Allie and Bea : A Novel Page 18

  Phyllis had been sitting on her lap, purring, but the constant twists and turns must have been making the cat carsick. She pinned her ears back along her head and slithered under the seat.

  “Whoa!” Allie said, feeling and sounding like a kid. “Look at that bridge!”

  A mile or so up the road the highway briefly morphed into a bridge with high steel arches of suspension underneath. To span what, Allie couldn’t see.

  “I can’t look at that bridge!” Bea barked. It was the first Allie had realized Bea was not enjoying the scene with her. “I can’t look at anything. I have to look at the road in front of us so I don’t drive us right off the edge of a cliff to our untimely deaths.”

  Before Bea could even finish the sentence the road performed an amazingly tight hairpin curve, turning directly away from the ocean, then bending at a wild angle to face it again. Allie watched Bea’s strained face for a moment. Then she looked around to take in the view.

  That’s when she saw it. A cop car. Well, a cop SUV. It was four cars back, but it was following.

  “Uh-oh,” Allie said.

  “Uh-oh what? Don’t say uh-oh unless you mean it! I’m seeing enough cause for panic without your help!”

  As she spoke, Bea instinctively braked. The van slowed to a crawl. The car behind them honked.

  “Don’t stop!” Allie shouted.

  “Well, you’re telling me there’s something wrong! I don’t know what it is yet!”

  “It’s behind us. There’s a cop back there.”

  Bea breathed in silence for a moment, and marginally accelerated. “What kind of cop? Sheriff? Highway Patrol?”

  “I don’t know. It’s too far back to see what it says on the side. I just know it’s black and white and has a light bar on top.”

  “Well, if it’s too far away for us to read the writing on it, maybe the reverse is true.”

  “We need to find a place to pull off.”

  “There’s no place to pull off!” Bea screeched. Then, seeming to achieve better control of her nerves—or at least her voice—she added, “In case you hadn’t noticed.”

  Allie knew they had a potential problem, and that it would play out fast. Bea was driving far too slowly, holding up a line of cars behind them with her terror. Several posted signs had announced the law: slower traffic was required to use turnouts. Bea had driven right by the signs—and the turnouts—as if she hadn’t noticed them. If they failed to turn out at the next opportunity, in full view of the cop, that was a citation-worthy infraction. If Allie carefully instructed Bea to turn out, and she did, the cars behind them would pass. Including the cop car. Whose cop driver would then get a good look at the van as he drove by.

  Allie glanced desperately over her shoulder, but they had rounded a curve that obscured all but the car directly behind them.

  She looked forward again and saw a dirt driveway. It was on the ocean side, guarded by a tall, wide, and ornate wrought iron gate. As luck would have it, the gate was standing open.

  “Pull in here!” Allie shrieked.

  Bea jumped, and the nose of the van swerved with her panic, but she did as she was told—even though it involved pulling across the southbound traffic lane at a blind curve. She just dove in and did it, and nobody came around the curve driving south.

  The driveway led sharply downhill, and the van picked up speed and bounced violently on the rutted dirt.

  “I’m not sure I have the suspension for—” Bea began. But the road got rougher, and Bea had to give all her attention to braking to a full stop.

  Allie craned her neck to look back at the road. It was gone. The road was out of view from their current location. And, thankfully, they were out of view of the road.

  They sat still a moment, breathing. Allowing the moment of panic to pass.

  The vista of the ocean from their high perch was so overwhelming, so all-encompassing, that it took Allie a few seconds to notice there was a house just a few dozen yards down. It wasn’t the house Allie might have expected in such a lavish location. It was fairly small and made of dark-brown, weathered wood. Funky. Almost poor-looking, except in light of its surroundings.

  “I think we lost him,” Allie said.

  “Well, great.” But it sounded sarcastic. “That’s just great. Now we’re on private property. I’m sure the owner will call the cops. Nice to know there’s one so close by to answer the call.”

