Motherless

1997

Locals have been saying for years that this stretch of sand called Monastery Beach is anything but a sanctuary. It’s the Venus flytrap of the California coast. The ocean cuts into the land here, and the sudden postcard view that pops up in front of the highway has caused many a driver to drift across the center line. Travelers make the spontaneous decision to stop for a stretch and a family photo: just look at that gorgeous blue backdrop, that sultry smile of coastline, that easy walk from the car to the packed sand.

For heaven’s sake, it’s called Monastery Beach. Who could know at a glance how deadly it is?

I hear the diving just offshore is amazing, though that adventure is for the experienced only, those who know what they’re diving into. Those people have seen the uncommonly steep underwater drop-off here, hidden by the surface. They understand the powerful undertow, the wintertime dangers. They expect the sleeper waves to tower out of nowhere and smash them onto the sand, then grab them by the ankles and drag them into the instant depths. They know about the tragic drownings and the doubly tragic rescue attempts. They’ve seen the death toll climb year after year.

But the happily ignorant vacationers? They turn their backs on the monster to smile for the camera. Once a single wave swallowed a family of four. In spite of posted signs that diagram the danger, too many don’t heed the warnings.

I park on the shoulder of Highway 1, under the low branches of an old salt-whipped tree. People park here all the time—in summer vehicles line the road door-to-door and bumper to bumper—but it’s nearly winter, and no one’s here yet, if anyone will come at all this morning. The sun isn’t shining even though it has recently risen. The winds are spitting sleet across my windshield, and clouds press down heavily. The beastly surf rattles its cage, daring me to come closer.

I take what’s mine and leave what I want others to find. I close the door and leave the empty car unlocked. Why frustrate the search?

The old monastery sits right there on the other side of the highway. I stand on this skinny strip of asphalt, the only thing separating life from death. I could turn in either direction. Strange hope swells in me, then settles back into the sea. Yesterday I might have looked for refuge in that place where they believe God welcomes sinners. But not now.

Like the unwitting visitors who make the mistake of taking their eyes off the water, I put the monastery at my back and face my fate. Unlike them, I am fully informed.

See, the locals call this place Mortuary Beach, and I am here to save my children from my sins.

2014

Almost seventeen years had passed since Garrett Becker last saw his wife. More exactly, he had survived for sixteen years, six months, two weeks, and a day since grasping at her as she made her devastating exit. He had cried, sobbed actually, begged her for forgiveness. Bargained, negotiated, pleaded with her not to go.

Her ears were deaf to him then, and her eyes didn’t see him now as she came down the sidewalk through heavy rain toward his SUV. They faced each other, their routes about to pass so closely, separated by just a few feet. And by eons. It would have been their twenty-second wedding anniversary.

The intensity of this summer storm was unusual for the region and the time of year. Overflowing gutters, the construction of a new skyscraper, and traffic clogging the downtown Los Angeles streets brought Garrett’s vehicle to a standstill. He stared at his wife through the glass.

The sight of her, the possibility of her, set off Garrett’s pulse. A landslide of anxiety came down behind his ribs.

Rain sheeted his windshield, and the rhythmic wipers couldn’t keep up. Silvery water distorted the view of her face. Behind him someone honked, and he inched forward.

But she held his attention captive. Her outfit was identical to the one she wore the day she departed. Dark-blue jeans and a soft sweater, rich pink, the color of bougainvilleas. Moisture glittered her thick black hair. Crystal spray flew from the ends of her bouncing ponytail. Murky puddle water splashed around her quick feet, clad in her favorite pair of ballet flats, magenta like the sweater and studded with flashy rhinestones.

She glided over the sidewalk, this ghost from his past. Dusk conspired with the overcast sky to keep her expression in shadow. Her gait was graceful but urgent and she hugged herself, shoulders hunched, sheltered by the awnings of downtown shops that poured waterfalls of runoff between her and Garrett. As she hurried, she leaped through the gaps between awnings, because the downpour would drench her if she didn’t keep moving.

The red taillights of the car in front of him brightened. He took too long to hit the brakes. When he did, his Suburban fishtailed in the street’s gathering river.

At the near collision she lifted her face to Garrett’s window for the space of a blink, then kept going.

In that breath her portrait was so clear. She looked so young, for all the years Garrett had aged since she’d gone. Her light step was untroubled. Stable. Free of the problems that twisted her mind and turned her heart wild after the births of their children.

