by Laura McNeal
He closes the book and sets it on the desk before him. Then he stands up. The librarian crosses her hands nervously and waits to see if he’ll go.
“I’m going,” he says.
She doesn’t say anything, just waits for him to walk in the direction of the exit, down the shiny hall. The light outside is different: it’s late afternoon. Somehow he’s been asleep for hours and hours. Can that be? It’s as if he were drugged.
There’s nothing to do about the impeller or his money now. He must go back to the boat and do without the motor, do without the card. He needs to hurry. So much time has passed. If he doesn’t hurry, when he opens the hatch to the cabin, it will be like the other time, in Oceano. The girl’s body so still. What did Shiva think when Frank sailed out from Oceano after dark, when he pushed the body off the deck, when the boat sailed away from it, when the ocean failed to swallow, then opened, then she was gone? So far away. Or when he and Ben Crames decided to have an ice cream while Julia was tied up in the pirate cave because there wasn’t enough money to buy three. He and Ben would buy one scoop each and then go back to find Julia and never tell her about the cones.
So much time gone now.
First Clay found the rolled-up flyer. Tossed onto the deck of his boat, evidently, where he stepped on it. One more proof that people thought this was his fault, but also good news. Maybe Thisbe was missing instead of dead.
He needed to check the stash. Maybe Thisbe had taken all thirteen bags. They could be hidden all over the island like land mines if her last act before disappearing had been to ride around dropping his stash in places the police could connect to him. Should he go by the house? He wasn’t supposed to disturb the tenants but this was an emergency.
Once he’d unlocked the cabin door and opened the cupboard, he found the bags lined up, thank God. He flicked through them to count them, just to be sure, and a blue card slipped to the floor, one of those playing cards Thisbe had brought the night she surprised him and he should have told her to go back home. The letter J on one side of the card, a blue-and-white striped flag on the other. What that one meant he couldn’t remember, though he remembered stuff about being on fire and going down in flames. Pilot me and stuff. The thing was, he really did like her. She was not much like the girls that he normally went out with. The facilones. She was the opposite. More like a difficult-oh-nay.
He needed a plan, though, so he made one, and then he started going through it, step by step.
Wait until dark. Check.
Drop by Mark’s and snag one of his mom’s Tupperware things. Check.
Transfer all baggies into Tupperware. Check.
Borrow the half shovel from the junior toolshed. Check.
Skateboard to golf course, where he received a message from Isabel Knapp, who said she could meet him wherever. 11th green, he said. 30 minutes.
Cross seventh green to Stingray Point. Check.
Stash shovel on sand beyond the green. Check.
He had plenty of time, so he took care to count his paces on the golf course from the seventeenth tee to the weird rubbery plants that grew at the edge of the grass, where the golf course stopped and Stingray beach began. Check.
Bury Tupperware really deep. Check.
Heave half shovel into bay. Check.
Cross golf course to eleventh green without being seen. Check.
And there was Isabel, sitting on the bunker beside the twelfth fairway, listening to her iPod, water bottle in hand. When his movement caught her eye, she pulled out her earphones.
“Clay?” she called through the damp evening air, and he felt the usual flicker of anticipation when things were fresh and new with someone, when only the good parts were happening, so it was no trouble at all to sound cheerful when he called out, “Check!”
Mandy called from Clayton’s at seven o’clock to say they were slammed. Could Gretchen come in? Gretchen had been on the island all day, seeing the lawyer about her mother’s estate; getting her teeth cleaned; buying bird food, milk, a new can opener; going from place to place like a zombie in the wintry air. She didn’t want to go back to town again. Change into her uniform, row to shore, unlock her bike, ride to work, smile at people.
“Please?” Mandy said. “I think every enlisted man on the island is here.”
“Is that supposed to entice me?”
It did, sort of. They were good tippers. While she was thinking it over, she noticed the Sayonara was back. The white cat was pacing around on its deck when Gretchen rowed to the Broker, but she didn’t see Frank’s dinghy. In town, apparently.
