One night, before she went home from the library, Lina found a room of cookbooks. She wrote down a California chef’s salad dressing recipe and made it in a jar. Her dinner tasted like a dish in a restaurant

  Sometimes, now, she was happy.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m ashamed I’m not a better artist,” she told Dr. Jin.

  “Are you equating being a good artist with making money?”

  Lina understood that those things were not always the same. Working in a museum offered endless examples of the uncelebrated: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Vermeer. But the young curators talked about would-be artists in a world-weary tone. They were sure that they knew of everyone even the least bit good.

  Lina was working on a clay model of an eighteenth-century Fool’s Tower.

  “I’m not sure you can be good or bad at art,” Dr. Jin said. “It’s expression. Deep human expression.”

  “Money is a thing for me,” Lina said. “I have to make a living. But I’ve chosen one of the only careers in which you can be doing okay and still not have earned ten thousand dollars by the time you’re forty.”

  “You do make a living,” Dr. Jin reminded Lina.

  For years, she and Troy had been re-upping their lives, as if they were leases, for one more year. “I could try to accept that I teach for a living. Be a night and weekend maker.” There was no shame in that.

  When Lina left the ground-floor office, it was snowing. Taxis moved slowly as in a dream. She skied along the park uptown.

  * * *

  —

  During the long Middle Ages, people believed that moonbeams hitting a person’s head while she slept could turn her insane.

  The image could be painted on metal. Like the retablos Susan’s parents collected.

  Lunatics were thrown into the river for the shock of cold.

  * * *

  —

  Lina told Dr. Jin about the day she’d had to go to high school with no college offer.

  “You didn’t apply to a safety?”

  As the therapist loosened those knots in the low-ceilinged room, the sound of jockeying taxis outside muffled by snow, they laughed together at the arrogance. Lina had dared the world to give her precisely what she wanted or nothing at all, then felt like a tragic heroine when she wasn’t anointed Queen.

  * * *

  —

  Lina tried Donnie’s recipe for muffins, with bran, bananas, molasses, blueberries, and cornmeal. Her apartment was small, but it had a real refrigerator and a stove. Troy walked in as the muffins were coming out of the oven.

  Lina told him about medieval olfactory therapy with flowers and about Geel, the Belgian town where, since the thirteenth century, patients boarded with families. “Van Gogh’s father considered sending Vincent.” Before bed, she read about Tuke, Pinel, and the York Retreat, and Vicenzo Chiarugi, the Italian who removed the chains from his patients. She’d found a used copy of Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad House at the Strand. Shirley kept saying: They die with their rights on.

  Troy’s boss was letting him make huge montages in the firing room. And he’d just been given a residency at Yaddo.

  She asked him more about his newest piece.

  “We’ll get to me later. You tell me.”

  Lina’s project would take a long time. She wouldn’t invite Sheila to see it for at least a year. By then, Sheila might have forgotten her.

  They decided that the story of life was a story of failure. And anyway, that painful binary didn’t account for the peaceful hour she’d spent at her sink scooping sweet-scented squash out of its baked skin. Gradually, Lina had come back to the way she’d been before Sacha; life was life, roving, wavelike, with the same quantities of pleasure, discomfort, sorrow, and excitement. Peace at the end of longing. The time with him, she’d thought she was happy. But along with that jolt of victory—he chose me—she’d felt a constant anxiety: Would she be able to keep what she treasured?

  All that was over. She could be herself now. No one cared.

  * * *

  —

  She flew to California to meet the Dauphin. He was as small as a cat. Lina had never held a baby before. Susan handed him over and she lifted him against her shoulder, Walter leaping up to make sure she cupped his head. “Their necks wobble,” he said, suddenly an expert. They’d wrapped the baby in clean-smelling flannel. The bundle against Lina made tiny movements. A circle of wet grew on her shoulder. After a moment, she felt its heartbeat.

  They strapped the baby into a buggy and pushed him to a bakery near their house, where they set him in a rush basket on a chair. They described the birth.

  “I was pushing and pushing and then this tiny little piece of poop came out.”

  “Susan was amazing,” her brother said.

  They looked flushed, as if they’d just finished a race.

  “He eats every two or three hours!” Walter exclaimed. After they’d picked at bread and coffee, they ambled home. When they turned in the gate, a smell of lavender and lemon verbena billowed up from the ground. Were roses usually this tall? Blooms came to Lina’s waist. Walter and Susan didn’t lock their doors.

  They lifted the baby carefully out of the buggy. The task seemed to require both of them. It was like traveling with a small molten sun.

  76.

  A week before Susan’s due date, Walter had called at midnight and asked Donnie to drive up. They were going to the hospital. They didn’t allow dogs, he said. Donnie had to wake up Caroline to hand Sylvie over. He called Walter back to see if he should try to get Mom, but Walter said no.

  “She’ll meet her grandson, but not yet. We pretty much want only you.”

  They didn’t want her the next time Donnie asked either, five days after the baby was born. Walter said Susan was just recovering from her own mother’s visit.

