Just Breathe

“Try being a little more specific.”

She stared at him, mutiny in her eyes. Then she pushed back from the table and went to get something from her backpack—a crumpled flyer printed on pale pink paper. “Is that specific enough for you?”

“Parents’ night at your school.” He knew exactly why that upset her, but decided to play dumb as he checked the date. “I can make it. I’m not on duty that night.”

“I know you can make it. It’s just that I hate it when they expect parents to show up.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

She plunked herself back down in her chair. “How about I have no mother. No idea who my father is.”

“He’s me,” Will said, fighting now to keep anger down. “And I’ve got the adoption papers to prove it.”

Thanks to Birdie, the family’s legal eagle, he had a father’s rights. Those had never been challenged—except by Aurora, who sometimes dreamed her “real” father was a noble political prisoner pining away for her in some Third World prison.

“Whatever,” she said, her inflection infuriating.

“Lots of kids have single parents,” he pointed out. “Is it really that bad here?” He gestured around the room, indicating their house. The wood-frame house, built in the 1930s, was nothing fancy, but it sat a block from the beach and had everything they needed—their own private bedrooms and bathrooms, a good stereo system and satellite TV.

“All right,” she said. “You win. Everything is just super.”

“Is this some new class you’re taking in seventh grade?” he asked. “Sarcasm 101?”

“It’s just a gift.”

“Congratulations.” He clinked his beer can against her milk glass. During his duty cycle, there was no drinking, of course, but on his first night off, he always had one beer. Just one, no more. Heavy drinking meant nothing but trouble. Last time he’d really tied one on, he had wound up married, with a stepdaughter. A guy couldn’t afford to do that more than once in a lifetime.

“So spill,” he said. “What’ll make you happy, and how can I give it to you?”

“Why does everything have to be so black-and-white with you, Dad?” she asked in annoyance.

“Maybe I’m color-blind. You should help me pick out a shirt for parents’ night.”

“Don’t you get it? I don’t want you to go,” she wailed.

He didn’t let on that her attitude was an arrow to his heart. There was never a good time for a child to be left by her mother, but Will figured Marisol had picked the worst possible age. When Marisol took off, Aurora had been too young to see her mother for what she was, yet old enough to hold on to memories, like a drowning victim clinging to a life raft. Over the years, Aurora had gilded those memories with a child’s idealism. There was no way a flesh-and-blood stepfather could measure up to a mother who braided hair, served pancakes for dinner and knew all the words to The Lion King.

He’d never stop trying, though. “I hate to disappoint you, but I’m going,” he told her.

Aurora burst into tears. This, lately, had become her specialty. As if cued by some signal he couldn’t see, she leaped up and took off. In a moment, he’d hear a thud as she flung herself on the bed.

Will thought about having another beer, but decided against it. Sometimes he felt so alone in this situation, he had the sensation of drifting out to sea. He went over to the slate message board by the door. He and Aurora used it for reminders and grocery lists. Picking up the chalk, he wrote, “Parents’ night—Thurs.” so he wouldn’t forget to attend. Upstairs, Aurora landed on her bed with an angry thump.

Chapter Eight

As she drove away from town, Sarah told herself not to dwell on Jack and the things he’d said. Instead, her mind worried the conversation as though seeking hidden meaning in every syllable and inflection: You’re not ready to acknowledge your part in this yet.

Of all the things he had said, that was surely the most absurd. What was she guilty of? Trading the gas-guzzling GTO for a Mini?

Please come home, Jack had urged her.

I am home.

She didn’t feel it yet. She had never been comfortable in her own skin, no matter where she lived. Now she realized something else. Her heart had no home. Although she’d grown up here, she had always looked elsewhere—outward—for a place to belong. She’d never quite found that. Maybe she would discover that it was a place she’d left behind. A place like this.

It was a land of lush abundance and mysterious wilderness, demarcated by flat-topped cypress trees sculpted by the wind, gnarled California oaks furred with moss and lichen, forget-me-nots growing wild in hilly meadows and ospreys nesting atop the light poles.

Her father lived in the house his father had built. The Moons were an old local family, their ancestors among the town’s first settlers, along with the Shafters, the Pierces, the Moltzens and Mendozas. There was a salt marsh behind the home and a commanding view of the bay known locally as Moon Bay, even though no printed map ever designated it as such. At the end of the gravel road was the Moon Bay Oyster Company, housed in a long, barn-red building that projected partially onto a dock. The enterprise had been started by Sarah’s grandfather after he came home wounded from World War II. He had been shot in the leg by a German in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, and he walked with a permanent limp. He had a good head for business and a deep love of the sea. He chose to grow oysters because they flourished in the naturally clean waters here and were prized by shops and restaurants in the Bay Area.

His widow, June Garrett, whose married name—Moon—made her sound like a Dr. Seuss character, was Sarah’s grandmother. She still lived in what the family called the “new” house simply because it was built twenty years after the original one. It was a whitewashed bungalow with a picket fence at the end of the lane, a hundred yards from the main house. After Grandpa had died, Gran’s sister, May, had moved in with her. The two sisters lived together, happy in their retirement.

