Dark Water

by Laura McNeal

  “Hickey’s his last name, dummy,” Greenie said with what I guess was an affectionate tone. Her loyalty was with Hickey now. I could feel it.

  “What’s your first name, then?” I asked, clutching the seats on every curve.

  “You won’t believe it,” Greenie said, delighted with what she knew and I didn’t. She sucked horchata through her straw. “Try to guess his name.”

  “Rumpelstiltskin.”

  “Ha, ha. Guess again.”

  “How am I going to guess his name?” I had gone from being panicked about missing school to being annoyed at how tightly I had to clutch the back of Greenie’s seat.

  “It starts with O,” Greenie said.

  “Ollie. Oral.”

  “Oral Hickey! That would be hysterical! But no,” Greenie said. “Three wrong, none right.”

  I was stumped, also carsick. I couldn’t think of any other O names. Mr. Hickey downshifted with one freckled arm to take the right fork to De Luz. We were less than a mile from the trailhead if we didn’t die in a fiery crash.

  “What if a police officer sees us out here on a school day?” I couldn’t help asking. “Won’t they know we’re truant?”

  “Truant,” Hickey repeated in a slightly mocking voice. Hooted, actually. “Where I come from, we just call it ‘ditching.’ ”

  “Guess his name,” Greenie urged me. Her perfectly brown, perfectly smooth legs were pressed together underneath her denim miniskirt, which, like most things that Greenie wore nowadays, was millimeters from a dress code violation.

  “Ohm,” I said.

  “Now you’re not even saying names. Four wrong, none right.” She paused theatrically, then couldn’t wait anymore. “It’s Ormand,” Greenie said, dragging it out for full appreciation. “Isn’t that the closest you’ve ever come, in the flesh, to that guy who’s maybe a man, maybe a woman—Orlando?”

  Ms. Grant was a big Virginia Woolf fan.

  “Watch the comparisons to the half-women types,” Hickey said, though he didn’t sound that annoyed. He was flying into the dirt parking lot, sending up beige plumes and sprays of white gravel. A big middle-aged guy in a baseball cap was removing the harness from his horse beside a dust-streaked trailer, and I could tell he was making a mental note of the rules we were breaking. When Hickey and Greenie got out of the car, they didn’t walk toward the trail I always took with Robby, which was through a yellow stile about twenty yards from the car. Instead, Hickey pushed his burrito into a little white cooler that had been sitting beside my feet the whole time and headed with Greenie toward the road, which they then started to cross.

  “Where’re you going?” I called.

  “There’s a swimming hole over on this side,” she yelled back. “Hickey showed me.”

  Except for the horse owner we were alone out there. The hills were covered with purple wildflowers and the green shrubs I didn’t know the names of then but can now rattle off like a rosary. The willows in the riverbed were doing that thing I loved, releasing their downy seeds like sideways floating snow. Greenie didn’t slow down but kept right on crossing the street, one hand entwined with Ormand Hickey’s.

  I didn’t have a plan, so I followed. I slogged after them through deep sand and powdery dust and oak shade to a steep, crumbling bank where a creek joined the river and made a near U-turn. The water was deep but opaque and khaki-colored in the shade, sky blue in the sun. Reeds clogged the currents that flowed away from us and disappeared around another sharp bend. I felt like I’d reached a foreign river, one where I wouldn’t be able to find my way.

  Greenie and Hickey kicked their shoes off and sat down in the warm sunshine, and that’s when I learned that what Hickey was carrying in his square white cooler was not just his Pedro’s burrito but a six-pack of Budweiser. Cold. Pre-purchased. Ready for the not-spontaneous spontaneous outing. I tried to get Greenie’s eyes on mine when he snapped a beer out of its plastic bracelet and handed it to her, but Greenie didn’t meet my eyes as she casually popped the metal tab. She took a sip, screwed the bottom of the can into the sand so it wouldn’t tip over, and began to unwrap her taco like we were all still in Normal World.

