“No reason. It’s a feng shui thing. I’m worried about the flow. Nothing worse than dirty dishes to clog up the flow of your space. Come on. I’ll dry.”
“Mom, those drugs are changing her,” Perry said. “I think someone should be monitoring her, like, levels.”
It wasn’t the drugs, though. Cam felt a cleanness inside her—a pureness of purpose. Something she hadn’t felt since before the cancer attacked and the doctors counterattacked with their battery of chemicals. For so long she had been afraid to let anything matter. It was too dangerous. But this could matter. It would matter if Perry was happy.
Twenty minutes later, Perry had gotten through all the dishes and had begun on the pots without even noticing the obvious unicorn standing in the woods directly in front of her face!
“Look,” Cam finally had to say. “What is that?” God, did she have to do everything herself?
“I don’t know,” said Perry, leaning her face closer to the window. Just then, James Madison made a little horsey move with his head and neck and pawed at the ground with one hoof. Cam would definitely reward him with extra sugar cubes for that display. Good boy, she thought.
“Is that a horn?” said Perry. “Mom!?”
“Oh, my God,” Cam said. “Go get your camera! Where is it?”
Cam had made sure to hide Perry’s camera and phone between the cushions of the couch in the living room. While Perry searched for the camera, she ran outside toward the trees. She would have just enough time to take James Madison back into the tunnel, cross under the house, and bring him out onto the beach. Perry would never think to look for him there right away, so Cam could lead the donkey out onto the jetty. It made for a magical image, and he would be far enough away to still look like a unicorn.
James Madison was getting used to being led around. She practically got him to trot through the tunnel this time. The donkey seemed to appreciate having something to do besides stand around in the corral. “See how fun this can be if you work with me, ass,” Cam said.
She left him balancing on the rocks at the end of the jetty, leaving him with two small apples and a sugar cube.
Before running back inside, she took a moment to appreciate James Madison. He was quite the Method actor. He stood with his nose in the air and his golden horn sparkling in the sun. He gazed out to sea, as if searching for his lost ancestors. He looked both proud and mournful, the last of his kind on a magical quest. The water splashed gently around his hooves, and the colors of the sunset provided the perfect background. The scene looked straight out of the cheesy posters in Perry’s bedroom. It was only missing a rainbow.
“I think I see him on the beach!” Cam yelled when she got back to the house.
Perry ran out to the lawn, camera in hand. By then the sun had sunk low enough in the sky that any photo she took would capture a shadowy silhouette. She clicked a few times. “I can’t believe this! I told you it was true. This place is incredible.”
Cam stared at the tide, watching it rise and begin to splash over the donkey’s ankles. Her sister was smiling as she happily clicked away. Cam found herself smiling, too.
“Whoa!” Perry cried.
Cam turned to see the water splashing around James Madison’s knees. He shifted his feet a couple of times and rose up majestically onto his back legs. Then he circled his front hooves in the air, neighed, and leapt with a giant splash into the dark waters of the bay.
TWENTY-ONE
CAM DARTED TOWARD THE BEACH JUST AS ASHER STEPPED OUT OF HIS house, wearing an untucked white button-down, rolled-up khakis, and thick leather sandals. He smelled like fresh limes.
“Asher, help!” she cried as she climbed down the steep, twisting path to the beach.
“Help. Don’t help. You give me mixed messages.” Asher sighed as he stuck his keys into his pocket and followed Cam to the edge of the lawn.
“Look!” Cam insisted, pointing out toward the bay. James Madison was floundering in the water, slowly making his way toward shore. The horn, thanks to the miracle of duct tape, had not fallen off. It stuck straight up and bobbed up and down like a buoy as James Madison struggled to keep his head above water.
“Oh, my God. Can donkeys swim?” Asher asked.
“How do I know?”
“You’re the Ass Whisperer.”
“Stop. That is getting so old already,” Cam said, out of breath. Asher fell in behind her as they scrambled down the cliff. She almost lost her footing and slid a little bit on some gravelly sand before taking a final leap to the flat rocky ground of the beach.
