Casey wonders if he’s hearing right. Can’t remember a time when he’s had a disagreement with Brock and Brock has come around to his point of view. Trusted his judgment. Believed in him.
“Cool, Brock. I think you’re doing the right thing.”
“Thanks for being my big brother sometimes.”
“You make me feel smart.”
Brock is smiling, his dark face dripping seawater, his stubby locs catching the early light.
23
Jen stands in the reeking lobby of the Barrel, Mae sitting at her feet.
She’s looking at a $400,000 replacement rebuild, of which $150,000 is covered by insurance. She hasn’t upped her policy since remodeling the Barrel eighteen years ago. Her bank is considering the loan. Her annual personal income is $10,000 from freelance magazine and newspaper writing, and occasional consulting work for television.
She’s got $75,000 in her savings account.
She draws a $75,000 yearly salary from the Barrel.
There’s a lot of demo to be done. Jen’s remodel was conventional construction—wood frame, Sheetrock, and expensive redwood siding. The wood flooring, walnut dark and streaked with blond—Jen always loved how it greeted her in the morning, buffed up clean the night before—has been destroyed. The raised foundation is still good.
Adding to those costs is the fact that the furniture, art, lighting, plumbing, electrical, sound system, ovens, stoves, warmers, and appliances were all high-grade commercial and expensive. Much of it has been damaged thoroughly by flame and smoke, some of it irreplaceable. The surfboard collection is almost totaled. The paintings are ruined. The high-end projection screens on which the surf videos played are now melted around the edges.
Laguna Beach fire trucks had gotten there less than twelve minutes after Casey’s first 911 call. But four crude fire bombs—casually staged as deliveries just outside the lobby, the back door, the side kitchen entrance, and the upstairs apartment deck—had already exploded, accelerant and high winds spreading the flames rapidly. Remote fuses, the arson investigator said.
His team found a fifth bomb under the north floor of the dining room—placed through a crawl space under the raised foundation. The access screen had been snipped off. No north-wall security cameras because of the inaccessible sandstone drop-off and chain-link fence heavy with mandevilla. The flames ate up through the framing timbers and into the room, swiftly.
According to Jen’s contractor, she’s looking at spring of next year. Which means a five-month wait, if the City of Laguna Planning and Building Department and the California Coastal Commission sign off promptly, and the supply chains hold. He says the price of his materials have doubled in two years and the union wages he pays are out of sight.
Mae follows her into the dining room where Jen kneels and touches one of the classic Hawaiian redwood surfboards that caught flame and finally came crashing down from its ceiling mounts. It’s a hundred years old and badly burned. Most of the other boards were made of foam and fiberglass, which of course ignites viciously and melts when swarmed by flames. Some are John’s. Some belonged to the greats: Kahanamoku, Noll, Weber, Dora, Young, Nuuhiwa, Lopez, Andersen, Tomson, Irons, Slater, Clark, Bethany, Parsons, Laird, McNamara. There are twenty-six of them, Jen knows—one for each year of John’s life. Some of which, blackened and disfigured, are still hanging on the walls.
She stands, pats Mae’s soft round head, feels like crying or kicking Jimmy Wu hard as she can in the nuts, but she’s not much of a crier and Jimmy’s a bit out of range.
Since the Barrel burned up and cooled down Jen has thrown herself into the cleanup—and into her training for the Monsters of Mavericks—with her usual ferocious energy.
And now, with a $175,000 shortfall for rebuilding her love and livelihood, she’s even more inspired to win the Monsters.
Which is a long shot, she knows, at forty-six, and not having ridden big waves in twenty-five years, according to the Surfline.com rankings and the surf contest handicappers on BetUS Sportsbook.
Not that she isn’t training and working her ass off: in between her sunrise stand-up paddleboarding, surfing whichever SoCal break is going off best, weight lifting, and striding underwater along the bottom of LBHS pool with dumbbells in her hands and weights on her ankles—Jen still reports to work exactly as she has for eighteen years.
