Authors: Drusilla Campbell
Wildwood (12 page)
After another climb, the path leveled and followed the curve of the hill. Occasionally the alder and live oak thinned, and Liz saw the gold and green countryside below bisected by streets and marked with houses.
“Rancho Rinconada Estates.” Jeanne swept her arm wide. Her fingernails were painted a sheer pink. Jeanne: successful, controlled, professional, and scrupulously groomed. Even on a hike her hair stayed tightly coiled. “The Peninsula’s most prestigious bedroom community.”
“Jesus,” Liz said, wiping the back of her neck with a handkerchief. “Doesn’t anyone in this town have any taste?”
How big were the houses? Three, seven, ten thousand square feet? Towers and portes cocheres, swimming pools, putting greens and tennis courts and guest houses and servants’ wings.
“They’ve ruined it.”
“Greed rules.”
“Our beautiful valley, these hills . . .” Liz felt a bitter impotence. “Once I went with Gerard . . . There’d been poaching in one section of the rain forest. Someone had clear-cut acres . . .” He had covered his face with his hands and wept.
“The Elizabethan one has an indoor pool. For the dozen truly cold days we get in the Santa Clara Valley.”
“Silicon Valley.”
“Yeah.”
They resumed walking and after another fifteen minutes reached the flume that had once carried water to Rinconada from the reservoir in the hills. It was a semicircle of rusted-out metal about four feet in diameter, bolted to V-shaped iron supports sunk in blocks of concrete that raised it a yard or so off the ground. Split and rotten plywood covered the top of the half circle.
Liz pried up a worm-eaten board, peered in, and recoiled. “Stinks.”
“Teddy says it’s full of rattlesnakes.”
Liz stepped back.
Jeanne laughed and hoisted herself onto the flume. She pulled Liz up beside her.
Liz stood with the hot sun in her face and the mating calls of grasshoppers shrilling in her ears. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was eight or ten or twelve again. Crows in the distance sounded the same. The sun still burned her skin. The brushy and pungent woods still smelled dry and tickled her nose like Vicks. She grinned down at Jeanne who sat on the edge of the flume, dangling her legs, staring up at her, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. She pointed at Liz’s leg with the other.
A circle of small red welts clustered between her anklebone and Achilles tendon. “Shit.”
Jeanne’s mouth tightened. “You and Hannah. Can you communicate without swearing?”
“Come on, Jeannie. I’ve heard you cuss with the best of us.”
“I guess that doesn’t happen much anymore.”
Liz sat down. “Speaking of Hannah—”
“Were we?”
Don’t fuck with me, Liz wanted to say.
“She’s depressed. Says she isn’t but it’s obvious to someone who hasn’t seen her in a while. And she’s distracted. Her mind’s always somewhere else.”
“You mean she’s not paying enough attention to her house guest?”
“You’re the limit, Jeanne. You know what I mean. There’s something on her mind.” Liz’s ankle tickled. Reflexively, she scratched. “Damn.”
“Ask Dan to give you a pill or a shot or something. There’s great medicine for poison oak. Or we could go over to the school. We keep an ointment for the boys.”
Liz hadn’t flown in from Florida to let herself be distracted by poison oak. “You see her all the time. What’s going on with her?”
“She seems the same to me.” Jeanne swatted a yellow jacket. “Older, but we’re all that. I suppose it’s menopause. She’s having a little trouble there.”
“Are you?”
Jeanne shook her head. “Sailing right through.”
Liz remembered puberty. Pimples. Cramps. The oily unpleasantness, the constant agitation that came of not being hooked up properly to her own body. Now this new change, different but the same feeling of not being hooked up quite right.
“What about you?”
I thought I was in it and so I relaxed and then . . . and then . . .
“No problems,” Liz said.
They sat swinging their bare legs over the flume’s edge. The parched, breathless scent of autumn dust and dry grasses sucked the moisture from Liz’s nose and mouth.