“Lady Loch,” Peek crooned. With all the treats she’d been giving them, Peek and Roll had sort of learned their new chant.
“I know,” she said. “Dinner.”
Feed the birds, get dressed. There was a small stain by the hem of her uniform. Ketchup or salsa. She should wash the stupid dress after every shift but laundry was the royalest of royal pains on a boat. Her only other uniform was balled up in the laundry bag, so she worked the stain with a drop of water from the galley sink and a fingernail that needed all kinds of reclamation that she didn’t have time for.
“Lady Loch,” Peek crooned again.
Roll climbed nervously up the bars of his cage because he knew this was the way Gretchen looked when she was leaving.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s get you some water.” Water being the other royalest of royal pains because she had to haul it from town in the dinghy, over the mudflats, which was crazy-hard work at low tide, so Gretchen tried to drink very little on board the boat. It was unhealthy. She needed to pee now but could maybe wait till she got to work. Or use the park bathroom. Which was gross.
Gretchen twisted her frizzed hair into the requisite ponytail, leaned close to the mirror, in which she could hardly see now that she needed glasses (which you couldn’t wear when applying eye makeup, so how was that supposed to work?), and drew lines on the rim of each eye that she would have to remember to check once she got somewhere with better light.
“You look like an actress,” Thisbe had said once, a long time ago, when Thisbe was little and lived next door.
“Ha ha. That’s what I am,” Gretchen had said.
“Peekaboo,” Peek said.
“Roll again,” Roll said, and the two of them kept repeating their old words mournfully as Gretchen stuck the water cups into their cages and climbed down into the dinghy and rowed past the wretched Sayonara. She hoped she wouldn’t run into Frank when she was locking her dinghy to the stay cable.
The sun had finally broken through, and the green slime of the mudflats lay like turf before her. Only trash marred the beautiful sheen of it: plastic bags, water bottles, broken lids, the eroded corner of a Styrofoam cooler. When Gretchen had time, she picked up as much trash as she could hold in two hands and threw it away so she wouldn’t have to look at the mess the next time the bay drained itself.
A shiny pink thing lay half-buried in the mud, rubber or plastic like the edge of a tube, but as she approached, the tube resolved itself into a boot. God, people were lazy and careless. How hard was it to keep track of your boots? If she tried to pick that thing up, it would get mud on her dress, so she’d get it next time. She dragged her dinghy to the stay cable, flipped the boat over on the dry grass, and turned the combination lock. The light glazing the flats was so bright that it burned stripes into her corneas. From a distance, the abandoned boot looked like driftwood, a natural lump in the finely rippled skin of the beach.
She was far away, looking left for an opening in the traffic to cross Third Street, when Roll Again pushed open the door of his cage.
The skate park was the right thing, actually. He got into a groove after a while, forgot everything. It was better than snorkeling because you had to pay attention or you’d wreck yourself.
But when he stood by the bay again, it came back. The bridge, Thisbe, his failure, Ted. The tide had gone out and the sun had come out and the water was a freakishly pretty shade
of blue. It enticed you. It said everything was fine, perfect, living, and good. He walked out on the sand where he was pretty sure he’d written his name with a stick that time with his mom, the whole thing, not just Fen. It had seemed like a big beach then, but it wasn’t. It was kind of gross, too, how the sand bled into mud, and the rippled mud was covered in what looked like green fur. People were disgustingly lazy, that was clear. Plastic bags and stuff. A cup here, a can there. Pathetic. The more he looked, the more trash he could see, including what looked like somebody’s boot.
