The Lemon Orchard Read online

  ALSO BY LUANNE RICE

  Little Night

  The Silver Boat

  Deep Blue Sea for Beginners

  The Geometry of Sisters

  Last Kiss

  What Matters Most

  The Edge of Winter

  Sandcastles

  Summer of Roses

  Summer’s Child

  Silver Bells

  Beach Girls

  Dance with Me

  The Perfect Summer

  The Secret Hour

  True Blue

  Safe Harbor

  Summer Light

  Firefly Beach

  Dream Country

  Follow the Stars Home

  Cloud Nine

  Home Fires

  Blue Moon

  Secrets of Paris

  Stone Heart

  Crazy in Love

  Angels All Over Town

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  A PAMELA DORMAN BOOK / VIKING

  Copyright © Luanne Rice, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Rice, Luanne.

  The lemon orchard / Luanne Rice.

  pages ; cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62291-9

  1. Bereavement—Fiction. 2. Separation (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. California, Southern—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.I289L46 2013b 813'.54—dc23 2013009690

  Photograph on title page copyright © 2012 by Paul Giamou / iStock

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Armando

  acknowledgments

  Much love and gratitude to Armando, Armando Sr., Delfina, Brandon, Antonio, Eliza, and Melanie.

  Much gratitude to my agent, Andrea Cirillo, and everyone at the Jane Rotrosen Agency: Jane Berkey, Don Cleary, Meg Ruley, Annelise Robey, Christina Hogrebe, Peggy Gordijn, Christina Prestia, Carlie Webber, Danielle Sickles, Rebecca Scherer, Donald W. Cleary, Brooke Fox, Ellen Tischler, Liz Van Buren.

  I am thankful to everyone at Pamela Dorman Books/Viking and Penguin, especially Pam Dorman; Kiki Koroshetz; Clare Ferraro; Kathryn Court; Julie Miesionczek; Dick Heffernan, Norman Lidofsky and their sales teams; Lindsay Prevette; Carolyn Coleburn; Nancy Sheppard; Andrew Duncan; Patrick Nolan; John Fagan; Maureen Donnelly; Hal Fessenden; Leigh Butler; Roseanne Serra; and Jeannette Williams.

  Thank you to Deborah Dwyer for copyediting this and so many of my novels.

  Veronique de Turenne is a graceful writer and wonderful friend whose blog, Here in (the) Malibu, introduced me to Malibu’s history, nature, and secret places.

  I am thankful to Asha Randall for countless kindnesses and for introducing me to Adamson House.

  Many thanks to Bernard Wolfsdorf for his expertise in immigration law and his generosity in discussing it with me.

  Much gratitude to Jim Weikart, Tim Donnelly, Jay Tsao, Ted O’Gorman, Injae Choe, Lauren Gardner, Elvira de Leon, Delsy Hermosa, Oscar Castillo, Nick Chambers, Jackie Bass, and Becky Murray.

  I feel very inspired by Luis Alberto Urrea’s brilliant The Devil’s Highway. Reading it changed the way I see the world—I know it will turn out to be one of the most influential books of my life. Luis opened my eyes to life along the border and I’m so grateful.

  Love and thanks to Maureen, Olivier, and Mia Onorato; Molly, Alex, and Will Feinstein; Robert and Audrey Loggia; and William Twigg Crawford.

  I’m grateful to my family of immigrants on both sides: for their hope, beliefs, struggles, and love.

  contents

  also by luanne rice

  title page

  copyright

  dedication

  acknowledgments

  prologue

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  prologue

  FEBRUARY 2007

  This is how I picture it: Eleven o’clock that cold and sunny morning, she is behind the wheel, hands in the two-and-ten position because she’s a good girl and that’s the way her father, sitting beside her holding the large black coffee he’d bought at Kendall’s, likes her to drive, and she’s taking care because she doesn’t want him to spill it and scald himself. The station wagon is twelve years old, and it smells of dog, and if she looked in the rearview mirror, she could see where we used to buckle her car seat.

  Bonnie Blue, our seven-year-old and the latest in a long line of blue-merle border collies, rides with me because she’s still rambunctious and likes to nuzzle the driver’s ear from the back seat, and Peter and I worry she might distract Jenny. Bonnie and I are two miles behind, with one last stop to make, to pick up the chocolate cake at Hoffman’s Bakery, where Viola and Norma have decorated it with goalposts and a fifty-yard line and know to spread raspberry preserves between the layers because that is Jenny’s favorite.

  My daughter: Jenny Hughes. She is wearing the bulky Nordic sweater, endearingly lopsided, she knit for Timmy from yarn that still contained bits of burrs and brambles from the sheep’s wool, and it’s so Jenny to be wearing it, just two days after he gave it back to her as part of the breakup, along with her telescope and dog-eared copy of H. A. Rey’s The Stars.

