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They were like two little girls on a playdate, like Sandy was about to reveal her secret doll collection, her stickers, or her mother's lacy lingerie. Jane tried to follow them inside, but once they were a few feet into the house, Sandy had turned around and said, "Go to Papa."
Once Jane was gone, Sandy pointed to the far wall, just to the left of the bed she shared with Bo. Frida had seen the grayish marks earlier, but had taken them to be Jane's scribbles: the cave paintings of a seven-year-old.
"Go ahead," Sandy said, and Frida let go of her hand to walk closer.
Of course the drawings couldn't be Jane's, they were too far up the wall. At the top, a line of carefully drawn circles, some of them shaded in, others only partially.
"The phases of the moon," Sandy said behind her, and Frida raised an eyebrow. She hoped Sandy wasn't inviting her into a coven.
"You can't just run to the store for tampons," Sandy said, and Frida understood what this calendar kept track of.
"I figured that out pretty quickly," Frida said. She didn't bother to tell Sandy that most stores in L.A. had found the needs of women harder and harder to meet.
"You can't be teenagers forever," Sandy said. "Cal should give you a child."
"Excuse me?" Frida said. No wonder Sandy had made Jane stay outside. "I don't think I understand what you mean."
"Yes, you do," Sandy said. "Lovebirds. Eventually there's a cloacal kiss."
How close had the Millers been watching them? Close enough. They had seen Cal move off of her, just before he came. She and Cal liked to do it outside, if the weather was nice. Frida wanted to sew this strange woman's mouth shut—or, better, her eyes.
"I don't think that's any of your business," Frida said.
Their birth control of choice was common back home. She didn't know anyone who did it otherwise; it wasn't foolproof, but no one she'd known had ever had an accident. And, thank God: Who wanted to bring children into this world? Who could find a doctor, who could afford condoms, let alone the Pill?
When Frida was in high school, she'd taken it to help ease her cramps. She'd loved the little pink clamshell they came in and the way the tiny tablets popped out of their plastic sheaths. But before her senior year began, Dada started having trouble finding work, and gas prices were rising every week, and the family began its Great Austerity Measures, as Hilda put it. Goodbye clamshell and a menstrual cycle Frida actually kept track of. Goodbye almost everything frivolous and easy.
By the time she and Cal had agreed to leave L.A., it seemed like no one had access to meds; only the deranged would buy a handful of drugs from a guy on the street corner. Was that really Xanax wrapped in tinfoil? Prescriptions, like doctors, were for the rich. The lucky ones, the people with money, had long fled L.A.
"I apologize if I'm embarrassing you," Sandy said then. "I didn't mean to see."
"Don't you believe in privacy?"
"Not really, I guess."
Frida didn't know what to do with Sandy's candor. She finally asked: "Why are you showing me this?"
"Because it's your responsibility. It's everything," Sandy said.
In the doorway, the sun caught the lightness of her hair, and it seemed for a moment as if she wore a halo.
"Don't tell me you came out here to die."
Frida was about to ask Sandy if she was nuts. She wanted to say it was too risky to have a kid, that it was selfish. What if they got sick? What if there wasn't enough food? What if, what if. But Sandy was already turning around. She left Frida alone in the dark house.
Cal admitted he'd been wrong, that—after spending the afternoon at the Millers' place—he trusted them. "They have small children," he said that night, once they'd finally reached the shed, just before sunset, thank goodness. As if he hadn't known about Jane and Garrett before he'd met them. As if people with small children couldn't cause harm. Frida decided not to tell him what Sandy had said. They would be seeing the family fairly regularly, and as weird as they were, Frida was relieved they existed.
Excerpted from California by Edan Lepucki. Copyright © 2014 by Edan Lepucki. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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