We Run the Tides

by Vendela Vida

  “Just checking to make sure everything’s going okay in here,” Mr. Makepeace says, sticking his head through the door.

  “It’s just great!” Shelley Stine says, her smile incandescent.

  “Happy to hear it,” he says.

  No, you won’t be, I think.

  Mr. Makepeace gives her the thumbs-up sign and closes the door. Shelley Stine’s mouth drops into a frown.

  “Okay. Now I have to get into the hard part. I don’t want to re-traumatize you, but of course our readers will be interested in your disappearances.”

  “Kidnappings,” Maria Fabiola corrects her.

  “Okay,” she says. “Tell me what happened first.”

  “It was a Thursday,” Maria Fabiola says.

  “I thought it was a Wednesday,” Shelley Stine says. “December 12 was a Wednesday.”

  “Oh right,” Maria Fabiola says. “I was thinking of Eulabee.”

  “But she went missing on a Tuesday,” Shelley Stine says.

  “Well . . .” Maria Fabiola says, and her eyes are suddenly wet. I’m certain she’s willed them to be. I am in awe. “The kidnappings were very traumatic for both of us. And the kidnapper had a thing about trying to confuse us about our dates. The place where he kept us was full of calendars, and all of them were different. Like from different years.”

  “Can you elaborate on that, please?” Shelley Stine says.

  Maria Fabiola nods with her whole body. “I can, Shelley. I think the kidnapper wanted to be the Zodiac Killer—he was like a Zodiac copycat—so he was very into horoscopes as you can imagine.”

  Shelley Stine pauses for a moment. “Yes, I can imagine. Please go on.”

  She writes something down, underlines it, and quickly flips the page of her notebook.

  “Well, he took us to this place,” Maria Fabiola says. “He made us look at horoscopes in old newspapers. The papers were from the Russian River. And he made us eat canned rabbit food.”

  “Canned rabbit food?” Shelley Stine says.

  “Well, it was canned lettuce,” Maria Fabiola says. “Like for rabbits.”

  Shelly Stine has stopped writing. She turns to me. I’m instantly covered in flop sweat. I can’t keep up with whatever Maria Fabiola’s doing. “What did the man look like, Eulabee?” she asks.

  “Long beard,” I say, and then stare at a swirling crack near the ceiling.

  “He always wore the same tie-dye shirt and he didn’t have any scars,” Maria Fabiola adds. “And he had mandalas in the rooms,” she says. “And there was a weaving machine.”

  “A weaving machine?” Shelley Stine asks.

  “A loom,” I say. I know Maria Fabiola’s thinking of the looms we saw when we toured the California missions in third-grade social studies.

  “Exactly!” Maria Fabiola says. “You saw it, too.”

  “Where was this place the man in the tie-dye took you to again?” Shelley Stine asks. She flips her notebook pages back and I struggle to see what else she’s written down.

  “Near Haight Street,” Maria Fabiola says, and again my body sweats all at once. She forges on, leaning toward Shelley Stine. “It was a Victorian house and he took us to the top floor.”

  “Where near Haight Street?”

  “Ashbury,” Maria Fabiola says.

  “You know there’s also a boy that went missing from that area not very long ago,” Shelley Stine says, sitting up. “You may have seen his face on milk cartons.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t there,” Maria Fabiola says.

  “Were there any other girls there?” Shelley Stine asks. “Was Gentle Gordon there?”

  “Why would she be there?” I ask.

  Shelley Stine turns to me. “She’s been missing for a day now.”

  “But Eulabee, didn’t you say you heard someone in the next room, a girl’s voice, and the tie-dye guy talking to her?” Maria Fabiola says. She looks at me, and her eyes signal to me Come on.

  Instead of answering I ask Shelley Stine where Gentle was last seen.

  “I’m going to leave it to the detectives to talk to you about that. I don’t think I want to say more about Gentle’s case right now.”

  “Okay,” Maria Fabiola says. “Wait. Where are the detectives?”

  “They’re coming by in a bit,” Shelley Stine says. “But in the meantime, I want to make sure I understand this correctly. So there was one male kidnapper and he always wore the same tie-dye shirt,” Shelley Stine asks. “What color was the shirt?”

