Sometimes snatches of the past floated up like shredded paper and caught me off guard, things I was sure I’d forgotten. My mother sleeping on the couch, on her side with her knees curled up like a child, a crocheted afghan over part of her face. A day that seemed like a fantasy when I was six or seven and the kids were toddlers, taking turns holding someone’s pet rabbit in our laps on a patch of grass. When it was my turn, I touched the ears, which were warm, felt the rabbit’s frantic heart and tensed muscles, how it wanted to run but didn’t. A few days later, three cop cars showed up at our apartment with a warrant for my father. They took him off in handcuffs while my mother yelled at them to stop. She threw an ashtray that bounced hard off the wall. Threw a lamp to the floor so that the bulb shattered. I watched everything from the darkened hall, all the bedroom doors closed, the kids hiding in a closet where I had put them and told them to be very quiet. A charged, stifling feeling in the air around me and in my body. After that, my dad became a stranger to us. It was only a few years later that my mother would leave to borrow fifty bucks and never come back.

But there were other memories, too, softer ones, like bits of webbing. Memories of Hap and Eden and Mendocino, how when I was ten, I found I could crouch down inside the bunchgrasses on the headlands above Portuguese Beach and be grass. I could be the sun setting, smearing light like wild honey over everything it touched. I was the Pacific with its cold blue eye, the crow in a cypress tree, flapping, talking to itself about the world. For as long as I could remember, I’d had reasons to disappear. I was an expert at making myself invisible, but this was something else. I was part of things now, knitted into the landscape. And not overlooked at all, but cared about.

—

The community center stands on the corner of School Street and Pine, next to the ball fields, now yellowed like everything this time of year. I meet Gray and his mother Di Anne there just after noon on Saturday to work on the bulletin board that should help personalize Cameron for those who don’t know her, and honor her for those who do. Will’s petition to use the space indefinitely has just been approved by the city council. A temporary sign hangs outside until a banner can be made, with Cameron Curtis Rescue Center in red block letters.