California: A Novel (21 page)

“My favorite is Suzanne,” Anika said, not waiting for Frida to answer. “Her eggs are divine.” She reached into the baking crate and pulled out a series of Mason jars, each of them filled at least halfway and labeled with masking tape and thick black pen:
FLOUR, SUGAR, BAKING POWDER, BAKING SODA, SALT.
If Cal saw all this, he’d flip.

Before asking her next question, the one Cal would want her to ask, Frida steeled herself, like she used to do before running across a four-lane boulevard, the break in traffic impossible to measure, dangerously unpredictable.

“Where did these come from?” she asked.

“You just saw me go into the root cellar.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

“What
do
you mean, then?” Anika asked. She paused and reached for a brown container at the bottom of the crate, its label still intact. Frida didn’t need to see the other side to read what it said:
HERSHEY’S
.
It was cocoa powder. It was chocolate.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. She could already smell its rich, slightly chalky scent.

“We have a saying here,” Anika said as she placed the container on the table. “Don’t get involved if you’re not ready.”

Frida wasn’t sure what Anika meant but couldn’t take her eyes off the brown container with its plastic top, its nutritional information printed along its side in black and white, and the big bold letters across the front. Back in L.A., chocolate, even the mass-produced kind, cost more than a week’s wages. If you lived in a Community, you could get it easily; that’s what Toni had told her once. She said some were still producing it behind those impenetrable walls.

Frida felt suddenly nervous. Anika was unpacking the baking crate with care. She was putting this all on display for Frida. But why?

“I want you to do everything,” Anika said. She handed her a set of nesting bowls, a measuring cup, and the measuring spoons.

Frida nodded, aware that this little cake-making party was a test, part 1 of Anika’s baking exam. It was also show-and-tell. If this morning Frida saw the Land’s cocoa and flour and sugar, then what might tomorrow bring?

Frida grabbed the largest bowl and began measuring out the sugar. She knew exactly how much to use. A clafoutis was easy, especially if Anika had an understanding of the stove and its tendencies.

Anika stepped out the back door and returned with one of the glass pitchers of milk. “I asked Lupe to milk Jessa last night and leave some for us.”

“I know there aren’t any cherries,” Frida said, “but do you have any fruit at all?”

“Some apples, I think. Why?”

“I’d like to use them. Skip the chocolate. It doesn’t fit.” She met Anika’s eyes, and for once, the woman looked away.

After Anika had retrieved the leftover apples, she stepped back from the table and watched Frida with provocation in her eyes. She was daring her to mess up.

As Frida cracked the eggs, poured the milk, and sliced the apples thinly, she pushed Anika and her judgment out of her mind. Forget her. Frida could, and would, enjoy herself.

“Don’t you have to get the oven going?” she asked. She tried to hide the smugness spreading across her face when Anika was forced to turn away and fulfill her duties.

Frida poured the batter into the round pie tins. She had always loved baking for the time it took, for the patience it required, and dexterity, too, if you wanted your results to be beautiful. It was about risk as well as precision: you never knew if a dessert was good until your guests were taking their first bites.

But Frida didn’t care if these cakes turned out badly. She wasn’t vying for head pastry chef. If she failed at this ghetto clafoutis, Anika might let her try baking bread because she wanted another good laugh. And if Frida made something delicious, Anika would be too busy eating every last crumb to say something snarky. Frida felt her bravery rise. She felt emboldened.

She handed Anika the tins to place in the oven. “Did you know the Millers?”

Anika held her face perfectly still, as if she hadn’t heard.

“Anika?”

“Who?” She turned to the oven, a small fire going inside of it.

Frida couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re a terrible actress, you know that?” She waited for Anika to respond, and when she didn’t, Frida decided to take a risk. “Sandy didn’t like red, and neither do you. You gave yourself away when I cut myself.”

Anika spun around, and Frida thought she was smiling. But, no, she was grimacing, and her missing tooth made her look witchy or homeless, or both: a sorceress who slept beneath an overpass and shit in the Silver Lake Reservoir.

