December 25

RAMONA IN MALIBU...

F OR THE FIRST TIME IN A VERY LONG TIME, OR PERHAPS EVER, Ramona woke up in a bed that she didn’t quite recognize. At least here, the first thing that she smelled was coffee. In the midst of rumpled sheets, she looked over to her left. She was alone with just the gently sloshing sounds of the ocean outside the window. It could have easily been Chelsea’s bed, but the view was different... and, also, the coffee. She made quick work of collecting the pieces of her whereabouts. Malibu... last night, she was with Jay, snow... oh yes, there was snow... and then drinks and music and the fireplace... oh and those hands, yes, those hands of his led to... here, the bed she was in quite comfortably.

She draped the loosened top sheet around herself—creating a plain and inartful ruched white dress—and waddled in a tight shuffle in the direction of the smells. It was easy to follow Jay’s own wall of windows. Out of the bedroom, on the opposite side of the living room behind the far wall, Ramona found Jay in the kitchen, stirring the contents of a French press.

“She is risen,” he said, as if cause for celebration. “Merry Christmas.”

“What is that, like a holiday mash-up?” Ramona bantered back with a smile.

“I’m just commemorating your interesting choice of attire.” Jay turned away from his stirring briefly to wink at her.

Ramona laughed. “Touché...”

She watched as he pushed the plunger down in the glass cylinder and, after a beat, poured the dark liquid into a mug he handed to her.

She waited until he’d poured his own mug and then made a gesture toward him. “Merry Christmas to me, then.” The mugs clinked. Sipping the steaming coffee, unsweetened and black, reminded her of work, which reminded her of Chicago. And that by now her family would be sending a cascade of texted greetings if not calls, which she was surprised not to have heard already. “My purse,” she mumbled clumsily, rustling in her sheet-dress back toward the living room. There weren’t many places to look, and she found her bag neatly nestled into the sofa near where she’d been the evening prior. And of course, fishing into her pocketbook produced a completely dead phone, black screen and all.

Jay offered her a charger, and within five minutes the device came to life with such continual insistence of noise that Ramona returned to it, expecting messages from her parents, and perhaps her brother, and of course Carlos and Latrice. Instead, there were about twenty messages from her mother, from Carlos, her father even, and all of them saying effectively the same thing: Where are you, Ramona? And there was, for the first time in weeks, a message from Malik. What was it about men? she thought. They all seemed to smell the moment that you’ve moved on. Except, Malik’s message was not about getting back together. It read:

MALIK: You didn’t tell your parents we broke up?

How did he know? And then she started scrolling and reading, opening message by message, as fast as she could as within her the cold panic rose to the point that even the toga was nearly suffocating. Carlos told her that Malik had shown up. And then he asked if she was with a person named Jay. And then just now, a message from her mother.

MA: Ramona are YOU awake? Are you there? ARE YOU OK? Did you get THIS MESSAGE?

“Hey, is everything okay?” Jay appeared behind her, his hand on her waist. It was a gesture that would have been so welcome last night, but she was wound up, so overwhelmed, it was a stimulus she recoiled from. His face registered confusion, and Ramona’s first instinct was to apologize. But all she could do was shake her head. No. No, it’s not okay. No, no, no, this can’t be happening. No, she only had one more day. In the very real-time play-by-play of frantic text messages, her worst-case scenario was unfolding. Her family knew everything . And worst of all, her mother, her mother who’d enjoyed so much the wedding dress shopping, and the planning, the guest listing, the dreams of her daughter starting her own family, now knew it was all a lie, and worse, thought she’d been abducted. With her face in her hands, Ramona groaned.

“What can I do to help?” Jay offered.

She made her way toward the door to his deck. “I just... need some air.” It was all she could manage to say. She shuffled her way outside to the deck, holding her phone. Deep breaths in... and out... she tried to take, but standing squarely at the convergence of all your bad decisions, there’s no effective way to calm down. She couldn’t tell Jay what had happened. How would that even sound? My family just found out that I’d been pretending to still be engaged. She could call Latrice, or Carlos. Who had the most information? Or she could reply to that text from her mother, rather than risk a search-and-rescue effort that would make this officially the worst possible day of her life.

She started typing a message to her mother and hit send.

RAMONA: I’m [very] safe. I’ll call you in a bit.

Immediately the three dots appeared. It was clear that her mother had been sitting by the phone. It wasn’t the way that she’d wish for anyone to be spending Christmas, not on her account. Next, was a call to Carlos. He answered on the first ring. She needed to fix this, and quickly.

“Moe, where are you? For real, all night I’ve been calling you.”

“I’m fine. My phone died.”

“Yoooo, Malik showed up last night at Ma’s party. It was some shit. But you know I handled business. And Chelsea said some woman named Joan was the one who called the po-po on you.”

“ Joan? ” Ramona spat out her disbelief. “Jooooaaaan? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, Joan, that’s what Chelsea said. You with her?”

She was shocked, positively stunned. But Joan’s lies were the least of her problems for now. Immediately, Ramona had to address the aftermath of her own dishonesty. “No, I’m with...” She paused and looked around her. Jay was indoors. “I’m with another neighbor,” she whispered heavily. “Jay.”

“Oh shit, Ramona!” Carlos sounded almost giddy. “She did say you might be with a guy named Jay. And I was like, naah, not Moe. For real? In Malibu? And with Malik there checkin’ for you last night?”

“Well... it’s a little late for that...” Ramona thought back to the previous evening with Jay.

“I’m not even gonna ask. ’Cuz last week you were sure planning a wedding.”

Ramona’s face burned hot in the cheeks. “I know, Carlos, but sometimes... things... change—”

“Very quickly, damn!”

Ramona shook her head and sighed deeply. Carlos was the last person she needed to explain herself to. Reaching deep for composure, slowly, again, she started speaking. “Let it go, Carlos,” Ramona warned. “Before I call Ma, what else do I need to know?”