He twisted around in his cab to watch her, but she was lost to him, hidden by the rain and the traffic and other pedestrians. Garrett wrenched his attention back to the busy street. He moved his left hand to open the door. His body was already leaning to spring out of the Chevy and chase her down.

But he stopped himself. There was no way in this world, in the known laws of the universe, that it could be her. There was no difference between giving in to wishful thinking and being delusional, and he wasn’t the one who was delusional.

If he could see the tiny scar on her left cheek, he’d know for sure, but that side of her profile faced away.

He forced his attention to the construction zone just on the other side of oncoming traffic, where a skyscraper would soon rise from the earth like a sprouting tree. At the moment, a tall chain-link fence surrounded a thirty-foot-deep pit that occupied half a city block. The massive hole was to become the skyscraper’s foundation and basement. The task of overseeing this mighty project was Garrett’s work, the job he had finished for the day.

His wife appeared in his rearview mirror. She reached the street corner behind him and looked left, down the avenue where boutiques gave way to office buildings, then right, toward the excavated pit. A passerby on the crowded sidewalk bumped into her shoulder. A man in an outdated maroon beret. He brought to mind the film director Ingmar Bergman in the early years of his career. Built like him too. Tall, slim, angular. He carried an umbrella. Garrett’s wife twisted toward the man, and they exchanged apologies.

Garrett’s self-restraint snapped. The woman was no ghost. And he was not delusional.

The car in front of him finally inched ahead, and Garrett used the margin to yank his steering wheel into a U-turn. His wedding ring, the ring she’d once slipped onto his finger with a promise, bit into his skin as he pulled.

The oncoming driver of a small, energy-efficient hybrid lay on the horn and gesticulated, but yielded to the brute size of the Suburban. Garrett forced his way through. A chorus of offended drivers objected, but what could they do to stop him, really?

The engineering part of his mind also raised a ruckus. It knew he didn’t have enough space to complete the illegal turn. His vehicle was too big, his steering radius too long. But Garrett was committed. As he came around, he drove up onto the opposite sidewalk and met the chain-link barrier that surrounded the pit. His headlights cut across the dripping gray mesh, and then his bumper pushed against it. The metal groaned before pushing back and taking some paint off of his passenger-side fender.

The old asphalt street was coated with excavated dirt that had escaped the dump trucks and turned to mud in the downpour. The back end of Garrett’s vehicle slipped a little as he stepped on the gas. He leaned across the steering wheel, eyes straining through the liquid windshield. He guessed she would turn left, around that corner, in which case he’d lose sight of her. He’d have to abandon the car and follow her on foot.

But she surprised him. She asked the man in the beret a question. He pointed at the work site. She nodded a good-bye and stepped off the street corner, then cut through gridlocked cars toward the construction zone. She began to run toward the skyscraper pit, open like a sore, as if it could give her shelter. Within two splashing steps, raindrops doused her.

The traffic had nowhere to go, so Garrett kept his SUV on that sidewalk, where pedestrians were temporarily barred. He accelerated. The passenger-side mirror rattled that fence like a boy with a stick. Husband and wife moved toward the same point, their paths on collision as she aimed for the barrier. She approached without breaking stride, then reached up her hands and stuck her long, narrow foot into one of the links. She began to pull herself up.

He couldn’t guess what she was doing, but he feared she might go over the top. Did nobody see? Would no one step in?

No! Garrett’s shout was loud in the confined space. Then louder, Wait!

Driving was the fastest way to reach her. He unbuckled his seat belt, preparing to leap out. She had both feet in the chain links now, but she paused there. The whole fence vibrated as Garrett’s mirror slid along its musical scale.

He opened his door and sideswiped a car in the lane he was trying to bypass. Metal squealed on metal, and muddy water splashed up into the footwell until Garrett corrected his error. He pulled the wheel to the right, and the Suburban leaned into the chain links. His door stayed open. The metallic groans on both sides deepened. He felt the right front tire leave the sidewalk and slip under the fence. Too late, he braked.

She turned her head to look at him, and no amount of rain could distort the connection their eyes made. Garrett believed she saw him clearly. Saw him, knew him, and somehow had expected to meet him exactly like this and at precisely this moment as he drove his SUV into the fence like a stone into a slingshot’s rubber pocket.

She sprang off the fence, eyes still on him. The flexible soles of her slim ballet flats stayed wedged in the links, like the chain-link memorials stuffed with tributes to loved ones after unthinkable disasters. The groaning metal extended to its limits.

