by Deb Caletti
The thing is, there were two bodies in the water that day, hers and Anna Youngwolf Floyd’s. What keeps Mads up at night, what keeps her on the computer trying to find out more, more, more, is the question, the big question, the only question much of the time: why. The why feels like something about to happen. The why is a mystery that might lead to a way out. Or else, to the last locked door.
• • •
Thomas’s truck leaves the community college in the dust and heads away like it has an automotive mission. Mads rolls down the windows, and the breeze ruffles the bits of her homework that stick out from Mastering Real Estate Principles, 7th Edition. The truck heads to a place Mads has been before. Once she had Anna’s name, the address was easy to find. Now she parks across the street from the house, in the spot where she usually studies it. She visualizes the layout, as always. Standard Seattle Craftsman bungalow: living room in front, kitchen in back, bedrooms upstairs. She’ll say . . . two bedrooms. Three. Bathrooms need updating, probably. One fireplace; creepy unfinished basement where the laundry room is, she’ll bet. She pictures Anna Youngwolf Floyd down there, tossing a load into the washing machine. At least, Mads pictures Anna as she was in the 1976 La Conner High School yearbook photo Mads found online. Anna had long, straight dark hair parted on the side, and she was wearing the usual dreamy-but-looking-toward-the-future 1 x 1 inch yearbook expression (as well as a white shirt with a collar big enough for liftoff). She was next to Steve Yepa, who had a grown-man moustache and was sporting a suit and tie, and Gene Yu, whose bouffy hair could have its own moons and orbit the sun.
Anna is about to pour the liquid soap into the washer of Mads’s imagination when a black SUV drives up. Her heart lurches, and she scooches down in her seat, fast. She starts to sweat. She’s seen that truck here twice before. The first time, a mattress was tied to the top, and the back was stuffed with boxes. The second time was very late at night. She likes this place best at late hours, when she can park in the dark space between streetlamps and gaze at the still, secretive house under the light of the moon. But that time, this same SUV had been in the driveway. And she swore someone was in it, sleeping in there, maybe. At least she thought she saw the truck rock slightly, and then she’d gotten out of there, fast.
Well, now she’s been caught. Definitely caught. The truck drives right past Thomas’s. She acts like she’s there with good reason, punches nonsense into her phone, pretends to talk while sneaking glances. She may look small and cringing right then, but inside—here’s the funny thing—there’s an odd boldness rising. It fills her like some magical, powerful, pink-smoke summons. It’s some kind of wish and wanting and it feels amazing. She wants to see who that truck belongs to. She wants to see a living connection, a face, a moving body. Someone who is proof that Anna Youngwolf Floyd was a real human being. Mads is scared to see what she might find, though. If it makes her feel worse than she does already, this will likely be a mistake.
Okay. It’s a boy. He’s getting out. Is this the son? Is this the William mentioned in the obituary? She pictured him older for some reason, but he’s about her age. He has Anna’s dark hair; it’s thick, but not straight like Anna’s. It goes a little wild around his face. He’s thin as a new tree, and his jeans ride his hips in a way that says he doesn’t give a flying fuck.
He runs his hand through his hair. If Mads had hair like that, she’d do the same thing all day long, it’d feel so good. He looks at her then, right straight-on at her, and she says, into her phone she says, “Yes, I’m so sorry I can’t meet you because something’s come up and a train is coming at me right now on a track,” so her lips will move.
He seems nervous. His eyes are darting around like a bank robber’s. Mads narrows her own eyes to see better, tries to locate the signs of devastation in him. What is his life like now? He has his mother’s nose, too, she notices. It’s a slightly hooked nose. But why is he shooting weird glances over to the neighbor’s yard and pacing around by his truck? The house, his house, his mother’s house—it’s an afterthought. No, it’s just an after. Not even a thought.
