The waves are autumn-rough and she’s mistakenly brought the longboard, the wrong board. The men in the water are riled. This group of seven or eight surfers who dominate the space at Steamer’s Lane hold court in the sea like a herd of fat elephant seals. She’s wading out to them when they start their heckling. “Get the hell out of here!” one of them yells. Someone from the lineup lets loose a banshee scream and calls her a bitch. She cups her hand above her eyes and squints into the distance. Slick and shiny in their black wetsuits, the men are fist-waving blips in a shimmering field of blue-gray. She scans the outer limits, searching for Calum.
****
The last thing Katie expected after her brother, Will, died last summer was to fall for someone. Will died on a skateboard, not a surfboard, the idiot kid. He was nineteen and most likely high. Coming home from a party, he tried to jump a rail on the tracks. A part of the Big Trees and Pacific Railway line—along the old abandoned stretch.
She doesn’t know for sure this is how it happened. No one knows for sure. He was alone. What is understood though is that he fell back. Backward. And in the morning, someone found him. He was unconscious and struggling for breath. Three days later in the ICU, her parents were asked to make the nightmare decision of whether or not to let him go.
This is how they handle their loss: Her mother ups her dancing classes. Her father clings to Bubba Kush, the same sweet cannabis blend Will enjoyed. And she finds Calum. She hopes Calum isn’t a stand-in for her missing her brother, but understands that he very possibly could be. Calum as her fallback guy. The pun that she’s falling back on Calum after Will fell back on the tracks is awful. She’s thinking too much, making weird connections that don’t match.
Will would say…Will would say. That’s what she does now; she runs it by Will. All sorts of things—from which electives to sign up for in the fall quarter to speculating that their mother’s Zumba fervor has risen to unhealthy new heights. Three sessions a day, isn’t that a lot?
The one thing she hasn’t mentioned to Will is the fact of Calum. Calum and her new foray into surfing. She wonders if Will even knew him. The two of them may have shared classes back in high school but Calum’s name never came up. As for Katie’s surfing, Will would laugh. Not a coordinated bone in her body. Awkward as a child and awkward as an adult. Will was the athlete, not she.
On the other hand, she’s the brains of the family, excelling in math and science. Totally STEM driven. Her “big delicious brain” is what her father calls it. Their future mothership. She’s the one who’s supposed to go out and succeed. Her mother, father, and Will all live life pretty chill. But not Will anymore, right? She keeps forgetting he’s dead.
She first met Calum at Will’s memorial, which was held on the beach near Pleasure Point. Will had been popular in high school. Dozens of old friends from back then attended and many shared their memories—in stories of sports and surfing mostly. The air was thick with the scent of weed as joints and spliffs were passed through the crowd. Katie shared nothing. What would she say? That they didn’t know her brother? She felt disassociated and out of her body. Disbelieving and numb.
The morning of the memorial her father had gone out early to purchase dozens of black-market flowers, mostly roses, from the man who stood by the freeway. After the service, when it was time to spread Will’s ashes, her father took the urn, gathered the flowers, and headed into the sea on Will’s shortboard.
A guy she didn’t recognize stepped out of the group and moved toward her. He touched her arm. “Hey Katie, I’m Calum.” He pointed toward the water, “Come on out there with me.” He had a slow, almost lazy way of speaking but there was warmth in his voice.
After checking on her mother, Katie pulled her hair back into a ponytail and waded out knee-high. Calum had put on a wetsuit, but she was wearing shorts. The water was icy. She straddled his bright yellow board and he paddled into a rip current, which caught them up swiftly and pulled them out beyond the breaking waves. It felt good to be on the water.
They reached her father in an instant. He glared at them in the sunlight, or maybe it was just a squint. He raised both arms into the air and let Will’s ashes pour out from the urn. Some of them blew into Katie’s eyes, some into her mouth, gritting between her teeth. Calum said to splash it out. She didn’t want to but he gently tipped the board and she flowed off. She bobbed up coughing and sputtering, more sad than angry as the ashes of her brother, the nicest guy on earth, washed away.
