“I know,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she did know or she was just saying it so I would stop comforting her. But she looked at me and said it again: “I know.”
My father’s girlfriend Tina’s hair was long and light blonde, the color of the hottest part of the flame: the same hair, the same person, I realized later, who was in his bed the night I thought the blond man had kidnapped and killed him.
I don’t remember when I met Tina, but maybe it was one day in the kitchen at my father’s Woodside house, where my mother and I had come for lunch. The people my father hired to make the beds and make his salads had made fresh whole wheat pasta, the machine still attached to the side of the kitchen counter, the pasta ribbons floured and long on a tray.
My father and a few others were playing with a toy, rolling it across the kitchen island. A small silver-painted plastic robot figure with a red helmet that rolled with one wheel between its fused legs and, as it rolled, from a dark round hole in the chest cavity where its heart might have been, sparks shot out. I wanted to try it.
Tina noticed me watching and called out to them, “Why don’t you let Lisa have it?” Her thick bangs were feathered on both sides. She had a smooth, low voice and a kind face.
My father kept rolling it, swiping his finger in front of the sparks. But then he handed it to me and said, ceremoniously, “A gift. You have it.”
Tina and my father had met several years before, when she was working at the philanthropic wing of Apple and my father was still living at the house in Monte Sereno where we’d taken the couch. She was a software engineer, warm, an introvert. Her beauty was something she shied away from, as if she didn’t want it, or care for it, and so it wasn’t notable to me, even years later, because she didn’t foster it or nudge it forward with affectations, makeup, or fancy clothing. She was just Tina.
There was a group of good people that hung around Tina, family and friends, artists and scientists, who, like her, took an interest in me and my mother, so that during the years that she and my father were together, I felt there was an extra layer of protection around my mother, my father, and me.
She told me years later that my father insisted, persuasively, when they first met, that I wasn’t really his kid. When she saw me, it was obvious that I was, but when she brought it up, he refused to discuss it.
My father invited me to come on a vacation to Hawaii with the two of them. I was in the fourth grade, almost ten. My mother and I didn’t go on vacations, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. When we arrived on the tarmac, the sky was bright white, the airport buildings were not enclosed but outside with wide brown roofs, humidity blurring the line between my skin and the air. A man wearing a polo shirt gave us each a long necklace made of many sweet-smelling hot pink blossoms with yellow centers, and we followed him to a white van. On the drive, there were only miles of charred black land, and I worried he was taking us to a moonscape only he thought was beautiful, but then we took a left toward the ocean and a circle of green.
The grass at the resort was mown short as baize and dotted with shade from palm trees with long, thin trunks, like strings. At breakfast, brown birds the size of my fist chirped in the high rafters and dropped down onto each just-vacant table, messy with napkins, syrup, and bitten pieces of toast. They hopped and picked at crumbs and squabbled until a waiter came to clear and they rose back up in unison to wait for another. Beside the pool I watched a peacock fan out, quivering, cawing. It stood still for a while and then strode away, still fanned out, in slow, methodical steps that made the whole semicircle of plumage sway.
That week I walked barefoot along the sand paths, the warmth rising up through my calves to my knees. After a few days, the dark hairs on my arms became blond to the roots. In the ocean the grains of sand and the yellow fish that were strummed up in the shallow waves were bright and clear, magnified by the water. Before this trip I’d never heard of virgin piña coladas; now I had at least three a day.
I made a friend around my age named Lauren, who also lived in California, and together we ran between lawns, meals, pools, beaches; the black-lipped fish, the one black swan, the birds and geckos. In the gift shop were cuff bracelets an inch wide, each made of a single piece of koa wood polished to a glow.
“Let’s pick one out for your mother and Tina,” my father said. They clacked against each other on the rail.
I wanted a bracelet too, but my hands and wrists were too small.
He bought me a bikini made of red cotton with a flower pattern. I’d never worn a bikini before. My new friend Lauren had a similar one, also from the gift shop, but in blue.
Tina wore jeans and T-shirts and china flats. She had wide wrists and large breasts and crouched down on her heels when she was speaking with me so we were closer to the same height. She laughed in a full way, and it made her whole face pretty. Her nose was like my mother’s, straight and small, with a pointed end that veered slightly to one side. She cut her own bangs.
Tina had a happy-sad quality and dry, self-deprecating humor. She was delighted by me, she liked me, I could tell. To me, she seemed like she was a woman but also a little girl, or could remember so clearly what it was like to be my age that there wasn’t such a distance between us. When we were back in Palo Alto and we went somewhere all together in my father’s Porsche, she would squeeze her tall body in the back so I could sit up front with him. She was a strange combination with my father, I could tell even then; he would often become grandiose about himself, leaving behind the part of him that matched with her.
“She could wear a sack, a brown sack,” I heard my father say. As if beauty was measured by how strong an obstacle it had to overcome. It was the same way he spoke about Ingrid Bergman. I watched for it, in Tina, because I didn’t think of her as particularly beautiful. Her eyelashes were as blonde as her hair. She didn’t try, and the trying was beauty to me then. But a few times when she tossed her bangs out of her face, her eyes shone in the sunlight, the color of the swimming pool, and her face opened up, beautiful, until she looked down and adjusted her bangs and looked ordinary to me again.
On the way to dinner on the white sand path that wound through the forest, Tina and I flanking him, he put an arm around us both. A hand around my ribs, under my armpit. “These Are the Women of My Life.” He said it in a slow, measured, nasal voice, like he was announcing a new act at a show. He looked up and out as he said it, addressing the statement to the forest.
I was one of his women! It filled me up with such a surge of joy I had to look away, look down at the path, at my bare feet, so he wouldn’t see I was smiling.
He leaned toward Tina to kiss her, and the arm he had around me yanked up as he leaned, so that he clawed under my armpit, fingers jerking with his steps. I wanted to stay within his grasp, to be one of his women.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” he said at dinner, when Tina got up to go to the bathroom. Whenever he and I were alone for a moment, he talked to me about her beauty, sighing as if she were far away, or it was out of reach.
When she returned, he leaned forward and kissed her, murmuring and whispering in her ear. She demurred; he grabbed the back of her head, his chair balanced on one leg. As they kissed, he pressed his palm against her breast, wrinkling the fabric of her T-shirt. “Mmm,” he said.