His face looks determined. So determined that a different curiosity stirs in Mads. He saunters across their old yard. Truly, this is the word, saunter—his thumbs are all casual in his pockets. He’s trying really hard to look like he’s cool as anything. But then he trips over an old garden hose left on their lawn. When he stumbles back up, he presses his palms to the legs of his jeans as if they sting. Now he runs like hell. The run is all guilty bumbling. He unlatches his neighbor’s gate and scoops up a little white dog and bolts back to his truck with one shoelace untied. He screeches and swerves down the street like an awkward firefighter off to save a family in a burning building.
Mads is stunned. Her mouth may even be open a little. She has no idea what she just witnessed. She tosses her phone over to the passenger seat, where it sits with Mastering Real Estate Principles, 7th Edition. She puts her hand to her heart to see if it’s working, because it feels changed enough to wonder. The neighbor’s gate is flung wide, and she can see how Anna’s old garden hose, so recently moved, has branded a large snaking S onto the lawn. The house looks different to her now. It doesn’t seem sad and finished. It is still breathing.
Chapter Four
It’s stupid, and it looks stupid, too, he knows, but Billy puts his arm over the map when Amy skips down the steps of Heartland Rescue where he sits. It’s what he used to do in the third grade when that bully, Devon Wilson, would cheat off his spelling test.
Amy isn’t a bully but she’s something close. Billy’s known her since junior high, when he and his mom moved from La Conner to Seattle to be closer to Gran after that asshole Powell left them. Mom needed someone besides him, even if Gran greeted her with a What did I tell you? and a Why do you keep trying to get things from people you will never get? On his first day at Eckstein, Amy and the blond girls (they weren’t all blond, but that’s how he thinks of them) teased him about his name and about that old shirt of his father’s he’d decided to wear. Grateful Dead. It’s a pretty sicko name when you think about it. His mother might be grateful now, but who knows for sure. He sure as hell isn’t. He’d always thought of it as his lucky shirt, though, and fuck ’em, even after that, he still would.
“Whatcha got, Wolfie?” Amy nudges his leg with her toe. She started being friendly to him sometime in their sophomore year. Now they both work at Heartland Rescue. Amy wants to become a veterinarian, so she takes classes at the U and hangs around Dr. Mukherjee when he comes in, but she still has to pick up shit like everyone else. She’ll go to veterinary school next, but she’ll never be the type of veterinarian Billy would ever take his dog to. He likes to think he has the true Seeing Spell, where you can cut through illusions to tell what a creature actually is.
“Nothing much,” he says.
“Looks like a map.”
“Yeah.”
“Wow,” she says. “That’s it? ‘Yeah’? You know, if you don’t let people in, they can’t be there for you.”
“I let people in.”
“Whatever.” You know what? The less attention he gives her, the more she wants him. He doesn’t get this. It’s a mystery. She stomps off to her car. Now she’ll probably go to some restaurant and spend twenty bucks on a lunch she’ll barely eat. Even Jane Grace doesn’t let Amy in. If anyone has the true Seeing Spell, it’s Jane. Billy’s noticed that Jane only lets Amy deal with the flighty, small dogs, not any of the more sensitive ones like Jasper or Zeke. Not any that have soulful eyes.
People can be mean same as dogs can be mean—there are the ones that have always been that way and will always stay that way because that’s how they came. And then there are the ones that get mean after they’re treated mean. He feels bad for those dogs, but truth is, they can rip your face off, same as the others.
You need theories about people and dogs and most other things when you have a mother who was a bridge jumper. He is trying out the phrase: a bridge jumper. It sounds
weirdly casual and purposefully cruel, but then it makes the knife twist. His stomach gets that feeling again. In comes the horrible rush of love and longing and hatred and why and you left me. Fuck!
Go back to the map! He does. He’s so full of self-hatred and hatred for his mother that he could gouge his own eyes out. He feels so bad right then.
But as he spreads the map flat once more, the Big Guy Upstairs (or fate, or the universe, or whatever you believe in—it’s helpful to believe in something) is moving the pieces around. Billy doesn’t know it, but some stuff is about to happen. Like, right about. Stuff always happens, whether a day from now or years, stuff that will make a person glad to be alive, if you can somehow just ride through the self-hatred and the gouging and the bad. Here he is, feeling like shit, sitting on a cement step with a stupid map on his knee, and big plans are in the works. Tick, tick, fate looks at its watch and smiles. Billy’s clueless. Pretty much most of the time, this is how it works.