  The February day is frigid but bright, and although there’s plenty of snow left from last week’s storm, the roads are clear of ice. Jenny is thinking of the party. She and I don’t care about watching sports but Peter played football at Brown, and every year we go all out for the Super Bowl. Jenny loves to cook, and together we’ll make chili, Buffalo wings, and guacamole. Last year Timmy came over, and the two of them huddled on the couch whispering and laughing, surrounded by Peter and our friends; I don’t think I watched a full minute of the game, I was so taken by the sight of my daughter in love.

  Jenny was sixteen in November, her license is new, and she brings her sense of responsibility to driving the way she does everything else. Straight As last semester, a talent for the violin, a blue ribbon in last summer’s horse show, caring for our animals, such good-heartedness, and a head-down pure-hearted determination to go to Brown University like her parents, and I wonder if her ch
oice is a way of trying to hold us together, to remind Peter and me of where we met, and I know she feels bad for leaving the house angry this morning, calling me a hypocrite for inviting people over and entertaining relatives just when Peter is planning to move out. My aunt and uncle from California are staying with us; they are in Connecticut because he’s a professor, guest lecturing at Yale, where I am an adjunct professor of cultural anthropology. Jenny is afraid that they have picked up on the tension and are judging Peter.

  So there she is, driving home from the barn along the Shore Road, past the marsh brown and glistening, the creeks frozen over, pure white in the sunlight, her father beside her sipping coffee, telling her how well she rode that morning, how she kept her elbows in and heels down and took Gisele over the jumps.

  Peter and Jenny adore each other and have since her birth. At night, as an infant, when she’d wake up crying and refuse to sleep, she’d quiet only when he would cradle and walk her, singing her made-up songs as he carried her back and forth across her room overlooking the meadow, that single stately elm framed in the window, ghostly in moonlight.

  And even those years when Jenny was ten and eleven, and I finally went back to school for my master’s, taking classes in New Haven, studying and writing about the anthropology of movement, my books and papers spread out on the dining room table every night, Peter would come home from the office and he and Jenny would take dinner into the den and eat in front of the TV, laughing, Jenny shrieking; they both loved comedies and cartoons, especially French ones—Asterix and Tintin were huge in our house.

  She drives toward home and the meadow, gleaming with crusted snow, the road straight and clear, no traffic in either direction, pavement sanded and clear of ice, tree branches interlocking overhead and throwing morning shadows, and her elm—she thinks of it as hers—comes into view. Shore Road takes a sharp left, a boomerang bend, just where our driveway veers off to the right.

  Ancient stone walls built by Connecticut’s settlers, arrived from England in the 1600s—evidence, as if we need more, of migration and movement, and how the history of the world is made up of people leaving one place for another, looking for more food, religious freedom, a better life—line the way; when she was little she loved to walk to and from the bus stop on top of the walls, and sometimes we’d hide messages for each other in a lichen-bound crevice that we called our mailbox. She remembers our secret hiding place, the shivery pleasure of finding a note, and she is wearing Timmy’s sweater, the smell of him inseparable from the feeling of being in love, and in that instant she steps on the gas.

  The sunlight bounces off the snow, off bright mica and quartz threaded through the granite walls, blinding her for just a second. The road is clear, she knows the way, she is such a good driver, her father is with her, he taught her to drive himself, she would never hurt him, never hurt herself, she loves her family, she loves her life, so there is no explanation.

  Ten minutes later Bonnie and I meander along, finished with our errands. We still have a few hours before friends will show up to watch the game, and I’m eager for time with Jenny—her father had the morning, and I’ll have the early afternoon to nurse our child and her broken heart, to just be with her because I’m smart enough to know that words don’t help, there’s no explaining that everything will get better, that she’ll heal, that time will pass and the day will come when it doesn’t hurt so much.

  Black Hall is a small town, and when you hear sirens your stomach drops because you’re pretty sure whatever it is will affect someone you know. Driving along Shore Road, I slow down to let the fire truck pass. Bonnie, in the back seat, paces back and forth. I tell her to calm down, everything’s okay, we’ll be home in a minute. I flip on the signal light, to veer off the main road and head toward our driveway, and see the burst of flashing lights.

  Some thoughts are too unbearable to allow. I see the town constable gesture for traffic to turn around, go back the other way, and I roll down the window to tell him I live here, and still, I won’t let myself think that this accident belongs to us. But Bonnie is barking, and she knows, and when the constable recognizes me and approaches the car with that look in his eyes that no human being wants to see, my heart stops because my heart knows.

  I open the car door, he tries to block me but nothing in this world could hold me back, I am right behind Bonnie running to the front of the long line of police cars, fire engines, and ambulances. I hear someone say, She didn’t even hit the brakes, she had to be going fifty, and someone else saying, Shut up, that’s her mother. The sun glistens off the snowfield and Long Island Sound, but it doesn’t blind me, I see everything, and my mind takes a picture of all that is there and all that isn’t.

