The Lemon Orchard (2 page)

The sunlight bounces off the snow, off bright mica and quartz threaded through the granite walls, blinding her for just a second. The road is clear, she knows the way, she is such a good driver, her father is with her, he taught her to drive himself, she would never hurt him, never hurt herself, she loves her family, she loves her life, so there is no explanation.

Ten minutes later Bonnie and I meander along, finished with our errands. We still have a few hours before friends will show up to watch the game, and I’m eager for time with Jenny—her father had the morning, and I’ll have the early afternoon to nurse our child and her broken heart, to just be with her because I’m smart enough to know that words don’t help, there’s no explaining that everything will get better, that she’ll heal, that time will pass and the day will come when it doesn’t hurt so much.

Black Hall is a small town, and when you hear sirens your stomach drops because you’re pretty sure whatever it is will affect someone you know. Driving along Shore Road, I slow down to let the fire truck pass. Bonnie, in the back seat, paces back and forth. I tell her to calm down, everything’s okay, we’ll be home in a minute. I flip on the signal light, to veer off the main road and head toward our driveway, and see the burst of flashing lights.

Some thoughts are too unbearable to allow. I see the town constable gesture for traffic to turn around, go back the other way, and I roll down the window to tell him I live here, and still, I won’t let myself think that this accident belongs to us. But Bonnie is barking, and she knows, and when the constable recognizes me and approaches the car with that look in his eyes that no human being wants to see, my heart stops because my heart knows.

I open the car door, he tries to block me but nothing in this world could hold me back, I am right behind Bonnie running to the front of the long line of police cars, fire engines, and ambulances. I hear someone say,
She didn’t even hit the brakes, she had to be going fifty,
and someone else saying,
Shut up, that’s her mother
. The sun glistens off the snowfield and Long Island Sound, but it doesn’t blind me, I see everything, and my mind takes a picture of all that is there and all that isn’t.

The memory will stay with me always, even when, in the future, I travel three thousand miles away. Distance is no match for this: the car crumpled against the wall, billows of black smoke, rescue workers with no one to rescue parting to let me through, spiderwebs of blood on the faces of my daughter and husband as they lie on the snow-covered ground, Bonnie between them not howling but keening soft and low, and the beloved elm tree, branches bare against the blue sky, that must have been the last sight that Jenny and Peter saw on earth.

chapter one

Roberto

SEPTEMBER 2012

Before dawn, the air smelled of lemons. Roberto slept in the small cabin in the grove in the Santa Monica Mountains, salt wind off the Pacific Ocean sweetening the scent of bitter fruit and filling his dreams with memories of home. He was back in Mexico before he’d come to the Unites States in search of goodness for his family, in another
huerto de limones,
the lemon orchard buzzing with bees and the voices of workers talking, Rosa playing with her doll Maria. Maria had sheer angel wings and Roberto’s grandmother had whispered to Rosa that she had magic powers and could fly.

Rosa wore her favorite dress, white with pink flowers, sewn by his grandmother. Roberto stood high on the ladder, taller in the dream than any real one would reach. From here he could see over the treetops, his gaze sweeping the valley toward Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the two snow-covered volcanic peaks to the west. His grandmother had told him the legend, that the mountains were lovers, the boy shielding the girl, and tall on his ladder Roberto felt stronger than anyone, and he heard his daughter talking to her doll.

In dream magic, his basket spilling over with lemons, he slid down the tree and lifted Rosa into his arms. She was five, with laughing brown eyes and cascades of dark curls, and she slung her skinny arm around his neck and pressed her face into his shoulder. In the dream he was wise and knew there was no better life, no greater goodness, than what they already had. He held her and promised nothing bad would ever happen to her, and if he could have slept forever those words would be true. Sleep prolonged the vision, his eyes shut tight against the dawn light, and the scent of
limones
enhanced the hallucination that Rosa was with him still and always.

When he woke up, he didn’t waste time trying to hold on to the feelings. They tore away from him violently and were gone. His day started fast. He lived twenty-five miles east, in Boyle Heights, but sometimes stayed in the orchard during fire season and when there was extra work to be done. He led a crew of three, with extra men hired from the Malibu Community Labor Exchange or the parking lot at the Woodland Hills Home Depot when necessary. They came to the property at 8 a.m.

