“The other one,” he commanded. “One, two, three!” We pulled the second bag toward the entrance of the shed, and suddenly we were staring at a rubber mat with a hole the size of a bullet in it.
“Is that a . . . bullet hole?” the roommate asked. But before I could answer, Ashley fell to her knees and yanked back the mat, revealing the rectangular outline of what looked like a door.
“Root cellar?” I guessed. Cellars were rare in Los Angeles, given how earthquake prone the city was. But what else could it be?
“How do you open it?” Ashley asked, pawing at the edges. I crouched down beside her. Powdered cement flew up into my eyes as I broomed the surface with frantic hands.
“Got it!” I shouted as my fingers found the rope handle, snugged inside its carved-out pocket. “Stand back!”
I leaned on my heels and pulled the rope. The door flew open. The roommate caught me as I stumbled backward into him. As I scrambled to my feet, I heard a voice that sent a waterfall of relief cascading down my spine.
“Nathan?”
“Winnie!”
She was still holding the gun as she stumbled up the stairs. Her face was a torrent of tears and grief. “Oh, Nathan!”
“Win, are you OK?”
“Charlie’s not breathing,” she blurted between her sobs.
“Call 9-1-1,” the roommate ordered Ashley. Then, to Winnie: “Let me by, I’m a doctor.”
I eased Winnie out of the way so Ashley’s doctor roommate could get by.
“My mom’s down there, too,” Winnie said.
“Oh my God, Louisa!” I gasped. “Is she all right?” My cousin bit her lip and shook her head.
“Oh, Win,” I said, then held her tight.
“Nathan! I need your help!” the roommate bellowed from below.
I squeezed Winnie’s shoulder, then descended the narrow staircase into the root cellar. Which of course wasn’t a root cellar at all.
“Holy shit.”
I would learn the history of the place later—how it had been designed by the original owner in the late fifties, then scrubbed from the blueprints when the county declared underground bomb shelters in LA illegal. The only people who knew about the structure were the handful of us and perhaps the odd neighbor or history buff.
“Over here!” Ashley’s doctor roommate shouted, and I rounded the kitchen counter to see Charlie lying flat on his back on the kitchen floor.
“Oh my God, Charlie!”
“We have to get him out of here,” the roommate said. “Grab his feet.”
We had Charlie up the stairs and onto the cold, damp earth in a matter of seconds. Winnie squeezed my hand as the good doctor thumped on Charlie’s chest until—miraculously!—he gagged and sputtered back to life.
“You’re going to be OK,” the doctor soothed, and Winnie fell to her knees and cradled her brother’s curly blond head in her hands.
Winnie saw me staring and reached up and grabbed my hand. “This is not your fault,” she said. My face burned with shame.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, even though I didn’t deserve forgiveness.
“You’re not the bad guy here,” Winnie assured me. “It’s obvious now.”
Sometime later, when Charlie was out of the hospital and beginning his life as a single dad, he would invite me over to watch a ball game, have a barbecue, toss a Frisbee in the backyard. On one of those nights, over a beer and under a starlit sky, he would come to confess that he knew he had married a gold-digging sorceress and insist he didn’t blame me for falling under her spell. And his genuine warmth and enthusiasm for his boys to know their uncle Nathan convinced me that he was telling the truth—or at least that he forgave me. And we would both shake our heads at the irony of how the stunt Louisa had pulled to destroy our family turned out to be the very thing that brought us back together.
I had always thought Charlie and Winnie had avoided me because they were ashamed of how they’d treated their mother. But now I know they pulled away not because they had behaved badly, but because their mother had. They knew how I’d depended on Louisa for comfort and company during those lonely undergrad years and wanted to protect her image in my eyes. What I thought was cowardice was in fact generosity; they didn’t want me to know how they had suffered as children or why a chill had settled over their relationship, so they disappeared.
I was sad when I learned Louisa had died. But I was happy to think she was in a better place; because we were, too.