This Place of Wonder (57)

But this isn’t the wedding of Meadow and Augustus. It’s Shanti and Augustus in the late seventies. I’ve never seen a photo of her before, and I’m startled to recognize I look quite a lot like her—the same very long glossy hair, long limbs. She looks biracial, with dramatic cheekbones and wide-set eyes, and her expression is deliriously happy. She wears a seventies-style hippie wedding dress, her feet bare, a circle of white flowers around her head. She is very, very young. Can’t even be twenty.

Augustus looks happy, too. He hasn’t yet grown a beard, but his hair is seventies-long, falling to the middle of his back in a tumble of curls. I stare a long time at the youth in his face, the unlined cheekbones, his lush mouth. Again I can see how much Maya resembles him.

I probably wasn’t even born when they married, but the knowledge doesn’t touch me. The photo of Shanti as a girl, not yet the addict who died, pierces me. Augustus told me her story easily. She was a waitress in the restaurant where he first cooked, and her boyfriend beat her up regularly until Augustus stepped in. They got married within six months of their first meeting.

Poor Shanti.

Focus. This trip down memory lane is also not what I’m here for.

The other album is various pictures of family life from when the girls were small, and I’m tempted to leaf through them, but it’s counterproductive. This period of Meadow’s life is well documented. I’m looking for her past. Carefully, I put everything back and start looking around the room. Built-in bookshelves line one wall, and drawers take up the lower half. I open one at random and it holds wrapping paper and ribbons. Another has old accounts for a restaurant I don’t recognize. Most of them are empty.

What am I even looking for? Basically Meadow’s full name before she changed it. I suppose she would have that paperwork, but I wonder if it would be online. I turn on the computer, a sleek desktop Augustus bought a few months ago. There’s no password and it lets me right in, though the same is not true of his email. I try a couple of passes, but honestly have no idea what he’d use as a password. My own is a meaningful phrase with uPpercAsE letters in weird places. I try Peaches&Pork in various ways. Meadow. Nothing.

From the main system, I run a search for meadow. The circuits run through everything super fast and dozens and dozens of files come up, photos and Word documents connected to the restaurant, invoices from Meadow Sweet Organic Farms. There are old forms from the divorce, pages and pages, but I’m not about to wade through all that. It makes my stomach hurt, honestly. So personal.

And breaking into your dead lover’s computer isn’t personal? asks a little voice.

Point taken. But one does what one must.

I tap my toes silently against the floor, thinking. What other search words can I try?

Maybe Tina? It can’t hurt. I type it in and hit “Return.” A single file shows up on the screen, a photo. Tina and Rory at the Buccaneer. It shows a much younger Meadow with a redheaded toddler on her hip. She is insanely beautiful, of course, all that light-sparked red hair tumbling down her back like a medieval princess, and a figure like a Vegas showgirl, all legs and breasts and hips. She’s wearing jeans and a crop top. Rory’s chubby leg presses against her low-ride waistband.

A twist of jealousy wrenches my gut. All his women, Meadow, Shanti. They got to have him when he was young, before he was at risk of dying too young of an idiotic heart attack. Meadow got to be with him for twenty years!

The surge of grief is so intense I can’t really stop it this time. It swells upward from my gut, burning through my lungs and throat, fills my mouth with a hunger for this thing I will never have.



I go outside to swim, in a suit, while Maya sleeps. The water is cold, just what I need. I swim back and forth, back and forth, cooling my grief. I shower away the chlorine, and by the time I pad back inside in a thick robe Augustus himself bought for me, I feel calm and focused. Maya is sitting up on the couch with a tablet in her lap, her arm propped up with a pile of pillows. Dark rings circle her eyes. “Hey,” she says, and it’s croaky. “I thought you might have gone.”

“Do you want me to?”

“No. You can stay here if you want, but you can have one of the bedrooms upstairs. Sorry I already took the main, but there are four others. Pick one.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

She waves with her good hand, a weariness that slices through all the bullshit. “Just stay.”

“You want some tea? Coffee?”

“I looked it up and I can take ibuprofen before twenty weeks.”

“Okay.” I smile. “I’ll get you some.” I sit on the ottoman in front of her and slide the plastic bag I used for ice last night from between the cushions.

And as ideas will do sometimes, one strikes me as I stand, but I’ll have to figure out how to ask. I fetch the ice and ibuprofen. “Do you want me to call your sister?”

“I can do it in a little while. She’s going to freak out, I think.” She sighs. “I wish I could have made decisions the way she has. Turns out it makes a big difference in your happiness.”

I see my opening. “Was she born here, your sister?”

“No, I think she was born somewhere near Chico. It’s some strange name, like a weather or something. Some shit town up there. Meadow left the second she could get out.”