The Lemon Orchard (3 page)

She knew a little about such things. She’d been coming here since she was a child—although this was her first time in five years—and she heard gossip from Lion, whom she’d be seeing for dinner that night.

As much as she loved him and always had, she wasn’t in the mood, would have preferred to stay home. She liked the way this landscape enclosed her, made her feel protected in a strange way, because really, what could be more dangerous than Malibu, with its earthquakes, mudslides, and wildfires?

Maybe that outward danger comforted her somehow and reinforced her sense of how impermanent it all was. Just look at the Chumash people, how they had thrived on this coast for ten thousand years, as hunter-gatherers and superb boatbuilders and basket makers. Being an anthropologist, she could vividly imagine their life here, and how timeless it must have seemed—until 1542, when Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo had sailed in and claimed California for Spain.

Anthropology, it turns out, had been her perfect field of study: learning about the cosmology of civilizations uprooted from one place and settled in another. She felt the loss of Jenny so acutely, the specifics of their days together, the constellations marking moments in their lives, their own lost culture. Who they had been, Jenny and Julia, mother and daughter, would last forever; but who Jenny, and what their relationship, would have become, ended with the accident.

In her profession Julia dealt with the real, the evidentiary, the tracks left behind by people. Even as an undergrad she’d loved hiding in her carrel at the Rock—the main library at Brown—and using long-lost and recently found artifacts to assemble, in her imagination, the way people had lived. It had always been her passion, to keep the dead alive through learning how they had behaved, where they had trekked in search of food, water, love.

She had been an emotional girl, and that never changed. At Vance School, in first grade, she’d attended class with the kids who lived at the Children’s Home—a big brick building at the top of a hill. They were there for various reasons: their parents had died, or had hurt them, or for some reason couldn’t take care of them. Julia could see the home from her bedroom window.

There was one boy, Billy, who sat next to her in school. He had freckles and a cowlick. When they went on a field trip to the fire station, he was her partner, and they held hands. It was fall, and walking down the Connecticut street, they kicked through fallen red and yellow leaves. Billy didn’t talk to anyone except their teacher. They spent the whole walk in silence, but he kept squeezing her hand, as if in Morse code.

The insides of his wrists were dirty, and he had a hole in the sleeve of his sweater, and something about that raveled yarn and his not talking told her a story about his whole life.

In fourth grade Julia saw a filmstrip about Margaret Mead working with children in Samoa. But by the time she got to high school, it was Margaret’s mentor, Ruth Benedict, who captured Julia’s imagination and made her want to be an anthropologist.

Ruth studied tribes in the Southwest and was the first woman to really make strides in the field. She wrote about the relationships between culture, language, and personality. She was interested in human behavior and the way it is shaped by traditions. Julia wanted to learn all she could about people’s behavior, including her own family’s.

How Jenny had behaved: a hurricane of love. She took after her mother when it came to emotion. It wasn’t unusual for Julia to return from her office and a late-afternoon trip to the grocery store, enter the kitchen, and have Jenny barrel over, leap right onto her, arms locked around her neck, saying “Why were you gone so long?”

“I came straight home from work.”

“Don’t you remember? We were going to have a picnic and watch the moonrise.” Or the sunset, or the bluefish in a feeding frenzy, or the monarch butterflies staging for their long migration south to Mexico, or the tree swallows in their funnel cloud formation each night at twilight.

That September night it had been the moonrise. Jenny had prepared sandwiches, delicious concoctions of smoked bluefish and whatever was left in the garden. Peter was home—Julia remembered that now—but he hadn’t wanted to join them. He was working on a case, or had a Red Sox game to watch. They’d never meant to leave him out, but he’d never seemed eager to join in, either. He and Julia seemed to be living two separate lives, and that, more than anything, was contributing to their impending separation.

Julia and Jenny hurried down the twisty, wooded path, stunted oaks and pines overhanging the sandy trail. They got to the beach just as the sun was setting. They sat on the smooth gray log—long stripped of bark, after years of storms and wind and blowing sand—and faced east.

They tried to do this every month on the night of the full moon, but it wasn’t always possible. But that night, they saw the apricot moon crest over an eastern headland, then spread its orange light across Long Island Sound in a path that seemed to run straight toward them.

“Oh, Jenny,” Julia said. “I’m so glad you thought of this.”

“Mom, you invented moon picnics.”

“I did?” she asked. But she knew it was true. She had always loved nature and the magic it brought to human love. As a kid, she’d been like Jenny: in love with everything. She didn’t believe in love unfolding, but being born in a big bang, like the universe.

Jenny’s enthusiasm was like Julia’s, and the contrast with Peter couldn’t be sharper. The older he got, the more measured and cautious he became, and the harder it was for Julia to find ways to feel they had anything but years and a daughter in common. It had taken Julia a long time to admit that she was desperately unhappy in what most people would consider a very good marriage. Staring at that full moon, holding her daughter’s hand, tears had rolled down her cheeks because she’d begun not just thinking about but actually taking steps to divorce Peter.

Divorce, as it turned out, hadn’t been necessary.

The Santa Monica Mountains ran east-west, north of the Los Angeles basin, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and the house was nestled in a canyon overlooking endless, sparkling blue. In the days since Julia and Bonnie had arrived from Connecticut, Bonnie had already claimed her role as queen of the property. She was getting old, and it touched Julia to see her happy again.

Collies were sensitive to their masters’ moods. Julia knew she was Bonnie’s master, like it or not. Julia was happiest hiding, being low on any kind of hierarchal totem pole, but when it came to dogs, the relationship was built-in. It had been five years, just Bonnie and Julia, and they belonged to each other. She’d made peace with the fact that Bonnie looked to her for everything—she had long since accepted the reality that until this trip, their lives were limited to the bedroom, the kitchen, and the as-infrequent-as-possible trips to the grocery store.

