by Laura McNeal
“What made him call today?”
“He said he told his wife and she had a bad feeling about it.”
On the street in front of Carl’s house, framed by his living room window, sat Fen’s truck. Red. Fen had driven it over the bridge around midnight, but he hadn’t said he’d seen a jumper. And he would, wouldn’t he? It was the kind of thing you mentioned. Especially if you were a new driver.
“Thanks, Elaine. I’ll see you in a bit.”
It didn’t take long for Carl to find Fen at Central Beach. Crumpled at the waterline was the purple orchid towel Stacy had brought home from their only trip to Hawaii, already layered with sand. Wind caught a beach umbrella and started flinging it down the dunes. A hairless man in a Speedo chased it down, caught it, laughed, and said something in Dutch or German. Carl thought he could see Fen’s snorkeled head out there in the waves among the kids on boogie boards, the dark floating birds. “Fen!” he shouted. Fen didn’t turn, just ducked under a wave.
Carl strapped Paul’s old fins to his knobby feet, pulled the mask down over his eyes, and stuffed the mouthpiece in. It tasted of salt and childhood.
He waddled in, then plunged, felt the cold like he was a turkey in fresh brine. His skin got used to it in seconds—that was the good thing about body fat—and he did his modified American crawl to the smooth belt of water beyond the waves everyone else was catching. It was Fen, all right, and he grinned around his mouthpiece when Carl touched him on the shoulder.
Fen spat out the mouthpiece and said, “This is awesome!”
“It is?”
“You can’t see much, but still, you know?” Fen’s teeth were chattering and his lips were white.
“Aren’t you freezing?” Carl said.
“Nah.”
“So the visibility’s okay?” He could hear, far in the distance, a helicopter, and it made him think of the divers and spotters, their masks and binoculars. The ocean where he and Fen were treading water was miles from where the girl would have been when she jumped off the bridge, all the way around the other side of the island, but now the water felt tainted anyway.
“It’s not that bad,” Fen said.
“Yeah?”
Fen stuck his mouthpiece in and waved for Carl to follow him. Carl felt a vague, suppressed need to hurry and wondered how he should ask Fen if he’d seen anything when he was driving over the bridge. If Fen had seen the girl and didn’t mention it, maybe it was because it was so upsetting, a thing like that after his father died. Carl should tell Fen they needed to get out of the water, but first he dived under a wave and swallowed water so salty it made him cough, a taste he always underestimated, and when Fen put his head down and stretched out, Carl let himself do the same. He floated like a dead man and stared into the cold, billion-mile Pacific. At first all he could see through the mask was whirling, pummeling silt. But as the building waves moved him up and down, the silt became its own kind of show, the top layer lit by the sun and swirled by the currents in an endless, glittery explosion. Strings of rippled kelp jerked forward, hung back. Then the silt cleared and he could see five feet down, could see plainly, as if through a magnifying glass, the ripples on the sandy floor and a stingray shooting away from him like a puck in a hockey game. He tried not to think about Thisbe Locke in the bay, the same water. A fish darted past him, slim as a pipe. A few feet away, at the surface, Fen’s body floated and pulsed, his hands hanging down like wings in mid-flight, beautifully alive.
When Fen stuck his head up again and spat out his mouthpiece, Carl did, too. “Amazing, isn’t it?” Fen asked, grinning.
“I love it.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“I gotta go to somebody’s house, though.”
“Now?”
“It’s kind of an emergency.”
“What kind?”
He didn’t want it to seem like a trap, but it did, the way he was presenting it. Like when he would say to Paul, I heard a party was rolled on the Strand last night, to see if Paul would admit to having been there. “I’ll tell you in the car.”
It was a long walk across the beach, but Fen didn’t ask where Carl was going. He just trudged along the way you had to in sand. Not until they were strapping themselves into the seats of Carl’s car, half-wet, cleaned and pickled by the ocean, families all around them dragging boogie boards and towels on sidewalks, rubbing sunscreen onto the faces of children who held up their cheeks and closed their eyes, did Fen say, “So what are we doing?” and Carl couldn’t see another way to do it now, so he laid out the basic facts: a car, a girl, a witness who saw a red truck.
