by Laura McNeal
The neon sign was visible from Frank’s grandmother’s attic window. He asked what Seer meant and his grandmother answered him in Portuguese. She pointed to the white neon hand containing in its center a blue neon eye and said it was a house of evil. He should pray if he wanted divine knowledge. Never, never to go to that false prophetess. To visit the adivinho would be a mortal sin.
But maybe the adivinho knew if Julia, when she was resurrected, would still be eight years old and if she would know what had happened to her and get to live as herself again or only as an angel, and most importantly if she would blame Frank, as everyone else did. Maybe if he couldn’t visit the adivinho, he could send a letter. He could mail the letter from a mailbox where nobody he knew would see him, because the Seer’s house was right on the busiest corner in town, one hundred feet from the church, in full view, night and day, of his grandmother.
The hardest part was figuring out how the Seer could write back. The letters couldn’t come to his grandmother’s house. He told the Seer his trouble, though, and the Seer understood. When the first letter came to Frank with the return address of Iron Mike’s American Fitness, Santa Monica, California, he was lucky to be the one who was sorting the mail. That way he could open it by himself and act unsurprised when the next one came and he had to explain that he was tired of being so puny and weak, getting beat up by older boys; that he could earn more, too, if he built himself into a man, and that’s why he’d been doing so many push-ups in his room. “Iron Mike” never failed to write as long as Frank never failed to send money from what he earned fishing and clamming. It was quite a shock when Frank visited ten years later and found Iron Mike was an old woman. It didn’t take away from her wisdom, though. Far from it. Are not many things an illusion? Is not the physical world a mask?
He sleeps and wakes, sleeps and wakes. It’s important to come out of the urban forest before the sun rises, before the runners and bikers might see him, so in the dripping black hour before dawn he goes to the park bathroom and washes his face, so old now, so different from what he really is, no wonder Julia can’t remember.
Knowing that she’s close to home makes her stronger. Either that or the duct tape is more clumsily attached. This time she doesn’t stop pointing her toes and sliding her ankles up and down when she feels the tight panic that stops her breath. She keeps pointing and sliding, stretching and wiggling, up and down, side to side. She chews on the gag in case chewing will work. She grunts like a pig and chews the wet edges of wet cotton. The skin is raw on her right calf when she finally frees her ankles. It stings when she stands up and looks in the moonlight for something sharp. The knife she pointed at him is not on the table or the floor but there must be other knives. She can walk now and she can open drawers by standing backward and groping at the handles behind her back.
There are other knives, but she’s no contortionist. One after the other she drops them. Her hands are cramped, her fingers are cramped, her head is cramped. She thinks of things that would never work—light a match and burn through the tape (match after match falls without lighting, then one flares only to burn her fingers, nothing else), rub the tape against the side of a drawer (hurts and doesn’t work), rub the tape against the metal edge of the counter (hurts even more and doesn’t work)—but maybe all the wriggling and chafing and scraping has made the glue dry up, because she’s jumping up and down in a semihysterical state, chewing with sore jaws on the disgusting gag, when a hand tears free. One hand, then the other. All she has to do now is take off the gag; she can untie it and throw it down.
“Help me!” she screams. Her voice is still wrong. Crackly and faint. The only sounds are of distant machines: foghorn, train horn, train wheels on staccato tracks. A weird chirping bird noise. Or is it bats? Owls? It goes on and on, a kind of far-off shrieking. She cries till she’s even more hoarse, till her voice sounds like crackled paper. Outside, the light is pewter. She can see one streetlight and the edge of the island, the square lights of hotel rooms, shadows passing now and then, water dipping and cresting, hollows of moonlight, the night. Out the other side of the boat, the bridge like a smeary crown.
