by Laura McNeal
Officer Lord said, “I didn’t want to rat on my sisters, either, Ted, so I get why you don’t want to break her confidence. But this is a really serious situation. We need to piece things together.”
“I’ve never seen these before.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“What about a letter from your stepdad?”
Ted didn’t know what they were talking about.
“Did she mention that he was talking about not sending her to college if she kept seeing Clay?”
“No.”
“So, the party. What happened?”
“I just know she got drunk.”
“That’s it?”
“She got drunk and made out with some guy she didn’t like and passed out. For her, that was like, I don’t know, doing heroin and stealing a car.”
Though stealing a car was an actual thing Thisbe might have done. Only not really, right? More like borrowing.
“And was that the part she didn’t want your parents to know?”
“Well,” Ted said, “yeah. She didn’t want them to know.” Getting drunk was the part that would have gotten Thisbe in trouble. The most trouble. Grounded, at the very least. But it was not the part that had bothered Thisbe the most, Ted knew. “Something happened with Clay.”
“What happened?”
“She said he humiliated her.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. But then later I heard that it was something he said.”
“He didn’t do something to her?”
“No.”
The woman did not believe her. Definitely not. She probably thought that Ted knew something more, like maybe Clay had given Thisbe roofies or something. Stuff like that happened to girls at parties, supposedly, though not any girls Ted knew. It was why their mother went along with Hugh’s overly strict rules.
Officer Lord said, “Oooooh-kay. Have you had anything to eat?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you want to come downstairs now?”
“No.”
The light shining between the curtain and the window frame gleamed bright yellow. She had wanted the sun to come out so much and now she couldn’t even enjoy it.
Weedie called while Gretchen was watering an upside-down tomato plant. “A girl jumped off the bridge,” Weedie said.
Water dripped out of the plant and ran over Gretchen’s bare feet.
“They can’t find her body,” Weedie went on.
Lots of water running all over. Wasted.
“The Locke girl. The one with brown hair.”
“Thisbe? They think it’s Thisbe?”
“That’s what they say.”
Peek was grooming Roll’s back. Seagulls dipped overhead. Tiny waves lapped the sand at Tidelands beach.
“Do you think Carl is working on the case? I thought since you used—”
“I’ll call you back later,” Gretchen said.
Take it out on him, not yourself. That’s what she’d told Thisbe. A week ago, right about there. She sat down on the deck and looked south at the blank water between her boat and the bridge. Indigo-ebony-turquoise water holding saucers of light that never stopped moving.
No.
You should never look under the water when you could look at the waves instead. Underwater was the grave, the lost, the tumbled, the dropped. Hope and illusion above; truth below.
No.
Her whole childhood had been spent looking at boats like these and imagining each one as the tiny, happy floating house of a person who would never have a boring job or a boring life but would live all the time in communion with the sea. Now she had it, free and clear: Richard Whistler’s sloop. Not just to use on vacation but to live aboard. A postcard view of the bridge. From which people killed themselves.
The blue-black flickering water rocked and flowed. The boat next door was empty and decrepit, its slanted windows plugged with rotten cloth. The boat next to that went out sometimes on weekends and the chrome was shiny. Beside that, where Frank whatever-his-name-was kept his depressing tub, the Sayonara, a slimy white mooring ball floated by itself. So Frank was out cruising or maybe had left the mudflats? Since he hated Peek and Roll and hated Gretchen and hadn’t even helped her that time her dinghy got loose in a storm, this was a good thing. She hoped it was adios, Sayonara.
Think back. Should she have done something more for Thisbe? Yes. She should have. But what?
Gretchen had been sitting on her deck in the darkness with Peek and Roll on her shoulders. Late. Not a bad evening, one of the good times when you felt like a bohemian woman of the world, not an aging spinster. She held a book on her knees but had switched off the light so she could just stare at the water and the lights of the hotels and high-rise apartments, each glow full of disappointment or happiness, she couldn’t tell which. She found she could assume happiness, could imagine some girl getting dressed for, say, an art opening or a birthday party in that tiny window way up at the top of the tower, and that was when she heard splashing. A glint slid forward in the water, became human. “Are you okay?” she called out to it.
No answer.
“Where are you going?”
No answer.
“It’s not safe in the dark. A boat could hit you.” Gretchen unclipped the flashlight from the wall and scanned the waves with it. “Where are you going?”
Still ignoring her.
“You know the tide’s against you.”
No answer.
“Are you staying aboard one of these boats?”
Mute.
“I’m going to call the harbor patrol,” Gretchen said, an empty threat, really, because it would take them forever to get here. “It’s not safe!” she said again.
Finally she decided she had to do something. She had to put the birds in their cages and dig out the Jim-Buoy ring before she could climb down into the dinghy and row in what she hoped was the right direction.
So annoying and shocking when the swimming girl turned out to be Thisbe, especially when Thisbe treated Gretchen like a stranger! “What the hell are you doing? Didn’t you see it was me?” Gretchen said. She threw the buoy thing at Thisbe and it landed close to her arms. Thisbe grabbed it and hung on, gulping and spitting.
