On Mischa’s mother’s final visit, she’d entered a repetitive loop of conversation blaming Santa Cruz for her daughter’s loss of ambition. The small seaside city was a land of lotus-eaters and it sucked her in. The place was an opiate. The Mediterranean weather, perpetual sunshine, glare of light on the bay beneath the cliffs. How did anyone ever get anything done here, or leave to go anywhere else?
Her mother had been staying at the Dream Inn, the fanciest hotel in Santa Cruz, and its only tall building. It was trying to be sleek in a city that felt more as if it had been built into its surroundings. Unlike most of the city, the Dream Inn had been interior-designed — its retro furnishings and the font for the logo of its sign more a tribute to a 1950s motel in Palm Springs or LA than anything in Santa Cruz, save for the surfboards hanging from the ceiling in the lounge.
Mischa went to the hotel every day even though she knew it was going to get worse the longer her mother stayed — the delusions, the nagging. They lay in chaise longues, sipping mai tais and bronzing in the sun. As her mother grilled her on all her wrong choices, Mischa stared out into the bay, tuning her out.
She saw a seal just beyond the surf break. That seal doesn’t give a fuck that you failed, she thought.
On the morning of her mother’s last day, she stopped by her daughter’s shack and pulled one of the ubiquitous blue-and-white-striped Dream Inn towels from her St. Tropez beach bag. “I got you this,” she said, dropping the towel on Mischa’s futon.
“You stole a towel from the hotel?”
“So you can still go, even after I leave.”
“But you stole.”
“Anything to get you out of sitting in this crappy shack and doing nothing but surfing all day and serving drunk people burgers all night. Go sit up there instead, think about what you’re doing and what you really came here to do.” Her mother looked down. “I don’t know why I even bother. It’s not like you listen.”
Mischa considered returning the towel, but she really did like it there, the pool deck hovering over the beach like some cruise ship from space coming in for a landing in the snug little cove beneath the cliffs.
Mischa and her mother walked to the ocean to go for the last swim of her mother’s visit. Mischa watched her mother’s form from a distance. So many sea lions and seals streaming through the gray flatness. When Mischa looked back she realized she’d lost track of her — what she thought was her mother’s bobbing head turned out to be a nearby seal. She scanned the ocean, growing panicked. Her mother had been a distance swimmer once. She was nowhere to be seen.
A rip current must have pulled her far under, sending her out to sea, the rescuers said. The search was called off, her body never found.
The towel attained sentimental value as the last thing her mother gave her. Mischa used it to pass into the pool area at the Dream Inn. She drank two mimosas and pretended she was someone else. She made small talk with tourists, changing her story for every different person — she was a professional horseback rider from Kentucky, a Parisian pastry chef, a musician from Nashville. Forgetting herself more and more.
The more Mischa used the towel, the less guilty she felt about having it. She wandered up and down the hallways of the Dream Inn imagining herself some kind of a living ghost, invisible, stealing the little shampoos from the housekeeping carts by the handful. When she made eye contact with the housekeepers working in rooms with doors left ajar, Mischa smiled, offering a little wave, the stolen towel draped over her wrist.
One day, she made her way down to the pool. As usual, she slipped past the guard — no one seemed to be expecting someone with a stolen towel to come in, or if they did, their sympathy for someone who needed to do such a thing outweighed their desire to enforce hotel policy — ordered a mai tai, and spread the towel over one of the choice chaise longues facing Cowell’s. She lay there until the sun began to dip across the cliffs.
When she’d first set foot in Santa Cruz, she’d walked all the way out on the pier to watch the sun sink into the ocean. It would be spectacular, she’d imagined. But the sun did not set behind the water. It felt as if the sun set in the wrong direction here, to the north, as if she’d landed on some alternate planet that was otherwise just like earth. She still looked at maps to remind herself of the simple but disorienting fact that the Santa Cruz coast faced south.
A seal swam in the water, near the shore. She watched it playing in the waves. She loved the harbor seals the most, those spotted gray meat tubes, their black marble eyes and dog-mermaid bodies. They were so elegant. Almost human. Then the seal stopped, treaded water, and looked directly at her.
You haven’t failed. You haven’t been ready. Some just need more time to adjust to all the feelings.
Mischa rubbed her eyes. Had the seal spoken? Did even seals here spout New Age aphorisms? Had somebody slipped something in the mai tais? On the chaise longue facing the sea, Mischa slipped into the drifting sleep of the drunk. When she woke it was twilight and all the tourists had gone inside.
At least you hear me.
Mischa met James the same way she met everyone: while impersonating a hotel guest. He was standing by the railing looking out into the bay. She walked over to check the waves. He held binoculars up to his eyes and scanned the ocean. When he lowered them, she was right beside him. She guessed he was in his forties. He was noticeably attractive, built like an athlete, but slightly worn, like he’d been in the sun a little too long and worked out at CrossFit a little too hard.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Oh, seals and otters,” he said, “... and you.”
“So, endangered species?”
He smiled, the crow’s feet around his blue eyes crinkling. “You’re in danger?”
“Of not living up to my potential, maybe.”
“You here for one of those weird self-development seminars?”
“No, I just live here.”
“At the hotel?”
“Sort of.”
“Really?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’m James,” he said.
“Mischa,” she replied. It was the first time she’d given anyone at the Dream Inn her real name. “Where are you visiting from?”
“I live down the street.”
“You have a stolen towel too?”
“No, what kind of person steals a towel? I walked up from the beach. The door is sometimes just open and if I see that, I come in. This is the perfect spot for watching sea lions and otters and sometimes even a seal.”
She smiled as they stood, suddenly together, a crack forming in their private spaces, facing the waves.
“Have you been to the lounge?” she asked.
He suddenly seemed nervous.
“They just remodeled it,” she said. “It’s nice.”
“Does that mean you’ll let me buy you a drink? You’re old enough to drink, right?”
There was something lonely about James, as if he’d missed out on pet adoption and wanted to take care of someone. Mischa felt like a stray, eating other people’s leftover food scraps during her waitressing shifts, looking at other people’s lives from outside. This could be all right, she thought.