The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  He was thinking of the crisis guys. They were trained to help people process things. What they said, he didn’t really know. What did you say to the mother of a seventeen-year-old girl? “I’ll call this guy, his name is Tim Ladow, and he’ll call you. Or you can talk in person.”

  She said she had Tim’s name. “I’m sorry to”—long pause— “bother you,” she said.

  “It’s not a bother,” he said. He didn’t want to leave the sunny warmth of the lifeless backyard, so simple in its state of decay. He could fix it in a matter of days or leave it alone, it didn’t matter. “Tell me where you are,” he said. “Are you home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me where you live and I’ll come over in an hour or so.”

  The vegetable garden was a tangled mess of dead tomato vines and rusty hoops. It had been Stacy’s project, something she did for the planet, with “the planet” in air quotes in his mind. Stacy had all kinds of uninformed suspicions about the food supply, but he’d stopped arguing with her because the food she’d grown had been beautiful to look at from this chair: the shiny red cherry tomatoes, the dark bouquets of lettuce.

  The peppertree dropped dead curls into the webs of tent spiders all around the Victorian gazing ball: a big pink mirrored globe on a pedestal that cast back his reflection as a fat, lonely dwarf.

  He finished the beer, now warm, and wondered if he should call the sergeant of the dive team first and ask what he thought of the situation. He closed his eyes and saw the man who had not seemed serious falling headfirst from the bridge, arms reaching out for what was already gone.

  Graycie’s aunt Estelle did not approve of a single mother working for the highway patrol. Before she agreed to help babysit, she asked Graycie a thousand times: Did Graycie want to leave Genna a motherless orphan? Get shot by a crazy on the I-15? But Graycie was good by then at not listening. Unsolicited scriptures had been raining down since Day One. What did her mother and Aunt Estelle know about life outside the chapel? Graycie could have forged her own way with Danny, moved away from San Diego, even, but Danny had turned out to be exactly what her mother called him: a flight risk. What was Graycie going to do now? Turn down every meal offered by Aunt Estelle, who lived within three miles of Graycie’s apartment and was a full-on baby hypnotist? When Genna started crying for no reason and arching her little spine in a rage, which happened almost every day, Graycie would walk her for a while, outside or inside, depending on the hour, then set Genna down in her crib, then pick her up, then set her down in the living room with some toys, but after a couple of hours of that she always thought of Estelle. Estelle could take over, fix things, let Graycie sleep. So Graycie would force Genna into her car seat (were you abusing a child when you made her stop arching her spine so you could strap on the seat belt?) and drive over to Estelle’s house. Genna would cry and the stoplights would turn red as if to hinder them, and Graycie would will time to collapse like it did in movies, cut cut cut, scene over, but Genna would keep on crying, no deliverance, until Graycie was standing with Genna on Aunt Estelle’s porch and the door opened. The second Aunt Estelle held out her skinny arms, Genna was cured. Blessed peace. Nothing but hiccups in Genna’s tiny chest.

  “It’s like you’re a witch,” Graycie said.

  “Hold your tongue,” Estelle said. “Nothing but God ruling over this world.”

  Peace came at a price, though. When you went to Aunt Estelle’s house, anytime, day or night, you were going to meet Real Africans. Aunt Estelle’s mission, revealed to her in a waking dream, was to minister to the diaspora. She gave no end of help to the recently arrived Eritrean and Somalian Christians who attended her church, the Hand of the Living God. When Graycie accepted an invitation to dinner at Aunt Estelle’s, she always asked, under the pretense of buying the right amount of cake to share (not that Aunt Estelle liked or even ate a single bite of your store-bought cake, but Graycie’s mother said she didn’t care if the hostess told you you didn’t have to bring anything. You did. Bring something), how many mouths to buy for. Aunt Estelle would say it could be any number God saw fit to send, so Graycie got to the point where she just bought one of those big old bundt cakes, one time cinnamon cream, the next time chocolate swirl.

  On Monday, June 8, when Graycie was still worrying herself to a nub about what would happen if the girl who had jumped off the bridge had a lawyer for a dad, someone who might sue and make Graycie testify in court about what she had been doing when she was supposed to be watching the bridge, Graycie decided that the last thing she needed was a long chat with Real Africans in Aunt Estelle’s red velvet living room, so she stayed home with Genna. She fed Genna sweet potatoes and rice with the little spoon that was all covered in rubber so Genna could chew on it between bites and not cut her mouth. Graycie took Genna for a long walk even though she was exhausted, because sometimes when you carried Genna through the pastel streets of Paradise Hills she went quiet as a nailhead. She even pushed Genna in the swing at the park where that homeless guy gave her the creeps, because swings were the only other Genna Hypnotist. Yes, Graycie ate two entire Danishes when she got home, and she felt terrible, but at least Genna stayed asleep when Graycie set her down, and that was a full-on miracle. Maybe Graycie shouldn’t have called up Kyle Jukesson on his cell before she lay down on her own bed, but she did. She couldn’t help it. “Did they find a body?” she said.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “So maybe she didn’t jump.”

  Kyle made a sound that might have been a sigh.

