Bug Hollow

Set in Southern California and spanning four decades, the novel traces the Samuelson family through loss, love, and secrets in interconnected chapters. The story begins in the mid-1970s and extends into 2016.

Eight-year-old Sally Samuelson watches her brother Ellis, a high school senior with a baseball scholarship to the University of Mississippi, drive up the California coast with friends. When Ellis fails to return, the family learns he has stayed with a girl near Santa Cruz. Sally's mother, Sib, a fourth-grade teacher, grows frantic and volatile, while Sally's father, Phil, a project manager at Parsons Engineering, remains calm. A woman who recognizes Ellis from a missing-person ad calls with his address. The family drives north to Bug Hollow, a communal house where Ellis has been living with his girlfriend Julia, a college art student. Phil negotiates Ellis's return. Katie, Sally's 14-year-old sister, eavesdrops on the tense discussion. At a communal dinner, Julia draws with Sally and tells her, "You and me. We'll be the artists in the family" (17). Ellis returns home miserable and leaves for Ole Miss a week early. Five days later, he dives into a quarry pond, becomes entangled in submerged branches, and drowns. Phil flies to Mississippi and returns with Ellis's cremated remains, wrapped in shiny paper with a purple ribbon.

Three months later, 20-year-old Julia drives to the Samuelsons' Altadena home, pregnant with Ellis's child. Hugo Lopez-Rafael, a teaching assistant at UC Santa Cruz, has suggested the family might want the baby. Sib insists they want Ellis's child, and Phil arranges a legal adoption in which Julia terminates her parental rights. Eva Ellis Samuelson is born the following May. Julia whispers to the newborn, "Whenever you're ready, come looking for me" (46). Phil gives Julia a check and a note urging her to see paintings in Europe. In Madrid, Julia weeps before Goya's painting of a small dog peering into vast space, then gradually rediscovers pleasure.

Sib returns to her gifted classroom after bereavement leave. She encounters Sandro Grolio, a boy who speaks at home but refuses to talk at school, and Freddy O'Connor, a boy from a plumber's family whose math ability went unrecognized. At home, Sib drinks Hawaiian Punch spiked with vodka and struggles with her daughters. She asks Freddy to befriend Sandro, and gradually Sandro begins speaking in class. When the call comes that Eva has been born, Katie and Sally insist on riding north. As the family drives through the dark, Sib allows herself "a first small pulse of hope" (77).

Yvette Joubert-Durand, a French-American architect, encounters Phil at a boarding school open house in Ojai, 15 years after their affair at the Aramco compound, a Saudi oil-company residential complex in Dhahran. While Yvette's charismatic husband, Claude Durand, was frequently away, she fell into an eight-day affair with Phil, who had arrived as Claude's project supervisor. Phil returned to the States and never came back after Ellis's death. Yvette's younger son, JP, was born 43.5 weeks after Phil left. She decided Claude was the father and kept her doubt private. At the school lunch, Phil laughs and Yvette recognizes the sound as identical to JP's. She resolves to protect Claude from any revelation.

Katie, now a third-year medical student at NYU, flies home. Sib has breast cancer metastatic to her spine after skipping mammograms for seven years. Sib reveals she plans to end her life with a stockpiled dose of Dilaudid, a liquid painkiller, mixed into Hawaiian Punch and vodka. Katie objects but agrees to be present. Sib distributes jewelry, deflects sentiment, and requests her ashes be scattered under pine needles or redwood duff. On Saturday, she drinks the mixture and drifts away, briefly calling for Hinky, the family dog who died the previous year. Phil confirms she is gone. Nearly three years later, Katie is struck by a settling conviction that everything is all right.

Eighteen-year-old Eva navigates college decisions, haunted by her family's tragedies: Ellis drowned the day before classes began, and both Julia and Julia's mother became pregnant when those babies' fathers died. Sally proposes driving north to scatter Ellis's ashes, which have sat in the living room cabinet for 18 years. Julia meets them at Bug Hollow, now a bed-and-breakfast spa. In the sauna, tensions erupt: Julia insists that surrendering her child was anything but romantic, and Sally retorts that Julia got everything yet still wanted Eva. Eva tells them to stop, and they make partial peace. Eva chooses Pomona and takes Ellis's ashes with her. Between Christmas and New Year's, the Samuelsons and Julia gather at the beach where Ellis and Julia first met and scatter the ashes into the surf.

Sally at 28 lives near the tiny town of Ingalls in the Sierra foothills, where a textile commission has led to an affair with a married stonemason who cannot leave his wife. Bill Woodrow, the county building inspector, a cheerful man with a sick wife, visits regularly, but Sally finds him too upbeat. When she falls into an old bomb shelter and breaks her ankle, Bill rescues her. The stonemason cannot come. Sally returns to Pasadena. Years later, married to a painting professor named Todd, she keeps a faint feeling she associates with Bill as a private, treasured secret.

JP Durand, a 33-year-old math professor, receives a 23andMe consumer genetic test kit from his wife, Pilar. His results show he is 50 percent Ashkenazi Jewish, which is impossible if Claude, a non-Jewish Frenchman, were his biological father. JP mourns his claim to Claude and contacts Yvette, who says she was never certain. He meets Phil, who tells JP that nothing can take away Claude's fatherhood. At dinner with Sally's family, JP and Eva discover shared academic interests. When Sally invites them to a Passover seder, JP writes back: "What can we bring?" (225).

Sally's relationship with Mrs. Wright, Sib's former principal, brings Fitz Brown, a Jamaican handyman, into the family's orbit. Fitz's mother, Linda Brown, visits from Jamaica and becomes Mrs. Wright's inseparable companion, editing her memoir and managing her household. When Linda's tourist visa expires, Mrs. Wright proposes marriage. Linda, who finds same-sex marriage ungodly, flees for months, and Mrs. Wright declines sharply. After Fitz's brother is deported in an immigration raid, Linda agrees to marry, confessing her deepest worry is that Mrs. Wright is too old and alone and their book is unfinished. In Mrs. Wright's garden, a Unitarian minister officiates.

The final chapter finds Phil walking through Oaxaca, Mexico, on the morning of his wedding to Yvette. JP's discovery of the paternity secret had brought Phil and Yvette back into contact; after months of correspondence they reunited in Oaxaca, where their old connection rekindled into a late-life romance. He reflects on his marriage to Sib, including a crisis he never shared with his children: Sib was found passed out drunk in the school janitor's back room, emotionally entangled with the man. Mrs. Wright intervened to keep Sib employed. Phil recalls the calmer later years, nightly domino games, and Sib's fatal neglect of her health. Dozing on a bench, he sees the faces of the dead and wonders if he has died. Sally and his granddaughters find him and hurry him along. A postscript closes the novel: an email from Dr. Fredrick O'Connor, now a mathematics professor at NYU, to Eva. Freddy credits his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Samuelson, with recognizing his ability and introducing him to Sandro Grolio, the classmate with selective mutism who became his lifelong best friend. He owes her, he writes, "more than I can say" (272).