True to their relationship, Carlos dropped the chiding and filled Ramona in quickly. The details of Malik’s reappearance, the conversation that followed, and exactly how deep the shit was that Ramona was wading in. He explained that when Chelsea had finally told the truth and revealed that Joan was “the caller,” as it was, she tried to assure everyone that Ramona was safe. But the panic caused by Ramona’s unavailability didn’t de-escalate until later when Chelsea informed Carlos—via text by the way, because by now he’d stopped speaking to her—that Ramona’s whereabouts (per Joan) were likely with someone else.

“Is she mad?” Ramona asked her last but most important question. The real one, the one she dreaded most. Everything else was secondary. Because in this moment, it was clearer than it’d ever been that the only thing she’d wanted to do, even by coming across the country and hiding in a place called Malibu, was to avoid being a disappointment, or a waste, or worst of all a failure.

Carlos told Ramona that her parents were noticeably shaken to discover the lengths she had gone to conceal her breakup with Malik, especially finding out in the middle of a Christmas party. “But Ma seemed relieved to hear that you were likely somewhere you wanted to be,” Carlos said. “You know her though. She’s not going to rest until she hears from you herself. Maybe she’s not mad, just hurt. Either way, you need to call her. You’ll find out.”

“Wow,” Ramona said, registering honest bewilderment. “Absolutely nothing in what you just said was reassuring, and yet, I get the sense that you’re trying to comfort me. Thanks, Carlos.”

“Aye. It is what it is, Moe. Oh, and Merry Christmas.”

The irony forced a reflexive laugh and a flat “Right... Merry Christmas” from Ramona before she ended the call with Carlos. After a last deep, exhausted sigh, she leaned on the deck railing still wrapped in a sheet, gazing across the Pacific searching beyond the horizon for tomorrow, even though she had no choice other than to figure out what to do today .

CHELSEA IN CHICAGO...

T HE LAST THING THAT C HELSEA REMEMBERED FROM THE NIGHT before was sending a message to Carlos. Or maybe it had been more than one message. Perhaps she sent five, or six, or ten. She couldn’t quite recall and was scared to look at her phone. For a while, the entire universe of people she knew in Chicago believed that one of their beloveds was missing. So, Chelsea did what she could to give them comfort, even if that meant squeezing out the secret she’d tried so desperately to hold. And she hoped that telling Carlos what Joan said, that Ramona was likely with Jay, had provided some comfort. But she had no idea, because last she checked, Carlos still hadn’t replied. In the silence, achingly honest now, Chelsea realized that it wasn’t just out of obligation to Joan that she managed to keep what she knew undisclosed for so long. It was to her own benefit as well. Chelsea had needed Ramona to stay, and if Ramona knew that the person next door was the person who... well... did what Joan did, she would have left. Who wouldn’t have? And while she hoped that the rest of the trip would have in some way made up for that horrible beginning, it was obvious to Chelsea now that she’d under-accounted for its effects on Ramona.

Perhaps it was this self-centeredness, rather than the secret she kept, that had frustrated Carlos. It stung when he told her that she’d missed the point about the patrol, but not because she immediately understood what he meant. She heard him, even in the haze of the evening’s prior merriment. She could feel his pain when he spoke about how nothing about being “patrolled” could be considered “harmless,” and that it wasn’t ever, ever experienced that way. That the stress of the threat was itself a harm—the life-and-death idea of what could happen, carried day in and day out, reinforced by what has happened and keeps happening, so many, many times. To that, she couldn’t relate. Because she hadn’t felt it, not like Carlos did, or Ramona did. And Chelsea realized then, when the pricking of tears came and the room blurred before her, the thought in her mind had struck a vein of deep-buried truth, that in thinking only about what the patrol meant to her, she actually had missed the point.

So, in her time alone, curled up on Ramona’s sofa as she hugged her arms around her shins and dropped her chin upon her knees, Chelsea searched herself for a memory, or an image, anything that could connect her again with Carlos. Across from the window that overlooked the frozen lake, she saw not through the tears in her eyes, or even through the glass outside. She viewed with her mind’s eye, backward through her memories, trying to imagine a time when she’d felt less than safe, and what had made her feel that way.

All that came to mind, again and again, were times when she lived downtown—when she and friends were too silly or too drunk to fully absorb the risk—and felt young and wild, but never felt totally free. As women, at night, the downtown spaces often felt like places they wanted to claim and enjoy but didn’t belong to entirely, because no one would or could protect them there, not fully. It was not safe the way she felt in Malibu, a place that was hers. And that was the point, wasn’t it, that for Chelsea, there was a Malibu. And it was safe all the time and welcoming all the time to her—but it hadn’t been to Ramona. And that’s why Ramona wanted to leave.

And that’s why Chelsea didn’t .

That was why she’d gotten stuck there; yes, she was stuck, she could acknowledge this now. Because after losing everything, and the entire base of one’s stability, so suddenly as with her parents and then her career, she had also lost the gumption to dream, to be silly, to be wrong, to be fearless. She’d clung to a rare privilege of safety—a bird whose fall from the nest focused its hope on getting back onto the branch rather than taking to the sky.

Inside of Ramona’s condo twelve floors above the city, you could almost forget it was Christmas—if you hid away your phone (as Chelsea had) and turned the television off (she only watched streaming anyway), and didn’t look out the window, although it was quiet outside and the lake was frozen and still. Chelsea rubbed her temples; her sleep-matted hair was a fireball, and her head was throbbing to the beat of a song she did not care to know. It was a rough morning. Chelsea looked like she’d been on the losing end of a battle, and in some way, she was. She’d endured the moment when your heart’s broken open by a force so subtle, so unintentional even, that it slips right past all of your defenses. When had it happened? For Chelsea, it was impossible to tell, only that something was quite different. She was different, and people that she’d never met before all of a sudden felt like those who she couldn’t bear living without. This was heartbreak, and this was also love.