“That was me,” Fen said.
Carl drove slowly, but he still had to concentrate on traffic. A kid in a swim vest was standing by his mother on the curb, but then he got too excited, so he jumped off, and the mother, holding a baby with one arm and a wagon with the other, raced out, jerked him back, and said, “I told you to stay!” Carl stopped the car and waved them across.
“A white Honda, right?” Fen asked.
“I think so. I don’t remember the make.” The little boy ran on his tiptoes and the mother scurried behind, her face full of worry.
There was a long enough pause on Fen’s side that Carl drove all the way around Star Park Circle—the round green park where he’d first kissed Stacy and where he had come to pick up Paul the night he’d been too drunk to ride his skateboard home—before Fen spoke again.
“Was she wearing pink boots?” Fen asked.
“I don’t know that, either.”
“I saw her! I thought she was having car trouble. Oh my God.”
By now Carl was stopped for the millionth time in his life at a red light on Orange Avenue, across from Clayton’s with its clean white plaster walls and the painted red letters promising coffee. He could see the lines of gleaming new bicycles for sale outside Holland’s; the clumps of tourists on all four corners mystified by the order in which the lights turned green and how long it took for their turn to arrive; the cars idling with windows down and kids in the backseats looking innocent and excited, the sun shining on their brand-new vacations; the edges of roofs up and down the street clean and sharp against a summer sky they’d done nothing to earn and could do nothing to keep. Everything and everyone was just waiting.
“What did you see?” Carl asked Fen. Let it not be the girl jumping off the bridge right in front of him. That’s what he thought.
“I saw her standing there. She, like, waved and told me to go around her. It was like she was pissed at me for even stopping. I thought she was having car trouble. I just left!”
“So she waved?” Carl said.
“She waved her phone at me. Like, I’ve got this.”
Now the light was green. Cars and people moved, so he rolled through the intersection.
“I just kept driving,” Fen said. He sounded panicked. He looked panicked. Like he was thinking he could have done something.
“Look,” Carl said. “You didn’t know. You thought it would be dangerous to get out of your car, and it would have been. You did what she told you to do.”
A block later, Carl slowed to pass a family cycling on a surrey, laughing and pedaling like cartoon characters, their progress comically slow despite the number of legs pumping up and down. He turned onto the Lockes’ street, a beautiful road on a beautiful day. Magnolia limbs touched overhead. When he reached the corner, he saw two police cars in front of a dark red wooden house. No one was outside except a boy who was standing still across the street, spinning the blade of his scooter around and around under his raised foot, waiting for something interesting to happen.
“It’s okay, Fen,” Carl said. He studied the red house. Green lawn. Ping-Pong table. Maybe the girl’s body had been found by now. If she had waved Fen on, Elaine was right. She had probably meant to jump. To get on with her plan.
“Listen,” Carl said. “You can stay in the car if you want.”
“I should have stopped, right? People are going to
wonder why I didn’t help her. Like, talk her out of it.”
“That would be a big stretch. Not even professionals can do that all the time. If you want, I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them what you saw, and you can talk to the police later. You don’t have to come in.”
Carl walked halfway to the house, then turned around. It wouldn’t look right. The parents would notice Fen sitting there in the car and wonder. Once they knew that Fen had seen their daughter, perhaps had been the last to see her, it would mark him. Everyone connected to a suicide was unhinged enough to see offenses everywhere.
“It’d be better if you came in with me,” Carl said. “Don’t worry. You’re just a witness. You didn’t cause it.”
When Fen got out of the car, he looked smaller and thinner than he had at the beach, and it reminded Carl of how Fen had stood squinting in the sun at the Las Vegas cemetery, lost and uncomfortable and too small inside his new dress clothes. “It’s okay,” Carl said, but Fen didn’t answer.
Ted saw them park across the street, where Billy Greenbaugh had been watching her house for at least thirty minutes. Billy probably had a cell phone in his pocket even though he was only about eight, and she bet he’d already told all his friends the cops were at her house. She didn’t turn around to face Ashlynn’s mom or Katie’s mom when she told them, “Mr. Harris is here. With his nephew.”
