Chapter One
Tessa
We’re waiting at Café Collage when he spots her in line. It’s hot in the coffee shop, and stuffy, despite its proximity to the Venice Beach Boardwalk and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Or maybe that’s the pregnancy talking. Either way, I’m sweaty and breathless as the other customers side-eye me and my round belly, the pregnant woman waiting for her caffeine fix with her son who is practically still a baby himself. Yes, I’ll have two under two in one short month. Yes, I’m pregnant and drink coffee. The French do it all the time. I squat to wipe the crumbs from Jasper’s sugar cookie off his face, hoping my drink arrives soon. Yes, I buy my eighteen-month-old son cookies to entertain him while I wait for the coffee everyone thinks I shouldn’t be drinking.
The café isn’t particularly crowded. Three other people wait for their coffees; two more stand in line to order. A few twentysomethings are spread across the tables, their skateboards blocking the paths between metal chairs. My latte should be ready by now, but the barista froths milk like he is kneading bread, in long luxurious strokes.
From his stroller, Jasper’s legs begin to kick. He leans forward, then thrusts his torso back, a seesawing that means he’s excited. His red-sugar-stained finger points as he shouts, “Gigi!”
I follow the line of his finger to the woman ordering at the counter. She’s about my height. Narrow like I used to be, with tattoos down her arms and scraggly blond hair dipped blue at the ends and pulled away from her face by sparkly butterfly barrettes. She must be one of the nannies he sees at Linnie Canal Park, although I don’t recognize her. I don’t remember anyone named Gigi, but children have their own language at this age. They splice and weave names into a shorthand only they can understand.LindsayintoZeze,SarahintoSasa. This woman’s name intoGigi.
The woman taps her phone to pay, then makes her way to an empty table by the door. Jasper’s eyes trail her every move, but she hasn’t noticed him. He flails his legs as he watches her settle into a metal chair and remove a small sketch pad from her leather satchel. Prada, which I wouldn’t have expected from her ripped jeans, the steel poking through both toes of her leather boots.
“Gigi,” Jasper repeats. She’s consumed by her drawing, unaware my son is beckoning her until he shouts “Gigi!” so loudly everyone in the café turns.
The woman looks up, scans the room until her attention lands on Jasper. He giggles when she spots him. She flashes him a polite, anonymous smile, then returns to her drawing. So not one of the nannies from the park. Not anyone we know.
Jasper continues to call “Gigi” to her, his excitement morphing into frustration when she won’t engage with him further. From the way she furiously sketches, I can tell he’s making her uncomfortable. I squat down again to unbuckle Jasper and hoist him onto my side.
“Hey, buddy,” I say as I walk away from the woman’s table. “Do you like your cookie?”
I brush his sticky blond curls from his forehead. My husband’s hair is straight and dark. Mine is light, and this close to the ocean has a wave to it, a trait previously unknown on the East Coast. Still, it’s never been curly, not like Jasper’s, not even when I was his age.
I thrust my hip out as a seat for Jasper to reduce some of his weight in my arms. With my growing belly, it’s getting harder to hold him likethis, but I want him to know that he will always have a place against my body, even when it hurts my lower back and flattened feet. That’s the sacrifice I’ll make as his mother. While I’ll love the child inside me as fiercely as I love Jasper, she’ll never replace him. He stares at me like he can hear my thoughts, can sense my guilt, all the ways I fear I’m betraying him by giving him a sister.I don’t need your judgment, coffee addicts. I have enough of my own.
“Cookie, yum.” Jasper offers me a bite. It’s covered in drool, the red granules of sugar melting off it like makeup off the face of a sad clown.
The barista calls a name. Not mine. Not the woman’s either. She remains at the table, focused entirely on her drawing. Jasper notices her again.
“Gigi.” He points, staring at her with the uninhibited intensity only small children display. She glances up, no longer smiling.
“Bud, let’s give the nice lady her space.” I peer over at her, expecting her to respond that it’s fine, to wave or coo or tell me how adorable Jasper is. Instead, she ignores us, and I’m starting to get offended. Gabe teases me that not everyone wants to marvel at other people’s children. But Jasper is impossibly cute. Strangers comment on it all the time. As I silently chide this woman for not acknowledging my son’s unparalleled cuteness, I realize that I’ve become one ofthosemothers.
Except his relentlessness isn’t cute now; it’s embarrassing. Over and over, he calls to her—“Gigi, Gigi, Gigi”—demanding a response she can’t provide. Why won’t he stop? A vertical line appears down the woman’s forehead from concentrating on ignoring him.