  “You worry too much. We’ll just turn around and—”

  A knock on the passenger window near her ear made Allie jump so hard and so suddenly that she felt as though she might leave her body behind.

  A man stood outside the window. He looked to be in his fifties, with a porkpie hat and a creased face that looked both impassive and sad.

  “Can I help you ladies?” the man asked through the glass.

  “I’m no good at these things,” Bea hissed. “I freeze up. This was your idea. You fix it.”

  Allie took a deep breath, smiled at the face outside the window, and opened the passenger door. She stepped out of the van and into the dirt. Into the ocean breeze. The place felt like heaven, like a place you might conjure up in a guided meditation, but Allie had no time to focus on that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is obviously private property. It was all my fault. It was totally my mistake. My grandmother was driving, and I looked over and I saw her start to nod off, and it scared me, because this is not the place you want to fall asleep while you’re driving.”

  “Well, no place really is.” His voice sounded flat. Deadpan. As if he could hardly muster the energy needed to participate in the conversation. “Granted, this place is worse than most. And there’s nowhere to pull over for miles.”

  “Right! My point exactly. So I saw this chance to pull off the road and I told her to take it. But this is your house. Our mistake. Sorry. We’ll just get out of your way.”

  The man rubbed his chin for a moment. As if Allie’s simple offer to leave required mulling over. He had a soul patch—a tiny, beard-like rectangle of facial hair under his lower lip. Both it and his immense and shaggy eyebrows were blond, shot through with gray.

  “She can take a nap here if she needs to. Don’t want you two going off the road.”

  Allie breathed deeply. They were no longer in trouble. She could stop being afraid.

  “That’s very nice of you. Thanks.”

  “No problem. If you need anything, I’ll be in the sculpture garden.”

  “Sculpture garden?”

  The man pointed. Maybe words were too much trouble. He raised a hand laden with heavy silver rings and indicated a gate to the right of the house.

  He walked away.

  Allie jumped back into the van.

  “Pull over there,” she said to Bea, pointing. “Behind those bushes. Just on the off chance that cop comes back wondering where we went.”

  “Wait. What are we doing?”

  “He said we could stay.”

  “Stay? What do you mean, stay? Stay how long? Why would he say that? He must be some kind of weirdo. Who tells some strangers off the highway they can stay?”

  “Will you please relax? I told him you were falling asleep on the road. He said you could take a nap here before you try to drive on. He just doesn’t want us driving off the edge of the cliff.”

  “Oh,” Bea said. She sounded disappointed to have to admit the man was likely only being kind.

  Bea looked again at the spot Allie had indicated, well concealed behind heavy brush. Then she shifted the van into gear and slowly, carefully drove there. It was shady in that spot, which Allie thought was extra nice, and the view of the ocean was astounding. Bea shifted into “Park” and shut off the engine. The silence was strangely complete. Just a light whistle of wind.

  “Well,” Bea said. “You’re getting to be quite the experienced liar, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Allie said. “That’s unfortunate. I was just thinking about that myself.”

  A
llie listened to Bea snore for maybe five minutes. Maybe ten.

  She didn’t know why Bea needed a nap. It had been a made-up story about her falling asleep on the road. Besides, it was still morning. They’d driven barely a couple of hours since leaving Cambria. Still, there was no doubt that those two hours had taken a lot out of Bea.

  Allie couldn’t warm up to the idea of a nap.

  She let herself out of the van and stood outside in the sun and wind for a moment, staring. Being hundreds of feet over the ocean made the view stretch out impossibly far, as though Allie could see to the edges of the earth. Or, at least, halfway to faraway lands.

  She sighed, then headed for the gate the man had pointed out. It was heavily grown with ivy. Allie had to brush tendrils of green leaves out of the way to open the gate and move through it.

  On the other side, Allie saw a zoo of rust-colored wrought iron animals. Life-size whales and dolphins surfaced out of the grass. Long-legged seabirds stood with wings spread, as if just touching down. Coyotes and mountain lions paced in between iron trees and oversize flowers.