The map has a lot of creases, even if he’s tried to be careful to fold it along its original lines. If he concentrates hard enough, it’s like he’s inside the actual museum just by looking at it. The asshole doctor in his head reminds him that the video games and the map and the book are just places to escape, but so what? Who cares? He already knows that! He’s not stupid. Give a guy a break! They’re lucky he isn’t drinking his head off or shooting up drugs. He’s not sure who “they” are, but they are!
He moves his finger from the entry of the American Wing to Arms and Armor. In the book where the map comes from, Jamie picks Renaissance art to study instead of Arms and Armor like his sister, Claudia, guesses he will. But Billy would definitely pick Arms and Armor. He looked it up online to see the actual pictures. Those long, mighty swords, those chest plates of steel—he can’t imagine walking around with so much stuff on, he doesn’t even like wearing a coat, but no one could get to you behind all that iron.
Amy’s not out of the parking lot yet. She pulls up next to the steps in her daddy’s old BMW, rolls down her window, and gives it one more try. His friend Alex keeps saying, She wants to blow you, but Billy just tells him to shut up.
“I could bring you a sandwich,” Amy says, leaning her head out. She makes her voice all breathy. She does that a lot, and she totters around on heels and shows off her boobs and bare stretches of stomach. It reminds him of those baboons he saw on that nature show, who always flash their red asses. (He was just flipping past. He only watched maybe a half hour.)
“Nah,” he says. His cardboard cup from Java Jive sits next to him. He isn’t all that hungry lately anyway.
“Never mind,” Amy says. “Just forget it.” She rolls up her window, mad. Her tires actually scream out of there.
Jane props the door open with one foot. “Wow. What was that about?” Billy doesn’t answer. Jasper and Bodhi and Olive and Runt race outside, yanking Jane out, too. The leashes aren’t twisted up yet, but they will be soon. She holds them in one fist, and that’s just asking for trouble.
Within two seconds, Bodhi lifts his leg on a tall weed, and Olive is sniffing Jasper’s butt, and Runt starts barking his head off at a passing car. Runt is no runt—he’s a Bernese mountain dog. He was turned in after someone found him sitting at a bus stop near Highway 99, as if he’d had enough of a bad situation and was moving on.
“I was hoping you’d take these guys for a walk,” Jane shouts over Runt.
“Sure.”
Billy stands, folds the map up, and puts it in his back pocket. He reaches for the leashes, sorts them out. Runt and Olive go on one side, Jasper and Bodhi on the other. He gives Runt’s leash a firm but gentle tug, which is dog language for knock it off. Runt listens. Still, he eyes the back end of that car like it better not forget who’s boss.
“Get out of here for a while,” Jane says.
“Sounds good.”
“Did I ever tell you I went there?”
“Where?”
“The museum. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. Dave and me. We took a trip to New York for our twenty-fifth.” Jane and Dave have been married forever, since they were his age. They don’t act like it, though. Dave will pinch her butt, and she always greets him with Hey, handsome whenever he comes by the shelter. Sometimes, it’s old people kissing, which is disgusting, but also kind of nice. After his father and Powell and a few losers in between, he thinks Jane and Dave are like the golden tiger or albino crocodile in Night Worlds—singular and rare animals. If you had a life like that, it might be better than having a million dollars.
“Cool.”
“We were there a whole day and it wasn’t enough. We skipped the Empire State Building so we could go back. You could spend weeks in that place.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve got to go.”
“I’m going to.”
“I mean, really. One day you ought to decide to just do it. Get in the car and go. Ditch this place.”
He grins. “Someday.” It’s his dream, but then there’s the reality. He can’t just take off and leave Gran. And the dogs need him. Zeke, and even crazy Bodhi, and now Lulu, too. But Jasper, especially. And then there’s Casper. No way he can leave him right now. He can’t do anything until he finds a way to save Casper from that bastard H. Bergman.
“Someday soon.”
“Yeah.”
