Half Moon Bay Six p.m. Fog. Impenetrable, but not cold. Balmy, like Hawaii. That red cottage on the south side of Kauai, near Princeville. Shrouded by eucalyptus, so pungent after rain. Cockroaches scuttled when you pulled back the shower curtain.
Where Jane and Rick and Angela stayed their last Christmas. The last year. The last vacation. Last things. So many last things. As Jane steps outside into the Northern California evening, the fog''s moist veil slaps her face, temporarily obscuring her vision. Dark things loom. Trees, cars.
Jane takes off her jacket and tosses it back inside her cottage. The door closes with a click. She doesn''t lock it behind her. No one does, here. Jane can''t see the ocean from her cottage, but she can hear it and, most important, smell it. She leaves her bedroom windows open when she leaves the house so that when she returns, her pillows are damp and scented of seaweed. Of crabs and fish. Of the larger, mysterious things that swim in the depths.
One of the reasons she moved here, to be closer to the sea, that deep insistent body of possibilities. Probabilities. * * * Once upon a time there was a woman. Actually, just a girl, when it begins. One of a family of ten children--first seven girls, then two boys, then a female caboose on the end. Jane is Number 3. Tragedy awaits, but she does not know it. She is being prepared.
Everything in her life is building toward this moment. As she is hurt, as she is torn apart, she puts herself in a state of suspension, anything to dull the pain. This is not true, she says; this is not my life. It is her life. * * * Jane''s cell phone rings from within the cottage. She''d set the ring-tone, in a fit of rage one day, on the Dies Irae and never changed it back. The day of wrath. One of her sisters probably.
Or a friend from Berkeley, checking in. Her people. Her community. Worried about her, as they should be. But no contact tonight. No. * * * Jane is haunted. Ghosts touch her but deign not to speak.
She wakes up in the middle of the night, cold fingers on her shoulder. Others on her arm. The laying on of hands, not to cure but to blame. * * * Jane walks toward the sea, avoiding the surfers'' beach that borders Route 1. Despite the fog and the hour, two or three fanatically fit young men will inevitably be catching waves, sleek as seals in their glistening black suits. Instead, she heads over to Mavericks Beach, the home, when conditions are right, of towering eighty-foot waves, recently discovered by the international surfing set, a place so cool that Apple named an operating system after it. Jane''s go-to place when she is in extremis. It has now been one year, two weeks, and two days.
She can calculate the hours too, if asked. Nobody asks. Nobody refers to it, out of . ? Kindness? Courtesy? Fear? It should be fear, fear of wakening the beast smoldering inside Jane. Jane puts one foot in front of the other. That''s how it works for her these days. The fog so thick she can see only a yard ahead, but she knows every step of this route. Right foot.
Left foot. Right foot again. She loses herself in the rhythm. Nothing but the muffled sound of her own steps for a quarter of an hour as she winds through the industrial district of Princeton-by-the-Sea. She is nearing her destination. She can smell the rotting seaweed, hear the plaintive calls of the ringtail harriers from the marsh. Then she stops. Something is wrong.
Red and blue lights flicker through the mist. Voices, both men''s and women''s, jumbled and unintelligible. A crackling sound, as of an untuned radio. * * * Jane had lost people before. Joshua, her postcollege boyfriend. She noticed the lesions first. A beautiful bruised purple. Aubergine.
On his back and his thighs. And then how thin he was getting. She''d originally thought he was looking good, more fit. She''d even complimented him. But the constant illnesses, colds, flus. And those lesions. One day she woke up before he did. He had his back to her.
She couldn''t see his face, but from the wasted body, she understood that she lay next to a dying man. How could she not have known? Her tears wet his shoulder blades, sticking out of his thin back like chicken wings. He had been so kind to her. She had felt safe with him, even loved. It wasn''t until later that it occurred to her that she had been betrayed. She didn''t feel betrayed but bereft. She might have known that this beautiful gift of this beautiful boy would have strings attached. Oh, Janey, he''d said.
