One early autumn afternoon when the maple forest was the yellow of votive for prayer and the red of heretics, she dragged a fifty-pound bag of cement toward her backyard. Sheriff Murphy drove down Maple Ridge Road toward campus. He saw her and stopped his patrol car.
Sheriff Jim Murphy carried the cement into her yard. He took her shovel and dug. “How big a tent you plan to pitch?” he asked. His eyes were hazel and he squinted as he looked at her yard.
“As big as circumstance demands,” Mrs. Stein replied.
“Can’t keep her under a canopy indefinitely. It’s unnatural,” Sheriff Murphy decided.
The sheriff handed her his card. “Need something, call me,” the sheriff said. “Anytime. I’ll come. Count on it.”
Mrs. Stein nodded. She no longer believed anyone could help her.
Elizabeth lives near the ocean. She’ll probably die near the ocean, too. Since she came to the West Coast, first to Seattle, then Portland, San Francisco and now Los Angeles, she’s rented an apartment in sight of the water. Barbara remembers this as she takes the last of the freeways to the final exit on the western edge of Los Angeles, at the bay called Santa Monica.
Elizabeth’s telephone is disconnected. It takes Barbara Stein all morning to find the yellowed stucco apartment half a block from the beach. The manager has never heard of Elizabeth or Lena or a dark haired woman resembling the photographs Mrs. Stein supplies. “Could be a blond or redhead now,” the man says. “They’re all skinny broads with wigs.”
Mrs. Stein stands in the entranceway, trying to envision what Elizabeth would have seen. The bay lacks the spectacle her daughter craves. Elizabeth requires seas like the Grenadines and Aegean, defined strata of purples and startled turquoise. Elizabeth wants a permanent Yucatan Caribbean, a patchwork of reefs beneath her skin forming a channel of depth and current only. There are no mirrors or monetary constrictions. You have fins and gills and glide through coral.
Can you say chartreuse, Elizabeth? Can you say cerulean? Do you know what is halfway between Borneo and Sumatra? A tiny island called Palau Kebatu. I’ll take you there someday. And the Bay of Bima to Komoda. Then Sumba, finally, and Bali. That’s what she promised her daughter.
The beach is a congestion of tourists and the bay looks oily and degraded. It smells tangy like citrus that’s gone bad from a wide-open sun that doesn’t play by the rules. The sky is vague and restless as if remembering a nightmare. Starched white Oleander along the fenced parking lot reminds her of nurses’ uniforms. Elizabeth might have made that association. She would have been drawn to the burgundy Bougainvillea spilling across the sides of the shabby apartment building where the paint has been abraded by wind and sand and formed what looks like scabs. Still, such an extravagance of claret vines would have caught her attention, even stumbling drugged in darkness.
There’s a boardwalk below the slow slope of hill of two-story stucco apartments with identical balconies where Elizabeth and Lena no longer live. Barbara Stein must touch this ocean, anemic and drained of blue as it is. She thinks of her English class assignments about the meaning of movement in American literature. The American experience is about physical passages. The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Manifest Destiny and the wagon trains. The European immigrant migrations. Jack Kerouac and the Beatniks. In any event, Barbara Stein must keep walking.
Maybe we each have our own personal manifest destiny, she thinks. It sweeps us from the Allegheny Mountains of northern Pennsylvania to a strip of pavement studded with yogurt shops perched between acres of soiled sand.
Mrs. Stein finds a splintered bench engraved with knife-etched graffiti, gang names, the slang for sexual acts and assorted scatology. It’s much too hot. The sun seems lacquered. It has the texture of paint. Skaters in their bikinis already inhabit a future century where all disease has been eradicated. Elizabeth can sell her body to the whole navy and then take a shower, two weeks in Cancun, rinse it off, heal in salt waters, and be done with it.
“Just don’t bury me,” Elizabeth had said. “Promise.”
“I promise, yes,” Mrs. Stein told her daughter.
They were talking on the telephone. Her daughter has been too long on this earth as it is. Her daughter, subsisting by acts of desperate translation. She negotiates the ordinary and redesigns it for her personal biochemistry of necessity.
“I’m an alien on this planet,” Elizabeth said. “They’ll burn me for free at the clinic. Let them.”
Further south Barbara Stein sees a courtyard partially in sand. It’s dense with excessively magenta flowers and tattered palms, their texture rank. There’s no logic to this stunted progression, she thinks. Women stand at windows facing the ocean. They wear slips and imitation silk kimonos and have syringes of heroin in their fingers.
These women are like Lena. They have divested themselves of their birth certificates and the longitudes and latitudes of their origin. Their documents proved inadequate for survival. Maybe, like her daughter, they were once named Elizabeth. They rebirthed themselves and became Lena, married to a brown tar she burns with a match in a spoon, turned into a fluid like a muddy river she sticks in your vein. The price is your life and she knows it. That’s why such women have faces that are epics. Their eyes are like the one lighthouse on the last peninsula at the end of the world.
Barbara Stein crosses the ragged beach. She suddenly remembers college when she once wanted to collect waters and preserve them in labeled bottles. She wanted certain rivers as merely symbolic ornaments — the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Danube and Seine. They were like one-night-stand rivers, brief encounters she name-dropped at a dinner party. She came to know other rivers with intimacy. The Snake in Idaho during three successive summers when she almost found Elizabeth. Then the Colorado which began as a creek in the Rocky Mountains when she thought Elizabeth was in Denver. She followed it west into the California desert.
It’s a light blue afternoon. Sand offers disappointing tiny fragments of broken gray clam shells. Barbara Stein must acknowledge this region with her hands. Los Angeles is a port, after all. All ports contain certain traditional elements. Sailors and the women they buy, and cargoes of kidnapped girls and smuggled rubies? Refugees float in oceans, hidden in cartons, drinking rainwater and burning with fever.
It’s an ordinary afternoon, boys on bicycles, women hanging T-shirts on ropes. The obligatory fishing boat comes to the dilapidated pier, water a listless bleached pastel. Barbara Stein knows the new wharves of contraband are inland. The stolen computer chips and software, the prototype vaccines for cancers, formulas for extending lifespan and magnifying intelligence. They’re kept in offices in Dallas and Baltimore.
The ocean is cooler than she expected. She places a damp hand across her forehead as if it were a kind of bandage, as if she might faint. She stands by the water until sunset, waiting for Elizabeth to call Mother, Mother. She’s prepared to turn from this bay, which tells her nothing, and embrace her daughter. She stands until the sky is livid and brutal with red and it looks alive and in pain. Somebody should put it out of its misery. Somebody should put a bullet in it.
It’s sunset. Barbara Stein walks south past tattoo parlors, bistros and piercing shops. On the boardwalk, women younger than Elizabeth when she first ran away stick out their palms for dimes. Their eyes are sheeted portals. They have tornadoes in their faces. Still, they’re some version of her 10th grade students with their round faces and wide-into-the-wind eyes. They could wear the clothing of Allegheny Hills High School. In a group photograph, they would look like cousins or classmates.