Sarah decided to stop in at Gran’s before heading to the main house. She had arrived in a whirlwind of fury and grief, and hadn’t seen Gran and Aunt May yet. Now that she’d consulted a lawyer and rebuffed Jack’s attempt to change her mind about the divorce, she felt more in control. She turned down the lane toward her grandmother’s house, the tires of the Mini crunching over the oyster shell gravel of the driveway.

The sounds and smells of the bay and tidal flats caused the years to peel away. With no effort at all, she regarded this place through the filter of memory. For a child, this was a magical realm, filled with dreams and fairy tales. With the sturdy, handsome house by the bay as her home base, and her grandmother’s cottage a short walk away, she’d been surrounded by security. She had explored the marshes and estuaries; she’d raced the tide and tossed homemade kites to the wind. She’d lain in the soft grass of the yard and imagined the clouds coming to life. In her mind’s eye, she’d turned the clouds into three-dimensional speech bubbles filled with words she was too shy to say aloud. This had been her dreamworld, scented with flowers and alive with blowing grass and the buzz of insects. As a child, she’d been a great reader, finding the ultimate escape within the pages of a story. She learned that opening a book was like opening a set of double doors—the next step would take her inside to Neverland or Nod, Sunnybrook Farm or Mulberry Street.

When she started high school, Sarah’s attitude changed. That, she suspected, was when her heart had come unmoored from this place. She became self-conscious about the family business. Other kids’ parents were dot-com millionaires, lawyers, rich movie execs. Being an oyster farmer’s daughter made her a total misfit. That was when she taught herself to disappear. In her many sketch-

books, she designed special places of her own, filling them with everything she wanted—adoring friends, puppies, snow at Christmas, floor-length dresses, straight-A report cards, parents with normal jobs, wearing business suits to work instead of rubber aprons and gum boots. She let herself forget the magic; it was teased out of her by kids who made fun of the very idea of living in this rustic, seaside family compound.

Reflecting back on those days, she realized what a dumb kid she’d been, letting someone else’s perception dictate the way she felt about herself. Independent and solvent, her family was living the dream, an American success story. She’d never appreciated that.

“It’s me,” Sarah called through the screen door.

“Welcome home, dear,” Gran said. “We’re in the living room.”

Sarah found her grandmother waiting with open arms. They hugged, and she shut her eyes, her senses filling with the essence of her grandmother—a spicy fragrance redolent of baking, soft arms that felt delicate, though not frail. She stepped back and smiled into the kindest face in the world. Then she turned to Aunt May, Gran’s twin, every bit as sweet and kind as her sister. She almost wished they were not so sweet; for some reason, their sweetness made her feel like crying.

“So did Dad tell you?” she asked.

“He did indeed, and we’re very sorry,” Aunt May said, “aren’t we, June?”

“Yes, and we’re going to help you in any way we can.”

“I know you will.” Sarah shrugged out of her sweater and sank into an ancient swivel rocker she remembered from her childhood. “I survived my first meeting with the lawyer.”

“I’ll make you a chai tea,” Gran said.

Sarah sat back and let them fuss over her. She took comfort in their homey clucking and in the fact that they never changed a thing in their house. They had the same cabbage rose carpet on the floor, the same chicken-print tablecloth. As always, Gran’s area of the living room was a storm of clippings and magazines piled haphazardly around her chair. Sketchbooks and an array of drawing pencils littered a side table. By contrast, Aunt May’s side of the room was painstakingly neat, her knitting basket, TV remote and library stack arranged just so. This had always been a place of familiar things, where she could always find a homemade fig-filled cookie, or lose herself in Gran’s display of World’s Fair souvenirs, or simply sit and listen to the twins’ murmured conversation. It was soothing, yet at the same time there was something stifling about this place. Sarah wondered if the sisters ever felt trapped here.

Because they were twins, the sisters were considered a bit of a novelty, and always had been. Growing up, they had enjoyed the peculiar social status afforded young ladies who happened to be pretty, popular, well-mannered and nearly identical. The story of their birth was the stuff of legend. They were born on the last day of May, at midnight during a terrific storm. The attending doctor swore that one twin was delivered a minute before midnight, and the second a minute after. Hearing this, their parents named them May and June.

Although biologically they were fraternal twins, most casual observers had trouble telling them apart. They had the same graceful drifts of white hair, the same eyes of milk glass blue. Their faces were all but indistinguishable, like two apples side by side, drying in a bowl.

Despite their physical resemblance, the sisters were polar opposites in many ways. Aunt May was conventional and neat as a pin. Gran was considered bohemian in her day; she preferred painting over housework and raising a family. More traditional, Aunt May dressed in calico cotton prints and crocheted shawls; Gran favored overalls and tribal print smocks. Both women, however, spent their lives fanatically devoted to family and community.

“You probably don’t want to talk about your meeting,” Aunt May suggested.

In this family, denial was a fine art. “I’ll spare you the details.”