“Can’t,” she says, glowering at her computer. The first draft of her book is due to her editor in a month and a half, just before I start my senior year at (terrifyingly unfamiliar) Cypress Valley High. “Rain check?”
I push up out of my chair. “Definitely. I’ve got photos to edit until then. I’ll fix us lunch before I go, okay?”
“Thanks, Lissy.” She moves to hand me my coffee mug.
“Keep it,” I tell her. “You’re on a deadline.”
elise
The park on Raspberry Street is straight out of any fanciful kid’s dreams. It’s a huge wooden castle, with slides and turrets and a drawbridge that swings creakily anytime someone runs across it. Janie is in heaven.
She’s dressed in pink: tutu, hoodie, miniature cowgirl boots, with a glittery bow pinning her wispy hair off her face. She’s the cutest—blue eyes, blond hair, perpetually golden skin—one of those kids who could be in commercials, if her equally beautiful mama was into all that.
Audrey sits on one of the benches surrounding the playground, reading from a thick textbook. She’s working on an early-childhood development degree, though with everything else she’s got going on, it’s taking her forever. She spends a few nights a week waitressing for big tips at Camembert, one of Cypress Beach’s fanciest restaurants (my mom and I have been sharing babysitting duties since we moved here), and weekday mornings, she works at the local preschool (where Janie tags along and scores a free education). Every so often, she glances up to watch her little girl take a trip down the coiled slide.
While Janie plays, I snap a million pictures. Normally, I choose inanimate objects as subjects—architecture, the seashore, and cemeteries, lately—but my niece and my dog are exceptions. Their jubilation is inspiring.
Janie scampers into the grass surrounding the playground. I follow, but at a distance, because I like to see where her imagination takes her. I snap a few shots as she stoops, teetering in her boots, to pluck a dandelion from the lawn. She examines its head, gone to seed, running a finger over the white fluff. She turns to me, holding it out. “Look, Auntie.”
I lower my camera and crouch down beside her. “These are seeds,” I say, pointing. “When the wind blows, they scatter. They make new flowers wherever they land.” I almost say new weeds but catch myself. Janie doesn’t see weeds; she sees beauty and believes in magic. “Do you know what your daddy and I used to do with these?”
She shakes her head, wide-eyed. She loves when I tell her stories about Nick.
“We’d pretend to be the wind. We’d take big breaths, then blow the seeds. But the best part is, we’d make wishes every time. Then, when the seeds made new flowers, our wishes would come true.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Want to try?”
She nods earnestly.
“Think of a wish—something really good.” I glance over at her mama and drop my voice, as if I’ve got a special secret. “Like, maybe you could wish for cookies. When I was little, I almost always wished for cookies.”
“Daddy, too?”
I have no idea what Nick wished for. I never asked, and I’ll never get to.
I swallow around the stone of regret wedged in my throat. “Yep. Daddy, too.”
“Okay,” she says. “You blow the seeds, too, Auntie.”
We scatter dandelion fluff like gusts of wind, setting countless seeds to the breeze. We make a lot of wishes.
After, we head to the bakery for drinks and cookies. Janie gives me a conspiratorial look as we walk through the glass doors, and I wink.
Van Dough’s sits in the center of town, surrounded by galleries and boutiques and touristy T-shirt shops. Cypress Beach is one of those off-the-beaten-path vacation spots frequented by Californians seeking a break from the bustle of big-city life. Though I’d never been here prior to the move, I’d formed a vague impression of its lifestyle: a charming town where the privileged flock to piss away enormous disposable incomes. It’d never occurred to me that there were actual residents in Cypress Beach, people who live in the delightful cottages and work in the restaurants and specialty shops. People with average incomes, who stroll the sidewalks year-round, like Audrey and Janie, and now, Mom and me.
Aud and I order iced teas and almond madeleines, and Janie picks a huge shortbread cookie with pink icing and sugar sprinkles. We sit on high stools at the counter that runs the length of the storefront widow, Janie in the middle, attacking her cookie.
“Unpacked yet?” Audrey asks me, breaking her madeleine in two.
“Mostly. My mom got sick of the boxes in my room and took pity on me.” In fact, she unpacked everything but my vintage camera collection, which I lovingly arranged on the shelves built into the nooks on either side of my window.
“Please tell me you repainted your walls.” Aud shudders. “Obsidian. Only you, Elise.”
“What? I am a sunny person.”
“Maybe, but you’re also into expression, and you make snap decisions, and you like to prove your point in really passive-aggressive ways.”
“I do not!” But I do, sometimes. I’m sour about the move, but I’d never complain to my mom or my sister-in-law, so I chose black paint to demonstrate my spite. Joke’s on me, though, because I’m the one who’s stuck suffering. “I picked Obsidian because I thought it’d make my bedroom seem like a darkroom.”
“But you process all your stuff digitally.” She sips her tea, raising a graceful pinky. She’s blond and blue-eyed, like Janie, and she’s got this cool, effortlessly boho style: flowy floral dresses or bell-bottomed jeans and tunics, always with silver jewelry. She never wears makeup because bare is best—she actually said that to me once, while watching me coat my lashes in mascara. “You should’ve picked yellow or aqua,” she says, like she’s studying to be an interior designer instead of a teacher.
“Or pink,” Janie says through a mouthful of cookie.
Audrey nods. “Pink would’ve been perfect. Janie and I can help you repaint, if you want.”
“No thanks. The black suits me fine. In fact, I think it offsets my sunniness.”
Aud rolls her eyes.
I’m not ready to admit I was wrong about Obsidian, though I wouldn’t mind spending the time repainting with them. Audrey and Janie have lived in Cypress Beach for the last year and a half, after a move that caught my mom and me completely by surprise. Aud grew up in the city like my brother and me; she and Nick met their freshman year of high school and were instant sweethearts. Even back then, when I was nine-ten-eleven, I recognized how in love they were. How they complemented each other.
As soon as they graduated, they announced their engagement. Audrey’s always-apathetic parents shrugged the pending nuptials off, but my mom threw a fit. It wasn’t that she didn’t love Aud—she just wanted more for Nick. Degree, career, savings account, and then marriage. He wasn’t having it, though. They argued even after the City Hall wedding, disagreements that escalated quickly and seemed infinite. Nick was eighteen, jobless and skill-less, and Aud was waiting tables at a dingy cafe in Nob Hill. They were living in his bedroom. My mom cried the day he enlisted in the army, her long-dormant fears regarding Islamic extremists reawakening.
After basic and skills training, Nick was assigned to a civil affairs brigade at Fort Bragg, and he and Audrey moved to North Carolina. They were nineteen, and she was pregnant almost immediately. A few months later, Nick deployed to Afghanistan. Aud was a mess, isolated and emotional and hormonal, and thanks in part to my alarmist mother, she was also terrified.
It was like she knew—like she sensed she’d never see him again.