Page 34 of The California Dreamers

33

Children

2002

The island

Day 3, midday

I ran heedlessly along the beach, then to the interior of the island, stumbling along rocks.

The landscape changed, gray turning green, and I found myself on the east side. If I kept running, I wouldn’t have to know they weren’t following me.

At the place Mama had named Golden Cup, the sunny fishing hole ringed in yellow blossoms, my legs gave out.

I sat there, on the dock. Hidden from marine traffic.

I thought of how I’d run, that morning after my seventeenth birthday. Run so that I wouldn’t lose courage. Run until I saw a lavender truck, purple blossoms. And it felt safe. Like a sign.

I’d hitched up to Oregon. Got work as a picker on the lavender farm. Bunked in the picker cabin. And Lou had been there, with his kindness. Not asking too many questions.

I couldn’t regret running, not now that we had our boys. But Mama had known where I was, and not come. Cap had forgiven me, wanted me back. But not her.

He had told her about the picture, and she’d been angry? It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.

Now they despised me, and it was over. I’d return to my boys. Forget I came here, and the faint, foolish, ever-present hope that I could make things right with them. Like tearing up old photographs.

I pulled Rontu-dog from my pack, opened the seam in her soft belly, and dug into the white stuffing. In her right ear, my fingers met something soft but solid—a film canister in its miniature Army green dry-bag. Made for cigarettes, purchased in bulk from the army-navy surplus store to keep Mama’s spices safe from damp.

I pulled out another, and another. Six in total. I tossed one in the water and watched it float, a puffy lily pad. One by one, I dropped the rest, until all six rode the surface of the sunny inlet.

They wouldn’t leave quickly; the water was too calm.

But slowly, steadily, they’d be pulled from me. The tide would take them out to the open sea. I could watch, if I stayed long enough.

“You sure you want to do that?”

I turned: Mag. Dyl behind him. And far back, up on the trail he’d led me along the first day, Griff.

“You found me” was all I could manage.

“We followed you,” Mag said. “Your tracks.” He came up and sat near me, on my right side. Wordlessly, Dyl settled on my left.

They dangled their muddy bare feet in the water as the three of us watched my lily pads float. It was only thanks to the storm that there had even been mud for me to stamp footprints in.

“I fled the interview,” I said wearily. “That’s a line from some movie, isn’t it?”

“We’ll have to take your word for it.” Mag held his palms up, Beats me . “Is that what you’ve been doing, up in Oregon? Watching movies and picking lavender, and beating yourself up about a picture?”

“How are you not mad?” I asked, an ache in my chest.

“I am,” Mag admitted. “I wish you’d trusted one of us with your secret, at least.”

“I do, too,” I said.

“Did that make you feel better?” Mag nodded at a film bag bobbing near his right ankle.

I watched it float for a moment. All I felt was profound loss. “No. But he asked me to throw the film away, right before I left. And I let him think I did.”

Dyl swirled his toes in the water and asked, “Ro?”

“Yes?” I looked over at him.

“Why did you give that one picture to a newspaper?”

There. The question I’d waited fifteen years for someone to ask. I began to cry again, tears of relief, gratitude, regret for the time we’d missed.

Though maybe they wouldn’t have understood back then, no matter what we wanted to believe. It was so easy, from a distance, to look at everything differently.

“We all have a right to bear witness to our own lives,” Pauline had said. I’d desperately wanted that as a teen, without the words to articulate it or the confidence to believe I deserved it.

“I wanted to bear witness to my life, I guess,” I told them. “I let him believe I submitted Dreamers because I thought he was a hypocrite, working for that creep at the hotel. I’ll always be sad about that. Because I realized later, it was so much more. I sent that photo in because I didn’t want him deciding which secrets I should keep. Which rules I should follow.”

My brothers didn’t answer at first. They seemed lost in memory, like me, as the three of us sat on the dock and watched my film surf away.

Throwing the film hadn’t made me feel better. But telling the truth had. I could forgive the girl who wanted to defy her father. Maybe I should’ve forgiven her a long time ago.

Dyl spoke very softly. “Mama said, just before we came after you, ‘We were children who stole a van.’”

I’m not sure which part I welcomed more. The fact that Cap and Mama stole.

We don’t steal.

Or the acknowledgment that they were children. Fallible, naive. That they’d made mistakes, and some of them had hurt us.

“Mama must have been about the age I was when I left, when they had you and Griff, Mag.”

He nodded. “ Children. She said they stole the Gull from a former boss of Cap’s father. From the factory lot.”

I marvel at this, try to picture it.

“I remember breaking a few rules myself,” Mag said. “You weren’t the only one. And let’s not forget Bruce Balboa up on the trail.” He turned to look over his shoulder at Griff. “He never admitted it, but he always dreamed of competing.”

“But he’s still furious at me, isn’t he?” I, too, stared up at Griff, high on the trail.

Mag said, “Give him time.”

“Ro? I used to crawl out our window, just to know I could. I wrote about it in my journal.”

“Which Pauline stole,” I said.

“No,” Dyl said gravely. He hunted in his pack and pulled out his journal. Then a second one, exactly like the other. Green kelp, Mer on the cover. “She uses the same brand. French naval science booklets.”

“Pauline?” I ask, astonished. The journal I’d snatched from her had been her own, not Dyl’s?

“What?” Mag asked. “That’s a freaky coincidence. Whoops. Guess we owe her an apology.”

“ Pauline shops at army-navy surplus stores?” I asked, trying to make it align with her prim fuchsia pantsuits, her gentility… My head throbbed at this new fragment of information; there was hardly room for it after all I’d discovered. A freaky coincidence…or something not coincidental at all. Something perfectly logical.

Pauline had said something. Alluded to an entry in her journal, about fathers and daughters. And those looks at Mama. Her insistence that she always had a lot of respect for our family. Always… Her admission that she and Cap had corresponded long ago, and only revived the connection due to the photography exhibit.

If I tried, I could put it together; there was a vital truth in there somewhere. Something important. But it was all too much of a puzzle for me now. Two brothers sat beside me, and one watched from above, like he wanted to keep us safe. I was reeling from learning that things I’d been so certain of weren’t so certain after all.

The boys were here, but not Mama. Never Mama. Mama hadn’t come for me when my postcard arrived, either. Mama. And Cap had wanted to.

Dyl stared at a bag of film, bobbing gently in a whirl of kelp heading slowly but steadily out of Golden Cup. For a moment it seemed that roll, the one that had traveled the farthest, might float back to us. It crested a little wave, came nearer, then, steadily, it picked up speed.

“What’s on them?” Dyl asked.

“Pictures of our beaches. Of us. There’s one of your elbow on our bunk at night when you were ten, with the dark freeway behind you, out the window.”

“You remember specific shots?” Mag asked, looking at me steadily, surprised.

Every last one.

The film rolls were spreading out, receding from us more quickly now. Soon they’d be lost for good.

A sudden movement next to me, a splash.

“Dyl!” I called. “It gets rough out there. What are you— What is he—”

“Come on, Dylly,” Mag urged, next to me.

Soon I was rooting him on too. One stroke, two.

And then Dyl had a fingertip on the film. It inched away from him, but he was getting close. He tried another method—duck-diving under water, emerging with scientific precision under the little dry-bag. This time he got it, clasping it, turning, waving it at me in triumph.

“I’m not going to let him have all the fun.” Thud, splash — Mag was in.

I jumped to my feet. “Mag! Griff warned me about riptides! Don’t bother! I’m sure it’s wrecked by now, anyway!”

Mag surfaced, had a hand on a second bag of film. “It seems fine!” he called. “It’s in a nice little air bubble!”

Pounding on the dock behind me, a flash of earth-colored shorts, sandaled feet, a third splash.

“Don’t, Griff! You’re sweet, but come back!” I shouted after him.

He saved the third roll. Swam after a fourth.

I hurried to the end of the dock. And then I was in. One second on the sunny, warm wood, the next up to my forehead in cold salt water.

Mag created a wave for a roll halfway between us, shoving at the water with both hands to create a little swell, and the thing surfed toward me. “Got it!” I called.

There was one roll of film left, bobbing ten feet from me, on its way out of the cove. In a minute, we’d lose sight of it. I swam in my awkward sidestroke, courtesy of my shoulder, propelled by relief, by gratitude.

They understand.

“Get it?” Mag called. I hadn’t realized how far out I’d drifted from him and the other two.

“Almost!” But the roll floated out of my grasp, teasing me.

You can’t catch me! A child’s game. My boys had gone through a phase where they loved it.

The current was more insistent, colder out here. A few more feet and I’d be out of the cove.

I turned, treating my bad arm gingerly, prepared to swim back. Five rolls saved. Three family members here with me…take the victory and cherish it.

But then I heard it: a steadily increasing buzz. A motorboat in the channel, probably a fishing charter headed out from Santa Barbara, and if they decided to veer this way to admire Manzanita Island on their way, I would be spotted.

I couldn’t be the reason my family got busted.

I held my breath, submerged, waited until my lungs protested and forced me up.

When I resurfaced, the boat’s motor was faint, but I couldn’t see my brothers. And no matter how hard I kicked, the island wouldn’t get bigger—my shoulder injury had stolen half of my paddling power. I tried again, determined, but this time pain shot across my right ankle. Flotsam? I’d had the bad luck to bang my ankle on a beer cooler or some other junk? But it bobbed next to me—a fat cross-section of invasive giant bamboo, like the hundreds scattered on the island.

I hugged the fat cylinder of wood and realized that my bad luck had really been good; the wood gave me enough buoyancy that I could gather myself, rest for a second, remind myself: Be calm .

And then I found grooves in my float. They were just like I remembered, the ones I carved into our old bunk for comfort. The pattern—up, down, swooping, sloping. If you were tracing it in the air, it would look like you were conducting a tiny symphony with one hand.

Just trace the waves, Ro.

I did. I traced my fingers on those beautiful, intricate carvings, carved from pure love, a gift from one child to another to make it through the night.