FIRST
Late January 2002
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he hardest part of telling a story to someone, Josh thought, was remembering all the details. One could tell a story that involves love and sacrifice and leave those in the room wondering if you really sacrificed enough to love someone. Remembering the details always pulled the story together, sharp insight into the affair that someone conveys as a “life altering” event with another person. But this story could only be partially told, much of the truth would endanger lives, even to this day.
Before the dream, life was normal for Josh; after, his world spun on a needle point.
Only problem was, the images of his dream were vague, the face unclear. But when Josh woke from his night’s sleep he could only think of the little sandy-haired blue eyed beauty from his past. The young girl he spent his long lonely summers with, well, previously lonely anyways. After Josh met Camela, his summer vacations were filled with youthful play, adolescent curiosity and eventually, young love.
Josh James Kennedy was sitting in his parked SUV about one hundred yards from where the beginning of the story took place so long ago, over twenty-six years ago, when Josh was first ten years old, a year older than Camela or Camy as she liked to be called. He glanced up into the rearview mirror, removed his sunglasses and looked into his own blue eyes. They’ve faded since then, thirty-six years old and the lines of age were showing. Along with the expansion of his middle, arthritis in his hands from too many broken fingers-broken while hauling in crab pots from his private charter business in San Francisco-and his greying goatee, age had been somewhat unkind to Josh. Not to mention, and rarely did he, his thinning and receding light brown hairline.
His usually tan and olive skin had been lacking the sun since his long vacation from the bay, the time he has spent indoors researching, recovering, so it was more flush egg shell white than his usual umber-brown. It had been a long painful month that finally brought him here, to the haunts of his childhood where he and Camy spent summer nights lying in her grandmother’s front yard, on the cool freshly cut lawn, staring at the stars.
The smell of the lawn and Camy’s cheap kid’s perfume was almost as clear on Josh’s palate as the odor of the asphalt under the afternoon sun outside his car right now. The Indian Summer in January had warmed the old neighborhood to nearly sixty degrees, Josh’s buddy Jeremy would blame it on SUV’s and global warming, but Josh knew this was the norm for his hometown of Sparks, Nevada, for this time of the year. Usually a week or two in January or February brought warm weather, mild to humid sixties, then dumped half a foot of snow a few days later.
Josh’s 2001 Ford Excursion didn’t really fit in here anymore, as if it would in his home of the last twelve years of San Francisco; but the 1960’s era Probasco style homes in his young life now belonged to landlords who rent the two and three bedroom, single bath homes to low income and Section 8 housing. Junk sedans and older compact cars lined the streets now.
When Josh first pulled onto his street this morning, the street where he spent the first twenty-four years of his life, the residents probed his eyes and vehicle with suspicion. Cops drove new SUV’s here, not tourists, who remained close to the downtown core. After he parked in front of his old house; the one with the windows half boarded, the lawn dead and torn out in places, the six foot trailer-gate on the side of the house ripped from its hinges and the word Norteños spelled out in big black spray paint on the garage door he helped his father install when he was eleven, most of the suspicious residents figured he was a realtor then and returned to their broken down domiciles and tattered porches.
He wiped a tear from his eye for the disrepair.
The house had been put up for sale several months earlier and had been vacant. Through the open bay window his father installed in 1980, he could see the bookshelves his late mother Alice had asked his father Robert to construct for her lovable Ron Lee figurines. Another tear came, as he thought about his mother, the times they shared laughter, cried at wakes there and were a real family with real neighbors-just like you see in old fifties television show.
In 1976, the summer air was filled with the smell of burning Kingsford Briquettes and lighter fluid. It reverberated with the sound of “Skyrockets in flight…” from the song Afternoon Delight by The Starland Vocal Band, and Wings’ Let ‘Em In. A three wheeled white and red motorcycle with a similarly striped umbrella over the top slowly made the rounds on the city streets playing The Entertainer on a loudspeaker with the white suited and capped elderly woman driver stopping to sell 50/50 bars and Push-Ups.
Children were safe to roam-day or night-without constant supervision, policemen stopped their patrol cars to throw a catch or toss a football with the kids playing in the streets. Life was idyllic as The Monkeys’ Pleasant Valley Sunday described on the two pound, book sized transistor radios children owned and carried on a plastic strap.
