Page 7 of The California Dreamers

6

The light was epic

Four days after Charlie and Bass’s arrival

The twins, Charlie, and I sit on the sand combing our boards while Dyl reads a book on Oahu birds that Charlie loaned him.

Charlie’s finishing a sno-cone and her tongue’s blue. She offers to buy us some as a goodbye treat—she’s flying back to her mom’s tomorrow—but Griff explains kindly that we don’t eat refined sugar or artificial dye. Cap’s rules.

“Oh, that’s smart.” She quickly rubs her blue-stained fingers in the sand to try to clean them, but the sno-cone on her seems indelible. “When your parents split they drown you in spending money.” She sometimes makes light of their divorce with sideways comments like this, but there is always something forced about her humor.

Charlie rolls up her white paper cone and throws it in the garbage, changing the subject: “One thing your beaches have on ours is prettier garbage cans.” She examines this one—a rusted metal barrel with thin cutouts of waves near the base so rain, or beer, or god-knows-what can drain out. There are others with designs of dolphins, seagulls, California poppies.

“That’s how Ro got the idea for our waves,” Griff tells her.

“What waves?” Charlie turns to me.

I shrug. “Just these carvings I do.”

“She engraves waves in all our woodwork in the van,” Mag says.

Because even Mag has warmed to her. He held out for two days, feigning aloofness, but then couldn’t resist her repeated invitations to inspect the Winnie’s drivetrain and top off the oil.

Charlie stares at me quizzically, and Mag goes on, teasing, “We all carve, but Ro’s a regular scrimshaw artist—no piece of wood inside the van is safe from her awl.” It’s practically a soliloquy for him.

“Cool. Maybe you’ll show me sometime?” Charlie asks us.

She still hasn’t been inside the Gull. Griff, ever courteous, offers to give her a tour now. After all, we’ve been inside the Winnie several times now, and when the twins asked Cap what we were allowed to say in front of Charlie, he’d nodded in approval of their caution and said simply, “We can trust her, but be sensible.”

She hesitates, watching me, and when I don’t respond to her interest says to Griff, “Show me next time we link up.”

I shrug and focus on waxing my board. The harder I try to act normally around Charlie, the more I become Shrugging Ronan, a person I don’t know.

“You use Mr. Zog’s wax?” she asks me suddenly, horrified. Her mouth is slightly open and her tongue is still blue.

I shrug again. “Why?”

“One sec.”

The twins jog to the ocean but Charlie runs up the bluffs, kicking back a wake of sand, and comes back with a SWELL magazine from her collection in the Winnie.

“Sex Wax: the Best for Your Stick,” it says across a Mr. Zog’s ad. And there’s Mr. Zog himself in a trench coat, opening it to show his naked front to two girls my age: “Expose Yourself to Sex Wax.”

“Disgusting!” I’m too shocked to be Shrugging Ronan.

“Right? Here.” Charlie tosses me her tin of Mrs. Palmer’s brand wax and I catch it in one hand.

“There’s a board shop in Hilo that has every kind of Mrs. Palmer’s, but it’s hard to get here on the mainland. You should make them stop using Mr. Zog’s, too,” she says of the twins.

Then she lifts her board. “C’mon, ready?”

I study the wax she’s lent me. It’s Plumeria scent. I read over and over: Plumeria. Plumeria. Plumeria. Even with the lid on, it smells like Charlie, like flowers under water. “I might come later. I’m making lunch for everyone. And Dyl needs me.” Every night, I vow to stop being so intimidated by her. She’s a citizen and she’s slightly older and she’s flown across the sea to drop in on our lives, but she’s just a girl.

Except I’ve never known a girl my age. I’ve read about them in books, and observed them from afar, but nothing’s prepared me for Charlie. For how desperately I want her to like me, and how desperate I am not to show her that.

Charlie glances over at Dyl, lying in a nearby dune and so lost pasting something in his field journal he wouldn’t know if I’d hitched a steamer. She looks the other way, toward where the Gull’s parked on the hotel’s utility road. It’s way too far to see, but Charlie’s meaning is clear. She knows that Mama’s on a day ramble and Cap and Bassett are off reliving old times somewhere, so making lunch for who?

When I stay silent, Charlie shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

I stare down at my board and blow off a piece of wax. But then her shins come back into view. “Hey, did I do something?” she asks.

I look up, and the sun behind her is so bright I have to squint. “What? No.”

“Because I get the feeling I offended you somehow and that’s why you’re not coming. Look at it out there.” She peers over her shoulder at the ocean. “Perfect three-foot, offshore. Not too crowded.” Swiveling her neck to face me again, with a little smile, she continues, “Don’t miss it because of me. Hey. I promise not to talk once we hit the water. My mom says I can be a chatterbox, but I never talk when I’m surfing. You’d know that if you ever came near me out there. Even your brothers can attest to it. You’d be astonished! Amazed! Okay, I’m stopping now. Right now. Right. This. Second.”

She pantomimes a zipping motion over her lips, and when I make no move to get up, she looks at me one last time and trots off to the water.

I sit next to Dyl in the warm dunes and shell sweet peas into our wooden bowl, watching the action on the water as often as I dare. Charlie’s got her hair tucked down her suit and once in a while I catch sight of her wide smile. My brothers are still too wary to get close to the main lineup, but Charlie paddles easily between their break and that one, trading friendly words with the twins and the others. Like she’s linking them. It’s like a dance.

When she claims a wave, I clutch my wooden bowl. Her style is effortless, her body long and supple. I heard Bass tell Cap she first stood up on a board at three, but she has a newbie’s joy on her face when she emerges from the froth, jumping off the nose of her red board at the last possible second.

I stand and take my blue board. I should be out there. Surfing is the one time I feel halfway at ease around Charlie.

“Goofy-foot?” she’d shouted to me yesterday during a lull. And I’d nodded.

“It took me a while to figure out,” I’d called, too late. Because by then, thinking that was all the answer she’d get, she’d paddled off too far to hear.

I traipse in the warm sand toward the water, ready to lose myself in the waves.

And then I notice him. I’d been so busy watching/trying-not-to-watch Charlie I didn’t realize I wasn’t the only one mesmerized by her. Ten feet in front of me, there’s a man on shore taking pictures.

His attention is on the twins, too, and when the three of them together catch a glassy little two-footer, Charlie in the middle, he clicks furiously.

I wave to Griff, who senses my urgency from far off in the water, and gesture toward the camera guy. He and Mag duck-dive, pop up out of the photographer’s view.

But Charlie straddles her board, paddles closer to shore to face the photographer head-on, throws a playful shaka , waggling her right hand, three middle fingers curled, thumb and pinkie extended, and sticks out her tongue. It’s a glorious shot; I can see it in my mind, her tongue still sea-blue.

Charlie doesn’t know our rule about pictures, that we’re to avoid them. How Mama lets her red curtain of hair cover her face, or disappears into the van, if a camera comes too close and Cap’s not around.

The photographer strolls off, training his camera on a sandcastle down the beach, and when he’s a safe distance away the twins swim back in.

“Where’s Dyl?” Griff asks when they reach me.

“There, way up the dunes,” I say.

We all turn that way, checking on Dyl, then turn our attention back to the guy with the camera, who continues on toward the pier.

“He only got shapes,” I tell them. I’m guessing, but I don’t want them to panic. “You were pretty far out.”

“Unlike the model,” Mag says of Charlie, who is heading our way.

“What is it?” she asks us as she trudges up the sand. “Why do you look so worried?”

“We don’t…” Griff says. “That photographer. We don’t call attention to ourselves.”

“It’s okay,” I say, to my own surprise. Charlie looks so stricken, her brown eyes wide as she senses our alarm.

“You didn’t know,” I continue. “Cap doesn’t like photographers getting too close.”

“What, is he a criminal on the run?” she asks, trying desperately to lighten the mood.

But Mag, unsmiling, shakes his head. “We should tell Cap.”

“I told you, he only got shapes,” I call after Mag as he stalks off, but Charlie has, in her innocence, undone her progress with him.

“Will someone explain?” Charlie pleads. She stakes her dripping board in the sand, and it casts a long shadow across the beach as she pulls her hair from her wet suit and rakes it back, squeezing it nervously.

So this is what it takes to make her nervous. Us. Mag, being unkind.

Griff hasn’t staked his board. He’s still clutching it to his hip, ready to take off toward the Gull if the photographer returns. “You didn’t— Cap’s not—” Griff wants to help, but he gets stuck when people fight.

“We have to be cautious,” I start. “We…” I glance at Griff, who nods approval. “Our paperwork’s not all current.”

It’s a beautifully vague statement, like “we’re on holiday” or “we’ve moved often.”

Charlie cocks her head. “You don’t have birth certificates, you mean?”

I hesitate. “Mama and Cap might.”

“But not you four kids.”

Griff and I glance at each other again.

“Shit!” (Not the time to tell Charlie that swearing is against the rules, too.) But then she quickly lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m sorry. Should I go after Mag?”

