“I know, right? I’m not allowed to have cats where I am, and I want to make her a safe home.”
“I’m sorry about your cat. That happened to me, too, unfortunately.
It was a bird, not a cat, but it was the reason I finally left him.”
Annie looked at her. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” Vita said. She spread out her arms. “But, you see, here I am and I’m happy and productive and I have a life I love.”
“Yeah, I see.” Annie shifted the cat in her arms. “Can you help me find a different place to live?”
“You bet. For now let’s take Athena here upstairs and let her sleep on my bed. Okay?”
“Very okay. I’ll do extra work, whatever you want.”
“You don’t have to do anything, Annie. Sometimes a friend does another friend a favor.”
Dawn came gray and cool. Vince dropped Tessa back at the hotel, and they stood outside his truck, kissing and kissing and kissing beneath the overcast skies. When he left to go fetch his girls, Tessa was both relieved and bereft. She had a shower and went out for a walk, ambling around the church and then around the perimeter of the town on a trail where she met swollen-eyed townspeople walking their dogs. They nodded at her and smiled at Felix, who was as polite as a little old man out for a weekend stroll. In a way it broke her heart—he seemed afraid to do anything that was even faintly puppylike. “I won’t leave you, you know,” she said.
He licked her hand. They walked for a long time, and Tessa was pleased at how quickly her foot was healing now. Maybe in the next day or two, she could try some of the longer trails. She’d hiked most of the shorter ones.
Later today she would have to find a new place to stay. Los Padres, while lovely, was too expensive for the long haul. She
could stay one more day but would have to find something else by tomorrow. She paused at the desk to make sure she could keep the room for another day, then went back upstairs and slept for a few hours. When she woke up, it was sprinkling a little. She headed out into the drizzle, hungry.
There were dozens of other restaurants, but Tessa really only wanted to go to 100 Breakfasts. Felix was happy to be tied up outside where he could see her. She sat by the window and he sat on the other side, calmly observing the world, safe and dry beneath the eaves.
Tessa scanned the menu, looking for something that tickled her fancy—she could work it off by checking out some of the trails around here later if it stopped raining.
The local specialties were in the 90s. Breakfast number 92 was huevos rancheros with green chile and corn tortillas and refried—not black—beans. Number 95 was migas: chiles and eggs and tortillas and chorizo scrambled together. There was a breakfast taco and a bowl of green chile stew. She chose the migas.
Vita caught sight of her and waved through the pass-out bar. She waved back. Annie was there, too, with a lime-green bandana over her head. She looked as if she’d gained a little weight this week, and it made her much prettier. Something about the angle of her face reminded Tessa of someone, but in her fuzzy state it took a while to bring it into focus: She looked like Cherry at Green Gate Farms.
Maybe Xander, the leader, had spread his seed far and wide. Annie said she’d grown up in Albuquerque. Not so far away.
Which made Tessa think of the conversation she’d had with Vince about her mother and her singular lack of interest in the woman. When Tessa was young, Sam would say only that her
mom had been pretty and kind but not really strong enough for this world.
As Tessa got older, he said only that her mother was troubled. And Tessa supposed she had accepted that Sam had her best interests at heart. If he glossed over her mother, then Tessa probably didn’t really want to know. She knew her name—Winnie, which seemed the too-soft name of a weak-willed woman—and that she’d come to the commune from California. That was about all she knew.
Thinking now of Natalie, who was five when her mother died and at eight still fiercely kept the memory alive, Tessa suddenly found it rather odd that she remembered nothing at all. Even with the trauma-induced amnesia. She had never wanted to know any more until she fell into the river with Lisa.
The story her father had told her all these years—the fairy tale making light of her terrible story, the vagueness of backstory—now seemed patently rehearsed, as if she’d been brainwashed or something. The thought made her sit back in her seat, pulse racing. What if
all
of it was a lie?
Stop
.
She was entirely too stirred up. By the town, by the rescue of Felix, by the waves of memory washing to shore. And by Vince. Staring out at the plaza, she thought of his mouth, his big hands, his low, thrumming voice, and knew that he was dangerous.
