This Place of Wonder (23)

I turn. “Maybe not.” But I don’t really want to leave on such a mean note. I pause, shake my head. “I’m just freaked that they don’t know.” I kiss her cheek. “I really do have to get back to Meadow.”

“Fine,” she says, and wipes away a tear. “It’s not just you that everything has happened to, you know. It’s happened to all of us.”

“Has it?” I ask, and walk away before I say something even meaner.





Chapter Thirteen


Maya


The first thing I do every morning is walk. Before coffee, before anything. I swing my legs out of bed, shed my pajamas, and don leggings, a long T-shirt, and a hoodie. My shoes are by the back door, so I sit on the bench there and tie them on, then head out. Meadow must be awake, but she’s nowhere in sight. The puppy is nowhere in sight. He must have slept with her. I find I’m disappointed.

Mornings are often gloomy this time of year. Farther south, the summers are bright and sunny, but in the Santa Barbara area, a marine layer often hangs low over the ocean until much later in the day. I grew up with it, and love it, love the softness it lends the air.

I bypass the swimming pool, finished in colorful tiles from the twenties, and unlock the cedar gate that opens at the top of a long, steep set of stairs that wind through succulent plants to arrive at the beach. Sixty-seven steps, exactly the age my father was when he dropped dead.

The beach is nearly empty so early, and the house is far enough from the towns to the north and south to escape tourist curiosity. A big swath of the mountainsides burned a couple of years ago, erasing hiking trails that used to lead here. Lucky for me, I guess.

Walk. One foot and then the next. Air moves over my face, my neck. I breathe it in a few times, filling my lungs to remember that being alive is not to be underrated, and then . . . I just walk. I don’t bring podcasts or music with me. I want to hear whatever the earth has to tell me.

It started in rehab. A lot of people do hard exercise to sweat out their demons, but I wasn’t exactly in the peak of health, and I’d broken a rib somehow when I chopped open the casks. Walking was all I could manage. I walked the grounds and garden—let it be noted that for all his flaws, my dad ponied up big-time for the best rehab around—and while it was not a lot of area, you can do a lot with loops.

Walking was possible. I could do it when it didn’t feel like I could do anything else. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t have functioned at all in the outside world. I can’t sit still all the time. I can’t always focus enough to read. Even when I’m walking, things pop up, memories and regrets and shame and guilt, but they don’t stick around and needle me the same way.

At the foot of the stairs, I take off my shoes and socks and leave them, and make my way to the hard-pressed sand on the edge of the water, walking close enough that waves ruffle over my toes and ankles now and again. The water is very cold, but I never mind that. A wind is blowing from the north, cleansing my face and neck. Seagulls and little plovers poke through the leavings of the tide, and a pair of brown pelicans soar overhead, peering at the surface of the waves for breakfast. A dog and a person walk in the distance, but I’m otherwise alone. It’s the great thing about this location. It’s lonely, but it’s also never crowded.

Lonely. That I am. Not as bad as I was during the pandemic, when Josh was stranded in France for months on end and I couldn’t see anyone. The drinking had been heavy before that, but the loneliness and isolation sent my habits into overdrive.

Meadow and Rory are great, but neither of them understands what happened to me. They don’t realize that this wasn’t some bad choice I made and I’ll “get through it.” I think for a long time they both expected that I would quit drinking for a while and then be able to drink like other people. They’re terrified now that I’ll pick up. To be honest, I am, too. There’s something in me that’s just broken.

We’re all broken, says my therapist’s voice. I somehow have always felt more broken than most, but maybe that’s not actually true.

Keep your head where your feet are.

The sand is cold beneath my feet. I taste salt on my lips. Something eases down my spine.

Only Josh—and my dad, actually—really saw what was going on with me. Even though I refused to speak to Augustus, he was around on the periphery of my life, there when each of the girls was born, present at family parties. He mostly respected my boundaries, but I felt him watching me.

Seeing me. That was his gift, after all: seeing people. It’s why we all had our own nicknames, why he knew how to give gifts that were so perfect, how he managed to hire and keep staff long term in an industry rife with turnover.

Across the screen of my memory, I see him looking at me with concern at some gathering or another.

I shove the visual away. Josh rises in his place. Handsome and ordinary all at once, an all-American boy I met in college, both of us studying viticulture. It was tempestuous from the beginning, which I realized in daily therapy sessions at rehab was my MO: I was drawn to slightly aloof men, men who made me work hard at gaining their attention, relationships that would be intense, passionate, full of sex and fights and making up.

Josh met every single one of my requirements. He loved me, but sometimes he was hard to reach. He adored me, worshipped my body, and then couldn’t stand to talk. He drank way too much, which put my college drinking into perspective. My parents never really liked him. They thought him too privileged, too arrogant, too prone to fits of high emotion.