Beth was used to medical emergencies. As a nurse, she’d called in more than one. But her clients were old, infirm, and for the most part, kind. They were in that stage of desperate hopefulness, counting days as good ones if there wasn’t too much pain.
Lana was nothing like them. She didn’t “do” sick. Beth assumed her mother would approach this cancer the way she approached everything else—as a series of hurdles to bulldoze. That’s what she’d done when she had the breast cancer scare ten years before. That crisis had proved a kind of blessing in disguise, an external push that forced Lana and Beth back together after five years of not speaking. Since then, they’d built a tentative reconnection out of annual visits to LA for Passover and occasional, awkward phone calls, sticking to safe topics like Lana’s work or Jack’s grades.
But the news in these garbled texts sounded far from safe. And the fact that Lana had called her, had asked for help, had agreed to come to Elkhorn—that was downright terrifying.
Five overstuffed suitcases, one box of files and legal pads, and two triple-shot lattes later, the Rubicon women were heading north. As Beth drove, Lana made calls, dispatching her friend Gloria to water her plants, her neighbor Ervin to collect her mail, and her assistant, Janie, to do everything else.
“Think of it as a growth opportunity,” Lana said, after dictating a long list of directives.
When Janie pressed her on what she should tell Lana’s clients, the older woman looked down at her black satin peekaboo pumps for inspiration. Lana could see her chipped midnight-blue toenails peeking out.
“Tell them it’s foot surgery. Very complicated. I need a specialist. Out of town. I’ll be back in the office in six weeks.”
Beth shot her mother a look.
“What?” Lana said. “They said there might be more tumors. Maybe there’s one in my foot.”
“Six weeks, Ma?”
“Seems like more than enough time to have the surgeries, get on a treatment plan, head back home, and forget about all this unpleasantness. Besides, it’s not like we could survive living in the same house longer than that.”
After two hours crawling through city traffic, they left the sprawl of Los Angeles. They wound up a mountain pass lined with citrus trees, Beth’s Camry chugging uphill as the stars came out. Lana shut her eyes at the first vineyards, and Beth drove on in silence, watching the rolling hills give way to the inky Monterey Bay. Even in the dark, the ocean made itself known, waves roaring onto rocks, spraying salt and mist over the bridge that separated sea from strawberry fields.
Beth’s house was perched between ocean and farmland, on a tiny strip of gravel and sand above Elkhorn Slough. Beth loved the way the wetland shifted with the tides, rising and falling like a lover’s breath below her house. When she’d first moved in fifteen years ago, she’d seen Elkhorn as a temporary refuge. But she’d grown to relish its foggy mornings and wild treasures, soft where Los Angeles was hard, scruffy where the city was slick. As Beth walked her mother to the door, she resisted the urge to point out the driftwood planters she’d carved and filled with succulents, the wreath of bracken fern she’d braided herself. She steered Lana to Jack’s bedroom, bracing for her mother to pronounce her verdict on the secondhand furniture, the nicked floorboards, the peaty smell of the slough wafting up from outside.
That night, Lana didn’t say anything about home decor or river mud. Lana didn’t say anything at all. Her face was locked in grim determination, mouth shut tight. Beth opened the door to Jack’s bedroom, waved Lana onto the bed, and helped her take off her shoes. It scared Beth to see her mother so compliant. It was easier too.
Once Lana was asleep, Beth started calling in favors. Her friend in neurology at Stanford had already connected her to their top brain surgeon, and he’d agreed to slot them in for a pre-op consultation the next day. Her old shift mate in oncology would find someone to cross-check the scans. Even the guy she’d dated last year, a bearded search-and-rescue paramedic from Big Sur, offered to be on standby. Beth was glad she’d spent so many years pulling long hours, covering for others, doing an extra house call for a doctor who asked. You only get one mother. Even if she was a pain in the butt like Lana.
Chapter Three
February 4 （Seventeen Weeks Later）
Lana bolted up at the sound of a scream outside her window. She’d been in Elkhorn Slough four months now: long enough to recognize the predatory snarls and howls that filled the night, not nearly long enough to sleep through them. She heard another shriek, then a rustle. There was a killer on the prowl again.