The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  Clay only answered the phone because he thought it was Rite Aid calling about his Solodyn. He’d already gone a week without taking it because he was always forgetting to renew the prescription, which only lasted thirty days, and the last time he called it in, they’d said the price would be $1,125 for thirty pills. Thirty pills! The trial period during which he could pay $35 a month to not have disgusting acne was over. “Are you sure?” he’d said, and the pharmacy woman said she’d check and call him back.

  But when he answered, it was not Rite Aid. It was the police. The police! They’d towed his car, which was unbelievable.

  “I was going to pay the renewal fee,” he said, thinking the old bag who parked her Mercedes right next to him at the club and liked to give him coupons for Sparkle-Shine Car Wash must have ratted on him. She’d complained once already about his sticker being expired—he hadn’t wanted to ask his mom if she’d taken care of it because it would give her a chance, again, to say he had no idea how many things she did for him every single day and how expensive he was—but you’d think the club could just give him a reminder or something, not call the police. He started ripping through the cabinets on the Surrender in search of a clean button-down shirt and an unwrinkled pair of pants to wear to the police station, thinking what he would say to pruney old Marni or Larni or whatever her name was. Then the policeman said they’d towed the car because it had been found on the bridge. Parked and abandoned.

  “No way,” he said, but it was his, all right. A white Honda Accord registered to Renata Moorehead. “Okay. Yeah, I’ll be right down there. As soon as I change.”

  How would he convince the police that the car must have been stolen right out of the yacht club parking lot? No way was he paying an impound fee of five hundred dollars for not parking his car on the bridge, but he’d been with Isabel, smoking weed in the dunes, last night. Not a supergood alibi. Problem number two was getting the car out of the police station before they felt the need to search it for evidence of who took it and why, because although he certainly wanted to know that information and was definitely going to track that down, he thought there was a fifty-fifty chance that weed he’d once carried or maybe was still carrying in his car could be detected by a drug-sniffing dog, unless it was all bullshit what the cops said in those Say No to Drugs assemblies. Had he cleaned it all out last time? Had he felt under both seats?

  He hadn’t heard a word from Jerome since the party, so he was glad to see Jerome’s name on his phone even though the message was, did you hear about thisbe?

  Jerome must mean how Thisbe had made out with that total dickwad from Point Loma and then fallen down because she was too drunk to walk, and cut her head open right when the cops were rolling the party. Jerome must have heard about that, finally, and wanted to hear what Clay thought. But he had no time to go through it now.

  Jerome didn’t answer.

  Clay found a pair of pants that didn’t show the wrinkles too bad and a white shirt with a small ink stain on the cuff, which would have to do. He took a Prozac with the rest of his Gutter Water Gush and combed his hair and hoped to God Teddy Locke wasn’t still sitting at the snack bar when he left.

  Gretchen had known Clay Moorehead’s routine by the time he came in with Thisbe. All the girls who worked with her at the coffee shop had filled her in.

  “His family has, like, a plane,” one of the girls told Gretchen.

  “He throws parties when his parents are in Acapulco running hotels.”

  “It’s not Acapulco.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere.”

  When Clay brought in a girl, he always ordered the same thing and played the same corny song on the corny jukeboxes that stood on the tables in every booth and at intervals along the counter: “Unchained Melody,” which was a weird song for someone his age to know, but all of the songs were ancient so it’s not like he could pick something current. He got the chocolate milkshake with no cherry, an order the counter girls made crude jokes about (the cherries he’s already gotten are enough, ha ha). Stared into the girl’s eyes and barely ate his food. Held her hands in a sweet old-fashioned way.

  It was a sweet old-fashioned place, so Gretchen could see why the girls fell for it. People came to Clayton’s for the not-foodie food: grilled cheese and fries, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, pie à la mode, burgers and shakes. They came for jukeboxes, red vinyl booths, and the waitresses, who, whether they were seventeen or forty, wore tight striped dresses, red lipstick, and saucy ponytails. This all helped people pretend, while they were sipping hot coffee out of thick white china mugs, that they were in a play or a movie or maybe, if they were really good at pretending, the past. Even Gretchen fell under the sway of this illusion at certain times of day, usually in the evenings when the light came in like liquid gold and struck a full milkshake glass that had just been topped with whipped cream and a cherry, and the cool, salty air floated in through the propped-open door and even the cars rolling by on the street seemed like props. These moments of delusion didn’t keep Gretchen from feeling sad. Just because the place was tricky-good at fooling you into a romantic vision of your life didn’t mean the spell lasted through the end of the shift, when she got on her bike in the dark, feeling grimy, tired, and old, and went back to life on a cramped boat with her inheritance: two talking birds.

  Clay didn’t bring the same girl in more than twice. According to Lauren Davis, who was a senior at the high school, date numero tres with Clay Moorehead usually took place on his yacht. “He makes her dinner,” she said. “Steak and chocolate mousse.”

  “Does he cook it?” Gretchen asked, intrigued.

  “I don’t know. The girls act like he does.”

  “Then what?”

