The beach was cold. Audra gritted her teeth against the wind, the hood of her parka cinched so tight around her face it was a wonder she could see the coast. “This is stupid,” she mumbled to herself, her sneakers sinking into the damp sand with each labored step. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Audra loved Maggie, but she hadn’t moved to Pier Pointe to take romantic midwinter walks along the shore.
Her father had nearly forbidden the move. Not in your condition, he had said. You’ve got a doctor here in the city. Pier Pointe is too small; you’ll never find a qualified physician there. Except that she actually had, and Congressman Terry Snow had given up the fight and ponied up the keys to the family’s abandoned coastal home. That had been two years ago—seven hundred and thirty days—and she was able to count the number of times her oh-so-worried father had called on a single hand. She’d spoken to her mother even less, but it was for the best. Congressmen weren’t supposed to father manic children. It was bad for his reelection campaign.
Shadow let out a series of barks and Audra looked up from the sand. There, in the distance, a group of four people were milling about a bonfire that had managed to stay lit despite the drizzling rain. A pair of red tents were staked into the sand, shivering in the wind. She pictured the tents taking flight, bursting into flame as they soared across the dancing fire. And then they’d drift over the expansive ocean like a couple of burning Kongming lanterns, red and glowing against a steel-gray sky.
“Are they really camping out here?” Audra directed her question toward her friend, but the wind stole her words. Maggie marched ahead while Audra’s steps lagged, leaving her to bring up the rear of their trio. By the time she picked up the pace to catch up to her friend, Shadow had reached the group in his mad dash across the beach.
When she finally reached the campsite, three pretty girls were rubbing Shadow’s ears, cooing over how cute he was. Maggie was sitting near the bonfire, as though she’d been there all afternoon rather than the sixty seconds it took Audra to catch up. Maggie was always one to quickly take to strangers, but this particular instance struck Audra as a world record. Maggie looked leisurely as she shared a joint with a guy who appeared like a young Tom Selleck. His hair whipped wild in the wind. And while his face and hands and clothes were clean, he immediately struck Audra as a true child of the earth.
The man rose to his feet and extended a hand in greeting.
“Welcome,” he said. “I’m Deacon. Come, sit with us.” Audra’s gaze drifted to Maggie, unsure, searching for approval while simultaneously scrutinizing her friend’s overly comfortable posture. Crowds made Audra uncomfortable. Strangers made her anxious. Maggie, on the other hand, looked as though she’d met this odd assembly of nomads before.
Deacon continued to stand, waiting for Audra to take his place around the fire. Neither Deacon nor the three girls with him wore much to protect themselves against the cold or rain. Deacon’s cowboy boots were half-buried in the sand. The mother-of-pearl snaps on his Western-style shirt glinted in the pale gray of the afternoon. The girls wore ankle-length skirts in a riot of colors—hues more suited for sunshine than rain. And yet none of the four seemed to mind the drizzle or the cold, as though inviting purification. The Washington sky offered a divine sort of baptism.
Audra reluctantly took Deacon’s hand, releasing it a moment later to pull her parka even tighter around herself. Maggie rose halfway from where she sat, seized Audra by the arm, and tugged her down to the piece of driftwood by the fire. There was no getting away. Maggie quickly made her insistence known.
“This is Audra,” she said, offering an introduction when Audra failed to do so herself. “She’s a little shy.”
“Welcome, Audra,” the three skirted girls greeted in unison.
“Yes, welcome,” Deacon said, kneeling on the sand beside his two newfound friends. “There’s no need to be shy,” he assured them. “We’re all family here.”
Family, Audra thought. If you only knew about mine, you wouldn’t say that with such benevolence.
“Are you guys camping? In this?” She motioned to nothing in particular, calling up the wind and the rain and the misery of it all.
“Not camping so much as traveling,” Deacon said. “We’ve been moving up the Pacific coast for a few months now; started down in L.A.” He paused, as if recalling the memory of the first few days of their trip. “I think the weather may have been nicer in California.” Deacon cracked a good-natured smile. Audra couldn’t help but to smile at him in return.
“Are you from there?” she asked. “California?”