by Jeff Shelby
I stopped my car in the circular drive and got out.
Marilyn looked up as I approached. “Noah.” Her voice was hoarse and disjointed.
I held up my hand, an awkward attempt at a greeting. “The police were just here?”
She nodded slightly. “Yes.”
“I’m sorry, Marilyn.”
Marilyn’s lips puckered, and her eyes filled with tears. She turned and disappeared through the massive doors into the house.
Ken Crier walked down the stone steps. He cleared his throat and extended his hand. “Noah. It’s been a long time.”
Ken was a small, compact man with thinning brown hair. His eyes were small, his mouth perpetually tightened into what looked like an uncomfortable grimace. Large forearms extended from the sleeves of his white golf shirt, which was tucked tightly into a pair of immaculate khakis. In eleven years, he’d aged about an hour.
I shook his hand. “Yeah. I wish I were here for a different reason.”
He cleared his throat again, his eyes unsteady. “You spoke with Marilyn earlier?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did the police tell you anything?”
“No. Not really.”
He sighed and shook his head. “It’s unbelieveable. I don’t know that I believe it.”
He was in shock, and I didn’t know what to say to him. I had never been able to speak comfortably with him. He’d intimidated the hell out of me as a teenager, always cutting me off in mid-sentence and making me feel small. It was his way. But I’d always known that he loved his daughter. I hadn’t seen Kate in years and her death was digging into me like an ice pick; I couldn’t imagine what Ken was feeling.
“Noah, I’d like your help,” he said, suddenly.
“My help?”
He nodded at me, his eyes beginning to refocus. “I need to know what happened to Kate.”
I squinted into the evening breeze. “I’m sure the police will keep you informed.”
He waved a hand in the air, dismissively. The wrinkles around his eyes tightened in contempt. “The police will take their time, tell me things I don’t understand, and treat me like an idiot.” He paused. “I don’t need that and I don’t want that.”
“I don’t know that I can do much better,” I told him honestly.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d try,” he replied, turning toward the house. He walked back up the stairs and stopped at the giant doors. He turned back to me. “She was in trouble, Noah.”
That surprised me because it was at odds with what Marilyn had told me. “Trouble?”
He bit his bottom lip for a moment, and his eyes blinked quickly. “Something was wrong,” he said, his voice tight. “This wasn’t random. I knew something was wrong with her or with her life. I could feel it. But she wouldn’t talk to me.”
Kate could be stubborn, but I remembered her being Daddy’s little girl. “Why?”
He turned toward the open doors, then paused. “She never forgave me,” he said, over his shoulder.
“For what?”
Ken Crier turned back and looked at me. There was little warmth in his smile. “For always intruding in her life.”
9
“I lied,” Kate Crier had said to me.
It was a July night, two months after our high school graduation. We were sitting on a bench on the boardwalk on Catalina Island. We’d had dinner at a small Italian place, near the casino at the north end of the island.
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“What?” I said. “You lied?”
She took a deep breath and brushed the blond bangs from her tan forehead.
“You asked me earlier if I was alright,” she said. “When we got off the ferry. And I said I was.”
I was puzzled. “And you’re not?”
Kate looked at me, her green eyes sad. She was trying to smile but it wasn’t reaching her face.
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
We sat there quietly for a few minutes, watching the people stroll up and down the walk, their sunburnt faces glowing in the evening air. They looked comfortable, carefree, happy to be on an island off the coast of southern California. Everything that, at that moment, I was not.
“So what’s wrong?” I finally asked.
Kate folded her arms across her chest, tugging at the sleeves of her white cotton blouse. She turned to me, but her eyes were just missing my face.
“Us, Noah,” she said. “Us is what’s wrong.”
Any time a girl breaks up with you, it’s painful. Always. But it may never be more painful than when you hear it for the first time.
I leaned back into the stone bench. “What’s wrong with us?”
She looked away for a moment, biting down on her bottom lip.
“I’m leaving next week,” she said.
“I know. So?”
She turned back to me. “So what happens then?”
I shrugged. “You get on a plane and go to Princeton?”
She frowned, faint lines of irritation tying up around her eyes. “Noah, you know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “We came over here to have dinner and spend the night at your family’s place. Now you’re telling me there’s a problem. Between us.” I paused. “Kate, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She let out a sigh and shook her head. “Fine. I’m going to the other side of the country. You’re staying here. How does that work?”
I shifted on the bench. “I don’t know.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “And that’s the problem.”
“That’s a problem with location. Not with us.”
She glanced at a group of junior high school kids ambling by, talking loudly and laughing. She looked back at me.
