The Lemon Orchard Read online

  He tapped the first post to set his aim, then swung the sledgehammer overhead, metal connecting with metal with a loud gong. He felt the shock of the impact in the bones of his wrists and shoulders. Moving down the row of stanchions, he drove each one a few inches deeper into the ground until they were solidly embedded. The wind was blowing toward the house. He hoped the sound wouldn’t bother her, but he figured it wouldn’t. She rose early, like him.

  The Rileys had left to go to Ireland for several months, leaving their niece to house-sit. She had arrived three days ago, having driven cross-country alone with a dog that had white, brown, and blue-gray markings, with one brown and one blue eye.

  The woman was small, pale, with silver hair and blue eyes. She looked nothing like the women Roberto had seen in California. Everyone here seemed glamorous, almost perfect, with skin golden from the sun and hair colored lush brown or bright blond, nails done and makeup on—he’d never once seen Mrs. Riley without lipstick. But the niece was different.

  She had introduced herself the same morning she arrived. He’d been in the barn, increasing the sprinkler controls to ten gallons an hour per tree, and she’d walked right in and shaken his hand without any regard for the fact his hand was greasy and his face streaked with dirt.

  “You must be Roberto,” she’d said, shaking his hand. “I’m Julia Hughes, Graciela and John’s niece. And this is Bonnie.”

  “Hi, Julia,” he’d said, embarrassed and wiping his hands on his pants, too late. “You made it here safely. Long trip?”

  “Yes, thank you. Luckily, Bonnie is a good traveler.”

  They locked eyes, and Roberto couldn’t have said why the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He bent down to pet Bonnie to escape the feeling, running his hands over her silky blue-gray coat. She had a smiling, friendly dog face, but with those spooky eyes, his grandmother would call her a perra bruja: a witch dog. Julia’s blue eyes troubled him even more; when he looked back at her, he felt jolted, as if he’d looked in a mirror.

  “I’ll let you get back to work,” she said, as if sensing his uneasiness.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Please let me know if you need anything.”

  She had walked away, Bonnie leading her onto the cliff path. He had seen her return again since that first meeting. In this world he couldn’t save everyone, but he could do his best to make the trail safe for her.

  Working his way along the posts, he realized that he would have to reinforce some—those too loose to grab the earth—with concrete. A kick with the toe of his boot sent pebbles and clay tumbling down the canyon. He grabbed an armful of brush from the hillside and blocked the trail; he’d leave it that way—even adding some yellow hazard tape—until he could fix the danger zones.

  Heading back to the barn, he heard trucks arriving and voices talking. The crew had arrived to irrigate and prune the orchard, but Roberto could think only of danger zones. They were everywhere. Some were compact and marked with warning signs, a few feet of cliff along a hiking trail, fixable with the right tools and a bucket of concrete. Others spread for miles, from horizon to horizon, across land crossed by thousands. The luckiest made it with their lives.

  The youngest ones who hadn’t survived were angels now. They haunted the pilgrimage route, the dry creek beds and narrow canyons, filling the air with their ghostly wails. Some had been taken by La Llorona, the weeping woman who stole others’ children to replace her own. Rejected by heaven for losing her children in the Santa Fe River, she wandered the borderlands and captured any young ones she found alone at night.

  “Hola, como estas?” Serapio asked, parking his truck in the shade.

  “Bien, y tú?” Roberto answered.

  “Bien. We’re digging drainage again today?” Serapio asked.

  “Yes,” Roberto said. “You and the guys pick up where we left off yesterday. I’ll be there soon.”

  Serapio nodded without question. Roberto could have asked the crew for help, finished reinforcing the trail that much sooner. But the job fell to him, and he knew it. Once in a while he felt inspired—was that the right word? Perhaps not—it was more like the relief of punishment being lifted, the chance to work and redeem himself and his sins. He wasn’t even a believer anymore. His mother had died in childbirth and his grandmother had raised him Catholic. He still carried her hand-carved black wood rosary in his pocket, but it was more for sentiment and love of her than any religious reason.