Weird how the nephew kept sitting in the car like he didn’t want to get out. Then Mr. Harris opened the car door and talked to him for a while and the boy got out of the car the way Ted did when her mom made her go be nice to someone. Well, that was a bad idea. She didn’t want to talk about Thisbe to a boy she barely knew. The only people she’d contacted were Jerome and Clay, and that was because they could know something. Clay hadn’t answered, and Jerome said he hadn’t seen Thisbe. They were worthless.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, and went upstairs so she wouldn’t have to listen to him being nice to her.
She meant to go in Thisbe’s room but two police officers, their torsos thickened by what had to be bulletproof vests, which seemed so weird in Coronado, were standing in there talking to her mom. She heard them say they were looking for a note.
Ted said again, “Mr. Harris is here. He brought his nephew.”
Her mother asked what nephew but Ted left so she wouldn’t have to answer, closed her door, and lay facedown on her bed. She heard her mother’s footsteps going down the stairs, the squeal-thud of Thisbe’s desk drawers, the scrape of hangers. She tried to pretend it was Thisbe cleaning her room, which Thisbe did all the time, deliberately making Ted’s messiness stand out more.
Hugh was on a plane. He was leaving Chicago even though he hadn’t finished his meetings, her mother had said. That meant her mother thought Thisbe might be dead, because if she thought Thisbe had just spent the night somewhere, she would never tell Hugh while he was on a business trip, and Hugh would never come home early. They’d found Thisbe’s bike at the yacht club, not parked in the racks like all the other bikes, but over by the tennis courts, leaning on somebody’s catamaran trailer. Everybody guessed that meant Thisbe really had taken Clay’s car. And if she’d taken his car, then—
Maybe Ted could fall asleep, and when she woke up there’d be a text from Jerome saying, I saw her she’s at Amy’s, or a text from Thisbe saying, I need your help, like that time Ted had needed Thisbe to bail her out because Ted had stupidly sent a text to her mom saying, I’m home, right at curfew even though she wasn’t, and when Ted really got home a half hour later, their mother was sitting wide-awake and vulture-ish in the living room with Hugh, so Ted texted Thisbe and Thisbe distracted their parents so that Ted could sneak upstairs.
Maybe Thisbe had left her bike at the yacht club because Nessa had a car and Thisbe was with her when her phone died, and maybe wherever they were hanging out, people got drunk, and Thisbe fell asleep and now she didn’t want to come home because she knew she would get in trouble.
Ted was looking forward to telling Thisbe how epic the mess was that she’d caused, much, much worse than the curfew thing Ted had done, but Ted would help her anyway and Thisbe would see that being street-smart was almost as good as being in the honor society. Ma hay-lo, Thisbe would say, twirling her finger in a circle over her head, their old joke from that visit to Hawaii when they were, like, six and four and their dad was still alive. Ma hay-lo, he would say every time they saw another sign that said thank you in Hawaiian. Do you see ma halo? Mahalo-alay-lay.
Even with her door closed and her pillow over her head, she could hear Mr. Harris’s deep voice. The boy’s full name might be Phineas, which was just as stupid as Theodora. Imagine your nickname being Phin. It was crazy letting grown-ups name their children. They were terrible at it. Consider Thisbe. A couple of years ago she’d read some book for English and found out that Thisbe was a girl in a myth who pretended to get killed by a lion or something weird like that, and her boyfriend thought she was dead, so he killed himself, so then she killed herself. Thisbe asked their mom, What the hell? (Only not swearing.) And their mom said that back when she was in high school, she’d played the part of Thisbe in a play that was Shakespeare’s or somebody’s and it was just a unique name in a funny play, a beautiful and completely original name, so don’t be silly. I didn’t name you after that Thisbe, their mom said.
If Ted had a girl, she was going to name her Margaret. If she had a boy, she was going to name him Jack.
