Page 37 of The California Dreamers

The next morning, dawn

It’s a calm morning at slack tide, the waves steady and easy to manage, as if even the wind has paused to pay deference to Cap. They are all out there waiting for me. I see the ring of bright boards and swimsuits, but they look away. Pretending they all suddenly had an urge to gaze off toward the pink horizon. They know I haven’t been on a board in fifteen years.

I’m clumsy as I heave myself onto my borrowed board and begin to paddle. “Like riding a bicycle,” Charlie said to me when we woke.

Hardly. I am older, heavier, in a life vest, with a bandaged ankle and injured shoulder. And this board is made of some substance that hadn’t been invented the last time I surfed.

I try to paddle past the little breakers but I overcorrect, spill over, gulp salt water. They’ll be watching me, even if they pretend not to. They don’t want me floating out of reach again.

I untangle my leash, heave myself back on and try again. Cap chose this place because of me. Maybe the waves don’t want me out there, but he does.

I stop thinking and let my body take over, and it starts to come back. Maybe, just maybe when Cap was teaching me to surf, and I overheard him saying “she is okay just floating out there in one place forever, it’s the damndest thing,” he wasn’t being condescending. Maybe there was a grudging admiration in it, an admission that he wished he could stay in one place sometimes, too.

My infuriating, stubborn, flawed, beautiful father.

I could float here forever.

But they’re waiting for me.

I paddle to the opening they’ve left for me, between Mama and Dyl. We all straddle our boards, and the sun is high enough that the ripples we surround are gold. From here, facing the island, I can see the flowery outline of Mama’s tribute to the Gull. She and Dyl rose in the dark to fix it up with fresh boughs; it had been damaged in the storm.

Mama begins, paddling to the center, saying something I can’t make out, and maybe we’re not meant to hear it. Maybe she’s singing a private song for him. She throws a winged seedpod, and I imagine the green arrow bobbing cheerfully, never sinking. It will make land, possibly on some island Cap never visited. After a long time, she shakes out the blue urn and tips it, and we watch the cupfuls of gray sand that were once Cap surf small waves.

The sun is in my eyes so I can’t see her face when she returns to my side, but her movements are calm, comforting.

The rest of us take turns paddling to the center.

Charlie whispers her limerick from Bassett. When she paddles back to her place, she looks at me and her cheeks shine with tears. She will visit the farm soon, we’ve decided. And she has invited me and the boys to stay with her during their next school break. There’s a killer skate camp in Laguna, she has told me.

Mag is next. I’ve seen his tribute already—from his pocket he pulls a picture from Pauline’s journal. One of my favorites, of Cap surfing Tybee, in Georgia, when he was sixteen and courting Mama. Mama took it, and Cap’s straddling his board, beaming at her. He didn’t have his hat yet, and his pale hair is buzzed short. But his smile is the same as Mag’s. Mag says his words, then repockets the picture.

Griff offers a dried hosta leaf with something written on it. Maybe it’s a letter, or a poem, or a sketch. Griff, so easygoing and caring, so quick to forgive, has been slow to forgive me for Dreamers , and all it wrought. I know he’s still trying.

I won’t give up on him.

Dyl’s next. He leaves a crown he’s woven of manzanita branches to resemble Cap’s fisherman hat. There was much discussion about the real hat, Cap’s cap. We considered giving it a water burial along with its wearer. But in the end, everyone agreed it should stay on the dashboard of the Gull, which Mag and Griff are anxious to retrieve and tune up.

Dyl’s replica hat bobs where Mama threw the glistening ashes. It tilts and, ever so slowly, drops out of sight.

Then it’s my turn. I paddle to the center.

I’ve brought my token, tucked behind my suit zipper. I thought for a long time about what to throw. I decided on lavender, because it is purple, the royal color, and Cap is surf royalty. Because lavender washes things clean, and because I think Cap would have liked to walk the fields with me.

Tucked behind my wet suit’s right sleeve, I have the locks of hair from my sons. They gave them to me so I wouldn’t miss them, but now I pull them out and set them in the middle of the purple blossoms, the flecks of floating ashes that are my dad.

If Cap had known his grandsons, he’d have teased them for skateboarding, but he’d have seen their joy and their fearlessness. They have some of Cap’s best qualities.

So do I.

I close my eyes and think of my favorite line from Cap’s morning promises. I’d resented that ritual as a teenager, but now I find it beautiful.

I close my eyes ’til it all drops away.

I close my eyes ’til it all drops away. What’s left is what I want.

For me, what’s left is an image of rolling blue. Not the sea—our lavender, back home.

I watch the locks sink down under the flotilla of petals. I watch as it all glistens, floats, as sprigs and petals break away.

It’s still not enough. It’ll never be enough. I wipe my cheek and—quickly, casually, because I don’t want anyone else to realize what I’m doing—I dip my fingers in the water by a lavender sprig. So my tears are in there, too.

Whatever mistakes he made, whatever pain he might have caused us in pursuit of his dreams, we still worship him for trying. He wanted something different for all of us.

Mama says, “Goodbye, love.”

Then she looks up from the ashes at me, a look I’ll try to decipher for years. Contrition, gratitude? I’ll never know. Maybe she just wants to be sure I’m really here.

I whisper to the waves, where Cap lives, “Thank you.”

Then I paddle back to where I’d been, closing the circle.