Woman King

CHAPTER 2

Stoner Halbert. Suddenly he was the new star on the rise in San Francisco. Everybody wanted to work with him. People seemed to think he possessed some kind of magic. It was painful to admit, but I was jealous. And a tiny bit worried.

I could count on one hand the number of women who did the work I did. Politics and public affairs are not a landscape women dominate. When we do, we often fall into three categories: ball-busters, bitches or sluts. I had long ago lost track of the number of times I’d been complimented on “taking the bit between my teeth,” or been a “real bull dog.”

While male consultants can be brilliant, relentless, even sexy or magnetic, those qualities don’t seem to exist for women. Women, it seems, can only be compared to racehorses and loyal pets.

Stoner Halbert was a former chief of staff to a prominent member of the California Senate. His wife ran an investment firm. The two had long been the darlings of the political and wealthy elite. Their photos ran in the society pages weekly as they were snapped at various functions, wrapped up tightly in fashion’s latest creations.

Then one day, the FBI charged Amber Halbert with insider trading and embezzlement. The ensuing news coverage detailing how she had stolen and defrauded some of the state’s biggest names in politics and business became too much for Stoner to bear. He resigned from his post to shield his boss from further embarrassment. Amber pled guilty to avoid a more stringent jail sentence, and the two quietly divorced.

Not long after, Stoner set up his own consulting business. From the moment he opened his doors, the city’s elite were enthralled. He was collecting big names and big projects. And now, it seemed, he had added one of my clients to his growing list.

After I left the library, I realized I needed a break and decided to get out of town for the day to see my mother. The magnificent, but overwhelming India Rose Shepherd, a landscape painter of some renown, lives in a house in Bolinas. Bolinas, a small hamlet north of San Francisco in Marin County, shares something in common with my mother: Both are difficult to find unless you know what you are looking for.

Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in my Audi wagon, I headed north on Highway 101 and exited in Mill Valley. After a thirty-minute drive over the hills and through a winding valley, I passed Stinson Beach As I drove past the lagoon, their silver-blue waters glowing in the dusk, I caught a glimpse of a lone heron, standing in the shallow inlet.

I turned off the highway onto a side road, although there are no signs or markings to indicate the nearby town. A half-mile further, I followed a long narrow road that led to my mother’s home.

Rose, as she likes to be called, lives in a barn that had been converted into a home in the late 1960’s. Since then, it was renovated and modernized many times. There are also two separate cottages on the property, which look out at the rough-hued green grey of the Pacific Ocean. One is her studio and the other is a guest house where I often spend the night. Although I had packed an overnight bag for my trip, I wasn’t sure if I would stay. I can never be sure of anything when it comes to my mother.

I’m the only child of a single mother. Unlike many children in the same situation, I didn’t suffer any economic hardship. My mother came from a wealthy family that did not disown her when, unmarried, she became pregnant with me. On the contrary, they embraced her and pulled us into the family even more closely. My grandfather was a successful dairy farmer who gave my mother the land she lives on today. My mother displayed a talent to paint very early on, and by the time she was in her early teens it was quite obvious she was a prodigy. She was sent to art school and returned a successful artist, whose landscape paintings continue to sell for princely sums.

My mother does not, however, always manage her life successfully. In fact, she has struggled through most of it. Rose carries more than just her skill for painting. She’s also an empath. Put simply, she can feel and read another person’s emotions.

There is no such thing as a poker face around an empath; they possess X-ray vision into your soul. Rose can read people, feel their nervousness, sense their hesitation to do something, detect their anger or sadness. She refers to it as “picking up on the energy of the universe.” My mother, grandmother and her mother before her were all empathic. All of the women on our side of the family carry the skill, including me. They call it the Gift, but I have never seen it that way.

From an early age, what I saw was my mother drinking herself to sleep at night to avoid feeling anything. She swallowed too many pills with her friends in order to maintain a barrier between the energy of the universe and herself. And then, when she did focus on her painting, she would remain sequestered in her studio for weeks, inevitably collapsing in her bed for several days afterwards.

As I grew older, I worried that my mother would kill herself, either through her excesses or through exhaustion. Now, at 32, I understand my mother’s moods and simply try to avoid her when she is on the dark side of the universe.