After breakfast, she stepped outside and called her father. “Hey, princess,” he said. “Did you get my letter?”
“You wrote me an email?”
“No, I sent it through the mail.”
“You wrote a letter by hand and sent it snail mail?”
“That must mean you haven’t gotten it yet.”
“No, but where would you have sent it? I don’t have an address here.”
“And you say that I’m the dumb one. Your hotel, honey. I mailed it to you in care of the hotel.”
“Oh. What’s in it?”
“Um … Just wait and see. What are you up to today? Finished with that lousy little town yet?”
“It’s not lousy at all—I keep telling you that you should check it out again. It’s not the place you remember.”
“Still has evil spirits.”
Tessa rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Listen, I’m calling because I remembered some things, and I’m kind of bothered by them.”
A depth of silence on the other end of the line suggested her father was not pleased. “What did you remember?”
“I remembered going in the river, off a cliff. And a fire, and a woman with long blond hair who always seems angry with me, and—this is the weird part—somebody who seems like my sister.” She paused, a pain in her ribs. “Do I have a sister?”
Again the quiet. “It’s complicated,” he said finally. “The letter will help.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“When you get the letter, princess, take your dog and a big cup of tea and go somewhere outside. Like that church—don’t you like that church?”
“You’re scaring me.”
“I told you I didn’t want you to go there.” His voice was ragged. Old. “But once you throw the lid off Pandora’s box, there’s no going back.”
“Dad!”
“You’ll be fine, Tessa. Call me after you read the letter, all right?”
She realized she was threading Felix’s ear through her fingers, over and over, as if it were the satin on a blanket. “Okay.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“I love you, kiddo. You know that, right?”
It made her smile.
Doubt thou the stars are fire
, she thought, but never doubt that Sam loved her completely.
“Yes, Dad. I love you, too.”
When Vince got to his mother’s house, she was putting out bowls for cereal. The girls were in their PJs and leapt up joyfully. “Daddy! We’re having Cap’n Crunch!” Jade cried.
“With Crunch Berries!” Hannah added, waving her spoon.
Natalie swung her feet, hair crazy all around her head. He smoothed it down. “What about you, Miss Scarlett?”
“I’m having toast. I’m not eating all that junk food.”
Judy snorted, banging a frying pan onto the stove. “Her Highness wants an egg.”
“I
said
I would have toast, Grandma!”
“But not with margarine,” Judy said, glaring at Vince.
Natalie flung her feet back and forth. “It’s not good for you.”
“Oh, brother!” Jade rolled her eyes. Even so early in the morning, she was well groomed, her hair brushed and tied back, her pajamas tidy. She woke up washed and pressed, just like her mother. He kissed her head, too.
“Not everybody likes the same things,” he said.
“I know.”
Sasha and Pedro were on the other side of the kitchen, on an area rug where they were banished while the girls were eating. Vince bent down to look closely at Pedro. “You tangled with a
porcupine, huh?” There were a few little marks but nothing serious. “I guess we need to keep him in a fence or something.”
His mother slammed spoons down, yanked the door to the fridge open so hard that everything inside rattled. Vince finally realized she was furious with him. He stood up and put his hands on her arms. “Hey, hey, what’s up, Mom? Sit down, let me do that.”
“Don’t you what’s up me,” she said, and lowered her voice. “I saw your truck over at the hotel when we were coming back from the vet.”
Guilt slammed him. “Mom, it’s not like that—”
“No, not in front of the girls.” She shoved the spatula into his hand. “I’m going to take a shower. You finish their breakfasts and get them dressed.”
Chastened, Vince fried an egg for Natalie, poured cereal and milk for the other two girls, and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“Grandma’s mad at you,” Jade said.
“No kidding.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“Don’t be stupid, Jade! We would know,” Natalie said.
Vince wiped up a spill of milk. “I don’t have a girlfriend, Jade.”
“Why’d you stay out all night, then?”
“Sometimes grown-ups do things they don’t have to explain to kids.” Time for a change in subject. “What happened to Pedro? Did he have a lot of quills in his nose?”