Bonnie rested next to her on the bed, watching with sad eyes when Julia thought of Jenny and tried to keep breathing. Five years after the fact, it felt like no time had passed. Breath was still a razor blade in and out, in and out. Why did Julia get to breathe when Jenny didn’t? A childish thought, but she would never stop hating that fact and wishing she could trade places with her daughter. Let Jenny be here with Bonnie, let her be in college, let her be house-sitting in this mysterious canyon that smelled of flowers and lemons and sea air.

She hated seeing people. She had nothing against anyone personally, but she’d become something different, other, since Jenny’s death. Jenny had loved Bonnie, used to pet her, snuggle her, throw the tennis ball and grab the slobbery thing and throw it again, run through the field to the dead tree and over the bluff to the beach, swim in Long Island Sound together, come home and hose off the sand and salt and tendrils of seaweed. So in a way, because Jenny had hugged Bonnie, when Julia stroked Bonnie she knew that somehow she was touching a part of her daughter.

Looking out the window, down the long slope of lawn and garden to the orchard, she saw Roberto smacking those posts into the cliff and felt weird fury boiling up. Why was he fixing up the path? Obviously he had seen her walking Bonnie along there yesterday, and fuck and shit, she swore he’d read her mind—that fleeting moment when she thought about how easy it would be to just stand on the brink and let go and fly down into the sea.

All of a sudden, even though she avoided seeing people, she knew she was going to walk out to see him. Why was it, having met him so briefly, she didn’t classify him as “people”?

He was the latest in a long line of orchard managers, all of them migrants, and she’d known most of them, joked around with them, gotten to know their families and—as a child—let them lift her into the branches to pick lemons. They had come from Mexico seeking a better life.

From her earliest memories, her uncle John had told her that the Mexicans and the Irish—her Irish family in particular—were related in ways deeper than blood. Both groups immigrated to the United States in great numbers seeking the same things: relief from starvation and poverty, a place to raise their families and create lives that would give their children increased opportunities.

He had told her about John Riley, their ancestor who’d come from Ireland to join the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War. Seeing injustice, he switched sides to form the Saint Patrick’s Battalion and fight for Mexico. The Americans eventually caught him, branded his cheek with a “D” for “deserter.” And Mexico lost the war.

Her uncle John had encouraged her to study anthropology. On a visit here when she was seventeen, he had given her René Grousset’s classic
The Empire of the Steppes,
published in 1939. She’d become fascinated with the Bulgar tribes in southern Russia, and how the eastward and westward migrations of the steppe nomads affected developing societies in Europe, China, Central Asia, and India. Every place in the world owed its identity to the people who had moved there from somewhere else.

She’d followed her dream and majored in cultural anthropology at Brown. Instead of going straight to grad school, she’d held off. She and Peter couldn’t afford two tuitions at once, so he’d gotten his law degree first.

Then Jenny was born. Julia never stopped reading and being curious about tribal movement and diasporas; when Jenny entered fourth grade and began asking questions about their family background, Julia tracked down a copy of the film about Margaret Mead and showed it to Jenny. It inspired Jenny to do a school project about Julia’s ancestors migrating from Ireland and her father’s from England.

Julia understood that the connection with Roberto had to do with the flash she’d seen in his eyes when she asked if he had children and he seemed unsure of whether to answer yes or no. He’d finally said, “Yes, a daughter,” but he looked away from Julia’s eyes the way a person does when he’s lying. She did that. She could never speak straight to anyone about Jenny.

The house was soothing. Her uncle was an academic, her aunt an actress. Graciela’s mother was Mexican, her father a native Angeleno who had run a small studio just over the mountains in North Hollywood. John and Graciela met at a beachfront bar a few miles away—John was developing the Mexican Studies program at UCLA; Graciela had been cast in a Western and was filming at Paramount Ranch.

They had both grown up in greater Los Angeles and in spite of their differences were instantly fascinated with each other. John proposed before primary photography on the film had finished; they got married in the lemon orchard, and moved into the house—Casa Riley—with his parents, living with them until they died.

This branch of the Riley family loved Spanish colonial architecture, and their house showed it. The walls were thick stucco, the arched windows too small to let in the full grandeur of the view, and the red tile floors set off the white plaster and dark wood columns and window frames. Julia’s father, William, had grown up in this house, but he’d attended Harvard, settled on the East Coast, and never really looked back. He ignored the Mexican parts of their story and focused on the Irish, living and writing in Connemara whenever he could.

Uncle John cherished local history, and over the years he and Graciela had collected many pieces from the legendary and long-lamented Malibu Potteries—the factory had existed on the beach five miles down the coast for only six years, from 1926 to 1932, before being destroyed by fire—brightly glazed tiles in the bathrooms and kitchen, bookends shaped like mischievous monks, a multicolored tiled fountain in the courtyard with a king’s head that spit a steady stream of water. Collecting such old and beautiful things had given her aunt and uncle a hobby together that made up for not having children. Yes, Graciela had actually said that.

Bonnie was now in the courtyard, lapping water from the fountain.

“Come on, girl,” Julia said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

In spite of the arthritis in her hips, Bonnie loped from the courtyard, heading left on what had become their regular route. Julia followed her; it wasn’t too difficult because she had slowed down so.

They walked down the lawn, the cultivated paradise: white roses blooming along the pathways, bordered by sweet alyssum and dark blue lobelia. Coral geraniums filled round pots made of seashells: thousands of channeled whelks per pot, patterned in unending circles. Dark pink bougainvillea cascaded over the fence by the barn, and bright green hummingbirds hovered at the deep-red flowers, darting around Julia’s head as she walked past.