She hadn’t changed out of her board shorts or her bathing suit, and she felt grimy and disgusting. She should have taken a shower sooner because now the Phin guy was here and her mom might say, “Ted’s in the shower,” and when you heard the word shower, you saw someone naked in your mind.
Someone was knocking on the door. Mrs. Vicks wouldn’t send the boy upstairs, would she?
“Who is it?” Let him hear that she was annoyed. She didn’t care.
“It’s Officer Lord. Can I talk to you for a second?”
Could you say no to police? She wanted to say no. She walked slowly to the door and opened it.
“Hi,” she said. The goofy man with the bald spot stayed in the open doorway, looking overly tall.
Ted stared. They came in with all their black shiny stuff in their black poly uniforms. They looked wrong and she wanted them out. “I need to ask some questions about your sister,” the woman said.
Ted waited.
“Did she ever talk about killing herself?”
“No.”
“Was she unhappy about anything?”
Pause to think about lying. To decide she couldn’t lie. “Yeah.”
“What?”
“This stupid guy.”
Officer Lord was not going away. She sat on Ted’s desk chair, which had a bunch of clothes thrown over the back. There were more clothes on the floor. Also a pair of sailing boots, which stank. Ted hadn’t put the pillows on her bed the way her mom liked or even pulled the blanket back up this morning. It was half-dark because she didn’t want to raise the window shade.
“So what happened with the guy?”
“He was her first boyfriend.”
Still not moving. Just sitting in Ted’s chair with her big black orthopedic shoes and her gun belt. “Go on.”
“He was just a mistake.”
“Why?”
It was hard to explain. “He’s very popular. His family’s rich.”
The giant guy stood like a tree in her room, waiting for her to make sense of Thisbe. Who could ever make sense of her?
“They’re also, like, gone a lot. So Thisbe would go over to his house or, like, his boat and there wouldn’t be any parents. My stepdad said they were…I forget the word.” Thisbe and Hugh were so annoying when they used big words like they were the smartest people on earth, if not the universe.
“My stepdad didn’t like that Clay threw parties and stuff. And Thisbe didn’t get how guys work.”
“How do guys work?”
“Thisbe thought
he loved her, but it was just for fun.”
The tall guy was looking at Ted’s bulletin board and tapping his lip. She could tell he was still listening, though.
Ted didn’t know how much she was supposed to say about her sister’s life. She thought Thisbe had probably slept with Clay, because otherwise Clay wouldn’t have gone out with her more than once or twice, and if they had just been kissing or something, Thisbe wouldn’t have been so freaked out when he dropped her. “She, like, went to one of his parties after they broke up and she was still trying to get him to talk to her about it. Texting him and stuff.”
“When was the party?”
“Like, the last month of school.”
“What happened at the party?”
“You guys came.”
The lady nodded. “Did something happen at the party?” she asked. “To Thisbe, I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“She told me not to tell.”
The giant man was no longer studying Ted’s sailing trophies. He was looking at her with his doughy face that maybe wasn’t as dumb as she’d thought.
“Did Thisbe sail, too?” he asked.
“Only with our family. Like, when she was younger. She didn’t like it.”
“Why did she collect fortune cookie messages?”
“What?”
“Fortunes. Like when you get Chinese food.”
When they got Chinese food as a family, which wasn’t that often because Hugh didn’t like it, she and Thisbe always read the fortunes aloud. Didn’t everyone?
“These,” the giant cop guy said, and he went out of Ted’s room for a second and he came back holding the tin Sunshine State box Thisbe had bought at a garage sale. He opened it, and there were four slips of paper, fortunes that looked slightly greasy but otherwise normal, and a stale-looking, broken fortune cookie. Ted didn’t like that there was some weird habit of her sister’s that she didn’t even know about. They watched her while she read them: TRUST ME, THISBE. YOU ARE SO MYSTERIOUS. PLEASURE AWAITS YOU BY THE SEA. DINNER AT CLAYTON’S TONIGHT? They were from a boy, probably, but this didn’t seem like something Clay would do. And yet. Pleasure by the sea. That was definitely Clay’s idea of romance.