by Laura McNeal
“Hey!” she screams, but her voice is weak and broken and cracked. Nothing happens. And then it does. She hears the lock snap open, and she’s standing with the knife in the darkness when he opens the cabin door.
“Don’t touch me,” she says, her voice a strange, whispery cry.
“I have to go ashore,” he says. “I’m sorry, Julia. You have to wait here.”
“No,” she says, holding the puny knife like it’s a sword and she’s a fencer. She wishes it were bigger. As big as an ax.
“Don’t be mad, Julia,” he says.
“I’m not Julia,” she says.
“Don’t say that.” He’s coming closer. He has a mournful look. His bristly beard shines in the light that glows above the cabin door. The light shines down on him as if he were a statue in a church. She hates him.
“I want out,” she says, and she hates how it sounds like she has laryngitis, like she’s too sick to hurt him.
“Not here. Not now. I want to take you home. You’ll remember when you see. It takes a while. The Seer warned me.”
“I don’t know who the Seer is but I want to go home.”
The cat swishes by his feet. It comes into the cabin as if nothing is amiss, as if this is an argument the cat hears all the time. The cat jumps up on the cushion and arranges its tail in the near darkness. Ready for the show.
The man uses his hands to talk. He holds them up to show he’s reasonable, but she knows he isn’t. He’s insane. “I should have showed you the article.”
“I don’t need to see any article.”
“You’re confused.”
“No, you’re confused,” she says, her voice annoyingly weaker when she tries to shout. She decides to walk toward him. Maybe he’ll let her go past and out of the cabin if she holds the knife in a threatening manner. It’s a steak knife, but it’s sharp.
“Don’t,” he says.
She keeps walking. He doesn’t step to the side, and the boat is so narrow she can’t pass unless he steps into the galley. She can’t bear to touch any part of him. She’s near enough to stab but she doesn’t. She holds the knife a little higher, and he reaches behind him and brings his hand back holding the gun.
She forgot that. She stands still. He points it right at her chest.
“Hand me the knife,” he says.
She hates him.
“I don’t want to use this again,” he says. “It isn’t a good part of my plan.”
She will never forget the sorrowful face he makes, as if he’s a good person. She hands him the knife and he makes her turn around. The cat watches stiffly the whole time that he wraps and tapes her wrists behind her back. She can see what the cat sees: the man has set the gun down on the floor to tape her ankles together. She could kick it backward, kick him, but then what?
He tells her to lie facedown on the cushion and she thinks she doesn’t care what happens as long as he doesn’t rape her. He tapes her ankles and ties the gag in her mouth.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he says.
When he goes out, the cat follows him and she’s alone again.
There’s no wallet by trash can number one. Not by the others, either. The trash cans stink and spill over in pools of yellow light, papers and bags pecked by birds and mashed by feet, smeary and torn. He looks and looks but there’s no wallet. It isn’t late enough that all the joggers have gone home so he keeps his eyes down. Girl, boy, man. He can tell by their calves and how fast they run whether they’re old or young, fat or thin.
Sand scrapes under his shoes because water has made flat rivers across the sidewalk where the swimmers wash their feet. More runners passing, the swish of a bike. The clack and thrum overhead as cars rush onto the island or rush away over the bridge. Water gleams on the waves lit below the pylons, and fog wets the empty grass of the golf course. He waits until the path is empty behind and ahead of him, and he darts into the place where it says NO TRESPASSING. Walks along the path in his usual manner, as if he’s an official of some kind, a gardener here from Parks and Rec, his purpose known and important. Break in the water line? Electrical failure? He can fix that sort of thing. He hears the soft rhythm of a woman’s running feet, but she doesn’t stop to report him, just goes on running.
