Elsinore Canyon (2 page)

Our school was small, a place where everyone knew everyone and a private moment of grief would be impossible. St. Maroveus Academy was located two canyons east of Elsinore Canyon, nestled in farms and hills. The air itself seemed to flow through grooves of tradition and ritual—adobe walls and cool pathways smelling of stone and incense—before it reached your nostrils. Prayers before class, Penance and Mass the first Friday of every month, dressing up as our patron saints for Halloween, “Saint Nicholas” and not Santa Claus, wearing grey smudges on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, daily Stations of the Cross during the last two weeks of Lent. Girls on the left side of the church, boys on the right, with the lower grades in the front rows and seniors at the back. The place had once been poor, and every kid, whether seven years old or seventeen, was required to do maintenance or office work. We tended an old cemetery and a garden of gaunt rose trees that twisted out of a pale green lawn. On warm days the giant blooms hung in the air and the perfume made you drowsy.

Although Maroveus taught one through twelve, a lot of kids started at ninth grade, after graduating from schools that stopped at eighth. Many of those kids already had reputations at Maroveus, because everyone talked about their brothers and sisters and the kids in their neighborhoods, and kids from all the schools mixed at diocesan ceremonies and CYO events. Dana was one of the ones coming in at ninth, from St. William of Bourges, where she had been a star volleyball player, May Queen, and “A” student—another school, other stories, but the point is, Dana blossomed gloriously upon her entrance at Maroveus as the smartest, prettiest girl in class and one of the best girl athletes.

That was the fall after my accident. I returned to school on schedule despite my doctors’ advice to wait another two weeks. All summer long I’d felt I was trying to fight my way out of a wet paper bag—and losing. The physical rehab and the sentencing to life in a wheelchair were almost the least of it. What ate my energy and filled me with rage was those pious voices and faces telling me to set aside thoughts of girls and adventures, and turn to a life of prayer and sacrifice. The message was clear.
Leave society, leave the world—most important, leave our sight!
They don’t want to look at you, so they tell you to go to hell, more commonly known as “heaven.”
Blessed and lucky are you, for you’ll be abstinent all your life!
But I was now immutably attached to my leaden lower half and I couldn’t help facing them with it.
Turn to God. You’ll find a way by helping others.
A way of what? This from people who never went to church. This from people who thought of nothing but sex.

But give them credit, the holy frauds gave me something to do besides die. My clawing, digging defiance of them was the last thing I thought of when I fell asleep at night and the first thing I dedicated myself to when I woke up in the morning. To turn the irony yet another notch, I was secretly starting to feel my own way towards a future in a wheelchair. It was that summer that I decided to become a doctor. It’s an infamous bid among crips, but I secretly resolved to find a cure for spinal cord injuries or die trying.

I had steered my wheelchair gingerly through school, looking up now at friends whose shoulders I used to bump with my own, rolling through halls and rooms where I had formerly strode, slouched, and danced. I felt tentative and shrunken as I went about familiar tasks. Dana and I were paired for work duty in the first week, hand-writing aid requests to donors. It was after class, and I was in a room with a few other people and a female teacher we called the Gargoyle.

“Are you Horst?” came a musical voice.

“Yes.”

“I’m Dana.”

I looked up. My view filled with a pair of large brown eyes and incredibly long, translucent lashes, widening to a beautiful, inquisitive face and blonde hair. Her white shirttails drooped over her skirt (the uniform plaid), and her arms and legs were covered with freckles. She was neither friendly nor unfriendly. She took the desk next to me, sitting on the table instead of the seat. I’ve wondered how things would have gone with Dana and me if it hadn’t been for a sort of cave girl aversion she had to indoor spaces and furniture. She pulled up her legs and put a binder on her lap to write. “You’re not going to tip over there?” I said.

“It feels steady.”

“Miss. Hamlett,” came the salivated voice of the Gargoyle. “Gett off thatt desk. You’ll break itt.”

Dana slid down to the seat with a sigh and wedged her work onto her lap. “I
like
writing on my lap,” she murmured.

I smiled at her. “I can’t feel my lap.”

I had no idea why I said that or what it meant, but she smiled back. “Do you want to sit in a desk?”

I had no earthly reason to follow this nonsequitur, but from her it sounded genius. “I could try.” The Gargoyle had gone to another classroom. We started laughing as I pulled a desk next to me and popped the tray-table off my wheelchair. “Someone’s gonna get sued,” I said—I think it was the first time I joked about my plight since the accident. Other people in the room started talking and giggling. Someone shouted, “Go, Horst!” Dana bustled back onto the top of her desk in her excitement while I tried to get balanced between my chair and the desk I was aiming for. SLAM. BANG. Suddenly, both of us were on the floor. I had fallen, and she had broken her desk.

We were still shaking minutes later as we sat in the principal’s office. “You two deaf?” came the gritty voice of Father Henry. Dana and I “umm’d” where we sat, I in my wheelchair and she in the straight-backed one she now occupied properly, her knees glued together and her feet flat on the floor. We had failed to answer his previous question because of the numbing effects of the twin death-rays he beamed at us over the rims of his glasses.

The rays got colder and the voice grittier as he repeated: “What are you here for?” His face, always shaven to an eye-watering pink and working slightly as if he was rolling a ball-bearing around in his molars, gave no clue to what might come next—a sigh, a chuckle, or an explosion of wall-shaking anger.