But now she’s demolishing the ruins rather than running the most popular restaurant in Laguna Beach. She’s got help from Mom and Dad and Pastor Mike, from Casey and Brock when they’re not surfing—god bless them—but they’re still not done yanking out the now-toxic drywall. Or scrubbing the smoke stains off the flame-scorched ovens and stainless walls and backboard in the kitchen. All this and more, instead of making sure that Casey’s catch of the day is being properly prepared, greeting and seating her friends and loyal local customers, tweaking the menu, touching up the paint, polishing the now destroyed floors, making sure the surfboards and framed photos and paintings are one hundred percent dust free and glittering like jewels in the sunlight shooting through windows.
The smell is awful but face masks make her dizzy. People out on the sidewalk stop and stare at her through the opaque plastic sheeting hung to keep the curious out and the ash and stink in. Every ten minutes she takes Mae around back to the deck facing the Pacific, lets the dependable onshore wind fill their lungs.
Her task today is to scour the ash, extinguisher stains, and carbonized burns off the life-sized bronze statue of John in what was once the lobby. She has to tend to every inch of him, faithfully rendered by the artist: face, neck, chest, those beautiful arms, the six-pack stomach, the butt inside the surf trunks, his thighs, calves, knees, and knobby feet. The statue doesn’t feel or smell human, doesn’t sound anything like a person when Jen accidentally bangs it with the handle of her brush, or pings the bronze with the wedding ring that she’s never stopped wearing. There’s still something painful and intimate about touching this statue. Makes her wish she could touch the real, living him; reminds her that she never will.
Mae seems to sense this, watching Jen fretfully, forehead furrowed.
Scrubbing away at her bronze husband’s forehead, Jen is reminded again—for what, the ten thousandth time?—that her hardwired instinct to protect and serve had failed most spectacularly in John’s death. If ever there was a test, that was it. Her cop father understands this better than her coach/athlete mother.
As she works on John’s eye with a toothbrush and cleaning paste, whispering, “I won’t hurt you, John, I won’t hurt you,” Jen thinks of those nights just after his drowning, sitting up late with Mom and Dad in their hillside house in South Laguna, staring at the fire but talking little.
What was left to say?
She had failed to protect and serve the love of her life.
And now, the Barrel.
Drifting back from this memory, Jen becomes aware of something behind her—just a slight change in the light coming off John’s face.
Mae sits up.
“Jen Stonebreaker?”
She doesn’t recognize the voice but when she turns she knows the face: Timothy Stanton Orchard, the man who set Laguna ablaze thirty-plus years ago, starting a fire in Laguna Canyon on a hot night of howling Santa Ana wind. Gasoline and a fireplace lighter. The wind blew the flames across the hills and into town. Spread north and south when they hit the city. Four-hundred-something homes destroyed, sixteen thousand acres. And, miraculously, no deaths. She was twelve. Orchard was arrested by her father. It half broke his heart that he had let his citizens be served and protected so poorly.
Mae is on the man—a potential treat giver—looking up at him hopefully.
“Mr. Orchard.”
“I heard about your tragedy. It smells like, well … they all smell different.”
“What could you possibly want?”
She steps off the stool and looks into Tim Orchard’s calm blue eyes. He’s mid-fifties now, she knows. Short and lithe, thinning brown hair. Chinos and running shoes and a button-down white shirt tucked in tight. A harmless-looking man. She had written about him for West Coast Monthly when he was released from Atascadero State Hospital ten years go. One of those reentry stories people hate. What the editor wanted. Jen wasn’t sympathetic but was at least somewhat positive about his chances, based mostly on stats and studies from the state’s attorney general. Got some heated mail. Talked to him for hours at his halfway house. Neighbors with signs, going bonkers. I’m absolutely, one hundred percent rehabilitated, he said. Took my therapy, take my meds. A very sorry and very changed man, he said. Demons banished. Showed her his positive discharge letters from the doctors and counselors and hospital staff. Even one from a fellow patient whose life he had saved with CPR. Nursed a crow back from a cat attack and made a pet of him. Orchard had asked his original arresting officer, Sergeant Don Byrne, for a letter of recommendation because the policeman had always treated him courteously, and told him once that people can change for the better. Her father had declined. Orchard says he’s hoping to be a paramedic someday but knows he’s a long shot. Wanting to volunteer now. Maybe with the disabled. Maybe become a caregiver. Hoping to undo some of the bad he’s done.
He’s got the same harmless, apologetic face today as he had back then. Same thin, almost ready to smile lips.