“You go, Griff,” I say. “Talk to him.” For so long, it’s only been us, the four Merrick siblings, who swim away from cameras instead of throwing shakas at them. So who am I to know if Mag is overreacting?

When Charlie and I are alone the two of us settle on the sand, cross-legged.

“Your dad really didn’t tell you anything about us?” I ask. I’d assumed Bassett had explained something to Charlie about our need to be cautious.

“He said your life is a permanent vacation. I didn’t know he was being literal.” She gazes out at the waves, the boogie-boarders and surfers floating among them. “Your folks told you they don’t have birth certificates for you?”

I’m tempted to lie, to suggest that I know more than I do. Charlie and her dad have no secrets, they joke around about everything, present and past. And maybe I wish, just once in a while, that it was the same in our family. But I tell her the truth, and it feels good. “Griff figured it out. It’s not something we talk about often.” Ever.

“So Cap’s allergic to photographs because he thinks they could lead to child protective services busting you for the van, or truancy officers because you don’t go to regular school? I’m sorry. I just want to understand.”

“I guess it’s that. Partly. It’s just a rule.” Every nonexplanation sounds more ridiculous than the last, and a germ of frustration sprouts in me. “He’s just careful about our privacy,” I finish limply.

“I get it.” She looks up the beach, where our photographer friend is now far in the distance, occupied with a flock of seagulls by the pier. “I feel like such a jerk. I was just horsing around.” She gives her hair another squeeze, then turns to me with a big smile. “Hey! You’re speaking to me! Actual whole sentences. What gives?”

I can’t help but smile myself. I shrug. “I hate how Mag talks down to people sometimes.”

“ Magnus is only civilized on water. Griffin told me that yesterday.”

“It’s true.”

“Well. Thank you, Magnus.”

***

The twins and I decide not to tell Cap about the photographer. He only got Charlie close up, really, and now he’s gone. And we don’t want anything to spoil Charlie and Bass’s last night.

For the special occasion, we plan a late dinner at the beach, around a bonfire. Mama and I make abalone stew, and potatoes with wild rosemary we picked this morning, zucchini pancakes, towers of them, plums, spiced walnuts, and our big glass jug of sun tea, which we’ve been tending to all day, moving it around the utility road like a sundial so it never felt shade. With a sweet laugh at herself, Mama adds sprigs of mint to each cup. She likes company as much as being alone , I think. At least this company. At least once in a while.

The twins gather wood while Charlie, Dyl, Mama, and I tote the food from the utility road to the beach, scouting for the best spot, finally settling on the perfect stretch of sand. Not too close to other bonfires, not so close to the water that we’ll have to run when the tide laps in. We rake the sand smooth with driftwood, then each of us takes a corner of the purple-and-gold paisley blanket, wafts it high, and even when it’s clean of sand we keep waving it up and down just for the fun of it, watching it billow above us like a parachute. As we set it down, the boys start the bonfire, the sky darkening.

Charlie sits next to me on the corner of the blanket farthest from the fire and entertains us as always. Mag acts standoffish with her for a bit, but finally shakes off his irritation from earlier, succumbing to her infectious laughter—and her whispered apology about posing for the camera.

As a surprise, after our stew Charlie unveils a maple cake she baked in her little RV kitchen. It’s lopsided and bitter, with clumps of undissolved baking soda that Bass teases her about. “We won’t need to brush our teeth tonight—the toothpaste is baked right in!”

But I ask for a second slice. She’s trying so hard to get our rules right—no store-bought cake, no refined sugar. Ever since the camera thing today, I feel oddly protective of her. I’d been so intimidated—by her confidence, her height, her two houses, and her snapshots—that I’d forgotten we outnumber her.

“You don’t have to, Ronan,” she says as I take a big bite of her terrible cake.

I eat every crumb while she watches, grimacing.

“The next one will be better,” Charlie promises.

“I’ll teach you how to cook skillet cake over a fire,” I tell her. “I mean. If you’d like.”

“Yes! Sign me up. I’ll pay for my baking lessons in Mrs. Palmer’s wax.”

As she’s pouring Bassett a final cup of her herbal tea, Mama urges him to link up with us again, anytime, and as we’re clearing dishes, Cap claps him on the back. “You know our address.”

Meaning 11641 Pacific Coast Highway, the location of Salt Bay Bait & Tackle in Monterey.

It’s decided: Charlie will return. Maybe, if I’m feeling bold and Cap allows it, I’ll write her a letter. I practice the casual request in my head: Hey, can I write to you?

