Pasadena (16 page)

Her eyes were closed, and her heart slowed. Bruder’s pulse reverberated through her breast. She felt something she had never felt before, and she told herself she’d never forget it, whatever it was. Bruder felt something too, but he knew precisely what it was; he jumped to his feet and pulled her up. “Come on now. She won’t be there forever.” And then, in a quiet voice she nearly didn’t hear, “My Linda.”

“Who?” Linda called, trailing Bruder. He had scraped his elbow in the fall, and it was red with dots of blood. He dabbed at it with the kerchief and then held it up for Linda to see the stain.

She chased after Bruder and grabbed the kerchief. It was stiff with sweat and now spotted with blood and heavy with the smell she’d been wringing out in the washer barrel. Linda hurled the kerchief toward the ocean. The wind caught it, the white cotton fluttering, and Bruder and Linda stood, shoulders touching, and watched the kerchief dip and rise, like a lazy gull, like a pelican loitering before its plunge, until the wind, as it sometimes does over the lip of the Pacific, died, fell flat immediately, and the kerchief, white with red stars of Bruder’s blood, collapsed on itself and sank into the sea.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“You’ll see.” He was hurrying along the sash of the tide, the lacy foam collecting on his ankle. “Down in Cathedral Cove,” said Bruder. “There’s something you should see.” He said they should hurry and he offered his hand, but Linda didn’t take it, instead running ahead and leaping over the driftwood logs and the clumps of kelp. One other thing Dieter had told Bruder about his daughter: “She doesn’t know herself. She doesn’t know what people think of her and she doesn’t care. She’s free that way. But then, so are you!” But Bruder knew himself, and running along the beach one step behind Linda, he thought of the girls who had sent him notes bound in Belgian lace handkerchiefs:
I love you!
Not too many girls, but one or two from the whitewashed mansions along Orange Grove Avenue, one girl slipping away from a governess and rushing high-waisted into the crowd on Colorado Street and taking Bruder’s hand and forcing his fingers around an orange-oiled square of lace.
I love you, Bruder, and you must love me!
The girl vanished into Dodsworth’s dress shop, and Bruder was left with a hand reeking of an heiress, the citrus perfume sickly sweet, and he rinsed his palms in the lily-pad fountain in Central Park. He threw away the note and burned the handkerchief in one of the grove-heaters at the City Farm. He never knew the girl’s name, but he knew enough about the rich girls of Pasadena to be sure that she, whoever she was, assumed that everyone in the valley knew her name. He knew that somewhere a girl was resting her chin on an iron balcony rail that even at night radiated the heat of the day’s sun, waiting for him, and he laughed, for he knew that he would never go to her. He would sleep with the dogs before
bedding a woman like that; even as a boy bursting out of his teens, Bruder knew himself enough to know that a girl with pearls choking her windpipe would never mean anything to him. He had assumed that no one would, but now here he was, running down the beach, at Linda’s heels.

Cathedral Cove was almost a mile south of Condor’s Nest, around the far bend, past Jelly Beach, where the helmet-shape by-the-wind sailors hovered like incandescent ghosts in the summer waves. For as long as Linda could remember, Dieter had warned her not to swim there, Edmund repeating the words of caution:
You could lose your leg to a sting
. Linda, whose natural inclination was to run past any
NO TRESPASSING
sign, had heeded their advice because one of the few things that frightened her was a jellyfish. Shapeless and colorless—blobs of nothing that you can’t put your hands around! She used to ask Edmund, “If a jelly is nothing, how can it hurt me?”

The previous night’s moon had been full, and the tide on Jelly Beach was so low that it revealed a table of tidal pools Linda hadn’t seen in nearly a year, a plane of shallow puddles undulating with red-mouthed anemone and paved with abalone. Linda noticed a small orange globe bobbing in a wave far out in the water, and then a second, and a third, came into focus. In the glare she saw more oranges floating atop the tidal pools and out in the waves, at first dozens but then hundreds and then thousands of oranges floating on the horizon, the sea decorated with perfect round knobs of citrus, as bright as the goldenorange garibaldi. Suddenly they were all over, as if dumped from the crate of the sky, and Bruder picked one up from the sand. He threw it high into the air, and together they watched its long arc and its faraway plunge into the surf, its disappearance, then its reappearance, as it popped through the water, perpetually afloat.

Linda asked where the oranges had come from, and Bruder said, “A wreck.”

The sea was littered with oranges, and the pelicans had found them and were diving in noisy swoops, mistaking the oranges for rare fish, the fruit bulging obscenely in their black pouches. How could there have been a shipwreck on such a fine day? Maybe a freight car had overturned on the bridge spanning Agua Apestosa, its load of citrus spilling into the marsh and then drifting out to sea.

