“Let’s go,” Deva whispered, rolling her eyes, implying he was a pain.
As I walked out, I turned to the desk one last time. The muffled sounds of guitars came from her father’s headphones. There was a music video playing on the screen. Deva pulled me by a sleeve, trying to keep me from looking, but I lingered long enough to see her wavy long hair bounce from side to side. It was she in the video. She wore her usual bell-bottoms and a tight white T-shirt cropped above her stomach, with a silver belly chain. She walked on a dirt path through a row of acacias. Her lips sang a song I couldn’t hear, but I could see how much effort she put in to it because she kept her fist on her belly, almost punching the music out of her body. Close-ups of her freckled face were intercut with images of her father, slightly bloated but quite elegant. Younger looking and clean shaven, not the guy with the dirty jeans and skinny ponytail who walked around the house. He leaned on a picket fence. In the video’s narrative the two singers were looking for each other—desire, longing, and melancholy all showing on their faces. I turned back to Deva, but she avoided me and pushed me toward Chris, who was cracking eggs open into a pan by the stove.
“Let’s have dinner in my bedroom,” she said, haphazardly assembling two pieces of toast and an avocado on a plate.
Chris started scrambling.
—
Rain trickled through the ceiling in Deva’s cabin. We put pots on the floor, lit candles, and got under the blankets making shivering sounds, still high from the Vicodin. The avocado sat on the desk, untouched. Neither of us was hungry.
“Sorry about that,” Deva said. “He can be an asshole sometimes.”
“How did he end up living here?” I asked, trying to keep things vague.
“He moved from Montana in the sixties. He came to the canyon because all the musicians lived here. Topanga was really special when we were kids. We used to camp out without tents at night. Our dad taught us to sleep under the stars.”
“So that’s where you got your wild side.” I chuckled.
Deva sighed. She cracked open the window, even though it was cold, and lit a cigarette.
“We were completely free,” she said, exhaling the smoke, hunching over through the crack. “Home-schooled by our mom with a few kids from the neighborhood. We were all different ages, of course. So my mom’s classes were kind of strange…but we were happy, my brother and me. We were the canyon’s mascots. They called us ‘the fairy twins’ because we looked like we’d come out of an Irish folk tale. You know, the red hair, the green eyes. Of course my brother looks nothing like me, so I felt even cooler, like I was the true thing. Neighbors fed us, gave us things to take home, tools to build things with, juice. It was fun.”
When I asked about her mother, Deva cringed. She said that when they were kids she remembered a warm, smiling woman. She tried to think about that woman instead of the person she became later.
“Who did she become?” I asked, moving closer to her on the bed.
“My father was this bare-chested handsome guy with thick long hair, no ugly long beard yet. Super skinny, always a beer in his hand and a guitar close by, always moving someplace, or going to somebody’s house to play music. His hair was so soft. I used to twist it in my fingers to fall asleep. He looked like David Gilmour, but even more beautiful. He partied a lot, but he was, you know, present. But my mom didn’t party. She was at home, lying on a bed on the terrace. She spent her days making these really long quilts. She just quilted. All the time. She collected tons of scraps. My image of her is just pieces of fabric and sewing needles. A cigarette smoking in a glass ashtray by the bed.”
I giggled, thinking about Serena. I told her my mother did the same thing. The “motionless collector.” I told her about the news clippings, the stories she gathered.
“My dad was messy, but you knew what you were getting into. My mom was just completely unpredictable. She spent all her savings to open this really cool rare-parrot shop and then managed to kill off all the birds within two months. Then she went back to quilting. I think she was depressed. That’s when she found Jesus. When I was eight she took off with this weird Christian hippie from Utah, Don. She met him at a county fair in Malibu. When my dad asked her why she was leaving us, she said she had done a lot of walking and talking with God and was inspired by Eve.”
“Who’s Eve?” I asked.
“Fucking Adam and Eve, Eve.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yes. Just like Eve she was ready to move on from the Garden which, it turned out, was Topanga Canyon. Now she and Don visit once a year. They have this kind of white-trash trailer attached to their car that they sleep in. Dad won’t let her inside the house. I don’t blame him.”
Deva exhaled the last of her cigarette and put it out in a small tin box she kept tucked in a crevice between the mattress and the window. She chased the smoke out the window and curled back up on the bed.
I couldn’t put the pieces together. Watering pools, camping under the stars, musical performances, hanging out with rock stars. If her father was so cool, then why did Deva have to cover herself in bay leaves and sneak out at night? Why couldn’t she just wear the pants she wanted even if her butt crack showed?
Deva wrapped herself in a wool blanket and moved down to the foot of the bed. I could tell it was hard to talk about those things and I knew I should have been grateful for the little information she had given me already. She rarely liked to speak about her family. But I felt that a gap was closing between us and I wanted to go on. I curled myself in another blanket on the bed and held a candle between us. If we focused on the flame perhaps it would be easier for her to talk.
“So what happened when she left?” I asked.
“My father had to hold down the home fort while all the other canyon musicians moved on to bigger and better things. The rug had been pulled out from under his feet. He started drinking more than normal and became kind of bitter.”
I gathered from what she told me that there had been an invisible moment sometime in the mid-eighties, when a group of musicians moved away from the canyon. The recording studios shut down, Deva’s father, Bob, and all the guys from the commune went from being stars to becoming burned out. The men’s beautiful long hair thinned out; they grew long beards to make up for it. Their taut muscles turned into beer bellies.
“By the time my dad was ready to get his feet back on the ground, the train had left the station. That’s when he became conservative with us. He was afraid his wild kids might turn into wild teenagers who would abandon him like he had abandoned his parents. We were the only investment that had given him something in return.”