“Does she ever mention Bluegang?” For a long moment Liz’s question vibrated between them like a hummingbird.
“Gail’s driving her nuts with that cleanup committee of hers. I think it’s a good idea and we’ve given her some money, but I don’t have time—”
Jeanne talked about the problems Bluegang caused at school, the need for a fence, her fear that someday a boy from the school would be hurt.
“Another boy.”
Jeanne cocked an eyebrow at her.
“A boy died down there and we’re the only ones who know the truth,” Liz said. “Don’t you ever think about it?”
When Jeanne answered the edge in her voice was sharp. Liz knew it as a warning. “Is that why you came home? To talk about Bluegang?”
The deep internal stirrings of imagination, emotion, and memory that directed Liz’s behavior, these were alien to Jeanne as far as Liz knew. And if they hadn’t been acquainted all their lives, they might not even like each other. Liz wasn’t sure they actually liked each other now, that it wasn’t their history and shared love of Hannah that bound them.
“For the last year or so, I’ve had the feeling like it’s . . . in my way somehow.” She flicked her hand at a yellow jacket. “I dream about it all the time.”
“No kidding? I barely remember it.”
Liz knew this could not be true.
“I feel like I’m haunted by it.”
“So you’ve come home to exorcise the demon.” Jeanne shook her head. “Think I’ll pass.”
“Are you afraid to talk about it?”
“Afraid?” Jeanne cocked her eyebrow again.
Portcullis down. Drawbridge up. Fortress Jeanne. Impregnable.
“My feelings have nothing to do with fear.”
“Well, then, even if you don’t need to talk, I do. Can’t we? For me?”
“It’s not that simple.” Jeanne examined her nails, pushing back the cuticle with the pad of her thumb. “When you’ve flown home to your tropical paradise and your perfect French lover, Hannah and I will still be here. Nothing will have changed for us. Rinconada is where we live and Bluegang runs right through our backyards the way it always has. If we don’t want to talk about what happened down there almost forty years ago, to three little girls who bear absolutely no resemblance to any of us today, then I think that’s the way it ought to be.”
Liz felt the color rush to her cheeks. “Jeanne, I need this.”
“You are so self-centered. It’s all about what Liz Shepherd wants. Or needs. Or
thinks
she needs. You haven’t changed a bit.”
thinks
she needs. You haven’t changed a bit.”
Liz jumped to the ground. Tears of frustration flooded her eyes. “You’ve always been good at making me feel like dog dirt.”
“No, Liz,
you’ve
always been good at making
yourself
feel like dog dirt.” Jeanne glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to get back.”
you’ve
always been good at making
yourself
feel like dog dirt.” Jeanne glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to get back.”
Liz grabbed Jeanne’s arm. “If you won’t talk about what happened back then, tell me something about now. Hannah’s depressed but she says she’s happy. What about you? Are you happy? Has life turned out the way you wanted it to?”
Jeanne looked off through the branches and sprays of barbed oak leaves, across the valley. A haze the color of winey mustard veiled San Jose and the eastern foothills and hung low over the vast grid of blocks and streets and the freeway serpentines that wove through and connected the valley, graceful and ugly at the same time.
“I don’t think happiness is the point.” Jeanne spoke precisely, teacher to student; but the sarcasm was out of her voice and that was a blessing. She wanted to like Jeanne, wanted to love and admire her as she had when they were young. “Just like anybody else, I’ve had good and bad times. There’ve been trade-offs, but there’s been rewards too. And commitment. In the long run, for me it’s commitment that really counts. That’s something you and I disagree on—”
“Why do you say that?” The unfairness stung. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Look at your history.” Jeanne leaned back against the flume and crossed her ankles in front of her. Such a neat and precise motion, Liz wanted to slug her. “How many men have there been? How many cities?”
And all of them my business, not yours.