She clung to Calum’s board and watched her father, a great believer in the grand gesture, ride awkwardly to shore in a wobbly squat. The group on the beach clapped and cheered. “Show-off,” Calum murmured. He lifted her back to his board, then caught up some of the roses. She followed him home after the memorial like any old stray dog who’s been offered a bit of compassion.
This morning Calum’s mom, Sandar, knocks heartily at the door. “Wake up you two, it’s almost time for work.” Calum lives up in the beach flats near the boardwalk in a converted shed behind his mother’s house. Katie’s been staying with him for weeks.
He first introduced Katie to Sandar the morning after Will’s memorial. His mother had opened her arms saying, “Come here honey and let me give you a hug.” Sandar held her and held her until Katie—unaccustomed to such warmth coming from a stranger—started to count silently to keep herself calm. One thousand one, one thousand two . . . The soft cushion of Sandar’s body, her heat plus a scent of something medicinal was all too raw. A ragged wave of grief welled up inside Katie. For the first time since Will’s death, she began to cry.
Sandar takes care of Calum. She wakes him and feeds him and gets him out of the house in the mornings like he’s still a school boy. She is a natural-born nurturer and Calum needs her. Now she’s taking care of Katie too.
Calum gets upset when Katie calls Sandar by her name. “Sharon Rose, not Sandar,” he insists. “All her life she’s known as Sharon Rose. All a sudden,” he snaps his fingers. “There it goes.” Calum complains, “Herself in hemp clothes and tire-tread sandals. Might as well be sackcloth and ashes.” His mother, a nurse, doesn’t wear hemp at all. Sandar works so many hours at the hospital the only thing Katie ever sees her in is faded teddy bear scrubs.
Calum calls his mother Maw. They come from coal-mine Kentucky in the mid-Appalachians, a place where people sit together on front porches to share stories about the past. Katie knows about Kentucky because Calum likes to talk. He tells her about nature and animals and what it was like to grow up in a little house wedged into the side of a mountain. A cabin with pull-string lights and no running water. His voice, a soft melodic tenor, carries a southern flatness she finds soothing.
Katie crawls out of bed. The space is claustrophobically small and smells so strongly of spongy mold she can hardly bear it. Calum has explained that the little building was originally a horse stable and the very reason his mother chose the property. In Kentucky, Sandar owned two mares, Mercy and Jo.
Calum follows Katie to the door to deliver a kiss. “Full moon tonight. Might just do some lunar surfing.”
On the deck Sandar has set out four hard-boiled eggs and an iron pot of Sencha tea. The eggs are from Sandar’s hens. The hens are pets and none of them are ever to be eaten. There are predators though, like hawks and cats and raccoons. Even the occasional coyote trots through and paws at the coop in the nighttime. Katie pockets an egg and grabs her bike.
She gave up her summer internship in Boston, which was to begin on the day of Will’s funeral. Instead she’s helping out at a summer art camp. The little kids are so easy. They’re up for fun and eager to please. If it wasn’t for the hollow ache of loss arising every afternoon during quiet time she’d say that at work she’s almost happy. Every morning she looks forward to seeing the kids and on the weekends, she actually misses going in. Pedaling down Pearl Street, she can hear the harbor seals barking.
At the end of each workday, Katie and Calum meet at Steamer’s Lane where Calum catches waves with the locals until it is too dark to surf. Sometimes on her way to the beach Katie drops by the house, but her parents are rarely home. For a while the three of them tried getting together on Sundays for lunch but it was too sad, their sitting wordlessly around the kitchen table missing Will.
Today she stops by to check the mail. Inside, the kitchen is a mess and the whole place smells like skunk. It’s her father’s weed. He’s gotten sloppy with his storage. She snoops it out and steals a little, stows the rest in the freezer behind some peas. Let him look awhile.
She wonders if her family is breaking apart. Without Will, they are no longer a solid unit. He was the wild child and oh so complex but he was also their glue. What are we going to do, Will? She puts the question out into the air of the kitchen.