The Riley family lived in a big Spanish colonial–style house, with arched windows and a red tile roof, just up the ridgeline from Roberto’s cabin. They had occupied this land in western Malibu’s Santa Monica Mountains since the mid-1900s. While other families had torn up old, less profitable orchards and planted vineyards, the Rileys remained true to their family tradition of raising citrus. Roberto respected their loyalty to their ancestors and the land.

The grove took up forty acres, one hundred twenty-year-old trees per acre, planted in straight lines on the south-facing hillside, in the same furrows where older trees had once stood. Twenty years ago the Santa Ana winds had sparked fires that burned the whole orchard, sparing Casa Riley but engulfing neighboring properties on both sides. Close to the house and large tiled swimming pool were rock outcroppings and three-hundred-year-old live oaks—their trunks eight feet in diameter—still scorched black from that fire. Fire was mystical, and although it had swept through Malibu in subsequent years, the Rileys’ property had been spared.

Right now the breeze blew cool off the Pacific, but Roberto knew it could shift at any time. Summer had ended, and now the desert winds would start: the Santa Anas, roaring through the mountain passes, heating up as they sank from higher elevations down to the coast, and any flash, even from a power tool, could ignite the canyon. It had been dry for two months straight. He walked to the barn, where the control panel was located, and turned on the sprinklers.

The water sprayed up, catching rainbows as the sun crested the eastern mountains. It hissed, soft and constant, and Roberto couldn’t help thinking of the sound as money draining away. Water was delivered to the orchard via canal, and was expensive. The Rileys had told him many times that the important thing was the health of the trees and lemons, and to protect the land from fire.

He had something even more important to do before his co-workers arrived: make the coastal path more secure. He grabbed a sledgehammer and cut through the grove to the cliff edge. The summer-dry hillsides sloped past the sparkling pool, down in a widening V to the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally hikers crossed Riley land to connect with the Backbone Trail and other hikes in the mountain range. Years back someone had installed stanchions and a chain: a rudimentary fence to remind people the drop was steep, five hundred feet down to the canyon floor.

He tested the posts and found some loosened. Mudslides and temblers made the land unstable. He wished she would stay off this trail entirely, walk the dog through the orchard, where he could better keep an eye on them, or at least use the paths on the inland side of the property. But she seemed to love the ocean. He’d seen her pass this way both mornings since she’d arrived, stopping to stare out to sea while the dog rustled through the chaparral and coastal sage.

He tapped the first post to set his aim, then swung the sledgehammer overhead, metal connecting with metal with a loud
gong
. He felt the shock of the impact in the bones of his wrists and shoulders. Moving down the row of stanchions, he drove each one a few inches deeper into the ground until they were solidly embedded. The wind was blowing toward the house. He hoped the sound wouldn’t bother her, but he figured it wouldn’t. She rose early, like him.

The Rileys had left to go to Ireland for several months, leaving their niece to house-sit. She had arrived three days ago, having driven cross-country alone with a dog that had white, brown, and blue-gray markings, with one brown and one blue eye.

The woman was small, pale, with silver hair and blue eyes. She looked nothing like the women Roberto had seen in California. Everyone here seemed glamorous, almost perfect, with skin golden from the sun and hair colored lush brown or bright blond, nails done and makeup on—he’d never once seen Mrs. Riley without lipstick. But the niece was different.

She had introduced herself the same morning she arrived. He’d been in the barn, increasing the sprinkler controls to ten gallons an hour per tree, and she’d walked right in and shaken his hand without any regard for the fact his hand was greasy and his face streaked with dirt.

“You must be Roberto,” she’d said, shaking his hand. “I’m Julia Hughes, Graciela and John’s niece. And this is Bonnie.”

“Hi, Julia,” he’d said, embarrassed and wiping his hands on his pants, too late. “You made it here safely. Long trip?”

“Yes, thank you. Luckily, Bonnie is a good traveler.”

