CHAPTER TWO
Sacred, Oregon, was named for a tree. According to Vivian, cascara sagrada trees grew plentifully around this town set in the shadow of the Cascade Range.
The next morning, I woke up inside my little corner of these foothills to the smell of the forest and a sunbeam bullying its way through the window shade.
When we arrived at our summer home last night, it was so late, I didn’t even turn on the light before falling into bed.
I looked around for the first time, seeing only a Mission-style bed and dresser fighting for space.
Viv had mentioned that the place had sold fully furnished.
The new owners weren’t moving into their vacation home for months, leaving plenty of time for Vivian to install whatever creations they’d commissioned.
Last night’s angry headache had faded with rest, but not enough. I’d hit it with more Aleve, but first I tossed a robe over my sleep set and opened the barn door leading into the living room. Knotty pine flooring was cool under my feet. “Tía?” I called.
She’d left her slippers by the fireplace. I slid into the green felted wool and wrenched open the front door, and the view made me forget that remote Oregon was the opposite of everything I’d wanted this summer.
It could’ve been a painting. Beyond the porch, the cottage grounds were carved straight out of the middle of the forest. Trees grouped tightly around the property, canopies tangling.
Here, the sky was parsed into bits—an afterthought.
Moss raided trunks and branches, and thousands of needles scattered over the lawn.
What Viv hadn’t mentioned was the wide, rustling creek flowing just behind the cabin.
A wooden footbridge spanned the water, leading to all sorts of possibilities.
The only problem was that none of those possibilities were the ones I really needed: a job, money, a way forward.
There wasn’t even another house as far as I could see.
In the distance, Vivian appeared in cargos and a red tank, plant matter jutting from her hair as if the woods had spat her out.
“Morning!” she called, approaching. “I couldn’t resist a walk.” She paused, gesturing over the path she’d trekked. “So beautiful. I could’ve lost myself in there.”
I picked a couple pollen cones from her hair, and she laughed.
I would lose her anyway. Soon, she would trek into the center of her artwork and rarely come out.
It happened during our Topanga summers too.
Here, surrounded by a triple dose of the natural wonders she honored and shaped (wood, stone, glass), she’d be completely swept away.
Tía walked me over to the detached garage, a generous log-walled building.
“You got everything in here?” I asked from the doorway, slack-jawed. “How?”
A huge workbench crowned the space. Next to it stood four types of industrial saws, plus a full-size grinder and coils of wire. Racks of menacing tools hung, waiting, and scores of different woods and colored glass sheets were stacked along the wall.
“A courier truck loaded in what I’d need from Topanga a couple weeks ago,” she said, shrugging like this was no big deal. “I flew in and stayed overnight to direct the guys in setting up.”
I stepped into the workshop, already smelling the cedar and oak whorls she’d shave from logs, the acrid heat of the metal she’d bend to her will.
Vivian Rojas’s art was a hybrid of carved wood and stained glass.
Some of her creations were small, like my quinceanera gift—a ropy tree-trunk lamp shaped from mahogany and topped with leaves in dozens of shades of painstakingly set glass.
Other pieces were massive—decorative beds and curio cabinets inlaid with colorful mosaic doors.
Patrons flocked to galleries worldwide for her designs.
“Why not make the client’s pieces in your shop and truck them up here?” I asked.
Viv arranged her set of chisels, superfine to weighty. “I’m guessing you saw that bridge over the creek?”
I nodded.
“It’s called Bearberry Creek, for the purplish berries that grow on the trees around here.” She picked another stray leaf from her hair. “Anyway, I’m shoring up and carving out the bridge with flowers, so I have to work on-site.”
An entire Vivian Rojas bridge? The final bill could feed Sylvie’s Perfect Triangle for years.
I wandered over to the bench and picked up a fragrant chunk of cherrywood, noting the beautiful grain. “Does this mean you’re starting on some of the cajas de suenos here too?”
The small cutting would be perfect to craft one of the dream boxes that had made her famous.
The cajas de suenos had mosaic glass lids and were perfectly sized for jewelry or trinkets, but Viv created them with a different purpose in mind.
She’d designed them as a place to put secret wishes and unfulfilled dreams. The boxes would protect them, according to her brilliant marketing.