After dinner, I fetch the dish tub from the rack on the Gull and fill it with seawater. Charlie helps Mama and me clean up, even when Mama protests, “But you’re our guest!”

“I don’t want to be a guest,” Charlie says simply, settling next to me to wipe plates dry.

We work quietly, the job going fast with three of us. “So where do you keep the rest of your kitchen stuff?” she asks as we fold the blanket together.

Mama says, “This is all of it, sweetheart,” with a little smile. She tells Charlie the zinc army tub we’re washing up with will get lashed to the roof rack once we’re back on the road, and it holds all we need—two big olive-wood spoons, one pot, one skillet, one rinse bowl, our camp dish sets and the scrubbers Mama makes out of clean straw.

On the other side of the dying bonfire, Bass and Cap and the twins lie back in a line with their heads on a fallen log, knees bent, Cap’s chin so high his hat has fallen onto the sand. Dyl sits cross-legged behind them. Five heads tilted up to watch the stars. Our fathers spar about Jupiter’s moons with the lazy ease of old friends, and Dyl informs them they’re both wrong. Even Dyl has accepted these two new creatures into our life.

It feels right now to show Charlie my home, to invite her inside the Gull. Just like those friends in her pictures would, flinging open their doors.

But just then Mama sees something over Charlie’s shoulder and murmurs, “There’s someone shooting us. There up on the dunes, next to that palm.”

We whirl around, and when my eyes adjust to the gloom up in the trees I spot him. Twenty feet from us, it’s the man with the camera from earlier.

Mama glides south down the beach, toward the refuge of the Gull, Dyl a few steps behind. The stargazers stand, and Charlie turns to me, anxious.

“You there!” Cap calls, walking around the fire in our direction. He’s picked up his hat, and he settles it on his head. “Come say hello.”

“Merrick, behave,” Bass says, jovial.

The man emerges from the trees. In the firelight I see he’s only a boy, not much older than the twins. He passes us, approaching Cap, and Charlie and I are frozen in place as he looks at us, expecting a greeting since Charlie was horsing around for him earlier. But neither of us speaks.

“Now, would you like someone to skulk in the bushes and secretly take pictures of you and your family on vacation?” Cap asks. His voice sounds steady, almost good-natured, but his expression is hidden under the shadow of his captain’s hat.

“I didn’t mean to sneak. I thought it was okay, because of before.” The boy looks helplessly at Charlie, the twins. Then me.

“They’re called wild shots, outdoors, and you don’t technically have to ask for permission, but—”

“He took pictures of me surfing today,” Charlie jumps in. “Mama says I’m a ham. I was showing off.”

The twins and I exchange worried glances across the firepit. We have made a mistake, not telling Cap about our near miss.

“We didn’t want to worry you,” Griff says hurriedly, and even from ten feet away, in the dim light of our dying fire, I can see how his face has gone taut. He and Mag walk up to Cap, flanking him, but Cap’s focus is on the boy.

“He only got Charlie, close-up,” Mag says. “We all left.”

The boy looks baffled, and if I didn’t know what was about to happen, it would be funny. “I’m doing local color for the Daily Triton . The UC San Diego paper? I’m new on staff this year.”

“Charles is a ham,” Bassett says. “Now, Merrick, there’s no harm.”

Cap looks across the firepit at Charlie, who still stands by my side clutching our picnic blanket, and offers her a small smile. “It’s not your fault some people don’t have manners, Charlie.”

I feel sorry for the boy, with his swoopy bangs and polo shirt. He’s no match for Cap.

“What kind of camera is that?” Cap asks. “It’s a beauty.”

“It’s a Leica DRP Xl.”

“Care if I check it out?”

I hug my arms around me and avoid Charlie’s eyes, but I can still sense her confusion. Cap may not be mad at her, but soon she will be mad at him. Mad at all of us, for not stopping what’s about to happen. Or instead she’ll feel sorry for us.

I’m not sure which is worse.

The boy unclips the camera from the strap and hands it over, across the firepit. “Some alumni group donated a bunch of equipment—we have shelves of them.”

Cap fingers a silver cylinder on the side of the camera. “What’s this gadget here?”

“The timer. To take pictures of yourself with a tripod.”

“And this?”

“Grip tape, for if your hands get sweaty. You’re into photography?”

Cap ignores this, fiddling with the camera.

“So how long have you been on vacation?” the kid asks to fill the silence. He’s still smiling awkwardly when Cap tosses the camera up and catches it with one hand. “Hey, what’re you— Careful…”

A nervous laugh, another toss.

