Page 5 of The California Dreamers

4

Rather pretty

2002

The island

Day 1, two and a half hours later

A few hundred feet from the island’s shores, our driver cut the engine and Griff hurriedly prepared the tender, tossing it in the water.

“Better wear this until we’re on the island, just in case,” Griff said, and handed me a huge brown anorak with a DFW logo on the back, like the one our driver wore.

Wait , I felt like yelling as I shrugged on the jacket. Wait, I’m not ready. The ride had gone by in a blur, wind whipping my face as we passed a dolphin pod, a vintage wood schooner, beautiful sight after beautiful sight I’d barely taken in. Instead I’d been picturing my arrival at the island, seeing the others. Mama’s red hair glinting in the sun as she waited for me on the beach with open arms. Mama —was her hair gray now, or henna red? Did she still smell like oranges and cloves? Would her voice still calm me? She’d summoned me, but she was changeable as the wind. What if she saw me, my brown hair and lined forehead, and was disappointed? She might let something behind her eyes drift away, the way her body often drifted away from me, from all of us, back then.

Dyl might cry, little-boyish, asking why I’d exited his life with only a scribbled note and a single postcard. Mag might not speak at all. He’d glower at me, or say something cutting, mocking. And though Mama would be waiting for me to fling myself into her arms, she would have questions, too, so many questions I wasn’t prepared to answer.

Suddenly I wanted to stay aboard the Popoki Kai , the DFW craft connecting the world of the living and this world of ghosts, indefinitely. I fussed with the jacket, my “federal worker” disguise. It was so big there was more empty sleeve than sleeve, and I rolled them, stalling.

But when Griff jumped aboard the tender and offered me a hand, I had no choice but to take it.

“Thank you,” I called to our driver before climbing down, but got only a small nod from the brown hood in return. They hadn’t spoken a word or looked at us during the hours-long trip, and the message had been clear: their identity was on a need-to-know basis.

Our little rubber craft glided off, Griff behind me in the stern guiding the outboard motor. I glanced back at the Popoki Kai . She bobbed alone. No other boats, no news helicopters, no amphibious SWAT hydroplanes on our tail. The captain of the boat stood tall, head tilted back to gauge the clouds, DFW parka whipping in the wind, then started the motor and sped out of sight.

“The island is shaped like an eight,” Griff was explaining. “One circle rocky, one green, with the highest spot in the center. See…there.” He pointed over my shoulder at the highest trees. “It’s a nice lookout if you’re willing to put in the sweat—2,400 feet. On a clear day, you can see the mainland. The rocky side gets the wind, so not as much grows there. Well, Mama and Dyl say—”

“‘You have to look closer for life.’” It burst out, the sweet memory overcoming my nerves.

He paused. Maybe surprised that I remembered what Mama always used to say. Maybe just fiddling with the motor. He quickly retreated into the safe topic of the island. “And on the greener side…” Griff trailed off.

“What?” I turned to him.

“You’ll see. It’s rather pretty.”

But what I saw, when I turned back to face the island and we rounded some rocky steppes so the green, east side of the hourglass-shaped mass came into view, wasn’t just rather pretty . It was primeval, untouched, impossibly lush. And it wasn’t just green . It was every green.

So many trees—Manzanitas, of course. Ground-hugging ones, little ones like babies of the apple trees they were named after, and big ones, twenty feet or taller. Bright red flame trees, stately pin oaks, eucalypti with shredded trunks and little silver-dollar leaves fluttering in the wind, gnarled olive trees bent horizontal.

It was the perfect place to say goodbye to Cap.

Griff killed the motor and rowed us as close as possible. “We wade from here. It’s calm now, we timed this well. The break nearly tipped us when we came, but even if we upend, it’s an easy swim on this side of the island. The other side gets most of the rips.”

He was ready to plunge in but I hesitated. “I haven’t been swimming in fifteen years, Griffin.”

