This Place of Wonder (61)

How could I go on without him? What would my life even look like?

So I refused. I told him he was being an ass. “Sleep with her,” I said. “Get it out of your system. We are not dismantling this empire. It would be ridiculous.”

I went to bed, and in the morning, his clothes and most treasured things were gone.

It was almost the worst moment of my life.





Chapter Twenty-Seven


Norah


I hang up after talking to Meadow and tuck the phone in my pocket. The sun is hot and I can smell smoke as I walk down the hill into town. For once, my belly is full and I’m clean as I make the trip. I was fully prepared to be kicked out last night when I went upstairs to make sure Maya was all right, and instead, we connected immediately. That she has invited me to stay feels like a hand from the other side, as if Augustus is still present, helping me.

Also helping his daughter. She tried to put a stoic face on, but her agony was plain. I was glad to be able to help her get a little more comfortable. And I was not at all surprised to discover I connected with her. She’s a lot like Augustus, but I recognized something of myself, too. A tough woman used to doing things herself.

A ripple of disappointment moves through me. I hate that I’m scrambling day-to-day again, trying to make sure I can eat and have a dry place to sleep. Making do with other people’s scraps was the story of my childhood. I thought I’d finally left it behind. Maya’s kindness is helpful, but it won’t solve the bigger problem of my unstable life.

Writing something meaningful will help get me where I want to go. If I can do a powerful, feminist take on Meadow and get it published somewhere highly respectable, it will go a long way toward establishing a career in food journalism.

The librarian waves to me as I settle into my place. My first search is to examine the map around Chico, a town north of Sacramento, and see if I can find a town with a strange name up there. A weather name, Maya thought.

I work my way across the map in a clockwise method. There are a lot of small towns up and down the Sacramento River, mostly farm towns, but I don’t find anything with a weather name. A sense of frustration grows as I scan around again, tension growing in my neck. What am I even looking for? A girl named Tina in a little town? How is that going to help me?

The truth is, it’s the only lead I’ve got, and I zoom in and try again. There, right on the river is a town of twelve thousand called Thunder Bluff. I type it into Google. The first thing on the list after Wiki is “What is the crime rate in Thunder Bluff?” and it has a D.

Several of the links are about crime in the town, but when I click on the local newspaper, the crime reports are kind of random—cows wandering into a neighbor’s yard, burglaries, dog complaints, a lot of domestic disturbances.

Domestic disturbances, I think. As if things that happen at home are mild, not the violent assaults and rapes and murders that happen every day in homes around the world. Why did we even start calling it “domestic violence” anyway? Why not assault and battery? Why not rape or murder or psychological terrorism? Flashes of memory blast through my brain before I can stop them. I was lucky as these things go—I suffered more neglect than violence, but that wasn’t true of all the people in the houses where I lived. I saw it. I heard the stories and saw the scars.

Focus.

Thunder Bluff. Tina. Rory. I feed the information into Google, but it comes back with a strange combination of offerings, most with one or the other of the search terms crossed out.

Try again. Birth records, Thunder Bluff. That narrows it down a bit. I run Rory, guessing her age to be thirty-five or so, so I set the parameters with a ten-year range.

Nothing.

Chewing on my lip, I narrow my eyes at the cursor and try to think. Yearbooks? There’s only one high school in town, so Meadow must have gone to school there. I try searching for yearbooks, but they’re locked behind a paywall, and I’m not that desperate yet.

How old is Meadow? That’s probably an easy thing to find, and it pops right up—she’s fifty-three this year. It startles me—she was fourteen years younger than Augustus, which is substantial. Not as substantial as the thirty-six between us, but still a lot.

Seized with a hard yearning, I type in his name, Augustus Beauvais, and up pop hundreds of results, image upon image upon image. There are a lot of him and Meadow at various events, for stories online or in magazines. One in Parade catches my eye and I click on it, unprepared for a close-in photo of the two of them looking deep into each other’s eyes. There’s so much heat coming off the page that I instantly find myself imagining his body, strong and long limbed and not at all what I thought an old man’s body would look like.

I click through more pictures of him—the guest-judge seasons on Top Chef, the opening of Peaches and Pork. And more. Casual shots of him walking, family pictures with the girls, a photo of the woman he briefly married after he divorced Meadow eight years ago. She has hard eyes and tattoos in lines up and down her arms. A panther tattoo covers her chest, and I touch my own cleavage, horrified to imagine covering that flesh with ink.

It was a big scandal when it happened. People talked about it in the food world, precisely because of the lore around Augustus and Meadow, the love-story-of-the-century crap. Because it is crap. They were just two people with a strong connection who fell apart in the end. It happens.

Looking at the photos, I feel his breath in my ear. I feel his mouth on my body. I feel overheated and my skin hurts and I want to do something dramatic like tear my clothes or slice marks into my forearms. Something to show that I loved him, that he mattered, that it feels like I might never be myself again.