  The memory will stay with me always, even when, in the future, I travel three thousand miles away. Distance is no match for this: the car crumpled against the wall, billows of black smoke, rescue workers with no one to rescue parting to let me through, spiderwebs of blood on the faces of my daughter and husband as they lie on the snow-covered ground, Bonnie between them not howling but keening soft and low, and the beloved elm tree, branches bare against the blue sky, that must have been the last sight that Jenny and Peter saw on earth.

  chapter one

  Roberto

  SEPTEMBER 2012

  Before dawn, the air smelled of lemons. Roberto slept in the small cabin in the grove in the Santa Monica Mountains, salt wind off the Pacific Ocean sweetening the scent of bitter fruit and filling his dreams with memories of home. He was back in Mexico before he’d come to the Unites States in search of goodness for his family, in another huerto de limones, the lemon orchard buzzing with bees and the voices of workers talking, Rosa playing with her doll Maria. Maria had sheer angel wings and Roberto’s grandmother had whispered to Rosa that she had magic powers and could fly.

  Rosa wore her favorite dress, white with pink flowers, sewn by his grandmother. Roberto stood high on the ladder, taller in the dream than any real one would reach. From here he could see over the treetops, his gaze sweeping the valley toward Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the two snow-covered volcanic peaks to the west. His grandmother had told him the legend, that the mountains were lovers, the boy shielding the girl, and tall on his ladder Roberto felt stronger than anyone, and he heard his daughter talking to her doll.

  In dream magic, his basket spilling over with lemons, he slid down the tree and lifted Rosa into his arms. She was five, with laughing brown eyes and cascades of dark curls, and she slung her skinny arm around his neck and pressed her face into his shoulder. In the dream he was wise and knew there was no better life, no greater goodness, than what they already had. He held her and promised nothing bad would ever happen to her, and if he could have slept forever those words would be true. Sleep prolonged the vision, his eyes shut tight against the dawn light, and the scent of limones enhanced the hallucination that Rosa was with him still and always.

  When he woke up, he didn’t waste time trying to hold on to the feelings. They tore away from him violently and were gone. His day started fast. He lived twenty-five miles east, in Boyle Heights, but sometimes stayed in the orchard during fire season and when there was extra work to be done. He led a crew of three, with extra men hired from the Malibu Community Labor Exchange or the parking lot at the Woodland Hills Home Depot when necessary. They came to the property at 8 a.m.

  The Riley family lived in a big Spanish colonial–style house, with arched windows and a red tile roof, just up the ridgeline from Roberto’s cabin. They had occupied this land in western Malibu’s Santa Monica Mountains since the mid-1900s. While other families had torn up old, less profitable orchards and planted vineyards, the Rileys remained true to their family tradition of raising citrus. Roberto respected their loyalty to their ancestors and the land.

  The grove took up forty acres, one hundred twenty-year-old trees per acre, planted in straight lines on the south-facing hillside, in
the same furrows where older trees had once stood. Twenty years ago the Santa Ana winds had sparked fires that burned the whole orchard, sparing Casa Riley but engulfing neighboring properties on both sides. Close to the house and large tiled swimming pool were rock outcroppings and three-hundred-year-old live oaks—their trunks eight feet in diameter—still scorched black from that fire. Fire was mystical, and although it had swept through Malibu in subsequent years, the Rileys’ property had been spared.

  Right now the breeze blew cool off the Pacific, but Roberto knew it could shift at any time. Summer had ended, and now the desert winds would start: the Santa Anas, roaring through the mountain passes, heating up as they sank from higher elevations down to the coast, and any flash, even from a power tool, could ignite the canyon. It had been dry for two months straight. He walked to the barn, where the control panel was located, and turned on the sprinklers.

  The water sprayed up, catching rainbows as the sun crested the eastern mountains. It hissed, soft and constant, and Roberto couldn’t help thinking of the sound as money draining away. Water was delivered to the orchard via canal, and was expensive. The Rileys had told him many times that the important thing was the health of the trees and lemons, and to protect the land from fire.

  He had something even more important to do before his co-workers arrived: make the coastal path more secure. He grabbed a sledgehammer and cut through the grove to the cliff edge. The summer-dry hillsides sloped past the sparkling pool, down in a widening V to the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally hikers crossed Riley land to connect with the Backbone Trail and other hikes in the mountain range. Years back someone had installed stanchions and a chain: a rudimentary fence to remind people the drop was steep, five hundred feet down to the canyon floor.

  He tested the posts and found some loosened. Mudslides and temblers made the land unstable. He wished she would stay off this trail entirely, walk the dog through the orchard, where he could better keep an eye on them, or at least use the paths on the inland side of the property. But she seemed to love the ocean. He’d seen her pass this way both mornings since she’d arrived, stopping to stare out to sea while the dog rustled through the chaparral and coastal sage.