Under the Bridge

by Rebecca Godfrey

  When she was in the laundry room, as she lifted the coat toward the machine, she saw blood. There was blood on the inside of the sleeves. There was blood on the white stripes. There was blood on the back of the coat. There was blood everywhere on the coat she had found hanging on the white picket fence by the old antique white schoolhouse.

  “Whoever stole Robby’s jacket must have got in some fisticuffs!”

  She shook her head and washed the coat in cold water with a teaspoon of bleach. She washed away all the blood and then hung the jacket on a brown wood rack, where she would find it in the morning, clean and dry.

  Some Kind of Fantasy

  THE GIRL WAS too excitable. That was one reason he didn’t believe her.

  She wore a small gold stud in her nose. He’d never met her before.

  Alan, a Filipino boy, was walking away from the house where he lived with his grandmother. He was at the bus stop when this girl came out of nowhere, this girl he’d never met before.

  She’s kind of cute, he thought, with that gold stud in her nose and her brown hair and brown eyes. He wasn’t all that confident, being only fifteen and shy, but since this girl, whom he didn’t even know, just stopped him right on the corner of Eltham Road and Adderly Place, he thought he would try his luck. “I was trying to hit on her,” he would later recall.

  The girl’s hair was damp, and the day’s rain was on her shoulders as well. He didn’t really notice the rain as he watched her mouth and her lips and the way she talked so fast as all girls talked—really fast—and yet she talked faster than any other girl he had talked to before. It was as if she wanted not only to talk, but to somehow be listened to so suddenly and immediately, as if the listener might soon be invisible, leaving her there with a story unheard. He caught phrases. Seriously. Something about being part Spanish. Or part Native. Something about her brother. He was trying to think of how to hit on her on that Saturday, but she just talked so fast. The stud in her nostril was gold and reminded him of a girl at his school who wore a ring in her nose, like a bull.

  Her run-on sentence went like this:

  “I got in a fight with a girl and I beat up a girl and she was beat up so bad she didn’t even know who she was anymore. She was beat up some more. We beat her up some more. I offered to walk her home. She was beat up more. She was beat up really bad. And now she’s dead.”

  “I’m sure whoever you beat up is not dead,” Alan said.

  Another fast sentence, so fast:

  “No, she is dead because her head was under the water and all this red stuff floated up and it was bubbly and it came from her and it was around both of us like it was around me this red stuff and then she floated to the top. I saw her float. I saw it but there were other people there too, it wasn’t just me, other people helped kill her.”

  A lot of lies, he thought. It was all a lot of lies. He caught the phrases. Floated to the top. No, she is dead. I saw her float. Other people helped kill her. But he couldn’t really believe that. How could you believe it was true? “It just didn’t seem real,” Alan would say later, adding that he thought the girl’s story of killing was just “some kind of fantasy.”

  So little attention had he given to her that he didn’t even listen to her name. “Kelly, Jennifer, don’t ask me. Something. Ah. Sarah. I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention to her. I thought she was lying,” he would later unhelpfully volunteer when telling the police about the brown-haired girl. “I don’t remember that much about her, and I don’t remember her name.”

  There was a little gold stud in the brown-haired girl’s nose. She walked away from him down toward the long concrete valley of the Tillicum Mall. A lot of lies. All that stuff she’d said so quick, like rat-a-tat-tat, her rapid-fire biography: I’m part Spanish, she said. No, I’m part Native. I have a brother and he drives a really nice Monte Carlo.

  • • •

  Dusty and Josephine took the bus downtown, where they were less likely to be recognized. No one paid attention to them as they moved into an alley downtown, for they seemed possessed of neither beauty nor menace. Their actions were completely unobserved.

  Nevertheless, they still moved furtively. In the slim and secret alley, they stood now near a rusted green Dumpster. Dusty kept watch while Josephine removed the black platform shoes from her Guess bag. She gripped the shoes, and her hands were so delicate and pale, and Reena’s shoes were clumsy and heavy and dark. She clenched the shoes and then tossed them upward, one and then the other. The shoes fell into the Dumpster, covered in ashes, leaves, and debris.