“I hoped you’d think I was just being squeamish,” she said. She had turned back to the stove again and was pushing the tins onto a metal grate that sat atop the small flame.

“The color makes you nervous. Sandy was the same way.” Frida paused, and she sensed her own brother in her voice, guiding its tone.

Anika straightened her posture and looked back at Frida.

“Tell me what it means,” Frida said.

“You mean you don’t already know?”

Frida wasn’t sure what else to say. She didn’t want Anika to know that she’d already talked to her brother about it, or had tried to. “I saw Sandy freak out about the color only twice. But I remember both times, because it seemed strange. She was frightened, like you were.”

Anika let out a tiny mewl, then stopped suddenly, as if embarrassed. “She was my friend.”

“Mine, too.”

For a moment they both watched the oven. Frida hoped they would be able to smell the cakes over the smoke of the fire. How would they cook in here without burning everything?

“I can’t believe they’re dead,” Anika said after a moment. “It’s easier, sometimes, to think of them as just a ways off, living separately.”

“I’d do the same, I think.”

“We were both here from the beginning,” Anika said, and Frida thought of the phrase Micah had used in the tree house:
original settlers.

If Frida was silent, maybe Anika would say more. She practiced a trick Micah had taught her when they were in high school. She silently counted backward from ten.

At the number five (it was always five), Anika began talking. “It started because of the Pirates.”

“I still can’t believe they’re real. That they exist.”

Anika laughed meanly. “Of course they do. How lucky for you, to be able to think otherwise.”

“I would’ve thought you were protected, by the…Forms.”

“We didn’t always have so many surrounding us. Most were built later.”

Anika’s eyes were back on the oven.

10-9-8-7—

“Soon after we arrived on the Land, just a week or so, two of our men were killed. When we found them, they were naked, their bodies…they’d been mutilated, sliced up. They were covered in blood, just covered in it.”

Anika spoke as if she had never told this story before. Hilda used to call that kind of story a slumber-party confession: the teller experiencing shame and relief in equal parts.

“After that, for a while, there was nothing. We went about our business, building shelters, getting the garden started. And then, one day, I found a red rag tied to a wooden stake, shoved into the dirt right outside the Hotel. I didn’t know what it meant, and no one had seen the rag before, let alone the stick.” Her voice went quiet, and Frida had to lean forward to hear what she said next. “The next day, the Pirates came back.”

Frida held her breath.

“There were probably thirty of them. They were all youngish men, and, I can’t explain it—the
greed
in their eyes. It was like they were just sitting down to a big feast.” She paused, shaking her head. “We outnumbered them, but over half of us were female, and we were vulnerable, and scared. None of us, the men included, had experience fighting. In our past lives, we’d been scrap-metal collectors, soup-kitchen coordinators. What did we know?

“We had only a few guns, and we were running out of ammo, and they came in on horses. They rode up slowly. I remember the sound of the horses trotting across the dirt as they approached, and how we came out to see who it was. They were wielding guns. Some had knives. We’d been naïve to think we just had guests.”

Frida shivered, just as she had on the ride out of L.A., thinking about men hurting her and Cal. On the drive, she’d made herself so cold with worry she had to be covered with a blanket at all times. Now she crossed her arms as Anika continued talking.

“That first time, half of them dismounted, coming toward us while the others just lingered. I remember the smell of those horses. The Pirates themselves were covered in sweat and dirt, thick as a second skin. They wanted food, they said. They took our guns. They made John give them his boots. Four of the women…they were—”

“You don’t have to say it,” Frida whispered.

“I didn’t see anything. I have nothing to tell you. They took the women into one of the half-collapsing houses, and the rest of us waited, guns to our heads.”

Anika was looking at her, as if waiting for her to say something, but Frida didn’t know what. Nothing would be sufficient. The smell of the clafoutis had started to fill the room: sweet and warm, a comfort if there was still such a thing.

“Later we tore down that house,” Anika said finally. “We didn’t do it completely, we left pieces of it up. As a reminder, I guess, that we had survived. The brick wall that Cal’s team is dismantling? That’s it.” She stopped. “We tried to give the Pirates all of our vegetables. We didn’t care if we starved, we just wanted them to leave. But the man in charge—he had long hair, and eczema or psoriasis all over his arms, he was scaly like a snake—he took only half of what we had. He would be back. He said he needed us alive to grow more.