“Oh. Right. I…” He gave up his fumbling apology and silently passed me a life vest.

Embarrassed, I looped it around one shoulder.

The two of us paddled the boat in silence until we were past the break, riding a miniwave over water shallow enough to see through to the sandy ocean floor.

“I’ll pull you to shore,” Griff said. “You don’t have to—”

But I’d already shucked off my shoes and stuffed them in my duffel. Bad enough Griff knew I was anxious about a little two-foot swell; he wasn’t going to tow me onto land while I sat here like some princess. I tossed the life vest into the tender, threw my duffel straps over my arms, making it into a backpack, and jumped into knee-deep water. Cold, but not icy.

Griff sloshed behind me and together we dragged the tender the rest of the way and up onto the sand, quickly stashing it under tree cover. “It’s half an hour to where we’re camping,” he said, gesturing toward the path that led uphill.

I followed him through the flora. The birdsong was like nothing I’d heard. Masses calling from high and low, riots of them. They seemed to know this was their domain, that they’d lucked onto a piece of land where ugly-voiced humans like us rarely came.

Beautiful, unreal, miraculous. All better descriptions than what Griff had offered.

Halfway to the peak, a bright copper-colored flower with straw-shaped petals caught my eye and I stepped closer to examine it, then the water below. We’d climbed steadily, and from this height, I had a good view of a small, circular cove. The same flower was clustered thickly around it on the rocks.

“Ronan?” Griff looked back to see why I was dawdling. “Mama named that cove Golden Cup. Our fishing spot—those rocks hide it from ocean traffic. Not that there’s much.”

Golden Cup—what a perfect name, so Mama. The bronze-yellow flowers meeting in a near circle around water so clear I wished I could sip it like an elixir to give me strength for this reunion.

But that wasn’t what had pinned me to the spot.

There was a man down there fishing. A man I’d last seen as a little boy. Even from up here he looked tall, his long, sturdy legs flanking the trap. Strong, as he jumped up, returned too-small fish to the water, coiled rope. He was impossibly grown-up.

Griff joined me. “Oh.” He emitted a sharp whistle and Dyl looked up.

Sometimes I imagined him late at night, when the skylight over my bed shape-shifted into the pop-up bubble window above the bunk where Dyl and I had slept; or when I was deep asleep, especially when the boys were young, when I was unguarded, exhausted, my move from the old life to the new still incomplete, and the feeling of a gentle weight, a small, patient hand on my arm felt just like Dyl’s…but when I opened my eyes it was one of my sons. Or no one at all.

Dyl had stilled. I held up my hand in an awkward wave. Would he whistle back, call up a greeting? Drop his haul of shimmering silver fish and race up to me?

He only nodded and returned to his work.

Griffin and I watched him, and then, when it was obvious that was all the acknowledgment I merited, Griffin tightened his ponytail holder awkwardly and we walked on.

Dyl had once trusted me more than anyone. You can see it in Dreamers . In the picture, he looks up and to his left, at me. But his small body veers away from mine. You can tell by the rightward turn of his shoulders. He drags his board, as if it’s lost his attention because he’s noticed something out of frame. If you knew him, you’d realize he might not surf at all; he might drop the board, leave the rest of us, and wander off to the trees.

In his hair—you have to look closely—there’s a leaf.

The little boy in the photo is half-wild. He’s torn between the safety I offer and the safety of nature.

Maybe he knows, even at eight, that nature is the only one who will not let him down.

***

“Not long now,” Griff said. “That’s one of the old DFW work shacks. See that tin roof?”

And then we were there, on a rise above a grassy clearing. I spotted a picnic table and benches built from downed giant eucalyptus trunks. The tree was non-native, crowding out everything else, Griff explained. So the felled wood was everywhere. We passed a firepit, but there were no fires allowed, so someone had piled rusty metal flotsam into the center to mimic flames.

