Santa Cruz Noir Read online

  I drank my tea and showered before bed. I put on my new necklace.

  I was sitting in my kimono on the couch, staring at the same page of a book for what seemed like hours, when there was a knock on the door. It was Bradley. Maybe he found out about the Madison stuff and was here to apologize too.

  “Hi, Bradley. What brings you out here?”

  “Madison told us over dinner,” he said, “how impressed she was with you and your book collection and what you’re working on for the university. We know you’re probably busy, but we also know that college budgets are tight. We were wondering if you’d be interested in tutoring Madison in exchange for lobbing off a few more hundred from the rent. Think about it and let us know?”

  In truth, it would bring down my rent considerably. Bradley’s offer meant my rent would actually be reasonable for six hundred square feet. I thought about the note I received. It was probably from Madison herself. I had a feeling I’d be seeing her all the time anyhow. Might as well get paid for it.

  I said yes.

  “Excellent,” Bradley said. “You can start tomorrow. Just an hour a day would keep her on track with her studies.”

  I saw Bradley out. There was a small tray with another box and note on the ground by the planter.

  “Secret admirer, huh?” said Bradley, as he whistled off across the driveway toward his house.

  I opened the second box. It held a tiny petrified cocoon that had been made into a perfect lapel pin. I opened the note, my heart racing.

  Protect yourself. And don’t look too closely in the backyard.

  I went inside and found a flashlight. I immediately went to the backyard. I saw nothing out of the ordinary, but there were large mounds of dirt in the rosebushes that looked as if something had been buried there. I went back inside and locked up the house. I locked up the rooms and slept on the couch. It was buttressed by a wall and seemed like the safest place. I hardly slept at all.

  * * *

  The next day I got up early and drove to the university provost’s office to check on paperwork and orientation. In the afternoon I headed home and Madison was waiting on the front step.

  “Hello, my new tutor.”

  “Yes, I suppose I am. You’ll have to tell me where you are in your studies so we can plan a course of study.”

  “I need to know everything. For instance, who is sending you notes and boxes?” Right next to Madison’s Mary-Jane’d foot was yet another box and note.

  “Tell you what, Madison—why don’t we start in an hour? I have to eat some lunch and attend to a few things first. I will meet you up at your place.” Again I whipped inside the house and dead-bolted the door behind me.

  I opened the box. In it was a silver charm bracelet. Each charm was a butterfly but one was a tombstone. My name and birth date was inscribed on the largest charm. With a question mark at the other side for a death date.

  You aren’t going to make it here.

  I got out my laptop and began hunting for other places to live. Perhaps someone knew someone at the college who could put me up a couple of days. There was a knock. Of course, Madison had come back already. But it was Sharon. She had mail in her hand for me. A letter from the college. It was one of those glassine envelopes with something pink inside.

  “Did your job get cut? That seems to happen all the time these days.” Sharon half-smiled.

  Indeed. I figured I might as well open it up in front of her.

  Something had happened with the funding. The job was on hiatus but the department head was sure they’d find funding from another source.

  “Seems like it’s a great windfall for us. We can use you full time!” Sharon acted like she’d won a prize at the Boardwalk. “Let’s get a drink up at my house, shall we? When are they going to treat academics with the respect they deserve?”

  “I told Madison I’d tutor her in an hour.”

  “And you will, but first a drink! Then I’ll show you the library where she takes her lessons.”

  Sharon led me by the hand up to the main house. I was stunned that my prestigious job was gone so fast, so fleetingly. A nice glass of wine was needed. At least Sharon is understanding, I thought.

  “Let’s drink in the wine cellar. We had it custom-made and built into the hillside. It’s like a little café in there!”

  I followed in Sharon’s footsteps. She punched a code in the side of the cellar door and a metal door opened. There were rows and rows of bottles inside. A little French café table and two chairs in the middle. She offered me the nicest one and found a pinot noir she thought would suit the occasion.

