Slowly she got out of bed, her right side aching a bit. She combed her hair in the dresser mirror, thinking that she should tell her parents she’d finally gotten in touch with Carlynn Shire. They would love to hear that she and the healer were becoming friends, and that Carlynn would soon be working with Mara in earnest, for whatever that was worth.

Slipping on her sandals, she walked from her bedroom to the kitchen.

“That smells so good, Mom,” she said.

“I thought you might like some soup, even though it’s warm outside,” her mother said.

“You’re exactly right,” Joelle said, leaning against the breakfast bar. “My stomach still feels a bit queasy.”

Her father came up behind her and put his arm around her waist. “I’ve been thinking, Shanti,” he said. “Good and good and good can’t possibly equal bad.”

“What do you mean?” she asked him.

“You’re a good person,” he said. “And so is Liam, and so is Mara. There’s no way something bad can come from anything the three of you do.”

She was touched by his rationale, and she rested her head on his shoulder. “You’re so sweet, Daddy,” she said. “I’m glad you guys are here.”

Her father looked at her mother. “Hey,” he said, “remember Shanti’s cypress in Big Sur?”

“Yes, of course!” her mother said. “I’d forgotten all about that.” She looked at Joelle. “Do you remember? You’re supposed to take a cutting from it for each child you have. You know, plant a new tree for the new baby.”

She knew what they were talking about: the Monterey cypress planted on top of her placenta. To be honest, though, she didn’t recall anyone ever talking about taking a cutting from it to plant a tree for a new baby.

“I don’t have to bury the placenta under it, do I?” She tried to keep the teasing tone out of her voice, but wasn’t sure she had succeeded. She decided she would wait a while before admitting to them that she’d contacted the healer. She could only handle so much of her parents’ eccentricities at one time.

“No, of course not,” her father said. “We’ll go down and get you a cutting from it.”

“She really should get it herself,” her mother argued.

“You guys are too much.” Joelle laughed. “Is the soup ready yet?”

As she lay in bed that night, Joelle found herself thinking of Big Sur and the Cabrial Commune. It was more the smell of her mother’s vegetable soup than the discussion about the cypress that brought the memories to mind, and she felt a yearning to go back there, to the place she’d spent her first ten years of life. The troubles of the outside world had been nonexistent there, and the world inside the commune consisted only of friends and forest and fog. It was the place where her father and the midwife, Felicia, had taken the time to dig a hole and plant a cypress to ensure her future. She knew exactly where her cypress was planted—near the northwestern corner of the cabin that served as the schoolhouse. Each of the kids who’d been born at the commune knew which cypress was theirs, and all mysticism aside, it had been a pretty nice custom.

She’d been to the Big Sur area several times in the last twenty-four years, but never to Cabrial. Rusty had shown no interest in visiting the place where she’d grown up, and each time they drove down Highway One to Big Sur, she would pass the dirt road leading to the commune with an unspoken longing.

Maybe, after she had the baby, she would go.







26






San Francisco, 1959



“SHE’S MY RIGHT ARM,” LLOYD PETERSON SAID, HIS HAND ON Lisbeth’s shoulder. “I’m not sure if I can get along without her that long.”

He was looking across the reception desk at Gabriel, who had come to the office as they were closing up to plead with Lloyd to let Lisbeth take a vacation. Lisbeth had already told Gabriel she couldn’t possibly take a whole week away from the office in the middle of the summer, when she was the only girl working, but Gabriel was not one to give up easily.

“You need a break,” he’d told her as they walked back to his place from the cinema the night before. “You work too hard.” They’d just seen Some Like it Hot, during which Gabriel had whispered to her that he’d take her over Marilyn Monroe any day. Those flattering words were still on her mind as she listened to Lloyd and Gabriel’s amiable argument over the possibility of her taking some time off. He wanted to go to the coastal town of Mendocino with her for a week’s vacation. Although Lisbeth longed for a week alone with Gabriel, she knew Lloyd couldn’t spare her. Still she decided to let the two men—the two old friends and tennis partners—duke it out.

“Let’s talk about this over a beer,” Gabriel finally said to Lloyd, who nodded in agreement, and the two of them left her alone to close up the office.