They locked eyes, and Roberto couldn’t have said why the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He bent down to pet Bonnie to escape the feeling, running his hands over her silky blue-gray coat. She had a smiling, friendly dog face, but with those spooky eyes, his grandmother would call her a
perra bruja:
a witch dog. Julia’s blue eyes troubled him even more; when he looked back at her, he felt jolted, as if he’d looked in a mirror.

“I’ll let you get back to work,” she said, as if sensing his uneasiness.

“Thank you,” he said. “Please let me know if you need anything.”

She had walked away, Bonnie leading her onto the cliff path. He had seen her return again since that first meeting. In this world he couldn’t save everyone, but he could do his best to make the trail safe for her.

Working his way along the posts, he realized that he would have to reinforce some—those too loose to grab the earth—with concrete. A kick with the toe of his boot sent pebbles and clay tumbling down the canyon. He grabbed an armful of brush from the hillside and blocked the trail; he’d leave it that way—even adding some yellow hazard tape—until he could fix the danger zones.

Heading back to the barn, he heard trucks arriving and voices talking. The crew had arrived to irrigate and prune the orchard, but Roberto could think only of danger zones. They were everywhere. Some were compact and marked with warning signs, a few feet of cliff along a hiking trail, fixable with the right tools and a bucket of concrete. Others spread for miles, from horizon to horizon, across land crossed by thousands. The luckiest made it with their lives.

The youngest ones who hadn’t survived were angels now. They haunted the pilgrimage route, the dry creek beds and narrow canyons, filling the air with their ghostly wails. Some had been taken by La Llorona, the weeping woman who stole others’ children to replace her own. Rejected by heaven for losing her children in the Santa Fe River, she wandered the borderlands and captured any young ones she found alone at night.

“Hola, como estas?” Serapio asked, parking his truck in the shade.

“Bien, y tú?” Roberto answered.

“Bien. We’re digging drainage again today?” Serapio asked.

“Yes,” Roberto said. “You and the guys pick up where we left off yesterday. I’ll be there soon.”

Serapio nodded without question. Roberto could have asked the crew for help, finished reinforcing the trail that much sooner. But the job fell to him, and he knew it. Once in a while he felt inspired—was that the right word? Perhaps not—it was more like the relief of punishment being lifted, the chance to work and redeem himself and his sins. He wasn’t even a believer anymore. His mother had died in childbirth and his grandmother had raised him Catholic. He still carried her hand-carved black wood rosary in his pocket, but it was more for sentiment and love of her than any religious reason.

Still, when he got this feeling—straight from his gut, not his brain—he obeyed it. He grabbed a bag of concrete mix, filled the first bucket with water, slung twenty yards’ worth of yellow hazard tape over his shoulder. Bees buzzed in dark pink bougainvillea growing up the side of the barn, and as he hiked back to the cliff edge, he felt the breeze rushing through sage and coastal scrub up from the sea. It cooled his skin, gave him goose bumps even in the morning heat.

The Pacific Ocean went on forever, as blue but not a fraction as deep as the sky. The wind cracked the surface into small white waves that built and surged and crashed at the foot of the cliff. The pounding was relentless. The noise kept him awake on nights when he stayed in the orchard, and made him lonely for his farm town at the foot of the mountains. He had never seen any ocean before arriving in Los Angeles. If the fall from the cliff didn’t kill him, he would drown—he couldn’t swim.

After mixing the concrete, he filled the holes he’d dug and placed the posts upright. They were solid steel and, once properly anchored, would make the chain strong and effective. Short of standing right here by the edge, this was the best he could do to keep her safe from the dangerous land. The sun rose higher and the sweat that formed on his brow ran into his eyes and made them sting, but he didn’t wipe it away—he didn’t want to stop swinging the sledgehammer, feeling the jolt to his bones so strong it kept him from thinking of loss or danger, or anything at all.

chapter two

Julia

This is Malibu but nothing like the Malibu you hear about when you live on the East Coast. Back there it’s all movie stars and scandals and tan blond girls in late-model Porsches who make people wonder, “Are they up-and-coming actors on shows that haven’t aired yet and if so did they buy the car themselves, or are they just so pretty they’re being kept by an older man rich and lonely enough to trade expensive presents for attention and affection?”