She ran into the water until she was waist-deep and dove headfirst into the middle of an oncoming wave. The cold was paralyzing. She let the heavy wave slosh over her, and then the undertow pulled her out to sea, dangerously close to the rocks of the jetty.
She swam a few strokes before she reached James Madison and took him by the lead.
“Stay way out in front of his hooves or he’ll kick you!” Asher yelled as he waded in up to his knees.
Cam gently tugged forward on the lead as she guided the donkey toward land, the cold water causing her legs to ache. He got his footing, and she walked him to the beach, where he shook himself out like a wet dog. His horn hung limply from his forehead and dangled in front of his left eye.
“Wow, that was kind of sexy,” said Asher. “Like Bray Watch.”
“You . . . are . . . hilarious,” Cam said, panting.
“Uh-oh,” Asher said.
Cam followed his gaze up to the edge of the lawn. Perry and Alicia were climbing down to the beach.
“I won’t say I told you so,” Asher said. “I’ll give you guys a minute. Open sesame.” The face of the cliff slid open, and he disappeared into the earth. “Good luck,” she heard him say before the rock slid closed again.
“Thanks, that’s so generous of you.” Cam wrapped her arms around her body and tried to stop shivering.
“Campbell, what is going on?” asked Alicia as she got to the beach. She covered Cam with a towel, rubbing up and down on the sides of her arms to warm her up, like she did when Cam was little and had just gotten out of the bath.
“Um, nothing.” James Madison threw his nose in the air and hee-hawed. The horn flopped limply from side to side. The flour was glomming together from the salt water, exposing his dark fur in patches. “I wasn’t sure that unicorns could swim, so I wanted to just, you know, save him or something.”
“That’s a donkey,” her mom said flatly.
Perry stood with her arms folded across her waist. She made circles in the sand with the toe of her sneaker.
“It is?! Really? How weird. You know what? Maybe it’s magic. I know. The water. The water turned the unicorn . . . into a donkey!! Can you believe that? Perry? Isn’t that amazing?”
Perry walked away toward the cliff and pulled her phone from her pocket. “Never mind,” she said. “There’s no unicorn. Just my sister being stupid.”
“I just—”
“You just what, Campbell?” Alicia asked.
“Well,” said Cam, “you guys got so excited by the prospect of miracles that I was just trying to make you happy. Help you believe . . . in them, I guess.”
“But you don’t believe in them yourself because that would be beneath you, right?” Alicia’s gaze was cold and hard.
“No. Not beneath me, exactly . . .”
“Well, that was very nice of you. Thanks.” Her mom had that dismissive tone, that “I give up” look in her eye. The one that could still make Cam feel desperately abandoned and alone, even though she was practically an adult.
“Maybe we should get you to that shrink.” The doctors had given Alicia the number of a shrink after the panic attack incident. She shook her head. “You just don’t seem to be giving anything a chance.”
“Me, see a shrink?” Cam said. “You guys are the ones who, just a second ago, believed in unicorns and magic tomato plants.”
“You did the tomatoes, too?” said Alicia.
>
“I thought you’d already caught on to that,” Cam said sheepishly. She pulled the towel tighter around herself. The sun sank toward the horizon. It was getting colder, and the tide kept coming in. The foamy edges of the waves slid their way beneath her soaking sneakers.
“Cam . . .”
“What?”
“I was hoping . . . Never mind.”
“What?” asked Cam.
“I was hoping that, if nothing else, this trip could teach you to surrender control. To trust how the universe unfolds.”
“People keep talking about this unfolding. I can’t trust the unfolding, okay? If there is some higher power making origami out of the universe, it hates my guts. I was a fat kid whose parents got divorced, whose father died, and then who got cancer herself. So no. I don’t trust how things are going to unfold.”
“That’s too bad,” said Alicia. She threw a final look at James Madison, who was pawing the rocky beach, still soaked through from his swim. “You better get that donkey home before he freezes to death.”
