Page 33 of The California Dreamers

32

Flight

1986

Half Moon Bay, California

One week before Ronan’s seventeenth birthday

It’s been a month since the morning we helped the whale, and no one has bothered us. We’ve all gotten used to our Gull’s black-paint disguise and my matching hair, even joking about it once in a while.

“Maybe she will molt soon,” Dyl said just this morning.

“Maybe Ro will,” Mag said, laughing. Because the dye was cheap and my hair is brittle.

The swell has been perfect here, south of San Francisco. But it’s turned cold, and tonight we will head south.

We’re parked at a small rest stop and it’s late, probably near midnight. We are all bedded down inside the Gull—all of us except Cap, who went to buy a windshield wiper from the late-night gas station half a mile off. We have made do with our worn wipers long enough, and he says we can’t scrimp on safety.

There’s a slight shudder, a little click from outside the front windshield, under his and Mama’s bunk. Another click. He’s hopped up on the bumper to snap the new blades in. In a minute, he will start our home’s ignition and we’ll soar down the highway.

The door opens and there’s Cap’s light step, a little whoosh of cold. A cozy feeling—all of us together for the long night on the road to where it’s warm. We will whisper and tiptoe tomorrow morning, to let Cap sleep all afternoon after his overnight drive.

I stretch and curve around Dyl, and soon the delicious rocking of the Gull in flight will lull me to sleep like him and the twins and Mama—

“Ronan,” Cap whispers. “Please come outside. I’ll wait while you put some more clothes on—it’s cold.”

This has never happened. Perhaps he wants my help with something, sensing I’m awake?

I don’t bundle up or put shoes on, and hurry out in my T-shirt and sweats. I shiver, my bare feet on scratchy, wet pine needles.

In the fog, Cap leads me over to the stump where Mama and I served our hasty dinner of nuts and windfall melons. Cap flicks on his portable lantern, careful not to bounce its light toward the Gull and the other four, who dream on, oblivious.

He lowers the light so I can see what he’s spread across the stump.

I’m grateful that my face is in darkness. But I wish I could see his. His hat is tilted too far down, and the lantern casts strange shadows across his chin, all the way to the bleached-out neck of his rash guard shirt.

It is me. A poster of me. Cropped from the photo, blown up. Fuzzy and printed on cheap, curling paper, but unmistakably me, running toward the water with my board, in my green bikini top, my half suit like a skirt at my hips because I hadn’t zipped it up my back yet. Me, the way I looked before I chopped my hair.

Perhaps he merely wants to warn me, a protective father. To show me so we can burn it, so no one else can taunt me with it. To sympathize, to tell me first that I am on strangers’ walls, that he and the other four have been cut out of this version, leaving me alone.

“They were selling these at the car wash.” He reaches to the ground, lifting and unfurling a thick stack of duplicates, which he sets over the first poster on the stump.

“I’ll pay you back” is all I can say. Though I wonder if he paid for them at all, or if he stole them, in his shock. “Thank you for showing me, I—”

“See here?” He crouches by the stump. “You might think it’s just a smudge on the poster, or a shadow, or perhaps a flaw in the printing. But what does it look like?” He traces a small, jagged mark in the lower-right corner of the poster. The distinctive curves of a Parks Service trash can drainage slit…in the shape of a wave.

I wish I could be brave. Admit to it, right then. Say Yes, I did it. I took it. Because I felt so much love for you all that day.

I didn’t do it to hurt us . Because he is admirably restrained. He is not shouting, or waving the poster around, like many fathers would. I know this somehow.

“I don’t know,” I lie. I pretend to examine the picture again. I feel so separate from the girl in it. That girl holding her board and looking north, her hair flying everywhere—she’s not me.

He waits. He knows. It’s in his voice, in how he’s pointing to the wave shape on the poster.

But I don’t say anything.