There it is: the cave of dry acacias. No one can see him here. The bag of bottles and cans is waiting as he remembered. It will make a certain amount of noise to dump them out, so he doesn’t want to do that. He searches quietly under and around the cans but there’s so little light. The streetlight is blocked out by branches and leaves. It’s hopeless. If he were to dig up his flashlight and switch it on this early in the evening, someone might glance over and see light in the place where no one is supposed to be. He shuffles and waits for his eyes to get keener, leans down and gropes with his hands under the bag, tears open the thick plastic, and lets the bottles and cans spill out. He holds his breath and kneels in a state of perfect stillness while he listens for a bike or a voice, hurrying feet. Nothing. He feels in the dirt for the wallet, but there are only jagged cans, crushed plastic bottles, pine needles, and rocks.
He’s lost it, and Julia waits on the boat. All this time, all this looking and waiting, waiting for her to return, was that for nothing? What if it’s like last time? With the girl in Oceano who was not really Julia, sitting on the boat, waiting for him, time passing, too much time.
This is different. This time the girl ate. This time he gave her water. And it’s just one more night. He can wait until morning. Go to the bank and say who he is and how much money should be in his account. Nobody says you have to be clean-shaven and wearing a suit to have a bank card. He can prove it’s his signature. He can prove he’s Frank Le Stang by writing his name the way it was on the card and by telling them his mother’s maiden name, Serafim. He, Frank Le Stang, has money from the sale of the Serafim house in Pismo Beach, California, all of it guarded and saved, which is why he isn’t dressed in a fancy suit, wearing a fancy tie, driving a big black car. The money is saved, sitting right there in his account, and in the morning they’ll see by the way he writes his name that he has plenty of money even though he’s lost his wallet, which can happen to anyone. He’ll get a new card. Take the Rib to buy an impeller. Setbacks are setbacks; nothing can stop him now. This time is different.
Hugh sat barefoot in the dark. He’d given Ambien to Anne and promised to take some himself but instead he roamed the house. Ted’s room: quiet. The kitchen: a row of glasses by the sink, an uncut pan of enchiladas under foil in the fridge. Pillows askew on the couch, a Monopoly box sticking out of the stack under the coffee table, the neighbor’s porch a globe of lighted mist. He was often awake this time of night, his mind three to eight hours ahead, but that was different. Normally, he could just work, go for a run, read the paper, send emails. His phone and Anne’s had rung repeatedly after Ted’s stunt: Missing. Thisbe’s face everywhere. Last seen on the Coronado Bridge. Emails from neighbors and friends had started arriving in an ever-lengthening queue: Oh my God! I’m so sorry. I’ll keep an eye out. Is there anything I can do?
Hugh sat down at his desk without turning on the light. He clicked through the new emails, all of them short, none of them informative. Anne believed Ted had a point. Why assume the police were right? She could be missing, couldn’t she? Thisbe wouldn’t jump. It was impossible. Therefore she must be alive somewhere.
Hugh walked up the stairs and stood at the threshold of Thisbe’s room. The door was ajar, as it never was when Thisbe was home. The girls kept their doors closed as a matter of principle, something he hadn’t allowed his boys to do.
Hugh pushed the door open and stepped in. Thisbe’s room smelled sweet, as she had. Her laptop was closed and plugged into the wall. Another cord was wrapped neatly in a bowl. He could hear nothing except a far-off bark. Josh’s and Aaron’s rooms had always smelled of sweat and deodorant. Despite their higher-than-normal ability to sink basketballs through hoops and throw footballs into outstretched hands, they
could not get a tissue into a trash can. But here the pillows were arranged with precision on the bed.
He stepped forward and opened the top drawer of Thisbe’s desk, slowly in case there was a squeak. No squeak. The pencils rolled once and lay still.
Checking the room for the letter he’d written her wasn’t wrong. The policewoman called Lord, she had said they’d found a letter from him, and did he think Thisbe was upset by it? He said of course she was upset! It was easy to make a teenaged girl upset! He hadn’t meant to hurt her, but to make her see that he was serious, this was serious, life was serious. College mattered to Thisbe, so college was the carrot and the stick.
