Kiki in California

That morning we walked on the beach was overcast, more like a morning in June than one in August. By afternoon, the marine layer would retreat miles off shore and the sun would come out. It was low tide, so we had a steep pitch of packed sand to ourselves, and piles of brown kelp the size of dinghies we had to walk around every few hundred feet. Sea birds dug for tiny crabs until we got too close, then they ran away. I held three-year-old Jade’s hand and lifted her in the air by both arms whenever the last creep of a wave slid under us.

“Back home,” Kiki said, “my office fills up with sun, and a lot of the detail around me dissolves, and I know I’m right here. I can smell it.”

“Better watch out for those waking dreams,” Joyce said. The two smiled.

Kiki was in town for her 20th high school reunion. Kiki’s friend Tony had known his sister would want to meet her once he found out about her line of work. He introduced them to each other at The Local Grind the morning before, and the two had hit it off. Whatever they had begun talking about the day before, I thought, they seemed to be picking up right then and continuing.

“All I ask of my clients is twenty minutes. Twenty minutes before you take the aspirin to cure the headache. Twenty minutes before you jump off the building. It doesn’t matter.” Kiki picked up a piece of driftwood.

Joyce held a feather. “I’m not saying I never had stress in my life. My marriage. My kids. They all seem perfect now, but for a long time I was just making it up, and no one could tell me I was doing the right thing.”

“When was the first time you thought something big was working in you?”

“You don’t think of it that way at the time, of course. Maybe when I was ten.”

Kiki tossed the piece of wood back on a pile of kelp. “Not the hand of something pushing you, like God. Not an angel whispering in your ear. More like a wind in a sail. Like tide under your boat.”

“A swell under your board.”

“Right.”

How can I convince you the most natural thing for me to do on the morning my mother died was to ride my bike to Joyce Hoffman’s house? To not mention what had happened? To pick up Jade when she ran to meet me at the door, to kiss her cheek and smell her lovely blonde hair? Joyce would be ready to go out for the morning, I thought, and I would be keeping my babysitting appointment, and something about the normalness of that appealed to me. Jade and I would lie on the floor next to the big window looking out on the ocean, and the two of us would read the book about shells or horses, and after a snack, if the fog was lifting, we would go outside and play the game about who could see the farthest. We would pick the most prominent piece of land to the south or north, usually Point Loma or Catalina, and give it a name like a new country.

“I see all the way to Flabbergast,” I would say.

“I see farther,” she would say.

“I see the island of Thorny Fish. No, it’s the Republic of Whale.”

Joyce was not going out after all, and Kiki was there at her house, and after they finished their coffee we all headed out for the walk I’ve been telling you about. I would have to tell Joyce at some point what had happened, but I probably wouldn’t be able to explain why I hadn’t stayed home.

When waves weren’t chasing us up the beach, I let go of Jade’s hand and let her run from one curiosity to another. As young as she was, she’d still been on enough of these walks not to be shocked by a jellyfish stranded too high up the beach, beyond the rescue of a wave. A dead gull did not faze her.

Keeping track of Jade, I could only keep track of snatches of what Joyce and Kiki talked about.

Joyce looked in the direction of San Clemente Island. “It’s never just medical or spiritual…” she said before her voice trailed off and I lost it

I couldn’t hear Kiki’s answer, then “…and that would mean more than anything else just relaxing, just allowing the inside to loosen its grip on you. The old book says, ‘The truth is at the bottom of the well.’”

I found out later they had both, over many years, taken different routes to similar conclusions. It was about believing in the body to restore itself and others. It was about believing in the invisible. It was about listening to the feel of the sand between your fingers or the taste of lemon or the sight of an jet threading the sky like a language being spoken to you at that very moment.

“I see all the way to that beach in Eel City,” Jade said.

When the two women turned in our direction, I said, “Joyce, I have to tell you about my mom.”