“You could have answered me,” Gretchen said. “You could have said, I am swimming in the bay like an idiot. Leave me alone.”
Gulps and spits, but no laughs. Then Thisbe started doing that hiccup thing that came from crying, and then she was crying hard. Gretchen pulled her closer to the dinghy and nearly fell in trying to help her climb aboard. She rowed them back to the Broker with Thisbe like a glum seal huddled in the front, not a light load by any means, plus the tide was against them the whole way. No explanation, no Thank you, Gretchen! Even when Thisbe was wrapped in a nice blanket on the deck of the Broker, she didn’t say thank you. She said, “I thought it would be easier if I just disappeared.”
This was hard to take from a seventeen-year-old girl. It looked like self-pity, not despair, and it was not attractive.
“It would not be easier if you disappeared, you idiot,” Gretchen said. “You’re too young to be so unhappy.”
No answer again.
“You have so much to live for! It’s all ahead of you!” Gretchen tried them out one after the other, as if they were Tylenol and Motrin. “Things change!”
“Grown-ups always say that,” Thisbe said. Scornful expression, scornful voice. Black sky, black bay, slivers of light rippling around the boat.
“Because it’s true.”
“Things don’t change,” Thisbe said. “Things just are what they are. And I’m like this. I’ll always be like this.”
“Like what?”
No response.
“You’re seventeen, for Christ’s sake,” Gretchen said.
“So?”
“Did that obnoxious boy drop you?”
“That guy who brought you to Clayton’s.”
Thisbe didn’t even have to nod. Gretchen knew.
“Oh, God. You should take it out on him, not yourself.”
She tried to think of a Life Lesson she could impart. After four years with Harry in Hawaii, Harry had said to Gretchen, “I want you to move out,” and Gretchen told Harry she’d rather drown and Harry said he was leaving for the trade show the next day no matter what, which he did, and she didn’t drown herself right then because, well, it was so dark out, and even though Gretchen wanted to disappear, she was afraid of sharks and tides and jellyfish. Every day for two weeks she thought she’d do it, just drown herself, but she stayed in her chair at Pua’s house, dreaming of painless obliteration, and then the call came from California. Her mom was sick. Stage four. Gretchen left Hawaii and came home to take care of her and the crazy birds.
“Things change and you feel better,” Gretchen said. “Not right away, maybe, but later.”
Thisbe stared with what looked like hatred at the black water in the bay.
Gretchen felt impatience. She wanted to tell Thisbe what other people had to do when you so-called disappeared. You didn’t vanish like sea foam in the bright air. You left yourself for others to find. You floated in pieces. You became a pair of hands someone had to reach out and grab, put in a yellow bag, take to the surface. All in a day’s work. Here are the hands.
Lots of people went back to work after finding things like severed hands. It was their job. They went back to work the day after they had cleaned up train accidents and murders and bits of victims stuck to the grilles of hurtling cars. Not Gretchen, though. She quit diving and went to work as a waitress.
She looked at Thisbe in the blanket, a beautiful, bitter mermaid of a girl. She thought of saying how she had found the girl’s hands in the water and put them in a bag because someone who’d wanted to disappear had not made sure she was over water before she jumped off the bridge.
She couldn’t say it, though. It was too grim. “You are not the problem” was all she said to Thisbe. “He’s a black hole. Take it out on him, not yourself. That’s what I’d do.”
Thisbe had not asked Gretchen how to go about this. Thisbe had not even seemed to be listening. Gretchen should have told her the terrible story instead, she thought now, looking down into water she was afraid to touch.
They know she’s gone, so they’ll be looking, right? They’ll publish her picture and the taxi driver from Eritrea will see it. He’ll call the police and say, I saw her. She didn’t jump. I took her down.
She considers this in the bathroom. Instead of stabbing him, she could just scream. Shout her name and situation. I’m trapped in here! If they’re near a boat of any kind, someone could hear her. How far could they have sailed by now?
Listen. She needs to listen. No motor. The whipping cloth of a sail. Is that a sail? The flapping is like a sail. She hears Frank’s boots as he shuffles around. Creaking hull as the boat rolls side to side. The click of the jars full of sand dollars. The repetitive chime of metal on metal, a high ring as if someone were playing the triangle. It’s not the feel of a boat speeding forward, when you could hear the water flowing and splashing and falling away, the gush of two streams as she sailed the blue sabot around the mark in last place. “DFL,” she had heard Hugh say one time. He probably said it about her, because that’s where she usually placed. Dead Fucking Last.
She doesn’t hear the gushing sound of water going around the hull. And the man isn’t steering. He would be steering if they were in the ocean, heading someplace like Pismo.
She leans on the bathroom door. An accidental bump of her sore arm makes her cry out. The borrowed pants slide. She’s upright and she isn’t falling, but she’s dizzy, and the boat, burbling and groaning, is like a living thing. What if she just falls over while she’s holding the knife to stab him? She’s Jonah and Frank’s boat is the whale. Is the whale swimming? No. More like it’s waiting. Waiting like the nurse shark in the tank at Birch Aquarium, gray and still.