He told the policewoman and Carl Harris and the giant guy the truth: that Thisbe had been mad at him after she’d read the letter, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about that. Her emotional ups and downs were not abnormal, from what he could see, but he’d had boys the first time around, and boys were different, people said. He could tell that Anne was mad about the letter when Officer Lord brought it up. Hugh hadn’t shown it to Anne first, so naturally she was mad. Anne was always saying vaguely that things would work out if you didn’t make yourself into the enemy. But she hid away from problems she didn’t want to face. Pretended they weren’t there, meditated, closed her eyes.
Now that Hugh was alone and awake, the letter seemed like a bigger deal. What if it was a trigger, as they had seemed to imply? They hadn’t handed him the letter, which he was grateful about, just said they had found it in Thisbe’s room. Hugh didn’t ask where or in what condition because he didn’t think of it at the time, was still shocked and defensive, to tell the truth. If they’d left the letter where they’d found it, that meant the letter was not a piece of evidence they felt they had to collect. And if Hugh found the letter in some particular state, that would be illuminating. Say she had wadded it up. Say she had folded it up inside a pocket. Say she had written something back to him in the margins, as his ex-wife had done with emails he’d sent to her, which she had printed out, for some reason, and then scrawled on in pencil and left inside an envelope he found months later instead of sending a letter back to him like a normal communicating person.
Moonlight chromed the shelves. He opened the second drawer, the one big enough for files, and it squeaked. Ted was next door, so he held still and felt the carpet under his bare feet and tried to hear whether she was awake, too. Six years was enough time for Ted to accept him, you’d think. From the age of eight, she’d received nothing from him but encouragement. The sabot that had started her love of sailing, the money he had shelled out for overnight regattas and the best gear and clinics and coaches and memberships, not to mention clothes, donuts, caramel-mocha-peppermint-pumpkin lattes, were they nothing? Still she seethed.
The files were full of what looked like old homework. He didn’t look through them all. He didn’t open the yellow tin box where the police had found fortune cookie messages that looked homemade, the edges crooked as if cut out one by one with scissors. Do you know where these might have come from? they asked. No, he didn’t. The boyfriend? Maybe, he said. Though it seemed like more work than that boy was capable of.
He poked the wastebasket with a pencil: just a few tissues and gum wrappers that sat forlornly in the bottom. The letter was not in the trash, so Thisbe hadn’t thrown it away, or the police had sealed it in an evidence bag.
Anne thought Clay had definitely given Thisbe the fortune cookies. Why else would she keep them? But kids kept all kinds of junk. Witness the “Wacky Island” map still pinned to Thisbe’s bulletin board, a school project from years ago, a hand-colored, made-up place she’d labeled (he winced for her) Poetry Island.
If Clay had, in fact, seduced Thisbe with sappy messages (the only one he could remember was Pleasure awaits you by the sea, which made him sick to his stomach) and she had slept with him, which she probably had—they all did it; it was different now—that was likely why she’d turned into a different person. She’d started going with a whole different crowd. Drinking experimentally. (He hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to tell the cops she’d gotten wasted at Clay’s house and then denied it when they asked her point-blank: Were you there? A woman he knew casually had been only too glad to tell him—prefacing her remarks with the assurance that she would want other parents to tell her if the tables were turned—that her daughter said Thisbe got so drunk at that party that she fell on the rocks underneath Clay’s deck and cut her scalp and practically bled to death. “I cut my head on Nessa’s gate,” Thisbe insisted. “It hardly bled at all. Mrs. Creevy is a nurse and she said I didn’t need stitches.”)
“I’ve heard all about Clay from friends at the club,” Hugh had warned Thisbe. “In addition to holding parties when no adult is home, he doesn’t study at all. Doesn’t have to. You know why?”
“You’re just against him because he’s rich.”
“Here are two SAT words in the same sentence: I’m against him because he’s a wastrel on his way to a sinecure.”
Sullen face, no response.
“Do you need me to define the words?”
Still sullen, lips together. “This town is so racist.”
“This has nothing to do with race,” Hugh said.
“Yes, it does. You just won’t say it. He’s rich and his family’s Mexican so you think their money’s different. Other people’s parents help them get jobs, too. And there are all these really nice families here who came from Mexico. Like that kid on the tennis team.”
