Yerba buena, p.1
Yerba Buena, page 1
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Flatiron Books ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For my wife, Kristyn, who stepped into a room and took my breath away. Look at this life we’ve made together.
And for my father, Jacques, who generously allows me to use the details of his Los Angeles youth in my fiction.
AN AFTERNOON IN SPRING
They rode together up the hill. Blur of trees and sky outside, groan of brakes, a current between them. With each curve of the road, the press of one bare shoulder against another, until the bus slowed and stopped.
The doors folded open, they stepped out to the street. Armstrong Drive dead-ended there—a parking lot, a ranger’s station, the entrance to the woods. Sara unzipped her backpack and pulled out a thermos, unscrewed the lid and sipped. Their fingers touched as Annie took it, and Sara watched Annie press her mouth against its metal rim and drink.
It struck Sara every time—the way the air changed as she entered the forest. Cool, wet, fresh dirt, even bright days like this one dimming and softening. “Should we get a map?” Annie asked, but Sara shook her head. She knew the woods well, had no trouble getting lost or finding her way back.
She took Annie’s hand and led her past the station. A group of tourists brushed by them, their faces upturned. It felt good to feel small. That’s why her mother had taken her here when she was a little girl, why Sara kept coming after her mother died.
They cut onto Sara’s favorite trail—the steepest, the quietest—and hiked until they were breathless, eye level with the ancient redwoods’ branches, as close as they could be to the sky.
“Over there?” Annie asked.
Sara followed her gaze to a grove off the trail. She nodded, her heart quickened. They stepped as carefully as they could across the forest floor to a ring of young redwoods with a hollowed trunk at its center. There, they unzipped their backpacks, pulled out a blanket and a couple sweaters, and laid them over the pine needles.
The forest was quiet. Everyone else was far away.
“Can I kiss you now?” Sara asked.
“Not yet,” Annie said. She pulled her T-shirt up over her head. She unfastened her bra.
“Now?”
Annie shook her head. “Your turn.” So Sara took off her shirt, too, and Annie rushed to kiss her before Sara could ask again.
The relief of it, after the hours of waiting.
The thrill of it: two fourteen-year-olds, secretly in love.
Sara sank to the blanket, Annie atop her. They kissed the curves of necks and collarbones. Cupped breasts with their palms. Smiled, blushed, kissed deeper.
After a time, they rested together, Annie’s head in the crook of Sara’s neck.
“Look,” Annie whispered, and Sara saw a banana slug, bright yellow, emerging from a fern. It made its way to Sara and she flinched at the strange, cold slickness of it, tried not to laugh. The slug made its way across her pale stomach, and then to Annie’s. It took an eternity. They were three creatures in the forest. The girls held very still. The slug left a glittering trail of slime on their skin.
In its wake, a wave of grief: the tiny diamonds of a hospital gown. The flamingo-pink polish Sara had applied to her mother’s nails in careful strokes. Yellowed eyes, cracked white lips. The nurses’ concerned expressions and Sara’s little brother’s tantrums and how their father had stood in corners when he visited, his hands clasped behind his back. Throughout the weeks in the hospital—the sensation that Sara was hovering over an abyss. And then her mother was gone and she plunged into it.
“Hey,” Annie murmured, and Sara was back in the redwood grove, her heart pounding. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing really.”
A breeze stirred the branches above them.
“Tell me something I don’t know yet,” Annie said. “About you.”
Her voice was close to Sara’s ear, her body soft, pressed against Sara’s skin. What could Sara say that would please her? Not anything from the last two years, not the months before either. Nothing from school because though it felt sometimes like they’d just met, they’d sat in classrooms together since they were small. She’d need to go further back … and then she found it.
“My family used to play a game together. A drawing game. We’d sit around the table and one of us would start, usually my dad. He’d draw a street or a train or a mountain. And then the next person would add something else to it. People or cars or the sky. Whoever was last would complete it, and by then the whole page would be full. I loved it so much. Waiting to see what they’d draw, thinking of something to surprise them. We’d do it for hours sometimes.”
She hoped it was enough, felt Annie pull her closer.
The sun was low in the sky by then, and they were due back—Annie to her twin and their parents, Sara to her little brother to make sure he was fed. He was probably mounting his bicycle, leaving his friend’s place now, heading home. Maybe their father would be there tonight. Maybe not. Either way, Sara would need to catch the bus back to town before the sun set over the ramshackle cabins and the rustic vacation homes and the wide, muddy river. Over the Appaloosa Bar and Wishes & Secrets Hair Salon and Lily’s father’s white steepled church.
But just another few minutes here, first, she thought.
Another kiss.
Another bird high above.
Another breeze cooling her skin.
How easy it was to forget the rest when they were small and safe in the woods.
* * *
At the other end of California, Emilie pressed a new green plant into the dirt of her Catholic school’s garden. Its leaves were familiar. She looked around and yes—there was more of it, spilling over the retaining wall.