Far out in the tidal pools, a figure in a broad hat stood bent over the
shallow water, collecting something, kicking the oranges, turning over shells and crabs. Linda couldn’t be sure, but she thought it was a young boy. She didn’t recognize him, but things were changing so quickly in the village that lately she could walk down the beach and pass people she’d never seen before, people who had motored over from Escondido and Julian and stumbled down the paths to swim and fish and chase one another in the surf. The world that she had once assumed belonged only to her was quickly opening itself to a surging crowd of strangers, with their car exhaust and their trammeling beach sandals and their habit of leaving wax paper and pipe ash in the sand. “The ocean will sweep up after us,” they would say.

“Is he waving at us?” Bruder asked about the boy in the tidal pools.

Linda couldn’t be sure; he was more than fifty yards away, shaded by a white straw hat. His hand moved quickly, and Linda wondered if the boy was saying hello or if he had discovered something, maybe an oyster with a pearl the size of a baby’s fist; or maybe the boy needed help, maybe his foot was trapped in a moray’s cave. The figure waved again, this time with his entire arm, but Linda thought she saw the flash of a smile. She thought she heard something, but with the wind skimming the water and the flushing waves and the gulls crying as if they had lost something, she couldn’t be sure.

“Did you hear anything?”

Bruder shook his head. He had heard nothing, and he wanted to get to Cathedral Cove. “We have to hurry. She might be gone.”

“Who?”

Bruder tugged Linda, his hand around her wrist; a hand as big as her face, Linda knew, because once he had held it over her nose and his pinkie had touched one ear and his thumb the other; through the mask of Bruder’s hand she had seen Edmund avert his eyes.

The oranges distressed Bruder, for he knew where they had come from and he knew what kind of mismanagement would lead to such a spill. In the beechwood forest of France, he had promised to keep a secret, and he couldn’t tell Linda that the spilled oranges had anything to do with him,
with us, Linda
. Sometimes when Bruder was restless, he would remind himself that only patience would ferry him into the future, and this would slow his overworked heart.

Cathedral Cove was a small inlet, its waters churning with riptide, potato-size rocks covering the beach. At the back of the cove, a row of
boulders covered in velvety moss attracted green-eyed flies. The cliffs rose sharply to a bluff above, where an abandoned Lutheran church lurched in the wind, its planks stripped and rotted and occasionally pried free for a bonfire set by ranchless rancheros. A small passage opened in the cove’s back wall, an arched hole that forced even young children to crouch to get through it. Inside was a small cave lit by a rose-shape hole above the passage, a cave smaller than Miss Winterbourne’s schoolroom, but with a vaulted ceiling and, at one end, a flattened rock like an altar. When she was seven or eight, Linda had wandered from Condor’s Nest down the beach, reaching the cove for the first time in low tide. She’d always remember her own little-girl’s gasp as she peered into the cave, seeing the sunbeams slanting through the hole above the passageway, landing on the altar rock. It was like a miniature church, a dollhouse cathedral, like the pictures in Dieter’s book on the Catholic churches of Germany; the book was illustrated, tissue paper shrouding each print of the cathedrals—in Köln, in Dresden, in Leipzig, in a place called München. Someone had tinted the prints with colored pencils. In the book, each cathedral’s nave lay lit in a slanted column of sunlight, just as the sun fell into the little cave on the beach. Its discovery—A chapel on the beach! A cathedral in a cove!—had excited her so much that she ran all the way back to Condor’s Nest to tell Edmund. I’m going to call it Cathedral Cove, she’d decided. She ran so fast that she could nearly see her heart leaping against her dress, and when she finally reached Edmund, who was lying on his bed reading an agricultural dictionary, she found it difficult to put the words together to explain what she had come across. “Down the shore …” she tried. “I found something, I discovered something. Come and see!” “Did you make it to Cathedral Cove?” Linda’s heart fell quiet as Edmund explained that she wasn’t the first to discover the little cave; in fact, she may very well have been the last.

When they reached the cove, Bruder and Linda stopped at its edge. The oranges sat brightly atop the black rocks like planets in the sky, and Bruder’s hand fell to her shoulder tentatively; he had warned himself against touching her, but his hand moved to her neck nonetheless. He had wanted to feel her flesh since the first time Dieter had said of his daughter, “Her eyes are as black as yours.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” said Bruder.

“Shouldn’t what?”

“I brought you here to show her to you.”