In the evenings on the beach someone always builds a fire. Girlfriends and wives wander in. The women are nice and not at all territorial like the men in the water. Katie sits in the circle and makes small talk discussing food and celebrities and work and kids. The group is cozy and it’s good to feel included.
As for the surfers they’re a mixed bag. Calum is the youngest. He stands out from the group and not just for his age. Wiry and agile, he wears his hair in shoulder-length dreads. Katie thinks his hair is his best feature. Eighteen blond tangles, eighteen drops of dangling gold making up for the crooked overbite, his too blue eyes and the startling line that runs straight across his forehead in a wrinkle so deep it looks like a scar.
The old surfers tease him relentlessly. For his surfing and for his looks. They call him El Tigre, little tiger, lion cub, and Leonardo di Crappio. They call him Calum the Malice.
Calum simply smiles. “Fuck you, brother,” is his amicable response.
Katie admires his bravado. It is an aspect that reminds her of Will. Her brother came up against all kinds of shit for his choices and most of it he handled with calm.
On the weekends, Katie and Calum travel north in his truck driving beyond the giant scoop of the Monterey Bay and out along the Pacific Coast Highway, which parallels the open ocean. They drive to the beach at Waddell Creek where Calum claims the water is calmer for beginners. Katie knows better; the water is almost always rough. She suspects he’s chosen the spot because it’s far enough away they won’t be seen by his friends. She doesn’t argue about the location. What’s important is that she learns to surf. To do a thing that meant so much to her brother. Not the skateboarding, no, she would never dare try that, but a board in the ocean is within her reach. The soft forgiving water is a place where she can meet Will and connect to his passion.
She and Calum paddle out together. She’s on Will’s longboard. Calum is patient. “Think of yourself as a part of the water,” he says. “Think of yourself as the wave.” At first, she can barely balance the board beneath her knees. She works at simply standing until around noon when a blustering wind kicks up and the ocean becomes choppy. Then there’s a changing of guard in the water and all but the most expert of surfers retreat to be replaced by kite boarders who fling themselves into the sea in bright flashes of blazing color—fearless airborne acrobats, utilizing waves as launch pads.
With further surfing out of the question, the lessons end and the rest of the day belongs to Calum. What he likes best is to go hiking. He consistently chooses the same trailhead just off Bonny Doon Road.
When he first starts taking her there, Katie doesn’t understand that they are spying. But after winding up at the same spot on every hike, she has to ask. They are standing in a grove of old-growth redwoods behind a small convent. Sisters of Devine Mercy reads a plaque attached to an ancient iron gate, which is chained and locked. “Why always here, Calum?” It must be their fourth visit.
Calum nods toward the gate. “Maw’s moving in there.”
Katie feels puzzled. “What? Moving into a convent?”
“You heard me. They got my maw, all right.” Calum makes a fist and knocks at his temple. His face turns red. “She’s completely brain-washed.”
Katie feels he’s being unfair. “Your mother seems sane to me.” Sandar is more than sane. She is competent and loving.
He visibly flinches. “Not about this.”
“Calum, you’re not making sense. Take a deep breath.”
“Take a deep breath,” he mimics. “You sound just like maw. That’s how they got her. Breathing deep and closing eyes and playing meditation make-believe.” Calum kicks at the dry duff on the forest floor and it drifts up a few inches before settling back onto their shoes. “I’ll be double God-damned if they ain’t got horses too. Just what she loves the most.”
Katie’s never seen him so wound up. She tries to soothe him. “What your mother loves most is you. Plus she’s got a job and a house.” She wants to say and a son to care for but she catches herself. “And what about her chickens?”
“Oh, she’ll find a home for them soon enough.”
Katie points to the sign on the gate. “Look, it says right there, Sisters. We can assume it is Catholic. I’m not religious but I’m pretty sure your mom can’t become a nun overnight.
“It ain’t no nunnery. The nuns are all gone. This here’s more of a cult. Samatha is what they call it. A sisterhood, maw says.”
“The sisterhood of Samantha?”
“Samaaatha.” He drawls the word out. “More like the sisterhood of the wretched wrecks. Governance of drop-outs and give-ups!”