  Still, when he got this feeling—straight from his gut, not his brain—he obeyed it. He grabbed a bag of concrete mix, filled the first bucket with water, slung twenty yards’ worth of yellow hazard tape over his shoulder. Bees buzzed in dark pink bougainvillea growing up the side of the barn, and as he hiked back to the cliff edge, he felt the breeze rushing through sage and coastal scrub up from the sea. It cooled his skin, gave him goose bumps even in the morning heat.

  The Pacific Ocean went on forever, as blue but not a fraction as deep as the sky. The wind cracked the surface into small white waves that built and surged and crashed at the foot of the cliff. The pounding was relentless. The noise kept him awake on nights when he stayed in the orchard, and made him lonely for his farm town at the foot of the mountains. He had never seen any ocean before arriving in Los Angeles. If the fall from the cliff didn’t kill him, he would drown—he couldn’t swim.

  After mixing the concrete, he filled the holes he’d dug and placed the posts upright. They were solid steel and, once properly anchored, would make the chain strong and effective. Short of standing right here by the edge, this was the best he could do to keep her safe from the dangerous land. The sun rose higher and the sweat that formed on his brow ran into his eyes and made them sting, but he didn’t wipe it away—he didn’t want to stop swinging the sledgehammer, feeling the jolt to his bones so strong it kept him from thinking of loss or danger, or anything at all.

  chapter two

  Julia

  This is Malibu but nothing like the Malibu you hear about when you live on the East Coast. Back there it’s all movie stars and scandals and tan blond girls in late-model Porsches who make people wonder, “Are they up-and-coming actors on shows that haven’t aired yet and if so did they buy the car themselves, or are they just so pretty they’re being kept by an older man rich and lonely enough to trade expensive presents for attention and affection?”

  She knew a little about such things. She’d been coming here since she was a child—although this was her first time in five years—and she heard gossip from Lion, whom she’d be seeing for dinner that night.

  As much as she loved him and always had, she wasn’t in the mood, would have preferred to stay home. She liked the way this landscape enclosed her, made her feel protected in a strange way, because really, what could be more dangerous than Malibu, with its earthquakes, mudslides, and wildfires?

  Maybe that outward danger comforted her somehow and reinforced her sense of how impermanent it all was. Just look at the Chumash people, how they had thrived on this coast for ten thousand years, as hunter-gatherers and superb boatbuilders and basket makers. Being an anthropologist, she could vividly imagine their life here, and how timeless it must have seemed—until 1542, when Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo had sailed in and claimed California for Spain.

  Anthropology, it turns out, had been her perfect field of study: learning about the cosmology of civilizations uprooted from one place and settled in another. She felt the loss of Jenny so acutely, the specifics of their days together, the constellations marking moments in their lives, their own lost culture. Who they had been, Jenny and Julia, mother and daughter, would last forever; but who Jenny, and what their relationship, would have become, ended with the accident.

  In her profession Julia dealt with the real, the evidentiary, the tracks left behind by people. Even as an undergrad she’d loved hiding in her carrel at the Rock—the main library at Brow
n—and using long-lost and recently found artifacts to assemble, in her imagination, the way people had lived. It had always been her passion, to keep the dead alive through learning how they had behaved, where they had trekked in search of food, water, love.

  She had been an emotional girl, and that never changed. At Vance School, in first grade, she’d attended class with the kids who lived at the Children’s Home—a big brick building at the top of a hill. They were there for various reasons: their parents had died, or had hurt them, or for some reason couldn’t take care of them. Julia could see the home from her bedroom window.

  There was one boy, Billy, who sat next to her in school. He had freckles and a cowlick. When they went on a field trip to the fire station, he was her partner, and they held hands. It was fall, and walking down the Connecticut street, they kicked through fallen red and yellow leaves. Billy didn’t talk to anyone except their teacher. They spent the whole walk in silence, but he kept squeezing her hand, as if in Morse code.