  I drank two glasses on an empty stomach. And then a third. I felt sleepy. I felt Sharon’s fingers on my face brushing my hair back behind my ear. “It’s so unfair what you’ve been through!” she said. I felt her kiss on my neck. Then I felt nothing at all.

  I woke up groggy and in my own bed. I couldn’t remember a thing after that kiss. There was no sign of anyone around me. I made coffee. I called Sharon’s number but there was no answer so I left a message: “Uh, it’s me. I don’t think this is going to work out. Money isn’t everything.” I opened the front door thinking perhaps Madison was out there, but she wasn’t.

  I took Maddy’s advice from the other day. I drove out to Natural Bridges State Park to check out where the monarch butterflies migrate to hang in the trees by the thousands. A group of schoolchildren was leaving as I entered the trail. They’d all just been down there, so why couldn’t I do the same?

  If you’re like me and don’t have the best vision, you don’t notice the butterflies, at first. But as you go closer to the trees, you realize they are moving. Thousands of monarchs beat their wings about the eucalyptus and pine so that trees appear to dance. They move back and forth like a kelp forest in a tide zone. Orange and black and white, so thick that the tree colors are hidden. The farther you go on the trail, the thicker the colony. By the end of the path there seem to be nothing left but the beating of a million orange wings.

  It had a dizzying effect. I stumbled and found a park bench to sit on. My breath was quick—like the life of a butterfly itself. Had Madison known the effect it would have on me? Had she suggested this place for a reason? I wanted to be kind now—to bridge whatever it was that had set me to hate her. But I couldn’t help it.

  And then I saw a girl around Maddy’s same age, staring up at me from an opposite bench. She had a neck brace on.

  “I’m Ashley,” she said, “the dead girl who fell from the tree. Perhaps you heard of me? You’re one of the tutors, aren’t you?”

  “I guess I am,” I said.

  Ashley pulled a phone from her pocket and called a number. “Found her. I can wait till you arrive,” she said.

  “You’re not dead?” I asked. I reached out to see if she was a ghost.

  “Well, of course I am. But I have a job now.”

  Two figures appeared at the top of the trail. It was Sharon and Bradley in their Land’s End trench coats. They smiled and waved.

  “You need to remember to ask permission, young lady,” Sharon said, marching up to my side. “We can’t have you just wandering off like that. Give Bradley your keys.”

  I did as I was told and dug into my pocket to get them. At the same time, I pulled out the cocoon pin and the butterfly necklace.

  “What is that?” Sharon shrieked. Her whole body pulled away from me, like she was retreating into the air itself. Bradley stepped forward to shield her, but with the amulets in my hand, he too screamed and flapped away.

  Ashley cackled hysterically.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her. “What’s happening to them?”

  “Nothing they don’t deserve,” she said. “But you’ve broken the spell. Thank you.” She sat down on the bench again. Her neck sank brokenly against her shoulder. Her eyes closed and she slumped over—and died.

  I put the necklace around my neck and the pin on my dress. Sharon and Bradley squawked like chickens in a pen, helple
ss. They couldn’t get any closer and they couldn’t run away.

  Wherever the jewelry touched on my skin it felt warm. I clasped the charm bracelet on my wrist and noticed that the butterflies seemed to be moving. Wings flying around my wrists. Sharon and Bradley were naked.

  “Aargh—after all we’ve done to help teachers like you! We’re the only ones who really care anymore!” Sharon screamed.

  “We rented for under market value! You should have been grateful!” Bradley seconded his wife.

  I heard a wind come up from the eucalyptus—one of the strongest I’d ever heard, deafening. It was the monarchs’ wings. They were swarming, and all at once they descended upon the couple—a whole grove of butterflies—onto Sharon and Bradley’s pink flesh. I backed away and left the butterflies to it. None of them touched me.

  Madison was waiting for me at my car. “Thanks,” she said. “CPS was totally useless, you know. You were far better.”

  “I’m not even sure what I did,” I said.

  “You weren’t really willing to be bought.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said.

  “You don’t have to move out, you know . . . and I kind of need a guardian now. At least on paper.”