Katie touches his arm. “Slow down Calum. Start from the beginning.”
It comes down to this: He’s terrified of losing his mother. She gets it but his mood is so dark she asks to be taken home.
It’s the first time she’s spent a night in the house in almost a month. It’s been that long since Will’s memorial. Her parents are out so she makes a package of mac and cheese and eats dinner alone. There’s a pile of mail on the kitchen table. She thumbs through. At the bottom is an unopened envelope from a boy who received something from Will. She’d know his name anywhere; she knows all their names. Was it an eye or a kidney or a liver? This detail she cannot remember. Will is spread all over the state, parts of him, that is. It’s not the first letter to arrive. Her parents won’t even open the notes, and tonight she decides to ignore this one as well. She takes it into her room and places it in the small metal box where she keeps the others.
She’s in her bedroom googling the Sisterhood of Samatha when she realizes she’s waiting for Will. Waiting for the front door to slam, for his sing-song hello. She falls back on her bed with a groan. Part of her still expects him to show up like he’s simply been off on some little trip. Then the reality of his death hits and it hurts all over again.
The last thing they did together was to go shopping. Shopping for Will. He was in the process of coming out. This is the saddest part about her brother’s death. That he didn’t get to live life long enough to fully inhabit who he was.
Katie is still thinking about Will when her parents arrive home. They’re arguing. She tries not to listen but the house is small. There’s a rhythm to their fighting. Her father pitches out four or five sentences, broad and long. Her mother replies in taut one-word snaps of no and never.
That evening she skips meeting Calum at Steamer’s Beach and arrives back at his house at the same time as Sandar, who is just coming off a fourteen-hour shift. The woman is so exhausted she can hardly make it up the steep porch stairs. For a change, it is Katie who heads into the kitchen for tea.
Sandar accepts a mug and takes it out back. “All night and day, it’s coffee and donuts just to keep going.” She closes her eyes. “There’s a limit to how much one body can take.”
Katie sits on the edge of the deck and listens to the high-pitched peals of roller coaster riders a few blocks away at the boardwalk. She feels sorry for Sandar being stuck in a job that makes her so unhappy. She says, “Calum mentioned that you might stop working at the hospital soon.”
Sandar balances her tea mug on the arm of her chair. She fingers a thin red string tied around her wrist. “I’d like to. I’ve been offered a spot as resident nurse in a cloistered community of women living up in the mountains.”
“Calum told me.”
“He’s opening up then. That’s good.”
“You have to take the position,” Katie urges. She’s not sure why. She doesn’t mean to give her opinion. It’s not like Sandar has asked.
Sandar runs a hand across her face like she is wiping away an expression she doesn’t wish to expose. “Mostly it comes down to Calum. He’s had a rough go. Started skipping school in Kentucky after his dad left.” She nods slowly. “About the same time, I tended to a patient passing through. Boy-oh-boy, did he make Santa Cruz sound good. A place of salt-mist living. He told me it heals.” Sandar picks up her mug. “And it has been good for us here these past five years. I’m not saying it hasn’t.”
“Not everything can always stay the same.”
Sandar sighs. “Folks grow old.”
Katie thinks of Will and her heart sinks. “Yes, if they’re lucky.”
About a month into her surf lessons something clicks and Katie gets the feel of it. The math finally adds up. The curve of the wave, the timing, her yoga-like rise from the board. She and her board are one. They glide together along the water, they soar atop a swell—all alignment and synchronicity. Calum can’t believe it. He’s so excited it’s like he’s just learned to surf himself. “Shit girl overnight you’re a pro!”
He takes her out at Steamer’s. He’s so proud he wants to show her off. The men are in a good mood and unusually tolerant. They make a space in the lineup to let her have a go. When the right wave arrives, the second of a set, she starts to move. “Paddle, Paddle!” Calum shouts at her back and she’s able to stand up in a smooth even motion. Calum is beside himself. “God almighty, look at my old lady go!”
