Because her mother's offer of financial assistance with college came with law school strings attached, Jasmine-having inherited her mother's headstrong temperament-refused the money and had put herself through school by flying a news helicopter for a series of Los Angeles television stringers and freelancers before finally landing a slot with one of the network affiliates.
All of this came back clearly and easily as the biplane emerged over the treetops so low and slow I was certain it would simply fall out of the sky. Instead it made a lazy, tight circle as only a biplane can do in the hands of an expert pilot, then loosed a dense shower of rose petals, filling the sky with color and the air with fragrance. The Stearman dipped its wings, then vanished as the brilliant petals drifted to earth.
No one moved until long after the sound of the Stearman's engine had faded, such was the shock, the depth of loss, and the reluctance to leave a wonderful woman behind. Then we all began to drift reluctantly away.
I thought I had said good-bye to Vanessa and the past. I was wrong.
CHAPTER 14
Standing at the wheel of my sailboat, I marveled at the smoky orange remains of a late June sun as it sank beneath the horizon, leaving behind a hazy Southern California sky painted with shifting pastels of peach, terra-cotta, and a strange smoky rose that worked its way through violet into the black approach of night.
The deck of the sloop Jambalaya hummed smoothly beneath my feet as I steered her on a port tack, heading straight toward the beach at Playa Del Rey. Night sifted down swiftly now, filling in all the spaces between the shadows. I reached through the spokes of the wheel and turned on the running lights. I kept a close eye for the idiots who had no clue about lights and for the legitimate Sunday-evening traffic as well. As the traffic to my port side opened up, I eased the Jambalaya's bow through the eye of the gentle wind. When the big 135 Genoa headsail began luffing, I hauled in on the port jib sheet wrapped three coils around the self-tailing winch, and trimmed it in. The main brought the boom around and filled itself with the air coming over the starboard bow.
On my new tack, roughly northwest, the lights marking the breakwater protecting the main channel into Marina del Rey made faint halos in the evening haze. The chatter on the VHF grew louder and more urgent as a jam of private watercraft clotted at the narrow harbor entrance.
As the Jambalaya gathered speed on its new tack away from the traffic, urgent, angry shouts echoed from the harbor entrance, shouts so loud they carried across the water, arriving like an echo moments after the same sound on the radio. Instants later the sound of crumpling fiberglass made it across the distance. Repairmen and insurance adjusters always had plenty of work on Mondays in Southern California, where the benign summer weather enticed too many Trafalgar wannabes into water way over their heads.
With my course steady for a moment and no traffic ahead, I gazed back toward Catalina and tried to recall the memories of Camilla and of the weekends we had spent there. In the beginning, it was the two of us, lazy weekends anchored at Fourth of July Cove, with walks in the hills and steaks at Bombard's at the Isthmus. Nate's birth and Lindsey's two years later changed all that, and as they grew older, there was snorkeling, swimming, and hiking around the Catalina hills, chasing after wild pigs and feral dreams. But as I squinted into the gathering night, Catalina's Bactrian hills were darkly indistinct against the flatness of dusk. Much like my memories.
I tried to recall other Sunday nights like this one, filled with songs and jokes delighting us during the six or eight hours' upwind return sail. In the first few months after the accident, memories of these return trips and the weekends preceding them came to me all too clearly and brightly, because throughout our marriage-but especially after the kids were born-Camilla had endlessly implored me to "make a memory." She'd hit me with this especially when we'd watch the children at play or as they slept and we realized they would grow up fast and one day leave the child-and us-behind.
Make a memory. How could Camilla know it would become a curse? The memory I once made of Lindsey haunted me most of all. One afternoon shortly before she turned five, she was dancing by herself in her bedroom in the little bungalow we had in Playa Del Rey. I don't remember the music now, but when I went in and picked her up and danced with her in my arms, I saw the most transcendent, undiluted joy in her eyes and a steady gaze of absolutely trusting love, which rocked my heart down to my soul. As we danced and I hugged her tight in my arms, a bittersweet revelation shook me that one day, some young man would see the same look and feel the same irresistible attraction in her eyes. I remembered praying then that this young man would treasure Lindsey's gaze and trust as much as I had, and when he took her away, he would protect her as I wanted so much to do. But I had failed, There would be no young men for Lindsey nor pretty young women for her older brother, Nate, whose trust in my ability to protect him from all the world's harms had been equally as strong as his sister's.
They'd invested me with that unbounded love and trust right up to the moment they died.
Make a memory, Camilla had said. Damn the memories! Those precious heartrending, frightening, wonderful, awful neuronal circuits whose actual workings eluded the best efforts of philosophers and of scientists like me.
We feel these memories in solitude and share them badly in the flat, sloppy medium of words and gestures that do little to re-create the fleeting snapshots of reality in our heads.
Then we die.
Where do the memories go? Were they attached to a soul? Or just cheap synaptic Kodak moments stored in a fragile biological medium destined for decay? I wiped at the moisture in my eyes and checked my watch. Vanessa's daughter would be arriving at the airport in less than two hours. I focused on this to take my mind off the memories.
I turned the ignition key for the Jambalaya's auxiliary diesel and counted to myself. At ten, I pressed the starter and the diesel fired up on the first crank. Next I flipped on the white light at the top of the mast, signaling my transition from sailboat to power vessel, eased the transmission lever forward, and steered gently into the wind to help me drop the sails. Then I set course to avoid colliding with the great clueless hordes at the harbor entrance.
With my portable air horn and emergency flare gun with extra rounds within reach, I steered a wide counterclockwise circle toward the south entrance, hoping to find a gap in the incoming traffic. Only in L.A., I thought, could boating be so damn much like jockeying for position on a freeway on-ramp.
With my attention riveted ahead, the bullet-fast approach of a dark inflatable with no lights and a well-muffled outboard motor startled me when it appeared on my stern. I stopped my gradual circle and held a steady course, expecting it to notice my lights and speed by. Other than for my wonder at the scarcity of brain cells that would set someone off at great speed at night with no lights, the inflatable did not concern me. Even if it hit the Jambalaya at speed, the small, soft craft could do little serious damage to a thirty-fivefoot sailboat.
I was right about the boat, wrong about the people inside.
Instead of shooting past me, the inflatable slowed and closed in on the Jambalaya's port side. I grabbed my handheld halogen spotlight. The half-million-candlepower light revealed three men, all dressed in black clothing and balaclavas, all holding elegantly misshapen weapons that, to my experienced eyes, were clearly Heckler amp; Koch MPSSD submachine guns with their long, tubular suppressors.
The men cursed at my light. The helmsman jammed the tiller to the right and spun his craft into a sharp counterclockwise spin. I tracked the craft with my light long enough to spot one of the men raise his weapon and aim it at me. I fell to the deck and turned off the light as a long burst of full-auto weapons fire punctuated the darkness with muzzle flashes.