Chapter 1: Fog

When she began to live again, she craved, of all things, fog. The thicker the better, fog soupy enough to ground planes and send the Santa Monica sunbathers scurrying inland. Slick and silky fog, like whale skin, rising and falling in long, sinuous arcs. She wanted to feel it around her neck like a cool, silver necklace or coating her throat like that first evening cocktail. Only then would the difficulty she normally had taking a deep breath turn suddenly to relief, as if the fog flushed her system, prying loose the impediments deep in her lungs.

Mist curled her hair and smoothed her complexion. Freckles, she'd come to believe, faded with every gray day. Dark days seemed a gift, someone's stab at recompense—she'd have the beach to herself, would not have to suffer the smell of cocoa butter or the jarring beat of a radio tuned to rap.

So it was little wonder that when the baiting began, it began with the clearing. The fog, which had been clinging to the sand and sea for days, rose up like a giant white bird and flew northward. The sun came on like a spotlight, and Kate Vegas blinked a time or two, feeling ambushed, suddenly exposed. Near the pier, the same old man swung a metal detector, and the Zamboni-like machines the Santa Monica City Council had splurged on groomed the sand into snake tracks. It was setting up to be a typical southern California October day—warm, dry, heartbreakingly clear—and though Kate still had a little more packing to do, when she pined after the fog, she knew she was already gone.

She turned toward the narrow street that, two blocks away, dead-ended at her apartment. An apartment she had already sublet. Two steps toward home, she got a whiff of something awful. Rotting seaweed. Perhaps that Long Beach oil spill oozing in with the tide. She shielded the sun with her hand, looked up the beach. Then she saw him.

Ray Vegas leaned against the waist-high concrete wall, his hands in the pockets of his faded blue jeans, black boots toe deep in the sand. He was thinner than she remembered, shorter, as if he'd spent the last eighteen years shrinking. All that black hair she'd once run her fingers through was streaked with white, uncombed.

She felt a familiar stabbing sensation below her heart, a pain that until this moment she'd thought she'd blanked out, like the agony of childbirth. She recalled the last time she'd seen him, the inhuman sounds she'd made. She felt so nauseated, she did not believe she could stand there and withstand the memory. She even said out loud, "I am going to fall."

But she did not. She squared her shoulders, calculated the time it would take to run home, into the arms of her father. Before she had a number, before she even moved, she decided the notion was silly and, worse, weak. She had long since stopped believing in the power of Ray Vegas, though the sight of him standing there, lighting a cigarette, then holding it between his thumb and forefinger, reignited some long-buried instinct, her most primal, murderous urge.

Her legs moved with an energy she hadn't exhibited since she'd begun taking in the children, since she'd learned the depths of exhaustion a mother of unhappy, cynical, and even criminal teenagers can feel. She realized the peace she had struggled for was like an old scar—functional but ugly, something that shouldn't have been there, if everything had gone well. Now it began to ache.

She ran across the sand just as she might have eighteen years ago, looking for some kind of weapon—broken glass or jagged rock—anything to cut out his diseased heart. In the beginning, she'd imagined this moment a thousand times, and it usually ended splendidly in her killing him with a slow-acting poison that began innocuously enough with a little foaming of the mouth, perhaps some queasiness, then accelerated rapidly into agonizing abdominal pain, paralysis, death.

She'd lived on that fantasy, digested it like food, but now it started making her a little sick. The sand snared her ankles, reduced her to slow-motion. She looked at the wall and he was no closer. She looked again and he was gone.

She fell to her knees on the sand. The parking lot on the corner was empty, the whitewashed condominiums on this stretch of clean beach lifeless. She spotted one tentacle of fog still clinging to the shoreline, then that too disappeared before her eyes.

She breathed deeply, but already the air was too light to capture, dry and speckled with sand. The grains stuck in her throat. She forced herself to laugh. She had conjured a ghost and that in itself might be optimistic, a sign that she valued life still. It was merely the wrong spirit. The only ghosts she believed in were the ones kept alive by devotion. The only psychic she'd put any stock in was Savannah Dawson, a tarot card reader with a blind spot for bad fortunes. Kate had driven to San Francisco a dozen times to let the woman read the palms of each of her children, to hear the confident promises of true love, long lives, and wealth.

She'd imagined Ray because of the move. She'd once sworn she would never leave Los Angeles, never budge from the place where she could be found. But over time she suffered the same fate as couples who've been married forever: She began to wonder what her life would have been like if she'd made no vows, if she'd learned, earlier on, to be less sentimental. She began to appreciate the value of change.

When her seventeen-year-old foster son, Wayne, pleaded with her to move north, to a fishing town he'd read about, she had actually had to fan the grief. This morning, she had walked not to say good-bye to Los Angeles, a town so spread out and disjointed she had lost what she loved best inside it, but to hide her guilty excitement beneath the fog, to run like a sprinter so no one got a good glimpse of the light in her eyes. She had dredged up tears, one last, long shudder, now that these were the only things she had left.

