“After a while, actions can become habits.”
He nodded. “Look—I’ve had enough college-imposed counseling because of getting in trouble. I know the symptoms and the signs and all that.”
“I’m just asking that you take a hard look at yourself.”
“I have. And I’m a college student who isn’t hurting anybody and who is just trying to have a fun time.”
“And consequences?”
Jake didn’t reply. He didn’t want this morphing into a theological question about morality and God and sin. Ms. Peterson knew better than to drag them down that path.
“You’re not a bad kid, Jake.”
“Thank you,” he replied cynically. “You’re not such a bad dean of students either.”
Ms. Peterson sighed. She looked ready to say something else, then tightened her lips. “That will be all,” she finally said, her face and body language raising the white flag of surrender.
The moving pictures blurred alongside of him. Jake rode like a gliding bobsled unable to stop, the icy world outside lifeless this time of night. He smoked and flicked the ashes on the dirty carpet of Alec’s rickety Jeep.
The drive was longer than he’d expected. He knew Alec was drunk, but how drunk was the question. The can of Coors Light in Alec’s hand didn’t help Jake’s curiosity, but he had one of his own, so he couldn’t say anything. They had reached Lake Shore Drive after heading up I-55 and now drove between the glowing city of Chicago on their left and the dark waters of Lake Michigan on their right.
“You didn’t tell me we were coming in to the city,” Jake said.
“Sometimes the ’burbs can be suffocating.”
Jake didn’t like the way his friend stared at the road ahead, his glassy eyes serious, the usual cocky smile absent. He wondered if maybe Alec was taking him to a strip joint—the only decent ones were downtown—but he didn’t think so. Something else was up. Alec just wouldn’t say what.
They turned off on an exit and began heading down a side street. It felt crowded for a Thursday midnight. Alec drove for a while and Jake finished his beer, the second one he’d had in the Jeep. Alec started looking for a parking space.
“So what’s this all about?” Jake asked again, this time with more frustration.
Alec had showed up at the apartment an hour ago, where Jake had actually been trying to study. That had meant sitting in front of the television drinking some beers and occasionally looking at his business textbook. Alec said he wanted to take him somewhere, no questions asked. His deliberate tone got Jake’s attention, so after a few minutes, Jake agreed. His first class didn’t start until eleven anyway.
“I said no questions allowed,” Alec said.
“Come on. What’s the deal?”
“The deal? You want to know the deal?” Alec slowed down the Jeep and stared at him a minute.
“What?” Jake asked, defensive.
“I’m tired of your attitude.”
Jake watched the way Alec sucked on his cigarette and tightened the grip around the steering wheel. The violent industrial music blaring through the speakers didn’t help his mood.
“And this is going to help it?”
“Well, it’s sure going to help mine.”
“So why not go alone? Why do you need me and my attitude?”
“Because you’re part of the package deal tonight. Without you this wouldn’t work.”
Alec parked the Jeep in a narrow spot between two cars. They got out, and Jake followed Alec down the sidewalk lined with dirty snow. The windchill was below zero.
It took five minutes to reach the bar on the corner of an intersection. A small sign said Four-leaf Clover.
“If we wanted a fake-Irish pub we could’ve gone to Shaughnessy’s,” Jake said as they entered the warmth of the bar.
“First, this is the real deal,” Alec said. “Plus, we’re not going to run into anybody from Providence here.”
It took two seconds for Jake to spot the two girls sitting at a nearby table, empty seats beside them.
“Well, nobody except her,” Alec said.
“We’ve been waiting here for an hour,” Laila greeted them, standing up and smiling at Jake as if he knew what she was talking about.
Alec grinned at Jake. He gave the dark-haired, shapely stranger a hug and said a few words in her ear, then introduced her.
“Jake, this is Gabrielle, who I told you about.”
Jake let out a laugh at Alec’s bravado and shook hands with the girl with dark eyes and eyeliner and pouty lips.
“Been awhile,” Laila said, slinking up to him and sliding her arms around him.
“Hi,” Jake said, his eyes unable to help themselves from gliding over Laila as he followed her to the table.
She wore a black skirt with heels that made her as tall as he was and legs that just kept going. A fuzzy white sweater looked snug around her lean figure. Her crystal eyes followed him as he sat down next to her.
“I’ll get us some drinks,” Alec said. “Jake—what do you want?”
He gave Alec a look that said I want an explanation. Alec returned it with a glance that said You’re going to have fun tonight.
“Get me a beer. You pick.”
Alec asked the girls and then went away, giving Jake a chance to find out what in the world was going on.
“So, Jake, you go to Providence, huh?”
Jake nodded at Gabrielle.
“I just met Alec the other day when I was visiting Laila. We told him you guys should come downtown and hang out for a while.”
“You live down here?”
Gabrielle already looked a little loaded. She giggled at Jake’s comment and rolled her eyes. “Of course. Else it’d be a long commute to school.”
“Where’s school again?”
“University of Chicago. I’m a junior.”
“I met Gabrielle at a party downtown a year ago,” Laila said, detailing how they started hanging out with each other after that night.
