“You meet him at the record store?” Ben asked. Emma and her friends hung out at Viral Records, and sometimes he did drive-bys just to check up.
“Strike one,” she said. “He lives over in El Camino Real. Hangs out at the skate park near Alta Square.”
“School, then?”
“You are a detective,” she said, wagging her finger at him. “Gray!” she said suddenly, sitting up and pointing out to sea.
The plume, maybe a half mile out in the ocean, fanned in the wind, and then the heavy arch of the whale’s back broke the surface.
“Must be one of the first,” she said. Emma was standing now, her hand shadowing her eyes, an excited little girl again. His daughter’s childhood was measured by the same topography that had measured Ben’s, and sometimes he had the strange feeling that they were living their childhoods simultaneously, as though the hills were some fold in time where their youths intersected. Ben and his father would catch their breath here on long rides, when his father was still running cattle for the ranch. The land was being gnawed away even then, and his father knew it—Leisure World terraced into Cherry Canyon, UC Med School cantilevered above San Joaquin Wash—and they stopped here often, his father staring at the ocean as though developers would fill it in with gravel and pave a parking lot over it. Ben’s father never lost his wonder for the Pacific, from the moment he first saw it, azure and sun-starred, out the window of the coast-to-coast Greyhound, until the afternoon of the day he died. The man never swam in the ocean, not even a toe dip in it, but he walked the edge of it, pressed his boots into the damp sand to snatch seashells from the salt; he watched it, too, from his perch on his horse, talked about the swells coming all the way from Korea, where his brother, Everett, had been killed a decade earlier trying to take Pork Chop Hill. He pointed out plumes of whale breath as the animals lumbered the shallow coastal waters in the fall, shielded his eyes to watch pelicans swoop the ocean’s surface. He knew where to find tide pools when the ocean ebbed, knew the names of the animals clasping tidal rocks—the rockweed and gooseneck barnacles, the wavy-top turban and dead man’s fingers.
It was only a single plume, and Emma sat back down.
“Mom’s talked to you, right?” he said.
“We talk all the time,” she said.
“I mean…” He hoped to God Rachel had taken care of this. “Talked to you.”
“About sex?”
“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat.
“Geez, Dad.” Her cheeks reddened a bit. “Yeah, she’s talked to me.”
“I hope she said something like, Don’t do it or I’ll kill you.”
She laughed. “I think she mentioned bamboo sticks under my fingernails.”
“Good,” he said. “You know, no one talked to me about it. It made things confusing.”
“You can stop now.”
A gust of wind rained oak leaves down around them.
“How old is this kid?” Ben said.
“Sixteen,” she said. “But he’s only a freshman. They held him back a year.”
Great. Fucking great.
“Why?” He tried to take the detective out of his voice, tried to soften it.
“He’s got an abusive relationship with math,” she said. “He’s an artist.”
Jesus. An artist! A pot-smoking, surfing artist. Graffiti probably.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said.
“What am I thinking, Miss ESP?”
She leaned back onto her elbows, splayed her fingers in the clump grass. She had painted her nails a neon red. He remembered, for a moment, the dead boy in the field this morning. It just burst out of his memory, an image imposed upon this lovely picture of his daughter.
“Graffiti, airbrush, something lame like that.”
He laughed. Her face was in profile to him, her sun-freckled nose, her long dark eyelashes. Her mother’s jaw.
“Comics,” she said.
“What? Like Superman?”
“Superman’s lame,” she said. “More like a novel with pictures. He’s working on this one where the hero rides a tidal wave as it crushes Los Angeles. It’s like this updated Armageddon story.”
“Well, I don’t like him.”
“Bro-ken rec-ord,” she said.
Ben glanced at his watch: 5:03, and it’d take fifteen minutes to get back. “Let’s get you to your mother,” Ben said.
On the ride back, they passed the old cowboy camp in Bommer Canyon. A decade ago, if you were running a winter herd, you could escape a rainstorm here or put in for the night. Now a yellow front-loader sat idle beneath the oak tree. The Santa Elena Historical Society had petitioned to save the place, but it was Rancho Santa Elena Corporation’s property, and as soon as the ink dried on the few hundred signatures, one of which was his, the heavy equipment had moved in. Up until a few years ago, he had thought the hills would be safe from development, but he had been na?ve. The toll road would run through here, and the Rancho had a vested stake in the expressway being built. Inside, he knew, the camp stank of piss and animal shit; there were broken beer bottles in the corners, graffiti scrawled across the walls. When the ranch was a working endeavor—clean cots pushed up against the walls, a small stove in the corner to make coffee—he’d spent the night out here once with his father, the hills outside a moonless inky black. Ben lay awake that night listening to the whoops and screeches, his father whispering to him in his cigarette voice, “There’s nothing out there’ll hurt you; there’s nothing out there…” until his father fell to snoring and Ben stared at the shapeless sky outside the window, nodding off when dawn outlined the twists of oak-tree branches.
“They’re going to knock the camp down,” he said to Emma as they passed.
“It’s falling down anyway,” she said.
—
“YOU SAID FIVE,” Rachel called from the front steps of his house when she saw them coming up the drive. It’s where she used to sit when they were still married, face turned to the sun, watching the hills and road as though perpetually waiting for something. Her knees were pushed together, and she was grading a paper on her lap. She wore acid-washed jeans that fell just above her ankles. Her socks, he noticed, mismatched blue to black. She was always the geek who didn’t give a damn about fashion, but a beautiful geek, a geek who turned heads.
Emma walked Gus to the barn and poured out a bucket of oats for the horse. Ben rode Tin Man over to Rachel, looking down at her from the saddle while she squinted into the sun.
“How’s the professor?”
“He’s in computers,” Rachel said. “Software.”
“Floppy-disk guy? Sits at a desk all day?”
“A lab.” She huffed a bitter laugh. “What, you haven’t investigated this?”
He gritted his teeth.
“You’re growing up, Ben.” She smiled, rubbing the pencil lead from the edge of her hand onto the thigh of her jeans. “Did she do her homework?”
Rachel knew the answer, just wanted to make it official. He shook his head.
She let out an exasperated breath. “I spend all day making kids do their schoolwork. I don’t have horses to entertain her with.”