  Syreeta Does Some Laundry

  WARREN HEARD the sound of falling water.

  He stood outside the door. Syreeta poked her head out of the shower, and he gazed up at her clean skin and the still hidden shape of her naked body. Her long hair draped across her bare shoulders, and her shoulders shone from the water.

  “I heard you kicked a girl in the head last night,” she said, reproachfully.

  He stared at the tiles, and she stepped out of the shower, ignoring him. She wrapped herself in a towel.

  “Who told you that?”

  “Tara.”

  “Tara should keep her mouth shut,” he said.

  “Well, why’d you do it?”

  “I shouldn’t have done it,” he said, still looking at the floor.

  From the room downstairs, she could hear the low rumble of the television and Marissa’s familiar giggle.

  “So why did you do it then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and he looked very ashamed, but she still was angry, and turned her back to him, and walked away, into her bedroom.

  She took a long time dressing. She wasn’t quite sure why. She tried on her jeans, and then changed into her khaki pants, which were flared slightly. She parted her hair in the middle, pulled it into a ponytail.

  When she went downstairs, she moved toward Marissa, who lay on the pale blue couch. Dimitri was sitting near the screen, cross-legged, enraptured by the American superstars throwing around a basketball.

  “Are you feeling better?” Warren asked her, but she ignored him still, and looked toward Marissa. She was not sure why she did this, only that she did look at Marissa then, and she noticed how Marissa’s face seemed so impossibly tiny, like a little treasure you would want to hold on to forever.

  Several minutes went by before Warren dared to speak to her again, and when he spoke, it was only with a request for her to do some laundry.

  He did not tell her that he was afraid to ask Grace to do his laundry. He had not yet found a place to live, but he knew he must leave by December, and he wanted to be a good guest and not bother her with chores. He did not tell Syreeta he had no money for the washing machines. Though his father said money was on the way, he had not yet received an envelope from California. It was pretty embarrassing to tell your girlfriend you didn’t even have twelve quarters to your name, like he was a scrub, or a grub, or whatever, a guy with no money.

  Though he did not tell her this, she knew instinctively the reasons behind his request, and so without asking for reasons, she lifted his laundry bag and headed downstairs to the washing machine. His Mossimo sweater was inside, along with his white jeans. He’d once asked her to bleach the sweater, weeks before. He did not like the cream color, he’d said, and she knew he liked white, and the sweater was not white. It was cream or beige or ivory.

  Syreeta did not know how to use the washing machine, and her mother was not home.

  She went back upstairs to ask Marissa for help, but Dimitri leaped off the couch, and he loped across the floor, swinging his left arm, as if in imitation of the rangy and determined basketball players. “I’ll show you how,” he said confidently.

  In the basement, Dimitri turned the dials, and Syreeta dumped out the clothes. She felt sad for Warren suddenly. He only had these three pairs of white pants. He had neither mother nor father to provide him with new clothes, to clean his clothes, to just take care of him.

  Be
cause she was half-blind, she did not see the blood right away.

  She was holding his pants in her hands, while Dimitri turned the dials and unscrewed the top of the bleach, and she saw suddenly the blood. Two drops of blood observed to be “the size of a quarter.” She pushed the clean hair from her face and remembered the phone call the night before. What had he said? Something about a fight. He’d said something about how he was walking with Kelly Ellard and some Native guy yelled at Kelly, and he’d gotten in a fight with the guy. She remembered this, and just then, Dimitri dumped the bleach into the washing machine, and she let the pants fall into the water that was rising up to her hands. She looked down, for a brief second, and saw everything before her, in the pure, clean water, turning about so rapidly.

  • • •

  On Saturday, Reena’s uncle Raj rose, took a long bath, and hoped his legs would be steady as he climbed over the porcelain border. He planned to take Reena shopping because she’d said yesterday that she wanted to buy a Winnie the Pooh teddy bear as a gift for a little girl she babysat.