Alec came back with something for everyone, including a round of shots.
“Good thing we’re not driving back to Summit,” Alec said, making a toast with the tequila.
Jake downed his and bit on the lime and then looked at Laila. She gently rubbed her red lips and then licked them, smiling at Jake’s glance.
“I love tequila,” she said.
And I’m in trouble, Jake thought.
“Thanks for telling me about the double date,” Jake said as they walked back to the Jeep a couple hours and a dozen drinks later.
“You’re welcome,” Alec said, almost in his own world. “You can thank me tomorrow.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Alec cursed. “You’d say no.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because of your recent bad attitude toward me,” Alec said, then adding, “and because of your high school crush on the little princess.”
Jake cursed back at Alec. “Laila’s a head case.”
“Yeah, but she’s a hot head case. You see her tonight? She really did it up for you, man. She’s looking good.”
Jake couldn’t argue.
“Plus,” Alec continued, “I just wanted to get you away from college. Just you and me, like old times.”
In the Jeep, the heater on full blast but only blowing out cold air, Jake kept the conversation going, his mind floating now after the continuous rounds of shots.
“Do you really wonder why I’ve been so annoyed? Just answer this: why’d you disappear?”
“I had my reasons. It was nothing to do with you.”
Alec drove down the side streets, looking at the directions Gabrielle had given him to her apartment.
“Then what was it all about?”
“What’d you want? A good-bye note?”
“A heads-up maybe.”
Alec shook his head and looked straight ahead.
“It’s like—we almost died that night, Alec. And I don’t even re
member a bit of it. Do you? I never even got to ask you. You were gone the next day.”
“I just know we were driving to get a burrito,” Alec said, humor on his face.
“That’d be nice on a tombstone. Jake Rivers. Died from an early morning craving for a burrito.”
“Yeah, that and six hours of steady drinking.”
“I just want to know—”
“What?” Alec hurled back. “What do you want to know?”
“It just would’ve been nice, you know—just to let us—to let me—know where you went.”
“I went to Florida to see my mom. Okay? Enough info for you?”
It wasn’t, but Jake figured it was the best he was going to get.
“Here we are,” Alec said. “Now we have to find a parking spot.”
“My buzz is going down.”
“I’ve got a little something for that.”
Jake wondered for a minute what he was talking about, then understood. Everything was happening too fast, and for a minute he felt out of his body, out of control, out of hand.
“It’ll be all right, man,” Alec said with a smile. “It might be a long night ahead. You need to have some energy.”
Alec laughed, and it wasn’t the sort of laugh that made Jake want to do the same.
It was the sort of laugh that frightened him.
TEN
June 2005
I SAT ON THE SHAKY propeller plane that was flying over the rolling hills of Napa Valley and heading toward Redding. I had flown in to San Francisco from Chicago’s O’Hare, making a half-hour layover before this hour-long trip up north. During my short stint in Illinois, I had used a number Kirby gave me to call Bruce Atkinson. I confirmed that he was still living in Redding and made sure it was okay to come see him. He acted fairly natural, though it had been years since we’d spoken.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Alyssa.
We had spent another hour talking in Starbucks, sharing a few memories and shedding more light onto our current lives. Alyssa said nothing else about her marriage, and I didn’t ask. By the time she said it was late and she needed to go, I had fallen in love with her again. On my drive back to the hotel, I realized I had never fallen out.
She gave me her phone number and e-mail and told me to call or write sometime. We ended the night with another hug, a lasting and meaningful hug. I didn’t get much sleep that night, and prevented myself four times from calling that number. I had to do the same the next morning.
But now, even though I was on my way to visit a buddy I hadn’t seen in years, I could not stop thinking of Alyssa. The thought of seeing Bruce and this all-expenses-paid expedition to find a long-lost college buddy suddenly felt insignificant. All I wanted to do was start over again with Alyssa.
But I knew it wouldn’t be as easy as that.
A 217-foot-tall blade rose high above the bridge and into the fading light of the sky. I had never been to Redding, California, and had never heard of the Sundial Bridge. Obviously Bruce wanted me to take it in, even though he was late to our meeting. I walked across the bridge several times, looking down at the calm flow of the Sacramento River.
Bruce had told me to meet him around five. There was a small restaurant at the edge of the bridge that had outdoor seating. At five-thirty I decided to get us a table. The weather was probably as perfect as it could get, with a light breeze and eighty degrees and a sky full of pockets of clouds resembling cotton balls. I was working on my second Diet Coke when Bruce finally walked up, an hour late.
“Dude, I’m sorry, man,” he said as I stood and watched him approach.
He gave me a big bear hug and then let me go. Back in college Bruce was tall and scrawny. If anything, he now looked taller and skinnier. He still had a boyish face with a loopy grin and long, wavy hair that needed cutting about two months ago.
“Been a long time,” I said.
“You bet. Sorry I’m late—I had this parakeet and it got out of its cage. The thing is possessed, man, I’m telling you. I got it saying ‘Redrum,’ can you believe that?” Bruce bellowed out a laugh. “The thing is seriously possessed. It got out and ended up flying away.”
