Beth knew she couldn’t leave for work until she dealt with the dead body on the beach.
She gathered her breath and the supplies she’d need. Jacket. Boots. Rubber gloves from under the sink. She stepped outside, grabbed the shovel leaning up against her makeshift potting table, then looked down to the slough below. The salt marsh was choked in early-morning fog, and she could barely see anything. But Beth wasn’t worried. She’d spent fifteen years picking her way down the steep, scraggly hillside to the water. And the stink of death told her exactly where she needed to go.
She clambered down to the bank by feel, and smell, letting the cool October mist wrap itself around her and tug her toward the dead body. Most carcasses that washed up were swept back into the water or eaten quickly by scavengers. But this harbor seal had been here almost a week. It was a big one, speckled brown, with a ragged hole in its side and pale patches where strips of skin were peeling away. Turkey vultures had pecked out its eyes and pulled a wet, maggoty trail of innards onto the beach. Beth grimaced. As a geriatric nurse, she’d seen her share of death, had seen it respected, welcomed even. Evisceration was another matter. She moved away from the seal and found a quiet spot by the underbrush. She began to dig.
Beth was still digging when Jack paddled up, her pink board carving a bright path through the fog. Her daughter was a cloud of dark hair and brown skin, her compact body swallowed in her red life jacket.
“Mom?”
Such a small word, but it never failed to warm her.
“I decided to bury it.”
Jack wrinkled her nose at the smell. “Need help?”
“I don’t think we have a tarp.” Beth straightened up. She was taller than her daughter, and paler, her freckled arms strong from helping thousands of patients in and out of hospital beds. “But in the Prima box in the garage, there might be a tablecloth. Grab a trash bag too.”
Jack nodded, then whipped her paddleboard on top of her head and carried it up the hillside.
Ten minutes later, she bounded back down to the narrow beach holding a shimmery white bundle in her arms.
“You sure you want to use this? It says it’s from Italy.” The fabric was thick and buttery, with an intricate pattern of silver vines snaking across it.
Beth snorted. “When exactly are we going to use a damask tablecloth?”
“I mean . . . Prima gave it to us—”
“Exactly.” Beth’s mother, Lana—or “Prima” to Jack—had never visited them in Elkhorn Slough. But every year for Chanukah, she shipped them ostentatious presents that belied her total lack of understanding of, or interest in, their lives. “Help me spread it out.”
They unfurled the pristine tablecloth over the weeds and sand. Beth put on the rubber gloves and closed her eyes for a moment. Then, with sure, steady movements, she rolled the dead seal onto the fabric, folded it in, and dragged it to the hole she’d dug.
Jack stood there, hopping from foot to foot, while her mother buried the seal deep under the sand and brush, then shoved the now-putrid tablecloth into the trash bag.
“So, first Wednesday
in October . . .” Jack said.
Beth held her breath. The day was coming when Jack wouldn’t want to go out with her mother for a foot-long at the Hot Diggity and a movie at the bootleg drive-in a farmer in Salinas set up behind his barn. Jack was fifteen now. She had a job. Soon she’d have boyfriends and car loans and a life that didn’t revolve around their little house by the slough. Beth knew how good it felt to break from your parents and make your own way. She just didn’t want it for Jack. Not yet.
“It’s sci-fi slasher night.” Jack grinned. “You’ll get home on time?”
“Of course.” Beth had been pulling extra shifts at the nursing home, trying to save up for Jack’s college tuition. But she wouldn’t miss one of their drive-in nights.
Jack charged back up the hillside to gather her stuff and bike to school. But something held Beth to the spot on the beach. She looked down at the freshly piled sand beside her, then out to the fog blanketing the slough. She realized she was looking for a disturbance, a ripple in the water, someone to bear witness alongside her.
But that was foolish. With her jacket sleeve, Beth wiped a smudge of dried river mud off her face, then ran a hand through her short, sun-streaked hair. There were no mourners in Elkhorn Slough. No murderers either. Only death, natural and brutal, every minute of the day. Leopard sharks hunted flatfish in the muddy depths. Otters cracked open crabs. Even the algae, blooming green and full of life, sucked the pickle grass dry beneath the water’s surface.
