The Last Beach Bungalow (6 page)

“Have you ever believed it?”

“I pretended to one summer at church camp when they asked everyone who considered Jesus their Lord and Savior to raise their hands one night during the campfire program. Jefferey Dobbs raised his hand next to me, so I raised mine, too.”

“It’s hard to believe it really happened.”

“But it’s such a nice story,” I said. “I love the innkeeper. I played Mary one year when we lived in Pennsylvania, and I got to wear the light blue satin headpiece, but I secretly wished I’d been the innkeeper.”

“So you like the story and that’s why you believe in God and that’s why we’ve gone to church all these years?”

“No,” I said. “I like the story and I also believe in God. But I’m not sure the story is true, and we’ve gone to church all these years mostly out of habit.”

“That’s pretty lame, Mom.”

I was about to say that I knew it was lame. I had, in fact, recently been struggling mightily with the fact that it was lame, but before I could make my confession, Jackie’s cell phone rang. I dug it out of her purse and handed it to her.

“Sweet!” she said. Then, “Are you serious?” There was a moment of silence, then she said, “Both my parents, actually.” She listened again, then said, “That’s so sweet.” And finally, “I’ll call you as soon as I get home.”

Ten minutes later, Jackie was called to an interior waiting room, and fifteen minutes after that, she went into the X-ray room. Rick stepped into the hallway to make a phone call. I picked up a battered copy of
Woman’s Day
and read about recipes for slow cooker suppers, then leafed through an old
Car and Driver.
A very large woman with a very large soda cup in her hand set down a copy of the
Beach Reporter
, our free local newspaper. I sometimes read it when I walk on the treadmill at the gym, mesmerized by poorly written stories about aging surf legends and health spa openings.

“May I look at that?” I asked.

"’S not mine,” she said. “You can do whatever you want.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I scanned the headlines—a local boy had been killed in Fallujah; a sophomore from Hermosa Beach was the backup kicker for USC’s Rose Bowl team—then I flipped inside. Someone had taken out a whole-page ad on page two. A moment after I registered the oddity of such a big ad in the
Beach Reporter
, I registered what it was: a photo of the house I had seen on Pepper Tree Lane. The elegant headline spread across the whole page:

My heart began to pound.

I glanced at the fat lady with the Coke, who had her nose buried in a
People
with George Clooney on the cover, then I ripped the page from the newspaper, folded it and tucked it into my purse, where I now had a little library of stolen print. The fat lady didn’t even flinch, but my pulse was racing.

Seconds later, Rick walked in.

“You OK?” he asked.

I shrugged, mostly to keep from squirming. I had that uncomfortable feeling I was about to be caught.

“I’ve broken three or four fingers,” he said. “She’ll be fine.”

The articles in my purse seemed like they were on fire. I could feel their heat and their danger, pressing through the leather that sat near my feet. “It’s not that,” I blurted, and the second I said it, I knew there was no going back. “It’s the house, actually. The whole thing is starting to make me kind of sick.”

“People always feel like that toward the end of a project,” Rick said. “It’s like buyer’s remorse, only ten times worse, because you’ve bought all these parts hoping they’ll add up to a whole and you’ve never built a house before so you’re not sure they’re all going to fall into place. But it will work. Believe me.”

“It’s no wonder your clients love you,” I said. “You’re smooth as silk.”

Rick smiled and took my hand. He was, in fact, something of a genius when it came to designing and building houses for our particular microclimate. He used copious amounts of glass, designing whole walls that could swing open to let in the light, but those same walls shut tight as a drum against the sea breeze and the fog. He liked sandblasted wood that tied the interior to the textures and colors of the beach and granite in warm red and orange tones.

He presented me with the design for our new house on the first day of the new millennium, which was just three weeks after my mastectomy. I was still bandaged and sore, still fragile and sad. I was afraid to get off the couch. He came out of his office on that day and called Jackie out to sit with us. She was only ten. He was holding a roll of paper tied with a red bow.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Do you remember what you said to me the night you were diagnosed?”