  “It was red and blue and white tie-dyed together,” Maria Fabiola says. “He was very patriotic.”

  “I see,” Shelley Stine says, writing nothing down. The sweat I’m swimming in is now cold. I feel so cold. I decide I can’t talk anymore. Shelley Stine’s eyes are giving her away. She knows we’re lying. She’s having fun now, and I know I’m expelled. Spragg will expel us both and private high schools are out of the question. I picture Ulysses S. Grant High School. I think that’s the public I’ll be sent to. It’s enormous. Thousands of kids and no uniforms. I picture Gentle there, in her bell-bottoms, leaning against a chain-link fence.

  “So,” Shelley Stine continues. “What do you think was the motive for this kidnapper who always wore the same patriotic blue and red and white tie-dye shirt and served you canned lettuce in a Victorian house and made you read horoscopes from a Russian River newspaper? Why did he want to kidnap you two, do you think?”

  “Well, we’re like the city’s most glamourous flowers, right?” Maria Fabiola says. “We’re hothouse flowers.”

  “Like you need to be kept in a greenhouse?” Shelley Stine says.

  “Oh, right,” Maria Fabiola says, “you know about this from covering gardening. It’s not just that we’re kept in greenhouses—that’s maybe not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean then?” Shelley Stine asks. She suddenly looks very tired.

  “We’re the city’s most meaningful flowers,” Maria Fabiola says. “We’re glamorous and intriguing to the outside world.”

  “The outside world?” Shelley Stine says. “You mean, like India? France?”

  “No,” Maria Fabiola says. “Like the rest of San Francisco.”

  “I see,” Shelley Stine says. “Well, I better get going if I’m going to—”

  “When’s your deadline?” Maria Fabiola asks.

  “I’m not sure,” Shelley Stine says as she gathers her notebook and pen.

  “Well, can I write out what happened to us and give it to you? My thoughts are a jumble,” Maria Fabiola says. I look at her and do a double-take: at some point she’s started outright crying. “Yesterday Eulabee and I talked and our stories were the same but now I feel so flustered by recounting it all.”

  Shelley Stine rummages in her bag for tissues and offers them to Maria Fabiola. “That’d be fine,” Shelley Stine says. “You can get the story to Mr. Makepeace and he’ll get it to me, I’m sure.”

  Once Shelley Stine’s left, Maria Fabiola stands to close the office door. She’s no longer crying.

  “Well, you were of no help!” she says to me.

  “I forgot which story we were going with,” I say. “And I just got so confused when she said Gentle was missing.”

  “That can only help us,” Maria Fabiola says. “Three disappearances are better than two, get it?”

  “But aren’t you worried?” I say.

  “About Gentle?” she says. “No. She’s a hippie. She’s always missing. She lives to disappear. I’m worried about you. I need to know I can count on you. At this rate, I don’t think we’re going to make it above the fold. You need to be more supportive when we talk to the detectives. You don’t have to tell the story since obviously you’re terrible at that, but you can just agree with whatever I say, right? Back me up?”

  Mr. Makepeace comes into the office.

  “How was it?”

  “It was so painful!” Maria Fabiola says, and instantly is crying again. “Reliving all those memories was ghastly!”


  “Here are your tissues,” I say, and slide the packet toward her.

  30

  Ms. Patel escorts us back to our classes and talks the entire way, which is a relief. I need a break from the machinations of Maria Fabiola’s mind. I have French class and Maria Fabiola goes to Spanish. In French class Mademoiselle tells us that in Toulouse a restaurant would never serve a salad that required its leaves to be cut with a knife. “Those kinds of salads are for horses,” she says. Mademoiselle is young and chic and wears scarves around her neck for the purpose, we suspect, of disguising the many hickeys her boyfriend has given her.

  Before class ends, Ms. Patel’s face appears at the door. I’m being summoned to the office. The detectives have arrived.

  When I get to the office, Maria Fabiola’s already there. She stands when she sees me and hugs me as though it’s been years. “This time, follow my lead,” she says as she pulls me close.

  Detective Anderson comes out of the room where she’s been speaking with Mr. Makepeace. She’s followed by the two male detectives.

