California Dreaming (9 page)

The living room was dark when she got to the bottom of the stairs. She flipped a light switch. Recessed overhead lighting lit the room. But her dad was nowhere in sight.

“Dad?”

Nothing. He had to be outside. Or maybe he'd gone out for the evening. Well, that was no surprise.

Logan had checked into a room at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. He'd invited her to go with him, but she'd found that she needed the comfort of what had been her own room, her own bed, for the past few months. After a long hot shower and steam, and a few hours of lying in her antique four-poster bed, waiting for the adrenaline to wear off, she'd slept through the entire day.

Anna took a few steps toward the kitchen, the thick Berber carpeting caressing her bare feet. She thought again of being barefoot on the plane. Her conversation with Logan as they neared LAX came back to her. That line from the country song. She was no fan of country music—the last time she'd listened to it had been with Sam, when they'd found themselves in that mysterious villa on the Pacific coast of Mexico on the same trip where Sam had first met Eduardo. But the line that had come to her resonated.

Live like you were dying
.

Today, it had a whole new meaning.

Anna had thought she'd come to Los Angeles to reinvent herself. In some ways, she'd succeeded. Certainly there had been more new experiences than she could imagine. But to live like she was dying? She hadn't. She'd lived like she was Anna Percy, on another coast where people didn't know her and couldn't or wouldn't report her to her mother. Even as she'd gotten on the plane to Bali—if she were to be honest with herself—she knew that in a corner of her mind she was already planning how to get back to the East Coast in time for the start of Yale. She probably wouldn't have stayed in Bali for more than a week.

“Dad?”

Still no answer. Maybe he was in the kitchen.

As she eased her way back toward the kitchen, she passed a wall full of the framed photographs that her father had recently started collecting. She'd passed them many times, but now she stopped to look. There were black-and-whites by Ansel Adams and Edward Clark. One of the Clark photos was of two migrant farm girls, their faces smudged with dirt, but with dainty bows in their hair. Anna nodded to them as if she'd just made a new acquaintance.

In the deserted kitchen she stared at the center-island cooking station with six burners and a convection oven. The marble kitchen table, the black refrigerator freezer large enough for a family of ten. On the granite countertop near the table, Anna saw a dinner tray and a full glass of fresh papaya, peach, and mango juice. Neatly folded to one side was a note with her name on it.

Anna,

I looked in on you sleeping before and didn't want to wake you up. It's been a madhouse here today, as you can imagine. Everyone called. I finally turned off the phone and forwarded everything to my cell so you wouldn't be disturbed. Your mother rang from Italy. Your sister from Massachusetts. Logan. He's still at the Chateau Marmont and said he'd wait for you to call him, that he wasn't going to try to catch another plane to Bali for a couple of days. Can't say I blame him. Cyn from New York. Other New York friends. Sam, of course. Ben Birnbaum. Adam Flood. Parker and his girlfriend. Django stopped by. And reporters. If you ever wanted your fifteen minutes of fame, this would be your time
.

The new cook, Mimi, made some of your favorite things—they're in the fridge if this little spread here isn't enough for you. I'm out back in the gazebo. I'll be there when you wake up, if you wake up before midnight. Otherwise, I'll see you in the a.m. If you're sore, there are two Advils on the tray. If you want to read about yourself, take a look at the
Los Angeles Times
online. But you might not want to. I'm just so grateful you're okay
.

Love,
Dad

That was it. She hadn't shed even a tear last night, not in the worst of it, nor when she'd stepped into the international-arrivals terminal to be reunited with her father, Sam, and Eduardo. Crying in public was another banned activity in the
This Is How We Do Things
Big Book.

But now, reading her father's words, here alone in the kitchen, the tears came. And she let them. When she was finished, she wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands, then rubbed her temples and took a deep breath.

Her dad had thought of everything, and thankfully there were tissues on the tray. The food that Mimi had left for her was simple: fresh fruit salad with diced mangoes and peaches, yogurt dotted with pistachio nuts, and herb-stuffed grape leaves. There was a miniature baguette fragrant with dill on the breadboard. She suddenly realized she was ravenous. She finished it all, slathering the bread with mounds of soft butter, relishing every bite and swallowing like it was her last meal on earth.