So he rises and leads me down the steep, railroad-tie trail, to the beach. It feels like it takes forever but I follow him, over the cold sand. He walks slowly, courteous with the lantern so that I don’t stumble. But my instinctive shame tells me where he’s taking me, and I know before we arrive what his lantern will illuminate next. A few yards from the end of the trail. A garbage can.

The kind I used for my timed photos. So clever of me, devising my crude system. Using the materials on hand, like Cap taught us all. Upturned garbage cans with drainage cutouts near the bottom, so I could position the camera lens for a clear view from inside.

This is the most common can in the parks system—there must be hundreds of them, scattered around our favorite beaches. It has a wave design, eight inches or so, repeated over and over around the bottom of the cylinder, and it’s exactly the same as the mark on the photo. My photo.

“It wasn’t that first boy at all.” Cap settles patiently on the sand, careful to keep the wave in the lantern’s glow. “Please sit, Ronan.”

I kneel next to him.

“See, someone else took that picture by hiding a camera in one of these and setting a timer.”

He waits for me to confess. He’ll have a grudging respect for me, a sliver, if I do. But I can’t. I’m seven years old again, and he’s bored, teaching me to surf. He holds his approval just out of reach, knowing it will make me paddle until my arms ache.

At his side, I run my finger along the cutout in the rusted metal. Over and over, trying to comfort myself, when it is futile. Not so far away, a group of kids on the beach, maybe kids my age, laugh around a bonfire. I look past the garbage can, Cap with his lantern, at that far-away glow, and wish I was there. Part of their happy noise, a melody to the background music of unseen waves.

“It must have been hard to line the lens up with the cutout,” he says. “Perhaps the camera was propped on something.”

“A book.” My confession.

He doesn’t ask me why I took the picture. He asks, “How did you get the camera? Did you steal it?”

I nod.

“From a store?”

“From our fire.”

He sighs sadly. “Of course. And it wasn’t an accident that our picture appeared in the newspaper, was it?”

How does he know? I feel so seen through. So foolish. How had we gotten here, kneeling by a beach trash can in the middle of the night? Submitting the photo had seemed such an ingenious idea. Balancing out his crime with my own in a way that only I would ever care or know about.

I shake my head no.

“Did you take more?”

I nod. “Six rolls.” I’d stolen fountain coins and resold the board wax Charlie mailed me to pay for them.

“And you still have them.”

“Yes.” I’m ashamed. But also, humiliation and anger begin to burn in my throat. I’m furious over my mistake, and at whoever blew up the picture, the picture I’d taken for my own private reasons, so much, zooming in on me… I’m furious that this is someone’s idea of sexy, that you could make out the bandage on my left pinkie, the strip of pale skin beside my left bathing suit strap…and that distinctive wave pattern from the can’s drain slit which gave me away.

Most of all, that he made me go through this, leading me to the garbage, making me confess, instead of saying right away I know what you did, Ronan. Why’d you do it? Caring enough to ask.

In the horrible silence, I grasp for words to explain myself, but this is all I come up with: “It’s not as bad as what you did for the hotel man, passing bribes to cops for him.”

I can tell he’s shocked. I’m shocked. But it tastes good, the ugliness I spit out: “I could have given the newspaper a picture of that instead.”

He pulls off his hat and rubs his dirty blond hair. It’s not as satisfying as I thought it’d be, watching understanding dawn on his face. It’s not like what I craved.

He’s shrinking, right in front of me.

I want to say We’re even now! Let’s both pretend we don’t know. Let’s go back to the way things were.

But I can’t get the words out.

I wait for him to hit back. He looks at me steadily, the green-eyed stare that’s intimidated beachgoers from Imperial Beach to Port Washington, when they did something to deserve a peek under his hat.

But I don’t flinch. I pull my shoulders back and stare straight back at him. I’ve studied Mama’s features, her rounder eyes and softly curving brows that seem to rest in a permanent position of calm. But Cap is so rarely hatless on land, and I’ve never looked at my father closely, or long enough, to see his. I never noticed before how our eyes are exactly the same almond shape, under high eyebrows, like we’re permanently surprised by the world.

