I wandered around, to the sound of my own footsteps. There was a new painting in the White Room. I don’t know how I could have missed it before. It was the only colorful thing in there, and it was huge—maybe four feet by four feet. It featured the head of a pop art blonde, her hair a cartoon yellow against a black background, her lips a blood red. With one elegant finger, she wiped away a single bright-white tear.
“Whoa,” I said to Max. “Look. Gigantic crying woman.”
He wagged. There was another new painting in the dining room. “Maybe you prefer this?” Max was keeping politely silent, but I thought it was kind of ugly. It had lots of triangles and squares at off angles, in angry shades of brown and red. “Whoa, it’s a woman,” I realized. “Ick.”
In the kitchen, I spotted a shiny red mixer on the counter, and a set of expensive-looking chef pans and knives. “Don’t tell me Lila’s taken up cooking. You probably already know this, but she can’t fry an egg.” Max tilted his head as if trying to understand a foreign language, which I guess he was.
Other new developments in the kitchen: lots of booze up in the cabinets too. Lots. And a whole bunch of unusual spices—saffron, kokum. I sniffed one. “Gross,” I reported to Max. It smelled like ancient copper pennies. “Who would eat this disgusting stuff?”
I made my way upstairs. I stopped on the landing, at the image of Lila hanging on the huge wall of the main stairwell. It was the framed film poster of that iconic scene in Nefarious, where she’s naked and straddling Oliver Knight and you see the long curve of her backbone and her butt and her calves and her feet in those heels, as she looks over her shoulder and stares right into your eyes. It had been in every house I’d ever lived in. Papa Chesterton had hung it above the fireplace.
“Can you believe the shit I have to deal with?” I said to Max, and nodded toward it. His eyes were soulful pools of understanding.
I poked my head into Lila’s room, but I didn’t go in. I didn’t really want to know what I might find. I saw the rumpled bed and a pile of shoes and that was enough. Next, I headed to the second-floor guest room next to Lila’s.
The door was shut, so I pushed it open slowly. I peered inside cautiously, just in case there was another creepy doll on the bed, or maybe a whole bunch of them, which would make me scream my head off. Instead, I was surprised to see that the room had been emptied of all its furniture. Now, it was full of wooden crates. Large, thin crates of various heights, stacked against one another, lined up and leaning against the walls.
It had to be art. Paintings. What else had that shape? I was kind of excited, because wow. Jake was maybe some kind of art collector, and I loved art. Art was my thing! Actually, to be honest, I didn’t know if art was my thing like it was Cora’s. It was a passion for her, a piece of her brain and body she was born with, where maybe I just liked having a thing and pastels were fun. Still, this was an amazing find. “Cora would freak,” I told Max.
I really wanted to see what was in those crates, but most of them were sealed tight. I carefully looked through the stacks, same as we’d flip through Hoodean’s brother’s vintage record collection, except the crates were really heavy. Some were so big that you’d need a couple of people to move them.
I finally spotted one that had been partially opened. The top of the wood frame was off, and the upper edge of all the layers of wrap and cardboard and foam were torn through. I wedged my fingers in so I could peek. I saw thick palette-knife swirls of yellow oil paint, hardened into layers.
It was old. Right away, I knew it was valuable. I don’t know why I thought that. I could just tell.
“Is this weird?” I asked Max. “This is kind of weird, right?”
I mean, there were a lot of them. And why were they there? They should’ve been hanging somewhere, maybe a museum, not stacked up and hidden in that room.
I went back downstairs. I felt strange, a little hollow, same as that house. The sense of dread returned and knocked around inside of me. Outside the enormous windows of the White Room, I could see the orange glow of the Golden Gate Bridge, stretched across the water like a dragon in a Chinese New Year parade. The homes on either side of 716 Sea Cliff Drive glittered along the stretch of the dark shoreline. It was quiet, except for a clock ticking and the sound of the waves and the jingle of Max’s collar tags. I went around turning on all the lights, but this made things worse. Now, I saw my own reflection in the black windows and nothing else. People had lived in that house since 1926, Lila told me, so I started doing all the wrong things, like wondering if anyone had died there.
I called Meredith.
“Eight more weeks!” I said when she picked up.
“Hey, Syd. I’m at Cinebarre with Cora and Hoodean and Sarah and Amy. We’re meeting Cora’s cousin Simon and some of his friends from baseball.” I could hear Hoodean shouting “Syd!” in the background. “We’re heading in.”
“Oh.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I was missing out, but even worse, it was just kind of creepy being there alone. That house was almost a hundred years old.
“I’ll call you tomorrow! Hey, your birthday!”
“Big sixteen,” I said.
* * *
After Meredith hung up, I opened the tall doors of the White Room, the ones that led outside to the patio. The night was cool, and I could feel a mist of sea spray on my face. It smelled great out there—salt brine and the deep, ancient ocean, plus something summer and celestial. Max thought so too—he lifted his nose and sniff-sniff-sniffed the dark night.
I gazed at the lights. Baker Beach and the Golden Gate Bridge were to the right. To the left—to the far left—Lands End, scene of shipwrecks and sheer, rocky bluffs, home of the Cliff House and the ruins of the Sutro Baths.
Down below, straight down, far down, was China Beach, the protected cove that faced north toward the Marin Headlands. It got its name from the Chinese fishermen who used to camp there in the 1800s, but on that night, it was just me, leaning over that orange stucco wall. I leaned far enough over that my feet lifted from the ground.
I decided to walk down to the shore. Enclosed in orange fortified walls, the steps turned and switched back like a maze, and ended up at that tide-pooled cove with waters that were too dangerous to swim in. Lila had warned me about this last time I was there. The sharks weren’t the problem. It was the rip currents you needed to fear. They were so strong that they could suck you out to sea.
I could feel the sand on the steps under my bare feet, and it got colder as I went down. Goose bumps trickled up my arms. My lips tasted salty already. I looked up and saw Max still on the patio, staying put and looking worried.
He was probably right. I changed my mind and turned around. It was so dark that it seemed reckless. I could disappear out there and no one would ever find me. I tried to count how many people would be sad, but that got depressing, so I stopped.
The ocean crashed and roared, and no wonder. There were those shipwrecks, and drownings, and the Chinese fishermen in that cove, and the fifty years they were banned from being there too, bashing with all that was coming. Because right then, at that moment, Nicco Ricci was serving halibut and Crab Louis to the diners of Sutro’s as they sat at their candlelit tables looking out over the Pacific. And on the terrace where I stood… well, you know what happened there.