I could, in fact, remember everything I said with excruciating detail. That day was like a shiny coin that I could pull out of my pocket and twirl in my fingers. There, etched into one side, were the exact expressions on people’s faces, the precise tone of the doctor’s declaration, the words I uttered to Rick when I called, hysterical, to tell him the astounding news. On the other side was the way I begged Rick to call my mother because I couldn’t bear to hear her shock or receive her sympathy, the way it appeared as if everyone walking down the street was suddenly so fragile, and Jackie’s endless questions—where did the cancer come from; how will the doctors get it out; will I get it, too; are you going to die?—and the way I patiently answered each one as if I knew what I was talking about.

“I said a lot of things that night,” I said.

Jackie piped in: “She said you should find a new wife and that I shouldn’t be afraid to let someone else be my mom.”

Rick squeezed Jackie’s hand and smiled at her—a smile full of obvious sorrow that a ten-year-old would have a memory like that in her head—then turned back toward me. “You said that it would be a shame to have to die in such a shabby house.”

I nodded. “I do remember saying that.”

“You said that we’d waited too long to build our dream house.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, “because we had such big plans when we moved in here.”

“And I’ve spent far too much time building other people’s dream houses,” he said. “Now it’s our turn.” He handed me the paper.

I slipped off the bow, knowing exactly what I would find inside. Blue lines crisscrossing blue paper, outlining a big, open kitchen, an office with built-in everything and a huge master bath oriented perfectly to capture the morning sun. Glass would be called out for the entire wall facing the ocean and sandblasted beams for the entryway. There would be bamboo floors, granite counters, tumbled marble tile in a kitchen with hand-rubbed oversized cabinets. He had done all this work while I was in the hospital, while I was waiting for toxic chemicals to drip into my veins, while I was throwing up, while I was asleep.

“Are you serious?” I asked quietly.

Rick nodded. He leaned down, buried his face in my neck and held on to the arm on my good side. “I love you so much,” he said. When he lifted his face it was wet, and the look on Jackie’s face was one of absolute terror. Her dad hadn’t said one word about building a house before it was too late. He hadn’t said one single thing about building a house as a fortress against an uncertain future. But her dad had cried. He didn’t have to speak.

When I was done with chemo, many months later, Rick submitted the plans to the city. We lived in an area that requires you to flag all additions and remodels for six months to give the neighbors time to complain if you’re blocking their views. We sailed through that trial, but turned up an engineering problem on the back property line and had to build a retaining wall before we could proceed with the house itself. Grief delayed us next. Rick’s parents were sideswiped by a semitruck on their way home from a Dodger game. Their car flipped, it rolled, and they were dead by the time the paramedics came.

It was one of those accidents you hear about on rush-hour radio with numbing regularity, but you never think that someone’s parents died; you always just think of how jammed the freeway’s going to be. Rick’s older brother, Dennis, got the call from the California Highway Patrol, but Dennis lived five hundred miles away. It was Rick who went to identify the bodies, and Rick who sat down with the minister to pick the hymns and prayers for the memorial service and Rick who ushered his parents’ wills through a year of probate. By the time we were whole enough again to think about working on the house, it was nearly four years from the day when Rick gave me the plans. And now here it was, a week until we moved back in, just a week before the Christmas of Jackie’s junior year in high school, the week I was five-years free of cancer, and we were sitting in a hospital waiting room just like we had before.

“Thank you,” Rick said, dismissing my praise about his smoothness with clients and my fears about the house. “And don’t worry. You’re going to adore this house.” He kissed my hand, and then leaned over to pick up
Car and Driver
off the waiting room coffee table.

A minute later, I said, “I think Jackie has a boyfriend,” but Rick didn’t hear me. He was so engrossed in a three-year -old article about Toyota’s plans for world domination that I could have started belting out the National Anthem and he wouldn’t have heard me. “I think they’re pretty serious,” I continued, “or at least physical. I think that’s it. I think they’re physical.” I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. When I glanced over, I saw the fat lady staring at me.

“You talkin’ to me?” she demanded.

“No.” I shrugged, waving my arm in the air toward Rick. “My husband.”

“Good,” she said. “ ’Cause I don’t want to be knowin’ nothin’ about nobody’s boyfriend.”