“I was just trying to help,” said Cam.
“Some kind of help . . .” Alicia began. It was a line from Cam’s favorite kids’ song on the album Free to Be You and Me. “Some kind of help is the kind of help that you can do without,” it went.
Alicia wrapped her arm around Perry’s shoulder. They hiked slowly together back up the steep path to the lawn, leaving Cam alone, shivering, on the beach.
In spite of being covered with three blankets, an Oriental rug, earmuffs, and a scarf, James Madison was still shaking when Cam got him to Elaine’s. Cam debated leaving him in his corral and taking off. But her conscience got the better of her, and she walked inside.
“Um, Elaine?” she said. The wood-paneled mudroom was cluttered with boots and lumberjack flannels hanging on hooks.
“Hey, Campbell.” Elaine was reading in her big chair in the living room. She put down her romance novel and removed her glasses, letting them hang from their cord and drop onto her bosom. That word always cracked Cam up, but it was the perfect way to describe Elaine’s matronly chest.
“That’s the last thing I’d expect to see you reading.”
“Yeah, well, we all have our vices,” Elaine said.
“Speaking of vices . . . ” Cam began.
“Yes.”
“I sort of borrowed something from you today.”
“That’s okay, as long as you return it. What was it?”
“James Madison,” Cam admitted.
“The donkey?”
“Yeah. And he’s, um, had a rough day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he ended up going for a little swim, and he seems pretty cold.”
“Why did you take my donkey for a . . . Never mind. Where is he?”
Cam retrieved the donkey and brought him into the exam room.
“We need to get him warm,” Elaine said, rushing to change his blankets. “There are some space heaters in the garage, Campbell. Run and get me some of those.”
“Should we blow-dry him?”
“That might work, too. There’s a blow-dryer under the sink in the bathroom.”
They set up the space heaters, and Cam held the blow-dryer over the donkey’s mane, sweeping it back and forth along his neck, while Elaine took his temperature and checked his eyes. She was trying to determine whether James Madison was suffering from hypothermia, which donkeys are more susceptible to than horses.
“I’m disappointed in you, Campbell.”
“I’m sorry,” Cam said loudly, so that Elaine could hear her over the blow-dryer.
“You know, veterinarians take the same oath as doctors.”
“Primum non nocere. First do no harm.” Cam knew all about it. When treating cancer, it’s the first thing they throw out the window. They go after the tumor with bold disregard for the rest of your cells that are humming along innocently, minding their own business, trying to keep you alive. Often it’s the treatment that kills you before the disease would. If nothing else came out of this trip, Cam was at least glad she wasn’t spending her summer being poisoned by well-meaning oncologists.
“It’s a simple rule,” said Elaine as she parted James Madison’s lips so she could look at his gums.
“I didn’t know I’d be harming him. Things just got out of hand,” Cam said. She turned off the blow-dryer and covered the donkey’s back with a dry wool blanket.
“Well, it showed some pretty poor judgment. I should fire you.”
James Madison nudged Elaine with his nose and rubbed his face against her side, leaning in for a hug.
“It’s okay, boy. You’re going to be okay. What is this sticky paste all over his fur?” Elaine asked.
“Flour,” Cam blurted. There was no sense beating around the bush.
“Flour,” Elaine stated, as if nothing could surprise her anymore.
“Yeah.”
“You dredged my donkey in flour? You know what? I don’t even want to know.”
“I was going to use spray paint,” Cam said, “but I thought this would be more organic.”
Elaine sighed and then leaned back on one foot. She held the blow-dryer toward the sky. “I think I’ve got it from here.”
Cam slunk back to her car, wondering if she’d been fired. She was not accustomed to such colossal failure. I’m Harvard material, after all, she thought, trying to cheer herself up. But she still felt humiliated.
She knew she shouldn’t because she’d be gone soon enough, but she imagined herself disappearing. First her feet, then her legs, her torso, shoulders, arms, neck, and head. She imagined everything was gone, except for her clothes, which magically backed out of the parking lot by themselves.