“A change of scene would do you good. I think that’s the line of some song.”
If he doesn’t start walking, Runt’s going to pull his arm off. Jasper has already had enough of the other dogs, Billy can tell. Jas is like a professor stuck with a bunch of inmates. The dog decides to sit and ignore them. He lifts his nose and sniffs all the scents of summer coming. That’s the kind of guy he is. That tells you everything you need to know about him, right there. Runt, on the other hand—Runt’s the muscly dude leading the barbarian army.
Billy crushes his cup in his hand, tosses it into the trash can by the steps. He heads out of the lot, then looks over his shoulder and calls to Jane. “You trying to get rid of me?”
“I’d only keep you forever if I could,” she calls back.
Certain people are your people, that’s all. That’s one thing he’s sure of.
• • •
Walking the dogs is Billy’s favorite thing. He especially likes how their heads bob as they trot along. They look so happy and serious at the same time. There are a lot of stops to pee. A tall grass clump, bushes, piles of bricks, whatever, they all have to be marked, like posting comments online. Every single dog, they all need their pee-voice heard. No one wants to be forgotten, even the most polite of dogs like Jasper. We are here, they each have to say.
Bodhi’s black lips are pulled back in a smile, and Runt’s big tongue hangs out. Olive has the shortest legs, so the poor girl pretty much runs the whole way.
Billy admires Jasper’s coat, which is thick and healthy now. The dog’s nose is still working hard, taking in every fabulous second from the garbage cans at the Mykonos restaurant to the deep-water-and-goose-shit-and-who-knows-what-else of the ship canal. Billy feels like a proud dad when it comes to Jasper. When Billy snatched him from the yard with the junk pile, Jasper had been chained up so long that his fur was gone in big patches. For a while, he walked all hunched, too, a slave crouch from chains, but now his neck is tall and straight. It pisses Billy off so bad. It makes him fucking furious. He doesn’t get it, he just doesn’t get it, and he never will. Why would you keep someone from leaving you, and then treat them brutally? Power, control? Was the cruelty some blood letting leech (nature channel, but, Jesus, never mind that now), sucking out some dark wound? God.
He walks all the way down Canal Street. Bikers zip past; a jogger or two or three huff by. He arrives at the famous Seattle landmark, the one on all the postcards, the group of statue people who look like they’re waiting for a bus. They’re always decorated—wearing hats or grass skirts and leis, draped with streamers or ball
oons. Right then, they’re in swimsuits (the woman with the iron shopping bag is wearing a bikini), and they all hold a sign that reads BON VOYAGE, JACKIE!
It’s a hub; all nearby streets converge here. A decision has to be made. Cross the Fremont Bridge, or not? This is not a small decision for Billy. Not since his mother did what she did. If you walk or drive over the Fremont Bridge, you have a perfect view of the sister bridge beside it. It’s five times the size and five times the height of Fremont. Hundreds of people have jumped off the Aurora Bridge, and his mother was one of them. It looks evil.
Where he lives—it’s hard to avoid that thing. Gran lives in the houseboats along Westlake, which is in the bridge’s shadow, and their old house and Heartland Rescue are right nearby. If you want to go anywhere, there it is. What does it matter, which way he goes? Because, really. Even if he doesn’t actually see it, it’s everywhere, all the time. It’s in his dreams, and in a flash of dark hair in a passing car, and it’s in certain smells (Ivory soap, barbecue sauce, the singe of a candle going out). Now he feels the rise of courage and Fuck it! He will stare right into the mean, steely face of it.
He takes his crew onto the wide, generous sidewalk next to the Fremont Bridge’s blue towers and helpful bike lane. It’s a friendly bridge compared to that other one, which is high, fast, and ugly. A guy strolls past him with a backpack slung over one shoulder. Cars and trucks ba-bamp over metal plates. It’s loud as hell here, too. It smells like city—onions frying and piss and car exhaust. Even on this smaller bridge, the water is so far down. He can see the same shoreline she must have seen, just before, with the houseboats below. The view is horrible and it’s sacred. He never wants to see it again, and he wishes he could see it every second.