F
RIDAY

In the early years of parenting, you’ll give anything for twenty minutes free and clear of your kids. You pray for nighttime, when the noise will stop, the hunger will stop, the accidents will stop, the incessant questions about the moon, the sky, the ocean, the cat next door, the cow on TV, the telephone and toy in the bottom of the cereal box—will stop. But in the teen years, you’ll give anything for twenty minutes in the same room with your kids. You’ll pay a ransom for a conversation, a bribe for just a little time. I imagined that Jackie would stay home to nurse her broken finger, which meant I could have a whole day with her. My work could wait. We’d go get smoothies, do some Christmas shopping. I still didn’t know what to get her. There was nothing she didn’t have, nothing she seemed to need. A few hours walking through the shops in Redondo Village might give me a clue.

When she was little, I used to love Christmas. I saved every single one of the letters she carefully wrote out to Santa, about wanting a real wooden train with a tunnel, or the red patent leather shoes for her American Girl doll, because they were requests I could so easily meet. For just a few hundred dollars, I could make her world complete. After church on Christmas Eve, Rick and I would stay up late wrapping all the presents we’d amassed and constructing some tangible proof that Santa had actually come to our house. We scattered ashes from the fireplace, kicked oatmeal around the front yard as if the reindeers had gotten their snouts into the food we’d laid out. We’d eat the sugar cookies, drink the milk, fill the stockings and wait to be awakened by Jackie’s squeals of delight.

Christmas began to change when Jackie turned six. That was the year she decided she wanted a dog. It was no longer enough to talk to all the dogs we passed when we rode bikes through our neighborhood, or to play with the dogs whose owners snuck them down to the beach to play in the surf. It was no longer enough that other people’s dogs would immediately come to her and lick her hand or bring her a ball to toss. She wanted a dog of her own—one who would sleep at the foot of her bed and wait for her when she came home from school and sit with her while she read. She asked Santa for a dog, but this was one thing I couldn’t deliver.

I can’t stand dogs. I can’t stand the way they jump all over you and lick you and never swerve from their high-demand status. I hate the way people treat their dogs like children, with hand-fixed meals and veterinarians who make house calls. I once read a Billy Collins poem about a dog—how the dog trots out the door every morning with only a brown coat and blue collar and how this is such a fine example of a life without encumbrance and how the dog would be a paragon of earthly detachment if it weren’t for the fact that the poet is the dog’s god. That was the last line: “If only I were not her god.” I remember thinking,
That’s it. That’s exactly it.
I couldn’t get Jackie a dog for Christmas because I would have to be the dog’s god, and that was something I couldn’t be.

So Santa brought soft stuffed Huskies and pug-nosed mutts, a whole veterinarian set with fifteen kinds of plastic dogs, and one year, a life-sized Saint Bernard posed in a sitting position with his tongue hanging out, but it was never enough. Jackie began to get angry at Santa. She began to wonder why he didn’t listen, why he was so mean, why he brought Julia Bertucci a King Charles Cavalier cocker spaniel puppy on Christmas morning when he only brought Jackie a calendar that featured a picture of the same thing.

What, after a certain point, can you say? You tell the truth and then Christmas becomes something else entirely.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, when Jackie came out of her room the morning after the incident with the broken finger. It was 7:00 A.M. and she was dressed for school: jeans, flip-flops, two layered T-shirts, eyeliner, lipgloss.

“Fine,” she said, giving me a wiggly-fingered wave.

“You’re OK to go to school?”

She shrugged her shoulders—
why not?
—then said, “We’re finishing our card sale today,” as if this fact made it obvious why she had to go. The cards were part of her midterm project in history. She and three other girls had been conducting a lunchtime fund-raiser. For three dollars, students and teachers could purchase a holiday card, an envelope, postage and the address of a soldier in Iraq. There was a big bucket of pens at the table, and right there, without having to even think about it, they could send a holiday greeting to a soldier overseas. With the money they made from the cards, the girls were going to buy chocolate bars to send with each box of greetings. So far, they’d collected 250 pieces of mail.