If I hadn’t known Bruce I would have asked him if he was feeling okay.
“Where’d he go?”
“Up.”
We sat, and he looked around to find a waiter.
“You already got something? Watcha got?”
“Diet Coke.”
“Oh, all right. Sure. Hey, over here.” He waved over a young girl. “What beers do you have on tap?” He ordered a Coors Light, exhaled, and looked up at the sky. “Man, I’m tired.”
He didn’t act remotely surprised that I was sitting across from him after an absence of eleven years; it was more like we were friends who saw each other every day and were bored with one another.
He glanced at me. “You lose weight since college?”
I nodded. “Probably trimmed twenty pounds or so.”
“Exercise?”
“That and a diet that consists of more than burritos and beer.”
“Right on,” Bruce said in his unique vocabulary that apparently hadn’t changed in the past decade. “I’m on that burritos and beer diet myself. But I never gain much weight.”
Bruce was a combination surfer dude and stoner. He was the sort of guy who would have a baby face at fifty and couldn’t look angry if he tried. The long bangs made it worse, along with his catchphrases of “right on” and “totally.”
“So what do you think?” he asked, nodding at the bridge just to our right.
“It’s incredible. Sorta Blade-Runneresque.”
“Yeah, it was all the talk for the longest time. People around here don’t have anything else to do except talk about a bridge. They’ve gotten used to it.”
“How in the world did you end up in Redding?”
He laughed. “How much time do you got? Long story.”
“I have plenty of time.”
“Yeah, no doubt. I don’t know if you remember Pam—this girl I was pretty serious with after college.”
“I haven’t seen you since college.”
“Right on. Really? Seriously?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
“Well, Pam—we were pretty hard-core, and her family lived out here. I met her, believe it or not, at Shaughnessy’s. Like a year or so after college.”
“You stayed around?”
“Yeah. Actually got an apartment in the same building we lived in. Sad, right? I know. Totally sad. I mean, I didn’t know exactly what to do. I applied to some schools and even started teaching for a while but—whatever. It was nothing. I met Pam, we started dating. She graduated from a local college in the area—I forget which one. Anyway, after graduating she wanted to move back home. And this was home.”
“So you followed her?”
“Yeah, sure. We actually moved in with each other. For a few years. I got the whole pressure of marriage and all that, and it was all pretty stupid. Anyway, things took a turn for the worse. Pam actually moved back to Illinois. I still see her parents every now and then. Weird, huh? I mean, I’ve got no ties to California at all.”
“So what are you doing?” I asked, more curious than ever.
“I do sorta everything. I was roofing for a while. Doing construction. You know I bought my own house? Yeah. But after Pam left I sold it. Got an apartment. And that stupid parakeet. I had a dog but it died. Got run over. The apartment isn’t much. Hey—do you need to spend the night somewhere?”
“No, that’s all right.”
“Whatever. Come on. When are you leaving?”
“Probably in a day or so.”
Bruce nodded and drained the remainder of his beer. “You smoke?”
“No,” I said.
“Man, I want one. Most places around here, you can’t smoke. How lame. They probably won’t even let me smoke outside. California, you know?” He ordered another beer. “So, like, what are you doing here?”
“I’m actually doing a—what should I call it? Favor? Project? I don’t know. I’m helping a guy who is looking for his daughter.”
“I didn’t do it!” Bruce sounded off with a laugh.
“Yeah, I know. The girl ended up going missing—she didn’t show up for her classes at college. Her father thinks she’s with Alec.”
“With Alec? Really?”
“Yeah. So he asked if I could try to find him.”
“You an investigator or something?”
I laughed. “No.”
“What do you do?”
I explained to Bruce about my company in Colorado Springs. I didn’t go into too many details. Bruce wasn’t one of those who necessarily cared about details.
“So like—the guy just said, hey, can you find Alec for me?”
“Yeah, something like that. He said he’d pay me.”
“Right on.”
“You ever hear from Alec since college?”
Bruce nodded. “You know—I think someone might have contacted me about him. Like a few months ago. I told them I hadn’t seen him in a long time.”
“Nothing? Not a phone call or anything?”
Bruce thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s hard remembering much. You ever have problems with your memory? Sometimes I wonder if I should get mine checked on. But they’ll probably ask me stuff that I don’t want to tell them, you know?”
“Still smoke every now and then?” I asked him.
“Well, you know. You know how it is.”
I didn’t know, to be honest, but I nodded and took this as a yes. The guy who once claimed that he would only wear clothes made out of hemp still probably got stoned on a regular basis.
I had a feeling Bruce was not going to be much help, but I was still glad to be sitting across from him. I told him that David Kirby said hi.
“Kirby? Right on.”
Bruce wanted to go out later to one of his haunts, a casino bar. I didn’t have much of a choice, so I went along.
“So tell me. How are you doing?” I asked him. “How are you really doing?”
“This is it, man. My life.” He wasn’t done drinking.
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