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Pom-poms flew into the air and the university cheerleaders tumbled across the wooden floor. The crowd cheered and stomped their feet so loudly you could barely hear the time buzzer. Players and coaches swarmed all over one another, and a teammate ripped Cale’s jersey in two and ran around him, holding the torn piece with his number, twenty-three, high in the air. They shouted, “Banning! Banning! Banning!”
Victor didn’t know he was smiling. He felt something he couldn’t ever remember feeling for Rudy. Maybe a hundred feet stood between Cale and him. They hadn’t spoken since Christmas. He placed one foot in front of the other, closing the distance.
“Cale!” An attractive young blond girl raced down from the bleachers and across the court, her ponytail flying, her long tanned legs running straight toward the knot of Loyola players. She wore a Mount Saint Mary’s sweater and flip skirt, and flung her arms around Cale, who caught her and spun her around, laughing as she kissed his cheeks.
Victor stopped, unable to move forward. Another girl he can throw his future away on. Cale hadn’t learned a thing from last year, from any years. Victor turned away in disgust and walked out of the gym without looking back. He wasn’t there when Cale set his roommate’s girlfriend down and tugged affectionately on her ponytail. And when Cale slung a towel around his sweaty neck and looked around the gym for the one person in his life to whom winning was everything, Victor was already on his way home.
CHAPTER 7 (#u72d2fca6-1860-5aae-a9ac-956cb623ea69)
The Island Theater was housed inside the old casino and always busy on the weekends, so Laurel studied the coming attractions on posters lit with small strings of Hollywood lights. A group of girls her age joined the back of the line, chattering. Shannon worked part-time at her mother’s shop, so Laurel stepped out of line and moved toward them, then waited for a pause in their conversation. She tapped Shannon on the shoulder. “Hi.”
“Laurel. Hi. I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
“I’m home for spring break.”
Shannon introduced her, then said, “The town’s going to be really crazy. Spring break always is. The beach gets packed. The bars. Guys and girls all over the place. Parties in the hotels. It’s pretty wild. You haven’t been here for Easter yet, have you?”
Laurel shook her head. “I’m not here much anyway, because of school. Just some weekends and holidays.”
“Laurel already graduated.” Shannon explained to the other girls. “She goes to cooking school in LA. What’s that place called again?”
“Pacific Culinary Institute.” The school was one of only three in the country that offered Cordon Bleu courses and certificates. The classes were small, tuition steep, and they accepted only one out of every few hundred applicants. The administrators and internationally famous instructors there would have cringed at the phrase “cooking school.” One of them could easily have waved a boning knife under poor Shannon’s nose and said, “Culinary institute. Cooking school is for the people who work at Denny’s.”
“You want to be a cook?” one of the girls asked, as if Laurel were nuts.
“I want to be a professional chef.”
“Like the Galloping Gourmet?” One of them giggled.
Shannon gave the girl a pointed look, but Laurel laughed. “Graham Kerr is a good chef.”
“Why would you want to be a chef? You’ll have to work in a hot kitchen, just to cook food for other people? Why not just be a housewife?”
“Ouch!” someone said. “That wasn’t nice, Karen.”
“Well, I mean, isn’t that like being some kind of glorified slave?”
Shannon punched Karen in the arm. “I wouldn’t talk. You said you wanted to be a nurse. I’d rather cut vegetables and take out the garbage than change sheets, give sponge baths, and clean bedpans.”
“You don’t meet cute doctors in a restaurant kitchen.” Clearly Karen had a plan.
At the box office, Laurel paid her admission and stepped aside, waiting for them. They bought their tickets, then the girls looked at her and at Shannon.
“Well, we’re going inside now,” one of them said.
“Do you mind if I tag along?” Laurel spoke to Shannon. A couple of the girls exchanged strained looks. Karen stared pointedly at Shannon. It was one of those long moments of telling silence and Laurel felt awful, but she kept a plastic smile on her face.
“Sure,” Shannon said without much enthusiasm. “Come on.”
The lobby was crowded and the concession counter hummed with activity, surrounded with the crackle of popcorn popping, the hollow rattle of ice in an empty cup, and the whirring of the drink dispenser. It smelled like popcorn and hot dogs and Laurel was hungry almost instantly. A pack of local boys joined them and swept the girls toward the counter. Laurel ordered Coke, popcorn, and Butterfingers, and when she turned around, the two groups had all paired off. Five boys. Five girls. And her. While the others were talking, she edged her way to Shannon and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. You didn’t know we were meeting them.”
“I’ll just ease away. I don’t mind sitting alone,” she lied.
