“Why? You weren’t sad before.”
“It gets a little bigger every day. And the things I have and love and look forward to, they get smaller.”
“Do you have cancer?”
“Oh, no honey, no!”
“Is it what happened with Dad?”
“Maybe what happened to all of us.”
“But Kyle’s going to make it home alive. And we’re going to get Jasmine back. And Dad’s gone for good. Don’t dwell on him.”
“I know.”
“Maybe it’s the dragon balls, then.”
Julie shakes her head but avoids Matt’s eyes. “No, certainly not. What do you know about opium?”
“The hash you smoke is laced with it. From Afghanistan. The Brotherhood smuggles it in by the pound. It’s how they finance the LSD and the Happenings.”
“But what makes you think that I smoke that stuff?”
“You left a dragon ball in the silverware drawer and I found it. Wrapped in foil.”
She looks down, takes a wavering breath. Her voice is softer. “If you’re ever tempted to try it, don’t. It will make you care less about the things you love. So all you’ll want is more of it.”
“That’s happening to you.”
“I’m fighting hard. I love you so much and I don’t want anything bad to ever happen to you. You are my baby forever, Matt. My last and in some ways my first.”
“First what?”
“My first and only you.”
More tears, chin trembling.
“We need to stay on Third Street, Mom.”
“No. This is where I need to be. This is where I make my stand. Where I started. When I was young and brave.”
Matt’s anger spikes. He pities his mom but she infuriates him too.
“I’m staying at Third Street until Pedley throws me out,” he says. “I don’t like it here and Jasmine needs a home to come home to. I can’t believe you’re ditching her when she’s in some living hell we can’t even imagine.”
“I need to be here, Matt. I need to save myself so I can save my daughter. You can have the van.”
Half an hour later they’ve finished unloading the boxes. There is mostly silence between them, and a heaviness in the air.
The first thing she takes from a box is the countdown calendar for Kyle’s return from the war. She’s already filled in today’s magic number: thirty-six. She’s packed the tape in the same box, so the calendar goes right over the skull on the Grateful Dead poster on the fridge.
“Can I bring you anything from home, or town?” he asks.
“Everything I need for today is here. I got it all. Thanks for your help!”
She gives him a hearty hug and a beaten smile. Matt can feel her desperation.
He drives down Roosevelt Lane to Milligan, loops back around into view of the barn and parks again. Leaves the engine running. Sees that the big barn door is now closed.
Notes the thick plume of smoke drafting out of the master bedroom window.
24
With the house to himself Matt calls Laurel but her mom says she’s out with Rose. He eats two Husky Boy burgers and fries in front of the TV, watches the Huntley-Brinkley Vietnam coverage for yesterday — one of the deadliest days in the entire war. Most of the segment is from an address by President Johnson, who urges the American people to be patient with the war: we are winning but it is costly. He suggests that TV is turning America against the war. There is grim footage of metal coffins being unloaded from a huge cargo plane at a military base in Maryland. Kyle could be in one of those, Matt thinks. The military is supposed to notify you as soon as it happens, though, so families don’t get shocked to learn it on TV. He read about a dad who died of a heart attack when they came to his door. Matt thinks of how scared Ernie Rios is of getting drafted, even though he’s not eighteen yet. Kyle was number 353 and enlisted anyway.
He half watches The Flying Nun with the sound off. So stupid a show, with all the bad things in the world, he thinks. Then stares at the street outside where they’d bagged his sister. He wonders what she’s doing right exactly now. Are they feeding her? Is she being tortured or raped? He feels like hitting someone, maybe the damned nun. Or how about the men who took Jazz? Or whoever sells that shit to his mom?
He looks again through Jasmine’s room for some hint or clue to her whereabouts. With his mom moved out, Matt misses Jazz more than ever. Leary looks back at him. As do Aretha and the Beatles. Maybe the Beatles had her kidnapped.
And Jazz loves her music. Which reminds him of the Advanced Ukulele Hits book he got for her birthday, and the lyrics she scribbles inside the back cover and in the margins. Maybe there’s some clue in her songs.
He takes it off the shelf and leafs through, but no luck. Just phrases and lines and chords written over them. Feels some of his mother’s desperation, the good things getting further and further away.
He gets her diary and sits on her bed. It’s got a black leatherette cover and gold-edged pages of heavy, lined paper.
Opens where the marker is, and reads:
When I graduate it all changes. But into what?
She’s always liked birds. Writes about migrating warblers the size of a woman’s thumb. Millions of them flying at night. How if they get tired over large bodies of water they fall from the sky and drown.
I can see the beauty in his body and hear the beauty in his music but there is something missing in him. I think he has dedicated part of his soul to having success and this makes him a driven, relentless striver...
Matt thinks of the carelessly vain Austin Overton, guitar strapped over his muscles, entertaining Dana and the other girls on the patio of Big Yellow. How Overton remembered sleeping with Jasmine but not much else about her. Again, Matt wonders at his sister’s brittle arrogance, how she’s superior and self-doubting at the same time. How she likes the singer and is repelled by him, too. Matt traces this to his father and mother, the way that, between them, they stoked pride in their children one day, followed it with belittlement the next.
I want to live in a village in Mexico. On a beach, in a clean little cabana with tile floors, where I can feel the beach sand under my feet and play my uke.
She told Matt that a year ago. He said he’d go too, fish and draw and paint.
He fans back a few pages.
Neldra says that her scene isn’t for everybody. She said I might be able to visit sometime, but she didn’t invite me directly. There is a secrecy about what goes on there.
Matt feels sneaky, reading these words that were never meant for him. Jasmine’s handwriting changes with her moods: angry, sad, playful, curious, confident. He hears her voice in the words. He reads a few more entries, but finds nothing to point him in her direction. In any direction at all.
Then he’s back in the dimming light of the small living room, looking out the window through the lank avocado tree to the street and the hulking GTE building. He realizes this may be one of his last nights here, and it surprises him how unhappy this makes him. This is a crummy place by Laguna standards, a barely affordable rental, small, drafty, and shadowed by other buildings. The landlord is annoying, stingy with his avocados, and looks at his mother creepily.
But this has been Matt’s home for his last four years — two of middle school, and two of Laguna Beach High School. The artists, he thinks. Like Christian. And Gauguin. This clapboard box with the groaning pipes and the flickering lights is a big part of what he is. He’s really kind of loved it.
From here on Third, he’s fished with Kyle, listened to Jasmine play and sing, had long talks with his mom about her growing up on that Ohio farm, the small school, Julie being the high school valedictorian for a graduating class of twelve, Julie and her friend Dee spreading out a map of the United States on the floor, closing their eyes and Dee dropping a Chinese coin onto it. The coin had a square opening cut into its middle and this square was to frame the city where fate told them to go — to find jobs and begin new lives in a world that might offer more than endless flat miles of corn, tiny towns, few people and little opportunity. The coin landed in New Mexico but there was nothing in its square window. On the next drop it landed way up in New Hampshire but again there was no town or city. Third try, Dee flipped the coin high and it landed in California. And when Julie and Dee leaned in close, they saw the small empty square framing letters Lagu... where his mother and Dee, aged eighteen, had begun their new lives in 1946, in rooms for rent on Victory Walk, and where they had learned to dance up in Newport Beach and to swim in a rich lady’s pool in Emerald Bay.