  I heard the swish of a car on the road. The breeze was soft and sweet-smelling, neither too hot nor too cold. I took out my burrito and though I’m not proud of it, I ate with my usual gusto. The sauce dripped like it always did into the folds of my hands, and like always I didn’t have quite enough napkins to get clean. I sucked down in a few gulps the cold, sweet horchata. It was like if I finished the food, I could go back and nothing bad would happen. No one would know.

  But I finished, and we were still there. My shoes sank into white sand by the khaki water. I balled up the foil wrapping and stuffed it into the paper bag, which I then shoved into my backpack. I tried walking in the direction of the current, and for a minute the glittery water had its old charm. Nubby tadpoles flitted away from my shadow and bright green moss trailed like hair from a piece of driftwood, but when I tried to follow the river around the next curve, I could go barely fifty yards. There was no trail on this side, just reeds and bleached piles of sand and trash—more trash than I’d ever seen on what I considered the real river. The reeds trapped cups, plastic bottles, broken glass, McDonald’s wrappers, straws, beer cans, bottle caps, and cigarette stubs. A diaper had been folded into a bundle and left on a shoal like artificial pastry. It disgusted me enough to make me walk back to where Hickey and Greenie were holding hands.

  “So what’s up with your eyes?” Hickey asked, looking right into them. I was aware this was how I’d framed the question about his name a few minutes ago, so I shouldn’t have been offended, but I was.

  “I have magic powers,” I said.

  “Really? What kind?” He flipped his head the way you have to if your bangs are always in your eyes.

  “One eye’s normal,” I said. “It sees the present. The other eye sees the future.”

  “Cool,” he said, humoring me. He took a drink of beer, leaned back on the sand, and asked, “Which is which?”

  “Blue sees you here, brown sees where you’re going to wind up.”

  He didn’t look amused anymore. He could tell I was being snotty.

  “In case you’re wondering what you see in the background of that future shot,” he said, “the yacht called I Told You So is mine.”

  Hickey had clearly been spending too much time reading the poster in Mr. Fresno’s room that showed the rewards of a higher education as a mansion with a Ferrari parked out front.

  “Good,” I said. “I think I’ll take a little walk on the other trail if you guys don’t mind. The river’s nicer over there.”

  “Don’t you want to fish?” Greenie asked, a little too incredulously, I thought, considering we’d never, ever gone fishing together. “Hickey has a net in the car!”

  “Nah, I feel like walking,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” Greenie said, her sunglasses obscuring her eyes.

  I darted back up the bank, through the sand, and across the road, past Hickey’s car, past the tire tracks left behind when the horse trailer was pulled away, over the yellow stile thingy, and along the narrow, shadowy, unlittered path, which on this side was overhung with oak and willow and white-limbed sycamore. Tiny flowers bobbed slightly in the breeze. Dragonflies the color of blood hovered and then zoomed away in the direction of water. I could hear the river now like a giant draining bathtub. The farther I went from Greenie and her strange new boyfriend, the better I felt, so I ran for a while. I ran until the path took a sharp turn up into some boulders and I picked my way, goatlike, to the next part of the trail, glad that I had no textbooks in my backpack to weigh me down. Huge trees lay where they had fallen, and a lone duck floated on the water.

  I reached the place where I normally left the shady trail for the open sun of the water and found a boulder to sit on. I wanted to do this for a good hour, possibly the rest of my life. I had to think, though, of what Greenie and Hickey would do when the
y’d finished drinking those beers. Would they start swimming? Necking and fabricating? (If you ask a computer to tell you the French translation for “making love,” you get “fabrication de l’amour,” which is what Robby and I had called sex ever since: fabricating.)

  Or maybe Hickey and Greenie would just go back to school and leave me here, unless Greenie made him walk with her along the trail, calling for me like I was a lost dog until Greenie started to worry that I’d been picked up by a serial killer, so she would call the police and give a description of my yellow hooded sweatshirt, my hoop earrings, and my jeans.