Chelsea felt like she was without Carlos. It was an event to her—certainly not nothing, or what does it matter anyway, I’m leaving tomorrow . A catastrophe instead. A loss, something to mourn, or fix, or cling to like the string of a balloon in the wind. What if this person was the rest of her? The door to her future self? The key that unlocked the prison where she had caged herself since the day of her parents’ passing? So, without word from him, not yet at least, to her last message of Can we please talk, I’m sorry —words wrenched from the clutches of pride—she decided to do what she’d been accustomed to doing, to hold on to that string, to prevent the memories from fading. To stop the love from leaving fully, she painted it. Or in this case, she resumed painting him.

Chelsea rummaged until she exhumed the canvas she’d tucked into the back of a closet following the close call after her first night with Carlos. She’d only managed to render one eye to completion but had sketched the rest of his face in the scene that she wanted to depict, the full moment she wanted to capture, that one in the gallery, when he confronted her with her own truth.

She resumed her mix of paints from the colors she’d purchased. Red and yellow to make the oranges, plus a touch of blue for certain browns. Of course, she had the burnt umber as a base for the eyes, to match that specific color of iced coffee in the sunlight. The beautiful browns of Carlos, the brightness of his countenance, she meant to capture it, so she could never forget. The bristles of her brush swirled in the paint, dipped in the water, ran in colors, left textures and marks on the canvas, built up dimension, shadows and light, contour and shading, lines of foreground and background. She was painting again, she was creating, doing art, going to that place she hadn’t been in so long, the one within her that was as wide as the ocean and deep, a pool of inspiration connected to everyone and everything. In every brushstroke she was painting the whole world.

All day, Chelsea painted and cried sometimes, happy tears and sad tears, remembering and reliving times of this week past and the distant past. She needed to mourn who she’d been, what she’d lost. There’d been so much loss, as she knew so well. But there was now something new, a rebirth she was painting. She was confident again, felt the remembering in her hands, her arms, the control, the vision, the execution of a masterpiece.

It was dark outside when she finished. She admired the painting, seeing the subtle changes in the colors as it dried, as was inevitable. Nothing ever stays the same. For an artist, nothing is ever done, no story is ever complete. But it was settled and time to stop, to release it. She pulled out her phone again, finally, from where she’d placed it. And she decided to send one last photograph, her Christmas gift, to Carlos. It was her message after I’m sorry . It said everything she’d ever had to say. It was painted in there, mixed with tears of joy, and of pain, and... of love—for his eyes to see. She snapped a single photo, placed it into a message, and hit send.

RAMONA IN MALIBU...

F OR AS LONG AS R AMONA RESTED ON THE RAILING OF J AY’S DECK, just doors down from Chelsea’s place, as hard as she thought about it and willed another solution to arrive, there was no other thing to do. She would face her family. She would have to speak the words, the truth. And she would have to face the consequences. She’d come so far from that day at the office, holding a coffee mug then, staring at the real snow falling outside and wishing she was elsewhere. Despite so much that had happened since then, the quandary she faced was the exact same. She’d tried running to the farthest reaches of the land, but even here she couldn’t run far enough away from the truth.

Grateful for the space that Jay gave her, she exchanged her sheet for her regular clothes and gathered her belongings to return to Chelsea’s place. Jay dropped her off, leaving reluctantly, with a concerned look and a promise to check on her later. Although she liked Jay very much, still, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be checked on, or frankly, if she even deserved it. Leaving now, she could avoid telling him the truth. She didn’t owe anything more to anyone. Not to Jay and certainly not to Joan. Imagining Joan’s blue eyes somewhere nearby, surveilling her every move, Ramona hurried into Chelsea’s house with an uneasy feeling of being watched. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to leave Malibu, even if that meant going back to Chicago.

Latrice had gotten her into this calamity of a situation, or at least had been her prime enabler. So it was Latrice who she dialed first and who thankfully answered, sounding like she’d heard about none of the prior evening’s drama.

“Oh my god, please tell your mom I’m sorry I had to miss the party,” Latrice said, upon answering. “Even though you never did forward that invite, I still had to work,” she continued. So, for sure she hadn’t heard , thought Ramona, because Latrice hadn’t been there.

“Malik showed up,” Ramona grumbled.

Of course, Latrice was surprised. “Whaaattt? He had the nerve to show up to your mother’s house? He got invited, and I didn’t?”

“Latrice, you were invited. My mother just didn’t have your number.”

“Oh damn, but she had Malik’s.”

“And she didn’t know we broke up, so... he was still on the group text. I guess he thought it was all good.”

“But, Moe, he just came to hang out? Who does that? Not even some grand gesture or big apology? No dramatic scene, no ‘I’m coming to get my wife,’ with all the tears and shit?”

“Knowing Malik, he just came to eat. But everyone knows everything now. And, of course, my phone died in the worst part of it.” When Latrice asked how everyone found out, Ramona had a chance to explain about Joan, “the pastry lady,” as Latrice called her.

“And she never once told me she was the one who called the patrol,” Ramona added. “Not once. So she was just spying on me the whole time?”

“How sneaky ,” Latrice said. “That’s some terrible shit, Moe, pure trash .”

“I don’t want it, send it back,” Ramona replied begrudgingly.

Latrice laughed, and in spite of the circumstances, after a beat, Ramona did too. Because, when it all falls apart, most of it your own fault, what do you do? You can laugh or you can cry. Ramona chose to laugh until her own tears came, because that was the only thing that felt good then, that was light, and allowed her to breathe.

“Girl, let it be the start of an era,” Latrice said. “Your send it back season. And your mom?”

“Calling her next.” Ramona sighed heavily. “Any suggestions?”

