9
ANNE AWOKE IN THE SEMIDARKNESS OF A SHUTTERED room, and for a moment she didn’t remember where she was. It was her own chenille bedspread, with its pink and blue flowers, but the room itself was disorientingly strange: it was too small, and the windows were wrong, and there were boxes stacked in the corners….
Then the sleep drained away and she remembered. She had been in the apartment for four nights now—sooner or later it should start feeling like home. On Monday she had looked at the place and impulsively signed a rental agreement, and on Tuesday she had moved in. The landlord, Mr. Hedgepeth, was incredibly fat and had wheezed going up the stairs into the apartment and then had to sit down and catch up with himself before he could show her through the other three rooms. He had carried a stick that he pointed at things with—the view of the ocean out the living room windows, the old Catalina tiles over the bathroom sink, the walk-in closet with red cedar cabinets built in and a window for ventilation.
There was a connecting door in the closet, too, which was locked tight, and which opened into the law office that she shared a closet wall with. Mr. Hedgepeth had the key. He offered to put a lock on her side of the door, too. It wouldn’t be a problem, just a hasp and a little Master lock. She could keep the key to that one if she wanted to. She had the idea that someday, if she stayed there, she would rent the law office, too, which had a pair of good skylights. She could open up the connecting door and use the office as a studio. But here she was already thinking years ahead. What was there for her here, except an obliging landlord and a funky old apartment with charm?
Mr. Hedgepeth had offered to carpet the painted wooden floor, which was clean but foot-worn, but she had talked him into leaving it. He had told her then that she could go ahead and splatter paint on it, because the whole thing would either have to be carpeted or repainted next time anyway, so it didn’t matter. His wife had painted pictures, he had said, before she died, and he welcomed an artist into the place, as long as she didn’t have some kind of artistic temperament. Anne had assured him that she didn’t, that her temperament was inartistic, nearly boring.
She flopped back down onto the bed now arid stared at the ceiling. How far was she from home? Fifteen hundred miles? Two thousand by the Coast Highway, with all its twists and turns? She hoped it was far enough.
The drive south from Victoria had taken her a long damned time—lots of Sleepy 8 motels and farmhouse B and B’s. In Port Angeles she had driven west and then south on 101 instead of east to Highway 5, and so instead of a two- or three-day run down into southern California, she had spent eighteen days on the Highway, stopping at likely-seeming galleries and walking on foggy, driftwood-littered beaches. She had set a hundred-mile-a-day limit—no more than a couple hours or so on the road—and somewhere above Eureka, when she was about halfway done with the journey, she had considered slowing down even more.
Someone had told her once that if you set out to cross a street, making each step half the distance to the opposite curb, you would never reach your destination, but would be walking across that street eternally. The same thing could be said for traveling: if you worked it right, taking your time, you could drive south on the Highway forever, with your shadow racing along the rocky edge of the road and the gray Pacific shifting and crashing on the rocks far below….
… Except that her stuff had been due to arrive in Huntington Beach at the Bekins storage warehouse on the first of April, and she was uncomfortable letting it sit there, especially the paintings. And, even more to the point, something had happened when she had crossed the Golden Gate into San Francisco. It had begun to feel to her almost as if the car were rolling downhill toward an inevitable destination, as if she were some sort of sea creature that had come unmoored from its rock and was adrift on an outgoing tide, swept on a current toward some farther shore. And maybe this was it—this apartment she had rented from Mr. Hedgepeth. Maybe this was her destiny.
Feeling suddenly lonely, she sat up and pulled the curtains open. Judging from the noise and the traffic outside, it was late in the morning. There was still fog in the air, but the spring sun shone faintly through it, and within another hour or two it would burn off. The street outside was lined with old houses, mostly wooden bungalows with big front porches and cracked sidewalks. There were camphor trees along the curb, and the branches arched entirely over the street. It was worth living there for the trees alone, although that hadn’t been what had drawn her to Huntington Beach. There had been plenty of trees in Victoria.