Thisbe takes a breath of stinky bathroom air. She prepares to scream, to run out, to grab the knife. She thinks the words she plans to scream: Hey! Help me! I’m kidnapped in here!
This boat is how many feet? Smaller than Hugh’s and Clay’s boats. Fifteen feet of cabin, tiny bathroom, tiny galley, maybe a twenty-six-foot boat, the kind at the yacht club. The boat set sail from Coronado, right? Because he took her from under the bridge? But maybe not. When this kind of thing happened to other girls, they were put in cars first. The car took you somewhere. She has no memory of a car but she has no memory at all between the underside of the bridge, where she was running in the dark, and the boat. In between, there was…what?
Maybe if she went on being Julia, if she pretended very, very well, the crazy man would leave the duct tape off her arms and legs and then when he was on deck she could move the jars around and look out one of the portholes and figure out where they are?
He’s crazy but she’s not. Sane beats crazy like rock beats scissors. The boy in the red truck had thought she was nutso, she’d seen it in his face, and something in her wanted him not to think that. She’d gotten sane again. She’d thought about jumping but she didn’t jump. She opened the passenger door to the Honda and sat herself back down in the car and leaned over the gears and the driver’s seat and she pulled the driver’s door closed so the door would not be torn off by a passing truck and the wind would stop coming in and she could think. A crazy person would not have done that. Headlights filled the car with whiteness like spotlights on a stage. The headlights went slowly around and the car was yellow. A yellow taxi that pulled over in front of her. Eritrea, it said on the trunk. A black man, it looked like, turned his head and used two fingers to say, Come here.
Come here, two fingers said, come here to the taxi and I will take you from this situation, this pickle, this car that isn’t yours and never has been.
She got out. She walked forward. The wind blew. The stars were not mica shards floating in outer space but white dwarfs that could burn up matter.
She opened the back door and got in.
The backseat of the taxi smelled like oil and dust, and the seat drooped beneath her, the springs broken, the hollow deep. The driver was a slender black man with long arms in a white dress shirt. “Your car, it is broke down?” the driver said, accelerating, taking her away from the situation, taking her down to the island, down to the ground.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have my purse. I forgot it.”
Was there another car? Did the crazy man have a car, too? A car with a backseat that sank into the springs? The boat lurches and she falls sideways like a bowling pin, hits the shower wall with her scabby arm, already throbbing, and her knees buckle. She cries out but doesn’t scream because the sound is unmistakable now: the churning thrum of an outboard motor.
She opens the bathroom door and no one’s there. He’s gone out of the cabin and she’s not taped up. Her chance! The motor cuts out and the silence is like a layer of fog. He starts it again, and she reaches for the knob of the cabin door, to let herself out. She could go on deck and jump into the water, any water, who cares where. The knob turns but when she pushes the door out, it hits something. She pushes again, harder. Harder and harder but there’s a latch or something. It’s locked from the outside. The roaring motor stops and she stands still. Green light, red light.
While Fen waited for his uncle in the Lockes’ house, he sat in their living room wishing he could go back to the car. The coffee table was the kind with a glass top, and he stared through it, wondering if he should pull out one of the giant books and pretend to read, or if it would be weird to check out the board games. Five minutes passed. Then six. His uncle didn’t reappear, and no one else came in. He could hear muted voices upstairs—a girl’s, a man’s, a woman’s. Creaking sounds now and then, as if people were walking. He quietly opened the Monopoly box and took out tw
o dice, one white, one red. He closed the box and put it back under the glass, then set the dice on the table so it was clear he wasn’t stealing them. He’d have stuffed them in his pocket if he meant to steal them. Then he turned a picture frame on the table beside the sofa so he could see it better. One of the girls was the Ted girl he’d met at the snack bar, but younger and smaller and flat-chested, her dress pink with skinny straps. He was brushing dust from the glass with his thumb when he heard footsteps on the stairs. Ted came into the room and caught him looking at her picture. He didn’t know what to say to her. Had his uncle told her parents yet? This was a freaky-bad situation.
She was still wearing her board shorts and he could see the bikini lines under a white shirt. “Hey,” she said, not smiling.
He wished he hadn’t grabbed the dice out of her Monopoly game, but they were in his left hand now, so—
“Did your uncle make you come over?”
He shook the dice in his hand a little. “No.” When Fen’s father had died, the school secretary and the principal and all his teachers had said, “I’m sorry about your dad,” but only one student besides his friend Greg had even mentioned it. Hillary Tieran had walked up to him at the cafeteria and said, “Sorry about your dad. That sucks the worst.”
So Fen said, “I’m sorry about your sister. That sucks the worst.” Then he wondered what she’d think about him saying that once she knew he’d been up on the bridge and had done nothing to help.
Ted stared at the floor for an uncomfortably long time. What she was looking at was a red-and-blue Persian-type rug, and in the part of the rug where she was looking, a tree grew out of another tree and flowed into another tree. Finally she said, without looking up from the tree chain, “She’s not dead.”
This wasn’t what he’d expected at all. It wasn’t what his uncle had said. Carl had said she jumped. Fen rolled the dice and they stopped on four and two.