“The men wore red. Bandannas on their heads, red shirts if they had them. And their hands, their fingernails, they seemed stained with it. Bloody.” Anika turned to her, condescension spreading across her face. “You see, Frida, red became the color of violence.” She spoke as if she were a teacher, reciting to a particularly dense student a lesson she had been explaining for days. “Every time the Pirates were coming, they’d warn us with something red, usually a piece of fabric, but once it was a red-handled shovel. Another time, red paint splashed across the side of the Church. They wanted to get inside our heads. You’d think the warnings would help us prepare, defend ourselves, but they just got under our skin and made things worse. That’s exactly what they wanted.

“Once we tried to make a plan. As soon as we were warned by a red object, the four women hid in one of the smaller houses—there was a crawl space that was hidden well. We knew they couldn’t handle seeing those men again, they wouldn’t survive, and so we made them as safe as we could. The rest of us hid in the Church. We figured we’d be enough for those monsters—as a group we’d distract them. We barricaded the doors, waited with our last scythe, the one they’d left us to garden with. We heard them outside, tying up their horses, laughing, calling commands at one another. They banged on the door, but didn’t try to get inside.”

“They didn’t? They just left?”

Anika shook her head. “They were waiting us out, and it worked. By the fifth day, we unlocked the doors. One of our men was very sick, he needed water, and all of us were starving. We needed food. We’d been shitting in buckets. If one of those Pirates wanted to shoot me, I would have welcomed it. I really thought they were going to, too. But they just burned down the barn we’d recently built and took off with our reserves of grain.”

“They didn’t hurt anyone?”

“Not anyone in the Church.”

“The women,” Frida said. She wanted to reach out to touch Anika, but she was afraid Anika would flinch.

“Once the Pirates had left,” Anika said, “we went to the crawl space. It was busted wide open. The women were gone. We’d assumed they wouldn’t be found there, that they’d remain hidden. They had felt almost safe, tucked away like that, but they weren’t. We’d been so stupid to hide them there, alone. When we found the crawl space empty, we thought they’d been kidnapped, but two days later, we found their bodies in the woods.”

“Oh, Anika.”

“You want to know why we didn’t leave. You think we were asking for it.”

“I don’t.”

“Where would we go?” She sighed. “The point is it didn’t take long for the color to turn my stomach. As stupid as it might sound, red scared all of us. Even something left out by accident—if it was red, we panicked.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid at all.”

Anika grunted. “Finally, when Pilar had a breakdown at the creek, sobbing as she tried to wash a red dress, we decided to destroy everything that color. Just rid ourselves of it completely.” Anika smiled, but it was woeful. “Believe it or not, it made me feel better, temporarily at least.”

“I bet.” It sounded so dumb, but she didn’t know what else to say. Frida remembered the way Anika had looked away from her cut. She hadn’t described later attacks—and there had to have been more. Had she seen a Pirate’s hands up close? Had they touched her?

“I’ve tried to shake the red thing,” Anika continued, “but it’s hard. Sandy once said it was like rejecting religion. We did that, long ago, it was partly what united us. But she said it was like turning your back on God and then catching yourself praying every now and again.”

“That sounds like something she might say.”

“Anyway,” Anika said, and moved to the table. She began putting the lids back on the jars and returning them to the crate. “It’s over. The Pirates are gone.”

“But how? How did you get rid of them?”

Anika had the cocoa tin in her hand, and she raised it like a judge’s mallet. “Your brother, Frida. He’s the one who helped us. When Micah and the others arrived, we were able to keep the Pirates away. He protected us.” She put the cocoa into the crate.

“Did he fight them off?”

She sighed. “He came with guns, and more men, strong ones, who wouldn’t be intimidated. He taught us how to protect our land.”

“And then he came to live with you guys here. I guess it was a smooth transition.”

“We owed him,” she said, “for what he did for us.”