“Well, there’s only one thing you haven’t tried at this point. You could tell the truth... the whole truth.” Latrice left a pause of silence, which Ramona presumed was for effect. There was honestly nothing for Ramona to protest. The truth was the only way forward, the way back to Chicago, out of this sleepy town of Malibu, where everyone seemed to be lying, or hiding, or tending the gates. Ramona, wanting to be nothing like Joan, decided that she should of course come clean, including to her mother, her father, Malik, Jay even, and most importantly to herself. But she didn’t know the right time for any of those conversations.

After a few more words of encouragement, interspersed with Latrice’s admonishments directed to her young nieces and her nephew who Ramona could hear clearly running wild in the background, Ramona and Latrice ended their call.

Nothing more stood between Ramona and her most important thing to do—call her mother and father, but really her mother, and finally tell the whole story.

In sum, the call did not get off to a great start.

“Ramona, where are you?” Ramona’s mother, who had only recently learned to use the video feature on her smartphone, insisted on a video call, which was understandable, but unexpected. Melba was certainly not looking at the camera, and most definitely not even squarely at the screen, which completely distorted her head in Ramona’s frame, making her mother’s forehead look much larger than the rest of her face. But all of her was bobbing and weaving back and forth, one eye to the next, as if the view of Ramona in her phone wasn’t dependent solely on how Ramona was holding the camera.

“I’m in Malibu... Malibu, California. Ma, look.” Ramona flipped the view on her device to show her mother all around the compact living room area of Chelsea’s house. In one quick sweep, she showed the living area, dining and kitchen areas, and then back around to the view, of course the view, out of Chelsea’s wall of windows to the Pacific Ocean past the deck.

“Is that... That’s the ocean? Right there? Look, Phillip...” Ramona’s mother in the screen of Ramona’s phone switched to her father, whose glasses and balding hazelnut of a forehead then bobbed in the same choreography as her mother.

“Hold it back some, Melba,” her father said. And Ramona watched as the phone image of him zoomed back a bit, shaking her head because by this point her parents should have been more familiar with technology. “Well now, would you look at that...” Her father sounded stunned, but recovered quickly in the way that old-school Black men from the Midwest were wont to do when it came to maintaining a particularly stoic equilibrium. But his reaction made Ramona cognizant of the actual splendor of her view and wish that she’d been able to share it under different circumstances than these. After another sweep, which took a few moments, she turned the camera view back to her.

“Hi, Daddy.” Seeing her father there, Ramona pushed back her own tears, imagining how upset he must have been, just thinking that something had happened to his baby girl. It was concern she never wanted to cause. He looked serious. With furrowed brow, he leaned into the screen.

“You all right, baby girl?”

“I’m fine, Daddy,” Ramona said, hearing the little girl reply in her own voice.

“Okay, then,” he said. “See you when you get back. Merry Christmas.” And in his red checkered shirt and Christmas suspenders, he got up from wherever he was sitting—which looked like the couch in her parents’ sitting room upstairs—and started to walk away.

“Phillip!” Ramona’s mother called after him, “You don’t have anything else to say?”

“She said she’s fine, Melba,” Ramona heard him say from far away and outside of the frame of the screen. “I’ll see her when she gets back. Let her enjoy the rest of that trip.”

Ramona’s mother turned back to Ramona with a look on her face of mild annoyance, but it seemed not to be directed at her.

“Ramona, I’m just so sorry you... felt like you couldn’t tell us... and, well, I’m just glad to know that you’re okay... and... well, somewhere safe.”

Ramona’s guilt swelled. She’d fully expected that her parents would be upset, enraged even. But she hadn’t anticipated how much they’d be palpably hurt. And with that realization, a mixture of relief and also regret swirled in her. And she knew then, especially, that she was going to cry. She would cry on the phone now, because she couldn’t help it. But she would sob later. And as the first tear welled from her, from the back of her throat to the corners of her eyes, the worry on her mother’s face blurred.

“Ma, I’m so sorry.” And Ramona meant it for everything. In the way she’d apologized when she’d had her bike stolen when she was eleven, when she’d lost the spelling bee, or when she’d gotten her freshly pressed hairstyle wet when caught in the rain, she apologized now, because it hurt her the most to hurt anyone else, even when she was the one who needed the tending.

“Ramona...” In just one word, the name of her daughter, Melba incanted the hopes and the dreams of a mother—that the world would treat her daughter well, that she would find a place in it as she desired. That she would be free and happy, so happy, that the smiles of her childhood would be with her always, even when they were apart. And deep down somewhere, Ramona heard this.

“I know,” Ramona replied softly.

“I’ve always wanted more for you than anything I’ve ever had. That your dreams would be bigger than mine, that your world would be beyond my imagination. And that would be worth anything to me. Do you understand?”

Ramona sniffled. With a staggered breath, she did reply. “I understand.”

“Good.” Melba shifted on the screen in front of Ramona, and then her face crinkled into an expression of concern. “So, you’ll be spending Christmas alone?” Her mother sounded genuinely worried.

Ramona exhaled deeply. She thought of Joan’s invitation, which wasn’t something she could even consider. But to say as much would have caused her mother even more concern. Then she thought to Jay, and she looked out at the water, remembering that she’d found a new part of herself out there, and how that’d come to be.

“I’ve actually made some new friends,” she said, and then considered her words. In speaking of Jay and the ocean, Ramona wondered, with the time she had left, if this would come to be true.

CHELSEA IN CHICAGO...

C HELSEA SEEMED TO KNOW THAT THE IMAGE SHE SENT C ARLOS, the one of him through her eyes, those of a lover, would spark his response. There is a language of artists beyond words that reaches the heart directly. This, Chelsea was aware of and drew upon most urgently in her painting. But this language costs for its use. It requires all of one’s energy to access. After doing so, Chelsea was spent. She’d fallen asleep on the sofa in the living room, in the silence of the evening with no sound from the extinguished television on the wall or the quiet, frozen lake below. Everyone else was making their holiday merriment sheltered indoors from the cold, with the ones that they loved or makeshift versions so as not to be alone on Christmas.