Old lady? She’s so astounded by his words she doesn’t notice the rocks. The famous boulders of Steamer’s Lane. The number two reason rookies stay away. Her board smashes into the rocks and cracks at the tip. She flips off and spins and finally emerges so dizzy that for a moment she doesn’t know what’s up and what’s down. It’s a miracle she didn’t hit her head. She reels in the board by its rope and trudges to shore. The only one whistling and clapping is Calum.
It’s the weekend again, and she and Calum are back in the woods. Today they skipped the surfing because there’s no swell. A slant of sunlight filters through the trees and the trail glows like it is beckoning to them. Calum spreads his arms wide. His shoulders shift beneath his clothes. “All of nature is a eulogy,” he says.
Calum talks about death more than she does. Katie rarely mentions Will. There’s no language for her loss, for a pain so private it feels sacred.
They move deeper into the woodland. Green moss covers the forest floor in a soft carpet, which yields silently beneath their feet. Then Katie walks into a spider web, and the sticky surprise of it across her face makes her yelp.
Calum stops in his tracks. “Look up,” he says, and Katie lifts her head. “Looka there at that spider. She’s the fine one, ain’t she? Dancing on gossamer threads like a ballerina in her tutu.”
Inexplicably, his words annoy her. He’s certainly no poet and yet, in trying to counterbalance her aggravation, she says just this. “Calum, sometimes it’s like you’re a poet. How do you come up with such pretty things to say?” She’s so gratingly patronizing, she imagines he’ll notice.
But he doesn’t. He says, “Gossamer comes from the Bible.”
“My brother loved the poets. He collected lines of verse and carried them in his pockets.”
Calum waves his hand at what remains of the web, and the spider starts bouncing. He announces out of nowhere, “I hear Will died in a dress.”
Katie jerks back. “Yeah, so what?”
“So, nada,” he says. “I’m cool with it. But part of me thinks that Will was asking for trouble by going out in a dress.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Her anger explodes when she realizes he’s not. “Christ, I can’t believe you, what a bigot!”
Calum holds up his hands. “Whoa now, don’t go crazy.”
“You despise the Sisterhood of Samatha! And what about your surfing cronies? You choose to hang out with a bunch of dopes who openly harass you.”
Calum adjusts the bandana that’s holding back his dreads. The crease in his forehead deepens. “C’mon on, Katie, that’s just cold.”
“They’re assholes, Calum. Admit it.”
One afternoon at the end of August, Katie stops by her parents’ house to mow the lawn. She hasn’t visited in weeks. There’s a cardboard box full of Will’s T-shirts set out on the sidewalk. She’s gutted by the sight of them.
She’s heard it’s normal to think you see the dead after they die, but never once has she glimpsed some other boy’s face or the back of a head and imagined it might be her brother. She does sense a bit of his spirit from time to time. Mostly it’s when she’s in the sea.
Sometimes in their old neighborhood, she’ll run into a person who loosely knew him and the loss hits her so strongly she can barely breathe. At Ace Hardware, there’s a manic woman, a waif who works outside waving a handmade sign advertising the store. Her clothes are colorfully mismatched. The sign is floppy and so large that the woman can barely see around it. Skinny and hopping, she is regularly almost nicked by fast moving traffic. Will would fill in for her occasionally so she could get off her feet.
And a few blocks south there’s another woman. This one is homeless. She lives on a street bench outside the yoga center that used to be a church. Will supplied her with a daily bagel, which the girls over at the deli gave him for free. Katie drops off a sandwich now and then. If the woman is coherent enough to ask about her brother, Katie shrugs and says, “I expect he’s moved on.” She still can’t bring herself to announce it out loud. Say to some stranger that Will is dead.
Both of these women seem lost to her. Stuck in the in-between, biding their time, and this is how she imagines her brother. He’s in a place that’s between here and whatever is or isn’t beyond.
The grass in her parent’s front lawn has dried up and turned brown. Katie checks the irrigation controller and finds it broken. There’s no way she can fix it so she takes on the blue- blossomed Plumbago. It was Will’s job to keep the bushes pruned, not that their parents ever asked him to. They’ve never cared much about the yard. Somewhere along the way she and Will decided to keep it up. Both felt embarrassed to be the only home on the street with a feral garden. “Let it go wild,” her father had told them. “Let it thrive ‘til it dies.”