As I pulled to the end of the drive, my mother walked out of her house to greet me, her wavy brown hair trailing in the breeze behind her. This is another trait the women in my family are known for: long, lustrous brown hair streaked with red and gold. I could see from her bright, brown eyes that she was sober and happy, a rare thing in the year since my grandmother had died, leaving her with no other woman beside me to confide in. As I got out of the car and began to walk toward her, she smiled.

“So you’ve come to bury your anger out here in the country, have you?”

I knew she would read my emotions—she always did—but I had nowhere else to go.

“I have,” I said. “But if you could wait a bit to finish reading my mood, I’d like to come in and rest.”

Rose nodded and escorted me into the house.

After settling down for a much-needed nap on the couch, I awoke forty minutes later and went to look for my mother. She was not in the house. I slipped on a pair of her shoes that were sitting by the door and walked over to her studio, following a path illuminated by small lights set along the paving stones. Maintaining an old habit I’d been taught as a child, I knocked once before entering.

“Come,” she called, and I opened the door. She was sitting in front of a canvas with a brush suspended in her fingers. In front of her was the view from the edge of our property. I had seen the same scene a million times growing up, but somehow in her painting she had made the sea seem alive. The deep green blades featured in the grassy cliff that marks the end of our land appeared to be moving. For a moment, I thought I could hear the crickets in the grass, too.

“It’s beautiful, Mom.”

“Thank you, my dear,” she said in a soft, low voice that was reserved for me. “Now why don’t you tell me why you decided to come in the middle of the week for a visit? You haven’t done that since gran was alive.”

When my grandmother Bella Rose was alive, I often visited during the week. After she died, I stopped coming as frequently, not only because I wanted to escape my mother’s grief, but also to avoid my own.

“I’m not sure why I’m here, Mom. I have been feeling a little unsettled lately.”

My mother nodded. “I can feel your unease. What’s happened? Have you seen Lily? She usually makes you feel better.”

“Things are not going as well at work as I would like. I got fired from a job recently, and I managed to blow an interview for a big project that easily should have been mine to win. Honestly, I just don’t feel like myself.”

My mother abruptly dropped her brush on a tray and turned to face me. “Olivia, you are not yourself,” she said. “Not really. You haven’t been yourself for many, many years. I think maybe it is finally catching up with you.”

I should have seen the speech coming. But I was feeling so lousy that I had forgotten where this kind of conversation would lead with my mother. Now, there was no avoiding it.

“Mom, please.”

“You’re agitated. I don’t blame you,” she continued. “But you have turned your back on a part of yourself, Olivia Rose. It’s like wearing contact lenses when your vision is fine to begin with. You’ve intentionally turned off your own sixth sense. It’s no wonder you don’t feel like yourself. How long did you think you could keep this up?”

“For as long as I live,” I said, as an image of my mother drinking in our darkened kitchen crept into my mind.

“I don’t need to use my skills to sense your anger at me, Olivia, and I understand. I love my gift, but it does overwhelm me at times. Your gran was the only person who knew how to help me keep it in perspective. It’s one reason why I never married. I didn’t want to have to pretend I could control my emotions.”

“So it was OK to be out of control around me?” I snapped back.

“No, but it’s not the same thing,” she said.

“You could have turned it off, Mom,” I said, cutting her off. “I have. You don’t need to open yourself up like that.”

Rose shook her head. “Look at my paintings, Olivia,” she said gesturing toward her easel. “Do you really think they would be so alive if I stopped feeling? I could not function if I closed myself off,” she continued. “Every time I place a brush to the canvas, I feel the energy of life though my hand. I cannot turn my back on who I am because it’s difficult.”

“Difficult? You call boozing your way through life difficult? You call taking drugs and sleeping for days difficult?” I said. “That’s not what I call it. I call it chaos. I think this curse from our family is a disability. And you medicate yourself to survive.”

My mother leaned back on her painter’s stool, looking beleaguered.

I had said too much and regretted my words immediately. I apologized and she forgave me, never having been one to let an emotional outburst offend her.

Soon after our argument, I left her studio and retreated to the guest house to go to bed, but my sleep that night was miserable. I tossed and turned, in the grip of a terrible, unexplained anxiety. At one point, I was plagued by a dream featuring an enormous black panther that seemed to be stalking me. When I woke up in the morning, I decided to head straight back to San Francisco. I felt guilty leaving my mother without saying goodbye, but knew that she would understand.