smell of damp or baking clay. The walls were white, stark, and clean, without a trace of life. As she stood there, her past was wiped out, her future hauntingly empty.
But something else haunted her. She looked back to where Julia had just stood and realized she understood her mother-in-law’s terrified look. Only that morning Kathryn had seen it in the mirror.
Over the next few days, Kathryn stopped reading the rental ads and Julia stopped telling her what to do and how to feel. Kathryn was dressing after a shower when she heard Laurel singing. It sounded like she was jumping on the bed next door.
Kathryn ran into the hallway. “Laurel! Tell me you are not jumping on your grandmother’s bed.” She entered Julia’s suite for the first time.
Laurel was bouncing jubilantly on her grandmother’s silk-dressed bed and chanting, “I love coffee, I love tea …”
“Stop it!”
Laurel looked at her midbounce.
“She’s fine, Kathryn.” Julia came out of her bathroom rubbing cold cream on her face. “I told her she could jump on it.” Her robe matched the room, which was a clean soft white. Even the furniture, including a dressing table in one corner and a hi-fi in the other, were painted white, and the suite was luxuriously decorated from the carpet and the bed linens to the silk draperies on two long mullioned windows that looked out over the water. Between those long windows was a five-by-eight-foot canvas of bold colors, contemporary like most of Julia’s art. Kathryn felt the blood drain to her feet.
“It’s impressive, isn’t it?” Julia used a tissue to wipe the cream off. “There’s another over the bed.”
Kathryn faced the bed where Laurel was still jumping.
“The artist is Espinosa. I bought them a while back. Their value must be rising, although Lord knows I paid enough for them to begin with. The gallery called a week ago. The artist died recently and her family has been trying to track down all her pieces. The canvases fit so perfectly in here I don’t think I want to sell them. I decorated the whole room around them.”
Kathryn found her voice. “Do you know who that artist is?”
“Rachel Espinosa. A Spanish artist.”
“She was married to Rudy Banning.”
“Banning?” Julia sat down. “Banning?” There was a hollowness to her voice and her skin was gray. She looked up at Kathryn. “He killed Jimmy. Rudy Banning killed my son.”
“Rachel Espinosa Banning died in the same accident. She had an art show that night. Didn’t you see the newspapers?”
Julia shook her head. “I couldn’t read them. I didn’t want to read them. I was afraid to read them.”
“She and her husband left the show arguing. He lost control of the car.”
“My God.” Julia stood. “My God …” She walked into the bathroom and shut the door.
Kathryn was left to stare at the paintings, first one and then the other, until they all blurred together and she couldn’t see them anymore.
Later that night, Kathryn awoke from the throes of a nightmare and sat up, startled at the sound of Jimmy’s music playing so loudly from the next room.
Laurel came to her bed. “Mama. The music’s too loud. Make it stop.”
Kathryn tucked her in. “Stay here. I’ll ask Grandmama to turn it off.” What the hell was Julia thinking? She rapped on the door. “Julia?” Inside, she froze. Her mother-in-law stood on the bed, a long kitchen knife in her hand, the painting slashed from one corner to the other. “Julia!”
Calmly, she sliced down the other side and faced Kathryn, then stepped down to the carpet. “I don’t want them in this room. In this house.” Julia started toward the other painting.
“Wait! Don’t.”
“I need to destroy it. They destroyed my life. They killed my son.”
“You said the family wants the paintings.”
“They do.” Julia looked so small and lost and confused, not like someone capable of setting your teeth on edge. She merely looked half there.
“Then don’t destroy them. To never sell them back is the best revenge.” Wicked words, she knew, but that made saying them all the better. “Never sell them.”
Julia looked from the knife in her hand to the other painting on the wall. She took deep breaths and wiped at her tears with the sleeve of her silk robe, then handed Kathryn the knife. Kathryn put her arm around her. “It’s okay.”
“Nothing will ever be okay again.” Julia started crying and leaned against her, no longer hard as stone but frail and brittle as shale.
“Come with me,” Kathryn said. “You can sleep in one of the guest rooms tonight. I’ll have the paintings removed tomorrow.”
“I’ll never sell them. You’re right, Kathryn. We will never sell them.”
1970
We often make people pay dearly for what
we think we give them.
Marie Josephine de Suin de Beausac
Newport Beach, California
The soil was rich in this Golden State, dark as the oil pumped up from its depths. Bareroot roses planted in the ground bloomed in a matter of weeks, and every spring the lantana tripled in breadth, filling the narrow property lines between homes where every square foot was valued in tens of thousands. Roots from the pepper trees unearthed backyard fences, and eucalyptus grew high into the blue skies, like fabled beanstalks, shooting up so swiftly the bark cracked away and fell dusty to the ground. If you knelt down and dug your hands into the dirt, you could smell its fecundity, and when you stood up you might look—or even be—a little taller.
Billboards sold everyone on growth, and the coastal hills swelled with tracks of housing because people hungered for a false sense of peace from the Pacific views. Newport was not the small resort enclave it had once been, with new restaurants now perched on the waterfront, housed in everything from canneries and beam-and-glass buildings to a grounded riverboat. Luxury homes stood on most lots, which had been subdivided into smaller shapes that couldn’t be measured in anything as archaic as an acre. At the entrances to entire neighborhoods, white crossbars blocked the roads and were raised and lowered by a uniformed security guard in a hut, a kind of cinematic image that brought to mind border crossings and cold wars. But the guard wasn’t there to keep people out; he was there to keep prestige in.
The Banning boys grew into young men here, tall and athletic, golden like everything in California. Thirteen years had changed who they were, now brothers separated by a demand to be something they weren’t. They wanted to win. They had everything, except their grandfather’s approval.
As soon as the opportunity arose, Victor Banning had bought the homes on either side of him, torn them down and renovated the Lido house until it spanned five lots, encompassing the whole point. The place had three docks, boasted a full basketball court and seven garages.
Today, Banning Oil Company was BanCo, involved in everything from petroleum by-products, fuel, and manufacturing to the development of reclaimed oil land. Annually listed as a Fortune 500 company, it was the kind of proving ground hungry young executives clamored to join.
Hunger wasn’t what had sent Jud Banning to work for his grandfather the previous May,