The thirteenth child. He was adding freshly split wood to the pile by the cabin porch when it suddenly occurred to him that his son or daughter would be the thirteenth child on the commune, and although he was not ordinarily superstitious, that thought filled him with fear. He didn’t want his kid to start out with the deck stacked against him. Lighting another cigarette, he wondered if he and Ellen had treated this whole pregnancy as too much of a lark. They’d talked about how the baby would look. They would never cut his hair. They would let him run around naked, if that’s what he wanted. He’d never be ashamed of his body. He—or she—would grow up here in the Cabrial Commune, free of the stifling rules and restraints of the rigid world outside, being taught by other adults who shared their values. They’d discussed names: Shanti Joy, if the baby was a girl, and Sky Blue for a boy. He’d imagined his son or daughter one day going to school in the northernmost cabin, where two of the women and one of the men spent most weekdays teaching the commune’s children. It had sounded like the perfect way to live. Now he feared they were playing with fire.

Arms aching, he lit another cigarette and sat down on the porch step just as Ellen began to wail, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the sound. Did he love Ellen? She’d looked like a stranger to him when he’d brought Felicia back to the cabin earlier. A young girl, glistening with perspiration, strands of dark hair stringy around her face, her body taking up far more than her share of the mattress. God, she’d put on a lot of weight. She was going to end up looking like Felicia, like a big earth mother type with long, frizzy graying hair. Ellen already had the bones for it. He growled at himself. Shouldn’t matter. Looks shouldn’t matter at all. He’d probably look like hell himself if he were in her position right now. He was a son of a bitch for even thinking about it.

Crushing the butt of his cigarette beneath his sandaled foot, Johnny stood up. He ran his hand over his dark, sparse beard, the beard of a boy, not a man, and stared into the fog. If the day had been clear, he would have been able to see the ocean from here, beyond a few of the other cabins, beyond where the cliffs plummeted down to the sea. Today, though, his gaze rested on nothing more than drifting clouds of cotton.

He became aware of the silence almost instantly. The wailing and moaning had stopped, and he turned toward the cabin door. Was it finally over? Shouldn’t the baby cry or something?

He heard the rapid pounding of footsteps across the splintery living-room floor of the cabin, and Felicia pushed open the screen door. Her face was flushed, and she looked like a wild woman.

“Get help, Johnny!” she said. “The baby’s not breathing. Get that woman who came last night. Penny’s friend. Carlynn. She’s a doctor.”

He turned and ran in the direction of Cornflower, Penny’s cabin, hoping he’d be able to find it quickly in the fog. He’d managed to find her cabin in the middle of the night several times during the past couple of months, when Ellen had encouraged him to go to the older woman for sex, since she had not felt up to it, and sure enough, his feet seemed to know the way.

He remembered seeing the new woman in the dining room the night before, but he hadn’t known her name. She was an old friend of Penny’s, someone had told him, just here for a visit. He’d found himself staring at her. She was a small and slender woman with large blue eyes and shoulder-length blond hair that framed her face in an uncombed, unkempt and utterly appealing way. She was probably in her mid-thirties, nearly his mother’s age. But she didn’t look like anyone’s mother. Nor did she look like a doctor.

He burst into the living room of the cabin to find Penny and Carlynn sitting on opposite ends of the old sofa, sewing. They looked up at the sudden intrusion, hands and threaded needles frozen in midair.

“The baby’s not breathing!” he said.

In an instant, Carlynn dropped her sewing and ran toward the door. He and Penny followed close behind.

“Which way?” Carlynn called as she stepped into the fog.

Johnny grabbed her arm and ran with her toward Rainbow, but he stopped short at the front steps of the cabin.

“In there,” he said, pointing.

Carlynn wrapped her hand around his wrist and nearly dragged him up the steps with her. “Your girlfriend will need you,” she said, and he knew she was giving him no choice.

The inside of the cabin was hot from the woodstove, the steaming air hitting him in the face as he ran with Carlynn through the living room and into the bedroom. Ellen was crying, shivering as if she were cold, and she reached a hand toward him. A strange scent, a mixture of seawater and copper, filled his head and made him feel dizzy, but he sat down on the bed next to Ellen. Holding her hand, leaning over to kiss her damp forehead, he felt a tenderness inside him that was so sudden it made his chest ache and his eyes burn. He kissed her fingers, rubbed her arms. He was a weak and stupid idiot for making her endure this alone, he thought as he bent over to hug her. He should have been with her throughout the whole ordeal.

Her legs were still spread, her feet flat on the mattress. From where he sat, Johnny had a clear view between her knees of Felicia and Carlynn hovering over something. His child. The thirteenth child.

“The cord was wrapped around her neck,” Felicia said to Carlynn.

Carlynn nodded. She leaned over the infant and puffed into the baby’s nose and mouth. Johnny waited for the cry, but it was only the sound of Ellen’s weeping that filled the room.

Carlynn puffed some more, and then Felicia sat back on her thick haunches, tears in her eyes.

“She’s gone,” she said, touching Carlynn’s shoulder. “She’s gone.”

“No!” Ellen wailed, and Johnny leaned over to press his wet cheek to hers. “No, please.”

“Shh,” he said.