  “Reena never came home last night,” Suman said, when he arrived at Reena’s home.

  Suman seemed more frightened than angry, and she held on to a notebook she’d found in Reena’s bedroom. The notebook belonged to Josephine and was full of phone numbers. Suman thought she would try to call some of the people in the notebook and see if they knew where Reena was. “I’m worried,” Suman said. “She called here around 10:30 and spoke to Aman. She was just at the Mac’s and she said she was on her way home.”

  “The Mac’s by the bridge?”

  Suman nodded. Raj knew of Reena’s wanderings, and yet she always called him. He was the one she called. When she was at Kiwanis, she called him for a ride. When she had to meet her counselor, she called him, and he thought it strange she had not called to tell him she wouldn’t be shopping after all. This wasn’t like her.

  By the bridge, he drove. He felt a little foolish, parking his car by the telephone booth, and wandering into the garishly lit convenience store. Kids bought Slurpees. Kids bought Cokes.

  “Come and pick me up around 11:00,” she’d said. “I want to buy a Winnie the Pooh teddy bear.”

  He returned to his car and thought of her beside him only days ago. He thought and hoped he would return to his house and find Reena cuddling up with her grandmother, drinking some tea and saying she’d just spent the night at a friend’s and overslept.

  The simplicity of the Missing Person’s report is a fraud of sorts, a betrayal. The few lines have almost no relation to the tragedy of their meaning. And yet there they were. Filed by a dispatcher at 1:50 on November 15, a Saturday.

  Reena Virk. Date of Birth: 83.03.10.

  Due to return home at 2200 hours, 14 November, 1997.

  Address: 1358 Irma Place.

  So began and ended General Report 97-27127 headed with four words: Missing Juvenile Female Report.

  Remembrance Day

  ON MONDAY MORNING, the young girls of Shoreline met in the foyer.

  “What happened under the bridge on Friday night?” Brandy asked Willow.

  “What happened to that girl?” Ashley said.

  “Be quiet,” Willow said. “Don’t mention anything.” She stood up suddenly, fixing the girls with a look, a little fierce, but mostly worried, and she walked away quickly as if pursued.

  “Let’s ask Syreeta,” Ashley suggested.

  “She wasn’t even there that night,” Brandy said.

  “She wasn’t with Warren?”

  “No. She went home early.”

  “But she’s always with Warren. Did they have a fight?”

  “She had cramps or something.”

  Out in the smoke pit, with only a minute before the bell rang, Brandy and Ashley sat on the low gray wall. Boys on bicycles swerved over the long green soccer field and attempted tricks. The boys rose with their front wheel lifting off the wet grass; they reversed direction with a sudden and seemingly precarious contortion. Kiara looked to the clouds to see if they’d yet begun to float or fade. It seemed like they’d spent the month in fog. Two crows rose up in the sky, and maybe they were from the bird sanctuary, Kiara thought. She didn’t understand why the crows always flew together, in pairs—these quartets of dark, beating wings. Poppies from Remembrance Day lay in the crevice of the concrete; some of the flowers were now burned and ashen. We are the dead, Brandy and Ashley had recited solemnly on the veterans’ holiday. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved.

  A boy sat alone in the smoke pit. He was often alone, though he smoked and wore a Nike sweatshirt and wore his hat just like Erik Cash. He was very small, with the face of an unfortunate urchin, and his body was far too delicate.

  This boy, Terry, wished he was taller and meaner and could be adored by girls like Ashley and Brandy. They were so sweet, so cute, so pretty, so hot. Ashley’s skin must feel like cotton. Terry talked to her once. She was reading a book in homeroom, and he went right up to her, yanking on his baggy pants, and he told her his favorite book was Fingerprints by R. L. Stine.

  “Have you read that?” he asked her. “That is some scary shit!”