“No,” Shannon grabbed her arm and turned to her boyfriend. “Jake? This is Laurel Peyton. I work for her mom.”
He seemed genuinely nice and before she could sneak away, he introduced Laurel to the other boys. She made some lame excuse and turned to leave, but they stopped her.
“You can’t sit alone.”
The girls weren’t happy. She wasn’t alone, but a few minutes later, when the heavy red curtains parted and the lights dimmed, she decided even sitting alone would have been better than sitting in the middle of a long row of seats with snuggling couples on either side of her.
M*A*S*H flashed on the screen, and by the time Sally Kellerman was Hot Lips, the couple on her right was making out. Laurel set her Coke down and bumped into Karen’s knee. “Sorry.”
A boy’s hand closed over her thigh. Karen’s boyfriend had the wrong girl’s leg. She removed his hand, but they shifted positions and now were leaning on her arm. On her other side, Shannon was locked in a long, deep kiss with her boyfriend. Hunched in the center of her seat, surrounded by lovers, Laurel shoveled handfuls of popcorn into her mouth, ignoring the soft whispers and moans next to her.
The film suddenly fluttered over the screen, then snapped off. The audience groaned and everyone sat in the dark. The lights came on and the manager came out to a round of boos. “Sorry. Sorry. The film’s broken, so there will be free passes for everyone at the box office. But don’t leave your seats. We will be showing Love Story.”
The audience clapped and whistled as the lights dimmed and Ryan O’Neal stood on the huge screen. Both Laurel and her mother had watched every single episode of Peyton Place, her mom always joking that they had to be loyal to the name.
Laurel settled into her seat with the jumbo Coke, the tub of popcorn, and the huge yellow box of Butterfingers to hold on to instead of a boyfriend’s arm. Instead of being in a romance, she would watch one, forced by lousy luck to dream of happily-ever-afters.
The camera panned in on O’Neal, sitting alone in the bleachers as he said, “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died.”
It seemed a cliché, a man sitting at a bar drowning his troubles. But bars supplied the perfect environment to beat yourself up for making stupid mistakes, so Jud was living the cliché in a small beachside bar in Avalon that night. The bartender whipped through drink orders and Three Dog Night blasted from the requisite jukebox in a smoky corner. Deep in the recesses of the place, couples played pool and drank.
In under an hour, the place had swelled with people until the noise level measured many decibels. Jud sipped the foam off a new beer, trying to shut out the obnoxious noise from a nearby table, where a group of college guys from University of California at San Diego were slamming back shooters and singing their college fight song in a key that didn’t exist. They acted as if the world was theirs. That kind of partying had lost its appeal before his third year of college. He felt suddenly old. Today he’d hounded after a young girl who was jailbait, and he’d managed to convince his grandfather he was a first-class fuckup. This morning he’d thought the world was his. Now he felt like the world had him by the balls.
Right after he’d left the company offices with his crushed pride and his tail between his legs, he’d wondered bitterly if what happened this morning was another way for his grandfather to manipulate him. Victor was happiest when he stirred up trouble. But now, when he wasn’t angry anymore, Jud knew Victor didn’t play games with his business deals.
Earlier, Jud had called his connections and scheduled a lunch for the next week, but he felt skittish about it. As much as he’d hated to hear the truth from his grandfather’s mouth, those men would not have welcomed him into their business ventures. He had been so full of himself, so glad to be accepted, he couldn’t see their motive anymore than he could see that that girl today was under twenty. Seventeen? Could have been real trouble there.
He stared into the bottom of his beer glass, still chewing over the mysteries of Victor versus Marvetti until he decided none of it was going to solve itself tonight. He scanned the place. Bars never seemed to change much, still smoky, still smelly, still one of the few places on earth where you could be in a crowd and feel completely alone. The empty summer house on the cove held more appeal for him than a smoke-filled bar, where too many college kids on spring break needed to let loose. He downed his beer, paid, and went outside, where he could breathe again.
It was dark and cool in the shadow of the door, and the air tasted salty with the water just a hundred feet away. Neon light from the beer signs in the front window fell onto the bricked street like brightly colored snakes. Along the beach, palm trees cast shadows that looked like giant forearms with splayed hands, and beyond, the water was cavern black out into the harbor, until the running lights flickered in a staggered chain from where the weekend boat traffic moored. The smell of the tide made it seem like summer, and it was warm for April, maybe sixty-five degrees.
There were no cars about, only the occasional electric hum of a golf cart or the clicking spokes of a bicycle. On a bench next to the sand, a couple made out. Jud lit a cigarette, took a drag, then remembered he was going to quit. He took another hit then crushed it out with his foot.