They soon became a must-have item, with everyone from movie stars to royalty to everyday art lovers clamoring for one of their own.
Yet Vivian had abruptly stopped making the cajas before I was born, much to the dismay of fans who’d begged her to produce them again.
For twenty years, she refused—until last month, when an article in the Los Angeles Times announced her limited run of one hundred boxes starting in the fall. Tremendous buzz was the reason we’d split our trip to Oregon into two days, stopping at three major galleries for photo ops on the way up.
“Not yet—no time,” she said in response to my question. “Besides the bridge, I’m making some furniture for the cabin.” She reached out to take the cutting and shrugged on a thick canvas apron. “Starting now.”
After breakfast and a quick shower, I got dressed and slipped my newest—and most valuable—accessory back onto my wrist. I studied the champagne watch face, finding the second hand frozen.
Whether last night’s ticking was an anomaly or a figment of my messed-up head, today the piece was just as broken as Tía Viv had originally said.
I left it alone and finally moved to unpack all my clothes.
I couldn’t have said exactly how much time had passed when everything changed.
After all, the watch didn’t keep time. But as I closed the final drawer on the dresser, the second hand started to tick.
I moved my wrist close to my face, making sure I wasn’t seeing things again.
Had I done something? Banged or jolted it somehow?
I didn’t think so. I watched the second hand tick and turn, tick and turn.
Maybe I could sell it sooner than I thought and set Sylvie’s Perfect Triangle into action.
With more hope than I’d given anything in years, I wound the crown on the side.
And suddenly, I was no longer alone in my little cabin bedroom.
Outside, Tía Vivian’s table saw screamed. And so did I.
Standing in my doorway was a teenage boy who had appeared out of nowhere. Except it hadn’t been out of nowhere, had it?
His ghostly form had flashed two times before the whole of him took shape. Even he seemed surprised to be there, gaping down at his hands, turning them over, then patting himself down as if to check he was real.
But he couldn’t be real.
I was hallucinating. My post-concussive symptoms must have expanded to include hallucinations, namely one of a tall boy with tousled dark hair and a flannel shirt who was now looking directly at me.
For an immeasurable span of time, he stared as if it were the only thing he could do—fitting, because it was the only thing I could do. Icy cold shock fizzed through my legs, my fingers. Adrenaline couldn’t even figure this out.
“Uh, hi?” he said.
Another scream escaped my throat. I tossed a throw pillow at him and nearly lost my breakfast when it sailed right through his torso and hit the wall behind him.
He glanced down, registering the sensation with a quick head shake. “I, uh—it’s okay. I think.” He tried to assure me, his voice low and dusted with a layer of sand like he’d just woken up.
Did hallucinations usually speak? Maybe he wasn’t a hallucination. That would’ve been a relief for my mental state. But then what did that make him, a ghost? Was that any better? I felt a shudder and eked out, “What is happening? What are you doing here?”
He ran a hand down his sleeve, let out an audible whiff of breath. “I’m not sure.”
“You are a ghost who magically appeared in my room, and you aren’t sure?”
“Right . . .” He surveyed his body again. “I guess that explains the pillow.”
If only it explained literally anything else. I massaged my pounding temples.
The ghost boy’s mouth softened. “If it makes you feel better, I won’t hurt you.”
“Oh, well, that’s great,” I said with false relief. One, two, set, I tried. The mantra added an ounce of strength to the base of my spine. “So you’re only the kind of ghost who slams doors and draws creepy words on the fogged-up shower glass?”
“I don’t know. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”
“What do you mean?”
One of his shoulders jerked up in a shrug. “I’ve never appeared in anyone’s house before. Where one moment I wasn’t here, and the next I was. Am.”
I looked him over a little more closely.
Nothing about his appearance was typically ghostlike.
His body seemed completely solid, even though my pillow had proved it wasn’t.
His clothes moved when he did. His pallor came up pink in the right places, tanned too, and almost too lifelike for the lot he’d fallen into.
I craned forward a bit; the dim shadow of a patchy beard scuffed across his jaw.
When my gaze met the blue of his eyes, I quickly looked away.
“So where are you, um, usually?” I asked.
My question landed over his face in a distressing sort of way. His expression wavered, and he began to pick at the raised seam of his jeans.