“My baby girl. You’re here.” She keeps hold of Angie’s hand as she searches her face. “You look so much like him.”
Angie turns to Marilyn, who hangs back a few feet, watching. She knows that this place is haunted, that her mom sees not only her father’s ghost, but the ghost of the girl she once was.
“Hi, Rose,” Marilyn says in a whisper—the kind of whisper that didn’t mean to be a whisper, but got stuck somewhere along the way.
But Rose looks away from Marilyn, at an invisible point in the distance. “Well. Come in,” she says finally, still not meeting Marilyn’s eyes.
They follow Rose into the apartment, where Justin waits on the couch. Angie takes in the walls full of photographs, the pretty glass lamps, the thick flower-printed curtains, the smell of roasting chicken. She can feel the weight of the memory contained within the space almost as if it were her own.
“It’s just the same…” Marilyn says.
“She refuses to leave,” Justin says. “I’ve tried to move her out, but she’s stubborn, aren’t you?” Rose only frowns in response before she disappears into the kitchen.
Angie follows her mom as Marilyn goes to look at a photograph on the wall: Justin, a baby; her dad, a boy, grinning that perfect grin; and a woman with his same smile—a radiant woman in a red dress.
“That’s her, your grandma,” Marilyn says to Angie.
Angie looks again at the woman in red. She remembers filling in Angela’s and Rose’s names on Ancestry.com not so long ago. She’d yearned to know who they were, but they’d seemed no realer than fiction, tucked into a past she’d never be able to find. And now, here they are: Rose, coming up behind them with a tray of lemonade, and Angela looking out from her photograph—a daughter, a mother, Angie’s own grandmother. Someone she can see herself in.
“Do you have more pictures?” Angie asks Rose.
Rose’s face peels open into a grin. “You don’t know who you’re talking to.” She disappears and comes back with a stack of photo albums that reaches almost to the top of her head.
Marilyn watches as Angie settles between Rose and Justin on the couch, paging through. There’s Angie’s dad, a child in his mother’s arms. There’s him and Justin dressed as Ninja Turtles for Halloween.
The albums go backward in time, and soon they are looking at a faded color photo of Angela as a girl, barefoot and beaming outside a rural North Carolina home. Angela on Alan’s lap. Angela in a school portrait, hair in braids, a front tooth missing.
There’s Rose and Alan on their wedding day. Rose, a pretty teenager in black and white. And then, Rose, a little girl with her family: mother, father, and three brothers, crowded onto a wooden porch.
“These are amazing,” Angie says to Rose. “I wanna hear all about where you grew up and everything…”
Her great-grandma pats her leg. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know, baby. But now, let’s eat.”
Rose moves slowly through the kitchen, refusing Justin’s help as she sets out plates of chicken and rice.
“This is delicious, Rose,” Marilyn says. “It tastes—just like I remember.”
Rose only nods.
“Yeah, it’s great,” Angie says, filling the silence. “Thank you.”
Rose smiles at Angie. “You’re welcome, honey.”
In fact, it tastes very much like a dish her mom used to make. They had this—chicken and rice—for dinner many nights when Angie was a girl.
“Your great-grandmother is the woman who taught me to cook,” Marilyn says. She offers a smile to Rose, but it goes unreturned.
From upstairs there comes the sound of children’s feet pattering, the muted laughter of a little boy.
“There’s a couple really cute kids that live up there now,” Justin says.
Marilyn nods. “Where—where’s Alan?” she ventures.
“He died,” Justin says. “Two years ago. A heart attack.”
“Oh, no.”
“It’s a shame,” Rose says, with a pointed look to Marilyn, “that he never got to meet his great-granddaughter.”
“I’m sorry,” Marilyn blurts out, her voice breaking. She gets up and turns away, wiping her eyes. Angie’s about to push out her chair to follow, but then Marilyn sits back at the table and looks to Rose. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “I should have had the courage to tell you that a long time ago. I just—”
“They killed my boy. And you just disappeared. Like it was nothing. Like we were nothing. And now we find out you kept his daughter from us?”