At the north point, where the street ended with the old casino, people spilled out from the movie theater. Ahead of the crowd, a girl walked faster than most, wearing a car coat, her hands shoved deep in the pockets. She had great legs. A group of kids sped past in two golf carts, shouting and waving as they passed by her. She waved and watched them disappear, then she shoved her hands back in her coat pockets and walked on, staring down at the ground as she passed under a streetlamp.
In the warm light, her brown hair brushed her shoulders; her face was distinct and familiar, because she looked so much like Jacqueline Bisset. It was Jailbait, and this was his chance to apologize, but he hesitated. The bar door swung open and almost clipped him, forcing him back and into the shadows. Jukebox music blared into the night and the UCSD guys stumbled out like a family of apes, laughing loudly and shoving one another around.
They began to giggle and took him back to those times when he acted like an asshole for fun. In a haze of mind-numbing tequila they turned and immediately zeroed in on Jailbait. She kept walking, sidestepping away from them and nearer the sand. To her credit she looked straight ahead as they surrounded her. “Excuse me,” she said too brightly and squeezed between two of them.
“Hey, there, sweet thing.” The group tightened their circle around her.
“Please. You’re drunk.” She tried to push through them.
“Come here.” One who looked like a linebacker roughly pulled her against him. His friends whistled and cheered.
“Stop it!” She pushed at his chest as the huge jerk tried to kiss her.
Jud stepped away from the building. “Let her go.”
“Please stop. Please … Don’t!” She sounded terrified.
Jud gripped the guy’s shoulder. “You. Now. Leave the girl alone.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure thing, asshole.”
Jud grabbed his arm and jerked it away from her. She stumbled backward, out of the guy’s reach, and fell down.
Jud spun around … right into the guy’s fist.
“Get him.” His friends chanted. “Get him!” They formed a circle around Jud, who ducked a punch and looked for Jailbait. He threw wild punches and twisted out of their grip twice, then one of them pinned his arms back. “I got him! I got him!” It took two of them to keep him pinned while they punched him. Jud could taste the blood in his mouth. His eye hurt. He blinked, trying to see her, but the edges of his vision blurred. The linebacker walked straight toward him, laughing, fists up, and beat the hell out of him.
CHAPTER 8 (#u72d2fca6-1860-5aae-a9ac-956cb623ea69)
Laurel sank down next to her dreamboat as he lay unconscious on the pavement. One eye was already swelling. He had a cut on his cheek, and both his nose and mouth were bleeding. “Please wake up. Please.” The streets were empty, but she could hear the distant footsteps of the bullies, who ran away down a side street after she’d screamed for them to stop, then screamed over and over.
“Help! Someone help! Please …” She lifted his head off the hard brick into her lap. “Please wake up. Can’t you hear me?” Where was everyone? The doors to the bar were closed. They probably didn’t even know there had been a fight. It was eerie, such silence in the aftermath of something so terribly violent.
He groaned, then winced and slowly opened his eyes.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry. Can you move? How badly are you hurt? What can I do?” Her words all came out in a rush.
He grunted something she couldn’t understand, swore, then rolled out of her lap onto his hands and knees. Silent, his breathing labored, he shook his head and tried to get up.
“Here. Let me help you.”
“No!” He jerked his arm away from her and stumbled to his feet, weaving slightly. “No.”
“Please. You’re hurt because you tried to help me.”
His face was beaten and flushed and he looked like he might fall down. “I’m fine.” He spit blood, then swiped at his mouth and stared down at the blood on his hand with a disgusted look.
“You need a doctor.”
“What?” He looked up again, scowling at her from the one eye that wasn’t swelling.
“I’ll call a doctor.”
He turned away like someone embarrassed. There were leaves and dirt on his back, so she brushed off his shoulder. “Jesus,” he scowled at her. “Just go home. You shouldn’t be out walking around town this late. You’re asking for trouble.”
“I was walking home.”
He pressed his hand to the cut on his mouth and stepped away from her. “Then go home.”
“This wasn’t my fault. You can’t blame me.”
“Go—home.”
She didn’t move.
“Go home where you belong,” he yelled at her. “Go home, little girl, and leave me the hell alone!”
His harsh expression turned blurry from her tears, and she ran—her face hot and flaming—around the corner and down the street into the small plaza by her mother’s studio and pottery shop. Laurel stood there, directionless. In front of her was the dark shop with its Closed sign hanging in the door. That sign seemed to say everything. One word that defined her life: closed. She sat down on the edge of a tiled fountain, where water spilled into a shallow pool.
