I cruised slowly through town, into the quieter side streets and back again, looking for a sign for GenFem. I saw a dozen other spas and retreats and centers, but none that fit the bill. The woman at the center had called it Dr. Cindy’s “personal property,” though, so perhaps there wouldn’t be a sign at all. Maybe it was just a house, indistinguishable from any other. How would I even know?
Charlotte had slept most of the way to Ojai but now she woke up and began to cry at the misery of still being strapped in place. I pulled over on the main street where there was a playground and pushed her on the swing for a few minutes, but the midday sun was unrelenting and soon Charlotte’s face was the color of a raspberry. I’d forgotten sunscreen. I didn’t have water, either. She swung listlessly in the heat as I cursed myself for not planning better. I was a shitty aunt.
We aborted the mission. Instead, we made a beeline for an ice cream shop across the street. I got her a double scoop of strawberry and we walked down the colonnade in the shade, until I found a crystal shop with a giant pink quartz in the window for twelve hundred dollars. Positive energy is not cheap. The crystal made me think of my mother, which made me think of my sister; it seemed as good a place as any to find a healing-oriented local.
The room was lined with glass shelves displaying glittering rocks on tiny stands. Charlotte immediately lunged for the first one she saw, fat fingers outstretched. “Tweasure,” she informed me, as I yanked her backward. The woman behind the counter—black curls to her waist, harem pants—watched nervously.
“Please don’t let the baby kill the crystals,” she offered, not unkindly.
I gripped Charlotte to my side as she squirmed unhappily. “I’m wondering if you can help me,” I began. “I’m looking for a wellness retreat, run by a group called GenFem?”
The woman looked at me blankly. “Huh. I don’t think I know that one.”
I pulled out my phone and pulled up the GenFem website, then thrust it toward her. “This? Recognize it?”
She took the phone from me and scrolled through the site, frowning a little. “No. But hang on.” She turned and yelled toward the back of the store. “Jessa? Heard of GenFem?”
Another woman appeared from behind a bead curtain that led to a back room. She was gray-haired, slight. She looked at us and frowned. “They’re the ones with the funny place up by Maisie’s avocado farm.”
“Some kind of spiritual retreat, right?” I asked.
“Spiritual? I don’t know about that. At least it’s not my kind of spiritual. They’re going for a different kind of energy.”
“What kind of energy?”
She thought this over for a beat, fingering the stone necklace draped over her collarbone. “More Narcissus, less Gaia.”
I had no idea what that meant. “OK. But you know where I can find their spa?”
“Spa?” The woman laughed. “I wouldn’t call it that.”
“What would you call it?”
“More like…a compound.”
This was unsettling. The word conjured up wartime bunkers, armed guards. I tried to reconcile this with the benign-looking strip mall storefront I’d visited the day before. Nothing was adding up neatly at all. “Have you been inside?”
She shook her head. “I really don’t know anything about the group. I’ve seen the members at the grocery store, but they don’t spend much time in town. Why do you want to go there?”
“My sister is there. Can you tell me where it is?”
She walked to the front window of the store and pointed out to the road. “Take this to the far edge of town, where it starts to climb up over the hill. Turn right at the pizza place and follow the road up past the avocado farm. The compound is gated; there’s no sign but there’s a big iron entrance. You’ll know it when you see it.”
“Thank you.” I tugged Charlotte toward the door.
“Wait.”
The older woman approached us and crouched down in front of Charlotte. She took the little girl’s free hand and pried it open, then placed a small, polished rock on her palm. The rock was green and black, a dark light glowing from its depths. Charlotte went still, silent with awe.
“Labradorite.” The woman stood up and smiled tightly at me. “For safety and protection.”
* * *
—
I followed the woman’s directions out to a pizza shack on the edge of town, and then turned off the main highway and up toward the hills. Wildfires had almost devastated the town a while back. In places the hills had been scorched right down to the road, and the blackened skeletons of trees still stood sentry over the devastation, although a green carpet of new shrubs had already thrust their way up around them. I found myself on a narrow road, driving past an avocado grove with an empty fruit stand out front and a sign that read Take one leave a buck. There was no farmer to be seen, although the avocados hung heavy on the trees, and lay rotting in piles in the brush. Thousands of dollars of spoiled superfoods.
Somewhere, a dog was barking an alert at our presence.
I kept winding up the hill, coming into a thick section of chaparral, dense with sumac and scrub oak. One more hairpin turn and I knew immediately that I’d found it: A long wooden fence, at least eight feet high, stretched along the road for as far as I could see. The fence was imposing, but it also wasn’t topped by barbed wire or protected by armed guards. I drove past an abstract sculpture of a woman, life-sized, made of bicycle parts and rusted scrap metal; and then another, of driftwood, painted pale pink; and then one more, twisted out of frayed and knotted rope. The vibe was less military compound and more hippie commune with a rather intense sense of privacy.
In the back seat, Charlotte had grown quiet; she craned her neck to stare at the curious sculptures as we bumped slowly up the road.
And then suddenly we were at the gates of the compound: two iron doors, topped with curious metal spikes. No, not spikes—small metal circles, each one topped with a cross. I puzzled over these for a minute before realizing what they were: the sex symbol for woman. The symbol, the amateurish sculptures, the quasi-feminist name—I laughed out loud, startling Charlotte in the back seat. It all looked so…harmless. Downright hokey. When you leave gaps in information, people fill the space with misunderstanding, imagining worst-case scenarios as hard reality. I don’t know what I’d imagined I’d find, but now that I was here the place looked as benign as my mother had protested it must be.
I felt something ease inside me, the tension slipping loose. Maybe I was just overreacting; maybe GenFem was just a women’s group with an overdeveloped sense of privacy and an extremely high price tag. Maybe Roni at the Santa Barbara center really didn’t find my sister’s name in their database, not because my sister was lying or because of some sinister disinformation plan but simply because they were disorganized.
The gates were locked, and there was no guardhouse, just a call box off to the side of the road. I pulled over in front of the gate, got out of the car, and pressed the button.
Nothing happened. The air was hot and still. A faint buzz sawed at my temples: the drone of cicadas hidden somewhere in the shrubbery. If there was human life on the other side of that fence, I couldn’t hear it.
I looked around, noticed a security camera, and jumped up and down, waving my hands. Maybe the buzzer was broken? Still—nothing. The minutes passed as I stood there stupidly, unsure what to do. Had it all been a wild-goose chase? Was this even the right spot? A mourning dove called out from the brush nearby, plaintive. I banged on the gate with my fist, sweat dripping down the back of my T-shirt, until the side of my hand began to ache. Charlotte stared soberly at me through the open car window, still gripping the labradorite stone in her fist.
Just as I was about to give up and go back to the car, the call box suddenly crackled to life, startling me.
“May I help you?” It was a young woman’s voice, friendly enough.
The sound of her voice filled me with relief. “Hi! Yes, I’m looking for my sister. Elli Logan?”
A momentary silence, then: “I’ve never heard that name before.”
“She also goes by Eleanor. Eleanor Logan. Or Hart, actually.”