The midnight walk out to the gazebo had the same otherworldly quality. The fresh-cut grass smelled wonderful and tickled her bare feet. A few crickets chirped off toward the swimming pool, and an insomniac mockingbird sang in the branches of the eucalyptus tree. She took in everything. The gaslights that illuminated her path. The tennis court, the swimming pool, the hot tub, the shuffleboard court, and the barbecue pit. Her father's estate was one of the rare ones in Beverly Hills with lots of land around it—it was so easy to take that for granted, too.

“Anna.” As promised, her father was waiting for her in the New England–style wooden gazebo, large enough to seat twenty. He wore a crisp white Lacoste polo and khakis. His feet were bare like hers. Shadows from the gaslights danced across his handsome, smiling face. Directly above them was an enormous eucalyptus tree.

“Good morning,” she responded.

He laughed. “It's not morning, but it doesn't matter.”

He patted the bench. She sat. He just stared at her. She knew why, but she still didn't know what to say.

“You saw my note?” She nodded slightly.

“You ate?”

“I ate.”

“You're sore?”

“Worse than I've ever been in my life.”

“There was Advil. That should help. …” He trailed off. “Someone once said that nothing focuses the mind like one's impending doom. I could say the same thing for the impending doom of your children. Did I ever tell you about your mother's and my experience in France? We were on a TGV from Paris to Lyon, and there was a bomb scare on our train. Very nerve-racking for most of the passengers, though the conductor just kept going, since the next station was just five kilometers away. Your mother simply raised a finger to summon a waiter into our stateroom and asked that the next martini be dry with an extra olive.” He smiled at her. “But of course, nothing compares to what you went through. I could spend the next twenty-four hours just staring at your face.”

Anna looked at her father in wonderment, still not quite sure what to say. This was another side of Jonathan Percy. Most of the time, he was an ambitious, driven businessman wearing Savile Row power suits and moving tens of millions of dollars of other people's money around. Off the clock, in his most private moments, he was a closet stoner with a three-day growth of beard and a Peter Pan “I never want to grow up” complex that Anna found more annoying than charming.

But now? In the aftermath of last night? He seemed like a different man entirely. A father.

“How did you happen to end up on a plane to Bali in the first place?” he asked as he ran his fingers through his spiky brown hair distractedly. “When Sam called to tell me you were on that plane—well, after she told me, I was so freaked that I pretty much didn't hear anything else.”

How to explain? That she'd gone because of a wonderful boy she'd known since she was a kid but had only now rediscovered? That seeing Ben kissing Cammie at the club had made her want to flee as far as she could get, as fast as she could get there? Or the reason that sounded most ridiculous of all: she hadn't enjoyed the Yale freshman mixer back in New York.

“It sounds ridiculous now, but … I went with Logan on a whim.”

“That's an awful long way to go on a whim,” Jonathan noted, but he seemed more amused than angry. “When were you planning to come back? What about Yale?”

Ah, yes, what
about
Yale? She was due to report for freshman orientation in a week. She'd met her roommate, Contessa, a published poet and self-admitted sex addict from Horace Mann, who managed to be both stridently competitive and “I'm not part of your fascist power structure” at the same time. They had
not
clicked. But this wasn't the time to discuss that. Too much. Too fast.

“I'd have been back in time to go to school,” she fibbed. “I just needed to get away for a while.” She leaned back on the uncomfortable gazebo bench and stared out at the elegant house, built by her grandparents in the 1950s. It was massive, white stucco with red shutters, shaded by giant palm and eucalyptus trees. It was strange to think that after all these months of calling it home, from now on she might not see it more than once a year.

“I can understand that. So what now? Another, um, flight to Bali?”

“Would
you
be eager to jump on the next jet?” she asked, arching a blond eyebrow with a smile. “And can we put this discussion of Yale, trips, and the like off for twenty-four hours? All I want to do is breathe.”

