Part Two
Chapter Fifteen
Finally! Someone who knows the value of a dollar,” said the girl as she slid into the seat beside me. I was startled. In nearly a year of classes at San Francisco State University, few of my classmates had spoken to me. The girl registered my confused look and gestured toward the students who were filling in the rows of the lecture hall behind us. “It’s like no one has explained to them that the best seats in the house cost the same as the worst ones.”
She had a point. In many classes, I found that I was the only student who sat in the front row. I preferred it this way. When I raised my hand to speak, which was frequently, it was easy for me to pretend that I was simply conversing with my professor, and not being silently judged and scowled at by my less-eager peers. I had not made any friends, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I was there to learn.
I was acutely aware of how different I was from my classmates. I was younger than everyone I met, I had only a passing knowledge of pop culture, and I had little experience withmaking new friends. I knew that my classmates thought me strange. A toxic mixture of guilt and grief and homesickness roiled within me—but I did not cry. I was skittish, half expecting that at any moment I would hear Bear’s voice in my ear and turn to see him looming over me with knives in his eyes. Fear had turned me into a dry-eyed recluse.
College was not what I’d thought it would be.Iwas not who I’d thought I’d be.
I had thrown myself into my studies. I wrote stories, and in them the sea always appeared. It was perpetually on my mind, tugging at me as insistently as an actual tide. I was sure that I could hear the sea even when it was miles away. I held the stone Amir had sent to me at the Langfords’ in my left hand as I wrote, longhand, in my notebook.
“Veronica Quilici,” the girl beside me said.
I set down my pencil and shook her hand. “Merrow Shawe.”
“Merrow? That’s pretty.” Veronica had shoulder-length brown hair that she’d pulled back in a twisted red bandanna. Her face was round, her cheeks dimpled, and her front teeth were crowded and bulging as though elbowing each other out of the way. “You can call me Ronnie,” she said. I had the distinct sense it was the first time she was trying out this nickname. “Did you start any of the books?”
I nodded.
The class was Contemporary Women Writers, and the reading list that the professor had circulated two weeks prior to the start of the semester was comprised of seven novels. I had immediately signed all seven books out of the library and hadfinished reading the last one on the list the night before the first class.
“I read them all,” Ronnie announced. “I couldn’t wait.”
I could not help but smile. “I read them all, too.”
She looked at me in surprise and, I thought, relief. I guessed that she was thinking what I was thinking: Here, at last, was a kindred spirit. A fervent reader of books. An unapologetic front-row seat taker. Someone who looked in need of a friend.
As the professor opened the classroom door and headed toward the lectern, Ronnie leaned toward me and asked if I wanted to get coffee after class. I answered, as casually as I could, “Sure.” I was seventeen years old and I had never had a cup of coffee.
It was hard to concentrate on the lecture. Ronnie’s offer of friendship was not a small thing for me. I had spent the last year so immersed in grief that I could not imagine my way out. Rosalie had fulfilled her promise to me, helping me file for emancipation and supporting me financially as I applied for and received various scholarships. Still, I felt alone. For the first time in many years, I remembered how lonely I had been before Amir had arrived at Horseshoe Cliff. I felt returned to that place of friendlessness, except now it was exacerbated by Rei’s death, Amir’s disappearance, and how disorienting it felt to be so far from anyone or anything familiar. I walked along San Francisco’s beaches as often as I could and let the sound of the waves calm me. I had what I’d always wanted—the chance to go to college, to live in a big city, to see more of the world than one crumbling cliff—but it was not at all how I’d envisioned it.
I was not sleeping well. In my dreams, Amir and Rei stared at me and would not speak. I could not read their expressions.
I had not gone to the police or even to Doctor Clark that night a year earlier when I found Rei dead and her money gone. I drove Bear’s truck home. His bedroom door was shut when I arrived. I put his keys back in the pocket of his jacket that still hung from a chair. I went to my room and lay awake all night. The next day, Bear didn’t say anything about how I had taken his truck. I guessed alcohol had made his memory of the night hazy—or perhaps that he would rather forget the embarrassment of his little sister stealing his truck. I did not say a word all morning. There was work to be done around the farm, but I did not do it. I sat on the porch and watched the driveway, hoping that Amir would return and knowing in my heart that he would not.
Late in the afternoon, Doctor Clark arrived. I supposed I’d been waiting for him, too. Bear came out to the porch.
The doctor asked if Amir was around. “I’m afraid I have news that he should hear, too.”
“He’s working in the orchard.” The lie came easily, but I looked off into the distance to avoid meeting his eye.
Doctor Clark gave a weary sigh. “Well, you’ll tell him then, when you see him.” He explained that after Rei had not answered his calls all day, he’d checked on her and discovered that she had died in her sleep over the night.
“She wasn’t in pain, Merrow. She fell asleep and didn’t wake up. It was peaceful.”
I pressed my lips together to keep myself from crying out thetruth. I had seen Rei’s face. She had not died in peace. She had died in terror.
Doctor Clark went on. It seemed to me he was speaking as much to himself as he was to us. “When I ran into her at the co-op earlier in the week, she mentioned she’d been feeling short of breath. Dizzy. She didn’t look particularly well. I told her to go to the hospital, but she waved me off. She said it was age, pure and simple. I called on her a couple of days ago, just to check. She said she was feeling better.” He looked off in the direction of the orchard and his hangdog eyes swam. “I should have driven her to the hospital myself.”
His anguish pained me. “You did what you could,” I whispered, my voice catching on the words.
Doctor Clark returned to his car. Beside me, Bear smelled like he hadn’t bathed in a week. When the doctor’s car was halfway to the road, my brother’s fingers squeezed my wrist.
“So Rei is dead and Amir is nowhere to be found, but you’re in a big hurry to tell Doctor Clark that Amir is working in the orchard.”
I wrenched my arm from his grip and went inside without responding.