Liz had lost count. Forgotten on purpose or accident the one-night stands, the weekends in the country with too much to drink and too many drugs. She had forgotten the men she met in bars who fascinated her for twenty hours or so and the ones she would have liked to know better who didn’t call back. And cities? Well, Rennes and Paris and Avignon. London and Florence. Vienna. Now Belize.
“I love Gerard,” she said. “That’s part of the problem.”
“Oh?”
“He wants to get married.”
Jeanne grinned and it was clear the news truly pleased her.
“He’s not the first, you know.” There had been other proposals of marriage, and she had been in love before. But when it came to saying yes, she couldn’t do it. Even when she wanted to, she couldn’t manage it.
“What’s stopping you?”
It had something to do with Bluegang, though it was impossible to explain an intuition that came to her in the middle of the night with the chill clarity of moonlight. During the last year Gerard had helped her by asking the kinds of questions that cornered her and left truth the only way out.
“We shouldn’t have left him there.”
“Maybe, maybe not. What’s that got to do with you and Gerard? And, anyway, it’s so far in the past now. We did the only thing we knew to do . . .”
“No. I wanted to tell someone.”
“Then why didn’t you? Are you saying it’s my fault?”
“Not a bit. We all . . .”
“It was an accident, Liz. And what’s more, it’s one Billy Phillips went asking for. He attacked Hannah. Have you forgotten that?”
Sometimes she did. Sometimes it seemed like Billy Phillips had come after her, not Hannah, and that it was she who had pushed him down onto the rocks. Gerard said she didn’t just carry her own guilt, she hauled around Hannah’s as well and probably Jeanne’s too.
“Teddy and I run a fine school, Liz. We’ve created something strong and worthwhile together. Once in a blue moon I have a bad day and wish I could run off and join the circus. But it passes. You have to let it pass, let the bad stuff go. I can’t believe you’re fifty years old and you haven’t learned that lesson yet.”
“It hangs on to me.”
Jeanne took Liz’s hands. The unexpected sign of affection brought more tears to Liz’s eyes. “Try to understand. If Hannah and I don’t want to talk about Bluegang, it’s our choice. We’re playing our cards the best we can. And you need to play yours while you have a chance. Marry this guy and get on with your life before it’s too late.”
“But I need to talk about it.”
“God, you’re a broken record.” Jeanne walked away. “Why don’t you think about someone besides yourself?”
Liz’s throat hurt from the effort it took not to cry. “We were all there.”
“Don’t try to hang this on us. You’ve decided you need to talk about what happened for
yourself.
You don’t care any more about Hannah and me and Billy Phillips today than you did back then.”
yourself.
You don’t care any more about Hannah and me and Billy Phillips today than you did back then.”
“That’s not true.” Liz scratched her ankle. “I can’t believe you’d say that.”
“Don’t scratch, it’ll spread.”
“Fuck it. And you too!” Liz dropped to the ground and gave in, began to sob. “I didn’t want it to be like this. I didn’t want to fight.”
“We always fight. If you’ve forgotten that, you’ve been away too long.” Jeanne crouched beside Liz. Jeanne took a tissue from her shirt pocket and handed it to her. “Keep your hands off your face. If you touch your face it’ll spread.”
“I hate you,” Liz said, dabbing at her tears. “You always have to be right. You always have to have the last word.”
“Yeah,” Jeanne said. “It’s the cross I bear.”
They parted at the road, and Liz walked down to the Bluegang bridge and looked over the edge at the gray stones, dead leaves and litter. She counted three beer cans, an empty Mondavi wine bottle and, under a manzanita bush, a shopping cart tipped on its side, wheels scavenged. How had that gotten all the way up Casabella Road?
Poor Bluegang, she thought.
And good luck, Gail Bacci.
She would write her a check before she went back to Belize.
And good luck, Gail Bacci.
She would write her a check before she went back to Belize.
The feeling after a fight was a weight at the base of her rib cage, resting on her stomach like too much rich food. She and Jeanne had always been quick to spar and then forgive. And sometimes Jeanne’s arguments were right on target—like that jab about commitment.
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