Will manicured the Plumbago, carefully pruning each bush into the shape of its neighbor. The plant was a native of Hawaii, he once told her, and he did a little hula dance. That was in June. He made garlands of his cuttings, then carefully divided his long brown ponytail into two flower-laden braids, pinning them across the top of his head. Swedish style, he explained. After all, wasn’t it the summer solstice? A celebration was due. In fact, he was going to a party.
And later in the evening he rode off on his skateboard. There was no dress, but maybe it was tucked into his backpack. They’d picked it out together at Goodwill the week before. It was pink and sleeveless, fitting his lanky frame like a dream.
Her father arrives home while she’s working. He steps inside and brings out two beers. Katie brushes herself clean and sits on the porch beside him. “How’s it going Kadydid?” he asks and touches his bottle to hers. “School starts soon. What have you got left of your vacation, like maybe another couple of weeks?
Katie nods and delivers the news that she’s not really decided herself until this very instant, but once she says it she knows it’s right. “I’ve loved working with kids this summer. I want to make it my career.”
Her father lifts his beer to his lips but takes it away without drinking. He frowns. “Don’t dumb yourself down for that haystack hillbilly you’re sleeping with.”
Katie feels sucker punched. She’d seen that side of her father with Will after her brother came out, but he’s never been harsh with her. She says, “Calum has nothing to do with it.”
Her father waves his bottle. “You and that big brain. Why waste it on little kids? And don’t forget your student debt.”
“Honestly, computer science feels kind of corrupt. It’s all about upending people’s privacy.”
Her father stands up. “Fuck privacy. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
He has everything to hide. After days of no decision, Katie was the one who said to let Will go. Her mother couldn’t stop crying and her father kept his eyes on the television. It was baseball season. His team was on a winning streak. Her fucking father, instead of keeping vigil with his son who was dying, he watched the Giants on TV.
On the last day in August with her summer job over, Katie starts surfing on her own. Every couple of days, she borrows the family car and drives north to Waddell Creek where she senses Will the strongest. When she’s out on the water and turned away from the shore, it feels like he is nearby—out in the open sea, oddly a part of the shadowy freighter she can barely make out in the fogline. A boat which never seems to move.
She begins to understand that Death is a slow-moving journey, as slow as the ship on the horizon. Death is a trip from the living that cannot be rushed. She raises her hand without thinking. Hello my brother. Will’s spirit is in the ocean and in the ironclad traffic at the edge of sea. He is dead, yes, but he’s gone nowhere. He’s simply pacing the rim of the world. Steadily tracing the fuzzy fogline in a place where heaven meets earth.
It’s Katie’s final week in Santa Cruz before returning to college. Sandar is working the late shift, so Katie and Calum buy thick ribeyes. Sandar doesn’t eat meat. They grill the steaks outside on the deck, along with fresh peppers and corn. It’s not dark yet, but the moon is up. They’re sitting at the picnic table eating when Katie mentions her father’s wild reaction to her change in career.
Out of nowhere Calum says, “My father was a boy at heart and it was only a matter of time until he would leave his family and go exploring on his own.” Katie is accustomed to Calum’s conversational hijacks but when he continues with, “Same as yours,” she’s taken aback.
“Are you saying my father will leave us like yours did?”
Calum screws up his face and his eyes get flinty. “My daddy ran off and he’s dead to me now, and to Maw too. Except he ain’t dead at all. What I’m saying is that you’re lucky you lost your brother the way you did.”
Hearing this, Katie’s skin heats up so hot it feels like her whole body is on fire. Calum’s leaps are outrageous; they don’t make sense. Her voice is shaking when she says, “You have absolutely no idea.”
Calum continues like he hasn’t heard. “You’re lucky his death was quick.”
She isn’t able to finish her dinner. His words hurt. Why can’t he accept her grief without bending it to fit his own story? She would like to leave but where would she go? Not home. She picks up Calum’s filthy bong. She takes a couple of hits of the strong weed and waits for the calm to set in.