  “Hello again, Eulabee,” Detective Anderson says. “Can you follow me into the office, please?”

  Maria Fabiola stands.

  “Oh no,” Detective Anderson says. “We’re going to do one interview at a time. We’ll take good care of Eulabee,” Detective Anderson assures her.

  I follow the detectives to the larger conference room, the same one we were in the first time they interviewed me.

  “We’re so happy about your safe return home,” Detective Anderson says, and holds my eyes for a minute before I turn to look out at the playground. The lower school is having afternoon recess and all the young girls are playing tetherball, four square. The same games we used to play, games with rules.

  “We would like to know what happened,” Detective Anderson says. “Can you tell us where you’ve been the last few days?”

  I watch a tiny girl send the tetherball round and round until, high on the pole, it runs out of rope and stops.

  I know I’m making a choice to not go along with Maria Fabiola’s story and I know the consequences—I’ve experienced them before.

  “I wasn’t kidnapped,” I say. “I was in a shed behind the Olenska School of Ballet on Clement. And then I ran into a cousin and went to his house in West Portal.”

  “Was Maria Fabiola with you?” Detective Anderson asks.

  “Only for a few hours yesterday. She came to the shed to find me because that’s where she was when she disappeared.”

  “Wait. She was in the shed? She wasn’t kidnapped?”

  “She was hiding in the shed,” I say, and I hate myself and know Maria Fabiola will never forgive me. I imagine the years of emotional violence she’ll unleash on me and I decide to fight back preemptively.

  “Did you coordinate your disappearances beforehand?”

  “No,” I say. “Hers was based on a book she read.”

  “On a book she read?”

  “Well, a book she skimmed,” I say.

  The detectives look at each other but don’t seem as relieved as I expected. “Thank you Eulabee,” Detective Anderson says. “You’ve saved us a lot of time, and we don’t have much. Gentle Gordon is actually missing.”

  I follow Detective Anderson out to the office’s reception area. Maria Fabiola stands and smooths her skirt when she sees us.

  “I’m ready,” she says to Detective Anderson.

  Detective Anderson puts her hand up like she’s stopping traffic. “Not now,” she says, and she and the other detectives walk out the office door.

  That afternoon my mother picks me up from school. She’s the first in line so I don’t have to wait for the parade of Volvos to make their way up the horseshoe drive. Maria Fabiola sees me get into my mom’s car. Her look is baffled.

  At home I tell my parents everything. Svea inexplicably prepares a footbath with Epsom salts and places it at the foot of my chair. My mother makes meatballs. My father shows me the letter he received from Christie’s, where he brought the Vanessa Bell painting to be appraised. It turns out the painting was a copy. “They think it was someone imitating Bell to teach themselves how to paint,” he says.

  I go to bed early again. My mother rubs my back with her long nails and I hear my father turning the pages of a book in the next room, the playroom. Ewa is still elsewhere. I can’t remember him ever sitting there before. I can see only his knees and the tips of his socks, and watch his feet tapping until I fall away.

  * * *

  I WAKE UP EARLIER THAN USUAL that morning. The clarity of truth is invigorating, I tell myself. I try not to think about the fact that I might be expelled. I go outside in search of the newspaper, to see if any part of Maria Fabiola’s story made it into print.

  My parents aren’t currently subscribing to the Chronicle so I have to walk up the street until I find a copy I can read. Almost at the top of El Camino del Mar I find a paper in the bushes. I open it. “SEA CLIFF TEEN STRANGLED—BODY FOUND IN PANHANDLE.” I collapse on the sidewalk and scan the article out of order. “Police have no leads . . .” “The death of Gentle Gordon . . .” “Troubled young woman abandoned by her mother . . .” “Struggled with substance abuse . . .” “Body showed signs of struggle . . .” “Found next to the seesaw . . .”

  I sit up and read it from start to finish, all the while not believing that it’s not me and not Maria Fabiola. Then I have a terrible thought: Of course it was Gentle. The rest of us were never at risk. Of course it was Gentle. The words become a mantra I can’t end.