Lisbeth had to smile as the men walked out the door. She doubted Gabriel would win this one, but it was sweet of him to try.

She turned on the radio on her desk, as she always did when she had the office to herself. Switching the station from Lloyd’s favorite, where the Kingston Trio was singing “Tom Dooley,” to the Negro station Gabriel had introduced her to, where the music was earthier and made her want to dance, she set about filing the charts that had been used that day.

Gabriel had become almost fanatical about wanting to take a vacation in Mendocino. He’d been talking about it ever since Alan and Carlynn honeymooned there after their wedding nearly two years earlier. They’d raved about the peace and quiet and the natural beauty of the location, saying how perfect it was for a romantic getaway. It would be different for her and Gabriel, though, Lisbeth knew. Whenever they stayed in a hotel, they had to get two separate rooms. Someday, Gabriel promised her, they would be married. She now wore a spectacular diamond and sapphire ring on her left hand, but they had not yet set a date. She trusted their relationship, its depth and its love, but she knew Gabe still harbored the fear that marriage to him would cost her more than he was worth.

She’d certainly thought about the price she was paying for being with Gabriel. She had not visited Cypress Point since Carlynn’s wedding, and she missed the mansion and the view from the terrace in a way that could cause her actual physical pain. Sometimes at night, she yearned for her old bedroom, where the open windows let in the sound of the waves slapping against the rocky shore.

She thought, too, about the financial cost a marriage to Gabriel would mean for her. She would lose a fortune if she was cut out of her mother’s will. That only meant, she tried to reason with herself, that she and Gabriel would live like most couples, dependent on only themselves and their own resources to get by. They would never be rich, but between her small salary and Gabriel’s larger one, they would be in better shape than many people they knew. She should need nothing more than that.

It was not fair, though. Not fair that Carlynn, who had gotten the best of everything as a child, should still receive it now, as an adult. It was a struggle for Lisbeth not to shift the anger she felt toward her mother onto her sister’s shoulders. When Carlynn would return from a visit to the mansion, Lisbeth could barely look her in the eye, she was so jealous. She knew that her twin fought with Delora to allow Lisbeth to visit Cypress Point, but there was no way she could win that battle. Delora had all the power.

Although Lisbeth hadn’t set foot in the mansion in two years, Carlynn made regular trips to see their mother, whose eyesight was worsening and who was developing other aches and pains as well, even though she was only in her fifties. Carlynn would be upset after those visits, because although she possessed the ability to heal total strangers, she seemed unable to rid her mother of her ailments.

Carlynn was upset over other matters, as well, Lisbeth knew. After two years of marriage, she was still not pregnant, and Lisbeth heard the frustration in her sister’s voice every month when she’d call to announce she had, once again, gotten her period.

Lisbeth, though, had decided she didn’t want children, and she thought Gabriel seemed relieved by that decision. He still worried about how their half-white, half-Negro children might fit into the world, but Lisbeth’s reasoning went even deeper than that. Her own childhood had been so unhappy, and her memories of herself as a little girl so excruciating, that she couldn’t bear the thought of watching a child of her own endure anything that might be hurtful. She still used a diaphragm to keep from getting pregnant, but Carlynn had told her that within a year or two, birth control pills would be on the market. Lisbeth had kept her joy over that news to herself out of sensitivity to her sister, who might never need a pill to avoid getting pregnant.

Little Richard was singing about Miss Molly when Lloyd and Gabriel surprised her by returning to the office. Lloyd wore a look of defeat on his face, but Lisbeth knew him well enough to see the smile behind it.

“Your boyfriend drives a hard bargain,” Lloyd said to her, and she looked at Gabriel.

“We’re going?” she asked, surprised.

“This Saturday,” Gabriel said. “For an entire week. I already called to book two rooms for us at the same inn where Carlynn and Alan stayed. Right on a bluff over the water.”

Lisbeth walked around the desk to give each man a hug. She could hardly wait to call Carlynn to tell her the news.

Mendocino was a small, stunning village, perched on a bluff high above the Pacific, and in some ways it reminded her of the area around Cypress Point. As they drove into the town in Gabriel’s open convertible with its fins and whitewall tires, she wondered if that might have been the reason he had so wanted to bring her here. Maybe it was his attempt to give her back a bit of what she’d lost.