California(14)

So she knew he was talking about Micah. Micah must have talked about those paintings with her, too.

They tried not to bring up her brother. They’d agreed to never tell anyone out here about him, and even between them, both his death and his life were difficult subjects, so thorny they could cut themselves on his name.

If Cal told her Micah had liked the paintings back when they were at Plank, she’d freak out. In the world according to Frida, her brother had been a precocious boy and then a brilliant man, faultless until the Group got ahold of him. According to her, Micah never would have said such a thing before he became involved with them.

“It’s nothing,” Cal said now. He tried to pull Frida back, but she was already slipping out of his grasp. She crawled over him to get out of the bed. He couldn’t help but look at her nipples. There they were.

“Babe,” he said, sitting up. “Why are you so mad?”

“Please, don’t,” she said. She put on her pants.

“I’m going to the well,” she said. She was already pulling on a sweater, her boots.

“Frida—”

But she was opening the door, the morning light spilling into the house, falling across all its dusty surfaces, its sad furniture. It was ugly; Frida had been right.

Cal called her name, but only after the door had slammed behind her.





3



Frida was chopping beets for dinner when she heard the crack of twigs and the rustle of trees and, after that, an animal’s hooves against the hard dirt of the path to their house. She could just barely make out August’s whistling, and then he stopped to mutter something. It sounded soothing, and she knew he was talking to the animal, Sue, probably congratulating her on another safe arrival.

Frida put down her knife and turned to Cal. They hadn’t spoken much beyond the necessary all day. She wasn’t sure why she was mad, and at whom, even. Her husband had brought up something stupid, something from a long time ago. It shouldn’t matter now, but it did.

They didn’t talk about Micah because, when they did, Cal got pissed and Frida got sad, and everything miserable about the world wedged itself between them. Frida knew what her brother had done; she had accepted it; she wasn’t in denial. But sometimes, the Micah that Cal remembered had not a lick of goodness in him. That dumb college kid who had once been into Gerhard Richter and other pretentious shit? That was her little brother. Whatever else he was, well, it didn’t erase that fact.

Cal probably wouldn’t bring up her family now, not for weeks. He’d be afraid that if he did, she’d fall into a grief spiral. As if never mentioning her brother or her parents made her longing for them disappear. As if he could will all that pain away.

Cal was sprawled across one of the couches, an arm slung over his eyes. He was thinking. This was an actual activity they did now—just lay down and let their minds wander. Sometimes they gave each other a term to meditate on: Magic Marker, air conditioner, strawberry. It was more entertaining than Frida would have ever imagined it to be. Sandy Miller had told her about it. She and Bo used to do it, before they had kids. “Jane and Garrett keep us busy,” she’d said. That made sense now: parenting as a way to kill time.

“He’s here,” Frida said, and Cal moved his arm off his face, sat up. “Get your foraging gear and meet him on your way out.”

“You can hear him? Your ears are as good as a dog’s.” He grinned, his version of an olive branch.

“Hurry,” she said.

Frida dried her hands and placed the beets in one of the metal bowls. With a little dried mint, they would be all right for dinner.

She heard August greet Cal. After a few moments, Cal yelled her name, and she headed outside.

The two men stood at the edge of the clearing, Cal with the foraging bag over his shoulder, the gardening gloves and paring knife in his hands. August had jumped off his buggy and was running a brush across the mare, who snorted at his touch.

The first time Frida had seen him approach the shed, sitting high on his carriage like someone out of Victorian England, she had felt oddly homesick. The carriage, choked with discarded furniture, car parts, crates of produce, and even a dollhouse, reminded her of those rundown trucks in L.A., filled with junk. There was always a hand-painted phone number on the side, to call if you needed something picked up and discarded. When she was younger, it had been a job for illegal immigrants, but over the years, more businesses like it began popping up, with all kinds of drivers. Near the end, they’d begun to disappear; you had to have a safe place to store your truck and its discards, or else all of it would be looted, and almost no one had that.

When she told August about these trucks, he had shrugged. “I’ve been out here a long time,” he said. But what was a long time? She’d wondered if he’d struck out for the wilderness before the earthquakes. At the time, Frida had been seventeen, Micah fifteen, and L.A. never recovered from the destruction. Nor had San Francisco, six months later. In the year following, the film industry—the kind that paid Dada, at least—left L.A. altogether, and the rich fled to the new Communities popping up everywhere. Hilda took to crying a lot and saying, “What now? What now?”

If August hadn’t seen the reports of wildfires in Colorado and Utah or, later, those snowstorms across the Midwest and the East Coast or the rainstorms north of here, he would have no idea how battered the world was. And besides, would they have bothered a man who only whispered his secrets to a mule?