  My legs begin running downhill. I run past the house where Jefferson Starship used to live and where China’s long swing used to hang above the ocean, but the swing is gone and so is Starship. I run past the house that used to give out King Size Hershey’s candy bars every Halloween, and past the house that belonged to Carter the Great and is now rented out by the president of a bank. I run past the house where a classmate’s hair caught on fire when she was blowing out her birthday candles. I run past the house with the turret, the house where, briefly, I took in the newspapers. I race past the house where the mom uses a wheelchair—we never learned why. I see my own house on the right, looking so compact between the immense houses that border it. I turn away and keep running.

  I run past palm trees and I run past gardeners with their trucks and loud leaf blowers and grating rakes. My body is sweating and cooled by the fog as I approach China Beach. My feet make a galloping sound as they race down the ninety-three steps. The beach is empty this gloomy morning. Once on the sand, I hastily remove my shoes and socks. I run to the water’s edge and the cold ocean licks my toes. Without touching my face I can feel that it’s wet with fog and tears and sweat. I stand there, on the cusp of the ocean and listen to its loud inhale. And then it recedes and takes everything from my childhood with it—the porcelain dolls, the tap-dancing shoes, the concert ticket stubs, the tiny trophies, and the long, long swing.

  2019

  We are almost fifty years old and the streets of Sea Cliff are no longer ours. The houses that follow the curve of the bay belong to the new San Francisco, to the tech giants, to buyers from abroad who, rumor has it, paid cash and bought the houses sight unseen. The “For Sale” signs were not up for long, and now the driveways remain empty and the curtains stay closed. Our parents’ generation laments the new money that’s changed the neighborhood, and we and the rest of the world roll our collective eyes.

  The venture capitalists have taken over Pacific Heights. The young tech workers have claimed Hayes Valley, Mission Bay, and Potrero Hill—neighborhoods close to the freeway so they have easier commutes to Silicon Valley. But the CEOs and the names behind the companies live in Sea Cliff, where there is privacy and unobstructed views of the Golden Gate. Sea Cliff is for solitude, for when you want to protect yourself from people. Of course, everything is extra fortified now—there are more gates, more cameras.

  But the kitchens are too small. The Silicon Valley pioneers want bigger ki
tchens, bigger closets and windows, higher ceilings, and their new homes in Sea Cliff are always under construction and never finished. They are encased in white plastic, roof to foundation—to hide the location of their tunnels and panic rooms?—while the drilling and hammering drown out the foghorns and crashing waves and every sound of our childhood.

  The houses of Sea Cliff no longer belong to our parents—they have passed away or downsized to smaller homes. We don’t live in Sea Cliff either. None of us who grew up there, or in almost any other neighborhood in San Francisco, can afford to live where we were raised—not that we necessarily want to. Symphonies of tiny violins play themselves to shreds.

  The disappearances of Sea Cliff girls in the eighties is still part of the lore. The newspapers called what happened the Sea Cliff Seizures, and the name stuck. Before the internet I was able to remain fairly anonymous and, upon meeting me, few knew I had been one of the three missing girls. After being expelled from Spragg, I went to Grant High, Gentle’s school. Sometimes I imagined I saw her in the hallways and I’d follow her until a head turned and I realized it wasn’t her—of course it wasn’t. At Grant I sought out friends who were studious and steady and my four years passed unremarkably. At UC Santa Cruz I found the work of Fernando Pessoa and took up Portuguese. Another excuse not to learn Swedish, my mother said. She was probably right.

  I married early (he was a fellow undergrad, from San Diego) and we realized our mistake on our honeymoon. We had spent months planning our modest wedding at a sheltered cove north of San Francisco. But after our friends and family departed, we quickly learned we had little to say to each other. We ate meal after meal at the same unsteady table in the same small wooden lodge overlooking the Pacific. In the span of a few days we’d become one of those couples who sit across from each other and eat in silence. We quickly grew tired of listening to each other chew.

  I felt ashamed when we divorced, just as I had felt shame about everything that happened in my final year at Spragg—my alleged disappearance, my expulsion. I had made multiple mistakes, witnessed by many. The geography of California was so embedded in my past, in my missteps, that I decided I had to flee.