Beth picked up a moon-shaped piece of sea glass from the beach and placed it carefully on top of the mound. A pelican dive-bombed into the slough in front of her, resurfacing with a fish wriggling in its gullet. Beth was inexplicably reminded of her mother: Lana’s sharp beauty, her biting tongue, her relentless hunger to swallow life whole, bones and all.
Her mother had never visited Elkhorn Slough. And no one had ever been murdered there.
But there was a first time for everything.
Three hundred miles south, Lana Rubicon lay sprawled on the dark slate floor of her kitchen, wondering how she got there.
Her interest was not philosophical. She didn’t want to know how she’d arrived on this planet or which of her Greek ancestors had blessed her with wrinkle-proof olive skin. She wanted to know why she’d collapsed, what was making her feel like a drunk at the carnival on a Wednesday at 7 A.M., and whether she could still make her 8 A.M. investor meeting.
She turned her head in small, careful increments, trying to get her bearings. Her briefcase and snakeskin heels were waiting for her in the front hallway to the left. To the right, the stainless steel door of the fridge was wide open, bottles of mineral water and premade salads lit from within as if they’d come from heaven instead of the Gelson’s delivery boy. A gooey liquid streaked across the floor from the bottom of the refrigerator to the side of Lana’s head. Lana put one hand to the matted hair at her temple and pulled it back for inspection. Her French-tipped fingernails were sticky and pink.
Not blood. Yogurt.
Lana decided it was a sign the day could only get better.
After five failed attempts to lift herself off the floor, Lana slid her phone out of her jacket pocket. She wavered for a moment over who to call. Her daughter was a nurse. Could be useful. But Beth was five hours away, and Lana wasn’t about to beg her own child for help.
She dialed the first number on her Favorites list instead.
Her assistant picked up on the first ring. “I know, I’m sorry, I’ll be in the office at seven fifteen. Some idiot set fire to the hillside by the Getty again and the 405 is—”
“Janie, I need you to . . .” Lana squinted up at the ceiling. Needed her to what? Scrape her off the floor? Stop the world from spinning? “I need you to reschedule my morning meetings.”
“But the Hacienda Lofts investors—”
“Tell them we’re adding sixty more units. Very exciting. Have to rework the plans. Champagne for everyone.”
“But—”
“Handle it. I’ll check in later.”
Lana closed her eyes for a moment, enjoying the feeling of cool tile against her cheek. Then she picked up her phone again and dialed 911.
Lana counted herself lucky that at fifty-seven years old this was her first time being wheeled into a hospital. Even lying on a gurney, Lana knew she looked worth saving. A tailored charcoal suit hugged her lithe frame. She hadn’t yet twisted her hair into a chignon, and plum-brown waves flowed down her back, some of them now tinted in strawberry yogurt. She held eye contact with the nurse as he rolled her into a giant white tube, silently directing him to do his best work.
Once she blocked out the loud clunks from the machine, Lana found the MRI to be oddly relaxing. No emails from architects about why they couldn’t get the drawings done in time. No calls from her friend Gloria about the most recent loser to break her heart.
Lana figured this must be what being dead was like. No one asking her for anything.
After she emerged from the MRI scanner, Lana negotiated her way into a hospital room with no roommates, but also no windows. Her assistant messengered over three project files, two draft contracts, a red pen, a pair of black pumps, a smoked salmon salad, and a bottle of Sprite. Lana was about to send the girl a text about the importance of attention to detail—was it really too much to remember Diet Coke was the only soda she drank?—when she opened the offending plastic bottle and sniffed. Janie had filled it with Chardonnay. Lana took a sip. Not half-bad.
That afternoon, when they told her they were still waiting on test results and recommended she stay overnight for observation, Lana humored them. One bed was as good as another. Not exactly true, but she didn’t relish the thought of wasting daytime hours in LA traffic shuttling herself back to the hospital the next morning to get a lecture from a doctor with mismatched socks about taking better care of herself. She figured she’d get the tests back early, pass with flying colors, run home to shower, and make her lunch meeting with the mortgage brokers.