Fen stopped walking. He could see the boot’s color, and it was pink. It could be a coincidence. The wrong size. From a distance, it looked small. If he went out there and it was maybe the right size, he should call his uncle. Or Ted. No, his uncle. Because maybe it was evidence that she was dead. This led to the much more terrible fear that it wasn’t just a boot but a body. Nausea bloomed. He couldn’t see anything like that, though, nowhere, not in the water, not on the green fur pelt, and he needed to man up. He took his shoes off so he wouldn’t slime them and he left his skateboard balanced on the shoes so sand wouldn’t get in the trucks, and he walked out a little farther until he was standing right over the empty boot. It was pink. It was not a child’s. He would call his uncle now.
A very skinny man was sitting on her aunt’s sofa. Africa-skinny. Fortyish or more, wearing a white dress shirt that was too large in the neck. New member of the Hand of the Living God, no doubt, via the Hand of the Living Estelle. Graycie had no problem with charity but it would have been more relaxing to just sit at Estelle’s table by herself and eat dinner rolls and feed Genna mashed lima bean soup until it was time to get ready for her shift.
“This is Awate,” Estelle said, holding Genna on her hip. “Awate, this is my niece that works for the California Highway Patrol. Tell him what happened on the bridge, Graycie. Tell Awate so he can pray for that girl’s family!”
Graycie didn’t want to tell him anything. She should never have told her mother about the incident, but on the phone her mother had said she’d seen a flyer for a girl who went missing on the bridge, and Graycie had just blurted it out: “We called that in. It happened on my shift.” Naturally, after Graycie told her mother, her mother told Estelle.
Graycie tried not to look at Awate. Maybe he wouldn’t show an interest and they could move on to other topics.
“I drive the taxi,” Awate said. “I am all eyes.”
Whatever that meant.
Estelle called from the kitchen, “Tell him, Graycie! He drives that bridge all the time. He knows how high it is.”
“Would you like something to drink, Mr. Awate?” Graycie asked.
He pointed to a full glass and an empty plate.
“That steep hill has parched me out,” Graycie said. “I’ll be right back.”
Graycie took time to cut a lemon wedge and squeeze it into her glass of iced tea, throw in some sugar, sneak a roll from the basket draped with a red napkin, admire the hummingbird feeder (Mm-hmm! Look at that, baby!) that Estelle was showing Genna on the back patio, but Mr. Awate was all eyes, as he said, when Graycie returned to the dark living room.
“You are saying,” he prompted. “The highways.”
She didn’t go all into it, just said it was a bridge incident, car parked up there, harbor patrol called to search the water, nobody found anything. A girl’s ID in the car. “We would have seen more if the cameras had all been working,” she said.
Awate had very good posture on the couch. A formal way of sitting, with both of his elegant knees together instead of slouched out, his hands with their long, slender fingers resting on his knees, statuelike, but he now brought his fingers together and blinked.
“You are saying a she,” he said.
“A what?”
“A she.”
“Uh-huh. They found a driver’s license in the car. That’s how they knew.”
“You are saying a white car?”
“It looked white on the camera. It’s not that clear, the colors, leastways.”
“Long-hair girl?” He drew a line below his collarbone, and she shrugged.
“I think,” she said.
“But cameras, they are showing?”
“Well, they have ’em, but they weren’t all working.”
“This, it happens Sunday?”
“Yeah. Sunday night, Monday morning.”
“I am picking up this girl.”
“Pardon?”
“I am picking up this girl on the night.”
“You picked up a girl on the bridge?”
“I do.”
“And did what?”
“She say, I am not having money. Leave me here. So I am.”
Aunt Estelle was standing in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen when he said this, and Genna was opening and closing her small hand, the light from the street muted by the drapes that shielded Aunt Estelle’s red velvet sofa from the rotting of the sun.
“You’re positive,” Graycie said. If the man wasn’t crazy and what he said was true, it was very, very good news.
He looked startled and offended. “No,” the man said. “I am not having AIDS.”
Was he dense? Like, really, really dense? It took her a second to see how he’d gotten from the word positive to AIDS. Graycie said, “All I mean is, you for sure picked up a girl Sunday night on the Coronado Bridge.”