“Come on, bud.” I start to put him into his stroller. He wrenches and screams incoherently, arching his back and refusing to be strapped in. Everyone’s attention is on me again, even hers, even the skateboarders’, their ears cocooned in oversize headphones. I lock eyes with the woman. Her expression is indecipherable yet intense, like she’s only now realizing that Jasper is accompanied by an adult.
We hold each other’s gaze until the barista finally calls my name. I collect my coffee and push Jasper’s stroller toward the door as hecontinues to shout “Gigi!” only more desperately, so it comes out “Geeee-Geeee.” People step out of our way, shunning me, like if I were a better mother, I’d be able to control my son.
“Sorry,” I mutter to the woman as we pass her table and Jasper tries one last time to get her to acknowledge him. She stays focused on her drawing. It’s a sketch of the barista with dreadlocks snaking down his back.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” a woman a little older than me says as she holds the door open for us. It’s a small gesture, kind enough to make my eyes sting. “We’ve all been there.”
We haven’tallbeen there. This Gigi hasn’t been there, the other patrons in the coffee shop. I can tell from their chiding manner that they’ve never had to negotiate a tantrum with a toddler.
I push Jasper’s stroller down Pacific Avenue toward the canals where we live, stopping outside Hotel Erwin to throw my latte in the trash and sit down to cry. Jasper stares at me from his stroller, sucking his thumb. His legs kick, only now it’s a happy tapping, sugar fueled. Once again, he’s the sweet child I love. Sometimes, I wonder if he has the memory of a goldfish, his moods vacillate so quickly.
“What happened in there?” I ask him, knowing he can’t answer me. And that’s the problem. He can tell me when he wants food or water or a kiss. Simple words that convey his basic desires. Young as he is, Jasper isn’t simple. His needs are nuanced, multifaceted. His language is not. That disconnect is the source of all his tantrums. As much as I want to know, as much as he wants to tell me, he can’t explain why he exploded in the café, why he calledGigito a woman we don’t know.
By the time I push Jasper’s stroller down the ramp into the canals, he’s forgotten about the incident at the coffee shop. It lingers in my nostrils like the stench of the waterways where we live, pungent and ripe. The Venice Canals were Gabe’s dream. I’d never heard of them before moving to LA, even though they date back to the early twentieth century, when Abbot Kinney hoped to bring a slice of Venice, Italy, to the shores of SouthernCalifornia. Most of the canals have long since been paved over, and our neighborhood is all that’s left: two hundred houses across four canals, bounded by Eastern Canal to the east and Grand Canal to the west.
Despite the city’s best efforts, the canals often smell. Although they’re flushed out regularly according to the tides, with fresh salt water from Ballona Lagoon, they’re never able to drain completely. Even when they’re emptied, one and a half feet of sludgy water lies trapped in the basins, clotted with debris and algae blooms that flourish in the rot. We’re entering the high tourist season, so the city leaves them empty during the week and hires workmen to clean them before they’re refilled for the weekend, when the tourists descend upon the crystalline waters, none the wiser. Today, there’s no water, only that muck, a reminder of the effort it takes to maintain our picture-perfect neighborhood.
I lug Jasper’s stroller to the side of the pathway so a man with full leg tattoos and two Yorkies can scramble by. The sidewalks around the canals are barely wide enough for a stroller and make passing anyone, especially someone with two dogs, into a game of chicken. Like most of our neighbors, this man looks familiar, but I don’t know if he lives on the canals or nearby, only that he walks here each day.
As we continue down Linnie to our house, I think back to the first time Gabe brought me here, the surprise of the now-familiar colorful houses hidden along a modest grid of waterways. We held hands as we got lost in the canals’ maze, imagining what our life would be like in the wind-battered Cape Cod, the craftsman bungalow, the modern glass house. We were new to the city, freed from the containment of New York’s skyscrapers to the open spaces of Southern California, ready to fall in love with LA as much as we were with each other.
The canals were a dream then, something we could covet but never afford. Gabe had just started his practice, the reason we’d moved to LA. Between student loans and the overhead of his fledgling career, it was all we could do to pay rent on our one-bedroom apartment in West LA. No one ever expected us to live off my jewelry career. Like everything with Gabe, he knew how to plan, how to save, how to churn fantasyinto reality. When we were ready to buy, the canals were the only place we considered.