  At the same moment that I decided to call Greenie and tell her I would just walk all the way home along the river, something I’d wanted to try for a long time anyway, my phone rang inside my yellow pocket. I looked at it first, afraid it was my father again or my mother standing in the attendance office, her face red with the humiliation of having a delinquent child, but it was Greenie.

  “Done walking?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Done drinking?” I shouldn’t have said anything. That’s the way it is with friends and family. If you insist on criticizing them, they want to get rid of you.

  “It was just one beer, Miss Priss. I told Hickey we ought to head back, anyway. Get there while Paula Menard can still slip us a tardy pass. Otherwise we’ll have to go to Thursday school. Or Saturday school. Or maybe even Sunday school.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Meet you at the car, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, but it came to me that I could stay there in the sunshine, on a rock, on the river, without Greenie or Hickey or anyone to disturb me. I knew my mother had told all of my teachers that my father had left. She’d made a point of it after I flunked a chemistry test. “Why did you have to tell everybody?” I asked at the time. But now I saw that I had a get-out-of-jail-free card. If I explained that my father had called and invited me to his love nest in Paris, my mother would write me an excuse note, I was pretty sure, and I was also sure my teachers would accept it.

  “You know what?” I said to Greenie. “I think I’m just going to stay.”

  “What?”

  “I need to think about some stuff. My dad called.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But call me later. I don’t want to worry that a mountain lion is digesting you.”

  I told her I’d call. Then I dialed my mother’s cell phone, which I knew she turned off during the day so it wouldn’t ring during her classes, and I left a message about being fine, just being on a walk, working some things out that Dad said that morning, and I’d talk to her later. Then I did something I almost never do outside of school: I turned my phone off.

  Fourteen

  I stood in the river up to my knees and let the water flow soft and cold around me until I felt, for just a second, that I was moving and the water was still. Then I put my shoes back on and hiked farther along the trail than I’d ever gone and I could see no one, no houses, no power lines, even. Suddenly I was in the wilderness instead of five miles from home. I stopped to breathe a little and looked across the river, where instead of reeds and willow bushes a thicket of oaks and sycamores grew.

  The Santa Margarita isn’t very deep or fast, so it was strange that I’d never explored the other side. Mostly the other side didn’t look that interesting, but these trees were tall and elegant and protective. I looked down at the river and decided it wasn’t too deep, that I could probably walk across if I rolled my jeans up high enough and used a few rocks as stepping-stones. I ended up soaking my thighs, but it was worth it: under the oaks it was foresty and dark and spacious. It was so peaceful and level that you could have pitched a tent, and as I walked around thinking about that, I realized that two sycamores in the farthest corner had an actual, genuine hammock tied to them. Not the big ropy kind but the type made of green string that looks like it’d barely hold a bunch of apples.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Nobody answered. I set my backpack on the ground and spread the strings apart, lost my nerve, and looked around. Who would care, really, if I lay down in an empty hammock? No one or, possibly, the owner.

  I listened to a pair of woodpeckers tapping on opposite sides of the river. DOT DOT DASH DOT, one went. DOT DOT, went the other.

  Then I just did it. I pulled apart the hammock strings and scrunched in. It was very, very comfortable once I was banana-shaped, and the longer I lay there, the sleepier I got, the more sense the woodpeckers made, and the less I worried about who owned the hammock.

  Had this been Sleeping Beauty, Amiel would have kissed me. Had it been a slasher movie, I would have awakened to the snapping of a twig. But when my eyes flipped open, the foresty grotto was just quiet: wind ruffling leaves and water tumbling over rocks and a hawk way up in the blue. I unpeeled myself from the hammock and slumped into my backpack.

  I had no idea how much farther I had to walk. I passed under bowers strung with wild cucumber, more oaks and sycamores, and the river got smaller and smaller until it was a tiny creek. The trail led away from the creek into a dry meadow and then to a matching yellow stile and Land Conservancy sign. I had reached the end of the trail and the dead end of Willow Glen Road, which meant I had a long way to go, most of it uphill.