Carlynn lifted the baby, and for the first time Johnny could see the infant, her tiny arms flopping lifelessly at her sides, her skin a pale, grayish blue. Carlynn held the baby in a strange embrace, her hands flat against the infant’s chest and back, her lips pressed against the bluish temple. The woman’s eyes were closed, her lashes fluttering slightly against her cheeks, her breathing slow and deep, and the room grew still. Ellen stopped crying. She lifted herself on her elbows to be able to see better, and for a moment, Johnny wondered if Carlynn were mentally ill. What was she doing?

Carlynn drew in a long, deep breath, then let it out in a slow wash of warmth against the baby’s temple. Within seconds, the infant let out a muted whimper. Johnny listened hard, praying for another sound from his child. Carlynn breathed again against the baby’s temple, and suddenly a cry filled the room. Then another. The baby grew pink between the woman’s hands, and in the hushed room, she wrapped a piece of an old flannel blanket around the infant and handed her to Ellen.

Johnny leaned over to nuzzle his woman and his child, a wrenching ache of love and gratitude in his chest, while outside the cabin, the fog rose into the sky, and for the first time in a week, Big Sur was bathed in sunlight.







1






Monterey Peninsula, California, 2001



THERE WERE NIGHTS WHEN JOELLE THOUGHT SHE COULD actually feel the fog rolling in outside her window, cutting her off from the rest of the world. She had trouble sleeping on those nights, and they were frequent during the summer months. She would awaken each morning in the dim interior of her condominium, every window coated in white. She’d moved from Carmel Valley to the seaside village of Carmel two years before, when she was thirty-two and newly divorced, and although she loved the beauty and quaintness of the storybook town, she thought she would never adjust to the closed-in feeling she had in the mornings.

It was more than the fog keeping her awake on this early-June night, however. Joelle turned from side to side in the bed, bunching her pillows up beneath her head, then flattening them again, wondering, as she had for the past couple of weeks, if every twinge low in her belly might be the start of her period.

She had never been regular. Sometimes she could go months without a period; other times she would be surprised by two periods only a week or two apart. The capricious nature of her cycle had made getting pregnant problematic, if not impossible, during the eight years of her marriage to Rusty. The absence of a period would give them hope, which would be dashed when the pregnancy test came up negative. Her failure to conceive eventually led to the end of their marriage. Two years ago, after medical tests had revealed no clear reason for either of them to be unable to procreate, Rusty had told her he’d met someone else and wanted a divorce. Joelle supposed she should have been angry, but in a way it had been a relief. Their marriage had been reduced to one focus, and she was tired of the temperature taking, the urinating on test sticks, the probing of impersonal doctors. The mechanical and regimented nature of their marriage had eaten away at their love for one another.

All the speculation about which of them was the cause of their infertility was answered when Rusty’s new wife had gotten pregnant. He now was the proud father of a little boy, and Joelle knew that she, herself, would never have a child.

Laughter rose up from the street outside. Her bed was in the center of a turret, windows on all sides, and the laughter and chatter surrounded her as though the revelers were beneath her bed. Although her condo was a fair distance from Ocean Avenue, the main street in Carmel, tourists sometimes had to park this far from the heart of the village, and she knew that was what she was hearing—people on vacation, who didn’t have to get up and go to work in the morning, and who had spent the evening exploring the little shops and art galleries and eating in cozy restaurants. She pressed one of her pillows over her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

Her condo was one of two in a charming old white stucco house, which had, at one time, been a one-family residence. It was only three blocks from the ocean and Carmel’s white sand beach, and from the windows of her second-story bedroom and living room, she could watch the sun sink into the Pacific in the evening, when the fog was not too thick. Her neighbors, Tony and Gary, lived in the condo downstairs. Her relationship with the gay couple was affable and neighborly, and she occasionally ate dinner with them or watched a movie on their big-screen TV, but they were in their twenties, and they had each other. Sometimes she could hear their laughter rising up through her floorboards, and she felt her aloneness even more keenly.

The tourists were getting into their cars now, and the sound of slamming doors rose through her windows and slipped beneath her pillow, which she clutched over her head.

It was no use. She was not going to sleep.

Throwing off the covers, she got out of bed and walked into the bathroom. From the cupboard beneath the sink, she pulled out an aging plastic grocery bag and carried it back to the bed, dumping the contents onto the lemon-colored matellasse. Here were the basal thermometer, the ovulation-predictor kits and the home pregnancy tests, items she hadn’t looked at since leaving the house she’d shared with Rusty. She was not even certain what had possessed her to bring these things along with her. She stared at one of the pregnancy kits for a moment, then picked up the box and opened it, slowly and deliberately. She tossed the instructions in the trash can; she hardly needed them after having performed this test dozens of times in the past. Removing the test stick from the box as she walked into the bathroom, she tugged the cap from the absorbent tip and sat down on the toilet, holding the stick in the stream of urine, counting to ten. She feigned indifference as she put the cap back on the stick and rested it on the counter. Smoothing her long, dark, bed-mussed hair in the mirror, she waited out the three minutes, then looked down at the strip. Two pink lines, one in each window. She stared at them. For eight years, she had longed for that second line to appear and it never had. Now, the color was nearly vibrant. And now was the wrong time for a miracle.

Fighting to stay calm, she checked the expiration date on the box. Still good for a year. She opened one of the other boxes, a different brand, because she used to try them all, just in case one test might find her pregnant while another did not. Just to give herself that little modicum of hope. She read the directions this time, following them carefully. The results were the same, though, only this test stick displayed a blue line.