Dawn
“The Matriarch is lying,” Morbus said, and Phoebe saw in his eyes a fleeting sadness that spoke directly to her own. “Vineland is not what it seems.”
—Phoebe and the Burning Vines
By the time I finished the book at two in the morning, I felt as queasy as I got after a bottle and a half of rosé on a hot summer afternoon.
I spent a sweaty few hours in bed trying to sleep while I recalled details from the book.
This world-famous, much-beloved series had clearly been written by someone who knew Hartley Vineyard.
Someone who knew Hartley Vineyard very, very well.
It wasn’t obvious from the broad strokes of the novel.
The title character, Phoebe, is a likable heroine whose real parents died in another fire when she was too young to remember them.
She was adopted by a doting widow who made her living as a seamstress to the wealthier residents of their town, Windy Hollows.
Phoebe loves her adopted mother fiercely, but readers learn later that she has always felt the loss of her true parents.
And though she’s enjoyed friendships and done well in school, she’s never felt she truly belonged.
Until she gets to Vineland.
Nothing is impossible in Vineland if you learn to harness the power contained in the vines, which all children are taught to do in school.
In Vineland, Phoebe is taken in by a loving family who recently lost their only child in a mysterious accident no one will speak of.
They enroll her in school, telling everyone she is the daughter of a distant relative.
Phoebe loves school and immediately makes friends with a girl and a boy who dresses like a girl: Tatiana and Rhule.
The three of them get into all sorts of mischief together as they learn the properties of the vines and the Three Elixirs that can be extracted from them: happiness, sadness, and anger.
In Vineland, there is peace, the last war having ended 110 years ago, when the elixirs came under the control of the Matriarch.
Since then, the country has been ruled by a series of benevolent women who raise the community and use the elixirs to bring balance to each person’s life. It is a cooperative and safe society.
The Matriarch Celeste takes a special interest in Phoebe, calling her to tea and asking questions about life on the other side of the vines—Phoebe is the first person to come through in more than a century.
Though Phoebe misses her mother from the other side of the vines, Celeste assures her that her mother has been notified that Phoebe is alive and well and will return to her after her training in Vineland.
There is a nefarious force at work, though, looking to poison the vines at their root, led by a man named Morbus who, it is said, refused to take the elixirs and grew into a man whose three main emotions are out of balance.
He and his followers, the Seekers, claim that the elixirs fog the mind and that greater clarity can only come from one’s own naturally occurring happiness, sadness, and anger—that managing these emotions through the vinous elixirs is keeping Vineland stuck in a harmonious but ultimately stagnant place.
Phoebe encounters Morbus twice in the first book.
The first time is when she emerges from the long dark corridor that began at the entrance, where she left her friends.
At the end of the dark is a glorious pasture of riotously colored wildflowers under a brightly shining sun.
Far in the distance are hills covered in rows upon rows of tidy vines.
A handsome man who seems old enough to be a father stands at an easel, painting.
Though his picture is still rough, it’s clear he is trying to capture the view.
She is about to say something to him, to ask where she is, when all of a sudden a woman on a horse rides into view, taking Phoebe completely by surprise.
When she looks back at the man, he is gone.
The second time, midway through the book, Morbus lures Phoebe into the Thousand-Year-Old Tree and tells her that there are many more elixirs than the Three and that the Matriarch is lying to everyone.
Phoebe confronts the Matriarch with this information, and Celeste readily admits there are more than three.
“In fact, there are fifty-three that we know of,” she says and then shows Phoebe an enormous laboratory where the elixirs are being studied.
Toward the end of the book, Phoebe and her friends discover that the vines are dying—and not just by Morbus’s hand.
The Matriarch calls this “the Withering” and says that Phoebe has been sent to them from beyond to help.
She is the One. At the end of the first book in the series, Phoebe, Tatiana, and Rhule have joined the secret Service of the Vines, and have pledged to use their talents to defeat Morbus, find the cure for the vines, and save Vineland.