  The insides of his wrists were dirty, and he had a hole in the sleeve of his sweater, and something about that raveled yarn and his not talking told her a story about his whole life.

  In fourth grade Julia saw a filmstrip about Margaret Mead working with children in Samoa. But by the time she got to high school, it was Margaret’s mentor, Ruth Benedict, who captured Julia’s imagination and made her want to be an anthropologist.

  Ruth studied tribes in the Southwest and was the first woman to really make strides in the field. She wrote about the relationships between culture, language, and personality. She was interested in human behavior and the way it is shaped by traditions. Julia wanted to learn all she could about people’s behavior, including her own family’s.

  How Jenny had behaved: a hurricane of love. She took after her mother when it came to emotion. It wasn’t unusual for Julia to return from her office and a late-afternoon trip to the grocery store, enter the kitchen, and have Jenny barrel over, leap right onto her, arms locked around her neck, saying “Why were you gone so long?”

  “I came straight home from work.”

  “Don’t you remember? We were going to have a picnic and watch the moonrise.” Or the sunset, or the bluefish in a feeding frenzy, or the monarch butterflies staging for their long migration south to Mexico, or the tree swallows in their funnel cloud formation each night at twilight.

  That September night it had been the moonrise. Jenny had prepared sandwiches, delicious concoctions of smoked bluefish and whatever was left in the garden. Peter was home—Julia remembered that now—but he hadn’t wanted to join them. He was working on a case, or had a Red Sox game to watch. They’d never meant to leave him out, but he’d never seemed eager to join in, either. He and Julia seemed to be living two separate lives, and that, more than anything, was contributing to their impending separation.

  Julia and Jenny hurried down the twisty, wooded path, stunted oaks and pines overhanging the sandy trail. They got to the beach just as the sun was setting. They sat on the smooth gray log—long stripped of bark, after years of storms and wind and blowing sand—and faced east.

  They tried to do this every month on the night of the full moon, but it wasn’t always possible. But that night, they saw the apricot moon crest over an eastern headland, then spread its orange light across Long Island Sound in a path that seemed to run straight toward them.

  “Oh, Jenny,” Julia said. “I’m so glad you thought of this.”

  “Mom, you invented moon picnics.”

  “I did?” she asked. But she knew it was true. She had always loved nature and the magic it brought to human love. As a kid, she’d been like Jenny: in love with everything. She didn’t believe in love unfolding, but being born in a big bang, like the universe.

  Jenny’s enthusiasm was like Julia’s, and the contrast with Peter couldn’t be sharper. The older he got, the more measured and cautious he became, and the harder it was for Julia to find ways to feel they had anything but years and a daughter in common. It had taken Julia a long time to admit that she was desperately unhappy in what most people would consider a very good marriage. Staring at that full moon, holding her daughter’s hand, tears had rolled down her cheeks because she’d begun not just thinking about but actually taking steps to divorce Peter.

  Divorce, as it turned out, hadn’t been necessary.

  The Santa Monica Mountains ran east-west, north of the Los Angeles basin, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and the house was nestled in a canyon overlooking endless, sparkling blue. In the days since Julia and Bonnie had arrived from Connecticut, Bonnie had already claimed her role as queen of the property. She was getting old, and it touched Julia to see her happy again.

  Collies were sensitive to their masters’ moods. Julia knew she was Bonnie’s master, like it or not. Julia was happiest hiding, being low on any kind of hierarchal totem pole, but when it came to dogs, the relationship was built-in. It had been five years, just Bonnie and Julia, and they belonged to each other. She’d made peace with the fact that Bonnie looked to her for everything—she had long since accepted the reality that until this trip, their lives were limited to the bedroom, the kitchen, and the as-infrequent-as-possible trips to the grocery store.