Lana spent the evening in the hospital bed inking up development plans. When the nurses came to check on her, she smiled so she’d get better service, but she didn’t chitchat. They sampled and poked her while Lana worked. She didn’t tell any of her associates where she was. There was no reason for them to know.
The next day broke sour. Lana woke early, impatient, with a fog in her head and a rash on her neck from the cardboard hospital pillows. At 7:30 A.M., she rang the nurse and badgered her into getting someone more important. The doctor who showed up was tall and willowy and entirely unhelpful. The tests weren’t completed yet. No, Lana couldn’t leave and get the results later. No, they didn’t have laptops for patients’ use. Yes, she would just have to wait.
Lana counted the water stains on the ceiling and made lists of everything she’d have to do when she got to the office. She wanted a Diet Coke. She wanted her own bathroom. She wanted to get out of there.
After what felt like hours, a new doctor came in, a middle-aged man with unkempt hair and scuffed white sneakers. There was an angry squeak as he yanked a wobbly plastic cart clear of the hallway and into the room.
“Mrs. Rubicon?”
“Ms.” Lana was perched on a visitor’s chair in her blazer and pumps, tapping furiously on her phone. She didn’t look up.
“I have some images from the MRI and PET scans we conducted yesterday of your head and neck.”
“Can you just give me the highlights?” Lana gave him a brusque once-over, her fingers still moving across her phone. “I have somewhere I have to be. Had to be, three hours ago.”
“Ma’am, you’re going to want to see this.”
The doctor wheeled the portable computer terminal over to Lana’s chair. He clicked some windows into view. Then he angled the monitor
and stepped aside.
It was strange to see her own head on someone else’s computer screen. The images were black and gray, with thin white lines delineating Lana’s skull and eye sockets and the top of her spinal cord. Lana rose to stand beside the doctor, getting as close to the screen as she could. He used the mouse to orient four different views into the four quadrants of the screen: from above, front, back, and in profile. Lana tried to follow his twisting motions, watching her gray blob of a brain rotate in the darkness, spinning in search of a solid foundation.
Once the doctor was satisfied, he hit a button. The gray blob went polychromatic. Clustered along the back of her skull were three bright smudges of orange with pink halos around them.
“What are those?” she asked.
“Those are the reason you’re here,” he said. “Have you been having headaches? Blurred vision? Any trouble finding words?”
A thin needle of fear pierced Lana’s confidence. But there was nothing wrong with her. Lana was the fittest, most active woman in her loose gaggle of friends. All single. All professional. All surviving dickwad ex-husbands with bank accounts and dignity intact. Lana was stiletto sharp. Lana was thriving.
At least, she had been until yesterday morning.
“Those bright blotches are tumors,” Dr. Scuffed Sneakers told her. “They’re causing swelling and inadequate blood flow to the part of your brain that controls your balance and large motor functions. That’s why you fell.”
“Tumors?”
He nodded. “They have to come out. As soon as possible.”
Lana lowered herself back into the stiff visitor’s chair. She lined up the points of her shoes and held herself taut, muscles vibrating.
“I have brain cancer?”
“Maybe. Hopefully.”
“Hopefully?” She fought to keep her voice from breaking.
“Sometimes, cancer originates elsewhere in your body and spreads to your brain. That would be worse, more advanced. We’ll biopsy the brain tumors once they’re removed to confirm the site of origin. And we’ll do a full body scan now to see if there are any more.”
She focused on his chapped lips, willing them to take back the words he’d just said. This couldn’t be happening. When Lana had breast cancer ten years ago, it wasn’t a big deal. Stage 0. Beth had come down for the initial surgery, but otherwise, she’d handled it on her own. After a few spins in the radiation chair and a reconstruction procedure she used to get a tad more lift, she was back to work.
Now this doctor was looking at her like she was an injured bird.
“Do you understand what I just said?”
