Concentrate on the here and now.
The three of them join Canyon Cocktails around the firepit. Bettina feels safer — maybe even bolder — with Strickland at her side. The evening is cold for Laguna but the swimming pool is heated. Two of the Canyon View residents talk and tread water in the deep end, the recessed light illuminating them from below. Legs like pale fish. The whirlpool is crowded, steam and words rising above the noisy bubbles.
Bettina introduces Strickland around; Felix takes a chaise lounge for himself, sitting upright, eyes on them, raising his nose to the cool canyon breeze.
Bettina likes Strickland’s manners, slightly formal, controlled but genial. He answers questions about himself and his work with ease and apparent honesty, though he’s quick to redirect his questioners back on themselves. Bettina is exactly the same way: the first thing she learned to do as a shy girl was to let people talk about themselves, which 99.9 percent of the time is what they wanted to talk about anyway. Which, years later, made her a natural reporter. Questions as a profession and a defense. Questions as armor.
She watches as Felix suddenly jumps from the chaise and, nose high, wends his way around a group of people standing near the pool. His limp hardly noticeable, he weaves his way along the water with his nose down, following a scent trail through the faint mist rising off the heated pool.
He angles away from the water, into a cluster of chaise lounges and patio chairs, to a round glass table on which purses and bags have been stashed. Sweaters and heavy jackets and scarves hang from the chairs around the table.
Bettina breaks away from the group.
“Felix, sit!”
He ignores her and, wagging his tail excitedly, drops back onto all fours and pokes his nose into the side pocket of a peacoat draped over a patio chair. Then he sits and looks at Bettina as she arrives.
By then the dog has everyone’s attention, and some of the partiers have come over.
He sits now, a foot away from the coat, staring at that pocket.
“Whoa, dog, that’s my jacket.”
“Sorry about that,” says Bettina.
Strickland arrives next with his practically untouched bourbon and an amused expression.
Peacoat swings the heavy jacket on. “Okay, dog. Good idea — this will definitely cut the chill.”
Felix braces his little front paws on Peacoat’s leg and jams his snout into the left pocket of the jacket.
“Felix, down!” Bettina commands. “Down!”
He pushes off and downs himself at Peacoat’s feet, dropping a small plastic bag on the concrete.
Bettina sees the foil-wrapped item inside, the small pipe, and a box of wooden matches.
“Leave it,” says Bettina.
Felix looks up at her with glee in eyes, then turns his attention back to the bag.
Which Bettina picks up and hands to Peacoat, who stuffs it back into his pocket with a nervous grin.
By then every Canyon Cocktailer present tonight has gathered around.
“Bust-ed!”
“Don’t let that dog into my place!”
“What is it?”
“What’s it look like?”
Peacoat steps back, dangling the bag to the audience. “Anybody want some more hash?”
Felix jumps for it but misses.
Bettina snaps his leash on and walks him back over to his original chaise lounge, lets him jump back up.
“Sit and stay, dog,” she says too harshly, regrets it because she knows he’s only done what he’s been taught to do. It brings him joy.
Bettina looks over at Dan, who has amusement on his face.
“Good dog,” she says. “Now, sit and stay, will you?”
32
After dinner, Bettina and Strickland talk late, sitting on her deck overlooking Laguna Canyon Road. The Festival of Arts grounds below are dark, and the traffic in and out of town is light. Heat radiates from a steel chiminea.
Between them is a table for their cocktails and sherbet, and a copper hurricane lamp. Felix lies under the table, eyeing them through the glass top as he works on his plush turkey.
Strickland prods Bettina for her version of the death of Joaquín and arrest of Valeria, what Godoy has tasked her to do, how her DEA handlers had reacted.
Recounting some of what she saw that night, Bettina feels the dull fear returning, sees Joaquín punched dead by silent bullets, sees the agent toeing his head to see if he was still alive.
“Did you see much?” she asks. “I saw you zooming around in your fancy green car.”
“Some.”
“I’d rather not remember that right now.”
“Please don’t.”
She looks out at Laguna Canyon, tries to let the remembered fear pass through her. She points out the once-notorious little cluster of homes nicknamed Dodge City, for the drug dealers who lived there in the sixties, and the cops who happily raided them, sometimes with guns drawn. Bettina has written articles and done videos on those wild days, and she’s always felt some affinity for those hippie outlaws.
“Why?” asks Strickland.
“I envy them. They were brave and half-crazy. Me, I’m just conventional.”
“Wait, you surf and race up and down Coast Highway with the Biker Chicks. And you’re good with a shotgun. Those aren’t exactly conventional things. Maybe you’re wilder than you think.”
Bettina never could take a compliment. Not that she’s ever been drowned in them, except for maybe the during her Olympic trials. “I don’t mind being me. Mostly.”
Strickland lets that one sink in. “You’re a lot. You’re good. You’re solid.”
“Thank you.”
A beat, then:
“What happened to you, Bettina? I see it on your face. It stands between you and what you want to say.”
The lamplight bevels Strickland’s face into light and shadow. It’s a hard face, but it says the man inside is smart and honest and trustworthy. Though appearances can be all wrong, she knows.
“There are two,” she says. Takes a moment to look out the stars twinkling above the black ridge of the canyon. Feels Keith, alive inside her, pleased to be thought of, taking form in her mind’s eye.
“My brother died of a fentanyl overdose when he was twenty. Keith. We were twins. He’s with me everywhere I go. I try to let in the good memories and edit out the bad ones. Sorry I can’t keep him off my face sometimes. Don’t really want to.”
“You shouldn’t,” says Strickland. She can tell by the gravity on his face that he understands. And is moved by what happened to Keith.
She goes inside, brings out her framed picture of Keith and herself as Superman and Wonder Woman, look-alike superheroes in happy times.
Strickland sets it upright on the table before them and studies it with a solemn expression.
“Tell me about him.”
“There’s so much. Maybe some other time.”
Bettina can’t talk about Keith on demand. Right now, can’t really talk at all. She wipes a tear on a knuckle.
His gaze in the steady lamplight is penetrating. “What else, Bettina?”
“No,” she says, wiping the knuckle on her jeans, toughening up. “Not a big deal.”
“Big enough to keep eating at you.”
“Avoidable,” she says.
“All of life is avoidable if you just stay home.”
“I was not asking for it.”
“No, you weren’t,” he says. “And that’s why you can’t let it go.”
“I don’t want to talk about it now.”