  Julie left Donnie a message, asking if he’d heard anything, wasn’t it getting near the due date? She’d been knitting a charcoal gray blanket and booties for a month. Half a tiny charcoal sweater hung from her needles. On Sunday, Donnie’s mother wrinkled her nose at it. Julie agreed. “But that’s what they want.”

  Donnie told Walter it really was time for them to come.

  “Okay. But not both at once.”

  Lina had arrived. And she’d already booked visits to board-and-care places. Sylvie could go along for those. Donnie had brought her, against Walter’s advice, to the first planning meeting, and the commissioners loved her so much that from then on Walter requested her for all their presentations to the city.

  Caroline knocked on his garage door. Lily and Jasper, in pajamas, stood with a box. They’d collected their old favorite toys and baby clothes, which he recognized from pictures, to give to Walter’s boy.

  “You don’t want to keep these?” He looked to Caroline.

  She handed him a Hans Christian Andersen book.

  “The baby got born at a bad time,” he told his adviser, laughing because it was already clear that this small animal was more important than finals. He was a slow reader, and each of the assigned novels was four hundred pages. He had to stop in the middle of the one he’d finally gotten into to start the next one.

  And there was still his mother, who had an antipathy toward Susan. During the wedding ceremony they’d staged in the ward with the old doctor and Shirley, she’d made a lifting arm gesture at Susan that meant Get away. No one missed it. That was probably why they’d been stalling. But his mother was ill. As Donnie drove her up to meet the baby, she fell asleep. It’s the drugs, he thought. Their refrain. Walter and Susan were too sensitive. At the house, he woke her and unbuckled her seat belt. She was hungry. A barefooted young woman stood chopping vegetables in Walter’s kitchen.

  Donnie fed his mother a banana a piece at a time.

  At last they sat her in a large armchair and put the baby in her lap. There it was. A hush. Donnie felt a constriction in his throat. Lina came downstairs to take pictures. After a few minutes, the baby spit up a white cloudy liquid and their mother handed him back to Susan. A good day. Their mother with her grandchild.

  Donnie hadn’t dared to hope she’d get that.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, going to look at board-and-care places, Donnie found out from Lina that Walter and Susan were offended. Their mother hadn’t said anything about the Dauphin’s beauty.

  The first facility was in Santa Monica, right across from the ocean. But it was dim inside. The people seemed to be alone in their rooms.

  On the drive to the next one, Lina asked about Donnie’s classes. They were all right. He always took one English because that’s what Caroline taught. But his life was not in school; it was on rides to and from meetings when he and Caroline talked. In the house with her kids. At the hospital with his mother. Lina asked if he still surfed. No, he hardly ever saw the ocean anymore. When he drove up for planning commission meetings, he went straight to city hall.

  In the college town, they dropped off Lina’s film to be developed and then went home to feed Sylvie before their next appointment. The special food she ate now, for older dogs, had to be refrigerated.

  Caroline’s house impressed Lina. “It’s so pretty!”

  She wanted to see Donnie’s rooms and climbed up the painted outside stairs.

  “It’s beautiful,” she called down.

  “Not really,” he said. But he knew what she meant. His rooms had the same feeling of tended order.

  * * *

  —

  The next board-and-care was an apartment complex where aides spoke Spanish over the heads of the sitting patients, who looked sedated. Donnie asked to see the kitchen, which wasn’t very clean. But animals were allowed. Their mother could bring her cat.

  “That kitchen looked terrible,” Lina said outside.

  The last place was owned by Beverly Enterprises, which had ties to Reagan, according to Shirley. “They’re all for profit,” Donnie said. “The hospital is at least state of California. They pay more, because they’re union. We don’t know how those aides are trained.”

  “How’s the new superintendent?”

  “They say he’s in Sacramento all the time.”

  “Walter says you’re quitting your job there.”

  Since Ida Kaufman died, Donnie had cut his hours. “I like being on the inside, though. I could get Mom out to see the baby without any trouble.”

  “Do you think we should move her?”

  “She knows Orchard Springs. I still drive up twice a week.”

  Lina mentioned saving to buy a building in New York. Friends of hers had bought one in Brooklyn.

  “You think you might stay there?” She’d gone for school and lingered; Donnie hadn’t considered that she might live there permanently.

  They picked up Lina’s photos, then stopped at an outdoor café and spread them on the table, Sylvie at their feet.

  “You know, Mom’s right,” Lina said. “He’s not beautiful.”

  “I guess it’s normal for babies to be bald, but do they usually have acne?”

  They broke out laughing. Walter and Susan couldn’t see it.

  * * *

  —

  Donnie made a quick supper: soba noodles, with a fried egg for each person (an over easy for Jasper) and snipped herbs.

  “We eat like this every night,” Caroline said, opening a bottle of wine and handing Lina a glass. She poured one for herself. “So, how were the places?”

  “Not what I was hoping,” Lina said.

  “Pretty horrible,” Donnie said. “I think we’re a decade too late.”

  The adults ate standing. “You know, you could bring her here,” Caroline said. “Might be good for her to be around kids.”