“You all were everything. But I didn’t know how to face you after what I did. I knew you must have hated me—”
“I’m not angry at you for his death, Marilyn. But we lost everything when we lost him. How could you leave us too?”
For a moment, Marilyn looks back at her in astonishment. “I shouldn’t have. But the pain was too much,” she says quietly. “I thought it would swallow me—”
“It was too much for all of us.”
“I thought the only way to be strong enough to be a mother was to start over—”
“Ignoring something does not make it disappear. And it doesn’t do your daughter any good to lie about the world she’s living in. She’s her father’s too. I see him in her smile. I hear him in her voice. She should have grown up knowing his family. You should have let us love her. You should have let us help you.”
“She’s right, Mom,” Angie says.
Marilyn turns to Angie, and her face fractures.
“It doesn’t mean that I don’t think you’re an amazing mom … but I wish we could’ve talked about this stuff. I wish you wouldn’t have kept me away.”
Marilyn takes in a ragged breath and tilts her gaze toward the sky, perhaps weathering a private earthquake. “All these years,” she says, when her eyes find Angie’s again, “I’ve known you were growing up in a world that took away your dad, that never accounted for the injustice of his death. I wanted, somehow, to shield you from that reality. And I thought I was protecting you, but I see now that I was also protecting myself—from my own sorrow, my own guilt.
“Rose, I know you have every right to be angry. But even if you can’t forgive me, I’m coming to you now, and to you, Justin, and asking for your help. To finish raising my daughter. I know I might not deserve it, but I’m asking you to let me back into your family.”
Angie reaches under the table and wraps her fingers through Marilyn’s, willing Rose to say yes, for both her sake and for her mother’s.
“I’m in,” Justin says, breaking the silence. He squeezes Angie’s shoulder. “I’m not missing out on any more time with my niece.”
“Okay, then,” Rose says finally. “Come here.” Marilyn goes to Rose and wraps her arms around her—timidly at first, but then she’s holding on as if to a life raft. Angie watches her mom become a child, crying in her great-grandmother’s arms, and she knows these tears are different: they are a release.
* * *
An hour later, the four of them sit together on the porch, watching the neighbor boy circling the lawn on his tricycle, as Rose tells the story of meeting Alan as a teenager: at the grocery store where he worked as a cashier, he used to slip a Sugar Daddy into one of her bags every week.
“Look!” Angie exclaims at once. A hummingbird hovers near the feeder, seeming to watch them, its wings beating so quickly they blur into air. Marilyn’s face breaks open into brightness as the bird flies up to them, tilts its head, and disappears into the sky.
Angie wakes on Justin’s couch, her mom’s air mattress empty on the floor beside her. She smells eggs and coffee in the kitchen, hears her mom’s and Justin’s voices. She walks in just as Justin’s handing Marilyn a 35-millimeter camera.
Marilyn lifts it slowly to her face, looks through the lens. “It was a Christmas present,” she tells Angie, “from your dad.”
“Your mother,” Justin adds, “gave me the camera years ago.”
He studies Marilyn for a mome
nt. “Took me six years to use it,” he says. “For so long I was too angry at James’s death. Angry at you for leaving me. Furious at your uncle, and at the cop who shot an innocent kid. I was so angry it could have swallowed me. Almost did.”
Marilyn meets his eyes, nods.
“I had a rough time of it for a while. Nearly dropped out of high school. Some part of me thought if James never got to go to college, I wasn’t gonna go either. It was my eighteenth birthday. And I was there, in Nana’s house, depressed as fuck. I thought back to the last birthday I could remember being happy, all those years ago. That day at the beach with you and James, taking pictures, and just like that, I reached under the bed, past a few balled-up T-shirts, and pulled out that camera. The moment I looked through the lens, I felt … like I could breathe again. I started shooting as much as I could, going to museums every day. I applied to art school the following year, and got in to RISD.”
“I just had this memory of watching you at the pier—I was so proud. And now look at you. I saw your video. It’s beautiful, Jus—just as good—better—than I’d hoped you’d become.”