  Bonnie rested next to her on the bed, watching with sad eyes when Julia thought of Jenny and tried to keep breathing. Five years after the fact, it felt like no time had passed. Breath was still a razor blade in and out, in and out. Why did Julia get to breathe when Jenny didn’t? A childish thought, but she would never stop hating that fact and wishing she could trade places with her daughter. Let Jenny be here with Bonnie, let her be in college, let her be house-sitting in this mysterious canyon that smelled of flowers and lemons and sea air.

  She hated seeing people. She had nothing against anyone personally, but she’d become something different, other, since Jenny’s death. Jenny had loved Bonnie, used to pet her, snuggle her, throw the tennis ball and grab the slobbery thing and throw it again, run through the field to the dead tree and over the bluff to the beach, swim in Long Island Sound together, come home and hose off the sand and salt and tendrils of seaweed. So in a way, because Jenny had hugged Bonnie, when Julia stroked Bonnie she knew that somehow she was touching a part of her daughter.

  Looking out the window, down the long slope of lawn and garden to the orchard, she saw Roberto smacking those posts into the cliff and felt weird fury boiling up. Why was he fixing up the path? Obviously he had seen her walking Bonnie along there yesterday, and fuck and shit, she swore he’d read her mind—that fleeting moment when she thought about how easy it would be to just stand on the brink and let go and fly down into the sea.

  All of a sudden, even though she avoided seeing people, she knew she was going to walk out to see him. Why was it, having met him so briefly, she didn’t classify him as “people”?

  He was the latest in a long line of orchard managers, all of them migrants, and she’d known most of them, joked around with them, gotten to know their families and—as a child—let them lift her into the branches to pick lemons. They had come from Mexico seeking a better life.

  From her earliest memories, her uncle John had told her that the Mexicans and the Irish—her Irish family in particular—were related in ways deeper than blood. Both groups immigrated to the United States in great numbers seeking the same things: relief from starvation and poverty, a place to raise their families and create lives that would give their children increased opportunities.

  He had told her about John Riley, their ancestor who’d come from Ireland to join the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War. Seeing injustice, he switched sides to form the Saint Patrick’s Battalion and fight for Mexico. The Americans eventually caught him, branded his cheek with a “D” for “deserter.” And Mexico lost the war.

  Her uncle John had encouraged her to study anthropology. On a visit here when she was seventeen, he had giv
en her René Grousset’s classic The Empire of the Steppes, published in 1939. She’d become fascinated with the Bulgar tribes in southern Russia, and how the eastward and westward migrations of the steppe nomads affected developing societies in Europe, China, Central Asia, and India. Every place in the world owed its identity to the people who had moved there from somewhere else.

  She’d followed her dream and majored in cultural anthropology at Brown. Instead of going straight to grad school, she’d held off. She and Peter couldn’t afford two tuitions at once, so he’d gotten his law degree first.

  Then Jenny was born. Julia never stopped reading and being curious about tribal movement and diasporas; when Jenny entered fourth grade and began asking questions about their family background, Julia tracked down a copy of the film about Margaret Mead and showed it to Jenny. It inspired Jenny to do a school project about Julia’s ancestors migrating from Ireland and her father’s from England.

  Julia understood that the connection with Roberto had to do with the flash she’d seen in his eyes when she asked if he had children and he seemed unsure of whether to answer yes or no. He’d finally said, “Yes, a daughter,” but he looked away from Julia’s eyes the way a person does when he’s lying. She did that. She could never speak straight to anyone about Jenny.

  The house was soothing. Her uncle was an academic, her aunt an actress. Graciela’s mother was Mexican, her father a native Angeleno who had run a small studio just over the mountains in North Hollywood. John and Graciela met at a beachfront bar a few miles away—John was developing the Mexican Studies program at UCLA; Graciela had been cast in a Western and was filming at Paramount Ranch.

  They had both grown up in greater Los Angeles and in spite of their differences were instantly fascinated with each other. John proposed before primary photography on the film had finished; they got married in the lemon orchard, and moved into the house—Casa Riley—with his parents, living with them until they died.