“Did you do some writing on this?” Liam pointed to the large black chalkboard, still attached to the wall at the front of the room.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. She’d written many sentences and worked out many math problems on that board. “I got a surprisingly good education here, Liam,” she said. “But enough of this. Let’s find the cypress.” She was anxious to see if the tree would still be there, if it had survived, maybe even flourished, on the bluffs of Big Sur.
Liam followed her outside again and around the west side of the schoolhouse. “The cypress is on top of a hill,” she remembered, stepping over the vines that covered the ground.
She spotted the rise of rubbly earth that she’d once considered a hill, and on top of it, a beautiful, bent and twisted Monterey cypress. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “That must be it, but it’s huge!”
“Well,” Liam said, “it’s as old as you are.”
“It’s so pretty,” she said. The cypress was no more than fifteen or sixteen feet tall, but its gnarled and twisted crown of green had to be at least that broad. The direction of the wind was evident in the way the branches reached toward the schoolhouse and away from the Pacific.
They helped each other climb up the small hill. Joelle held open a plastic bag, while Liam took the cuttings from the tree, following the instructions Quinn had given them to make sure they took a bit of the brown stem along with the leaves. “It’s not a good time of year to take a cutting from a cypress and expect it to take root,” Quinn had warned them, but Joelle had wanted to try, anyway, as long as they were here. Quinn had promised to work with the cuttings in the greenhouse at the mansion, doing his best to get them to root.
“Think we have enough?” Liam peered into the bag, and she nodded.
They exchanged a look, then, and she sighed.
“Well,” she said. “I guess we’d better do what we came here to do.”
Quietly, they walked back to the car, both of them sobered by what lay ahead of them. Joelle took the time to wrap the cuttings in wet paper towels and store them in the cooler in Liam’s trunk before taking her place again in the passenger seat.
Neither of them spoke as they bounced back along the rutted dirt road from the commune, but once Liam turned left onto Highway One, he glanced at her.
“How are you going to know the exact spot?” he asked.
“I don’t know if I will,” she admitted. “Carlynn told me the general area, though, and I think that will be good enough.”
She was thoughtful as Liam drove along the twisting highway. This was her first day away from Joli. The baby was still in the hospital, and Joelle spent most of her days with her, feeding her and rocking her now that she was out of the incubator. If all continued to go well, Joli would be coming home January first, the day she was supposed to have been born, and Joelle was anxious to have her daughter home with her, to slip into the routine of motherhood. She’d have three months off. Then Sheila would take care of both Joli and Sam, and Joelle was immensely grateful to Mara’s mother for allowing herself to become attached to her baby.
Joelle and Liam usually visited Mara together these days, although once a week or so, Joelle encouraged Liam to go by himself. She knew he still needed that time alone with his wife.
“I think that must be it,” Joelle said, leaning forward in the car, pointing ahead of them toward the hairpin turn in the distance.
“Man, I would not want to drive off a cliff from that height,” Liam said with a shudder.
“We’ll have to try to park somewhere and walk over to it,” Joelle said. “What about on that straight part of the road?”
“There?” Liam pointed ahead of them.
“Right.”
“We’ll still be taking up half the lane,” Liam said.
“But people will be able to see the car, at least,” she said. “It’ll be all right, don’t you think?”
“Let’s try it.” Liam slowed the car, then pulled as close to the low guardrail as was possible. “How’s this?” he asked.
“Perfect.”
They got out of the car, and Liam reached in the back seat for the simple metal canister. He lifted it into his arms, and Joelle fell in next to him as they walked in silence toward the hairpin turn.
Carlynn had asked Joelle to be the one to do this. Lying in her bed at the mansion, the hospice nurse adjusting the morphine in her IV, she’d explained as best she could the area where both she and her sister had, in many ways, lost their lives.
“Wouldn’t Alan or Quinn want to do it?” Joelle had asked her.
“Those old men would fall off the cliff, dear,” Carlynn had said. “I’m sure they’d be grateful if you and Liam would take care of it.”
This wasn’t going to be easy, though. They’d reached the very point of the hairpin turn, and Joelle stepped over the guardrail and held her arms out for the canister.
“Step back a bit,” Liam said, handing the container to her. “I’ll come out there, too.”
He joined her on the precipice. Crouching down, Joelle set the canister on the ground and lifted its lid. She didn’t look inside. Did not want to see Carlynn contained in there. Slowly, she stood up, the open canister in her arms.
“You all right?” Liam asked, and she knew he could see the tears in her eyes.
“Just anxious to set her free,” Joelle said. She raised the canister high out in front of her and tipped it. The breeze caught the ashes, sending them south, and Joelle watched some of them land in the chaparral, others sail
