After that, it was easy — she didn’t let on to anyone about what she was planning, not even Ida, and she made sure no one saw her leaving the house. All she could think was that if she could somehow get back to her room at school her stepfather would relent — he’d have to. Either that or make the trip himself to reclaim her. There would be the question of board and tuition, she wasn’t fooling herself on that account, but once Miss Everton saw her there at her lessons with the other girls, in the dining hall, at the piano — saw how she belonged—she’d intervene for her, Edith was sure she would. And her stepfather would have to pay. He’d be too ashamed not to.
This was what she was thinking as she walked briskly back down the street to the wharf, one hand occupied with her parasol, the other with the suitcase, and she didn’t want to think beyond that. Her feet, buttoned tightly into her best shoes, had begun to chafe, but she ignored them. She was fixated on getting her ticket before the smokestack of theSanta Rosa appeared on the southern horizon on its way up from Los Angeles, and then losing herself in the crowd until the boat left the pier and she could breathe again, because there was no telling when her stepfather would discover her missing. Hurrying on, she scanned the glistening apron of the sea as it opened up at the base of the street and fanned out across the channel to the islands. Santa Cruz, the largest of them, was clearly visible on the horizon and not a cloud in the sky. Which meant that the seas would be calm — or calmer than on the way down. Or at least she hoped so.
And then she was in the waiting room, the benches full, baggage scattered about and everybody staring at her as if they’d never in their lives seen a young girl traveling back to school on her own. She took her place in line at the ticket window and concentrated on her posture — chin high, shoulders back, No slouching, Edith, take pride in yourself, her mother would nag if she were here, but her mother wasn’t here and never would be again. When she got to the ticket counter and presented the precise amount for a steerage ticket as it was listed in the schedule of fares, the clerk just stared at her. “I’ve gone to the bank for the proper change,” she said.
He was an effete little man, no bigger than Jimmie, and Jimmie was only a boy. She could see that he was trying to grow out his whiskers, his face splotched with reddish patches of hair that looked like open wounds at a distance and animal’s fur close up. “I beg your pardon?” he said.
“For the double eagle,” she said, pushing the money forward. “I’d like a ticket, please. One way to San Francisco, third class.”
“I’m sorry, miss, but it’s against company policy to issue tickets to unaccompanied”—here he hesitated, snatching a quick look at her face before dropping his eyes to the counter—“children.”
“But you said… you said you didn’t have change.”
He stiffened. “I didn’t,” he said, and the lie lay there between them.
“I’m no child. I’m”—she could lie too—“twenty-one years old.”
“Company policy,” he said. “You’ll have to bring a parent, your father or mother—”
She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, that was the last thing she wanted, but she couldn’t help it. “My mother’s dead,” she said.
“Then your father.” He spoke softly, sadly. He was already looking past her to the next person in line.
“My father’s dead too.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
When she saw he wasn’t going to give her what she wanted — he was immovable, a mule, an idiot — she swung round abruptly, glaring at the man waiting in line behind her, stalked the length of the room with her heels clattering and the suitcase flaring at her side and flung herself out the door and into the full blaze of the sun. She tried to calm herself, to think things through, but already her anger was shading into despair. She felt exposed. Helpless. Anyone could have seen her there, some friend of her stepfather’s she didn’t even know, some sheep magnate or deckhand or dry-goods merchant come down to meet the ship. She felt a small flutter of panic. Just then the blast of the ship’s horn racketed across the water and she looked up to see the boat riding just offshore, as big as a block of houses, its smokestack fuming. The planks of the pier shifted subtly beneath her. “Here she comes!” somebody cried.
For one mad moment her only thought was of stowing away, of following a family up the gangplank, pressing close to them until they were aboard — if she was going to be taken for a child, she’d act like one — and then hiding somewhere overnight, in one of the lifeboats, in a closet or the head or under a table in the saloon. She had money. She could buy herself dinner, tea, sit there as long as she liked, tell the waiter her parents were indisposed, seasick, green around the gills — anything, anything to get away from here — but she knew she was fooling herself. Very slowly, squaring her shoulders and taking up the suitcase and parasol, she turned away from the ticket office and began making her way back down the pier as if she’d just arrived, ignoring the men in carriages and the fishermen and all the rest of them with their pat stupid expressions and leached-out eyes.
By the time she reached the end of the pier, she knew what she was going to do, though it was risky, riskier even than the boat. She didn’t dare try to take a coach — that would be the first thing her stepfather would expect and there was no guarantee that the agent there would take her money any more than the idiot at the steamship office would — but the railway was another thing altogether. Anyone could take the train. Of course, rail service was new to Santa Barbara and she’d never been on the train herself, yet Becky Thorpe had and that was good enough for her. The problem was that the train didn’t go to San Francisco, it went south, south only. To Los Angeles. If she boarded the train, she’d be on her own, without a room or roommate or meals in the dining hall or piano lessons with Mr. Sokolowski or Miss Everton’s guiding hand, not that Miss Everton had ever guided her personally, but she was there, like a monument, in loco parentis, a buffer between the girls and the harsh hard world they all knew from Zola and Dickens. She’d have to find her way all alone in a city she’d seen only once, with her mother, years ago — she’d have to take rooms, but who would rent to her? And once her money was exhausted, how would she pay?
No matter. She strode into the station, went up to the window and booked passage on the next train for Los Angeles and the only question the agent asked was Will that be round trip or one way? and without hesitation she answered: One way. She took a seat on a bench in the far corner and settled in to wait. The train was at five-thirty and it would be past dark then. Her stepfather would be sure to come looking for her if she wasn’t home by dark, no question about it, but then he’d never imagine she’d try to get away to Los Angeles — to school, yes, to San Francisco, where she belonged, but not Los Angeles. Los Angeles was a place he scarcely knew. Still, it was just past one-thirty in the afternoon and who knew but that Ida would have sent up the alarm by now? She could imagine her stepfather sitting down to luncheon after a morning of laying in supplies against returning to the island — the big sacks of rice and beans and flour she’d come to loathe the sight of, farm equipment, tools — and saying Where the devil’s Edith got herself to? and Ida saying I haven’t seen her all day and I know she’s not in her room or the yard either.