  Madison had a point. The housing market still sucked.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just promise me not to lurk around the cottage so much?”

  “I’ll try not to lurk at all.”

  “We’ll see how it goes,” I said. The fog had rolled all the way in. I drove us home. My jewelry had cooled off. It felt just right on my skin.

  54028 LOVE CREEK ROAD

  by Jessica Breheny

  Bear Creek Road

  I walk from my classroom at San Jose City College to the faculty lot, my coat draped over my elbow, tote bags full of papers that need grading slung on each shoulder, my hands gripping my dinner leftovers and an invitation to a union picnic. I don’t have a hand free to pull up the worn waistband of my skirt, which keeps falling down lower and lower on my hips. Dim amber lights illuminate the fog that trolled in while I was teaching my evening class. My white car is a smudge in a far corner of the lot, now, at 9:45 p.m., nearly empty.

  I cut diagonally toward my car and hear the voice of my student Frank Gonzalo yell, “Miss! Doctor—Profess—Miss Janet—” His arms pump back and forth as he walks toward me.

  Frank has missed the last two weeks of class, and his essay is late. He’s a tall man in his forties with a doughy face. He is wearing a shiny short-sleeved shirt printed with flames and skulls, and he smells of Bleu de Chanel. He brandishes a rolled-up piece of paper.

  “My essay!” he says. He is out of breath. “Here, I’ll help you to your car.” He takes my leftover dinner and one of my bags and hands me his paper.

  I pull up my sagging skirt as we walk. I have been teaching since 8 a.m., starting with two morning classes at Cabrillo College with its Monterey Bay views, then an afternoon class at West Valley College in Saratoga where every student drives a Benz—and, finally, ending my day at San Jose City College, flanked on one side by the freeway and on the other, an emergency room. I am hoping to get home to Ben Lomond with an hour or so of time to myself to shower and read before going to bed.

  “You’ve missed a lot of classes,” I say. After his last paper, I’d hoped he wasn’t coming back.

  “It’s my stomach. I have a note from the doctor. He says I have an ulcer. I have to keep, you know . . .” he lowers his voice to a whisper, “going to the bathroom.”

  A motorcycle screeches past on Moorpark, the four-laner that divides the college from Highway 280.

  “You can’t miss any more classes, okay? Or I have to drop you.” I fish my keys from the bottom of a bag of papers and open my car.

  “I need to pass,” he says. “It’s—” again he whispers, “my probation officer. She wants me in school.”

  His first essay was about his probation officer who, he wrote, was “always in all of my business.” She even stopped by his house sometimes unannounced. He ended his paper by saying he was in school to be an inspiration for his nieces and nephews and to earn a good living to “support his lady.”

  “You need to come to class to pass.”

  An airplane bellows overhead, descending toward the airport. Frank hovers so close I think for a moment that he might be planning to get into my car. He is very tall. I am eye level with a skull on his shirt, a flame burning in its mouth.

  “No, no, you see, you don’t understand.” He gestures to his belly. “I’m not feeling very well. But I need to pass. And my group, you know, they still require a lot from me.”

  Frank’s “group” is one of the major gangs—he hasn’t told me which one. His “group” was the topic of his second essay, a wandering mess describing his position of leadership. He is busy with a full-time job as a bouncer at a club downtown, and he said he was trying to get out of his gang but he still had to give them money and help run meetings. He made being in a gang sound boring, like serving on the board of a neighborhood association, except that in his conclusion he said he’d “hurt a lot of people.”

  I tuck my bags into the back of the car, next to stacks of papers from my other classes. Frank’s cologne lingers.

  “I need to go. It’s late.”

  “Don’t drop me,” he says. “Read my paper. I was more descriptive, like you said we should be.”

  I settle into the driver’s seat and close the door. He says something I don’t hear. He smiles and waves as I pull away.