  Often, when in his bedroom, watching The Simpsons, his favorite show, Terry would think that he looked like Bart Simpson, with his spiky hair and thin arms. He would be in his bedroom that night, alone, watching a movie on his “entertainment center” and he would think about what happened under the bridge because everybody was talking about it, and how everybody was saying to keep it secret, and so as far as he knew, nobody had said anything to a teacher. Everyone was saying keep it quiet. Later, Terry would recall that of the night under the bridge, he knew, but did not tell, because everyone was saying, “Just keep it on the down low.”

  The Russian Sisters

  NADJA ARRIVED AT Seven Oaks on Tuesday, November 15. Nadja, whose family life was often described as “unfortunate,” was nonetheless possessed of a certain nobility. Social workers who met Nadja were struck by the young girl, for she seemed unlike their other charges. Her family life may have been horrible, but Nadja was neither wounded nor fragile, and she worried more for the fate of her little sister, Anya, than for her own predicament, which was, more or less, orphaned. Anya and Nadja both had long, black hair and high foreheads and sharp noses and green eyes. Nadja had grown four inches in the past year, and she’d found herself towering over her little sister. She wore clothes from the Salvation Army. Flat black shoes and plaid shirts and men’s cardigans. Sometimes she wore an old navy blue pleated skirt she’d found at the St. Vincent de Paul. She thought it must have been part of a rich girl’s private school uniform. Nadja’s last name was Barusha, and sometimes people told her it sounded like a car. “A fast car,” Anya would say. Sometimes Nadja flipped off cops for no reason at all. She didn’t like cops, and she didn’t trust anybody. Her new roommate was Josephine.

  This girl is full of herself, Nadja thought, seeing the photos on the wall, the photos of Josephine. The fashion magazines, the photos of models taped to the mirror. Nivea cream and Chanel perfume and a Guess handbag were all dumped on the empty bed, her bed, so Nadja picked up the clutter and chucked it on the floor. She wanted to sleep. She’d had a rough day, getting “assessed” by these people at Seven Oaks. She hated talking about herself.

  She wanted to call Anya and tell her she was okay now, in this place called Seven Oaks, but Anya would be asleep in her new foster home. Anya’s new family were retired shopowners who lived in the tiny suburb of Oak Bay. “I’ve got a skylight here!” Anya exclaimed. Nadja missed Anya terribly.

  She climbed into bed. Several hours later, Josephine arrived and turned on the light, and Nadja introduced herself. Josephine stared boldly at Nadja: another assessment of sorts. She observed the green eyes of Nadja, her long neck, her slightly crooked nose. Nadja said very little and then turned away, lying on her side, looking out at the trees, wishing to forget the things she remembered sometimes when she slept
.

  “Have you ever heard of me? I’m Josephine Bell.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Nadja said, though she had never heard of Josephine.

  “I’ll tell you something, but you can’t tell anyone,” Josephine said suddenly.

  “Yeah, I won’t.”

  Who is this girl? Nadja wondered. I’ve just met her and she starts telling me all this.

  “I hate Reena. I hate her. She lied to me all the time. She made up all these stories. I got pissed off. She hated me because I’m so beautiful.”

  Nadja turned toward Josephine and saw only the pale curve of the girl’s cheek. Their room was very dark, and the light was of the moon through the forests. Was Josephine so beautiful, she wondered, and she listened some more.

  “We beat her up, and then this friend of mine,” Josephine continued, “she called me in the morning, and she said, ‘Reena’s dead.’ And I was like, ‘How is she dead?’ And my friend said, ‘We continued it and we threw her in the water and blood was coming out of her mouth.’ My friend told me that she drowned Reena and Reena tried to get out of the water.”

  Nadja turned away from Josephine, turned so her body lay closer to the forests and the moon. Nonetheless, Josephine went on with her story, indiscreetly and carelessly. She did not even know Nadja and must have assumed the girl was like the others in View Royal, who had listened to her story and been both skeptical and unconcerned. Nadja, in her worn white T-shirt, with her slightly slanting green eyes and rare Russian surname, was in fact very much unlike the others in View Royal, and, thus, Josephine would have been wiser to not boast so callously.