  “Did that woman from the Coronado police call you?” she asked him.

  “No.”

  That was good. A piece of good news, finally. It meant she wasn’t digging around some more.

  “I have been half in love with easeful Death,” Kyle said.

  Was he drunk? Since when did Kyle quote poetry to her? Since when did Kyle even know poetry? When she didn’t answer him, he made a weird laughing sound.

  “What?”

  “Keats, Graycie. The po-et.” He dragged it out like she might not know the term.

  “I’m not stupid. I know who Keats is. I just don’t see the relevance.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Long silence in which she hated him.

  “People who want to die want to die,” Kyle said. “They found a letter from her stepdad. He gave her some sort of ultimatum, I guess. And that was her boyfriend’s car. He broke up with her.”

  She felt bad for the girl. She felt bad for the family. What could Graycie have done, though, if she’d seen someone step out of that car and climb up on the rail? It’s not like she could have run out of the building and driven a patrol car up there and shouted, “Stop!”

  “I’m going to sleep now,” Graycie said.

  “Good idea,” he said. “This isn’t over.”

  “What do you mean?” He really knew how to stoke up the fear, get it good and hot.

  “Until they find the body, I mean. The parents are in denial.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” she said, and when she hung up the phone, it was a long while before she fell into an uneasy sleep.

  The living sand dollar looks like a disc of sodden purple velvet, and the velvet traps prey for passage to the mouth. Inside the mouth, the sand dollar has jaws and even teeth for chewing plants and animals. She’s stopped rubbing her wrists together, because she’s hungry and it doesn’t make the tape come off. When she passes out or falls asleep, the sticker on the spine of the library book falls off and becomes a stingray moving gently over rocks. She dreams she is up on the bridge again, and the wind on the bridge is so hard it would take her upward if she were a plastic bag. It flings her hair into her mouth and flays her eyeballs, and the water miles and miles below the bridge is hard. You can tell by the way the ripples catch the light that they have sharp edges, like flakes of broken glass. Yellow taxi, blond satin edge of the stingray, I don’t have my purse, the man coming out of the shadows and saying, Julia!

  It is not y
esterday or the day before, and it never can be again.

  She and Ted used to try to hold their breath the whole length of the bridge. Ted almost always won, as she won everything that required friends, balance, sails, or paddles. Thisbe was better only at memorizing, math, and words. When they were eight and eleven, Hugh had promised them perfect little wooden sabots if they could learn all the signal flags by Christmas Eve (not just the letters, either, but the messages each one represented). Thisbe learned them all in three days, not because she wanted a boat but because she liked to ace tests. Ted, on the other hand, had cried nightly at the dining room table as Christmas lights twinkled outside the window, red and green, red and blue, flashing Santa, flashing palm, standing deer. Thisbe bought Ted a pack of nautical playing cards that showed all the flags on one side, their meanings on the other:

  I am maneuvering with difficulty; keep clear.

  I have a diver down; keep well clear at slow speed.

  I require a pilot.

  Still Ted flunked. Flunked again. After the fifth or sixth failure, Thisbe asked Hugh, “Couldn’t she just send up a flare or something? I mean, is she going to carry twenty-six flags in the sailboat every time she goes out?”

  “It’s good for her. It’s good for both of you,” Hugh said. “You have to earn the right to be on the water by yourself.”

  Their mother went upstairs. She always just went upstairs.

  “I am on fire and have dangerous cargo?” Ted said as Thisbe held up, again, the flag card that meant All personnel return to ship. All personnel return to ship! Under what circumstances would a little girl in a sabot need to send that message? Under what circumstances, for that matter, would a girl in Glorietta Bay find her sabot to be on fire? Still Hugh insisted. A-plus or no sabot.

  When Ted finally passed the test late on Christmas Day (and they ate their French toast soggy-cold), they all walked down to the yacht club. The world before them was blue and pink, more Easter- than Christmas-colored, the sky dipped in blue Paas dye and the water warm when you stuck your toe in. Ted, her eyes puffy, climbed into her little vermilion sabot and forgot—it was annoying, really—all the crying and slamming of doors. Thisbe posed for a picture in her own sabot, too, but she would hate hers once she learned what it was like to try to steer it. Another way they were different.

  Thisbe had told this story to Clay on his boat the night she snuck out. Went down to the yacht club after curfew like she wasn’t afraid of anything, and she thought no one had seen her, not a soul except Clay. He’d asked her why she didn’t sail and she told him the whole story while they were lying next to each other in the little boat bed.

  “So you know what all the flags mean, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “If they put them on the SAT, I’m ready. I will ace the signal flag section.”

  “Say them to me,” Clay said as he undid her buttons. “Recite them to me and I’ll give you a prize.”

  Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta.

  Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel.

  As she recited, he turned all the warnings into double entendres.

  I am on fire and have dangerous cargo.

  Coming alongside.

  Man overboard.

  But then the very next day, after she kissed him in Spreckels Park, poof. “I think this was a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t know Jerome liked you.”

  “What?” she asked.