Later, she goes to bed with him. They even make love. But it is Calum who is doing the lovemaking. She lies on his mattress and grips his shoulders. All through it, through the clashing of their bones, she keeps her eyes open and looks beyond what is happening. Looks past the man on top of her to a dirty square of skylight caught in the beam of a full moon. She bites her lip to keep from crying. For the first time, she wishes the dead to be dead. She would never want her brother to see her so defeated.
During the night, a coyote kills the chickens. Maybe it’s a raccoon, but Calum says he’s sure it’s a coyote from the way the dirt is dug out from underneath the wire pen. And what a mess it is. Blood and feathers everywhere. Adding bad luck to more, it’s Sandar who comes home from the late shift and discovers the carnage. Six dead hens in a bloodbath. She pounds on their door. “Calum, Katie. Come quick!”
Sandar sounds frantic. She waves her arms at the butchery, then turns her back to it saying she can’t clean it up. She sits at the picnic table and weeps. It takes a moment for Katie to understand that Sandar is not so much angry as she’s upset at the situation, at a world which gives you back-breaking labor and brutal murder all in one evening. Katie wonders if Sandar was working in the ER the morning Will was brought in. She’s surprised she’s never thought of this before.
Sandar tells them that she feels like she could lie right down beside what remains of her hens and die too. Calum perches beside his mother and takes her hand. “It’s alright Maw. Tomorrow I’ll shore up the fence and go to Chick and Bees and get us some more.”
“There will be no more chicks, Calum. You know that.” With this the tables are turned. It is Calum who is doing the weeping, and Sandar has no choice but to regain her composure. She folds him into her arms. “It’s been a matter of when, not if, for a long time now,” she says while patting his shaking shoulders. “You’ll be fine. You’ll stay right here in your apartment and whoever rents the house will know you’re the boss.”
Katie wishes she could slip away. It’s too intimate a scene to witness.
“I won’t be very far,” Sandar reassures. “Less than 20 miles. You can visit. Come to our lunches. Every week, at least one of the nuns has a son or daughter attend.”
So they are nuns after all, Katie thinks. And the dead chickens are a solution, a release button for Sandar who has been waiting to make a change. Katie stares into the woman’s face. If there’s any relief there, she doesn’t see it.
They send Sandar to bed and start cleaning. Calum bangs around. He lays the blame on Katie, saying she left the steak out uneaten on her plate and lured the predator in. They were both lazy, he tells her, taking on a little of the blame at least; they should not have rushed to sex but cleaned up.
Katie and Calum scrub and scrape. The fog rolls in to obliterate the moon. Small bits of downy chicken feather get caught in their hair and nostrils and even their teeth as they clean. It’s near dawn before the mess is completely cleared. Calum puts the dead birds in a garbage bag and walks them out to the street where the bins had been placed earlier for weekly pick-up.
The light is just breaking when Katie tells Calum she’s going home. He says he’ll drive her, but she says no and reminds him that the bike route is brief. She can take the clifftop shortcut above the beach and go over the tracks, which she’s avoided all summer. But Calum insists, and rather than upset him again, Katie gives in.
Instead of taking her home he drives to the boardwalk. “What’s up?” she asks. He doesn’t answer, just steers around the amusement park pay gate and stops the truck in the middle of a huge vacant parking lot. He gets out of the truck and walks to the rear. Katie leans through her open window to watch as he removes a black plastic bag. Calum has put the dead hens in his truck, not into the garbage.
He pulls the chickens from the bag and lines them up by side on the asphalt. He takes out his pocketknife and slits each hen’s delicate chest in a single stroke. “This here’s what’s called an air burial,” he calls out to her. The blood isn’t pouring anymore. Still, the scene is gruesome. Katie feels like she’s going to throw up.
Calum tells her to get out of the truck and she does. She’s exhausted and dazed, an obedient zombie. There’s an extra dense morning fog and she’s wearing too few clothes. She wraps her arms tightly around her body, but her teeth start to chatter. She jerks her head violently to make them stop. How did she become a part of this circus sideshow? Calum is nuts, out of his mind. Somewhere to the east, the sun is trying to rise, but she can’t see it. There’s only murky brume.