  I heard a bicycle, and because sometimes the world gives you what you want, the bicycle that streaked into view held Amiel. He slowed down and I stayed hidden in the shade of a big broken tree. He circled once where the asphalt came to an end, then circled again, and then he hoisted his feet gracefully onto the seat of the bicycle. Once his two feet were poised on the seat, he slowly extended one leg behind him, and then he stood up for one breathless second, gliding away from me with one hand on the handlebar, the other straight up. He brought his leg and hand back down until he was seated again and, after pedaling to renew his speed, tipped both feet back behind him until he was lying flat on the bicycle. He lay very straight, like Superman in flight, and then he arranged himself normally on the bike and headed straight for where I stood.

  I don’t see how it helps the reproductive process to be dumb in the presence of potential mates, unless this is one of those leftover primitive responses that made cavewomen easier to subdue.

  I think I said, “Hola.”

  He looked startled.

  “That was great,” I said. “You’re really good.”

  He nodded slightly and held on to his bicycle. I tried to think how to ask where he lived. “¿Dónde?” I said. “¿Su casa?” and he waved his hand to the north. I looked up at the hills and saw avocado groves, a white house, a brown house, and a shed, all of them far apart and none of them connected by driveways to where we stood.

  “I’ve been walking,” I said, wishing I knew more Spanish. I did a little head toss to indicate the trail. I was disconcerted by his slender fingers, his bare arms, the flattish angle of his brown cheeks. “I’ve hiked really far, in fact. The bicycle’s a much better way to get around.”

  He nodded and watched me with his sepia eyes.

  “I’ve got to walk all the way home, too,” I said. “Caminar.” More of the universal finger-walking signal and head bobbing, this time in the direction he’d come from.

  For some reason, he smiled and I saw that he had teeth like dental masonry, very white and square. He looked back up the first steep hill of Willow Glen and nodded. I was hoping he’d say something to me, though I’d never heard him speak. He reached into his pocket then and pulled out a small piece of paper that was the same piece of paper I’d handed him in the morning. I took the paper from him, and before I could read it, he was doing that casual ride-off move I have never managed on my own bicycle, where you coast a bit on the pedal before swinging your leg over the bar.

  “Gracias,” I said.

  He turned his head slightly, waved, and kept riding slowly in the direction of a dirt road that curved away from the trail and around an aloe field. I st
ill couldn’t see how that road would lead toward the houses north of us, but I was desperate to read his note, which for a while made walking up Willow Glen feel like floating:

  Below the question that I hoped was What is your favorite food? he’d written in a curiously foreign printing, cangrejos.

  After Where did you learn to juggle? he’d just written, México.

  How did you lose your voice? was followed by: Tuve un accidente.

  What kind of accident? In a car? For at least five minutes the fact that he’d written back to me at all kept my mind off the walk, but the road went on and on and up and up. Like most roads in Fallbrook, it led mostly to no-trespassing signs and electric gates and watchful dogs and fruit trees. I gave up hope of walking all the way home and turned on my little black phone, which held four increasingly irate messages from my mother. When I called her, she said she’d pick me up so that she could personally kill me. I said those were terms I could accept.

  After all, I had in my pocket a conversation with Amiel.

  Fifteen

  Cangrejo means “crab,” my Spanish dictionary informed me. I would eagerly and promptly have told Amiel how much I, too, like crabmeat, but I had no way to reach him and I was grounded. My mother didn’t find my father’s phone call much of an excuse, as it turned out. The second I got in the car, she said, “Where did I go this morning?”

  “The high school.”

  “And the day before that?”

  I wasn’t positive where she’d been subbing the day before. “Potter?” I said.

  “And the day before that?”

  “I don’t remember, Mom. I don’t remember every school you went to in the past week.”

  “Work,” she said. “I went to work. I didn’t go to the river or the mall or the movies or the beach because I was depressed and didn’t want to face people.”