My bedroom abutted the lush, tangled backyard, which had had grass once but had been overtaken by errant ice plant and other, native coastal scrub and weeds. A cypress stood untrimmed in the corner of the yard and ivy crawled up the side of a dead oak that stood tall and stately and truncated just at the level where the first branches might have begun. The grass was tall and impassible, and the overall state of the yard made me uncomfortable. It was a mess to be put into order, like the living room and the bathroom and the hall, but yard work presented a challenge that cleaning the house did not.
I asked Russell one day why he didn't do anything with the backyard. He shrugged and said it was a rental house. "And anyway," he said, "look out the window sometime, and tell me if you think what you see would feel quite as comfortable in a yard with a manicured lawn and trimmed oleander."
I didn't think much about what he meant until an evening two or three days into March when I heard a scratching sound outside my window and sat up in bed to see a spotted skunk digging for slugs by the waning moon. The backyard wildlife had been an idle preoccupation that I didn't think much about unless it was bedtime, and I could spend an hour on my knees on the bed, leaning on the windowsill and waiting for a barn owl or a raccoon to visit in the night.
When I presented my first discovery, he told me about ecosystems, and the next time we went to the beach, he went on about it some more. The whales and dolphins and sea lions out there in the ocean fed on the fish, check out the pelicans, Hazel, and I learned more about mercury and sand and seaweed than I thought there was to know. He pulled a drawer out of his desk and showed me a sheet of kelp forest stamps. It was a self-contained ecosystem, and while his backyard was only a tiny patch of Daly City, it was the home or on the route of several different kinds of native species. "If you want to do anything to it," he said, "pull up that ice plant. It's invasive. It was planted here a hundred and fifty years ago to keep the cliffs from falling into the sea, and it's taken over everything." Like cottontails and starlings and house cats and angry-looking house sparrows. I was not so much interested in the diversity of the animal life, but the idea that those animals could make a living on slugs and forage was fascinating. I wondered what it would be like to pry mussels from a rock with a screwdriver for your lunch or dive for seaweed and abalone in the cold Pacific ocean.
This Wednesday night, I had gone to bed early. Russell had invited Mia over and she had made it abundantly clear to me that she wanted to be alone with him; somewhat put out, I'd brushed my teeth and closed my door and read for awhile, but when I tired of that, I turned the light out and opened my blinds for a glimpse of the nocturnal drama of Russell's backyard. It was more appealing than sleep.
Russell and Mia were absolutely silent in the living room. The walls were thin and I could hear the television faintly; they were watching nothing in particular but they didn't seem to need to.
A cat slunk by atop the fence, looking
for all the world as if it was on some important errand.
Nothing
else appeared, and I laid back down, wide awake and bored. I could
turn the light back on and read some more, but I'd been doing that
more or less since I'd gotten home from school. I played another
game, the guess-where-I-am game, pretending again that my
thirteen-year-old self was previewing her life at fifteen, making her
guess: Where am I? Whose things are these? What is this alien
patch of ground outside the bedroom window?
And at last: Who are those people talking in the living room?
Mia's voice carried much farther than the sound from the television. I could almost make out what she was saying, and at once I got out of bed and crept to the closet, whose back wall separated my room from the living room. "Well, how long is she staying with you?" she was saying. At once I was struck with guilt - after all, I was eavesdropping, spying again - and a little excited, terrible thrill. Mia was talking about me, and she sounded bewildered and concerned.
"I don't know," Russell said, as if he'd never thought about it before and couldn't think why she'd be bringing it up now.
"You don't know? But she could be here for years. Why did you take her in, anyway?" Now she sounded curious, but I knew better.
There was a silence. "She needed
me. You know the night she came here she'd been raped?
And she came
to me. She was living out of dumpsters." I felt my face redden.
This wasn't Russell's story to tell.
"She doesn't have anyone else?" Mia said. "Do you even get child support for her? Or social security or something?"
"No." Surprised. "No, I don't know her family. I don't think there is a family. Her mother died a couple months ago."
"Oh." It was the kind of oh that invited a request for elaboration, which Russell politely supplied. "Well," Mia said, "it just doesn't seem right that she's not your kid and you have to support her anyway. I mean, there's no one? That's why they have social services set up. For kids like her."
"Mmm." Non-committal. I stood with my forehead to the wall, waiting desperately for Russell to say something. The air in my bedroom was cold, but I didn't notice; I had ears only for this conversation that could upend my place in Russell's home and in Russell's life.
And then it came: "We'll see what happens," he said, as if bored with the conversation. And the television got louder, and after a minute, two minutes, four minutes, they said nothing else.
I turned away from the wall and looked for something to release my frustration upon, but in the end I crawled back into bed because I couldn't hit anything without making noise. Russell's reply had left open ends in the conversation, and the implications frightened me. Suppose he should decide to get rid of me because it would make Mia happy? I couldn't think of a worse fate, to be usurped by someone asking something completely different of Russell, to be shoved out of the only home where I'd ever been happy because his girlfriend thought I was in the way. It reminded me of what I'd come from, how my mother had only found peace once I wasn't there.
What I didn't realize at the time was that I wasn't happy at all. I'd been too scared of this apparently-inevitable eviction to allow it.