  In the middle of it all, the man stood wearing a welder’s mask and working on a statue of a woman. More specifically, on her hair. She had amazing hair, that iron woman. Long and curly, separated into coiling strands by the wind. Or so the sculptor had made it seem.

  For a few minutes she watched him adding strands to that astonishing head of iron hair.

  Then he stopped, turned off his welding torch. Lifted the face shield of his mask. He noticed Allie there. Allie could see him notice her. See his roving gaze stop on her. He raised one hand faintly in recognition.

  Allie walked closer.

  “I hope it’s okay that I’m here,” she said. “You said if I needed anything. But I don’t. I just got tired of watching my grandmother sleep. And I wanted to see the sculpture garden.”

  “No worries,” he said, setting the torch in the grass.

  Allie moved in another step or two. She didn’t know this man. Bea was right about that. But the statue was drawing her in. And besides, she was strangely sure this man did not have the inclination—or the energy—to cause her trouble.

  “I love her hair,” Allie said. She waited, but the man did not reply. “Is she a real person? Inspired by one, I mean.”

  For a long set of moments, no words were spoken. Allie thought her question did not warrant a reply in her host’s mind.

  Then, barely above a whisper, he said, “My wife.”

  “Oh. Good. Got it. She must love that. I mean . . . does she? Does she like it? Does she think it looks like her?”

  The man lifted the heavy mask off his head and set it in the grass. Then he turned to look at Allie. For the count of three or four, his gaze burned into hers, their eyes remaining locked. Then he looked off toward the ocean.

  “She left me.” Surprisingly, his voice rang out strong.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “That came out wrong,” he said, still gazing out to the horizon. “I don’t mean she left me as in she walked out on me. I mean she left all of this. Everybody and everything. She left the world.”

  Allie thought she followed his meaning, but didn’t feel sure enough to speak.

  “She died,” he said a moment or two later. “It’s still hard for me to say that.”

  “I’m so sorry. How long has it been?”

  “Thirty-seven days.”

  “Wow. That’s not much time to get used to a thing like that.”

  “No.”

  For a long minute or two he said no more. He was eyeing the statue now. Critically. Not as though he didn’t like it. More as though it needed something else to be okay, but he couldn’t pin down what. Then he shifted his eyes to Allie’s face again.

  “Where are my manners? Lemonade?”

  “Thank you,” Allie said. “That would be very nice.”

  The man disappeared into the house. Allie wasn’t sure if she had been intended to follow. But she didn’t feel comfortable going into a strange house with a strange man, so she chose to believe he had meant for her to wait.

  She wandered among the sculptures, staring into the tiny, knowing eyes of the dolphins and whales. Their bodies had been formed with long, flowing strips of iron with plenty of air in between. Allie could see the ocean right through their massive forms, which seemed appropriate.

  Allie walked up to the man’s iron wife. She stood with her arms extended, open wide, as if to embrace the world. Her head was thrown back into the wind. She looked blissful. Allie wondered how it would feel to approach life that way. She wondered if it was even possible to do that while you were still alive. Maybe you had to wait until you’d left the earth and someone immortalized you in iron.

  A movement caught Allie’s eye, and she looked over to see a glass of lemonade extended in her direction.

  “Thank you,” she said, and took it. “Was she really like this?”

  She expected him to ask for a definition of “this.” He didn’t.

  “No. She was much more.”

  They stared at her in silence for a moment.

  “Jackson,” the man said.

  “Allie.”

  “And this is Bernadette.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Not nearly as sorry as I am. But I had thirty-three good years with her, and that’s not nothing. That’s worth some gratitude.”

  Allie sipped the lemonade. It was surprisingly tart, but still good. It tasted like it had been made with honey instead of sugar. But she would deal with that.

  “Is this what you do for a living?” she asked.