His tires quickly left the solid ground. They chipped away the tiny lip of earth underneath the fence, above the excavation, and gravity took care of the rest. The vehicle tipped to the right. His door slammed shut. Everything strained, just long enough for Garrett to hope the chain-link slingshot might shoot him back onto the street. He might at least get the chance to say good-bye to his children, to explain a few things. They had never understood their mother’s abandonment. How much less sense would his own exit make?

He looked for her. She had withdrawn, backing away into the frozen traffic, where all eyes were on his catastrophe.

The Suburban tipped past the point of no return. He tried again to open his door and found the weight of the world holding it against him. The fence posts whined and then collapsed, and his head crashed into the cab’s ceiling as everything plummeted. His feet pointed to the sky. His arms braced for hell.

One

That SUV falls for years.

Like a burst of lightning I’m back at the twisted fence, pouncing on it, gripping the strained wire links, watching. Disbelieving. Terrified. This moment is so different from what I expected when the sun rose this morning and I made my way here. I rattle the fence with all my strength and have less power than a gust of wind. The barrier doesn’t budge.

The metal is solid and real beneath my fingers. I can feel the pain of it cutting into my joints. The world resists me. Each raindrop strikes me like hail that strips a tree of its leaves. Within seconds I’ve been pounded off the fence. I have to seek shelter. But first, I have to watch.

The Chevy dives headfirst into the excavation, where everything will soon be laid to rest in a casket of concrete. Hard-hatted workers still finishing their workday scatter. The vehicle finally hits the bottom. It bounces off the exposed net of crosshatched rebar and tumbles twice, the ground sledgehammering the cab.

The final, fatal, upside-down impact sends a shock wave that cuts me in half, and for a long minute, as the flattened SUV stills, the only thing I can do is try to breathe. Yes, the dead do breathe, just in a different dimension. Right now, it takes all my concentration.

A whispering voice at the back of my mind reminds me that I’ve been this way for some time. Dead, that is. The voice is fear, and it caresses my neck with cold secrets. Death is timeless and irreversible. It begins its work on the human heart long before it strikes its final physical blow. And by then, we’re conditioned to hardly notice it.

For a sacred moment there’s nothing but the sounds of my wheezing and the pattering of rain drumming on car tops, splatting in its own puddles, pinging the undercarriage of a destroyed car, a crushed life. The rain is shredding me to ribbons, causing pain without injury. I crawl between an outhouse and a piece of plywood tilted against it.

Gawkers are collecting on the sidewalk where they’re not supposed to be. The especially stupid ones play with their own lives by leaning into the chasm opened up by the truck and the distended fence. The merely careless risk their electronics in the downpour for the sake of a picture or video. One phone slips out of its owner’s hand and plummets into the site. How can these people value their own lives so cheaply? They can’t see what’s right in front of them, and they’re going to call themselves witnesses. What do they know about what happened here today, really? They’ll tell stories that might seem true but aren’t even close, and no one will be able to point out the falsehood.

But even I feel confused about what just happened. The flimsy pink shoes jutting out of the twisted links look like a lie. Or at least a terrible misunderstanding. I crawl out from under the shelter and reach for them, thinking to pry them out, but I can’t even wiggle the soft soles. My fingers are like floppy feathers trying to jack up a steel beam. I leave the shoes to rot and walk away with nothing, staggering under the pelting rain toward the shelter of a low awning on the other side of the street. The brick building embraces me.

The man in the beret who pointed out the work site is walking away under his umbrella. Did he know what would happen there?

The dead have a very broad view of the living, of actions performed out of sight, of thoughts believed to be private. Across the pit, someone standing at the front window of a store is praying. Fifteen cars behind the red light, a nurse has left her car door open and is looking for someone who knows the way down into the site. In the deli on the corner, a crane operator who stopped for dinner at shift’s end has left half a sandwich on the plate and is rushing back to work. Behind me, where the street is jammed with people who want a good story to tell over drinks tonight, an off-duty highway patrolman in sopping wet street clothes is showing his badge to drivers and giving them instructions.

Eighty miles away, surviving family members are watching TV in a beach house, unaware that the curtain is rising on a terrible drama in which they will have to take center stage.

My children. Almost adults but not quite. Independent but not self-sufficient. Capable but in need of resources.

Who will take care of them now that both their parents are gone?

Who will tell them what happened here?

Raindrops fall from the awning onto my protruding feet, striking like stones. The pain is a living thing.

I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about what it would have been like to apologize to my kids courageously. Face-to-face, and with a happy ending. My fantasy looks like this: I’d unveil my secrets over cups of strong coffee, and they’d listen, and understand. We’d exchange weak smiles and awkward hugs all around. They’d get answers to their questions. I might eventually get mercy.