“I’ve still got a lot to learn. The point is, even if there’s part of me who’s still that twelve-year-old boy mad you left him behind, that camera saved my life, and I’m grateful to you for it. But I’m ready to give it back. And that girl I used to know—the one who was always taking these weird fake pictures, the one who was able to see so much—I bet she’s still in there, waiting to come out.”
“Thank you,” Marilyn says, and Angie watches her mom carefully place the camera into her backpack, trying to see the girl that Justin sees.
“Get dressed,” Marilyn tells Angie. “I’ve got a big day planned.”
* * *
At the downtown library, Marilyn shows Angie the table where she and James used to study, and the bench outside where they’d sit in the evenings to read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. They go to James’s favorite taco truck and picnic in Elysian Park. It is not, after all, the facts of her father’s death, but the details of his life, the stories that Marilyn tells her about their time together, that begin to give Angie’s dad new dimension.
Over the next couple days Angie and Marilyn visit colleges too: USC, UCLA, and, Angie’s favorite, Occidental. She can imagine herself there, among the white buildings with red Spanish tiles, the palms and purple-flowered trees, the bustle of students that will come when school resumes in the fall. She could go to Justin’s house on the weekends; he’d only be thirty minutes away. She could visit Rose for home-cooked dinners. Outside one of the many campus cafes, she and Marilyn agree to add it to Angie’s list of places to apply.
* * *
As they hike up Runyon Canyon in the evening, Angie thinks back to the camping trip she and Marilyn had taken when Angie was in first grade—the one in which Angie stuck her head out the window, singing at the top of her lungs to her CD of children’s folk songs. They spent the days exploring the forest and the nights sleeping outside the tent, making wishes on the shooting stars. She remembers now that they hadn’t gone back to their old apartment after that trip, but instead had moved into another, smaller place. She remembers that Marilyn had told her they were going on an adventure, that the back of the car had been stuffed up with so many possessions that Marilyn joked they’d have everything they could need to survive the wilderness.
“You know that time we went to the Sangre de Cristos?” Angie asks her mom.
“Yeah,” Marilyn answers.
“Was it really ’cause we had to leave our apartment?”
“It was.”
“I never knew. I mean, I never realized until now.”
“It was Manny who found us the new spot when we got back. He had a friend who owned the building. I didn’t know what we were gonna do.”
“You must have been so scared … but I couldn’t tell. That camping trip is a really happy memory for me,” Angie says.
“I was scared,” Marilyn answers. “But in a way, it’s a happy memory for me too. You were so wide-eyed. So full of wonder. It was contagious.”
“Do you ever—” Angie starts, and then pauses. “Do you ever wish maybe you didn’t have a baby?”
“Oh, Angie, no! Why would you think that? Having you is the single decision I could never regret.”
“But, I mean, you never got to go to Columbia, or become a photographer, or even actually date anyone. You never got to do anything you were supposed to.”
“Well, I’ve got some time left, you know.” Marilyn smiles. “And I would not trade you for anything in the entire universe. Not for a lifetime at Columbia, or photographs in a million galleries, or Idris Elba in my bed.”
Angie laughs. “Mom! Gross!”
Marilyn pauses on the trail and turns to Angie. “There was a part of me—a big part of me—that didn’t believe I deserved to live after your father died. So, I think, in a way, I’ve lived for you—for our girl—instead. And that’s not—I don’t think I’ve understood, until now, how big a burden that’s been on you. I’m sorry.”
Angie nods, and she feels the familiar tension in her chest loosening its grip.
* * *
They reach the top of the cliff just in time for the sunset. Angie stands at the brink and stretches her arms out wide, as if to open herself to the city below. She remembers her first view of LA in the car with Sam, and the sense of hope she’d felt. Perhaps her father has been here all along, hidden in the light, just as she’d thought.
When she turns, she sees, with surprise, her mom looking through the 35-millimeter camera.
Click.
