That was all.

“You and Dyl come an hour after I put the coin out,” Charlie went on. “But that hour. It feels like a week. I get enough change for us to take the bus somewhere, then I spend the time pacing back and forth, and going into the restroom to check my tattoo. See, I’ve drawn a little turtle inside the real tattoo. Remember the game I played with Dyl? How I’d put things in there and see how long it took him to notice?”

Dyl had loved that sweet, simple game. Charlie had drawn animals, words, symbols. “Just keeping you sharp, Dylly,” she’d said.

“So, this day. You’re wearing your sundress. Do you remember it?”

A spaghetti strap Gunne Sax, three dollars from a thrift store. Stained at the waist, but I’d cut off the lace tier on the hem and used it as a sash, covering the stain. I felt beautiful in it.

“And your hair’s pulled back, except for this one wild curl that always escapes by your right cheek. You have your yellow swimsuit on under, because we’re going to the beach.

“And you ask, ‘Have you been stealing coins, ma’am?’ in this serious voice.

“And the whole time, I’m thinking, Notice my tattoo, Dyl. Notice my tattoo. Because sometimes, after he checks it, you touch it, too.

“And then we’re on the pier. You, me, and Dyl. And right before we go down the stairs to the sand, Dyl says, ‘Hey. You put a turtle on it!’ And I kneel for him to touch the fake part of my tattoo, the turtle. Because it’s our ritual, right?

“But you don’t touch it. Not today. You laugh, but you don’t touch it.

“And then we go down the beach.”

One word from me, one shake of my head so small it wouldn’t be visible, but would change the air just enough to feel it— No, Charlie. It’s too late for us —and she’d stop.

“I measure that day in all the times you don’t touch me. When you take off your sandals and I offer to carry them up to our hiding place in the shade—it doesn’t happen.

“When you’re showing me new footwork, and I’m standing on your board pretending I’m listening even though I can’t pay attention to what you’re saying for the life of me. I think you’re going to touch my instep, showing me what to do. But it doesn’t happen.

“We go for ice cream and I have chocolate on my lip, but you only point to your own to let me know. You don’t touch me. You have to leave any minute, and it’s not going to happen.

“And then.”

Charlie looked at me for a long time, and my breathing must have been the loudest thing on earth for me to hear it over the rain.

“And then, when we’re walking down the dunes right after sunset, and I’ve completely given up on you touching me today, and we’re making our plans for tomorrow…

“You just… You hook your pinkie in mine. Your left, my right.”

Charlie demonstrated, raising her hand to the hull of the raft and hooking her right pinkie over the edge of the wooden bench seat above us.

“And you don’t say a word,” she said. “You just stop walking, and hook our pinkies. And give me this look, like, Is that all right? And it’s a perfect day. Because I knew we weren’t just friends anymore. I knew it was just a matter of time.”