“Hey, hey, hey, that has ten frames left!” Still the kid doesn’t seem to understand. Does he think my father, the engineer, doesn’t know precisely what he’s doing?

“Don’t, Merrick,” Bass says. “I’ll talk to him, you can—”

Cap tosses the camera into the fire with our potato peels and abalone shells. There’s an unsettling power in his gestures: the confidence with which he got his hands on the camera, rotated it as if to admire it, and destroyed it—and every image it held, including Charlie with her blue tongue. I hadn’t expected that. Not the whole camera. In the past, Cap has only taken film.

The firelight is faint now, and his hat is too low over his eyes for me to read the expression in them, but I wonder if Cap isn’t a little surprised by what he’s done, too. The twins are silent, two tall sentries on either side of him, staring down at the ring of stones around our dinner fire.

“Was that entirely necessary, Merrick?” Bass asks.

The boy’s too shocked to speak.

Cap’s head is tilted down, and he could be looking at the dying fire, or his bare feet, or the boy’s white sneakers. I wish I knew.

When he finally answers, there’s a tinge of something I don’t recognize in his voice. Regret? Embarrassment? But he says only, “He’ll understand when he has a family of his own to protect.”

Bass shakes his head and rises. “C’mon, Charles. We have a long drive tomorrow.”

I feel her looking at me, can almost guess the hundred ways she’d try to make light of what just happened, the funny comment that might set things right again. But I don’t want her pity. I stare down at the fire.

When she and Bass leave, Cap says quietly to the college boy, “Someone on the beach stole it and you didn’t see their face, it was too dark.”

The kid swallows. Nods.

“And you won’t come back here.”

The boy nods again.

“Thank you.” Cap strides away, toward the Gull, and Mag and Griff follow. Griff trotting up so he’s right at Cap’s side, Mag a little behind, walking rakishly, as if nothing has happened, but I know it’s a cover. I picture Cap chastising them for not keeping him informed.

I watch down the beach as they pass another bonfire, then a second before disappearing into the dark. They’ve left me alone with this stranger, this boy. Forgotten me, or assumed I was right behind them.

“I guess I should’ve asked permission,” the boy sputters. “My editor at the Triton assigned me this beach, that’s all. I wasn’t trying to be rude. But I guess he felt…” He gazes up at the stars, grasping the camera strap around his neck. “The light was epic today, and I got some great shots on the pier. In the dunes…”

At the sight of him, his wistful expression, my tangle of emotions gives way to certainty. Because somehow I know. I know what he’s seeing up there. Not Orion or Ursa Major or the Big Dipper, but the photos he took. He’s going through his real pictures, one by one. He’s remembering the light, the angles, what he left in and what he left out. But they’ll never be pictures now. They’re melting plastic, or whatever film is made of.

“He only did it because…” But I have nothing to offer him. No comfort, no explanation.

Why are photographs such a grievous sin? The chances of the wrong person seeing us in one are minuscule.

And yet No Cameras is one of our laws primeval, like in our Plutarch book in the vanilla library. A commandment.

The first time Cap defended us from a photograph—that I remember—I was six or seven. It was morning, the end of our predawn session, and a lady in Santa Cruz was taking pictures of me surfing, squealing to her husband, “Just look at the cute little thing go!” like I was a baby duck. Cap had calmly sloshed out to her, his board still leashed to his ankle, and asked for the film. It was too windy for me to catch his words. But she’d handed it over, then she and her husband had hurried to their umbrella, gathered their stuff, and left, the woman sending one last, confused look my way. Only once they were gone did Cap unleash his board and drop the film, with its sad little brown plastic tail, into one of the festive beach garbage cans with a wave cutout for drainage.

Three or four times since, Cap has thrown film away after tourists tried to take a photo of us. Twice he’s asked to see a pocket-sized camera as if to admire it, removed the film, and dropped the cameras carelessly onto a beach towel rather than handing them back.

But this…

Before I can find anything to say to console the boy, he hurries off in the dark, the camera strap around his neck attached to nothing.

***

The next morning, as we’re saying our farewells next to the humming Winnie, Bass pulls Cap into his bear hug and pretends last night was no big deal. “No more camera smashing, Merrick. We’re getting too old for it.”

I race for the Gull, but Charlie runs after me and puts a hand on my shoulder, stopping me from going inside without a goodbye.

“I’ll come back,” she says.

I nod but I can’t look at her, and I don’t believe her. Seeing what Cap did through her eyes, I’m certain now we’ll never link up again.

Then the Winnie is a cloud of dust on the freeway.