“Well, that’s the work shed.” Griff gestured at the shack a minute’s walk from us, a structure of about ten square feet. As we approached, I studied it and tried to steady my heart. Corrugated tin roof rusted to burnt umber with only a few streaks of the original silver showing, walls and a crude door made of—what else?—eucalyptus planks.

We were at the threshold. I steeled myself for the sight of Mama and Magnus, hoping I’d come up with something articulate to say to them.

Griff swung the door open for me and my heart skipped, but no one was inside. Only a simple metal desk, a bare wood floor, and shelves stacked neatly with supplies.

“I’m just getting your bag,” Griff said, noticing my reaction. “We’re keeping gear here, but we’ve set up camp in the trees.”

They’d brought my old sleeping bag, the one with the mallard-on-red-pattern lining that I’d found at the thrift store when I turned thirteen and could no longer deny that my old one was too short. Mama, so positive I’d come.

Griff was half out the door, but I lagged inside the shed. I’d noticed something in the far corner and couldn’t move.

“Are you coming, Ronan? Oh.”

“Is it?”

Griff nodded. “We didn’t know where else to put it.”

It was an urn, a simple, ocean-blue enamel cylinder.

He fit in there. The king of the waves.

“I’m sorry,” Griff said. “I didn’t think.”

“It’s all right.” I hurried outside. Confronting the living would be enough for one day. If I let myself think too long about Cap now, how the urn was the last I’d see of him, I’d never make it until his memorial.

Griff scanned the family’s encampment, the tidy setup of cooking pot and dishes next to a camp stove, neatly folded blankets and towels, the trees encircling it all. “Tread softly on the land,” Cap always said. And the Merricks were treading softly on the island. They’d brought very little.

“Ahoy, Merricks!” Griff called.

No answer.

“It’s windy today,” he said, which seemed a feeble explanation. But as if to prove his point, a length of fair hair that had escaped from his ponytail flew sideways in the breeze.

“It’s fine!” I admired the clearing’s silky, celery-colored grass, butterflies flitting from stalk to stalk. They were lovely creatures, their wings a milky orange.

“Those are Catalina Orangetip butterflies,” Griff said. “They only survive on the Channel Islands.”

“They’re gorgeous. And what’s that bird with the pretty call?” I was only asking out of nervousness, but waited until it sang again, a low, wistful sound amid the happy chatter: Whishoooleeee. Whishoooleeee.

“I don’t know, but you can ask Mama or Dyl.” Griff looked around, clearly uncomfortable now that we’d stopped moving for the first time in hours. He’d hosted me—managed me?—solo long enough. “I’ll show you the hammocks.”

Tranquil and beautiful as it was here, I fought a growing sting of disappointment. Had I expected welcome balloons? Everyone bearing a cake with my name on it, faux candles fashioned from rusty nails?

I wiped my water bottle with my T-shirt hem, tightened my shoelaces. I checked my duffel bag zipper.

I hadn’t prepared anything to say to them. It had twisted my heart in knots all day, trying. I kept telling myself there’d be time on the drive, on the boat, on the hike…but here we were. And based on Dyl’s cold greeting and the clear lack of interest in my arrival from Mag and Mama, I should brace for the worst.

“Griff?” I burst out.

“Yes?”

“When you first saw me, on the farm. What did you think?”

He considered the question for a long time. “The brown hair was a surprise. But then I heard you talking to one of your sons, and I thought— that’s her . You sounded like you. I don’t know. The way you used to talk to Dyl.”

It helped, knowing. It was something to hold on to.

“Thank you.”

***

We crossed the clearing to a stand of tall Torrey pines where they’d set up camp. It was cool in the shade, but I was sweating hard. I wiped at the moisture running down my cheeks, but immediately more droplets tickled my scalp, the back of my neck.

And then I knew. The same inner shiver I got on the farm when one of my sons was hiding nearby behind a lavender row—

My body felt it. Someone was near.