There were only two other people online—an older man who may or may not have been homeless, and a teenager who should have been in school. I picked a machine near the end of the row and logged in to Amelia’s account.
There were no new messages from Cory, and I was surprised by the flash of disappointment that passed through me. How quickly I’d become addicted to the thrill of a new message from him.
Then I logged in to my account. There were three guys I was messaging with, each of them a slightly different version of the same person. Jason, the venture capitalist who seemed to start every sentence with the word I. Sean, a mortgage broker in Manhattan Beach. And Dylan, the party promoter.
Up until now, my criteria had been pretty simple: they had to have a job, they had to ask me at least three questions about myself, and they couldn’t look like the Unabomber. I always made sure I met them in a public place, and I never went home with anyone who felt unsafe. But sometimes, I couldn’t tell until it was too late. Fingers running through my hair that tugged too hard. Hands that gripped too tight. Bruises in places easily hidden. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, I’d learned how to compartmentalize. To turn off my thoughts and go somewhere else in my mind until it was over.
I stared at Jason’s last message, an invitation to a restaurant that just opened in Venice, imagining an interminable evening stroking his ego, before closing it without responding.
Then I toggled over to the community college website, just so I could tell Cal that I looked. Accounting. Art History. Business Administration. The words began to blur until my eyes snagged on Digital Art Certificate. This six-month course will take you through the basics of HTML code, web design, and Adobe Photoshop. Students will gain skills valuable to any existing business, or allow them to work for themselves as a freelancer. I studied the sample images that went alongside the Photoshop course. A picture of a family portrait taken at a park with several people in the background. The second image was the same photo, this time with everyone behind them edited out, as if no one had ever been there.
I clicked on the tuition button and blew out hard. Including registration fees, it would be nearly $200 to complete the coursework and get the certificate. More, if the class had any required materials to buy. And then there was the equipment I’d need once I’d finished—a computer. Software. For someone who made less than $150 a week after taxes—most of it already spent the moment it hit my account—$200 might as well have been $2 million. I closed the window, feeling the pinch of regret I always felt whenever a door closed.
I logged out and gave the librarian a wave. I had about four more hours of daylight to find a place to park for the night.
***
Instead, I made a detour through Brentwood, the streets as familiar to me as an old friend. The Brentwood Country Mart where my mom used to buy me ice cream and, if I was lucky, a book from the bookstore there. The corner where I fell off my bike and skinned my knee. The large stump of a tree that came down in a storm when I was seven, cutting off traffic on San Vicente for an entire day.
I turned left onto Canyon Drive and navigated as if on autopilot. The houses there were on large lots, set far back from the street, some behind tall gates you could barely see through. I wound my way slowly, as if pulled by some magnetic force, back to the place where it all started.
I parked just south of the house, a spot that gave me the best vantage point from which to study it. To follow the familiar contours of the dark wood and white stucco. The round tower that housed the circular staircase that led to a tiny third-floor study. The large windows of the living room, where my mother said her grandfather would spend his days, smoking a pipe and worrying about his son—her father—who spent more time in rehab than out of it.
“The front door is made of oak, milled from a forest in Virginia,” I recited into the silent car. “A tree that probably greeted the colonists of Jamestown before arriving here to keep us safe.” The start of my mother’s monologue, the one she’d use to help me sleep at night. Like a bedtime story, she’d walk us through the home we both yearned to return to. Always, I’d picture it behind my eyes. The plastered walls that still held the tray marks of the artisans who smoothed them. The wide, wooden beams that spanned the width of the ceiling in the great room. The fourth stair that always creaked if you stepped on it near the banister. The closet with the trapdoor that led to the attic, and the wall that measured not only my mother’s height, but a few months of my own heights as well.