Her dad laughed, then reached down and scratched a bare ankle. “Consider it put off. Damn, I love being barefoot. It's hard to stay in the moment. Or at least it's always been hard for me. I always want the next thing and the next thing. And then it turns out the next thing I thought I wanted is never the thing I actually want.”

She was curious. “So what is it you
do
want?”

It was very quiet in the yard. Anna thought she could hear the faint chirp of crickets. The moon glowed brightly above them.

“The summer I was twenty,” her father finally said, “a buddy of mine took off on this tramp steamer to the South Seas. Fiji, or American Samoa, I don't exactly remember. He was going to do volunteer work in these native villages. Build a school. Teach English. This guy—Darren Chesterfield—his dad was a senior partner at Bear Stearns and owned about half of East Seventy-fourth street between Madison and Park Avenues. He could have done anything he wanted. He invited me along.” Her father got a faraway look in his eyes, and he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I thought about it. The adventure. The feeling that I'd be doing something more important with my summer than smoking reefer and getting into trouble.” His eyes flicked to her. “But I decided not to go.”

“Where is Darren now?” Anna asked. She swatted at a couple of gnats that were circumnavigating her head.

“He ended up in Appalachia, in a town called Haggertsville, something like that. He's a teacher there. I hear from him now and then. He's really happy.”

“Aren't you happy?” Anna asked, leaning forward on the gazebo bench and looking at her father intently.

He didn't answer right away. “I would like to matter,” he finally responded. “I can't tell you how many times I've wondered what my life would have been like if I'd gone with Darren. I think I might have become a teacher too. But I didn't. I couldn't imagine telling my parents I was taking a leave of absence from college and doing something as déclassé as teaching high school.” He shrugged.

“Why didn't you ever tell me that before?” Anna asked.

“Maybe because you were never in a plane crash before.” He draped an arm around her shoulders. “Besides, if I had gone to be a schoolteacher, I would never have met your mother. Which means there'd be no Susan and no you.”

“True.” She turned her head from side to side. The Advil was finally kicking in, and she realized her range of motion had increased quite a bit. It still hurt, but it no longer felt like she'd been run over by a succession of heavy motor vehicles on the West Side Highway. “But except for the progeny part, you both would probably have been better off.”

He smiled at her. “Ah, but the ‘progeny’ part trumps everything else. You'll see one day when you have kids.”

Kids. Children. If she wasn't ready to talk about Yale, she definitely wasn't ready for this conversation. In fact, she couldn't imagine why her dad had brought it up. “If being a parent was so important to you, why did you do so little of it?” Anna asked bluntly. It was something she would never have said even a day ago—too indiscreet, too direct. But if she was going to live like she was dying, there wasn't much utility in self-censorship. “When I came here at the end of December, I felt like I didn't know you at all.”

Her father rubbed his chin. If he was offended by the question, he didn't show it. “I suppose wanting something and being good at it aren't necessarily the same thing.”

Well, that was honest, at least, Anna thought.

“What about you, Anna Banana?” he asked, and she grinned. That had been her sister Susan's pet name for her when they were very young, and still part of something resembling an intact family. “Is there something you have a burning desire to do? Besides go to Yale?”

She said nothing, just shook her head. “Not now, Dad. Please. I need to think.”

He nodded, pursing his lips. “Well, keep thinking. Here's how I see it. Right now, you're looking at the world with a special kind of clarity. That clarity fades, Anna. It doesn't last forever. Take advantage of it.”

Anna stood.

“Heading back in?” he asked. “Going back to sleep?”

“Yes on the in, no on the sleep. I might read for a while. …”

“Say hi to
Don Quixote
for me. I may stay out here and have a smoke. It's been kind of stressful.” Anna saw her father reach into his jeans pocket and take out the Altoid tin in which he kept his marijuana. He'd stopped hiding his penchant for it soon after she'd arrived. “Want to join me?” he asked.

“I'll pass. But enjoy.” What else could she say? It
had
been kind of stressful.

“Wait a sec. Come here.”

Her father stood too, and held his arms out to her. She went into them for the longest hug she could remember. Once again, she felt tears well up in her eyes. This time, she choked them back.