They were both in plastic baggies. It was the safest way I could think for them to travel. The baggies were in an old cardboard clementine box on the floor of the passenger seat. My father used to call me Clementine, or he would sing the song, in any case. Maybe he did both. He had a goatee and when he kissed my forehead I felt like an angel.
There were eighty million cars on the Pacific Coast Highway. The sun on their hoods made it feel even hotter than it was. The beach looked dry in the distance, more shimmering surface than cool blue depth. Just before the turnoff into the canyon I noticed an outdoor market with furniture and decoration for sale, hollowed oaks made into tables, the heads of gods rendered in resin.
I pulled in because I wanted new vases for the ashes. I’d thrown out the old ones. Naturally it was awful for me, the idea of carrying their remains in baggies, but I was infinitely more shattered by the remnants in the vases that hadn’t made it. I kept thinking that parts of them were gone forever. A toenail might have lingered in a vase. One third of a brow bone.
I got out of the Dodge and walked past hurricane candleholders. I drew a slash in the bushy dust of a gazing ball. I passed topaz seahorses, Mexican sugar skulls, aquamarine sea glass in rope nets.
I was approached by a round-faced boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt in all that heat.
—Miss, he said, how I can help? His happy smile made him seem ignorant to everything going on in the world.
—You can’t, I said. I said it kindly, but by that point in my life I had a very low tolerance for unhelpful conversation.
The marketplace shared its parking lot with Malibu Feed Bin. Seed for birds, vats of grain for horses. There were lots of horses in the canyon. Women with long braids rode them over rocks. I picture you being one of these, taller than me, stately in all aspects.
There were vases inside the shed next to some hanging petunias and dusty roses. One vase was black with yellow blooms. A glass frog with orange eyes and feet hung from the lip, peering in. It was vulgar, something you’d find in an elderly person’s house in Florida. I was attracted to it.
The young man at the cash register noticed me and then didn’t take his eyes off of me. I was in a white nightgownish dress, thin as smoke. He was picking a pimple on his chin and staring at me. There are a hundred such small rapes a day.
I picked up the vase and walked around with it, pretending to appraise outdoor pillows and jade foo dogs. The acned clerk got a phone call. I could hear the other boy behind me, moving seahorses from one place to another. People rarely think you will steal something larger than your own head.
* * *
WITH THE VASE IN THE car, I felt like I had all the important pieces I needed. The movers were meeting me at the house with the balance. A truckload of pieces I’d sat upon. I began the climb up the canyon. Wilted dark greens rose from the sandy cracks between the rocks. There were hot bushes, maiden-hair ferns, false indigo, and bent grass. There were occasional splashes of color, but mostly it was brown and olive and untidy beyond expectation. The houses I could see from the road were 1970s-style structures built of campfire wood and smudged glass. They looked out over the rattlers and the tanned grass. The view in the canyon was important. The realtor, Kathi, kept saying the word over and over. View. Eventually it stopped sounding like a word I knew.
She also talked about the coyotes and the rattlesnakes. But don’t worry, she said. On the phone she sounded red-haired and pretty. Don’t worry, Kevin likes to catch the rattlers and move them to a happier place, no problem.
Kevin was the former rap star who lived on the property. I wonder if he will mean anything to you. Relevance is fleeting. There was also a young man named River who lived in a yurt in the meadow. The landlord lives nearby, said the realtor. In case there are any issues. You are going to love it there. It’s fucking heaven.
I climbed the winding road until I saw the sign for Comanche Drive. I was filled with terror because already the street didn’t look charming. It was treeless and the house was at the top of a steep gravel driveway. It was the highest point of Topanga Canyon, nearly piercing the clouds. Mostly it looked like someplace to make meth.
There was no formal parking area, so I pulled up beside a black Dodge Charger on a strip of land overlooking a steep drop. Up close, the property resembled the pictures the realtor sent but not in the ways that counted. The realtor sent the dream. She sent the view through the glass windows plus the pellet stove. She did not send the rusted bathtub outside the front door that was filled with browned succulents. Next to the bathtub planter there was a wrought-iron table with two chairs. The ginger sand was scattered with pebbles so neither the table nor the chairs stood evenly. The windows were moth-skinned. The house was dark orange adobe and shaped like an ocean liner. There was nothing attractive about its design, nothing symmetrical. Both outside and inside it was the kind of hot that kills the old. When I think of you being alone in heat like that—the way that I would come to be—I have to force myself to think of something else.
I’d been instructed to knock on Kevin’s door. His place was a somewhat-attached structure beneath mine. I suppose it was a house with two apartments, but it didn’t read that way. Kevin would give me the keys. His stage name was the White Space. The realtor, Kathi, spoke of him the way that a certain type of white woman speaks of a Black man who’s achieved fame.
Before knocking I took a walk around the property. Kathi was right. The view was theatrical. Every time we spoke I pictured her at an outdoor table in the sun, nibbling gravlax. I felt sure that if I got to know her, I would hate her.
Beneath the mountain you could see the ocean and on the other side of the canyon the slim rectangles of the city rising behind the trees. The skyline was underwhelming. I walked to the tallest point of the property. It was miles above the car-phoned traffic. There was a delicate mist that must have been the clouds. When I was ten, my aunt Gosia told me that was where my parents were. Up in the clouds. But are they together up there? I would ask, and she would get up to wash a dish, or shut a window.
There was a large firepit at the highest point. It looked medieval with its big rocks and charred wood. There was a giant store of firewood under a black tarp. A Michelob beer bottle filled with rainwater.
I noticed the canvas yurt in the valley a few hundred feet below me. Down a grassy path in the other direction there was a small red saltbox. It looked like a glorified potting shed, something you bought at a home improvement store but larger and more elaborate. It was the only area with grass on the property, on account of the oaks. Everywhere else the ground was dry nut brown, but around that big potting shed it was moist and green. There were two flower boxes full of marigolds flanking a Dutch door. I worried the tiny home belonged to the landlord. I didn’t want to be so close to him. But Kathi hadn’t mentioned that sort of proximity. Not at all.
I peeled the dress away from my body and it clung back down with the gum of my sweat. I would come to learn there was no respite from taking a shower in the Canyon. It was a matter of moments before you turned a t-shirt translucent.
I knocked on Kevin’s door. I heard some bluesy rap and after a few moments I knocked again, louder. He cracked it just a quarter of the way, then blocked the view with his frame. It smelled like tinctures inside.
—Miss Joan, peace and welcome to the neighborhood. He was very tall and good-looking and his eyes were friendly. He didn’t look at me. He looked through me like I was barely there.