“I’ve got to call my daughter,” she said.
Beth took a swig of tepid coffee and considered her cell phone. Three missed calls from her mother. One voicemail, short, asking for help. The content was alarming, and more so, Lana’s voice. Was she drunk? Congested? Beth was used to her mom’s staccato messages, a mix of crowing and indignation, with a slug of guilt thrown in for good measure. This was different. Unfamiliar. Lana’s voice sounded lost, almost pitiful.
Beth left Amber in charge at the nursing station and walked out the side door of Bayshore Oaks. She gave a reassuring smile to the young man fidgeting by his car, clearly nervous about visiting the long-term care facility. Then she ducked around the corner, slipping into the grove of Monterey pines. She took a deep breath and dialed.
“Ma?”
“Beth, finally.” Lana’s voice came through in an urgent whisper. “Are you still working for the brain surgeon? The one with the big teeth?”
“The one with the Nobel Prize? You know I left two years ago to spend more time with—”
“Beth, listen to me. They’re telling me I’ve got tumors. Lots of them. In my brain. That I need surgery, right away. But you should see the shoes this doctor is wearing. I mean, how can he expect anyone to take him seriously?”
Beth’s face froze in a half smile. “Wait. Slow down. Where are you? Are you okay?”
“Besides being held hostage by a radiologist who can’t be bothered to brush his own hair, I’m fine. I’m at City of Angels hospital. They say I can’t check myself out. That someone has to take care of me. I need to get to a better facility. One with real doctors in decent suits. So . . .”
The non-question hung in the air.
If Lana had ever asked for Beth’s help before, she couldn’t remember it. Demanded her attention, sure. Assumed her acquiescence, constantly. But needed her help? Valued her expertise? If Beth weren’t so worried, she’d mark the day on the calendar with a gold star.
“Ma, of course I’ll come.”
Silence. Lana was never silent. For a moment, Beth pictured her mother in a hospital bed, alone, maybe even afraid. It was hard to imagine.
Beth spoke in her most confident voice. “Dr. K retired. But I know the charge nurse in neurology at Stanford. It’s one of the best neurosurgical facilities in the country. I’ll make a call.”
“Can’t we do it at UCLA?”
There was the prima donna she’d grown up with. Beth knew it would be useless to remind her mother that she too had a life, a job, and a child. Instead, she responded in language Lana could understand.
“Ma, this is brain surgery. Let’s get you the very best.”
“Stanford?”
“Stanford. I’ll take care of it.”
“Hold on. Someone’s coming in the room.”
Beth scanned her schedule for the rest of the day. Two more patients, nothing complicated: vitals check, an infusion, a bath, and a chat. She could get Amber to cover her. Jack had already texted to ask permission to go to a soccer game after school and sleep over at her friend Kayla’s house. Perfect. Beth could book it down to LA, scoop up her mother, and get her checked into Stanford the next morning.
Lana’s voice shot back through the phone. “Stanford. Fine. But I’m staying in a hotel.”
“Ma, you can’t be alone when you’re recovering from brain surgery.”
“I hardly think I’ll recover in a shack that’s about to fall into a mud pit.”
Beth closed her eyes and resisted the urge to throw the phone. “It’s not your condo. It’s not LA. But it’s nice. I promise.”
There was a long pause during which Beth presumed Lana was contemplating the many ways her daughter’s shabby house and backwater town fell short of her minimum requirements.
“Can you ask what time you’ll be released today?” Beth said.
“They want me to talk to an oncologist here, but then they said I’m free to leave.”
“All right. Sit tight. Get as much information as you can. I’ll be there in five hours.”
Beth sped down the highway in her dented Camry, stopping only for gas, a caffeinated energy bar, and a supersize iced coffee. As she drove, her mind raced, punctuated by the intermittent buzz of text messages from her mother.
Tumors in brain, lung, maybe colon? Stage 4 at least. Not good.
DR picking his nose. GET ME OUT OF HERE.
Pls swing by the condo for my laptop, good jeans, black top (slimming).
Also if I die give my car to Gloria.
