The Days of Summer

Will grabbed the ringing phone. “Timothy Leary’s House of Hash. You smoke ’em, we coke ’em.” His gaze shifted to Cale. “Yeah, he’s here … somewhere. Let me see if I can find him. Oh, I think I see his foot. There! Yes! In the corner! He’s buried under … Wait! Wait, I need a skip-loader here.” He paused for drama, then shook his head. “Uh-oh. Too bad. Looks like he’s a goner. Make a note for his epitaph, will you? ‘Here lies Cale Banning, who, on April 3, 1970, suffocated to death under the largest pile of med school rejections in the history of the modern world.’” Will held out the phone and whispered, “It’s Jud. Lucky Mr. Four-F.”

“Hey, there, big brother.”

“Hey, you.” Jud’s bass voice sounded exactly like their dad’s. Cale always had to take that one extra second to remember who was on the other end.

“Will Dorsey is a nutcase,” Jud said.

“Yeah.” Cale looked at Will. “I know. You ought to try living with him. It’s like being trapped inside a Ferlinghetti poem.”

Will flipped him off and jogged into the bathroom. A couple of seconds later, Cale heard the shower running, then the tinny notes of a transistor radio playing a Jimi Hendrix song. “What’s going on?” Cale asked Jud.

“I’m on a pay phone at the steamer dock, waiting to board the boat. I’m going to the island a day early.”

Damn … He’d forgotten this was the weekend they’d planned to meet at the Catalina place. “I can’t leave yet, Jud. There’s a play-off game tonight.”

“I know. I just wanted to let you know I’m going over early. I’ve got to get out of here today.”

“What’s wrong?”

“What isn’t wrong.” Jud sounded disgusted.

“Victor.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get me started. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.”

They hung up. He hadn’t seen Jud in months. Cale used school as an excuse to avoid going home; it had become a comfortable habit. He used sports, studying, anything to weasel out of going to Newport. Nothing waited for him at home but Victor’s expectations. He grabbed his game gear from under the bed, slung the athletic bag over a shoulder, and hammered on the bathroom door, then opened it. Steam hit him in the face. “How long are you going to be in here?”

“Till I’m clean.”

Cale turned down the radio.

“What’s going on with Mr. Perfect?” Will asked.

“Jud’s not perfect.”

“He’s a helluva lot closer than anyone I know.”

Cale glanced in the mirror at his foggy reflection. Smeared and far from perfect. Maybe his grandfather wasn’t the only person he was avoiding. Jud had been accepted to his first choice—Stanford—for both undergraduate and graduate studies. He wouldn’t have any idea what a rejection letter looked like. Cale’s most insurmountable problems were a piece of cake for Jud, who skated through life on silver skates, never slipping, never falling. Never failing. Jud first took off for college when Cale was still in high school, and he knew he would never forget that summer, because Victor gave Jud their dad’s MG.

By August it was just Victor and him, which meant they lived in a house of silence until a long weekend or school vacation when Jud came home. Life was pretty much a set formula. Jud set the bar; Cale usually failed to meet it. From the very day they drove up to their grandfather’s home in that long black limo, his life had been very different from his older brother’s, and he had the feeling that was exactly the way Victor wanted it.

Cale zipped his shaving kit closed. “I’m going to meet my brother tomorrow at the Catalina place. Since it looks like you’re gonna stay in that shower till graduation, I’m heading over to the gym. I’ll shower there.” He closed the door, but stopped in the middle of the room. The torn envelope sat on his bed. Talk to Victor, Will had said. Cale could just hear his grandfather now. Youyoung fool. You let a girl snatch away your dreams. Your only jobwas to go to college and study, not skip classes and screw somesweet young thing. Victor had an uncanny ability to zero in on an open, bleeding wound and stick a knife squarely into it.

Cale threw the envelope in the trash. No way he would go to Newport now. Will had been right on when he’d called Victor the great and powerful Oz. He was. But for Cale, no place was home.

CHAPTER 6 (#u72d2fca6-1860-5aae-a9ac-956cb623ea69)

During the years she lived with Julia, Kathryn Peyton had lost herself. Her mother-in-law hadn’t been old when Jimmy died, only fifty-five to Kathryn’s twenty-three, but she was frail, her bones the first thing anyone noticed about her and much of what gave her the hard look that went along with her controlling nature. With Laurel in the house, Julia’s mind stayed sharp, but her body hadn’t. Those bones shrank into nothingness over twelve years, and even Julia, with her sheer determination to control everything, couldn’t stop her own death.

Those same twelve years had shrunk Kathryn into a nonentity. She was Laurel’s mother, Julia’s daughter-in-law, a reclusive artist known only through the pieces sold. No Kathryn. Her life had been dissected into two precise pieces—before Jimmy died and after Jimmy died. Everything before was only a dream, everything afterward alien territory.

It wasn’t until recently that she had faced her own existence with clearer eyes, and saw what it had been—one distraction after another. Laurel needed her. Julia needed her. Her work—a place to hide from what she was really feeling. Then one day she was living in her dead mother-in-law’s home with no one to tell her what to do or how to live. She didn’t fit anymore and felt swallowed by the emptiness of her own existence. Until Evie called with a plan. She was getting married and moving to Chicago, so Kathryn should buy the house on Catalina Island. The timing was perfect. Nothing was keeping her in Seattle. “After all, Kay,” Evie said, “you’re almost thirty-six years old.”

So Kathryn bought the house and moved to Santa Catalina, a small Channel Island off the coast of Southern California, where everything was different. From the island village of Avalon, the moon looked as if it rose right out of the sea, and the palm trees stood so tall, like hands waving hello in the sea breezes. It was lazy here; things began only with an arrival from the mainland—a regatta, a steamship, or a seaplane. This was the land of glass-bottomed boats, of coves named after jewels, of starfish and abalone shells, a place where people preferred to drive golf carts instead of cars.

