Out Of Control

There had also been a fight the night the house burned down with her father in it. “I hate you,” she’d screamed.

“Lighten up, Daisy,” her friend Kit was always telling her. “You’re too hard on yourself. You’re not responsible for other people’s behaviors.”

Like maybe her sixty-five-year old stepmother driving a dune buggy. Inebriated.

Deep breaths. Daisy closed her eyes and tried to meditate. She was learning the technique from a book she’d picked up last week, How to Forgive. The author, Baba Rama Das, pictured on the front cover, had dark, mesmerizing eyes that seemed to follow her around the room. No matter where she set the book, she’d somehow catch a glimpse of him. Yesterday, she’d felt guilty for watching Dr. Phil instead of meditating about forgiveness.

Forgiveness creates peace of mind, Baba said. It also helps heal emotional wounds and leads to new, more gratifying relationships. Hey, sign me up, she’d thought.

Suddenly, she felt frantic to talk to her daughter. Emmy had stomped off to catch the school bus that morning, mad over something or other. Her usual mood these days. Daisy couldn’t recall the last time she and Emmy had actually talked. Really talked. A heart-to-heart kind of talk like the kind Kit regularly had with her daughter. Lately, it seemed all she and Emmy did was fight.

Still, just hearing Emmy’s voice would make her feel better, more in control. She reached into her purse for the cell phone. As she punched in the number, she noticed the sign on the wall. A picture of a cell phone with a red line drawn through it. She ignored it. The answering machine came on.

“Hi sweetie,” she said. “I’m at the hospital with Amalia. She had some kind of accident with the dune buggy—”

“Mom?” Emmy had picked up the phone. “What’s wrong? Is she okay?”

“She’s in surgery right now. She was driving up the dirt road to the highway, God knows why. I’ve told her enough times—”

“Just tell me.”

“Well, she hit her head, which isn’t good, but she’s going to be okay. She will be okay. She’ll be fine.”

“Tell her I love her,” Emmy said.

“I will.” Daisy’s nose stung with tears. “I love you too, sweetie.”

Emmy had already disconnected. The cell phone rang before she had time to put it away.

“Hello, is this Daisy Fowler?”

“Yes.”

“Nick Wynne. We spoke on the phone a few weeks ago…about the biography I’m writing on your father.”

For a moment Daisy couldn’t think of what to say. Go away came to mind. “This is a bad time,” she finally managed. “I really can’t talk right now.” It was the same tone of voice she used on telephone solicitors. Rude and impatient, letting them know they’d intruded on her privacy. “

“I’d intended to call you in a day or so,” Nick said. “But I was supposed to meet your stepmother at noon, and it’s now half past one and I wondered if you might know—”

“She’s in the emergency room,” Daisy said. “Which is why I can’t talk.”

“Oh, no.” A pause. “Not serious, I hope?”

“I’m waiting to find out.”

“Well, look, I don’t want to pester you when you obviously have other things on your mind, but I’ll be here in Laguna for the next few weeks so perhaps you could give me a ring when—”

“Sure,” Daisy said.

“Shall I give you my number, or—”

“Go ahead.” Whatever else Nicholas Wynne said, she didn’t hear. The doctor had just walked into the room.

LATER THAT NIGHT, after she’d learned that Amalia’s injuries weren’t serious, after she’d cooked dinner and done the dishes, helped Emmy with her homework and tried to meditate for five minutes—it was all she could manage without her thoughts going all over the place—she started feeling bad about being rude to Nicholas Wynne.

Maybe she would call tomorrow and explain that she’d just been distracted because of Amalia and, even though she wasn’t that thrilled about the whole biography thing, she’d do her best to work with him.

She walked to the window and looked out at the grove of eucalyptus and beyond the trees to the clearing where she’d built the goat pen. One of the goats was trying to butt its way out, and she made a mental note to fortify the fence. The wind had picked up since the sun had gone down. Scattered about the property between tree trunks, she could see the roofs and wooden porches of the other cabins. At night, the lights from their windows twinkled like stars.

Her father had built the compound himself nearly fifty years ago, hand crafted cabins embellished with sculpture, stained glass, mosaics and wrought iron. Her father had been the consummate collector.