That shudder might have summoned the devil, if she was prone to that kind of dramatic thinking. But she was not. She started back toward her apartment at a brisk pace, did not turn around once. She believed in heaven but not in hell, in fate instead of in God. If the answers were in church, she would not find them. She'd stopped going when she began to question not only the doctrine but also the intentions of the pastor, the sincerity of the choir. When she no longer believed a single word that was said.

Wayne had already piled his meager belongings on the curb. Her father, Gerald, had popped the hood on her car and was swiping the dip stick. A rogue breeze caught her shoulder-length hair and slapped it hard into her eyes, drawing tears.

"Hey, sweetheart," her father said. "Some morning, huh? Fog's clearing out quick."

She smelled cut grass, her neighbor's jasmine. The Dooleys on the second floor blared hip hop. Mrs. Crandall, who played a conniving nurse on General Hospital, sat on the stoop practicing lines. It was amazing really, extraordinarily lucky, to have accumulated next to nothing all these years—a few boxes of clothes, her paints and canvases stacked in the trunk of her car, no friends who would mourn her for long, no child she could keep. She could leave, follow the fog, start over. She could paint anywhere; the only thing tying her to Los Angeles was memory and a pinprick of hope she could hardly acknowledge, if she wanted to make this boy happy. She and her father had talked about going to Miami after this, but really, she had no idea where she'd end up. This secretly delighted her in a way her paintings and her children could not. Sorrow had once seemed lodged in a loftier atmosphere than anger and even joy, but over time she had realized it was no different. As with anything, it snapped like a frayed cable if you put too much weight on it, if you hung your whole life on its thread.

"You sure you're okay with this?" Kate asked. "Just leaving?"

Her father replaced the stick and moved on to the various liquids her car required. "You realize I've never been north of San Francisco? Lived in California all my life and never been north of the Golden Gate." He shook his head as if this galled him, as if it was the disappointment of his life.

"I don't know about you, but I feel like a teenager," Kate said. "Just heading out without even a hotel lined up, let alone a place to live. I feel made of air."

Her father stuck a funnel in the hole she could never find and added a quart of oil. In the last twenty years, his hair had gradually fallen out. She had told time by his slow slide into baldness, his switch from slacks and wing tips to sweat pants and sneakers, each purple spot that rose up on the hands he had once used as weapons. He had put on more weight, especially after her mother, Patti, died. Thirty, maybe forty pounds. It was all around his middle, hard as stone. Sometimes she imagined he'd gone through the house after her mother had died swallowing the things she'd loved best—her silver jewelry, paperback novels, the porcelain Lladrós they'd bought her every Mother's Day. He didn't move right anymore. He'd been fierce once, a Los Angeles detective. Now he grimaced when he sat down, sometimes cried out when turning too fast, as if too many things were clanking around inside him.

"I'm ready for a little adventure myself," he said.

She toyed with the idea of telling him she'd seen her husband, but it was only melodrama. She'd already grouped the mirage with the other things she would leave behind—a bulky armoire, a dozen old paperbacks on the shelf in the closet, a bottle of champagne she'd bought on some New Year's Eve and never drunk. Her father had suffered enough on her behalf. Seventeen years ago, he and her mother had passed on a trip to Europe, afraid to leave her, worried about what she might do with that bottle of Valium the doctor had prescribed. They'd manned the hotline, cooked her dinner for the better part of a year. Then her mother had gotten sick, and worse than that, the complications from MS took their sweet time killing her. After the funeral, her father could have moved to Miami—his dream—but he'd stayed in the same tiny house in Santa Monica so he could watch over Kate, keep on top of the investigation, hold her during the sobbing jags after everyone else grew frustrated with her relentless crying. He'd taken up woodworking, making rocking horses for other people's grandchildren.

He wouldn't leave as long as he thought he might be needed. For as long as she could remember, he'd passed up poker Fridays and fishing trips on the off chance he'd be required during the night. Obviously he'd never forgotten the night she'd stood on the roof of her six-story apartment building and climbed out onto the ledge. She'd heard the rattle of traffic belowher, but she was so alone wind didn't touch her; it bounced off her nose and headed right back to sea. Her father had found her, but he'd been on the force long enough to know to keep his distance, to feign calm.

He'd stayed by the door, but when he spoke, his usually gruff voice was wobbly, like a little boy's. "Honey?" he'd said. "Honey. Come on back now. Come here, sweetheart."

Three years since her baby had been stolen from her, and she hadn't willed herself dead yet. Three years when she should have succumbed to despair, but her body had betrayed her and continued to work. She'd been to forty states following leads, but the more telling fact was that she had gotten up every morning breathing. Even on the morning after William had been taken, she'd eaten half a bowl of Raisin Bran. That was the most hideous betrayal, that living, those hunger pangs, the unrelenting urge to go to the bathroom. Even worse, she reached a point when she woke up some mornings and didn't think of the baby first thing, when she didn't want to think of him, when she betrayed him all over again by waking up all right.

"Look at the ocean out there," her father had said. "So beautiful I can hardly stand it. God's got a soft spot, that's for sure."

"God does not exist."