Esther Williams had leapt off an island cliff on horseback once, creating a small but dramatic piece of cinematic and island history. The movie studios had shipped a herd of buffalo over to film a Western, and left them to become part of the place, like the wild boars and herds of goats and other seemingly mythic animals. So, given all the elements, Catalina became the magic isle, a place that rose out of the fog, an emerald in a sea of sapphires, a place where the fish could really fly.

Here the rain didn’t come down in sheets of water so thick they blocked out life going on around you. Island sunshine made things appear clearer. You could see all the sharp edges and soft curves of life. Here, when you looked into a mirror, you saw what you had become, not what you had been.

Hiding in excuses wasn’t so easy in the clear air and sunshine, or inside a small house filled with rooms as colorful as her sister’s personality. So perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising when Kathryn shared a pitcher of margaritas and a platter of nachos earlier that evening with a man named Stephen Randall, whom she’d met at a Chamber of Commerce meeting the week before. She had sat down alone in the bar of the local Mexican restaurant and felt reckless for even showing up. She knew how to hide; she didn’t know how to date.

Just drinks, he told her when he’d come into her shop one afternoon. But tonight he came into the bar with his arms full of yellow daffodils, so drinks moved on to appetizers, and he left hours later with her home telephone number. Funny that she didn’t regret giving it to him, even now, as she set an overflowing vase on a glass table in her bedroom. His flowers were the same sunshine-warm shade as the walls. Happy colors, Evie called the paint she’d used inside the house. Daffodils were happy, like snapdragons, and pansies, and lost women who moved to small islands in the blue Pacific.

Wilmington Pier, Los Angeles Harbor

Laurel Peyton stood on the corner as the local bus pulled away from the wharf and headed back toward downtown LA. A slight breeze lifted her hat, so she pressed it down, picked up a large, rusty brown suede purse, and rushed toward the boat as she did almost every Friday, when she routinely made the two-hour boat trip home.

The SS Catalina was a three-hundred-foot white steamer, a ship really, but everyone called it a boat. As always, the Catalina was docked in the last slip, where nothing but an expanse of blue-gray water stood between her huge hull and the Channel Island she serviced. On most days, you could see the island from almost anywhere along the Southern California coast. Against the western horizon, Santa Catalina Island looked like an enormous sleeping camel, sometimes shrouded in marine mist and sometimes sitting there so clearly you could almost make out the saw-toothed outline of the trees along its ridges.

Laurel joined the long line waiting to board. The late afternoon sun was hot and shone at eye level. The sun was more intense in California, especially at the very end of land and on days like today, when no cool wind blew in off the ocean. People shifted in line and muttered impatiently, removing jackets and sweaters. Kids whined or ran about. Their mothers ignored them, fanning themselves with island pamphlets and folded-up guide maps.

Although she hadn’t lived in California a year yet, Laurel could spot the tourists with the innate eye of a native. Men in dark shirts wore straw hats with black hatbands and socks with their sandals. Women in floral print dresses carried white patent-leather purses and wore nylons. California women were true to the golden land and wore only their tanned skin, polished with a bit of baby oil.

Laurel glanced left at the sound of a deep male voice coming from a bank of pay phones. The young man leaned casually against the wall, his back to her. He was tall, with light brown hair and the lanky build of a movie idol. He wore khaki shorts and a polo shirt the color of fresh lemons, his skin looking darkly tanned against that light clothing. On his feet were sandals—no socks.

The line shifted with an almost unanimous sigh of relief as two crew members came down the gangplank and unlocked its chain. He glanced over his shoulder and she forgot to breathe. Paul Newman and Ryan O’Neal rolled into one. He was too old for her, really—in his mid-twenties—but when he walked past her, he winked.

She counted slowly to ten before she turned around, and had lost him while pretending to be so casual. The boarding line was backed up to beyond the turnstiles, four or five people wide. The Gray Line tourist buses in the parking lots still unloaded passengers, but he was tall enough to stand out in any crowd, so she systematically scanned the dock from right to left.

“Excuse me, missy.” A man tapped her on the shoulder. “You’re holding up the line.”

A gaping distance stood between her and the gangplank. “I’m sorry.” She rushed forward, her face red, struggling to sling her bag up her arm.

A familiar crewman greeted her at the gangplank. “Going home again?”

“Sure am. Looks like you have a full boat.”

“Spring break starts today. The next couple of weekends will be pretty wild. College kids. High school kids. Heard last year was almost as wild on the island as Palm Springs. This might be the last calm crossing for a while.”

Her frozen smile hid the truth: she had no idea what spring break on Catalina Island was like. She and her mother had lived there only since summer, after they had moved away from everyone and everything they’d ever known. Halfway up the gangplank she looked back over the crowd, searching, but the line was now just heads and hats and people milling together like spilled marbles. Once on board, she searched for that handsome face and yellow shirt, but soon gave up and went to find a seat.

An hour and a half later the seat felt hard as a rock. The sun glowed low on a vibrant pink horizon, a golden ball magically balancing itself on top of the blue sea. Passengers shifted to the bow, where the colors of the sunset looked like fire, which meant no lines in the snack bar. Inside, she stared at the black menu board with its crooked white letters. She glanced back and Paul O’Neal himself stood three people back. He smiled. She smiled back.

“What can I get for you?” The worker behind the snack counter waited impatiently, a plastic smile on his face.

She glanced quickly at the board and blurted out the first thing: “A white wine.” There was complete silence for an instant, the kind where you wish the floor would swallow you up.

“Can I see your ID, please?”