  “What do you think? The boat’s called the Surrender.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  It had seemed impossible at first. Why did girls fall for him if it was a cycle? But he was handsome, he really was. The forehead smooth and wide, the hair black and just the right amount of shaggy, the white teeth blocky and strong, the dimple on one side making his smile seem even more sincere. He could really do a number on you, just sitting at the counter, smiling at you, saying, “Nice dress today, Ms. Ryman,” in a way that was innocent but somehow sexual because he looked frankly at her breasts and made her think about how sometimes women her age and boys his age…It made her ashamed to have even thought it. She wasn’t that way. It was just her maternal instinct gone crooked or an animal response to a handsome male by a not-quite-past-childbearing-years female or the way Clayton’s made it hard to remember what decade it was.

  Which was why Gretchen hadn’t liked seeing Thisbe Locke come in one afternoon before sunset, on a glorious spring day when the light might as well have been champagne.

  “Now, that,” Lauren Davis said, filling two flared glasses with ice, “makes no sense at all.”

  “Do you think he drugs them?” Mandy Shue said. “She should know better.”

  “How would she know?” Lauren said. “She’s too stuck-up to go to anything.”

  “Come on. I know her. She’s really nice,” Gretchen said.

  Lauren snorted. “Depends on what kind of nice you mean.”

  “I mean nice nice.”

  “She thinks she’s so much better than everyone else,” Lauren said, and went to take an order, so Gretchen didn’t say that Thisbe’s mother, Anne, had been a little that way, honestly. Anne of Green Gables, as she had been known then, went away to college somewhere back east—Vassar, maybe—and married a rich guy who died in a plane crash, so Green Gables moved back to the island with her two girls, renting, as it happened, the house next door to Gretchen’s mom at about the same time Gretchen came back from Hawaii to take care of her. To Gretchen’s surprise, Green Gables was always sending over cake or cookies or soup or bread that she thought might tempt Gretchen’s mom to eat. The girls brought it over on what looked like the good
china. Thisbe was the older one, lying on a towel in the backyard, reading fat books, or playing classical stuff on the upright piano, her mother’s daughter to a tee, and Ted was the wild one, it looked like, and was always heading off in a wet suit or a life jacket. Then Green Gables started dating Rich Guy #2, the lawyer, and Gretchen was happy for Anne, she really was, even though he seemed kind of pushy and critical the few times Gretchen heard him in the backyard. He had a big old house on B, so when they got married, Anne and the girls moved over there, no more than six blocks away but six blocks was like thirty miles on the island, especially if you weren’t really friends.

  “Hi, Thisbe,” Gretchen said. “Hello, Clay.”

  Thisbe smiled incandescently. “Hi, Gretchen! I didn’t know you worked here! I thought you were doing, like, scuba diving for the police. My stepdad told me. That is so amazing!”

  “I was.”

  “Search and rescue, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you didn’t like it?”

  Thisbe and Clay waited for Gretchen to explain why she would give up an amazing job. “Diving is one of those things you have to do for fun or it gets ruined,” Gretchen said.

  “Oh,” Thisbe said. “But you’re living on a boat, right? Ted is so jealous!”

  The Lockes were members of the yacht club Gretchen couldn’t afford to join. Gretchen felt bad for wondering, but maybe Anne or her snobby new husband had been among those who had helped decide that Gretchen could not be grandfathered in and given a slip, which forced Gretchen to moor at Tidelands instead, where you didn’t have any amenities, and every time you needed to go ashore, you rowed your dinghy from the boat and back again and dragged whatever you were carrying—water, groceries, laundry—across the mudflats.

  “I hear Ted’s sailing a lot,” Gretchen said.

  Thisbe nodded. “She’s so into it. Clay sails, did you know that?”

  “No!” Gretchen looked right into Clay’s face, which she honestly tried not to do anymore, and he flashed his dimple. He shrugged. He tried to look modest.

  “He offered to let Ted crew for him in some big regatta but she wouldn’t. She’s obsessed with being skipper. Which is cool.”

  Clay shrugged his handsome shrug. Gretchen was heartened, somehow, that Ted could resist him. “Well, you’ve gotta hand it to her,” Gretchen said, and the way Clay was holding the menu she knew he was ready to order now and stop all the chitchat.

  Gretchen wanted to take Thisbe aside before she left with Clay and ask if she knew what she was doing, but there was no chance. Thisbe went to the bathroom after the cheeseburgers, the hand-holding, the melody unchained, so Gretchen found herself standing there with the check, saying, “Thank you,” and then she just went for it. “You wouldn’t break her heart, would you, Clay?”

  “Who, me?”

  “Yeah. Seriously.”

  Amber light touched the edges of the little flip-down names of songs in the miniature jukebox, the crumpled edges of napkins, uneaten fries. Even the dirty milkshake glass, coated with dried foam, gleamed.

  “Thisbe’s a very unusual girl,” Gretchen said, not even sure what she meant by that. Her voice came out a little severe, like she was insane or something. “She’s very innocent.”

  “I know,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Consider me worried.”

  “It’s all good,” he said. His smile seemed a little anxious, and for a minute she wondered if she was listening to too much gossip. Maybe Lauren and the other girls were jealous, so they spread stories that weren’t true. Nobody said you couldn’t bring more than one girl to a diner when you were in high school, or that you couldn’t play the Righteous Brothers for all of them.