I wish he would speak. Give me a sand grain of hope that we’ll be able to move past this, with time. That he guesses how awful I must feel, as a sixteen-year-old girl, to see myself on a poster for strange men to buy in gas stations. Or that his hotel work was not the reason I needed to rebel. Not the only reason.

He doesn’t—he only waits longer.

“Maybe I’ll…” I flail. A car’s red taillights float past, up on the road, and I say, “I’ll hitch north.”

He nods slowly. “If that’s what you want. You’re seventeen next week. And perhaps you’ve wanted to go for a long time, Ronan. I wonder, in fact, if that’s not the reason you took your photographs. Though I know the others would miss you terribly.”

But not you? Not you? You want me to go? His voice sounds sad and strained, but he’s too proud to say it. And I’m too proud to ask him.

He didn’t ask me why I submitted the picture. He supplied my answer.

“Are you going to tell them?”

He considers, then says, “You will, if you decide not to go.”

As if it is a condition of me staying.

“And you will also…” Now he seems indecisive. His confused look before he threw the camera into the fire, like it pained him, what he was about to do, and he was fighting an internal battle, comes rushing back to me.

I wait for the rest of my penance. I will tell them. Wax all of our boards forever. Go to every gas station and souvenir place from here to San Diego and scour their shelves for posters or towels or notepads of any Merrick, burn them? Happily!

“You will dispose of the rest of your film,” he finishes.

“All right.”

“Good. It’s settled, then.” He rises. “You should go get warm. Your feet look so—” He stares off in the dark toward where the waves are. “Go inside and get warm.”

Throwing out the film is such a small price to pay, considering what I’ve done to my family. A few curls of plastic, or whatever film is made of. It’s nothing.

But I don’t sleep that night, as the Gull shudders her way south. I imagine telling them. Their faces. Griff’s expression will harden. Mag will say something mocking, his eyes flashing fire. Dyl will not look at me at all.

Mama…of any of them, Mama would be the only one to ask Why?

But I don’t know how I’ll answer.

No matter what I say, none of them will look at me the same.

***

The next dawn, in Santa Cruz, while everyone sleeps, I carry Rontu outside and shut the Gull’s door as quietly as I can. I take her to a far-off picnic bench, open her Velcro belly and pull out clouds of white stuffing. In her paws, in her ears, she hides my pictures. I take out every film roll she’s kept secret for me. One after the other, tightly rolled Army green dry-bags for soldiers’ cigarettes. Six of them. I take them out of the bags, hide those back in Rontu, carefully replacing her stuffing, fluffing her gently as if she is a real puppy. I carry the film in my shorts pockets and Rontu in the crook of my right arm—she’ll be my witness.

I walk away from the Gull on wet sand as the first light, purplish gray, breaks behind the hills at my left. I’ll miss exercises, but Cap will know what I’m doing. I want him to.

I hunt for a long time, passing dumpsters, trash cans. Until I find a can like the one that told on me. A metal one with waves—it has to be that kind.

I reach into my pocket and hold a roll of film over it. The trash smells like sour beer and rotting fish. And I can’t seem to let the film go.

***

I am late for exercises, but Cap offers me an understanding nod, trusting that I’ve done it. He hasn’t given me a deadline for telling the others I took the picture. I’ll do it today. Throw the film out tonight.

But the day passes. A regular day, not that different from the day I took the picture.

I don’t make it to a garbage can that night.

Or the next morning.

Cap says nothing, but he doesn’t speak to me except during meals.

Mag asks me, “What’s up with you?”

Griff teases him for the way he’s phrased this, and loses interest in how off I’m acting.

The next day, two nights after Cap confronted me, I try again. I find a trash can in a little strip of park abutting the beach. This one smells of cigarettes, and there are wasps stuck to a sticky soda cup. I wonder what could be on my undeveloped rolls, but tell myself I’m being silly and these aren’t worth grieving over. They’re images of rusty trash can, or blurry limbs, or fuzzy animals. Garbage belongs with garbage.