“Same plant, right?” she asked, and Mrs. Santos nodded.
“If you see a bare place in a garden, look at what’s already growing. Good chance you can take a little from what’s there.”
School had cleared out a few hours ago. Now it was just the three of them—Emilie, her friend Pablo, and Pablo’s mother—tending to the small plot that separated the school from the street. Mrs. Santos had volunteered to make it both beautiful and useful. Some flowers, mostly herbs.
“What’s it called?” Emilie asked. She’d been learning the names of the plants but had missed this one somehow, growing in the shade.
“Yerba buena.”
“Funny,” Emilie said. “That’s the name of my parents’ favorite restaurant. Pablo, remember? That place on Sunset we went to?”
“The fancy one?”
“Yeah.”
Pablo dropped the weeds he’d pulled into a bucket and joined her in front of the plant. He plucked a stem, dangled it in front of Emilie’s face. “Here’s a sprig of mint. Give me all your money.”
They laughed, Mrs. Santos, too.
“So is it a kind of mint?” Emilie asked, rubbing a leaf between her fingers.
“Yes, it’s good in tea,” Mrs. Santos said. “Most of these plants are. A tea garden is an easy thing to keep. Tisane, technically. Small plants. Unfussy. I’ll gather some for you. See what you like.”
Verbena. Spearmint. Chamomile. Sage. Yerba buena.
“It’s a bouquet,” Emilie said when Mrs. Santos handed it to her.
“Use them fresh. Try some while you do homework tonight.”
They gathered their things and started the walk to their houses, across the street from each other, six blocks from the school. “How’s Colette?” Mrs. Santos asked.
“She’s okay. She’s teaching me guitar. Feel my fingers.”
Mrs. Santos touched her calluses. “You’ve been practicing.”
“Feel,” Emilie said to Pablo as they waited at a crosswalk.
“Whoa.”
The light changed and they crossed, and Emilie thought of Colette positioning her fingers, telling her when to switch chords. The two of them on Colette’s bed, learning songs. More often, though, these past couple weeks, Emilie had been practicing alone in her room while her sister stayed, alone, in hers. The scene from a couple nights ago came back—Colette screaming at her, slamming her door shut.
They were almost to their houses now. “Tell me what you think of the tea,” Mrs. Santos was saying. “Just hot water and a few leaves. Honey, too, if you want it.”
Emilie waved as she climbed her front steps. “See you tomorrow.”
“Come over and give me the algebra answers later,” Pablo called after her, and Mrs. Santos play-scolded him, and Emilie found her front door unlocked and let herself in.
No one was around so she sliced some cheese to eat with an apple and took her plate outside to the deck. Just a few months ago, her father, Bas, and his two cousins had taken apart the old deck and invited Emilie and Colette out to help them build a new one.
“Family tradit ion,” Bas had said. “We helped our fathers build houses and decks and all kinds of things.”
“And back in New Orleans,” said Rudy, the eldest of the cousins, the only one of them born before the families moved to Los Angeles, “our fathers helped their fathers.”
Colette rolled her eyes. She’d just finished high school, but barely, her second semester transcripts so bleak that the college she’d planned to attend withdrew its acceptance. “My friends are waiting for me at the beach,” she said. But it looked exciting to Emilie. The piles of wood, the cousins they rarely saw even though they lived in neighboring cities.
“Come on, sister,” Emilie said. “It’ll be fun.”
Colette leaned against the house. She was almost otherworldly to Emilie with her extra three years and two inches of height. Her hair was longer than Emilie’s, and her jean shorts were shorter, and she cocked her head and kept them all waiting. And then she shrugged and said, “Why not?”
Colette helped for about an hour before saying she had to go. But Emilie spent all day out there with them, listening to their stories, smiling along with their jokes even when she didn’t understand, hammering the nails where they told her to. They taught her to use the electric sander and she’d donned a mask and goggles and worked the guardrails until they were smooth.
She leaned on the rail now, looking over a bare patch of garden where a rosebush had died and never been replaced. Maybe she could transplant a cluster of lavender. Or maybe start her own tea garden. She saw a movement through the sliding door—someone must be home. Her parents didn’t keep regular work hours. Bas was a contractor, Lauren an entertainment lawyer. They came and they went and they let their daughters do the same.
Tea, Emilie thought. Not lavender. She would ask Mrs. Santos to help her get started. And then she heard a pounding from inside, boots down the stairs, heard Bas’s shout for help.
“Call 911. It’s your sister.”
She grabbed the phone and dialed, followed him upstairs as it rang and the operator asked her to state her emergency, but Bas was blocking the bathroom door.
“Don’t look, honey. Tell them to send an ambulance now. Tell them an overdose, say come right now. Don’t look, Em, wait at the door for them.”
So Emilie went back down and the ambulance approached, quietly, without sirens, and parked out front. Two paramedics rushed into her house and she pointed at the stairs, and then Lauren was home, too, and there was nothing for Emilie to do as the paramedics carried her sister, unconscious but alive, out the door and into the back of the ambulance, Bas climbing in behind them.