  * * *

  To avoid the late-night construction on Highway 17, I take the hairpin turns of Bear Creek Road home to Ben Lomond. I’m tailgated most of the way by a car so close behind me that all I can see are its brights. I can’t make out the turnouts on the unlit road. Just after the Summit, the tailgater turns off, and I’m left alone in the darkness to muddle my way home. I pass a pile of car parts in a driveway. To my right are steep drops. It would be so easy to miscalculate a curve and drive right off.

  When I get home, I turn on the space heater in my one-room rental and change out of the clothes I’ve been wearing since dawn. It’s only October but starting to get cold already. I look through my half-fridge for something to eat. Last night’s dinner and this morning’s breakfast dishes are piled in the sink; a dirty pan sits on the hotplate with a crust of pasta starch and rancid oil shimmering under the overhead light.

  My landlord’s house is dark. He’s gone away on a vision quest with his shaman and won’t be back until Thanksgiving. I’m by myself on his six-acre property, up a long gravel driveway above Love Creek. The nearest neighbors are a mother and daughter who breed Burmese cats. The lights of their cabin are visible in the distance through the forest. I have never stayed for any length of time in a place this isolated before. The aloneness has taken on a heavy quality.

  I make toast while I sort through the papers from the five classes I taught today. I unroll Frank’s paper, conscientiously stapled on the right-hand corner, his name typed on the first page, and a centered title, “My Life.” The assignment asked students to write about a single decision that changed their lives—not their entire lives—but he begins, “I was born in San Jose. The son of two parents a single mother and a father which was absent mostly.” I am about to check on my toast when I see the word “bleeding” near the bottom of the first page.

  The guy was part of another group and he was talking about stuff and in some faces of some individuals whom he shouldn’t be. He got stabbed bad he was critical bleeding internal in his organs one guys kicked him hard in the stomach with its big boot now pray to god for mercy because stabbed him.

  I read the sentences again. They are set in a paragraph about the “group.” The next paragraph is about going to church and how God can “transform everything unto something better.” Smoke wafts from the toast that is now burning in the toaster oven. I unplug it and look again at the paper. On the last page, he writes in his conclusion, “I had done a lot of things in my life. I’m am
changing who I am and what I’m going to be.”

  I look again at “pray to god for mercy because stabbed him.” He has left out the personal pronoun that should precede the word, “stabbed,” but obviously, someone was stabbed by someone. I make another piece of toast and get into bed.

  The quiet in my house is so loud, I put earplugs in to muffle it. My bed is cold as dirt. I turn and face the wall and think, Because stabbed him. I see a young man, maybe twenty-five, the age of my daughter Zia, bleeding, too hurt to even beg for his life, being kicked. And Frank—maybe this stabber—standing there, watching. I will need to report the paper to someone in the morning. The campus police, perhaps the dean.

  * * *

  My alarm goes off at six. I’m exhausted and can’t imagine teaching “citation” in my morning English 1A at Cabrillo. The more tired I am in class, the more my students tend to slip away from me, into their phones, or wherever it is they go in the space they stare at, when I call their names. It will be another day where I won’t be able to hold their attention. I still owe them grades on papers they turned in two weeks ago.

  Over coffee, I check my campus e-mail accounts. Two students who’ve been absent in my West Valley “Intro to Lit” write to tell me they were absent. An e-mail at Cabrillo alerts employees that e-mail will be down for maintenance. The dean at San Jose City College writes about an upcoming division meeting I can’t attend. The SJCC union sends another reminder about the union picnic. And I have an e-mail from Frank: Don’t tell anyone what I wrote, okay. It is confidential. I just want to be descriptive. And then, under that: 54028 Love Creek Road. My address.

  For a moment, I don’t register what the e-mail means. A spring of nausea bubbles up from my stomach and percolates into the tips of my fingers. Frank knows where I live. Frank is telling me he knows where I live.

  I stand up and walk to the other side of the room, as far away from the computer as possible. I want to run outside, away from 54028 Love Creek Road, and I want to check the locks on the door and windows and stay inside 54028 Love Creek Road. I don’t do either. I am having trouble breathing.