The man nodded, so she got his phone number, writing it down on a notepad with a not-very-sharp pencil. She needed to call it in for sure.
“I need to go,” she said to Aunt Estelle.
“Not before you eat,” Estelle said. “Not before this little one has her lima beans, right, sugar? Not before you and Mr. Awate and this little angel have eaten my famous succotash.”
Fen stood by the half-buried boot and felt ice-cold. “Should I tell Ted?” he asked his uncle on the phone.
Carl said, “No.”
“Does it mean she’s dead?”
His uncle didn’t answer.
Fen didn’t want to talk anymore.
“I’ll send someone out there to get it,” Carl said. “Are you okay?”
He said he was, but he didn’t feel okay.
“Wait there until I come or somebody else comes. I think it will be a woman named Elaine Lord. She’s very nice. Just wait nearby, okay?”
He said he would, but he didn’t want to. He walked back to where his shoes were and stared at his skateboard.
“It’s important that you stay because if the tide comes back in, the boot might get covered back up and washed away,” Carl said.
“Okay,” he said. That was different than waiting for someone to babysit him, so he did it. He took his skateboard and his shoes to a bench and waited for his feet to dry, the boot stuck in his mind the way it stuck in the mud, half in, half out.
The number Skelly called for Awate Mebrahtu went to a voice mailbox that had not been set up yet.
“Nothing?” Elaine asked.
“Nothing.”
He called Graycie back to see if he’d written the number down wrong.
Graycie had the same numbers.
“Can you ask him again?”
“He went home.”
“Home where?”
Graycie was silent.
“You didn’t get his address?”
Hold on while she asked her aunt Estelle.
Aunt Estelle wasn’t sure, but she would call the pastor and ask if he knew.
The pastor, it turned out, was not home.
For a long time she was obsessed with shells. Broken, chipped, jagged, smooth. All the broken bits mattered. Then she got choosy and brought home only sand dollars that had survived everything.
“They’re just skeletons,” her cousin Neil had said when he came to visit. “You’re picking up bones! It’s gross.”
“They are not!” she said, because she actually thought they were seeds, like pinecones or maple keys or acorns. She went on looking for tell
tale circles in the wet sand where a wave had just come and left a long puddle, sucking things back into itself. Nine out of ten sand dollars were crushed in some way. All the joggers, walkers, and Navy SEALs running in boots, the lifeguards’ Subarus, stupid Neil dragging his stupid boogie board, Ted playing smash ball with their mother—they shattered them underfoot without even looking. She developed a magic sense that told her when she was going to reach down and find the saucer whole. It gave her a shiver, the premonition.
Her mom would bring tissues and wrap the dollars like they were teeth that had fallen out at school. Don’t hold them too hard, she would say. I won’t, Thisbe would say.
Sometimes they were little like dimes, and those were her favorites.
“Lady Locke,” a bird is screaming. Her name. It’s screaming her name.
Through the grimy porthole, the ocean is gold and promising, but she can’t get there.
“I’m in here!” she says to the bird, but her voice is like a hiss now, so she kicks at the door.
The next time she hears the sound, it’s farther away, and she sees a gull swoop over the water. Just a gull, like all the others.
The flyer isn’t unexpected. It all took too long. If he hadn’t dropped the wallet, if the impeller hadn’t broken, if he hadn’t been such a screwup from the beginning.
The flyer on the pole by the library says: MISSING: THISBE LOCKE. LAST SEEN BESIDE A WHITE HONDA ON THE WESTBOUND CORONADO BRIDGE.
Not under, but on.
There’s another one by Spreckels Park.
He needs to hurry, hurry, hurry. He rides toward his camp in the acacias, and he sees three more flyers before he gets there, Julia’s face looking out at him from poles and trees, smiling and young, still trusting him, though she shouldn’t have, she shouldn’t have. He fell asleep and stayed away too long. He will lose her again.