  Jackson laughed. “Hardly. I’m retired.” For a moment she thought he had no plans to say more. “I wish I was a retired sculptor. I’d like to go back and rewrite my history.”

  Allie watched his face in the silence. He looked as though he might be trying to do just that.

  “But you can’t undo the past. No, I was in finance. For a very long time. Decades. One day I woke up and realized none of it was real.”

  “None of . . . what? Finance? Finance seems pretty real.”

  “Well, it’s not. Let me tell you. It’s not. It’s just a value we agree to put on things. It used to be numbers on a piece of paper. Now it’s numbers in digital memory.”

  “But the numbers represent real money. Right?”

  “There is no real money. Not anymore. The banks just make it up. We just create these numbers, more and more with every year that goes by. We use the numbers to keep some people up and other people down. Used to be there was a gold standard, but you’re too young to remember that. The government used to own gold, and paper money represented it. But what does it represent now?”

  “I don’t know,” Allie said, not sure whether or not she was listening to a reliable narrator. “What does it represent?”

  “Whatever the people in power want it to. I had to get away and work with something real. I had to live in a place nature made, and use my hands to create something that isn’t about to turn to dust.”

  He looked into Allie’s eyes briefly, and made a conversational turn she could almost see coming. She didn’t know where they were headed, but they were departing their current location. She had heard as much of his inner thoughts as he planned to reveal.

  “So where are you and your grandmother headed?”

  “Just . . . up the coast. We haven’t really talked about how far we’ll go.”

  “How much time do you have?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. We don’t really know. How far can you go?”

  “Just about to the Canadian border. And I would recommend it.”

  “That sounds like a nice adventure. But my grandmother doesn’t have the nerves for this coast route.”

  “It’s not quite this hairy all the way up. It is in a lot of places. Not straight through. I think she’ll get used to it as she goes.”

  “Maybe,” Allie said. But somehow she didn’t think so. “So y
ou can drive all the way to Canada on this road?”

  “Yes and no. North of California it turns into the 101. It’s not all on the coast. And you don’t exactly drive to the Canadian border. Because it’s in the middle of the Puget Sound. You can go up to this place called Cape Flattery. Nice up there. You have to walk out to it on this series of boardwalks. Native land. That’s the northwest tip of the U.S., right there. Or you can stop someplace like Port Angeles and take the ferry over to Canada.”

  “We don’t have passports. I mean, not with us.” Part of her felt she shouldn’t speak for Bea. Another, bigger, part of her felt it was a pretty safe bet.

  “To Cape Flattery, then. That’s the best of the coast.”

  “That would be a great adventure. Thing is, my grandmother’s not the adventurous type.”

  “Up to you to wake her up, then. Figuratively speaking.” Then he turned abruptly toward the house. “You can just leave the glass on the table.” With a flip of his head he indicated an iron table on his patio.

  Then he was gone. Back inside his home.

  Allie sipped the tart lemonade and wondered how many times Jackson and Bernadette had sat at that iron table. Maybe eating dinner, or drinking tea, or watching the sun set over the dark blue horizon.

  Then she wondered what he would do without that, now that she was gone.

  When that proved too sad, she wondered how she would talk Bea into driving up the coast all the way to Cape Flattery. By the time she arrived at the inevitable conclusion that she probably couldn’t, that it was impossible, the strain had caught up with Allie, and a nap sounded like a good idea after all.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Spray Paint, and the Stretching of Worlds

  Allie woke to a strange hissing sound. She blinked and looked around.

  She was on the pool float in Bea’s van, with Phyllis sleeping heavily on her chest. Bea hadn’t bothered to draw the front curtains, probably because they were parked up against a thicket of impenetrable bushes. Which is how Allie knew they were still at Jackson’s house.

  She sat up, trying to avoid upsetting the cat in the process but failing. She rubbed her eyes.

  She stepped out of the back door of the van to investigate that sound—and found herself face to face with Bea and an actively spraying can of spray paint.