“Let’s drive to the ocean,” Margot said, starting the car. “We can walk around the pier a little, then we can come back and go to a bar, or there’s this old salsa club downtown. We should check it out.”

“Hell yeah,” said Miguel.

Fifteen minutes later they reached Pico Boulevard, named after the last governor of California under Mexican rule, which stretched all the way west from Los Angeles to Santa Monica, getting richer, cleaner, and quieter toward the coast.

Although chilly and damp from the ocean, Margot cracked open the window for some air. She had always loved coming to the beach, oftentimes by herself so that she could plop down on the sand, bury her toes, and watch the waves crash, or walk along the old creaky pier and play Galaga at the arcade. As a teenager, she would ride a local line to Rimpau station where she hopped on the Blue Bus for an easy, hour-long commute to Santa Monica.

She had been mesmerized by the smell and the sound of the waves and the vast expanse of murky blue that was not only a moving color but actually a well of living organisms—fish and algae and octopuses and whales—all moving through their lives unaware of the terrestrial world above it. Knowing also that somewhere at the end of the ocean an entirely different continent of people stared into the same abyss of water and distance and time comforted her. A universal aloneness and yearning.

“I would be too far away from you,” her mother had said.

And now she was gone forever.

On Ocean Avenue, they parked beside the bluff with well-maintained grass, robust palm trees, and a recreational area for a retirement center. Homeless people lay down in their bundles on the benches.

“Do you want to walk around a little?” she asked.

They opened their car doors and flung themselves into the cold, biting wind. Already pitch-black outside, carnival lights danced on the pier where floodlights touched the surface of the ocean with a mottled yellow glow. Walking to the pier, tourists bundled up in coats and sweaters, filling the darkness with a cacophony of voices and languages—accents, tones, and rhythms from across continents. The cheerful crowd floated like a diaspora of desire, seeking the thrill of new experiences, the satisfaction of hunger with funnel cakes, hotdogs, hamburgers, and fries. Arms outstretched for selfies. Local couples and families moved at a slower, more contemplative pace; they, like Margot, had come here for comfort, for the familiar sights and sounds, a part of the patchwork of memories that we touched when life and the future felt uncertain.

Margot zipped up her jacket as the wind cut their faces and ears. Stopping at the bottom of the stairs that took them to the beach itself, they removed their shoes. The soft, cold sand swallowed their feet. She rolled up her jeans. They stomped arm in arm through sand, shivering as they pressed their sides up against one another. The wind whipped Margot’s hair in her face, clinging to the balm on her lips. As they stood twenty feet or so from where the ocean licked the shore, Margot released a great big sigh.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked. “It’s freezing, but . . . yes, there’s something magical here.”

Her cell phone rang. She flinched. An unknown number.

“Hi, this is Tom from Ko-America tours.”

“Oh, yes?”

“You wanted some information? About Mina Lee. September, Grand Canyon?”

“Yes, do you know who my mother was with during that trip? Do you have any information on her or him?”

“Yes, um, I have his emergency form. Hmm, no phone number, but the name is Kim Chang-hee. I have address only, in Calabasas.”

Margot remembered the black tennis shoes she had found in her mother’s closet, covered in a fine rust-colored dust, the smell of mineral and sage. She had finally made it to one of the national parks, after all these years of work, and she had not been alone, but with a lover.

“Could you give me the address? Or any other information.”

“Uh . . . who are you again?”

“I’m her daughter. I’m Mina Lee’s daughter.” The words carved into the heaviness inside her chest, which being by the ocean had only partially relieved. Was she still a daughter if her mother was dead? “She died a week or so ago and . . . I wanted to get in touch with him to let him know. I thought he would want to know.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry about that.”

“Could you text me his address? Will you do that now? I don’t have a lot of time. I have to leave soon,” she lied. “I live in Seattle and I have to go back to work.”

As soon as she received the text with the Calabasas address, she jumped with excitement.

“He sent it,” Margot said. “What next?”

“No phone number, right?” Shivering, Miguel danced his feet in place.

Margot shook her head. “We could drive there maybe?”

“Yeah, this week for sure. I gotta go to the Valley anyway to look at apartments. But would we just knock? We can’t do that, right?”

“What if Officer Choi is right and she doesn’t know about the affair, or who my mother is?”

“I think we should go check it out anyway. I mean, we’ll be in the Valley already. We don’t need to knock, just kind of scope it out. I mean . . . this would be the former residence of your mom’s boyfriend. And . . . do you still think he could be your dad?”

“Maybe, but it just all seems too coincidental at this point.” She shrugged. “But I think there’s something there. My mom never ever had a boyfriend to my knowledge while I was growing up. What would she be doing with this specific man? A married man . . . with cancer. It was doomed.”

“And the wife—she had to know, right? I mean, c’mon.”

“Yeah, he went on a goddamn recreational tour with my mother. She had to know.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“I’m just glad. It’s weird, but I’m happy that she went on that trip.” The ocean rippled under the full silver moonlight. “I never saw her on a real vacation. Ever. I’m relieved she got to do that before she died.”

For the first time since discovering her mother’s body last week, she felt hopeful—as if somehow, slowly, her persistence might be paying off. She dropped her shoes to the ground and ran toward the ocean, which appeared calm and placid. The cold air rushed in and out of her lungs, whipped her hair out of her bun, all over her face. She had felt so trapped her entire life in that apartment, at that swap meet, inside her mother’s life. And temporarily she could free herself here, right now; there was so much space and hardly anyone around.

Her feet splashed into the icy water. She screamed, then laughed, realizing she had chosen this for herself. With her teeth chattering, she ran out and back in again, deeper, up to her knees. A dip in this water was a kind of insanity. But she felt free.

She had always been a little scared of the water, of getting in too deep and being swept away. She never learned how to swim. There were no swimming pools where she had grown up, no extracurricular classes for kids. Water was always something she walked in and feared for its power.

On the pier, roller-coaster riders screamed. Red and white lights danced in a black sky. The salt air smelled like safety, the longest sigh of relief. The Ferris wheel spun and blinked, throbbing lightheartedly, its spokes like many arms outstretched in the night.

As she stood knee-deep in the water, a tangle of weeds wrapped around her ankles, tickling the skin. She could trip and fall into the dark foaming water, and the strands would wind around her, squeezing the last breath out of her body, until she belonged to no one, not even herself. She would belong to the sea. In a panic, she lifted her feet in a dance, retreating toward the sand, to free herself from what was, upon closer inspection, not actually seaweed, but a thin rope, no, a net, a piece of fishing net, gummy and laced with kelp leaves and pearl-like polyps. Maintaining her balance, she dragged the net out of the water and picked it clean as she walked toward Miguel. Her nose ran from the cold, and she wiped her face on her sleeve.

“Are you okay?” Miguel asked.

“This thing wrapped around my legs.”

Margot held a corner of net out to the sky, up against the shape of the Ferris wheel on the pier in the distance—blinking in black, many-spoked, turning slowly, aglow. She imagined all the tiny silver fish that would swim through the weave—like her mother’s words, no, her mother herself, shimmering, liquefied, slipping through every hole.

Mina

Fall 1987