So, although she knew she would hear from him, she was startled to hear Carlos at the door, knocking. But it was him, it had to be. She knew it before she answered. She had hoped for him to come. Hearing the knock, she awakened, half groggy from a nap of complete exhaustion, and didn’t even bother to ask “Who is it?” Chelsea was certainly going to answer the door.

Seeing him on the other side of the door when she pulled it open, her body flooded with the force of relief. Carlos, in the splendor of all his beautiful browns, was standing before her. This time, again his eyes held kindness and connection in them and all of the warmth that she remembered. Time and her apology, perhaps, her acknowledgments of what he explained and the work of understanding—it had made an opening for them, one to talk.

She only realized she’d been holding her breath when he walked through the threshold as if he was going to stay for a while. Only then did her body finally relax. Her shoulders lost a half an inch of their height, as she subconsciously braced herself for some kind of disappointment, any kind. While Chelsea had become used to losing things lately, it was much more uncommon to find them again. Like she’d been finding herself, recovering that portion that Carlos awakened that day in the gallery.

“Ma sent me,” Carlos said. “No way she’d let you stay here alone. Not on Christmas.” In his hands he held a plate wrapped in foil. “I brought this for you.” Carlos lifted his arm up, the one with the plate. “And this.” He brought up his other hand, holding a small, nondescript brown bag, folded across the top like it could contain a sandwich or a treasure, although for Chelea his presence was miracle enough.

“Thank you.” Chelsea reached out to take the bag and the still-warm plate. Even with delicious smells drifting upward, she hesitated, unsure of what to do next. Right then, she was holding all the possibilities of what each of these could be, delight and disappointment, elation and something far worse. Gifts also came with an obligation, to demonstrate at least some kind of liking for them. Given the fragility of their reunion, this was a game of gift and giver that Chelsea did not want to lose.

Carlos took the plate from her hand. “Okay for me to come in?” Chelsea nodded, and Carlos headed toward the kitchen with the plate and deposited it on the top of the island counter. “I’m telling you, there’s some good stuff in here. I hope you’re hungry.” He walked back over to Chelsea and pointed down to the bag she was still holding in a bit of stunned immobility. “Open it,” he said.

Reanimated, she very slowly unrolled the folded top of the bag in her hand and reached in to circle her fingers around its contents. A tube? A small tube of something? She pulled it out of the bag and saw a tube of paint. A blue color, PB86, an unfamiliar shade whose name she did not know.

“It’s super rare,” Carlos explained. “The first new blue in years.”

“Blue, a new blue?” Immediately, Chelsea thought back to the gallery, the painting that Carlos showed her, the one that was his favorite.

Carlos nodded. “You can do a lot with blue. And this one’s special. A new color for a fresh perspective.”

“How’d you get this?” Chelsea asked. She knew the rarities of special paints. Elusive colors could cost a hundred dollars a tube or more, and then be sold out indefinitely. Something like this, something new and rare, would have been difficult to procure. It felt like she held gold in her hand, and for an artist, the right color could be. An open door, a fresh perspective, the difference between work that sells and doesn’t sell in a market of arbitrary prices based on how inspired one is to pay.

Carlos smiled. “I know a guy.”

And then Chelsea laughed, and as that laughter rippled through her, she felt such a release, a fresh buoyancy lightening her entire body. She could talk to Carlos about anything, she knew this now. Well, almost anything. There were things she still dared not ask, not for fear that he wouldn’t answer, but for fear that he would. But for now, he was here, lost and found, and Chelsea hoped not to lose him again.

RAMONA, BLUE IN MALIBU...

R AMONA EXPECTED RELIEF TO FEEL MUCH BETTER. C URLED UP she was, in Chelsea’s bed, with the shutters partially closed out of concern about snooping Joan next door. Chelsea’s bed was particularly well-made for moping, as it was plush and deep in pillows and bedding also. A person could stay buried there for days. Ramona, however, only needed to make it through twenty-four hours. Although the ocean called her from outside the window, and the sun still shone, and it was still Christmas, Ramona was wrapped in her feelings as much as she was the comforter and sheets.

She pulled the sheet up over her head and kicked her feet against the bed beneath her. She wasn’t usually one for dramatics, but she was alone. Really alone, in Malibu, single for sure now, facing weeks ahead of actually unraveling wedding plans, confronting the reality of starting over, at least personally. And wasn’t this her biggest fear, facing a life of unforeseen circumstances? And now, only one possibility remained, the one that Ramona had been trying to outrun—that Malik was possibly not the person for her, and never was. That maybe the love they’d fallen into was more like a groove of habit. That the proposal he offered was more about “knowing a good woman when I see one,” and less about knowing anything specific about her. And that maybe getting married had been more about the getting than the being .

The ocean was noisy outside, the waves and the seagulls. Inside the small bedroom, with the windows covered, Ramona was starting to feel suffocated by the weight of not just her thoughts but the piles of bedding she’d burrowed beneath. Even this, this moment wasn’t what she wanted. She imagined that she’d spend her last day basking in the sunshine, smelling the briny sea air, walking at the edge of the water, or going swimming in it, doing her best to bottle that feeling of freedom within her so she could take that back to Chicago. So that she could pour that out into her life, for whatever came next. She wanted to keep feeling like she was a person who rode on water, who could find balance anywhere, even on top of a rolling wave.

“Get up, Ramona,” she heard herself speak aloud. It was the same thing she’d said to herself each time she fell days prior, when she lost her balance and slipped into the sand-filled shallow water beneath the frothy whitewash. And each time was the same, her feet found the ground below and she was ready to stand, and to try again. This was who she was.