Was there a grounded ship just beyond the cove? A beached dolphin, bloated and heaving in the sun, a fin flopping desperately? Those seemed possible, or maybe a sea lioness mourning a lost pup, wailing in the tide, her eyes weepy and her whiskers limp. And then it occurred to Linda that just maybe Bruder had brought her here to be alone with her. Maybe his hand would lead her through the mouth of the cave and into the damp hole in the bluff. What would she do were he to lay her upon the stone altar? Her longing for him had been deep, a remote ache rising within her at night.

Then she saw something on the beach. “What is that?”

Fifty feet away, in the passage that led to the cave, something white and blubbery lay sprawled, a few oranges glowing around it. At first, Linda thought it was a baby sperm whale caught in the riptide and thrown ashore. But there was something about the shape—long but tapered at the end, with something resembling a head—that told Linda it wasn’t a sperm whale. A dolphin perhaps, or a bluefin tuna, its belly silvery white in the afternoon. And maybe that would explain the smell, which just then reached Linda’s nostrils—a black odor of decay and rot and overripening beneath a fat sun. Her hand took Bruder’s.

“Do you want to see her?” he said.

He moved and Linda followed, her hand over her nose and mouth as the odor erupted, the way a light you’re inching toward widens and floods the eyes with its whiteness. Except that this smell was black, it was dead, but not like a dead fish—already, Linda could tell that it, she, wasn’t a bluefin tuna or a dolphin astray from its swimming grounds off San Clemente Island. No, she was something else. Someone else.

Bruder picked up a stick smooth and glossy from the tide. “I found her like this,” he said.

And as they approached, Linda began to wonder who the girl might be: a girl like her mother, flinging herself from the stern of a ship; a girl praying in the abandoned Lutheran church above who slipped at the bluff; a girl pulled under by the greasy hand of the riptide; a girl not unlike herself, traipsing and hunting the ocean and the beach, who somehow found her death.

She was a tall girl, naked, with her arms at her sides and her knees at an awkward angle and her ankles crossed. Her mass of mossy blond hair fell over her shiny cheek. Her back was a silvery-blue hump, and
Linda, now only a few feet away, could see that hours in the water had bloated the girl, filling her flesh with a layer of saltwater that made her look something like an oversize doll: arms padded and soft, feet white and jellyish. Her hair reminded Linda of the horsehair sewn into the porcelain heads of the dolls kept on the upper shelf at Margarita’s, behind the register. How frightening were their painted blue eyes, following Linda round the store whenever she went to try on the eagle-feather hat.

Bruder poked at the girl with his stick, nudging her shoulder, releasing a cloud of flies.

“She’s dead,” Linda heard herself say. “What happened to her?”

“She must have been in the wreck.”

“Who do you think she is?”

“Probably a captain’s girl.” He nudged the girl’s head with the stick; it flopped heavily, waterlogged; her spine was limp, apparently snapped—and the thought of it filled Linda’s head with the bright crackle of an imagined
snap!
She could hear it, the girl’s neck cracking in a thrust, in an unexpected jolt, the girl once alive and pretty and fearless and proceeding happily with her young life, expecting nothing, expecting everything, and then a sudden whip that snapped her throat; it was as if Linda had been there when the girl’s life had come and gone, and now she watched the neck turn limply with the shove of Bruder’s stick, and suddenly Linda realized that that horrible sound, that sound she had actually never heard, would linger with her for as long as she lived, and that this day, with the tide creeping forward and the gray gulls hanging motionless in the wind and the sun shifting perpetually and Bruder’s hand falling to her hip and his voice, deeper than any boy’s she had ever known, saying, “Are you all right?”—that all of this, the foul black odor and the shimmering hump, and the puffy ankles crossed and the golden flash of pubic hair as Bruder continued to prod the girl’s body, trying to flip her over but, when they saw the swollen stomach, the expectant stomach, eventually giving up: “Oh God, she’s pregnant!” Yes, she realized that all this would someday come to mean something to her, and to Bruder, too, and then the boy with the stick, the boy who had come home from the war with her father and slipped into her former bed and snatched away Dieter’s filial affections for Edmund, and maybe
her
feelings for her brother too, the boy with the hair as black as her own and the body—once, through the window of the
cottage, Linda had seen him undress—like a roan’s, strings of muscle in the thigh, across the breast, in the black pit of his groin, then this young man named Bruder pulled Linda to his chest. His heart knocked against her breast, and she felt it echo within her and sobbed softly into his shoulder, and he stroked her head; and Linda wanted him to hold her forever, but the stench was too much for them to remain at Cathedral Cove, and she said, “We’ll come back on a nicer day,” and Bruder released Linda, and he hoped that that would be true but he couldn’t be as sure as she, and they moved up the beach in silence, and each imagined the future differently.