As I said, it’s a fantasy.

The rain tapers off. It’s safe to venture out. The skies are gray and night is near. Lights from cars and streetlamps and windows flicker on, resisting darkness. My weak hands smack a mailbox, a skinny tree growing out of the sidewalk, a newspaper stand, a parking meter. I make no sounds, leave no mark.

My children have believed a lie about me for years and years and years. After all this time I can still feel their hurt in my heart. The tether holding me to them is an old rope frayed by years of neglect. I have to find a way to make my confession before it snaps. What I did was unforgivable, but my own pardon is beside the point. My children deserve the truth, and more. They deserve what I could never give them: a mother’s love. I want that much for them even at this late date. Because some part of us always needs mothering no matter how old we are.

My plodding walk quickly becomes a jog fueled by a new goal. I turn west and break into a run.

Two

By car the Rincon Point beach community is about an hour and a half northwest of LA, but I arrive on foot, unaware of how much time has passed or which route I took to get here.

The night sky is clear and sharp, and the scents of recent rain are almost as strong as the sea salt. The tiny, gated neighborhood is a quiet combination of year-round residents, snowbirds, and vacation renters. And surfers. Its crescent of rocky beach, rich with stones and real estate, juts into the Pacific just far enough to catch good, consistent waves.

By day dolphins leap through the surf. At night glittering oil derricks light up the ocean horizon.

The Becker house itself is a money pit, a modified (and modified, and modified some more) cottage first built in the fifties. It hasn’t sucked up cash because it’s a problem, but because it is a disappointment. The house has failed to be a home no matter how many improvements are made, no matter how luxurious the finishing touches. It is a showcase house. A facade.

This is only one of many reasons why I hate it. But it’s my kids’ home. And it’s full of windows into their lives.

A wide clay-tiled porch leads to this door. Moonlight shines down on it through a redwood frame dense with bougainvillea vines that cast lacy shadows on everything. A small circle of light over the front door illuminates the three wide steps. Marina always remembers to turn the lights on.

She’s responsible, capable. Twenty going on forty. My beautiful girl. Came out of the womb like that and will probably have her own funeral arrangements in order before she dies of a wise old age. And you know what? She will be that way whether I succeed or fail. She doesn’t need me in the same way her brother does.

I know with a sudden, strange awareness that my sixteen-year-old son is upstairs reading poetry books that he has secreted away in the crannies of his room, because he needs some area of his life to be hidden from his sister’s hovering, protective eye. It’s not that she’d object to a few poems, it’s that he wants the poetry to be his and his alone, even if thousands of people have had similar experiences reading them. Some things are just too sacred to be discussed with others.

There’s also the fact that very few sixteen-year-old guys can make loving poetry look cool. Dylan prefers the people who know him to think of him as a brainy computer builder, gamer, and programmer. A quirky recluse who is too genius to leave his house.

I step onto the porch, which should be ocean-breeze cool, but the burnt-orange tiles are as hot as glowing coals. A soft hiss rises up beneath my feet, along with something like stage-trick fog. It seems like a warning, so I jump away and watch the smoky substance rise. It forms a barrier between me and the door before it finally dissipates. Of course. This house will be no different from the inanimate objects on the streets of LA—the fence, the newspaper box, the streetlamp. I can’t turn a doorknob any more easily than I can pick up a pair of shoes. The door will deny me entrance. I’ll have to find another way in.

The voices of Marina and her friend Jade come to me from the back patio, a partially enclosed area that overlooks the private beach.

How come you never talk about her? Jade is asking.

"He never talks about her. I’ve tried enough times."

My daughter’s presence outside saves me. I circumvent the strangeness on the porch and go across the lawn to the brick footpath, which connects the front porch to the back patio. The path follows the front of the house and borders a small garden that Marina has planted and tended. Without the bougainvillea to shade them, the sweet peas, the snapdragons, the matilija poppies all glow in moonlight.

Tonight the light shines down on the memorial stone that sits among the flowers. A simple plaque mounted on granite:

In Memory of Misty

Wife, Mother, Friend

1971–1997

At the back of the house, a low wall topped with an acrylic windbreak surrounds the patio. A wraparound bench holds several potted plants, interesting pieces of driftwood, and dozens of seashells, whole and broken. A low gate with a simple latch grants access to the beach. In the far corner, Dylan’s surfboard leans against the wall next to a couple of spares. Little pools of rainwater on the sandy wood slats reflect the wall-mounted floodlights. Overhead, the sunshades are retracted on their rolls and the stars shine down.