“Oh!” Dana fluttered as if the question was totally unexpected. Her brown eyes were serious and large. “Um, we were sent to report a broken desk, Father.”

Blue death-rays. Metal rims. “When did the desk get broken?”

“Oh, um,
today,
Father.”

“I mean what time.”

Dana looked down at her watch. Her head bobbed back up. “Just now.”

The death rays scanned down to Dana’s wrist, then back to her face with growing incredulity.
“How?”

Earnest and helpful was Dana. “Oh, ahm, a girl sat on it, Father.”

What was coming, the sigh or the nuclear explosion? “Who was the girl?”

Dana scrunched her eyes shut as if dredging the distant and sunless depths of her memory. “Ahh, I believe it was a freshm—”

Dana and I became friends that day. “It’s not my fault my mom’s a lawyer,” she said kittenishly as we took turns at the water fountain afterwards. We ate lunch with each other every day that week. She told me she planned to go into her family business, that she loved music and dancing, all kinds, that she wasn’t sure whether to go steady with Bobby Swiacki since he was off to Uni High and they’d practically never see each other, that she was beginning to wonder whether some of those things they said were sins actually were. People thought I knew Dana better than anyone because she and I were constant companions, but to me, her essence wasn’t the literal things she shared with me in her confidences and ramblings; it was her sheer high-spiritedness. It was expressed in her laugh, her energy for a fight, her flying hair, her bouncing step and her curious eyes, but that was just the outward show. It seemed the depths of her heart launched her to corresponding heights, where she reveled among clouds and sunbeams and stars. No one could join her up there. You could only watch and wonder.

I explained to her the mechanics of a spinal cord injury. I told her how my parents had died and how my now-childless, open-hearted, patient, very Catholic, ever-caring and utterly maddening grandparents had taken me in, how I was trying to figure out how to get back into surfing and scuba without a pair of functioning legs. She came running to me one afternoon after school when I was at office duty. She’d been raking in the rose garden and hit a big long worm. She brought it to me in her hands, just one side squirming. “Look,” she said, “like you said about your spinal cord.” We put it out of its misery by dropping a book on it.

It turned out she didn’t go steady with Bobby Swiacki. She went steady with Walt Smith, for a year. When he broke up with her, she found me in the rose garden and flung herself on my shoulder and cried for half an hour. Then the summer before our senior year, Phil Polonius’s mom died in a car wreck in Hawaii and he came to live with his dad, and Dana started talking about Phil. He was a year younger than us and went to a different school, but it wasn’t long before everyone knew him. I’ll never forget the Saturday afternoon I saw him and Dana in town, the two of them cruising along an empty sidewalk on his skateboard. He stood behind her, his fingers resting on her waist as she balanced easily, safe in his touch while the breeze blew her hair back against his chest. Her red tights skimmed past lawns and buildings.

When the news about Mrs. Hamlet’s death hit, everyone in the upper grades at Maroveus was running around claiming to know something, claiming to know Dana, everyone wanting a piece of her, even in this. That was the thing with Dana’s popularity. People who weren’t close to her knew she was awesome, but they didn’t know why. She was a rock star to them, a glittering being they would take with any and all faults. But to me she was a true friend and a real girl, and near faultless.

Six weeks dragged by after Mrs. Hamlet’s wake, and I heard scarcely a word from Dana. This was incredibly strange and upsetting. For four years, we hadn’t gone a day without communicating, and now all I got from her were one-liners (“Too sad to talk”) or emoticons or a promise to call me soon. No one else got a call back or a message, not a blip of her online although she must have finished her classes electronically. No one heard anything about or from Phil Polonius either. As for graduation, it had come and gone like a soft swell on a warm sea. Never had anything I’d anticipated so much and for so long passed so trivially.

An invitation arrived in my inbox. A file with a parchment background and elegant lettering, requesting my company at a reception in Elsinore Canyon, from the Hamlet family. No occasion or honoree—a belated graduation party, something subdued? I would be starting a pre-med program at UCSD in September, after my usual summer visit to my uncle’s Santa Barbara ranch. So I synched my dates and planned a detour to Elsinore Canyon on my way north. With my car packed, I headed up the Coast Highway once again, this time under a juicy blue sky.

When I pulled up at the Hamlets’ place, the front was full of cars like the last time. Like the last time, Marcellus greeted me. He rolled up in a golf cart and waved me over. “Horst! I need to talk to you.”

“What’s going on? I was coming for the…”

“You’ll see. Come on, I want to show you something.”

Had I misread the invite? “Hey, I could change my shirt—”

“No need. We’re going down to the adobe.”

I transferred to his cart and collapsed my chair against the back. The walls of the main house grew higher, the paving weedier while we whirred down a path towards an adobe cottage, Marcellus spelling out his story all the way. “Routine rounds two days ago. And then it happened again yesterday.” I’d never known Marcellus to be a bullshitter, and I couldn’t think of a reason why he’d be doing it now, especially about this. We reached the adobe and he punched a code into a console next to the arched wooden door. A
bleep
and a flicker of lights. We went in.

I’d been in the adobe before. It was the oldest building on the property, a rectangular knob on the edge of the cliff, with the waves smashing on rocks below. Mrs. Hamlet had made it her sanctuary. A staircase inside, also of brick, led upward to a hinged trap door cut in the flat roof. You could push it open with a stick and walk out under the sky. I noticed a few books were lying open on the floor, as if they’d been dropped or thrown. “Did you try to read up on it?” I said.