What had drawn her here? she wondered suddenly. She wasn’t sure that she believed in tides and destiny. Why not Laguna Beach? It would have been simple to have Bekins truck her stuff farther down the Highway. She had looked at three nice apartments in Laguna, including one with a studio that had better light than this apartment in Huntington. Rents weren’t all that much higher in Laguna, and six of her paintings were hung in Potter’s Gallery on Oak Street. It didn’t make any sense, her driving twenty miles back up the coast to find a place to live. Of course she had also found a day job at the Earl of Gloucester, the old theater props warehouse here in town, but considering what it paid, she would have made more waitressing in Laguna, which was packed with upscale restaurants. On the other hand, the job at the props warehouse looked like potential fun, and now that her mother was no longer living, she didn’t need the money anyway. That hadn’t sunk in yet; neither of those things, her money or her mother’s death, seemed quite real to her.
And any college psychology student would have an opinion on what she was doing in Huntington Beach. She looked into the dresser mirror, which stood against the wall at the end of the bed. Her long dark hair was a fright, pushed around by sleep. In the dim light of the bedroom it looked jet black, although in the sunlight there were shades of auburn in it. Yesterday she had turned twenty-eight years old, and she had celebrated alone, eating a burger and fries at the Longboarder and then bringing a slice of cake home to her room. She had only eaten half of the cake before her walk on the pier. There was something about eating her birthday cake alone that had ruined her appetite.
And yet right now she didn’t feel half as dismal as she had the right to feel, and even the loneliness that she had felt a few minutes ago had evaporated almost instantly. She had been in the apartment for only four nights, but somehow this morning, despite waking up stupid, she finally felt moved in. What she had seen last night on the pier, or thought she had seen, had been nothing but a trick of foggy lamplight and runaway imagination, a fragment of a bad dream that had followed her south from home. And of course, speaking of lamplight, there hadn’t been nearly enough of it for her to have seen colors. Red would merely have looked dark gray.
Actually, the leftover cake sounded good to her right now. There was nothing wrong with cake for breakfast. Marie Antoinette had recommended it. Of course the food police had cut her head off afterward, but that just made her a martyr to the cause of starting the day with dessert. She climbed out of bed and went into the living room, which doubled as a studio. It was a big room—nearly twenty by forty—in a building that was mostly office space. Hers was the only actual apartment in the building. Her front door opened onto a long interior corridor some ten feet wide and with five other doors similar to hers, most of which led into one-room offices. At the top end of the corridor was a bathroom shared by the rest of the tenants—two fairly pitiful law firms (bankruptcy and divorce) and a record company called Doctor Slim. The other two offices were empty, and, because she could afford it, she had briefly considered renting one of them to use as a studio, except that the living room in this apartment was nicer—big windows looking down toward Main Street on the east and south sides both, and she didn’t have to cross the hall to work. Outside, there were stairs from the bottom end of the corridor down to the street, where there was a door that was kept locked after business hours—officially five o’clock. Mr. Hedgepeth had warned her against leaving the street door unlocked. He made random checks, he said, at all hours, and it was written into the rental agreement that failing to lock the street door, as well as keeping pets, was cause for eviction.
She unlocked the chain lock and the dead bolt and opened the front door now, looking out into the corridor. The old building was silent, musty-smelling, and dim. Today she would switch the low-wattage bulbs in the overhead lamps to something bigger. Mr. Hedgepeth could charge her another couple of bucks a month if he wanted to. It was Saturday, her first weekend day in the building, and so, as far as she knew, none of the offices were open. The place was hers on the weekend. She could bowl in the corridor if she wanted to.
She closed the door again and moved to the other side of the living room, where she opened two windows to let in the morning air. Then she looked for the paper plate with the other half of her cake on it. The plate was gone, disappeared from the table it had sat on next to the stuffed chair. She glanced around the room, looking for the cake, which, she told herself, she must have moved somewhere else absentmindedly. But she was certain that she simply hadn’t put it anyplace else; she remembered distinctly having left it on the table. Was it still on the table when she’d gotten home from the pier late last night? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t been in any mood to be thinking about cake. But the door had been bolted while she was gone; that much she remembered.