By noon, true to his word, Jay had left a message for her.

JAY: Wanna go for a ride?

And Ramona did, for sure, but the answer wasn’t so simple. She’d have to tell Jay something that brought her a sense of deep shame. But she owed him the truth and needed to be elsewhere, away from the eyes of Joan, her insistent and unpredictable visits. With this last escape, in the sun, feeling the breeze, she’d find a way to tell Jay the truth.

Soon after, she was in Jay’s car again, just on the other side of saying yes. They were headed down the PCH, wind whipping in the windows with the ocean on their right side.

When they stopped, parked, and walked, she did not expect that “ride” would mean standing on the pier, the Santa Monica Pier, looking up at the giant Ferris wheel that had until now just been lights in the distance along the shoreline.

“Now you can’t say I didn’t get you a gift.” Jay handed Ramona a wristband, which she managed to put on as he did the same with his own.

“When you said go for a ride, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” she said, maneuvering the plastic bracelet. “But thank you.” Ramona couldn’t help herself then and smiled her first real smile of the day.

Jay snapped the clasp of his band closed. “One of the few places open on Christmas. Good place to forget about things, have some fun.” He turned out toward the water. All around them, kids were laughing, giddy, joyful. Parents hauled cotton candy and stuffed animal toys, following along in the merriment.

Ramona and Jay entered the Ferris wheel cabin together, and the ride began to lift them slowly up along its ascent path. They sat together, their legs comfortably touched on the bench. Jay’s arm draped casually around Ramona on the backrest. She released all of her breath and relaxed into the crook of his arm as they surveyed an incredible view of the Pacific shoreline from a hundred feet in the air.

At the very top, Jay reached his other hand over to hers and held it. She turned to look at him, and he met her gaze. She left her hand there with his, to inhale the beach air and to remember that moment up there in the sky, like she belonged there. Like she could float on air. It was the right time to tell him, she wanted to, but just a little while longer , she told herself. It wasn’t at all how she wanted to say goodbye.

Later, after the sun slipped into the ocean and the lights came on at the pier, after a day of long rides and short ones, a roller coaster and a pirate ship, Jay asked Ramona if she was ready to go. “Not back to Chelsea’s,” she said. So, with the wind whipping against them, carrying the moisture-heavy night air of the sea on their left, up the PCH they went back to Jay’s place.

Ramona nestled into the cushions of the sofa in Jay’s living room. Through the windows the moon hung high and full in the night sky and draped a wedge of silver along the gently rippling surface of the ocean. In the quiet, she recalled the surge of power she encountered in the water that belied all that stillness. Ramona had experienced her own power too, out there, as if strength was drawn from her to match the rhythm of the wave.

“Beautiful, no?” Jay’s voice entered from the opposite side of the room, floating from around the corner just before he appeared holding two glasses filled with that same dark elixir. Ramona could already taste the rich cinnamon.

And while she was looking at the water, he was looking at her, and continued to do so as he transferred a glass to her hand, through a toast, and over the rim of his first sip. Outside, Ramona responded with the signs of flirtation. Inside, her body responded with the indications of attraction. She was both tense and relaxed, aroused and serene, desirous and lax. She lowered the rim of the glass from her lips and raised a finger there, not quite intending to trace her lower lip as she did. But the warmth inside her wasn’t just the drink anymore. It was a brewing of something, something that if given more time would be special, she just knew it.

“What?” Jay asked his simple question and smiled at her. Ramona raised an eyebrow. “Just that, you’re smiling. I wanna know why, that’s all.”

“My mother was worried that I’d be spending Christmas alone. I was just thinking how I’m not, not at all.”

“That’s an important thing to you?”

“To my family, of course. Togetherness means that you’re loved.”

“And what does being alone mean?”

Ramona met his eyes with her own look of confusion. She’d never considered the question. And perhaps that was what explained her predicament. What she’d return to in the shambles of a failed engagement. Starting over, alone.

“I guess I’m about to find out.”

Jay reached over and placed his hand over hers that lay in her lap. “But not tonight.”

She sighed and sipped again. “Not tonight,” she repeated.

Jay maneuvered to meet Ramona’s eyes. “You know, I’m often alone. It has its benefits—growth, introspection, life revealing all of its mysteries—”

“Like?”

Jay laughed. “Like joy, like peace, like pleasures...” While he let those words draw out slowly from his mouth, the moonlight’s reflection made the brown of his skin look like satin. She remembered touching him. His hands touching her.

“Is that how you learned... last night... how you...” Ramona felt herself blush.

“Satisfied you?”

She looked down. Jay squeezed her leg. She felt wild all over again, as if she’d burst at the seams. Still-raw desire boiled hot inside her, for so much that she didn’t ask for, but that had its own demand. It was everything that swirled beneath the surface of who she was; the calm of how she appeared wasn’t calm at all, especially now.

“Yes,” Ramona whispered.

“Most women don’t climax from penetration. That’s not a secret of life though. Just some anatomy reading... and some practice—”

“So, what was—”

“ Pleasure... is what you seek. What you ask for. When you don’t accept less than what fulfills you. You demand more, and more comes, Ramona. Until you’re satisfied.” Remembering the night before, the heat built in Ramona. The current of arousal that flowed was enough to sharpen her senses and her awareness. Her sensitivity was a dial turned up to its max.

“What about enough , then?” She could barely push words beyond a whisper.

“A place to stop, yes... but, Ramona, I have a feeling you aren’t even close.”

