Free Pasadena by David Ebershoff

other things, too, that separated Valencia and Sieglinde from Dieter and Siegmund. Their love of water, for instance. “Why do you suppose Siegmund hates to swim?” Sieglinde would ask. As a fishergirl she believed that wealth would come from the waves and the murky ocean floor, not from a fistful of seeds planted in a row. Early on she had learned to cast and catch, scale and gut, flay and ice, pound after pound of fish: sharp-snouted halibut, black-speckled sea bass, righteye starry flounder, lateral-keel bluefin, swell shark, mako, butterfly ray, priest, the loud black croaker, scaleless marbled cabezone, rubberlip seaperch, steep-profiled sargo, blunt-headed blacksmith, thrice-striped shiner, white-bellied opaleye, yellow-orange señorita, half-moon, turbot,skipjack, and the spiny clawless rock lobster pulled from the pots she built herself, their antennae tapping her wrist as if to remind Sieglinde that the world was hers to snare.
    “Why do you suppose at supper Papa blesses only the earth?” Her mother would say that Dieter and Siegmund would never know certain things. “It has to do with where you come from.”
De donde
 … and Valencia would set to plaiting Sieglinde’s hair and tell her the stories of her own youth.
    Sieglinde loved her mother for many reasons, but especially because Valencia had survived misfortune—or had survived it thus far. After all, Valencia had arrived in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea not by train or wagon but on an iron-hulled freighter, the
Santa Susana
. The ship had flown a Royal Hawaiian flag, and it smuggled Spencer pump shotguns with damascus-twist barrels between Los Angeles and Mazatlán; and Valencia, in 1896, first saw Condor’s Nest from the ocean, from five hundred yards out, on a run up the coast. She was seventeen at the time, indentured to the ship’s owner, a man named Moya, forced, along with a flat-chested girl four years younger than she, to comfort the captain and his crew through the roll of the night sea. It was dusk when Valencia first saw the sunset shimmering on the cottage’s tin roof. Before she could talk herself out of it, she slipped over the
Susana’s
gull-caked rail. It never occurred to her that she wouldn’t make shore; her arms, thin but muscled from years of shoving men away, brown from the sun, soft with a pale fur, turned again and again, propelling her toward the bluff. When she emerged from the tide—her blouse clinging, her skirt lost to the waves, kelp braided through her hair—she began to sob.
    By now it was dark and the full moon had become Valencia’s torch, and from the beach the sea cliff appeared too steep to scale. It loomed—seventy feet, she guessed—craggy friable rock and eroding sand and vines of ice plant and beach morning glory and evening primrose, their blossoms open demurely for the night. She walked up the beach, from one cove to the next, balancing herself with extended arms as she stepped through the pools of the splash zone, slipping on a loose stone, turning her ankle in a sinkhole. Each cove was more difficult to reach than the previous: rocks slick with the rising tide and red sea urchins, with skittering hermit crabs, with the greasy Pacific laver, with sea cucumbers like banana peels on her path. One cove had a secret cave in its wall, a dark room in the stone that looked like a nave, Valencia thought,frightened and moving on. Ramparts of rock isolated each cove, loose scree obstructing her. Eventually she became trapped by an impassable cliff that thrust itself up from the sea. Her attempt to scale it ended in a pair of bloody palms. Valencia turned around.
    The tide was rising quickly, the waves exploding, so much louder than the Spencer shotguns the captain had shot off the starboard rail when showing his crew what he would do if a customs agent tried to board his ship. She worked her way back, past the cliff where she had seen the cottage, and beyond, hoping to find a beach where the bluffs turned to hills