California: A Novel by Edan Lepucki Page A

rancher,” Micah wrote. Frida could tell that her brother admired his roommate, which was strange, since Micah rarely admired anyone. That wasn’t how Cal saw it; he told Frida that Micah had underestimated him from day one. Perhaps that’s how things ended between them; but it wasn’t how they began.
    The sky was turning from the purple of dawn to a dazzling blue. It would be warmer today than yesterday. Frida sighed; she should be drinking more water. If she were pregnant, she’d need to stay hydrated, and either way, she didn’t want a headache. Thank goodness the water around here was clean—or at least clean enough. She dipped her cupped hands to the creek and pulled the cold water to her lips. Out here, she often found herself dreading even the smallest physical discomfort. And now that she knew August could get her pills…well, that was just too dangerous. He’d told her such trades were a rarity. Was that true?
    Frida brought her hand to her stomach. Did she want to be pregnant? She couldn’t keep a child out of danger. But she’d love him.
    When she and Cal had first started dating, he’d told her, “The only reason to bring a kid into this godforsaken world is to give it a mother.” His own mom had died a few months earlier in that first awful snowstorm. It was a crazy thing for him to say, but Frida had loved it, had loved him, for being so mixed up. Cal. For a while after he moved to L.A., Frida couldn’t abide anyone but him. He wrote her poems and brought her vegetables grown in one of the community gardens he oversaw, and at night they made frenzied love on her narrow bed, sometimes rolling onto the floor because there just wasn’t enough space for this thing they needed from each other. If someone had told her then that the two of them would marry and come to the middle of nowhere to be alone—well, she would have smiled.
    Like Jane and Garrett, their child would have no idea of the world he was missing. He’d think this, wringing out shirts in a babbling creek, was the height of entertainment. Her kid would grow hooves for feet like Garrett and Jane had, run through the woods with his eyes closed, and eat squirrel meat. The stories of Cal’s mother and father, the artist and the farmer, would be myth. Hilda and Dada, just a fairy tale. So would, too, the terrible things they’d left behind to come here. Sandy and Bo had tried to create a new world for their kids, but it had been flawed. It was nothing compared with what Cal and Frida would build.
    She sank a pair of her leggings under the water and then rubbed soap onto the waistline, let it foam up. The creek was so cold it made the joints in her hands ache. She’d have to pull them out soon and rub them in the dirt, or else her fingers would get too numb to work. A small fish flitted across her wrist, and her heart sped up, pulling her out of her brain fog.
    She had a sudden desire to go running. She should be in better shape if she was going to give birth. She spent hours doing manual labor but nothing that really worked her heart and built up her body’s stamina. She missed that.
    In L.A., before it got too dangerous, and before the streets fell too badly into disrepair, Frida used to go jogging. On the first few attempts, her lungs had felt swampy, her breath at once sharp and shaky, and she had to stop every few feet to recover. It hurt. But she kept at it, and each time, she ran a little farther. Two weeks in, her body began to crave those miles.
    She used to go with Toni, Micah’s girlfriend, who was also in the Group. Soon after the two women met, Toni enlisted Frida to join her on her runs. “It’s a great stress reliever,” she’d said, and added that she didn’t want to run with anyone in the Group because she was trying to deal with her “Jealousy Problem.”
    “Sounds like a bad movie,” Frida had said.
    “A juicy story, of love and loyalty. It would be quite good, actually,” Toni said.
    Frida laughed, but she