Oh, Jane, don''t cry. But he had been crying himself. * * * A police car, she can see as it comes into focus. Its lights flashing. White with black geometric markings. And another. And another. A dark figure approaches, grows darker and more substantial as it gets closer.
May I help you, ma''am? When did she turn from a miss into a ma''am? The shift has been imperceptible. Yet it has happened. Maiden, mother, crone. She is no longer either of the first two, so that leaves the final stage. At thirty-nine, her red hair glints gray in direct light. What''s going on? Jane asks. Even her voice is muffled by the fog. The figure comes closer.
It is wearing a hat, a uniform with a badge on it. It is male, as she should have known from the voice. But somehow that surprises her. What did she expect? Something not quite of this earth. A hobgoblin. Bugbear. But this man seems solid, human. A policeman.
The bearer of bad news. It''s a search party. You live near here? A silly question. No one lives near Mavericks. To reach it, you have to wind your way through the acres of rusting warehouses and grounded boats Jane has just navigated. Over there. Jane motions with her head in the general direction of her cottage. You know the McCreadys, then? Just the name, Jane says.
She tries to conjure up faces, fails. They live up on the hill. He points into the darkness. Oh. That explains it. Hill people. They''re different. In another life, Jane would have been one of them.
They live in the new houses clinging precipitously to the steep hill above Princeton-by-the-Sea. The ornate ones painted to look like Victorians from the last century. With balconies no one stepped onto, lounge chairs no one sat in. Hill people were the prosperous professionals: the doctors and lawyers and engineers who commuted every day over the hill to Silicon Valley. Another world from here, the San Mateo coast. Although it''s a small community, Jane isn''t on speaking terms with any of the people who live up the hill. Most of them belong to a different species altogether, with their business suits and BMWs that roar off at 7:00 a.m.
to make it over Route 92 to Sunnyvale or Milpitas by the start of the workday. Programmers and project managers. Financial analysts, accountants. Men and women who spend more time on the road than at home. People capable of organizing their thoughts into logical code, Gantt charts of responsibility, and numbers that add up. Ambiguity banished from their lives during the day. Then back here, to the rolling sea and amorphous fog. A strange existence.
It takes a certain kind of person to juggle the contrasts. Jane knows she sounds scornful, but really she is envious. They have found balance. What about the McCreadys? Their little girl, Heidi. She''s wandered away. Jane considers. Why are you looking here? she asks. It seems an implausible place and time.
This was her favorite spot. She''d been here with her parents this afternoon. The little girl lost her magic pebble. They thought she might have come back to look for it. Jane considers. Magic pebbles. It hurts to remember. Magic string, magic pencils, even magic bugs.
Jane had fixed up a cardboard box to contain the spiders and the roly-polies Angela captured from under the porch, but they all skittered away through the cracks. Jane''s heart breaking to see Angela''s tears of irrevocable loss. A child''s grief, never to be trivialized. How old was she? Jane asks. Five. Angela didn''t speak until she was five. Jane and Rick had taught her sign language and communicated with their hands. Eat.
More? All gone. Then, suddenly, out came everything in full sentences. Angela had kept it all inside until she burst. She learned that from Jane. A long way to walk for a five-year-old, Jane says. A missing girl. Police. This will end badly.
Such things always end badly. Your name? The policeman has taken out a pad. A pen. He looks at Jane, or at least she thinks he''s looking at her. The fog so thick he no longer has a face. Jane. Your last name, ma''am? O''Malley. Why is Jane so reluctant to give this information? She feels as though she is confessing to something, that he is writing an indictment with his pen right now.
And what are you doing here? Just walking, Jane says, but it doesn''t sound convincing. Alone, in the dark, in the fog, without a coat or a flashlight, striding along, hands in pockets. She should have brought her landlord''s dog. No one questions you when you''re walking a dog. I''ll be heading home now, she says, in a voice that sounds deceitful, even to her. You do that, ma''am, agrees the policeman, but she sees him circle her name on his pad before he turns away. But Jane doesn''t go home. Instead, she takes a few steps before doubling back and heading toward the sea.
She circumvents the official vehicles and walks the dirt path alongside the ba.