“Lots!” Hannah said, and put her hands around her face as if drawing quills hanging off her nose and jaw and forehead. “And he said, ‘Mmm, mmm, mmm.’” She whined like a dog perfectly.
“That’s a good whine, Little Bit. Poor Pedro, though, huh?”
Natalie looked darkly at him. “He
needs
a fence, Daddy. It made me so sad that he got hurt!” Her eyes filled with tears. “What if he got
killed?”
He covered her hand. “Shhh. I promise we’ll build a fence. Right away, okay? Don’t worry. He’s fine.”
“Vince!” his mother said from the other room.
“Finish up, girls, then go get dressed and get your stuff together.” He took his coffee with him and went to face the music.
Tessa went back to the hotel and took advantage of the free WiFi in the lobby to get online, hoping for a response from Mick, her boss, to the proposal for the tour. There wasn’t one. She looked up a couple of motels and found one that seemed reasonable that was just around the corner. She’d check it out when the rain let up, and probably go with that. Nice and easy.
But now she was very, very curious about her father’s dark hints. Flipping open her notebook, she looked up the names of the original founders of the commune, Robert and Jonathan Nathan, and Googled their names in conjunction with “Xander.”
A string of links popped up, including, to her surprise, a Wikipedia article. She clicked on the link and read the short paragraphs, which mostly reiterated what she already knew—the two were the highly successful owners of Green Gate Organic Farms, which grew out of an old commune where Alexander “Xander” McKenzie was shot and killed by an unknown assailant under mysterious circumstances. The Wikipedia entry for McKenzie was thin, but it did have a grainy black-and-white photograph of a lean man in his early thirties, wearing a handlebar mustache and the long hair of the
seventies. Even in a very bad photograph with very bad styling, he was extraordinarily good-looking.
She Googled his name and came up with a handful of articles. The rebellious but good-natured Xander was the oldest child of a Northeastern shipping family; he’d dropped out of Princeton and headed west on a painted bus. Tessa rolled her eyes. It was so hard to imagine living in a world where that wasn’t a joke, where it still represented revolution and excitement, a chance for a new life. She clicked on a photo of Xander in a group of six or seven others—men and women, all in their dewy early twenties, with flowing hair and flowing sleeves and bare feet. Was one of them her mother? She peered closely at the women, but none of them looked familiar.
None of the men was Sam, either. Tessa didn’t know exactly when her father had come to the commune. She knew he’d served in Vietnam, though he didn’t talk about his experiences there; they were brutal and still sometimes gave him nightmares. You didn’t wake Sam from a dead sleep, ever. He was an orphan who’d been on his own since the age of fifteen, from somewhere in the Deep South—Mississippi or Louisiana, she didn’t know. He was vague about it. Magic had been his hobby from the time he was a small boy, and at the commune he had a chance to develop it into a polished show.
How had she never realized before how little information she had about all of this? Why had she never thought to ask? It was highly disorienting.
She rubbed the bridge of her nose, where a slight headache had started. The article on Xander commented on his charisma and his troupe of willing followers who eventually settled in a group “marriage” in New Mexico, where they lived for seven or eight years before Xander was killed, likely by a jealous lover,
though nothing was ever proven. Several women made paternity claims against his estate, but they were all soundly dismissed.
Sketchy, Tessa thought. It was all so sketchy. Checking the time, she saw that it was only early afternoon, and the rain was finally stopping. There was time to get to the library, and, on the way back, she’d look at the motel.
The library was housed in an old Carnegie-style building with pillars and enormous double-paned windows. It was surprisingly large for a small community, though there seemed to be only two people working in the whole place: a librarian and a desultory older Latino janitor, polishing the foyer floor.
The librarian, a Pueblo woman with long beaded earrings and her salt-and-pepper hair cut in a tidy pageboy, had to unlock the reference room for Tessa. “Microfiche readers over there,” she said. “The reels are filed in these drawers. Some papers are bound in books, too, so you can check those volumes over here.” She paused. “Looking for a particular event?”
“Well, sort of. I want to read about the commune.”
Her mouth tightened. “Just like everybody who comes through. You’d think all the rest of our history would matter.” She shook her head. “It’s over here.”