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Already Bella was adjusting to life with her foster parents. During their scheduled visits, she would chatter on about her friends in school, the projects she was doing in her first-grade class, and various fun excursions with the Bartholds. What would it be like six months from now, a year? Would her little girl stop asking when she could come home? However well meaning, the Bartholds didn’t know and love Bella the way Kerrie Ann did. Would they remember that she was allergic to bee stings? Did they cut the crusts off her sandwiches the way she liked? Tell her it was okay when she wet the bed, that it happened even to big girls? To anyone who knew Kerrie Ann’s history, she’d have sounded ridiculous airing such concerns. Yes, she’d fucked up. But she was still Bella’s mom. No one could take that away.
    Her thoughts returned to Lindsay. She still couldn’t get over the fact that she had a sister. Even weirder was that she had no memory of her. How was it possible for those years to be a blank slate?
    There was one recurring dream, though. In it she was a little girl again, snuggled on a woman’s lap, her head nestled against a bosom more supremely cushy than the softest of pillows. In the dream, she never saw the woman’s face. Nonetheless, Kerrie Ann knew that lap to be the safest place in the world. Each time she awoke from the dream, she would try to hold on to those feelings of warmth and comfort. At times, lying in bed with her eyes shut as she struggled to keep from surfacing, she could almost swear the woman was real, her presence was so strong. She’d even catch a faint whiff of her scent, a mixture of cigarette smoke and some flowery perfume. Kerrie Ann didn’t think the woman in her dream was her mother. Maybe her sister would know . . .
    Before she knew it, the plane was touching down at San Francisco International. Making her way through the terminal, she stopped for a hamburger and fries to quiet the growling in her belly—she’d skipped breakfast that morning—before heading for the rental-car center. She hated having to spend money on a car but didn’t have much choice. Her old Falcon wouldn’t have survived the trip to Blue Moon Bay, and if she’d taken a bus, she’d have been stuck overnight. And who knew what kind of reception she’d get?
    Half an hour later Kerrie Ann was crawling through traffic on the Bayshore freeway in her rented Hyundai, her window down, smoking a cigarette. When she reached the exit for 92, she took the ramp marked Blue Moon Bay/Santa Cruz and soon was cruising along a less traveled route that wound through grassy, oak-studded hills. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but along the horizon a line of fog crouched like a gray cat waiting to spring.
    She was approaching the outskirts of town when she found herself enveloped in a soft gray mist. Not the dense fog she’d known on previous trips up the coast but one that merely blurred the landscape, giving it the look of a story-book illustration. The tall eucalyptus trees lining the road rose like Jack’s magic beanstalk to disappear into the thicker fog overhead. Beyond stretched fields of cultivated flowers—roses, snapdragons, chrysanthemums, and dahlias with blossoms the size of teacups—where she could make out the indistinct shapes of toiling figures and several greenhouses that, from this distance, might have been glass castles. Directly ahead, a short distance from where the road merged with Highway 1, lay the sea. She could see it glinting where the sun had burned through the fog, a silvery sweep of ocean furrowed by long swells that sheared off into whitecaps as they drove in toward the cliffs.
    The damp sea air rushing in through the open window brought pleasant memories of days at the beach, warm sand scrunching beneath her bare soles. In the distance, she could hear the booming of surf. Seagulls circled lazily above the cliffs. Kerrie Ann felt her anxiety ease a bit. In a place as majestic as this,