“The grove?” he asked.
I nodded.
We buried him just off our favorite path. I placed three long sticks of the type that he liked to chew on top of the grave. It was difficult to believe that he had been alive that morning and now was gone, but I knew by then that this was the nature of death. I thought that it had taken Bear a long time to steal Pal from me, but in the end, that was what he had managed to do.
It was as we walked out of the grove that I thought of thesharp knife I had used to cut seaweed from the rocks. “Bear did this,” I said, quickening my step. “Pal was trying to protect the chickens. He could have fought off that coyote if Bear hadn’t hurt him.” When I wiped at my eyes, the dirt on my hands stung them. “I hate him,” I said. The words were hot in my mouth, and I spat them out.
When we reached the coop, the basket of seaweed was where I’d dropped it and bright sunlight reflected off the knife. Amir reached the basket first and picked it up. I could not stand to see how Pal’s blood darkened the dirt in every direction. I kept my eyes instead on the knife. I reached for the basket, but Amir swung it away from me.
“Merrow,” he said gently. “Let’s change our clothes. I have an idea.”
When my eyes met his, my anger gave way to sadness. I nodded mutely.
We changed our clothes and headed down the long dirt drive that led to the road. My body felt so heavy that I had the sensation I had stepped into someone else’s—someone slower, older. I was lost in my memories of Pal. It took me a moment to realize that we were on the road walking toward Osha. When a car passed, Amir stuck out his thumb. The car sped by in a thrum of dampened music and dust. I pulled Amir onto the scrub grass off the pavement.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting us started,” he answered. His dark hair fell in his eyes.
“Started on what?”
“Wait and see.”
When the next car approached, I stepped up to the side of the road and stuck out my thumb. A man with gray hair that curled below the back of his faded cap drove the car, and a woman with a long gray braid sat beside him.
She rolled down her mud-flecked window. “Everything okay? Need a ride to town?” A Grateful Dead song was on the radio—I didn’t know which one, but I recognized Jerry Garcia’s voice from the radio station my father used to play. It was music from another time.
Amir nodded, and we climbed into the backseat. Rei took us to Osha every few months, but we had never been there by ourselves. The woman looked over her shoulder. She had a kind smile and the sight of it made me worry that tears would rise to my eyes.
“Seat belts, please,” she said. Once we had buckled ourselves in, she nodded to the man beside her and he pulled the car back onto the road. No one spoke again after that. The music changed from one Grateful Dead song to another. The road south to Osha curved toward the ocean and then away from it toward the hills and then back toward the ocean again. Clouds sat up high in the bright blue sky, so perfectly white and still it was hard to imagine they would ever break apart. I watched this all numbly.
The car stopped in front of the Osha co-op. Amir and I opened the door and climbed out.
“Thank you,” Amir said, as easily as if this were the sort of thing we did all the time.
“You got it,” the driver said, speaking for the first time. The woman just nodded at us and offered up that smile one last time and then they were off.
I looked at Amir. “Now what?”
“Are you hungry?”
I nodded. Instead of heading into the co-op, he started up the street away from the ocean. The main street in Osha ended on one end at the ocean, and on the other it climbed up the hillside, eventually forking and then forking again, growing narrower with each turn. We were unusually quiet. I was lost in thoughts of Pal and hardly noticed how far we walked. In town, houses were set on small parcels close enough for one neighbor to stand on his porch and stretch out his hand to touch his neighbor’s hand, but up on the hill the houses gathered distance between them, each one claiming a bit more land than the last. As we walked, Amir opened one house’s mailbox and then another and another. We kept walking.
Amir stopped in front of a brown-shingled house with yellow roses lining its walkway. The driveway was empty. When he opened the mailbox at the fence, I saw that it was stuffed full of mail.
“It’s not San Francisco,” he said, looking back at me. “But you wanted to see somewhere other than Horseshoe Cliff.” He headed down the driveway and disappeared behind the house. “Come on!” he called.
I was startled to hear how deep Amir’s voice sounded. Years earlier, Rei had told us about puberty, and about sex. She’d warned me that I would be shocked by my blood when I hadmy first menstruation, but when that time came, I had not been shocked. Blood was not particularly frightening to me by then. I welcomed my period as though it were an end marker to my childhood; I was ready for something more.
The back door of the house was locked. Amir bent down and lifted the doormat and laughed when he saw the key. I picked up the key and slid it into the door lock as though I’d been unlocking doors my whole life.
Inside, we found ourselves in a large kitchen. The lights were off; the house was silent. Amir walked to the sink and gulped water straight from the faucet. When he stopped, he looked at me and smiled, his chin gleaming and wet. The kitchen floor was covered with beautiful pale blue tile. I wished I were wearing socks so that I could skate on it.
The refrigerator, sadly, was empty but for the rows of condiments that lined the door. I picked out a jar with a dark green and gold label that declared itself honey mustard and proved to be delicious—sweet and spicy, just as my father used to describe me. Amir and I sat on stools at the edge of the kitchen counter and sunk our fingers into the jar until we had wiped it clean. Then he rifled through the cabinets and returned with an unopened bag of pretzels. When we finished the pretzels, Amir rolled the crinkling bag into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket.
Something knocked against the kitchen window, making our eyes widen. It was only a branch. We smiled at each other, relieved. The smile felt funny on my face, but I didn’t chase it away.
The living room had a thick gray carpet. I had never seen anything like it. I lay down and pressed my face against it, closing my eyes. I thought of Pal. When I stood, I saw that I’d left a smudge of dirt behind and felt a pang of regret.