TWENTY-TWO
CAM BROUGHT THE U-HAUL TO AVALON BY THE SEA AND UNHITCHED IT from Cumulus. Then she climbed back in her car and breathed in the sweet heaviness of the plumeria oil that reminded her of home. She didn’t dare go back into the house. She was welcome nowhere. Talk about backfire. She had tried to make people happy for once, and instead everyone hated her.
She took out her phone and dialed her father’s phone number. He was the one she called when she felt lonely.
“Aloha,” she heard her father’s showbiz voice boom. “I’m not here, but feel free to leave . . .”
Cam had secretly continued to pay the bill on her father’s cell phone, so she could call it occasionally and hear his voice. She only called it when she knew she needed to cry. And she cried now, wishing he had never died and wondering if this was happening to her, if the cancer was happening to her, because her father couldn’t bear to see her living on Earth without him. He could be very possessive.
When her tears had stopped and she could see again through the windshield, she drove north toward the town elementary school. She hadn’t heard much about the flamingos since the Fourth of July, and she wondered if they were still there. She wanted to check on Buddy, the baby, to see if he’d gotten any pink feathers yet or if his legs had begun to grow.
Buddy was there, perched on the muddy stump his mom had made for him so he wouldn’t wallow in the acidic mud that would burn his skin.
Cam watched from the old broken-down wooden fence. “Hi, Buddy,” she said. She thought he actually acknowledged her with a little flap of his oven-stuffer wings.
She watched the flock for a while. A lot of them slept on one leg with their heads tucked all the way into their tail feathers, their legs invisible in the dark. Dormant pink clouds that seemed to hang suspended in midair. Maybe that’s what Cam needed. Sleep. She would go home, and everything would be fine in the morning.
When she rounded the corner to the side parking lot, a Jeep sat there idling, the bass of the stereo vibrating the steel sides of the car. Inside, a thirty-year-old woman with a highlighted bob and bloodred fingernails stared at a man as she ran the fingers of her left hand through his hair. Familiar, golden-from-the-sun hair. Her skinny, Pilates-toned arm was draped between the seat
s, and her right hand was somewhere in his lap.
Oh, Asher, thought Cam. Why did she always have to be right? Why were people so predictable?
Asher turned his head and looked at Cam through the window. Their eyes met for a second before he closed his eyelids in slow motion, pretending she didn’t exist. It was as if Cam were already dead.
Back in her car, Cam held her iPhone, willing her fingers to dial Lily. She needed someone to acknowledge her existence. The call went straight to voice mail. She texted and waited ten minutes for a response. Finally, she decided to call the house phone. That was really admitting defeat, if Cam was willing to go through Lily’s parents to get to her.
Kathy answered on the sixth ring.
“Hello,” she said hazily.
“Hi, um, I’m sorry to call so late.”
“Cayum?”
“Yeah. It’s me. I was wondering if I could speak to Lily.” Cam closed her eyes and leaned her forehead into her hand. She was trying to permanently erase the image of Asher and that woman from her memory. She brought a photo of it into her mind and then imagined making it disappear using broad swipes of some Photoshop eraser tool.
“Oh, God.” Kathy’s voice caught for a moment, and then she heard her suck in a deep breath.
“Hello?” Cam asked. When she opened her eyes, she could see the dark bay to her left. The yellow beam of the lighthouse made intermittent sweeps out over the ocean as if searching for fugitives. To her right, most of the flamingos still slept, pink powder puffs suspended in midair, like long-legged marionettes waiting for someone to pull the strings.
“Campbell, baby.”
“Yes.”
“Hon, we meant to call you.”
“Why?”
“Lily passed, baby. Three days ago.”
Cam was silent. A ghostly moth fluttered in the accusing beam of her headlights. A flamingo talked in his sleep.
“Campbell? Hon?” said Kathy. Cam had forgotten she was on the phone. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you. It’s just that it’s so hard. It’s like you relive it every time you have to tell another person.”