Her lips sting at the corners where the gag made sharp cuts she can’t help licking. The boat has never been cleaned. The dirt of it makes her scared and sick but it’s like when you have to do something gross, like unclog the toilet or reach into the disposal; you just say what her mom always says, which is you can always wash yourself afterward and you’ll be clean again. She finds pasta pinwheels in a box and sucks on them like cough drops. Cans of tomatoes and cat food and Mrs. Dowder’s Major Chowders. Books she would make fun of if she saw them in a store: Same Soul, Many Bodies. Reincarnation and Karma. The Path to Wisdom Through Past Lives. She looks on the shelf where Frank put the picture of the little girl. A zippered book, fake leather starting to tear, is full of envelopes from someone named Iron Mike. Iron Mike is a cartoon muscleman showing his pecs. Lines radiate from his arms as if he’s the Virgin of Guadalupe. There’s a business card that says SEER: Reuniting Souls in Transit, Pacific Coast Highway, Pismo Beach. A picture of a large covered porch where a woman stands with her face in shadow. She might be pretty, based on her figure, the clear skin of her chin, and her slender neck. Serafim House, someone has printed neatly on the back.
A newspaper clipping that has been cut out and folded says:
GIRL DIES IN BEACH ACCIDENT
BROTHER NOT TO BE CHARGED
PISMO, CA: A girl, 8, was found with her hands and feet bound at Harlow’s Cove around 6 p.m. Monday and could not be revived, having been buried by an apparent rockfall. The girl’s brother, 12, and another boy, 11, came running after the collapse, as did Agostinho de Ferro, a Grover City fisherman, who answered the boys’ calls for help. The three children had been playing a pirate game, according to the testimony of both boys, and had dug a cave into the side of the cliff, leaving the girl with her hands and feet bound while they went to “gather the ransom.” Due to the age of the two boys and the instability of the cliff, the death has been ruled an accident. The city is urged to make plans to block off Harlow’s Cove, which is accessed by a footpath known to locals. “It is a tragedy for all concerned,” said the investigating officer.
He’ll come back, won’t he? Frank will come back and unlock the door and she’ll be ready to lunge out and grab the gun. She lies down with the box of pasta and tries not to lick the corners of her mouth, tries to stay awake, closes the white jewelry box over the ballerina, imagines the stingray, the sea in darkness, the sand dollars 625 to a square yard, purple cilia quivering.
On Tuesdays, Jerome hit with Rolf at ten o’clock, which he couldn’t cancel, not without telling his dad why he didn’t owe the money, and if he told his dad he canceled, what reason would he give? The girl I liked but who didn’t like me and who I never mentioned to you is dead somewhere in the bay?
He went to the courts and played horribly, which made sense if you thought of what might happen to your game if you no longer cared about your game. He played Brian Banks after that and beat him 2 and 0, which felt better because winning always felt better than sucking even if you were a monster for caring about a game on a day like this one. Neither Rolf nor Brian knew anything about Thisbe so at least Jerome didn’t have to talk about it.
When he got off the courts, though, there was a message from Camilla Waller, who wasn’t even a friend, asking if he’d meet her at Panera at six o’clock. She said she had something to tell him about Thisbe.
Camilla was a CoSA girl, meaning she went to the school of the arts part-time, and her hair was currently sherbet orange. At first he couldn’t even figure out why she had his phone number, but then he remembered they’d been forced into the same Spanish group last year. OK, he typed, because he hated it when people just said k, and he fell asleep in his tennis clothes even though he never napped unless he had a fever, and then he took Maddy to the dog beach and threw the Kong into the water about a hundred times because the new manager o
f the apartments hated Maddy and always looked like she wished she could revoke permission to have dogs, so it was important to tire Maddy out.
The ocean was gray and the beach was gray and he found himself watching the low curl of the surf like it owed him something. A lady throwing tennis balls for her Lab said what at least one person always said at the dog beach: “I thought Dobermans hated the water.” “Not this one,” he said, and threw the Kong again. There were no dolphins. Nothing but pelicans, their bodies like swords as they pierced the water.