  Here in the kitchen with all the people he was closest to, Caroline had said out loud what Donnie had privately wished. Had she read the longing on his face?

  “That’s so kind, but she needs round-the-clock help,” Lina said. “Did Walter and Susan ever offer?”

  “Think about it. I mean it,” Caroline called, as they got into the car.

  A wild offer. Too big. She was overspending again.

  * * *

  —

  They drove in silence, both tired. “What’s the deal with your landlord?” Lina asked.

  “She’s still pretty hung up on her ex.” In almost every meeting, she talked about him. Donnie had been there a year and a half and the guy hadn’t visited his kids once.

  “Sounds hard,” Lina said. “But…her or somebody else, you’re going to be loved. Of all of us, you’re the most apt to be loved.”

  At the airport, they hugged hard, longer than Donnie did with anybody else.

  * * *

  —

  In May, the guy from the swap meet unearthed more plans: the old Palisades fire station, the bank, and what had once been a haberdashery. For sixteen yellowed tissue drawings, he charged $148.00. After nineteen meetings with the planning board, Walter and Donnie were given tax abatements for ten years, under something called the Mills Act, for the preservation of three historical properties. They came out of the small upstairs city office on a warm September day and walked over to the site with take-out coffees to watch the bulldozers. Donnie thought this would be the end of what he could do to help.

  “Just wait till your roastery opens—we’ll have way better coffee.” The professor cared about coffee and subscribed to bean of the week, from a green roaster Donnie contacted in Berkeley. Walter unrolled the landscape drawings. Ken had flown down already to source the trees. Rows of citrus in boxes were lined up behind the Laundromat.

  Donnie said, “Oh-oh. This sandbox is continuous?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Picnic tables were drawn around the perimeter of the half acre of sand. “That means if kids get in a fight in the middle, it’s a far run, over sand, to break it up.” Walter looked from the plans to the parking lot. The plans had been drawn, in dimension, by one of LA’s renowned landscape design firms. “Don’t know what kind of shoes your Palisades moms wear, to be walking over sand to fetch little Janey and John to go to the car.”

  Walter called Donnie a week later. “I need you to come up and walk through all the spaces. You have a good instinct for use.”

  Donnie laughed. In rehab, the word use had other meanings.

  With each walk-through, Donnie surprised himself by having ideas. They’d keep the Laundromat until the Hamel-Wongs retired. Of course. Walter asked if one of their kids wanted to take over eventually and learned that both were doctors, in the Pacific Northwest. The old fire station with WPA murals would be refitted for a twenty-eight-year-old sober chef, trained at Chez Panisse, whom Donnie met in a meeting. It was a new experience being listened to this way. With reduced rent, they’d subsidize a shoe repair shop, a contract post office, and a barber, who’d once cut Yo-Yo Ma’s hair for fifteen dollars. “Keeps it neighborhood,” Walter said. This took discipline; they had to resist greed. “We’re doing our homework. Where did you find that tattooed historian? Which swap meet?”

  The original Palisades commercial district opened in 1948. Katharine Hepburn rode down the hill on her horse to eat a hamburger. Em Ball found bound local newspapers in the Pacific Palisades Historical Society. “See if she can find pictures,” Walter said. We can blow them up, even if they’re grainy.” In the fifties, the chamber of commerce held Brownie troop fund-raisers, fashion shows with afternoon tea, and a pet parade. “A pet parade! We’ll do that.” They could hire a Santa Claus for Christmas and fill the parking lot with noble firs. “Summer nights, we can make a drive-in, like you said.”

  “With blankets on the roofs.”

  “Our insurance company would be all over us. But we’ll play classics. And our favorites. Just think, by next year this time, we’ll be able to meet here for coffee while Jack is crawling in the sand.”

  Donnie tried to sneak in the offer of an amend. But Walter wanted to talk about money. He wrote down numbers on a napkin. “You’ll have some cash you’ll need to figure out what to do with.” He began explaining index funds. Donnie tuned out, thinking that money in the bank might make Caroline take him more seriously.

  “You finish college in—what, one more year?”

  “Maybe a year and a half. Two. Depending.”

  “When you finish, you’ll be able to buy a place. A house.”

  “If I tried to move them, the professor might bolt.”

  Walter didn’t answer. Donnie understood that Walter thought he should move to LA, to get away from her. At least he knew better than to say it.

  * * *

  —

  Donnie drove up to Pali High, where he tried to find Mrs. Graver, but no one in the office had any idea where she lived now. He’d taken too long.

  There were still businesses he’d stolen from. He could hit one before heading home. He drove to the Santa Monica supermarket and asked to speak to the manager. He’d come up from the beach once when there were buckets of flowers on risers in the parking lot; usually an attendant stood waiting to wrap the bouquets in paper and take the money, but no one was there that night. Donnie and his friends piled armfuls of the watery stems into the truck and roared off. He tried to explain the basics of this to the current manager, who stored a pencil behind his ear.

  “This was when?” the man asked, scratching each elbow with the other hand. He had eczema on the insides of his arms. He was pale, with thinning, pale hair and glasses.