My father lived near Saratoga in Monte Sereno, a suburb about half an hour away. I’d never been to this house or heard of the town where he lived—I’d met him only a couple of times.
My mother said my father offered his extra couch when she called him. But if we didn’t get it soon, she knew, he’d throw it away or rescind the offer. And who knew when we’d have access to Elaine’s van again?
I was in the same first-grade class as Elaine’s twins, a boy and a girl. Elaine was older than my mother, with wavy black hair and loose strands that created a halo around her head in certain lights. My mother was young, sensitive, and luminous, without the husband, house, and family that Elaine had. Instead, she had me, and I had two jobs: first, to protect her so that she could protect me; second, to shape her and rough her up so that she could handle the world, the way you sandpaper a surface to make the paint stick.
“Left or right?” Elaine kept asking. She was in a hurry—she had a doctor’s appointment to keep. My mother is dyslexic but insisted that wasn’t the reason she eschewed maps. It was because the maps were inside her; she could find her way back to any place she’d ever been, she said, even if it took her a few turns to get her bearings. But we often got lost.
“Left,” she said. “No, right. Wait. Okay, left.”
Elaine was mildly annoyed, but my mother did not apologize. She acted as if one is equal to the people who save them.
The sun made lace on my legs. The air was wet and thick and pricked my nose with the smell of spicy bay laurel and dirt.
The hills in the towns around Palo Alto had been created by shifting under the earth, by the grinding of the plates against each other. “We must be near the fault line,” my mother said. “If there was an earthquake now, we’d be swallowed up.”
We found the right road and then the wooded driveway with a lawn at the end. A circle of bright grass with thin shoots that looked like they’d be soft on my feet. The house was two stories tall, with a gabled roof, dark shingles on white stucco. Long windows rippled the light. This was the kind of house I drew on blank pages.
We rang the bell and waited, but no one came. My mother tried the door.
“Locked,” she said. “Damn. I bet he’s not going to show.”
She walked around the house, checking the windows, trying the back door. “Locked!” she kept calling out. I wasn’t convinced it was really his.
She came back to the front and looked up at the sash windows, too high to reach. “I’m going to try those,” she said. She stepped on a sprinkler head and then a drainpipe, grabbed a lip of windowsill, and flattened herself against the wall. She found a new place for her hands and feet, looked up, pulled herself higher.
Elaine and I watched. I was terrified she would fall.
My father was supposed to come to the door and invite us in. Maybe he would show us other furniture he didn’t want and invite us to come back.
Instead, my mother was climbing the house like a thief.
“Let’s go,” I called out. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be here.”
“I hope there’s no alarm,” she said.
She reached the ledge. I held my breath, waiting for a siren to blare, but the day was as still as before. She unlatched the window, which scraped up and open, and disappeared, leg by leg, and emerged a few seconds later through the front door into the sunshine.
“We’re in!” she said. I looked through the door: light reflected on wood floors, high ceilings. Cool, vacant spaces. I associated him that day—and later—with pools of reflected light from big windows, shade in the depths of rooms, the musty, sweet smells of mold and incense.
My mother and Elaine held the couch between them, maneuvered it through the door and down the steps. “It doesn’t weigh much,” my mother said. She asked me to step aside. A thick woven raffia frame held wide-weave linen upholstery. The cushions were a cream color spattered with bright chintz flowers in red, orange, and blue, and for years I would pick at the edges of the petals, trying to dig my fingernails under their painted tips.