And while I had been completely swept away by the twists and turns of the story, the plot is not what kept me reading so furiously.
What kept me awake all night were the startling similarities and, in particular, the many analogies to my family in the characters: The arch Matriarch reminded me a bit of Grandma Joan, and the setup of daughters raised mainly by women likewise reminded me of the way I’d been raised and the way I knew Mom had been raised after Grandpa Leo died.
But what really made my hair stand on end and convinced me that Vineland was Hartley Vineyard were the smaller details.
The treacherous, twisty road that leads to the Matriarch’s house.
The beauty of the vines on a hill that was described to sound exactly like Spring Mountain, with its view of the Vaca Mountains.
The Three Elixirs that correspond to the three varieties of wine made by Hartley: chardonnay, pinot, and cabernet.
The damn hammock knotted by Grandpa Leo.
The creak of the fourth stair—specifically the fourth!—in my childhood house and in the back staircase that Phoebe and her friends always use to sneak out of their school.
I’d never snuck out of my house, but I imagine that if I had, that fourth stair would have been quite a nuisance.
If I was going to create a film-set version of Hartley Vineyard, the hammock and the creaky stair would be crucial to creating the immersive world.
I also wondered about Morbus, the one adult male character.
He’s a shadowy, ambiguous figure not unlike Grandpa Leo, whose ghost haunted Hartley in a very strange way.
With a devoted wife and daughters and the promise of a thriving vineyard, he had every reason to live, and yet his depression convinced him otherwise.
Mom clearly made it her life’s work to fulfill his dream that Hartley would make California wine as fine and famous as any French label, and she was successful…
which, now that I thought about it, made her like the Matriarch as well, self-possessed and self-controlled and able to accomplish anything she set her mind to.
Who on earth could have known all this about my home and family, and woven the details into these books?
I couldn’t imagine that Mom had written them; she foisted all writing for the vineyard onto other employees.
Grandma Joan and Emilio and Winnie had been dead for too long.
The only other people who were in our lives enough weren’t writers, like Mom’s best friend, Rachel, or Emilio’s nephew Raul, who’d become a co-owner of the vineyard six years ago when I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in taking over.
My own best friend, Audrey, wouldn’t have kept something like this from me.
The pseudonym of the author was E. Lang, which didn’t mean anything to me either.
When I gave up trying to sleep, I lay in bed googling the name and reading all the many theories about who it might be.
Incredibly, no one knew. This author was “the best-kept secret in publishing.” Remarkably, no one came anywhere near Spring Mountain as a possible origin.
The closest anyone got was a reclusive man in Sonoma who’d published a few kids’ picture books in the 1980s, who’d played along with the theory that he was E.
Lang for a little while until the publisher issued a statement about his fraudulent claims.
The most prevalent theory was that E. Lang was a man because the true main character of the books was Morbus; he was the one with the strongest character development.
I bristled at this suggestion, since he doesn’t get nearly as many pages as the women characters, but many of the blogs supporting this theory—some with pages upon pages of literary analysis—were written by women, so I told my inner feminist to stand down.
And if the author was a man, then casting women in the leading roles was a brilliant way of throwing readers off the scent.
Around 4:00 a.m., an answer pinged into my mind: My father.
Could my father have written the books? Surely he would have been at the house enough to have gotten to know it well, and maybe he’d even snuck in and out on that staircase.
He was the one subject Mom had never been willing to talk about.
This was all just too much. If I hadn’t poured all my wine and vodka and gin down the sink five months ago, I’d have been three drinks deep by sunrise.
Instead, I stood in my kitchen and ate saltine after saltine with peanut butter and honey until my mouth was practically glued shut and I had to melt off the sugary paste with hot coffee.
Alfie looked at me with a worried, ears-cocked expression.
I was worried about me, too; this was the strongest craving I’d had for a drink to date.
To pass some time and get outside, I took him for a walk around the block.
At 6:30 a.m., when I knew Mom would be up and caffeinated, I called.
“Well, isn’t this a surprise,” she said, all warmth, when she picked up on the second ring.