Marina and Jade sit on cushioned wicker chairs around an outdoor dining table. Marina has a dark beauty that is unapproachable when she wants it to be. Those heavily lined midnight eyes, the molasses hair that sits on her shoulders like a helmet, the velvet brows, and the Michelangelo mouth can all speak as one without uttering a word. She uses her fierce good looks to select which few people can have access to her heart.

In spite of her name, Jade is beach-bunny plain by comparison, blond and tan and dime-a-dozen pretty. She sits with her head down, half listening to Marina, half tending to something on her phone.

. . . says there isn’t much to talk about, Marina is saying, her back to me. Her bare feet are propped up on the wraparound bench, and she’s sipping natural soda straight from the can. Mom committed suicide before Dylan even learned how to roll over.

Jade’s eyes widen and abandon the phone. She killed herself?

Marina shrugs. I guess she had a condition. A mental illness.

So that’s where Dylan gets his panic stuff from? Jade asks.

I don’t know.

Why not? Doesn’t your dad know for sure?

As you already pointed out, we don’t talk about it. What difference would it make?

But isn’t that kind of thing genetic? If my head were screwed up, I’d want to know everything I could about why.

Marina’s attention swivels toward the house, where the living room is bright but empty. She’s looking for her brother, not knowing he’s engrossed in a poem that’s inspiring him with a new game concept. She lowers her voice.

Dylan’s not screwed up, okay? He’s actually really high-functioning.

I just meant it’s a good idea to know your medical history.

He worries about enough already. What good would it do if he started thinking he was his own worst enemy?

Doesn’t he already? Jade frowns at her phone. Suicide is so sad. Aren’t you even a tiny bit curious?

Marina takes another drink and stares at the dark waters.

Jade sniffs. "Your dad still wears his wedding ring. He doesn’t even date. You’d think he’s still madly in love with her."

Jade! Marina laughs. She pulls her feet off the bench and leans in to the table toward her friend. You have a sick crush on my dad!

No, I just think it’s weird he doesn’t talk about your mom. If I were crazy in love with a dead person I’d—

Well, you’re not, or you’d know how much it hurts. Him and everyone else.

Marina’s laugh is gone. Her warning is clear, but Jade’s head must be full of air.

"C’mon, Marina. You told me you don’t even have a picture of her."

My daughter’s back stiffens and she pushes her soda aside. It’s true, what Jade said about the pictures—and the letters, and the mementos, all of it—and the reason they are gone pains me too. It’s nobody’s business, though. Definitely not Jade’s.

Still, Marina lets her off the hook. Sort of.

When do you leave for Jakarta? Marina asks.

Three weeks from Monday. Jade grins. If I decide to go.

If? I thought it was all set.

I don’t know. You’re not going. I still have to come up with that last payment. I met a guy.

A guy. Marina scoffs. You’d give up the trip of a lifetime for a guy?

I don’t know if I’d call sleeping on dirt floors and helping to vaccinate snotty kids ‘the trip of a lifetime.’

No, you probably wouldn’t.

He runs an auto shop up in Goleta. Says business has been really great and he can give me some work. Worst-case scenario, I’ll scrape together enough for the last bill. But who knows? If he and I click, if the money’s good, maybe I’ll stay.

Yeah, stay for all those broken-down cars. What’s a few kids on the other side of the world?

Jade reaches out across the table and gives Marina a playful shove. You’re the one who really cares about that sort of thing. It should be you on that plane.

Too late. No money. Work. You know.

No, I don’t. Your dad’s loaded. Unlike my delinquent parent, who dares to call herself my mother just because we live at the same address.

You assume a lot. And your mom tries.

Then Dylan must be your real excuse. Are you turning into an agoraphobe too? Seriously, Marina. He’s sixteen, old enough to snap out of it so you can have a life. When’s he going to get a job? Even a driver’s license would be an improvement!

Marina sighs. He gets paid for some of his computer stuff. And if you had a brother with special needs maybe you’d understand.

The problem as I see it isn’t that Jade doesn’t have a brother, but that Marina doesn’t have a mother. She’s had to be both mother and sister since she was three. She has special needs even she doesn’t know about.

The gate on the enclosed patio is shut. I stand there, as invisible to those girls as I am to everyone else, and place my hand on the Plexiglas. My fingertips flatten against the surface, but when I lift them away, my palm leaves no mark. No fleeting moisture, no oily smudge.

The sound of a car pulling into the driveway at the front of the house reaches