Before she’s aware of the daylight, it seeps into her dream. The dream is memory, early spring. Outside the tennis court where Jerome is playing, Thisbe stands like an animal that wants not to be seen. If she gets closer to the mesh, trying to see Jerome better, the light splits and bends to the shape of his body waiting for the ball. He’s a crouching shadow, an animal that waits to pounce. The ball comes so hard she doesn’t think he can possibly hit it but he does. She can’t see the other court well enough to know where it lands but the far shadow of a boy hits the ball back with a popping sound, and Jerome runs for a spot he must be able to predict, because he’s there, pop, and she creeps to the place where there’s a gap between the giant pieces of green mesh that make the tennis court a cage. Jerome is so intent on protecting himself from the balls that keep coming like bullets that he won’t notice her there with her face unshielded, nakedly watching him. Then he stands still. Nothing between her and the sight of him holding the bright neon ball as he stares down at the ground. He bounces the ball once, twice, a third time, and then he throws it straight up. She knows it’s called a serve, everyone knows that, but the serving they did in PE was not like this. When he throws the ball, it goes straight up out of his hand and the palm of his hand goes flat like he’s offering it for benediction. It seems to her that he doesn’t so much throw the ball as summon it from himself, and all the straightness of his body then coils and his other arm comes down to hit the ball hard over the net to a place she can’t see through the narrow chink. It is not returned. “Sooo big, Jeronimo!” someone says from the bleachers, followed by a cackling laugh, a clap, and a cry of “Let’s go!” Jerome smiles slightly, more of a grimace, but she thinks he was amused, and she knows that voice later, knows that the voice cheering him on was Clay’s.
The next time I see Jerome, she thinks, she’ll tell him that she dreamed about his serve, his hand open like a water lily, the ball suspended high above him, hovering, beyond gravity.
No, she won’t tell him. It would sound weird. She’ll just say his serve is awesome. Really awesome. And then she’s awake, a box of pasta wheels on her chest, the light gluey and grainy, the wooden shelves dull and dark, the world when she parts the curtain lost in fog.
At breakfast, Ted’s mother wanted to know what Ted knew. What had Thisbe told her?
Nothing.
What had she seen on the Internet?
Nothing.
Why had she printed up all those flyers that said MISSING?
Ted didn’t lift the flyer off the table, but she didn’t answer yet, either. Her mother sounded upset but not angry. She held a pale blue coffee cup. She offered to make toast, and when the toast popped up, she spread butter on it and the butter melted. Normal things. The day outside was white and still, the lawn furniture glazed with dew. The sky was featureless, the air like a struck gong.
“There must be something,” her mother said. “Something you know.”
“There is.”
“What?”
“That she couldn’t do it.”
Her mother didn’t take a sip of her coffee. There wasn’t any steam rising from the cup so maybe her mother had been sitting there not drinking it for a long time.
“She’d be too chicken,” Ted said.
Her mother shook her head and looked like she was going to cry but didn’t say anything.
“Mr. Harris’s nephew saw her,” Ted said. “The boy who was here yesterday.”
Her mother nodded.
“He saw her on the bridge and she was standing there awhile. Long enough to make him go away. So she would have had to think about jumping.”
“I know. Carl told me.”
“So the high dive. Remember?”
Everyone in line for the high dive had had to wait and wait for Thisbe. She was ten. Ted had been jumping off the high dive all summer and she was only seven. On and on, Thisbe stood there, until pretty much the whole pool was watching. Ted was annoyed at first, then ashamed. “Just jump!” people said. “It won’t hurt!” Thisbe was probably the only person in the history of the world to climb back down.
“Do you think it’s the same?” her mother asked.
Hugh came into the kitchen all dressed up, as if for work, slippery-smooth white shirt, tie knotted. Ted braced herself for what he would say about the flyers.
“So you put these up around town?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell the police you were doing that?”
Ted shook her head. It wasn’t a crime. It was a factual fact that Thisbe was missing.
“We’re going to talk to the police right now.”