I can’t do it.

***

So I begin to think he’s right. Maybe I do want to go. Maybe I have wanted to go for a long time. Otherwise I would not have taken such a risk with the camera.

That night, the night before I turn seventeen, I do something I’ve never done. When Dyl’s sound asleep, and Cap’s driving, I slip out of my bunk. I climb over Mag in his bunk, waking him. “What’s going on?” he hisses.

“Shhhh.” I’m already half out the window.

It’s not as hard as I feared, climbing up onto the roof, positioning myself between the boards on the roof rack. It’s a little narrow, and I can’t use my usual surfing stance. But I’m doing it—sky surfing.

Griff joins me. Then, after a few minutes, Mag comes up.

“Why?” Mag asks, laughing.

I lie to him. “For my birthday.”

The three of us ride the van like it’s our board, like the road is the sea.

I close my eyes and tilt my face to the wind, trying to memorize the feeling.

The next morning, dawn

Cap and the big boys are in the water. Cap still hasn’t spoken to me much since he found out. He’s been cordial. No dirty looks, no impatience over when I’m going to tell the others.

But I know—if I tell them, this is what it’ll be like from now on if I stay. Silence, distance, distrust…from all five of them. I won’t belong anymore.

When he and the twins are far out, surfing, I ask Mama to take Dyl for a ramble without me because I don’t feel so hot.

“Poor Little Seal,” she says, and places a cool hand on my forehead. “But I think you are hot. Warm, at least.”

“I just want to sleep,” I say. Memorizing her sweet voice, her childish joke, the arch of her eyebrows, her scent—the one we share, at least for a little while longer—oranges and cloves.

“Ro,” Dyl whispers when Mama’s outside. “Read Island . It’ll make you feel better.”

“Thank you, Dyl, I will.” I have a lump in my throat. I clear it, trying to pass it off as part of my sudden sickness.

I watch them leave through our bunk window. Mama’s holding Dyl’s hand, and they walk away, in no rush. Stopping to examine flowers, leaves, things I can’t see. Mama’s leaning down, her hair shining in the sun, and she’s listening patiently to Dyl.

They leave me slowly. It’s like they know I’m trying to imprint the picture of them in my mind forever.

I pack a few things. Not much, just what fits in my backpack. Then I take a last look around, trying to make the Gull look shabby and cramped, trying to see her the way strangers see her, to make it easier to go.

But she refuses to look ugly. She looks more beautiful than ever. Her shag-carpet remnant is bright red, and light’s pouring in her tape-mended windows, and even Cap’s vanilla wall of books looks like a work of art I got to live with.

Rontu-dog—Dyl will worry that I’m never coming back if I take her. And I will come back. I retrieve the big toy puppy from way down at the bottom of the quilt Dyl and I share. The plush is still warm from our feet, and this is what breaks me. Turns everything I look at wobbly and glassy. I have to go now or I won’t be able to do it.

I scribble a short note for Dyl: “Take care of her until I come back, Love R.” I stuff the message in Rontu-dog’s collar and put her back under the blanket.

Then I remember the film in my backpack. I’d been carrying it with me for days, trying to destroy it. The film, which holds proof of our good and bad…of the six of us sunrise surfing at Trestles, and of so many other times. So many more good than bad.

I can’t destroy it. I don’t want to bring it with me, where it could only make me sad.

I’ll leave it here. Part of the Gull. I’ll get it when I visit, when things are different. I pull Rontu-dog back out from under our blanket and hide the film again, in the stuffing of her ears and legs. Dyl vowed he’d never look inside again, after the first time. He’d been so disappointed by the Highest CD Rates in Town! on her tiny plush heart, hated seeing her flayed open.

I tuck Rontu in and hurry outside.

One more look. One more glance at her clipped wings, the boards on her roof, the worn, rainbow-striped beach towel folded by the door for us to wipe the sand off our feet, softer than any cul-de-sac girl’s welcome mat.

Then I go.