Chapter 4 — Mornings at Nyes Place

The morning sun lay in long panels across our living room at 499 Nyes Place, lighting up the psychology journals and case files scattered across the coffee table. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows the marine layer had already burned off, and far below, boats dotted the water off Victoria Beach. The air had that Laguna morning mixture to it: salt spray, eucalyptus, sun-warmed sage off the canyon.

Mornings in that house had a recurring soundtrack, too, and it wasn't always gentle. For all his brilliance, Mark was a world-class procrastinator: he rarely did homework, almost never studied for an exam, and treated report cards as weather, something that happened to you. Some mornings the kitchen erupted with Marty freaking out at him about school, about preparation, about wasted potential, while Mark absorbed it with an infuriating calm and drifted back to his computer and his friends. The grades suffered. He did not appear to.

I sat cross-legged on the carpet, doodling in my notebook while Marty shuffled her notes.

"I can't believe Laguna Beach TV is coming to do a feature on The Human Equation," she said, her eyes bright. She and my stepdad had launched the practice in 1982. David wasn't a therapist, but a shrewd consultant who saw big corporate accounts where she saw healing.

She paused, lifting a well-worn research paper from the stack. "You know, your dad and I wrote this together, back when we were both at Florida State."

She meant my father, David Watkins, the one in Virginia. It confused people our whole lives: my father was a David, and my stepfather was a David, and the two men could not have been less alike. In this house, "David" meant the stepfather down the hall; my father lived two words away, in "your dad." Mark and I were born RoBards-Watkins and went by RoBards only. There had been whispers, once, of changing my last name to Hardin. Both of them raised it back when they married, and I don't think I cared much either way. After Mark, I did. It never happened. Marty used to talk about the papers they wrote together, at Florida State and then at Virginia — on possums, of all things, what ran where in a possum's brain — the two of them so in sync, until they weren't.

Mark leaned forward from the couch, brow furrowed at the paper's title, something long and Latinate about the neuroanatomy of hearing. At fifteen he was already fluent in our mother's work, holding whole conversations about the brain that sailed over my ten-year-old head.

Marty settled onto the couch, smoothing the paper on her lap. Her eyes went somewhere else for a moment. We almost never heard about the years before I was born.

Then David came in with his Polo cologne and the ocean on him — pressed chinos, oxford sleeves rolled just so, Wall Street polish gone coastal — and the room arranged itself around him the way rooms did. "Looks like someone's ready for her close-up," he teased, pressing a quick kiss to Marty's cheek.

She swatted him, radiant.

David's eyes settled on Mark with the intensity he saved for business. "Hey bud," he said, deliberately casual. "Mind if I steal you for a sec?"

Mark tensed. His hand closed around his journal before he set it aside. "Sure. What's up?"

Through the big windows I watched them cross the sun-bleached teak to the far corner of the patio, by the bougainvillea. The pink flowers made a backdrop for a silent movie: David leaning in, gestures precise and measured; Mark standing straight, one hand locked on the railing, the other jammed in his pocket, nodding on a beat. It was how he looked on the blocks before a race. Behind them the ocean went on being impossibly blue.

Marty noticed me watching. She ruffled my hair, though her eyes stayed on the patio a beat too long. "Probably just talking about the computer, phone and sound systems. Your brother's helping David with those," she said lightly, and busied herself straightening an already-neat stack of papers.

I took her word for it. It was years before I understood what those patio talks were: David teaching my brother about investments.

Then they were back inside, Mark's expression pensive until he caught sight of Corinne arriving, and cleared. He pulled her in for a quick kiss. "Ready to hit the festival?"

"Absolutely. And I think we should bring your little shadow along," she said, winking at me. "What do you say, Michael?"

I was off the floor before she finished. "Can I, Marty? Please?"

Marty hesitated — she'd wanted my help prepping the office — then sighed, indulgent, and told Mark to keep an eye on me.

The Sawdust Festival was an artist's dream built on a slope in Laguna Canyon: wooden walkways and staircases winding through the eucalyptus, every booth torn down and rebuilt new each summer, the paths covered in actual sawdust.

At a corner booth, a woman in a paint-splattered apron — Mrs. Norwood, who ran the art-therapy workshops at Marty's practice — looked up from a huge canvas and brightened at the sight of Mark, and told me my brother had quite an eye, gesturing to some black-and-white prints in her booth — photographs Mark had taken during a session, hands in every state of making: molding clay, holding brushes, sketching. There was something haunting about them, the way they told stories without ever showing a face. I have those prints now. They are in the box where I keep the pictures of him.

We wound down through the lower levels, past the glassblowers' furnaces breathing heat into the canyon shade, and up again through booths of jewelry and wind chimes, kettle corn and essential oils on the air, a folk singer's voice carrying clear through the trees.

Then Corinne stopped at a booth tucked under a canopy of twisted branches, where a silver-braided woman in layers of indigo wrapped copper wire around sea glass. On a piece of driftwood hung a necklace: a small teardrop of aquamarine on a delicate silver chain, wire-wrapped like something caught in a small net.

Mark stepped close, his hand finding the small of Corinne's back. "Try it on."

He was already reaching for his wallet. "May I?" he asked, and Corinne gathered her honey-blonde hair up with both hands while he fastened the clasp at the nape of her neck, his fingers lingering there a moment. When she turned to face him, the look between them was the kind that makes a ten-year-old want to be anywhere else.

"Perfect," Mark said softly.

"You two," I groaned. "You're worse than those soap operas Marty pretends she doesn't watch."

Corinne laughed, but her hand kept finding the stone, and Mark's eyes kept finding her.

The afternoon sun was high when we came out of the festival’s shade. Mark and Corinne’s laughter carried in the salt air as we walked to the Cabriolet, and the Coast Highway unrolled beside the ocean, carrying us back toward town, where Marty’s cameras were waiting.