“Then gradually the screaming faded… finally stopped,” Chyna told Laura. “When I opened my eyes, twilight had gone and night had come. There was still light in the Mercedes, and the woman’s face was still pressed to the glass, but a breeze had risen, rippling the water in the canal, and her features were a blur. I knew she was dead. She and her husband. I started to cry. Woltz didn’t like that. He threatened to drag me into the canal, open a door on the Mercedes, and shove me inside with the dead people. My mother made me drink some grapefruit juice with vodka. I was only seven. The rest of the way back to Key West, I lay on the backseat, dizzy from the vodka, half drunk and a little sick, still crying but quietly, so I wouldn’t make Woltz angry, crying quietly until I fell asleep.”
In Laura’s Mustang, the only sounds were the soft rumble of the engine and the singing of the tires on the blacktop.
Chyna finally opened her eyes and came back from the memory of Florida, from the long-ago humid twilight to the Napa Valley, where most of the red light had gone out of the sky and darkness encroached on all sides.
The old man in the Buick was no longer in front of them. They were not driving as fast as before, and evidently he had gotten far ahead of them.
Laura said softly, “Dear God.”
Chyna was shaking uncontrollably. She plucked a few Kleenex from the console box between the seats, blew her nose, and blotted her eyes. Over the past two years, she had shared part of her childhood with Laura, but every new revelation—and there was much still to reveal—was as difficult as the one before it. When she spoke of the past, she always burned with shame, as though she had been as guilty as her mother, as if every criminal act and spell of madness could be blamed on her, though she had been only a helpless child trapped in the insanity of others.
“Will you ever see her again?” Laura asked.
Recollection had left Chyna half numb with horror. “I don’t know.”
“Would you want to?”
Chyna hesitated. Her hands were curled into fists, the damp Kleenex wadded in the right one. “Maybe.”
“For God’s sake why?”
“To ask her why. To try to understand. To settle some things. But… maybe not.”
“Do you even know where she is?”
“No. But it wouldn’t surprise me if she was in jail. Or dead. You can’t live like that and hope to grow old.”
They drove down out of the foothills into the valley.
Eventually Chyna said, “I can still see her standing in the steamy darkness on the banks of that canal, greasy with sweat, her hair hanging damp and all tangled, covered with mosquito bites, eyes bleary from vodka. Laura, even then she was still the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. She was always so beautiful, so perfect on the outside, like someone out of a dream, like an angel… but she was never half as beautiful as when she was excited, when there’d been violence. I can see her standing there, only visible because of the greenish glow from the headlights of the Mercedes rising through the murky canal water, so ravishing in that green light, glorious, the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen, like a goddess from another world.”
Gradually Chyna’s trembling subsided. The heat of shame faded from her face, but slowly.
She was immeasurably grateful for Laura’s concern and support. A friend. Until Laura, Chyna had lived secretly with her past, unable to speak of it to anyone. Now, having unburdened herself of another hateful corrupting memory, she couldn’t begin to put her gratitude into words.
“It’s okay,” Laura said, as if reading Chyna’s mind.
They rode in silence.
They were late for dinner.
*
To Chyna, the Templeton house looked inviting at first glimpse: Victorian, gabled, roomy, with deep porches front and rear. It stood a half mile off the county road, at the end of a gravel driveway, surrounded by one hundred twenty acres of vineyards.
For three generations, the Templetons had grown grapes, but they had never made wine. They were under contract to one of the finest vintners in the valley, and because they owned fertile land with the highest-quality vines, they received an excellent price for their crop.