Lauren grabbed the car keys.
“I’m following them to the hospital,” she told Emilie.
“I’ll come, too.”
“No, no, you stay.” Lauren took Emilie’s face in her hands. “My steady daughter, my good girl. You stay right here while we’re gone.”
Emilie watched out the window as the ambulance rolled away, her mother after it, all of them somehow unnoticed by the rest of the world. A few minutes later, across the street at the Santoses’ house, the lights turned on. She could have crossed, told them everything, eaten dinner at their table. But she didn’t. She stayed alone in the house as the night wore on. Stared at her homework, forgot to eat. The herbs from the school garden wilted on the countertop. She tucked herself into bed, held her body as still as she could. She would stay right here until it was over.
PARADISE
Two years later, Sara woke to the sound of her bedroom door opening.
“The phone kept ringing,” Spencer said from the doorway, his hair matted on one side, his eyes tired. “It’s Annie’s brother.”
Sara reached for the phone, pressed it against her ear. “Dave?”
“Is Annie with you?”
“No.” She saw that it was one thirty in the morning, and her heart began to pound. Spencer sat next to her and pressed his cheek against hers to listen.
“You’re sure she isn’t with you?” Dave was asking.
“Of course I’m sure,” Sara said.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“When school got out. When I said goodbye to both of you. Then I went to work, and then I came home.”
“My parents need the phone. I’m hanging up. I’ll call you if we find out anything.”
Sara nodded, unable to speak, cradling the phone in her hands until Spencer took it from her and set it by the bed.
“Wait,” Spencer said. “Shouldn’t he be able to figure it out? Like if he closes his eyes and concentrates?”
“What are you talking about?” Sara asked.
“I thought twins could do that,” Spencer said.
“Oh.” Sara took his smaller hand in hers. “I don’t think it works that way.”
* * *
In the morning, Sara made their usual scrambled eggs for Spencer, though she felt too sick to eat.
She took down their mother’s plates, chipped at the rims now, their floral patterns fading. After a time, she’d climbed her way out of grief, but now Annie was missing, and she felt it closing in again. The terrible weightlessness, something cavernous below.
Spencer slid into the breakfast nook. When she carried his plate over, she saw a blank page and a pencil on the table. Their drawing game, just for two now.
“You start,” Sara said, so Spencer began to draw.
She sat across from him, light through the gingham curtains, pan cooling in the yellowed sink, the family drawing from years ago hanging on the wall by the window.
Spencer was sketching a cloudy sky, blending the pencil marks with his fingers. He passed it to her when he finished. She drew the tops of trees. “We have to go,” she said. “Can we fill in the rest later?”
“Okay,” he said, and stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet. “Or maybe Dad will.”
“Maybe,” she said.
Together, on the porch, they put on their shoes before heading in opposite directions to their schools.
Sara kept her backpack light in case she’d be heading straight out again. Stepping off the bus across the street from campus, she hoped to see Annie out front—her curly brown hair and jean jacket, her bad-girl posture undone by the sweetness of her face. You scared me, Sara would yell, and Annie would grab her around her waist, and they would try to look like just friends. Sara imagined tugging at Annie’s belt loop. Don’t disappear again, she’d say. Promise me.
I promise, Annie would answer.
But she saw Dave and Lily huddled by the entrance with Crystal and Jimmy. Annie wasn’t there.
“What should we do?” Crystal was asking.
“Leave,” Dave said. “Split up and look for her. It’s bullshit that my parents dropped me off here.”
“I’ll look in town,” Crystal said. “But I’m kind of freaked out. Shouldn’t we double up?”
Jimmy nodded. “I’ll go with you.”
“You two can look together,” Sara told Dave and Lily. “I’m fine by myself.”
“You sure?” Lily asked, and Sara said yes.
“I have my car. We can go to Monte Rio,” Lily told Dave, and Dave agreed.
Sara felt her backpack’s lightness, felt a fierce and desperate hope.
“I have to be at work at four. If anyone finds her, call the motel, okay?” Her friends nodded. “I’m going to the woods.”
* * *
She rode the bus up Armstrong Drive alone, rushed past the ranger’s station and to their trail. She trusted the woods. All those afternoons they spent in it. But still. She braced herself for the moment she’d find Annie, hurt or unconscious, bleeding or broken. Or worse. It was foggy and cold. She called Annie’s name but was met with silence. She climbed higher and higher and off the trail, found their grove. No one was there. She hiked down to the main path, discovered other trails.
Sara would find her—she was certain of it. She searched for more than six hours, and to calm herself she imagined Annie appearing cross-legged, leaning against the soft wood of a tree trunk, smiling at the sight of her. She imagined their kiss, Annie’s singsong voice as she asked Sara what was wrong. There Annie would be, perfectly fine, and the world would be right again, and she would not lose another person she loved.