While Jay sounded sincere, for a moment Ramona felt a flash of anger. She had accomplished so much, in her education, her career, her life even. Didn’t he see that? She came from the South Side to the Gold Coast, in one generation, she’d done that. So, what did he mean she didn’t come close to enough? What did he mean? And as soon as that stab of anger came, like a flicker of lightning, charging her, striking her in her core, she was ready to lash out. To defend herself. But from what? What did he mean? her thoughts insisted. Ramona bit down to keep her mouth shut. The twitch of tension reached her jaw. The question surfaced again in her mind, pulling with it this time a series of quick images—her early days in school of wanting to study art, but picking something safer. Of admiring Latrice and her building designs. Of hiding her disappointments away like acorns. And then, she did start to understand. Perhaps, yes, she was far from enough. Too far to settle and too close not to ask for more.

Ramona brought the glass to her lips again, tasting sweetness, some bitterness, and then the overwhelming essence of cinnamon and spices that she’d come to love so much. It warmed her going down, loosening her again, releasing the tightness, the resistance, leaving her open to desires, to pleasures, to joy.

“So, you’re saying that I should ask for more?” She turned to look at Jay, and in her eyes provided flirtatious challenge.

In return, Jay gave her a very slow, very definite, yes . He leaned in toward her. His breath warmed her face and carried with it the same smell as her drink. She wanted to taste his lips again too, but something more pressing called for her focus. She needed to tell him the rest of her story.

“Jay... I... need to... well, there was something more to why I came to Malibu.” Ramona turned to him. She was unsure of exactly how to say what needed to be voiced and apprehensive about how Jay might think of her after.

“Is this where you tell me you’re not who I think you are?”

“I hope not...” Ramona’s eyes scanned Jay’s face for the depth of expression she could make out in the moonlight. “I just didn’t expect that this would be more than...”

“More than what?”

“More than just one night. More than just acting on a feeling...” She wanted to reach out and touch him, to hold his hand. Not tenderly, but for reassurance, for something to grasp in case he pulled away from her. She didn’t want to let him go. She was a saver, she didn’t want to let anything go, not her relationship with Malik, not the version of herself that she’d envisioned once married. But her meaning now was more than who she dated, what man claimed her, or didn’t. She’d gotten a taste of being her own, belonging to herself. Wondering what all she could do, what her body could do, and what her life could be if she just focused on her pleasures.

“Why does this feel like a breakup speech?” Jay’s brow furrowed, but he smiled also. Ramona understood, she was confused too. “Like a terrible spoiler alert. I already know what’s coming. You’re leaving, going back to Chicago.”

“You deserve to know the truth... which is, when I left Chicago, I still had my engagement ring on.” Ramona’s eyes darted to his as he sat there on the sofa. It was a place that was starting to feel so familiar, so comfortable. And now it seemed like she was messing it all up. But she had to. She didn’t want anyone to feel the way that Joan had made her feel. And she wasn’t keen on keeping any more secrets.

“So... you’re... still engaged?”

“Well, it depends who you ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

Ramona shifted against the seat beneath her. Her insides were crashing against each other. “I’m saying that I wanted to be... still engaged. I came here so that I wouldn’t have to tell my family that my relationship ended, that the wedding we’d been planning wasn’t going to happen. And I didn’t tell them because I didn’t want that to be true.” Ramona took a sharp breath in. It was the first time she’d heard the truth herself, an admission in her own words. And as bad as it sounded, it felt far worse.

“So, what are you saying? That you don’t want to be still engaged?”

“This is the first time... I’ve felt free from it. Except, I’m not free from it—not yet. But right now... all I want is for you to not think I’m crazy.”

“Then I don’t know if this is off to a good start—” To Ramona’s alarm, Jay sounded like he was losing some of his patience.

“I... was engaged,” Ramona responded quickly, trying to catch up to the words that were spilling out of her now. “We were planning a wedding. My dad spent nonrefundable money. And my mom... she just loved everything about planning so much. I felt like I was disappointing them. To not see it through... And, um, we did... we broke up. And I kept planning the wedding. Just like nothing ever happened. After a while, it just seemed like the right thing to do. At least, I convinced myself of that. Because we could always get back together. And if nobody knew we broke up and we got back together... then everything would be all right in the end...”

“So, you thought you’d come to Malibu, have a little fling. And I’m the fling. Is that right?”

“Not a fling, not like cheating!” Ramona slapped her hand on the sofa next to her. “I don’t think that he and I will... I mean...” She set the glass on the floor next to her and immediately folded her head down into her hands. “Jay, this is an impossible situation,” she said finally. “Either I admit I’m crazy, or I’m a cheater, right? And... I don’t know which one I am right now.”

Ramona sat back up to look at Jay, hoping for some sympathy. An off-ramp perhaps. But the look she found on his face crushed her. In his eyes was hurt, she could see it even in the moonlight.

“Before anything else happens, between you and me,” he said, “I need you to figure that out. Because I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a cheater. How you do one thing... remember? And I’m not playing that game with you.”

“What do you mean?” Ramona was just as surprised by Jay’s reaction. “You have women around you all the time. And I heard... well, Joan said—”

“I don’t know Joan, and Joan certainly doesn’t know me. Joan said what to you? Because she’s never said more than five words to me, not ever.”

“She just said that you’re popular... with women.”

“So now you think I volunteered myself to be your one-night stand? Your local distraction?”

“What’s the difference between a one-night stand and something more?” Ramona asked, pulling away from Jay. “Maybe...” Ramona hesitated, sure of what she wanted to know, but unsure of what she was about to ask.

“Something more, like what?” Jay asked.

“Maybe...” Ramona thought back to the beginning of her trip. To her excitement when she first arrived. And everything she thought she’d experience—how it’d been altered. Because rather than just a traveler fumbling her way through a new place, the innocence of discovery turned into something traumatic. That first night, she was ready to leave, planning to. But, she didn’t because... “I stayed here,” Ramona said, “because of you .” She spoke the words as she experienced the realization they were meant to convey. The truth rolled in for her, washed over her, and she had no choice but to surrender to it.

“What do you mean?” Understandably, Jay posed the question. His head shook as if Ramona had thrown him a curveball in conversation. But for her, it was no puzzle, just the beginning of an unfurling honesty she wished she’d always had the courage to use.