“It’s like you’re getting ready to fly,” Marilyn says quietly. She glows against the pink of the evening sky. “There were nights here when I felt like I could…”
Angie looks out over the City of Angels and remembers the question Sam had asked her: If your dad were here, if he could talk to you, don’t you think he’d tell you that love’s worth it, for however long it lasts? Yes, Angie thinks now, she believes he would.
Her mom walks up beside her, and they stand like that, together, each of them at their own edges.
Marilyn and Justin follow Angie to Miguel’s, Justin’s car packed with beach supplies. Her mom and Justin say they’ll go to the park to wait for her, so Angie walks up the block alone and knocks on Miguel’s door.
A moment later, Cherry appears.
“Hey,” Angie says. “Here’s your key. Thanks so much for offering me your place.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Is Sam here?”
“He is, but I … don’t think he wants to see you, to be blunt.”
“I just,” Angie stutters, “I … really need to apologize to him, in person. Can you—can you ask?” Sam hasn’t replied to a single one of the string of texts she’s sent over the past three days.
Cherry pauses for a moment. “Sure,” she says, and disappears inside.
Angie sits on the stoop to wait. It feels like ages ago that she walked up this street with Sam on their first night in LA, though it’s been only a week. She counts the palm trees peeking their heads over the buildings to distract herself from her anxious heart.
“What’s up,” Sam says as the door swings open.
Angie stands to face him. “I brought your car back. Thank you so much for letting me use it. My mom’s here. She has to work, so I’m gonna go back to Albuquerque with her tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry, Sam.”
“No worries,” he says flatly, and turns to go.
“Wait,” Angie says. “I was wondering—what are you doing right now? I mean—what I meant to ask is if you’d want to go to the beach with us? To Venice? My mom and me and Justin.”
“Um. I don’t think so.”
Angie takes a deep breath. So far, the conversation she’s been practicing in her head hasn’t gone as planned. “Sam, I know that—that I’ve been really selfish. Something about the night I found that photo of
my parents—it’s like suddenly my dad was real, and I wanted to know him so badly. I missed this person I’d never met so much, it’s like there was a hole inside me. And it brought up all these questions I didn’t know how to understand myself, so I didn’t know how to share them with you, which made me run away, I guess.
“I used to have this feeling that there was something wrong—that something awful was just around the corner, but now that I can see what it is, even if it’s worse than I imagined, at least I can start to try and figure out how to look at it … Getting to know Justin has helped. And especially finally talking to my mom. She told me. My dad was shot, by cops that came in the middle of a fight with her uncle. They didn’t even ask what was going on. They just—killed him.”
“Jesus, Angie. I’m so sorry.”
“There’s a lot that I still don’t understand. But you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. And the truth is, I love you,” she says. “I love you,” she says again, “but I didn’t know how to say it before.”
Sam stares back at her for a long moment. “Come here,” he says finally, and pulls her into a hug. Angie’s not sure how long they stand like that, still inside of each other’s arms as the car horns and distant sirens and passing songs of the city rush on around them.
“Give me a minute,” Sam says. “I’ll get changed for the beach. I’m gonna see if Miguel and Cherry wanna come too.”
As he disappears inside, Angie feels as if she’s just stepped out of an ice-cold pool on a hot summer day—half shocked and shivering, but awake, alive, trusting the sun to warm her.
Justin’s Mustang moves west on the 10. When he pulls off the freeway and drives them over a hill, a sudden, endless expanse of blue water appears, glittering. Angie follows him and Marilyn out of the car, and she’s overcome at once by the smell of the sea, the sound of the waves, which she’d imagined so often as she stared at the picture of her parents.
She watches her mom, trying to see the grinning girl with the golden hair as Marilyn takes a deep breath, looks out at the horizon. On a path running parallel to the sand, a little girl on a scooter pushes ahead of her father, who follows with a stroller. Someone rides by on a bike, playing “Ultralight Beam.” Angie catches hold of the fleeting music: Deliver us loving … Two old women sit on a bench, doing arm lifts while looking out at the water.