Ted waited. She was required to pay attention when Hugh was talking, and to keep her eyes basically trained on him, but he couldn’t make her smile.
“Don’t post any more of these while we’re gone.”
Ted’s mother would have finished that sentence with a question. It would have been, Don’t do this, okay? Hugh never talked like that, though.
After they left, Ted tried watching TV but the laugh track was too weird. She caught the Greenbaugh kid watching her close the curtain. She ate two pickle spears and eight Rolos but what should have made her feel better made her feel worse. She had to go somewhere, learn something. She called Clay again. Again. Again. The voice mailbox of the person you’re calling is full or has not been set up. She texted and got the red exclamation point: undelivered.
At noon, her parents weren’t home. House screaming with emptiness, so she sent a message to her mom: Going for a bike ride. I can’t just sit here.
Keep your phone on, her mother said back. That was it.
She saw people she knew, Camilla Waller with her freaky orange hair, and Mr. Peck, who always did race committee and bought about eight dinners from her when they were doing fund-raisers at the club, but she didn’t stop, even though Camilla turned her bike around midblock and Mr. Peck held out his hand from the car and clearly expected her to come back. At Clay’s metal-and-stone megahouse the entry gate was locked (of course) and the windows were like mirrors for trees, for the misty sky, for knowing nothing. She pushed the buzzer but no one came. The flyer was still in the mailbox.
The bay was choppy, a muddy, ugly, freezing abyss. She wanted to drain it like a tub, part it like the Red Sea, fly over it like a pelican that knew what to kill.
If only she could find Jerome and get his help. She checked the high school courts where she’d stood with Thisbe between the green mesh of the fence and the prickly hedge.
Today the high school courts were empty. Wind rolled an empty tennis ball can into a pile of leaves. Across town, the Glorietta courts were crowded with not-Jeromes. Old guys playing some sort of mini-tennis with plastic balls. Tiny kids hitting oversize balls into the gloomy white sky. Ted found a new green ball in the hedge and held it, squeezing it, rubbing the white seam, until she noticed that a high school–ish girl in a pink spandex dress was looking at her. Ted tossed the ball over the high fence, and the girl in the pink dress said, “Thanks,” with a normal smile, but then she must have figured out who Ted was because when she leaned over to say something to the girl she was playing with, she definitely said, Thisbe’s sister. They must have seen her flyers.
Before she could stop feeling strange, Jerome stood before her, his huge tennis bag like the shell of a hermit crab on his back.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“What is going on.” More like a de
mand than a question, and she was suddenly afraid.
She’d stuck a flyer in between the screen and door of his apartment but she hadn’t knocked. For one thing, she barely knew him, and it was weird that she even knew where he lived. She couldn’t explain that she’d seen him there once, opening the door with his tennis bag on his back, and remembered which door as if marking it with an X in her mind. She wanted to explain things to him now but her mouth screwed up in a funny way. She had to un-tense all her muscles and all that came out was, “Thisbe’s missing.” Which of course he’d already read on the flyer.
The popping sound of tennis balls and the squeak of shoes went on. Cars passed on the street. “I thought she jumped,” Jerome said.
Ted heard something raw in his voice. She didn’t know what it was. Intensity, anger, relief, pain. Something of hers went out to meet that feeling and she found it hard to talk. “She wouldn’t jump. The police don’t know her.”
“So where is she?”
She normally didn’t have trouble talking to anyone, but she didn’t know how to answer him. She just stood there. Finally she said, “I don’t know.”
“Is there going to be a search or something?” he asked.
This was a good idea. She could do that. “Yeah,” Ted said. “Later on. Would you come?”
“Yeah.”
It got easier to talk now. “You have a dog, right? I saw him through the window.”
“Her. It’s a her.”
“I thought she was going to, like, break the window and kill me.”
“Nah. She’s a softie.”
“You could bring her to help.” A silly idea, something you got from watching hounds in the woods on TV. Ted blushed. She normally never blushed.