Her own cabin, the largest, had three bedrooms—one of which she thought of privately as her studio—and a wraparound porch. Winding gravel paths linked one structure to another. The occupants were all friends—like Kit, artists. Daisy found the sense of unity comforting. Martin, her uncle, saw it as another example of what he called her “naïve” generosity. “If they can’t sell their stuff, they obviously don’t have talent. They should take full-time jobs and support themselves instead of relying on you,” he’d point out ad nauseam.

Building developers were always trying to get her to sell the property, but Daisy preferred to believe that her father would have liked it that she was helping a bunch of struggling artists. Collectively, they referred to themselves as the Raggle Taggle Gypsies. She’d come up with the name from an old folk song about a noble woman who ran off with the gypsies. She thought it more romantic than, say, Undisciplined Artists Who Lived Mostly Rent Free.

Unlike Daisy, none of the other cabin dwellers had inherited substantial fortunes.

“You imbecile,” her father had shouted the night he died. “You stupid, stupid, girl. You utter fool,” he’d thundered, pointing an imperious finger at the door. “Out of this house. I don’t want to see your face again.”

“Oh, I had the most perfect childhood imaginable,” she pictured herself telling Nicholas Wynne. “Idyllic really. Yes, exactly. Just like the picture.”

CHAPTER TWO

NICK HAD ARRANGED to meet Truman’s brother Martin at the Hotel Laguna for a late breakfast. Still slightly jet-lagged, he had awakened at three, then stayed awake listening to the wind howling down the canyons. Now, five minutes early for his appointment, he strolled through the tiled lobby in the footsteps of Bette Davis, Judy Garland and Charlie Chaplin.

Laguna Beach, heart of the California Riviera, and a playground for the fabulously wealthy, a mix of artists’ colony and upscale resort, of rustic beach cottages and gated mansions. The water was blue, the sand was the color of milky coffee and he couldn’t look at either without thinking guiltily of Bella back in London. He would see how the work went and perhaps have her over for the last couple of weeks.

He wandered into the art-deco bar. The Grand Old Lady, as the pink stucco landmark on Pacific Coast Highway was affectionately known, had reportedly been the favorite trysting spot of Bogart and Bacall. Truman’s wife Amalia had told him that the artist had often enjoyed an evening cocktail on the balcony while he watched the sunset. He would send flowers to the hospital today, he decided.

“Nicholas.”

Nick turned to see a tall and imposing man with thinning gray-black hair dressed somewhat formally for hypercasual Laguna in tan trousers and a cream sports coat. He looked like his brother, or at least the pictures Nick had seen of Truman.

After exchanging pleasantries, they moved out to the balcony and sat at one of the white wrought-iron tables. Nick craned his neck to look around. In one direction, the curve of blue and silver shoreline, in the other dark green hills tiered with terra-cotta roofs. Purple bougainvillea sprawled down the walls, red geraniums spilled from several giant urns. Realizing that Martin was watching him, he grinned self-consciously.

“Just playing awestruck tourist,” he said.

“I’d like to think I never take it for granted,” Martin said, “but the truth is I do. After a while, you stop seeing all this.” He waved an arm to encompass the postcard-perfect scenery. “We get caught up in our lives. Have you seen much yet?”

“I just arrived two days ago, but I’d like to incorporate a bit of sightseeing.” A waitress in blue jeans, tight as a second skin, and a tourniquet of yellow spandex set down water and menus, treating him to the sight of full breasts, tanned and freckled like eggs. “I’ll probably wait until my daughter gets here.” He drank some water. “She’s incensed about having to stay in London while I’m gallivanting, as she sees it, in California.”

Martin smiled. “How old is your daughter?”

“Twelve.” When Martin said nothing, Nick rushed to fill the conversational void. “Child of divorced parents. Ever-present guilt.” He remembered that Martin was a psychiatrist and Nick decided the silence was intended to draw him out. A tactic he often used himself. He decided not to be drawn. “And you? Children?”

“Unfortunately, no. My wife, Johanna, is a pediatric psychiatrist and we were so involved in building our practices, the time never seemed right. And then it was too late.”

He took a pair of silver-rimmed glasses from the pocket of his blazer, put them on and studied the menu. Nick picked up his own menu but managed a few surreptitious glances across the table. Martin had a soft, full mouth, red-lipped and almost womanish. He’d removed the blazer, carefully draping it over the back of an empty chair. The cuffs of his off-white shirt were rolled just above the wrists, both at precisely the same length. Nick imagined him comparing them in the mirror, lining them up just so, using a tape measure perhaps. If he shared any of his late brother’s artistic temperament, it wasn’t evident.