  Thisbe had come back from the bathroom, wearing freshly applied lip balm and smelling of the hand lotion she was still rubbing into her hands. Clay had hustled her out as Thisbe was smiling and saying, “Bye, Gretchen! Thanks so much! I miss you! Take care.”

  Carl Harris was sitting in the backyard, feet up, beer in hand, when he saw that he had two voice mails. Stacy had always accused Carl of leaving the ringer off all the time on purpose to avoid her but it wasn’t true. He just forgot to turn it back on, or he couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t hear it ring, and he hated cell phones, so he never wanted to spend any time learning what he didn’t know. This was not the same as hating to hear from Stacy. Before he could punch in his code and get the messages, his phone lit up again.

  “Carl?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Anne Locke.”

  The voice was strained, not normal, something wrong. He thought at first that something had happened to his boat. To Stacy. To Paul. He’d known Anne since high school but they’d never called one another.

  “You still work for the harbor patrol, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear about a car on the bridge last night?”

  “I was off,” he said. “I heard about it this morning.”

  “The medical examiner came.”

  He pulled a dead bougainvillea blossom off a branch that was poking his thigh and rubbed it between two fingers. “The examiner?”

  “Someone from the office.”

  An investigator. Someone charged with notifying next of kin.

  “I’m sorry, Anne. What happened?”

  “They think it was…” She didn’t finish the sentence. Then she said, “Thisbe.”

  He knew there were two girls. It was odd that he’d seen Ted that morning. He hadn’t seen the other girl since they had camped out on a catamaran one night, not the craziest stunt he’d ever seen and on the sweet end of the spectrum once he saw they were just camping, not hooking up with guys.

  “If they didn’t find her, she didn’t jump. Right?” Anne was saying.

  It didn’t mean that. Bodies drifted. Sank. Got stuck in places you couldn’t see. None of which he could say. “Was there a witness?”

  She said something about a camera, but her voice was getting harder and harder to understand. Maybe the Chippies watching the monitors had seen a pedestrian, so they’d called the dispatcher, and the officers—it must have been Elaine—had gotten there too late.

  He asked, “But not a witness? Another driver on the bridge?”

  “No.”

  The search and rescue team could only search for a couple of hours on the surface near the probable point of entry, and then they would have to give up. Wait to see if she refloated. It didn’t help to tell families that San Diego Bay was forty to sixty feet deep, depending on the tide, or that the bridge was two miles long, or that the current was fast, or that cargo ships the size of skyscrapers passed through those channels, or that the pylons, though they were solid above water, rested on dozens of subpylons between which bodies could be trapped. Pylons 19, 20, and 21 rested on forty-four subpylons, each of them four feet thick, and to swim between them looking for a body was like swimming through a forest in the dark. Sometimes visibility even in the daytime was zero because of the silt. It could be twenty feet on a really clear day but it was usually about five. You hoped when you were looking for a body that you wouldn’t swim right into the face.

  He felt the sun on his feet, the dry grass pricking his heels because he hadn’t been watering the lawn enough. “When did they find the car?” he asked, and she told him about the boyfriend from the yacht club, which clicked now with what Elaine had said. Each word was hard for Anne Locke to say, so he strained to listen, to push the stuttered words back together.

  She said, “We told her to—to stop seeing him. He throws a lot—a lot of parties. He drinks.”

  The sky was very blue between the eucalyptus trees. Paul had gone to parties, and Paul drank. It was impossible not to know about it and impossible to prevent. He’d tried.

  “But it doesn’t make—make sense,” she said. “Does it?”

  “Which part?”

  “There wasn’t a note or anything. The woman at the police department said th
ey do: they leave a note in the car or on the table at home or they text a bunch of people. Right before. So it seems like searching the water is premature, and if they didn’t find her, it might be something else, like she ran away. Or someone picked her up.”

  “What did they say when you asked that?” he asked. The sun was warm on the dry grass and a dove rested on the power line.

  “That it didn’t fit the profile.”

  “Well, there aren’t any rules to this,” he said. Not about who jumped and how good their reasons were. He used to think there was a rule: that the truly serious jumped right away. The ones who sat on the rail or the hoods of their cars, who dropped cigarettes over the side to watch them fall, or who shouted at officers to get back were not serious. They were lonely, desperate, crazy, and afraid. They wanted someone to talk to them, fix them, beg them to live. And then one day a man broke that rule. He dallied and threatened and reconsidered for an hour and a half, and then, while Carl watched, his hands empty, the man sprang for the rail and vaulted over it into empty space.

  “Even if she jumped she could have”—long pause—“survived, right?”

  He hated this question. Those who were alive when you reached them in the water had massive injuries. They often floated in pools of blood. The force of hitting the water ripped their clothes off or printed the weave of the fabric into their skin. Sometimes they were still conscious, but incoherent, and they babbled. They waved grotesquely broken arms in shock. It wasn’t like they were capable of swimming to shore, if that’s what Anne was thinking. “It’s very unlikely” was all he said.