Sometimes Boone could still hear that movie in his head.
Then Sandra told him a realtor said she could get more than a million dollars for the house. She said she had no choice but to sell and move to a place where she could afford a good school for Nalu and buy a decent car. She told him it was better if he didn’t come with them, that they each needed to get on with their lives.
They both cried, but not Nalu, who said, “Oh yes, the past can hurt,” which was from his favorite scene in The Lion King. Three months later, the kook’s contractor began tearing down every piece of wood and nail and pipe that held the memory of Sandra and his son.
Boone saw the smoke from the window grow heavier and then the kook jumping up from his chaise longue to run inside. The wind was stronger now. A few heartbeats later, the kook was on the front lawn yelling for help.
The wind whipped the fire into a fury in a way that let Boone know Pele had summoned it for her work. He watched the orange flames lick the sky, the house fall in on itself, wet and ugly. He felt the earth underneath heave a sigh of relief. He had not expected the depth of Pele’s unhappiness.
A week later, he heard firefighters had blamed the blaze on the kook’s phone, which had caught fire as it was being charged. But Boone knew better. That same night he retrieved the talisman from its spot in the dirt near where the gray house had stood.
He held it for a good five minutes, marveling over the truth of what the old man had said. He tucked the talisman back into his pocket. There was a house, down near the lagoon where he camped, that had just been turned into a vacation rental, with two surfboards in the backyard for its guests.
Safe Harbor
by Seana Graham
Seabright
She was standing right at the bar the night Ray walked in — a hairbreadth from skinny and Ray tended to like his women with more meat on their bones. It’d been a long day at work; he’d only come to Brady’s for a drink before heading home.
Her tattoos intrigued him — that serpent that disappeared under her shirt. People had tattoos in Detroit, of course, but Californians seemed to embrace body art with an abandon he hadn’t seen back home. Milder weather? Sheer exhibitionism, the Midwesterner in him scoffed.
Skinny Girl must have felt his gaze, because she turned right around and began her own frank appraisal of him. If she wasn’t actually a prostitute, she wasn’t in this place for the conversation, either.
Ray stepped up to the bar and ordered a drink, offering one to the lady as well. She peered at him with huge green eyes — and accepted. She told him her name was Jazz and that she’d just come down from San Francisco.
Her tattoos might disguise the fact that she was from the South, but it didn’t take Ray long to grasp that she was a long way from home. Caught out, she admitted her real name was Jasmine, that she was escaping some trouble back in Memphis. Everything about her suggested she’d brought a lot of it with her. On that first night, Ray asked Jasmine if she’d come out to California to see the Pacific Ocean. She looked at him strangely, as though he wasn’t quite right in the head.
“No, sugar,” she said, “I came to California for the money.”
It seemed as good a line as any to start their negotiations.
For as long as Ray could remember, he’d wanted to live by the ocean. Where this idea had come from, he didn’t know — he’d grown up in the middle of Kansas. His parents were no-nonsense Methodist farmers, not given to encouraging flights of fancy or yearnings for anything but one’s hard-earned place in heaven. What they did give Ray, though, was the opportunity to work on tractors and other farm equipment, which developed not only his practical skills, but also his talent for innovation. After college, when the family farm had all but withered away, these aptitudes gave him a foothold in Detroit, where he found his niche in the more experimental foundation of the auto industry. Once Ray was established, he married, and bought a big house on the river, believing it would satisfy his need to be near water. Later, when he realized that it wouldn’t, he told himself it would have to do.
When Ray got the call five years ago from the headhunter about a job at one of the Silicon Valley firms, he believed God had heard his prayers. His wife Maureen objected to the move at first — they knew no one in California. But the money was too good for her to hold out long. So they put the three kids in their big SUV and drove out to San Jose.
San Jose proved disappointing. It was late summer and they’d left green lawns in Michigan. Here, the hills were brown and tired, relieved only here and there by small dark stands of stubborn live oak.
Once they’d settled into the hotel room his company provided for their transition, Ray wasted no time in packing the whole family up for a trip over the mountains to Santa Cruz. As he drove the winding road through the redwoods, he took in one deep breath after another. This was the life he had always wanted, right here for the taking. He tried to share it with Maureen, but the kids were feeling queasy from the twists and turns of Highway 17 and she’d turned around to comfort them. The moment passed.
They came down out of the mountains and got their first full view of the Monterey Bay. Ray caught his breath. Even from this distance, the water was dazzling. They drove straight down to the Boardwalk and plopped their towels on the beach. Ray was just as entranced as the kids. When evening came, they all walked out on the wharf for supper. “Supper” — he would soon learn that this was a word that marked him as a Midwesterner.
They ate at a family-style place called Gilda’s, watching the sun set on the Pacific, with huge pelicans lounging on the pier right outside the windows and sea lions barking under the wharf. Ray ate his calamari and thought, This is it. He would find them a house by the ocean and then they would all live happily ever after.
Ray kept Jazz in the dark at first. He didn’t want her to realize right off what a big fish she’d landed. He should hold something in reserve. She might be the type who would bleed you dry if you let her. She had an armband tattoo that circled her right bicep which read: Trust me... wait... Trust me... wait... Trust me... It seemed to flicker back and forth from being just her little joke to revealing some deeper truth. He didn’t know quite how he could think this and want to keep seeing her, but he did.
So for a while Ray wined and dined her, taking Jazz down to Monterey where no one was likely to know them. They had sex for the first time in a discreet hotel on Cannery Row. The sex was good but not great. Ray thought afterward that maybe Jazz was holding something back too. Those green eyes had to mean something.
Ray couldn’t get Jazz to talk much about herself, not at first. He was an affable guy when he wanted to be, and it came as a surprise to him that she had even less interest in being drawn out than he did. She used her lithe body to great effect, one moment beguiling and winsome, another sultry and seductive. It was like a costume she put on.
She mentioned a man several times in passing, someone back home, and Ray, after a few glasses of wine one night, was more persistent than usual in trying to get more out of her. It amused her to tease him, but when she saw that he was getting sulky, she leaned across the table and kissed him full on the lips, something she hadn’t done in public before.