Calum positions himself in front of her. “Pay attention to an ancient tradition coming from Tibet. Them monks or whoever else it is my mama has taken to following, that’s what they do up in the rocky Himalayas where the ground is too hard to dig.” He wipes his pocket knife on his jeans and folds it close. “Except it’s with people, not birds. They lay out their dead and wait for nature to take over.” He tilts back his head and searches the sky. “All the gulls we got around here won’t be long.”
With revulsion, Katie watches Calum’s prediction come true. Within moments, a dozen gulls descend on the chickens and start to pull and peck at the flesh. There’s so much noise from the squawking Katie covers her ears.
Calum stands with his hands clasped in front of his waist. His head is bowed and he looks like he’s praying. He says, “Nourishment is a force for all of nature.”
Katie snaps out of her stupor. She screams at him. “This is sadistic!”
He shrugs. “Nature.”
“Fuck you, Calum! You know what I mean.”
“The dead are dead, Katie. Stop kidding yourself they’re not.”
She escapes by turning and running across the wide expanse of the parking lot toward the boardwalk. Calum shouts behind her, “Feel the pain, Katie! Feel it!”
The amusement park gate is locked, so she scrambles down the concrete steps leading to the beach where people without homes are sleeping. Tents and tarps are all in a jumble on the sand. She races through dirty blankets and vulnerable sprawled bodies. She tries not to think of how similar the scene is to the one she is running from; seagulls might arrive here next to feed on those who seem to be less sleeping than dead.
She keeps running until she reaches the place where the river splits the beach in half. The tide is in. Ocean water covers the connecting sand bar she’d hoped to cross. She backtracks and scrambles up the train trestle that crosses the river. Many of the redwood ties connecting the rails are rotten or missing. She has to be careful not to step wrong and fall through. It is the Big Trees and Pacific Railway line, the same track that killed her brother.
At the end of the trestle she picks up her pace and sprints toward her parent’s house. Again, she has to go over the tracks, but the rail is running flat now. It’s littered with weeds and broken glass and plastic wrappers. She’s only a block from where Will took his fall.
She doesn’t stop running until she reaches home. She stands on the sidewalk in front of the house and gasps for air. There’s a stabbing pain in her side and her heart is pounding so hard it feels like it may burst open. Katie thinks that it must have been something like this for Will when he hit his head. Blinding pain, breath that won’t come. No, that’s not right, he went out in an instant.
She collapses to the grass and stares at the sky until more immediate surroundings claim her attention. Colorful flowers have been planted in the front garden and someone has finally repaired the irrigation. The lawn is green and soft beneath her. Later she finds out that it’s her mother who’s assumed these tasks. Her dad isn’t even at home. He’s taken bereavement leave from work and gone off backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail. He’ll be hiking for months.
****
At Steamer’s Lane Beach, she searches the water for Calum. They’ve not spoken all week. A couple of days ago, she ran into one of the wives from the campfires who told her that Calum had cut off his dreads. Katie came up blank for a response. The woman had tried to fill in the gap by saying, “He’s a complicated kid.” Katie pedaled away, furious about how much she missed him.
Now she turns her back to the surfers who can’t stop their jeering. Calum may be out there or he may not. Calum found, Calum lost. She could never be the woeful partner he wanted.
She hauls the surfboard to the car. She’s heading back to Stanford later and still has more packing. Her mother has taken off work to drive her.
They take the long route to Palo Alto along Highway One. It’s a beautiful autumn afternoon, more like summer than any day of summer actually was. At Waddell Creek Katie asks her mother to pull over. A troop of kite-boarders are out in full force bouncing across the glinting waves. The shipping freighter is there as well, steadily tracking the pale thin line where sky meets sea. The air is clear, so pure, that the entirety of the enormous ship is laid bare to the eye, not the foggy monster it’s been all summer.
Katie stands on the shore watching. She catches her breath as the ship suddenly swerves and disappears over the horizon in what she hopes isn’t a plummet.