“When Joan called the patrol, when that strange man came in the middle of the night, I felt... so... violated . I wanted to go home. And I was planning to leave. But your music... You know I hated your music?” A smile broke through on Ramona’s face. “And then you invited me to your class, and that was my first real invitation here, my first welcome. You helped me find comfort and peace again. And that’s why I stayed... why I could stay.”

When Ramona smiled, Jay did too, because it was contagious. And his expression quickly shifted from one matching Ramona’s memory to a serious one that matched the mood of the present.

“So, why are we here... now ?” he asked her, earnestly. His eyes softened, seeming to plead independently for an answer, showing his own vulnerability.

“Because, Jay... you turned this place into somewhere I wanted to be... You made somewhere I couldn’t stay a place where I could find myself again. That’s not a fling. That’s anything but a fling.” The scene before Ramona became blurry on the other side of the tears that filled her eyes. She hadn’t expected to feel so deeply moved. “Only an incredible surprise that—” she managed to say, and just then a tear spilled, wiped quickly from her cheek with her hand. “I’ve had the most wonderful time.”

Jay’s hand came to meet hers, touching her face. Holding her cheek. Coming closer to her. Closer, until the space between them was tiny and then disappeared where their lips met. And after a soft kiss, Jay pulled back.

“Something more, like anything, is on the other side of decisions you make,” he said. Then, he kissed her deeply this time, more deeply than he ever had. She returned his kiss, not wanting it to end, but knowing that these were the last moments of the most wonderful time of her life.

JOAN IN MALIBU...

J OAN HAD NO EASY TIME ACCEPTING THE OBVIOUS, THAT R AMONA was not going to make an appearance on Christmas Day. In fact, dinner had already finished, with just her children in attendance—the seat reserved for Ramona remained empty. And just after they dined and opened gifts, the kids, or the adults they’d become, set off to the guest rooms to settle in for the night. Joan was alone again, not like she planned, with only her thoughts and the feral self-accusations of her mind.

When Joan received Chelsea’s message the night before, the one about ratting her out, she’d all but finished wrapping her cornucopia of gifts, mostly for her children and those who provided her multitude of very regular services—a bottle of great wine for her hairdresser, an expensive scarf for the gal who did her facials. Never a gift card, or worse, an envelope of cash. To her that reminded her of the tips her mother used to count at the kitchen table, so impersonal, so unfestive. No, Joan was very much a gift giver and considered herself a very generous one at that.

The message about Ramona being “missing” and her return message to Chelsea about Jay confirmed Joan’s original concerns about the man and exactly what she’d feared. That he’d taken Ramona out of character, taken advantage of her. That she was just another one of his conquests at the beach, a casualty of his ego and libido. He didn’t care about Ramona—how could he? He didn’t know her, not like Joan did. After all, look at how much effort she’d made.

So, seeing the lights still out next door, the shades drawn, the place quiet and motionless, even when she succumbed (only briefly!) to the urge to take just one more peek with her mounted binoculars, she was infuriated by helplessness and determined still to find a way to make the case for her virtue. Without the ability to rescue, Joan did the only other thing she knew best how to do. She gifted. Heading back downstairs, she pulled out the bright orange scarf box with the horse on top and decided then and there that this one would be Ramona’s, her own square of Joan’s life, her very own symbol of belonging. She pulled the folded card out from under the ribbon that held it in place, picked up her pen, and started to scribble a note.

Other than her gifts, her invitations, and her (very generous) donations, she had nothing else to show for the fact that she loved and accepted all people. Her children were woefully ordinary, her regular friends embarrassingly homogenous. So, what else was there to evince her kindhearted, open-minded goodness if she couldn’t make friends with people like Ramona? And now, having entirely ignored her dinner invitation, Ramona must be thinking the worst of her; of course, not that she was r—, but that, perhaps even worse, she was, God forbid, fake.

So, Joan decided that she would walk over to Chelsea’s and leave Ramona her gift and the note that accompanied it. That square orange box with the horse atop, and her words of friendship, this would be the repair solution for everything . Joan climbed down her external staircase, the wrought iron spiral that spanned through all of her home levels down to the beach below. She walked along the narrow strip of sand that remained before the tide came back in, all the way over to Chelsea’s house. She climbed up the spiral staircase there, simi lar to how Ramona had when she first arrived in Malibu. And on the wooden deck, Joan searched around in the dark for the best place to leave Ramona’s gift without it being ruined in the night hours by sea air or ocean spray. And for just a brief second, with Ramona’s gift, on Chelsea’s back deck, Joan thought about where she’d first seen her. Right here, where Ramona was doing then almost the exact same thing as Joan now. And just briefly she wondered if there was someone who’d do what she did then, call the patrol on her . And then she thought, That’s silly , because there was no one there to see her, and moreover for anyone who could, she was so obviously Joan, who belonged there, who belonged in Malibu. Joan, who belonged there... and Ramona, who... did not?

And then Joan froze. She froze still on the deck, standing on the gently creaking wood and the piles adjusting with the rising of the tide. She realized with such clarity in just that moment what she had done. She had one spectacular moment of seeing everything in a single flash of brilliance, how fascinatingly unintentional it all was—how preexisting conceptions of someone can shape your assessment of them, of the threat they pose, or the value they have, or of their belonging in a circumstance. And how that same split-second assessment determines the decision you make of what to do—whether the patrol is called, or not. Whether a hello is extended, or a helping hand, or an open door rather than a closed one.

But the awareness was brief, fleeting, too uncomfortable to sit with, an equation too difficult to solve. And rather than examining it, finding its roots, and pulling them out like she did with the unwanted hairs on her chin, or the tufts of ugly crabgrass in her garden, she left it there, with Ramona’s gift and the card attached, to sit on the deck in the darkness.