Peter Heller: Celine

It was bright and windy, with the poppies flushing orange down the slopes of the bluffs, all mixed with swaths of blue lupine. The Pacific was almost black and it creamed against the base of the cliffs all along Big Sur. He loved this. He hitched the rucksack higher on his shoulder. Since Jence had died in the war it was the only thing he really loved. Good haul today, too, a solid handful of jade pebbles from the cove below. He stopped to catch his breath. The trail was steep here, the rocks like steps, his pant legs soaked to the thigh and heavy. Just a second here, he was in no hurry this afternoon.

He heard the click of rock and voices and looked up the trail and saw the family. The little girl was practically running down. She was wearing a yellow-and-blue summer dress a little like the flower-covered cliffs and she was yelling. Must be her mother right after, trying to catch up, trying to watch her step in her leather sandals, her arms held out for balance like wings. She was calling “Gabriela! Gabriela! Cuidado! Querida! ” She was very pretty. She wore the same dress as her daughter and when the two got close he noticed they were like big and little twins: olive skin and green eyes, long black hair in ponytails. Well. It was a day for beauty. The father came after. He took his time. He wasn’t worried about a thing. He wore a black T-shirt and he was handsome like James Dean—older than Jence, maybe ten years, too old for the draft. The girl Gabriela yelled “Hi! Hi!” as she breezed past, and the mother brought herself erect when she saw him and flashed a shy smile. He held up his hand for the dad and spoke.

“Pretty good today. The rougher seas have brought down more stone. But be careful with the tide.”

“Thanks. We will. Thanks.” The father touched his arm and continued down, out of sight.

The man hooked his thumbs in the rucksack and climbed. He got to the top of the bluff and sat on the little bench that was just a slab of wood on two rocks. He closed his eyes against the sun and smelled the warming yarrow, the salt. Nice seeing the family. He and Jence also came here when Jence was a kid, and when they got home they covered the kitchen table with bits of jade. He still did that now. He came home and he didn’t think about his son blown to shreds fifteen months ago in Vietnam, and he pieced the stones close together like a jigsaw, like a growing green island, so there was no room to eat anymore. He ate his meals on the porch.

He thought he heard shouts. Shouts and cries. Hard to hear over the wind and rush of surf. People got so excited about jade. Well.

Gabriela screamed. The foam rushed cold over her bare toes and as it slid back it vanished in a million tiny bubbles. What a glorious afternoon. White seagulls lifted off the boulders and terns dove. The waves broke and spumed over the outer boulders that were covered in shiny dark kelp. The waves rushed white through the rocks right up onto the gravel of the tiny cupped beach and turned the stones black and when they all glistened was when you could see the bits of green.

“Gabriela,” Amana said to the girl. “ Querida. This one—exactly the color of your eyes! See? But it’s shaped like a bird! Here’s a little fish, look. I am going to find one that looks like your eye.”

“ Your eye!” The girl shrieked with delight. “One that looks like your eye! I am going to find one for you. ”

They kneeled, heads almost together, black hair flying in the wind, and sifted the stones. They raced. Paul helped Gabriela a little, but mostly he sat on a rock and closed his eyes. The wind was almost cold. He was thinking that he should have brought some sausage and cheese, that they could stay here maybe till sunset, when he heard the girls scream. He opened his eyes. A bigger wave had pushed whitewater right over the entire swath of gravel, right up to the wall of the sheltering cliff, and his wife and daughter were standing, soaked, and laughing.

“Hey! Hey!” he yelled. “Come higher!” He laughed too, but what he felt was alarm. He looked past Amana and Gabriela to the outer rocks and saw the dark swell. It was the next wave and it was the second in a set and he watched it as if in slow motion: the wall lightening to green as it rose, rising impossibly tall, the guarding boulders out in the cove dwarfed beneath it, the quivering top frayed by wind and then a piece of it curled and collapsed and the wall fell: a surge of whitewater chest-high roared in over the black slack water of the inner cove and he was slugged and knocked over, his shoulder and neck hit rock, he came up lunging out of ice foam to see the tumult sucking back.

Then he saw his daughter. Heard. Gabriela was screaming, the whitewater rushed back and she was in it, it was taking her, and the wall—a bigger wall was rising out there, steepening, green— “Amana! Where—” He took two steps and dove. His chest hit hard and he was flailing toward his daughter, her head, and then he saw his wife farther out and she was swimming. She was a strong swimmer and she was swimming! In the sliding rush beneath the next wave he saw the rhythmic beat of her arms—and the wave suspended and crashed and then he was tumbled. His back struck sharp rock and he cried, no breath, and she was somehow against him. Gabriela! His little girl was against him, the weight for a moment, and she was pulling away and with everything he could summon he flailed and reached and somehow grabbed her arm and held. And held. Grip like a claw. The charge of whitewater sucked back and he rolled, he rolled with her, and then somehow felt the bottom, loose gravel, and he scrabbled for a foothold and then the water was only knee-deep and he staggered and stood and she was in his arms. He was hugging her tight, she was bleeding from somewhere—was she breathing? She was blue—and he saw with a black terror the next wave and he could not see his wife. He scrambled back. Back against the cliff as the froth sucked on his knees and he ran. He half fell, half stumbled around a spur of rock holding his daughter, and he knocked shins and knees, elbows on the boulders and then he was at the foot of the trail and climbing and in the blank static of panic he turned once and saw something that might be the dark head of his wife, an arm—being tugged swiftly toward the point.

The call had come while she was at her workbench wiring the naked taxidermic form of an ermine onto a rock, beside the skull of a crow. The plan was to have the skinless ermine looking down at his own hide tacked to the rock. Her sculpture had a distinctive dark streak. When Celine wasn’t solving cases, she made pieces from anything at hand, which often involved skulls. The year before, the window washer had been fascinated by her art, which was displayed throughout the open studio, and the next day he brought her a human skull in a bucket. “Don’t ask,” he said. She didn’t. She covered it immediately in gold leaf and it stood now on a pedestal by the front door, looking elegant.

Now, she felt like this ermine. She felt skinned and lost, without protection.

Her own fur had been her family. She had Hank, of course, but a son, no matter how old, was someone to be protected, not the other way around. When the phone rang, she almost didn’t answer it, but then she thought it might be Pete calling from up in the Heights, needing grocery-shopping help.