He didn’t know who she was talking about. “It has nothing to do with that. That’s a whole separate issue. The problem is that he deals drugs and uses them. I’ve heard it from more than one person.”
“You said he was a good-for-nothing person on his way to a cushy job. Like the problem was that his dad is giving him a job in the family business, so he doesn’t have to study hard at school.”
“My problem is with how he acts. Not where his family’s from.”
She walked out the door even though she knew she was forbidden to walk away from an unfinished conversation.
Was Thisbe suicidal in recent weeks? the policewoman had asked. No, he wouldn’t have said so. Acting different from her normal self? Decidedly. Was Hugh homicidal as a result? Yes. A hundred years ago, or maybe it was more like four hundred, Hugh could have shot Clay. All the village elders would have clapped him on the back. Roasted him a pig.
On Thisbe’s bedside table sat a couple of girlish-looking novels, a wrinkled New Yorker magazine, and the big fat paperback guide he’d bought for her before they went on their first college tour together: The Best 379 Colleges. Sticking out of it like a bookmark was a folded paper, and he knew before he slid it out of the book that it was his letter:
Dear Thisbe,
I do not understand what is not clear to you about the rules of this house. I have always been straight with you and your mother. I told you I would pay for your dream school if you could show me your mettle and get in. You are absolutely on track to get admitted to USC or Cal or even Stanford. But ever since you started seeing Clay Moorehead, you have shown reckless disregard for us, your schoolwork, and your teachers. I don’t even know who you are anymore. What happened to your judgment? You have time to turn things around. Applications are coming up. I need proof that you can follow rules and be smart or you can plan on living at home and going to school around here.
Love,
Dad
Thisbe didn’t actually call him Dad, but he called himself that in hopes that Ted and Thisbe would eventually see him that way, and he’d asked Anne to do it, too, and she usually remembered to say your father when referring to him at home, though sometimes the way the girls looked at Anne or curled their lips when she spoke made her falter and touch the pendant on her necklace.
Perhaps it was characteristic of certain women that they wrote responses they didn’t send. Cryptic ones, in Thisbe’s case. At the bottom of his letter to her, in her beautiful, precise printin
g, she had written:
This will not work.
The rest of the page was clean and white. He read the letter again to see what she meant by this and then looked out the window at the bridge, slim and silent in the darkness. This will not work, meaning, I won’t be bullied by you? That’s what he would have thought if he’d seen it before today. Now Thisbe seemed more confusing and fragile than he could ever have imagined. He refolded the letter using the exact creases she’d made and wondered why the police hadn’t taken it as evidence, but it didn’t matter. He would blame himself whether they blamed him or not.
He doesn’t sleep. The cars diminish but never cease. There is always, after a long pause, the clattering of weight on steel, the whine of acceleration. The light stays the same, a haze beyond the branches, artificial and cold. Water drips from the leaves. Now and then he’s seen a tortoiseshell cat in the urban forest, wandering where it shouldn’t be, but it doesn’t come into his cave. There aren’t many spiders, and he isn’t afraid of the ones that walk over his knees, the spindly ones that want nothing but to disappear. Tonight a possum comes waddling and sniffing. Ugly little pointy face, bright frightening eyes. It hisses before it runs.
His mother, Francisca, was the daughter of a Portuguese fisherman. A Serafim was supposed to marry the man picked out by her father, but she fell in love with Bruno Le Stang, a boy she met at the cannery, and they eloped. It was his hair that was yellow-white, his skin that was too pink for sun. Frank took after their mother, Julia after their father. They all lived upstairs in Cousin Telma’s house, but their mother had an idea that she could be a movie star if she only lived in Los Angeles, and Bruno Le Stang thought so, too. They left Pismo, when Frank was eight and Julia was four, promising to fetch them both when things got going. Julia looked for Francisca Le Stang in all the movie magazines their grandmother bought until Telma said, “You’re never going to find her in there, you know.” In the summers, Frank and Julia and Ben Crames started playing pirates down at Harlow’s Cove.