Josh looked to his left-or across the street of his old home-and saw the house he played at most frequently. There lived a girl named Carrie Ann Thomas, who was six years older than Josh, but loved to play the games and make believe that was so important to kids before video games atrophied their muscles in later ages. Her brother, Mark, the oldest in the family was a real honest to goodness Hippie, who drove a Volkswagen Bus painted with a pink peace sign on the back. He wore his hair long and spent evenings on the back porch playing sixties protest songs on his flat top with his free-love girlfriend from a few blocks away. Josh hated being over there when Mark and his girlfriend were together, they smelled like burned tea bags all the time.
Straight ahead and to his right a little, down the cross street was the house that Toni Stratford lived in. She was four years older than Josh, they were good friends until Toni hit puberty and started doing drugs, and then at sixteen she began living with her eighteen year old boyfriend. Her family was crushed; Josh was too, because she was the tomboy who protected him from the bullies in the neighborhood.
Josh hadn’t seen her in years until they caught up with each other in a chance meeting when Josh was in town ten years ago. They spent the day reminiscing and had lunch, promised to stay in touch then went their separate ways. Toni was killed in a car crash two months later. Her mother sent Josh a letter with the obituary, Josh sent a sympathy card back and wept quietly to himself for days.
Josh opened the door to his Ford and stepped onto the cracked and broken sidewalk that was raised several inches from where it used to be by roots underneath. The same concrete that thirty some years before he wrote his name in with a ten penny nail. He walked to the corner, his home sat on the corner, and gazed at the old storm drain that he and his buddies from several blocks away would jam up with a three gallon ice cream bucket during cloud bursts to flood the street. Out would come the truck inner tubes and toboggans and summer thunderstorm fun was born.
At the corner, Josh looked hard to his right. The four foot cyclone fence was still in place of the Humbolt’s home. The Humbolts had a red-head; red-freckled daughter who was actually named Ginger, Josh always wondered if it was a joke on her parent’s part, or naiveté. Ginger and Josh used to walk the top of the seven foot redwood fences that ran around the entire community, going from one yard to another, one friend to another’s via a two by four path.
Mark smiled when a thought passed through his mind, one night he heard a crash outside his window, peeked out and saw Ginger ramming her parent’s 1962 Chevy Impala into the Peterson’s truck, parked directly across the street from the Humbolt’s home. Ginger was twelve at the time and the neighborhood was massed by cops, lookie loos and the Petersons, who rarely left their house. Few ever saw the strange family of four, even the kids kept to themselves at school. When Josh saw Twilight, he thought the Cullens were modeled after the Petersons.
That night was the exception, with all four of them out screaming obscenities at the Humbolt family. Ginger was in cuffs, her mother was crying and her father was looking at the steaming Impala, shaking his head. Josh didn’t see much of Ginger after that, her folks moved away just a few months later. Josh thought they were a little over the top anyways, they were the first family in the neighborhood with an electric garage door opener and underground sprinklers that had to be turned on by hand; the Humbolts pretended they were rich.
Standing on the corner Josh finally looked to the reason he was here. Oxford Way made a lazy S curve from his house, a slight left then a slight right. Next door to the Stratford home, just a hair to Josh’s left, was her house. 1917. The reason Josh drove 220 miles to this place, was just to read the address off the home. Gone was the wooden plaque over the door that read NICHOLSON, as they had moved out in 1986. The finely trimmed lawn and manicured evergreens that rose fifteen feet in the air and were so meticulously cared for by Camy’s grandparents in the seventies, were gone and replaced with red lava rock, dormant roses and brown curled piles of meadowgolds. The house was in shambles, a FOR RENT BY NEW OWNER sign was wired to the chain link fence.
Well, Josh thought, at least a new owner meant new files to trace the past owners down, a new way to find her, if he could, he wrote the number down.
The address. For the life of him Josh couldn’t remember the address. For a week he had tried calling the city’s record office for an address, the county recorders and even the Exxon Station a few blocks away for it. No one could give him the information by name, there were just too many people living in the city anymore, and the Exxon Station-where Josh used to get his bike tires pumped up and an ice cold Coke for a quarter-was closed.
So after all that, he decided to drive here, just to get the number of the house. Perhaps with the physical address and the name both he would have more luck researching where the Nicholsons moved to. Not that it would do any good to find them now, they would be centenarians now and he knew at least her grandmother had passed away, but at least he could use the information to dig even deeper. Dig deep enough to find out where she is. To find her.