  Jerome was watching them, and then Clay was running after him. Jerome had liked her when? Had liked her then but didn’t like her now? Should she have known? Should she have waited? Was she a different kind of person now? She waited to see if Jerome would talk to her, but he didn’t. Clay cut her off completely. She should have put it all out of her mind, but she couldn’t. The exams came one after the other and she kept blanking out in the middle. Fell asleep instead of studying. Answered adults’ questions with a blank stare. What’s gotten into you? What indeed?

  In the aft cabin of the boat, her toe is naked again, outside the sock, and the gag is wet on the side where her cheek touches the cushion, the low point of her mouth. She can’t swallow anymore, just click. It was like when the dentist had two hands and a tool in your mouth to suck out the spit and you kept throat-clicking. Like a bird waiting for a mother that didn’t come. Click click.

  The cop behind the desk said, “Driver’s license?”

  Clay kept the real one in the front of his wallet, behind the yellowish transparent panel. The fake one was tucked in with the money.

  His hand was trembling a little when he double-checked the age really fast, because how dumb would that be if he handed his fake ID to a police officer? The officer was a big, cranky-looking guy with curly hair and a mustache and freckles all over his cheeks. He didn’t act like he noticed the trembling but he did what clerks at skate parks did (and liquor store workers almost never did): he compared the face in the picture to Clay’s face. He tapped the keyboard without saying a word.

  “Did your car break down on the bridge?”

  “No, sir. Like I said on the phone, it must have been stolen.”

  “You didn’t notice it was gone?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “I left it parked like I always do at the yacht club. I don’t drive it that much. I ride my bike, mostly.”

  “The yacht club?”

  “I’m living on our family’s boat for the summer.”

  He could feel the guy’s disgust. Any minute now he’d make some sort of crack about what a hard life kids have these days. Tap tap on the keyboard. The cop let his chair rock back a little more.

  There was nothing illegal about living on your boat, was there? He was pretty sure you didn’t have to be an adult to sleep on your own boat without your parents, but maybe there was some weird rule, so he hoped he wouldn’t have to get into that part. He needed to use the bathroom right now because he’d drunk the whole Gutter Water Gush.

  “Should I call a lawyer or something?” he said.

  “I’m not arresting you, Mr. Moorehead.”

  Mr. Moorehead. Okay, fine. Who cared about attitude as long as he was not being arrested? He was only here in the police station because his car had been found on the bridge, a thing that had been done to, not by, him. His bladder was going to pop. “I don’t mean to be rude, sir, but if we’re going to talk some more I could really use a bathroom.”

  “Down the hall to the right, Mr. Moorehead. I’ll wait right here.”

  “Thanks.”

  The bathroom was enormous. A lot nicer than the yacht club’s, actually. He couldn’t see any cameras but he felt like he was on one.

  A woman officer in a black uniform and a fancy gun belt, the whole cop regalia, was waiting for him in the lobby when he came back. “Clay Moorehead?”

  He nodded.

  “Can I ask you some questions?”

  “What about?”

  “Come on in here,” she said.

  It was the same place he’d had to wait on the night of the bad party, the room that was like where you waited to be called into the principal’s office, except here they had a glass wall so you could see the cops working on computers and saying stuff about you that you couldn’t hear. Renee took like an hour to come and get him and he had to sit there the whole time with nothing to do.

  The lady officer looked familiar. Maybe she was the same one from that night. Freckly face, pale eyes, crinkled skin. She walked him into the carpeted glass room with the ugly hotel ballroom chairs and waved him into one. “When will your mom be back?” she said.

  “August,” he said.

  “How about your dad?”

  “Same.”

  “Do you have any other relatives who could come over here for a chat?”

  “No offense, but why are you acting like I’m in trouble? I’m the victim here. Someone totally stole my car.”

  “What about your sister, the one I met before?”

  “She’s in Mexico.”

 
Clay’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He didn’t answer it.

  “You know what we found in the car, right?”

  Stomach dropped all the way to the basement. Dry lips, wet palms. So they did search it. And he hadn’t cleaned it out.

  “Pretty serious stuff we’ve got going here, Clay.”

  Clay looked her in the eye and said he had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Possession. Intent to distribute.”

  “Whoever stole the car must have put it there.”

  “That could be. We’ll check into that.”

  “Did you call my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she coming?”

  “We haven’t reached her yet. Maybe you should call her.”

  “Now?” He got out his phone. He was thinking he should really call his father about this one.

  “In a minute.”

  He waited stiffly in the chair. The screen said Missed call.

  “Do you have any idea where Thisbe Locke is right now?”

  “Why do people keep asking me that? I have no idea.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know. A while.”

  “A week, two weeks?”

  “More like four.”

  “Was she upset for any reason that you know of?”

  He knew a few reasons, but they didn’t seem like good ones to bring up now. “No.”

  “Do you know why her driver’s license might have been in your car?”

  He thought back. No. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Did she have a key to your car?”

  “No. She knew where I kept it, though.” That was what had happened. He felt it. Thisbe couldn’t get him to open the door on the boat so she went to the boat rack and stole his car keys and parked his car somewhere that would get him in huge trouble. To punish him because he said he couldn’t see her anymore. “She stole my car,” he said. “And she must have planted stuff in it.”