Again he’d made her feel young and foolish, like some thirteen-year-old with a silly crush making a pest of herself. He called her a little girl to put her down for being seventeen—as if she could change the year she was born. And no one wanted to be twenty-one more than she did, instead of stuck in some kind of hinterland between a teenager and an adult. She didn’t belong anywhere: on this island, with those girls, in Seattle; even her age was undefined. There was a time when she could have talked about what she felt with high school friends. Now, whenever she spoke with them, scattered as they all were in colleges all over the country, there were more long silences than meaningful words. None of them knew what to say to one another anymore.
Things would have been easier, maybe, if her father were alive. Somehow she knew he could have given her the answers she needed during the moments when living became so hard and ugly. Without a dad, she felt as if she were hobbling through life on one leg, when most other people had two.
Her grandmother Julia claimed her dad had been a star and made Laurel promise to never forget. It was important to her grandmother, the star thing. At first Laurel had been too young to understand the difference between a music star and a star in the sky. To children, stars were stars. Confused, she’d asked her aunt, Evie, what stars were, one night when they were standing together outside and the night sky was filled with them. Her aunt had told her that the stars were magical things, other worlds so far away that sometimes it was impossible to believe they really existed. Laurel had been probably seven at the time, an age when she had blind faith in magical things and grew up trying to believe in fathers who were never there.
He was an image in a faded photograph, a name on a record that hung on the wall of her room. He was a star—something impossible for her to believe ever existed. And now, as she sat there feeling inconsequential, she looked up in the sky and searched those stars, wanting them to magically spell out the answers to all her most important questions, like why did people have to die? Why did life move so slowly? What was real love like? Why was she so lonely? She felt as if she were in a different dimension than everyone else and destined to watch life from outside.
Sitting on the edge of the fountain, she could see copper and silver coins sparkling back at her, the water and lights making them seem bigger than they actually were. There must have been close to a thousand forgotten wishes in the bottom of the fountain. When you didn’t believe in magical things like wishes, you never set yourself up for disappointment. You understood that all too often things looked bigger than they really were.
Laurel pulled a couple of pennies out of her pocket. Two cents. There was a joke in that somewhere. She turned her back to the fountain and closed her eyes, then tossed the pennies over her shoulder and made a wish for someone to love her.
* * *
Kathryn could hear the night frogs in the side garden through an open window in the living room, so she sat down in there with a book. It was almost eleven when Laurel came in the front door and hung up her coat. “Hi, Mom.” Exhaustion was in her voice, her shoulders sloped in defeat.
“How was the movie?”
Laurel shrugged.
“You look so pretty,” Kathryn said brightly. “I bet you turned some heads tonight.”
Her daughter looked at her as if she’d slapped her, then ran out of the room sobbing and slammed her bedroom door closed.
“What did I say wrong now?” Kathryn said to the empty room. Everything had been so much easier when Laurel only worried about a Halloween costume or a book report or if she performed some complicated ballet position correctly. In those days, Kathryn had all the right answers.
She tapped lightly on Laurel’s door. “It’s me.”
“Just leave me alone, Mom. Please.”
A blank white door stood between them, a wall of Kathryn’s wrong words and wrong choices. She heard Laurel’s muffled cries and reached for the doorknob, but a voice in her head said, Don’t barge in. She understood self-pity and despair, feeling helpless, confused, and frustrated—apparently the normal state for a mother with a teenage daughter. She sagged down into an overstuffed chair and stared at the empty hallway as if she could divine answers from there, a thread and needle for the worn and unraveling seams of their relationship.
The awful truth was that the move here had made Laurel miserable. Laurel was miserable, but Kathryn wasn’t. She liked living in Evie’s house. It was well over sixty years old, with a small floor plan, tall ceilings, crown molding, and hardwood floors. Lazy beach furniture filled the rooms—Victorian wicker, an antique French daybed, rattan—so different from Julia’s formal white furniture. There had been little color in Kathryn’s life except her own blue bedroom.
Evie had painted every room a different color. The place was all spring and sunshine, yellows and pinks. It felt like a woman’s house. Here she wanted to drink tea from a flowered mug instead of a three-hundred-year-old tea service, her mother-in-law serving her without ever asking whether she wanted the lemon and sugar.
Moving to Catalina had freed Kathryn’s spirit. But her freedom came at a price, one Laurel had paid.
Kathryn waited for the sound of crying to stop. This time she didn’t knock. Inside, a muted hanging lamp and sandalwood candles lit the room. In the corner, flat on the floor, sat Laurel’s bed, covered with an ethnic print throw and mirror-trimmed pillows from India. Evie was right. George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and the Hare Krishna who stuck carnations in your face at the airport would feel right at home in this bedroom.
