CHAPTER 20

.20.

“I thought you were never coming back,” the woman said.

For a moment, I was taken aback. The words didn’t sound like a lament; they were a wish. Even the tone was that of someone who felt the water was safer than the shore. And the way she said it tossed me back into the past: the rhythmic, North End sing-song of the Boston Irish lilt that had flavored so many summers of my childhood at Grandma O’Neill’s. It was a voice made of granite and sea-fog, turning every sentence into a melody that refused to leave the room.

I stood there, feeling like a ghost in my own shoes, watching them. The hug had broken, but she kept holding Jimmy by the forearms. Her grip looked like a set of iron clamps that almost suggested he might hit the floor the second she let go.

Then, those keen, gray eyes swung in my direction. She looked at me. She weighed me. Apparently, I passed. She walked over with a stride that made the tiles resonate and wrapped me in an embrace that felt like being folded into warm, thick branches.

“You saved our boy,” she whispered against my ear, the heat of her gratitude more intense than the California sun. “Thank you.”

I hugged her back. When a woman made of Koa wood decides to embrace you, compliance isn’t just the best policy, it’s the only one. I stammered something about being there, some half-baked humility that sounded thin even to my own ears.

She pulled away, her face splitting into a grin that was all sharp light and open lines. She looked at Jimmy. “Your friend here must think I’m a crazy woman!”

Jimmy actually chuckled – a real sound, not the Hollywood ghost-laugh he’d used at the Inn.

“Ray, this is Mrs. Florence Higgins. She runs this place. Birdie, this is Mr. Horatio O’Neill. He’s the one who brought me back from the other side.”

“I know,” she said, her smile lingering on me. It was a look that said she knew exactly what “the other side” felt like. “Call me Birdie, please.”

“Ray,” I managed.

“Well, Mr. Ray, if you need anything, I’m right next door.” She tilted her head toward the back of the property, the colorful silk of her headscarf shimmering. I’d had a glimpse of the tiny bungalow from one of the windows and wondered who, if anyone, lived there. Now I knew.

“Ray’s a writer,” Jimmy added, almost like a warning.

There was a flicker, a subtle tightening at the corners of her eyes. It was gone in a heartbeat, replaced by that steady, observant mask. My first instinct was to think that, to a woman like Birdie, “a writer” might mean a man who traded in secrets; in Malibu, that was probably the only currency that mattered. Had I just turned into a threat in her eyes? I couldn’t tell.

“Did you punch your uncle?” Birdie asked, turning back to Jimmy as casually as if she were asking about the weather.

Jimmy almost smiled. “No.”

Birdie shrugged, her shoulders set square. “Well, maybe some other time. There’s always tomorrow.”

My jaw dropped; it practically hit the Spanish tile. I looked at this woman – this “housekeeper” with the Boston lilt and the casual approach regarding familial violence – and wondered what kind of “job description” she actually operated under.

“Were you there?” Jimmy asked, his voice losing its edge, becoming small. “At the… the ceremony? Was it nice?”

“It was grand,” Birdie said, though her voice had softened into a velvet rasp. “If you like that sort of thing. Personally, I think your father would rather have been buried at sea, like a real Viking king. All that fuss and marble… it wasn’t him.” She paused, her gaze dropping to the glass in Jimmy’s hand. “Did they tell you what happened?”

Jimmy nodded, staring into the amber liquid. “Too much insulin.”

Birdie didn’t nod back. She didn’t move at all. She just stood there, a statue of Koa wood. Her silence became a physical weight in the room. She was pondering something, measuring the truth against the lie, and I could practically hear the gears of her memory grinding.

Jimmy broke the quiet like a man smashing a window. “They’re getting married. Did you know? This month!”

Birdie’s brow furrowed, a deep, jagged line appearing between her eyes. “Who told you that?”

“She did.”

Jimmy didn’t even have to say who “they” or “she” was. The look that crossed Birdie’s face was a silent litany of the special, jagged insults that women of character reserve for reprobates and women of convenience. It was a look that could have curdled milk at fifty paces.

“She’s chosen her own punishment, that’s for sure,” Birdie finally said, her voice sharp enough to cut glass. “That man hasn’t got one honest bone in his body.”

Then, as if she’d flipped a copper switch inside her head, the “Birdie” who thought Ole deserved to be punched became the Stella Maris housekeeper again, smoothing her skirt with hands that didn’t shake.

“Well, I’m going to get your bedrooms ready. I went shopping today – when they said you were coming back from the islands, something in my bones told me the wind would be blowing you to Malibu. Let me know what you want for dinner later, yes? It’s very good to have you here, Mr. Ray. Don’t be shy. Like I said, I’m right next door.”

And just as she had irrupted into the house, Birdie Higgins swept out of it. I stood there in the sudden vacuum of her absence, the smell of salt and soap lingering in the air.

I looked at Jimmy, then out at the dark Pacific horizon. If Birdie Higgins was just a housekeeper, then I was a postcard. Malibu was starting to feel less like a retreat and more like a different kind of battlefield – one where the weapons weren’t swords or poison, but the things people refused to say out loud.