After the first hour of texts, Beth decided she didn’t need a car crash to go with the heart attack. She stuck her phone in the glove compartment and focused on the road and her spiraling thoughts.
Beth was used to medical emergencies. As a nurse, she’d called in more than one. But her clients were old, infirm, and for the most part, kind. They were in that stage of desperate hopefulness, counting days as good ones if there wasn’t too much pain.
Lana was nothing like them. She didn’t “do” sick. Beth assumed her mother would approach this cancer the way she approached everything else—as a series of hurdles to bulldoze. That’s what she’d done when she had the breast cancer scare ten years before. That crisis had proved a kind of blessing in disguise, an external push that forced Lana and Beth back together after five years of not speaking. Since then, they’d built a tentative reconnection out of annual visits to LA for Passover and occasional, awkward phone calls, sticking
to safe topics like Lana’s work or Jack’s grades.
But the news in these garbled texts sounded far from safe. And the fact that Lana had called her, had asked for help, had agreed to come to Elkhorn—that was downright terrifying.
Five overstuffed suitcases, one box of files and legal pads, and two triple-shot lattes later, the Rubicon women were heading north. As Beth drove, Lana made calls, dispatching her friend Gloria to water her plants, her neighbor Ervin to collect her mail, and her assistant, Janie, to do everything else.
“Think of it as a growth opportunity,” Lana said, after dictating a long list of directives.
When Janie pressed her on what she should tell Lana’s clients, the older woman looked down at her black satin peekaboo pumps for inspiration. Lana could see her chipped midnight-blue toenails peeking out.
“Tell them it’s foot surgery. Very complicated. I need a specialist. Out of town. I’ll be back in the office in six weeks.”
Beth shot her mother a look.
“What?” Lana said. “They said there might be more tumors. Maybe there’s one in my foot.”
“Six weeks, Ma?”
“Seems like more than enough time to have the surgeries, get on a treatment plan, head back home, and forget about all this unpleasantness. Besides, it’s not like we could survive living in the same house longer than that.”
After two hours crawling through city traffic, they left the sprawl of Los Angeles. They wound up a mountain pass lined with citrus trees, Beth’s Camry chugging uphill as the stars came out. Lana shut her eyes at the first vineyards, and Beth drove on in silence, watching the rolling hills give way to the inky Monterey Bay. Even in the dark, the ocean made itself known, waves roaring onto rocks, spraying salt and mist over the bridge that separated sea from strawberry fields.
Beth’s house was perched between ocean and farmland, on a tiny strip of gravel and sand above Elkhorn Slough. Beth loved the way the wetland shifted with the tides, rising and falling like a lover’s breath below her house. When she’d first moved in fifteen years ago, she’d seen Elkhorn as a temporary refuge. But she’d grown to relish its foggy mornings and wild treasures, soft where Los Angeles was hard, scruffy where the city was slick. As Beth walked her mother to the door, she resisted the urge to point out the driftwood planters she’d carved and filled with succulents, the wreath of bracken fern she’d braided herself. She steered Lana to Jack’s bedroom, bracing for her mother to pronounce her verdict on the secondhand furniture, the nicked floorboards, the peaty smell of the slough wafting up from outside.
That night, Lana didn’t say anything about home decor or river mud. Lana didn’t say anything at all. Her face was locked in grim determination, mouth shut tight. Beth opened the door to Jack’s bedroom
waved Lana onto the bed, and helped her take off her shoes. It scared Beth to see her mother so compliant. It was easier too.
Once Lana was asleep, Beth started calling in favors. Her friend in neurology at Stanford had already connected her to their top brain surgeon, and he’d agreed to slot them in for a pre-op consultation the next day. Her old shift mate in oncology would find someone to cross-check the scans. Even the guy she’d dated last year, a bearded search-and-rescue paramedic from Big Sur, offered to be on standby. Beth was glad she’d spent so many years pulling long hours, covering for others, doing an extra house call for a doctor who asked. You only get one mother. Even if she was a pain in the butt like Lana. ...
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