She heard the shuffle of his tennis shoes, the nervous swallows he hid with a dry cough. Of course he didn't understand. He survived as a detective for the LAPD—pulling sheets over babies, shooting heart-high in order not to be shot—for one simple reason: He was on the right side. He believed in justice, and any man who did so in this day and age had to know when to play blind. He had to have a share and a half of faith.

If God was there, he would have noticed she could no longer curl her arm into a cradle and form a pillow of soft skin beneath her shoulder. If God was there, he would have given her the courage to jump. Instead, by the time her father reached her, her legs were numb and she knew she was going to close down the hotline. She allowed her father to take her arm, then she rose on tiptoes, as close to heaven as she could get, and spit at it. She never looked up again. Even years later, when the children started coming, when they told their first jokes and she laughed, she kept that one vow. She made her peace with everyone but Ray and God. Both, in her opinion, were unforgivable.

Now, she squeezed her father's arm, kept her phantoms to herself. "Start packing," she said. "Wayne's been up since dawn. I'll bring down the last of the bags and we'll go."

She walked into the building, remembered to check the mail one last time before the stop was put on tomorrow. She took out a stack of catalogs and bills, started to climb the stairs. She made it only to the second floor when she spotted the pink envelope with no return address. Years ago, she'd gotten all kinds of letters from strangers—tips, leads, sympathy notes. She'd found, in the first few weeks after it happened, that there was an almost mystical reciprocity of affection between her and strangers. She was more generous with people than she'd ever been—forgiving impatient drivers, putting an arm around teenagers with no respect—while strangers hugged her without warning, with no knowledge of her situation except for the horror-struck look in her eyes and the precarious way she stood, always leaning. A woman she'd never seen before had shown up on her doorstep with an afghan she'd been knitting for her grandson—a boy who had died of leukemia before she could finish the last stitch. Kate still had that blanket; it was packed in a suitcase with one precious photo album and the only infant-sized dressing gown that had been left behind.

But it had been years since she'd gotten a note. She sat down, ran a finger over the wavery script, checked the postmark. Cambridge, Massachusetts. She worked a fingernail under the seal, pried it open. She saw the tip of a photograph.

She leaned back, caught her breath. She heard Wayne thundering down the stairs. He bypassed the last two steps, leapt to the second-floor landing, a laundry bag stuffed with his clothes in hand.

"This is awesome, Kate," he said. "This is so rad."

She laughed, tried to grab hold of him but he was too quick. He flew by, was down to the ground floor in a second. "I don't want you to get too excited," she called after him. "I know that article said they need fishermen, but we have no idea if they'll take you on. We really don't know anything. We're taking such a risk."

Wayne turned back, his free hand tapping his jeans, the whites of his eyes cleared of the last fuzzy traces of marijuana. She knew this for a fact, thanks to court-ordered drug tests. His smile was brilliant. "It's no risk when you're doing what makes you happy. I know all I need to. Seal Bay is where I'm staying. This is it."

He launched himself out of the building, tossed his bag in the back of the car. Her father started the engine.

She looked down at the envelope. The corner of the photo was blurry—dark blue, perhaps the edge of a table, a lace curtain beyond. Her heart had begun to pound, rattling her chest, sending pulses up her neck to the soft skin behind her ear. She pressed a finger against the pulse, came away with a bead of sweat. She traced the white border of the photo, slid it back inside the envelope. She looked out the door, watched Wayne, who, for once, was talking too much for her father to get a word in edgewise. Wayne, who had spent twenty-two days in her house before saying hello.

"Silly," she said to herself, then she slid out the photograph. She stared at it a good ten seconds before the world went dark. She knew the picture well; she had taken it herself. William was two weeks old, still with white speckles on his nose and cheeks, his fist curled up under his chin, his eyes squeezed shut and glistening at the corners. He had an uneven thatch of black hair and wore the light blue dressing gown she'd picked out herself, on a shopping spree Ray had told her they couldn't afford.

Something emerged from her throat, a cry, perhaps a scream. Something loud and raw enough to draw her father and Wayne, to bring them running. The alarm on her father's face was bad enough, but it was Wayne's resignation that steadied her. He walked in the building with arms crossed, expecting to be denied. He'd anticipated nothing less than total disappointment for weeks, since she'd told him they could move to Seal Bay. Every time he'd dropped a fork or been told to turn down the television, he'd closed down his expression, uncoiled his body as if he'd already been steamrolled.

She stood, slipped the photograph back into the envelope before either of them saw it. The worst possible thing had already happened. What more did she have to fear? It was a prank, and not a very good one. Only one person could have done it. Ray had taken this photo with him the day he'd stolen his own son, and she wasn't about to listen to another thing Ray Vegas had to say. She wasn't about to believe in him.

"I slipped," she said. "Turned my ankle. It's fine now."

She walked down the stairs, ignoring her father's steady gaze. She took Wayne's arm, felt him stiffen. "No more dawdling," she said and watched his shoulders rise up despite his attempts at cynicism, watched him sway to the balls of his feet. "Go get the last of the bags. We're following the fog north."

Excerpted from Song of the Seals © Copyright 2003 by Christy Yorke. Reprinted with permission by Berkley, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved.