Page 36 of The California Dreamers

35

Anthills

2002

The island

Day 3, evening

“I want to see the lookout at night,” I tell my brothers.

It’s our last night on the island. We’ll throw the ashes tomorrow, and then we’ll have to say goodbye.

Everyone says I should just rest, but I wear them down, finally winning them over when I agree that they can carry me up to the center of the 8 on a board like they toted Pauline yesterday. Dyl in front, so that I can see by my dancing flashlight when a leaf adheres to his honey-colored hair. Griff in back. I heard Mag insisting on that; he wants to make up for Griff’s continued silence.

His breathing, behind me, is labored.

“Griff? I know you haven’t forgiven me like the others,” I say.

He doesn’t answer.

“It’s all right. I can’t be greedy.”

“It’s not a matter of forgiving.” We follow three bends in the trail before he speaks again. “I entered my name in that contest, remember? What if I had gone through with it?”

“You didn’t.”

“I came close. And what if someone had taken a photo of me that day, and it happened to catch everyone’s fancy. And chased us. And there’s something else I was thinking about when you were caught in the riptide.”

“What?”

Griff stops, asks Dyl to lower the board, and they rest me on the ground. “Stewart Tippetts,” Griff says over my shoulder.

“Who?” I ask, baffled.

Griff gestures with his right forefinger in front of me. Tracing something invisible.

“A wave?” I ask, still confused.

He traces the invisible outline again. A sharp swoop, down and up. “A fake bite cut into a board,” he says. “Stewart Tippetts is the real name of that Jaws guy. Remember him?”

“How could I forget?”

Griff signals to Dyl to lift me again and they resume climbing, carrying me.

“Cap told me something after he got sick,” Griff says after a minute. “He figured out Jaws was the one who vandalized his board and had the cops hassle us, taunt us about being on souvenirs. Cap and Jaws… Stewart Tippetts…met before any of us were born, butted heads with each other over other stuff. The photo was only…an accessory.”

I shake my head in disbelief. “So that’s why he and his friends picked a fight with Mag at the party, and broke your board? Over some chip on his shoulder because, what? Cap was a better surfer?”

“They met, both working under the table at a garage in Central California, Cap told me. Before any of us were born. Cap and Mama had just run away from Georgia. ’67, ’68. And they needed cash. He told me something that must have been really hard for him. He said…” Griff hesitates. “At that very first garage gig, Jaws helped him swap a VIN-number placard, inside the driver’s door.”

“Years later, Cap tried to stop his boss at the hotel from hiring Jaws as another money runner. He was trying to protect him. He told Jaws, ‘Don’t get tangled up with them…’ That he hated himself for it, that it was one of his biggest regrets and he was getting out.”

I picture black hair, a dorsal-finned VW. Chapped lips forming the word Duchess .

“Cap tried to help Jaws, but Jaws didn’t take the gesture kindly,” I say.

“No,” Mag says. “It really burned him. He didn’t think it was a selfless act—”

Griff continued, “He couldn’t imagine that kind of decency. He thought Cap was being petty. But of course he couldn’t out Cap for the VIN, or his secret…gigs for the Sapphire…”

I finish, “So he hurt him in other ways instead.”

I close my eyes, marveling at all of it. So Cap’s “celebrity” hadn’t caught the attention of cops by dark magic to taunt me. “What a small, hateful man.”

“That’s what we said to Cap, more or less,” Mag says, from behind Griff. “I wanted to confront him. But he said, ‘We can only pity him. He’s chasing all the wrong waves.’”

Cap was a large, loving man. Despite his flaws. He’d gotten out of that hotel work, tried to protect others from it. I’ll never get a chance to tell him I understand.

“And is the hotel still fronting for dealers as a side business, paying off cops?” I ask.

Mag shakes his head. “They stopped needing that line of work a few million ago.”

We’re almost at the top. Dyl, at the nose of the board, looks off at the dark sea coming into view. I touch his shoulder. “But it’s all right now. Pauline has piles of money—she wants to help.”

We’re there. At the summit of the island, in the center of the 8.

“Here, let me down.”

They try to stop me because of my ankle, but I insist on disembarking from my board.

Griff looks off at the winking lights. “Ronan. I know logically that you’re not to blame. But.”

But his heart hasn’t caught up.

“I know,” I say. “We have time.” Not all the time in the world. But enough to let forgiveness come without forcing it.

I’m not sure I’ve quite forgiven Mama yet, after all. For not coming for me. But I’m patient, and hopeful.

That can come first.

***

The view from here is spectacular—lights of yachts berthed in the Catalina harbor, bobbing just enough to make them seem like they are shimmering, and the amber of hotel windows strung up and down the hills.

“Anthills,” Mag says. “Cap took me up to the top of a hill in Santa Gabriel a few nights after I turned fifteen and showed me the lights in high-rise offices. He called it anthills.”

“He brought me there, too,” Griff says softly. “He said it was a secret. He told me he’d worked in an office when he was fifteen as a runner, and he never wanted to forget how stale the air was.”

Mag added, “And his boss smelled like—”

“Rum and despair.” I smile. “And then he had you do this.” Slowly, I turn so that my back is to the winking lights of the hotels and boats in civilization, and instead I face open ocean.

“No way,” Mag says. “You, too? Dyl?”

Dyl turns as I had done.

Then the four of us sit, looking out at the dark water.

“You could develop that film after nearly drowning for it,” Mag says. “Aren’t you curious how the pictures came out?”

The pictures span about two years of our lives, from when I’d obtained the camera to a few months before I fled the Gull. Twenty-four on each roll, times seven, meant I held 168 photographs on my lap. Some taken with the timer, others in moments when I’d stolen off alone. I began to look over them in my mind. Pictures of me, my family, our strange life. Pictures taken everywhere from the Mexican border to the Canadian.

“I’m sure they’re ruined,” I say. “They’ve been in a hot van for fifteen years, and just went for a swim.”

None of the boys argue. But maybe this is an excuse, and I am merely afraid of what I’ll see in the film if I allow it to uncoil itself and come out of the dark.

Even to print them for my eyes only would be hard. I’d have to look so clearly at what I’d given up. But it was pointless to think about… Even if the film wasn’t ruined, it probably held only blurs. A sweep of rusty metal and sand, or leaves. Dreamers had been pure luck.

“What do you think would have happened if Cap hadn’t sent the detective off our tail, that time Mama’s father found him? Or if Pauline or someone had found us when we were little, and decided Cap and Mama were unfit?” Griff asks softly.

“If we’d been yanked from the life, you mean?” I ask.

We are silent, trying to imagine this, but it’s only seconds before I shake my head— No .

And Mag says, “It’s too awful to imagine.”

Dyl says, “There’s something I wanted to ask you. All of you. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget how to say it.” He goes to his pack and returns with his journal. He flips through it and I catch glimpses of his handwriting, of faded petals and bright, intricate diagrams, until he comes to what he wants and holds it out for the three of us to read over his shoulder:

Could we have had both?

“The van and the regular world?” I ask.

“Yes,” Dyl says.

We’re silent for a little while, thinking this over.

“Charlie had both, I guess,” Griff says.

I shake my head. “Charlie’s van time came when she was practically grown-up—it’s not the same. But if we could’ve had both…” I think about it for a long time. “It would have been nice, having a young aunt outside the Gull,” I allow. “As I got older.”

My brothers nod, and if they can’t fully grasp what it was like, being the only girl in the Gull, at least they’re trying now.

“Maybe I would’ve been allowed to compete once in a while,” Griff says.

“College,” Dyl says quietly.

And Mag sums up his alternate life this way: “Marriage. Maybe kids.”

“It’s not too late, Mag,” I say.

We all consider this idea. Could there have been a halfway life? One foot on citizen-land, one in surf? Straddling the two worlds? It doesn’t seem possible.

“It was all-or-nothing with him,” Mag says. “Cap committed. Like seeing the shoulder of a wave and developing it into what you want by throwing yourself at it. We couldn’t have both.”

We all agree on this. Imperfect as it was, the world we had was better.

Cap and Mama gave me beautiful places, and the time to know them well. Maybe my children ride the school bus to town every morning. But we spend long days outdoors, and our bodies are tuned to the rhythm of nature. It’s because of my parents that we live that way. They gave me that.

They took from me… No. No lists of the taking.

They gave me much more than they took.