“We’re eighteen,” Kate said. “We’re going in different directions.”
Her words stung me. It didn’t matter to me if they were true. They hurt. And I didn’t like the feeling.
“Your mother write that speech for you?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “You know better.”
“Sounds like her,” I said. “All of a sudden, we aren’t compatible because you’re going to live in another state? That sounds exactly like her, Kate.”
We sat there quietly for a few minutes. Her parents had been a sore spot during the entire year we’d been together. They didn’t approve of their daughter dating someone who wasn’t going to an Ivy League school and whose family was dysfunctional at best. I hadn’t made it any easier by playing the surly, disaffected teen. We had put Kate in a difficult spot. And until that moment on Catalina, she’d always chosen me.
“Maybe it does sound like her,” Kate finally said. “But maybe she’s right, Noah.”
“She’s right about me, you mean.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she said. “But is it realistic to think that we’re gonna stay together over the next four years, three thousand miles apart?”
I turned and looked at her, her eyes tearing into the heart that she had created.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I never thought we wouldn’t try.”
Her eyes fluttered, maybe surprised by what I said. She bit her bottom lip again. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes.
“Noah,” she started, but choked up and stopped.
I looked away, my throat tightening.
She cleared her throat and tried again. “Noah, they won’t…” Her voice trailed off.
The smell of popcorn wafted in the air from somewhere down the boardwalk. That same smell would forever evoke an unpleasant reaction in my gut.
“They won’t what?” I asked, turning to her.
The tears were now rolling down her cheeks, dancing off her face and into her lap. She shook her head, her lips pressed together. The pain in her face answered my question.
“They won’t let you go to Princeton,” I said for her, “
unless you cut me loose.”
She nodded quickly, a sharp sob escaping from her mouth.
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, my brain numb. Her parents had played the toughest card. Me or her future. She’d tried to do it herself without laying the blame on her parents, trying to save me the embarrassment of being a black mark on her life.
“It’s not fair,” she mumbled.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “But that’s your parents.”
We sat there, not looking at one another for a while. Over the years, I would come to realize that it was a no-brainer of a choice for too many reasons to run through. But at that moment, my second-place finish filled me with unfettered bitterness.
I stood up and shoved my hands into the pockets of my shorts. “You gotta go to Princeton.”
“I don’t have to,” she said, trying to hold the sobs in her chest. “I could figure out another way to go, without their help.”
We both knew that wasn’t true, not at that point in our lives. And I knew, somewhere in my mind, that Kate wanted to go to Princeton. She wouldn’t say it and I couldn’t admit it, but even then, I think, I knew it was true.
“It’s okay,” I told her, turning to her. “You need to go.”
She looked at me, the rims of her eyes red. “We don’t have to tell them. We can still be together. Call each other, you can come visit, I’ll see you when I come home.”
I shrugged. “We can’t hide from them forever. They’ll know. They always do.” I shook my head. “And what if they did find out? You come home for a break or something and they won’t send you back.” I shook my head again. “Not worth it, Kate.”
She looked at me, frustrated, upset, knowing I was right. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say to you.”
My chest felt like it was being squeezed. “You said it fine. I get it.”
“I’m sorry, Noah,” she said, her tears spilling onto the concrete of the sidewalk.
“Me, too,” I said.
I turned and headed up the walk. I heard her call behind me, probably wondering where I was going, since we’d planned to spend the night. But it was easy to lose her voice in the commotion of the evening revelers. I was heading to the dock to catch the last ferry. I didn’t turn around because I couldn’t look at her, couldn’t spend one more minute with her if we couldn’t be together the way I wanted to be together.
And she didn’t come after me.
If I’d known that was the last time I’d see her alive, I would’ve turned around. Maybe I would’ve even taken on her parents. But I didn’t know that. You can’t ever know that. So I kept walking, hoping that the feeling in my chest that was squeezing tears out of my eyes would eventually go away.
10
I opened the sliding screen door to my place just before one in the morning, the smell of jalapenos and nacho cheese immediately burning into my nostrils.
“Honey, you’re home,” Carter Hamm said from the sofa amidst a pile of beer cans, plastic wrap, and tortilla chips.
“How did you ever convince me to give you a key?” I asked, shutting the door behind me.
“I didn’t,” he said, wiggling his enormous frame into a sitting position. “I stole one.”
“Ah.”
He grinned, looking like a humongous Cheshire cat. “Ah.”
Carter had played center to my small forward in high school, pulling guard to my fullback and juvenile delinquent to my better judgment. Despite our differences-the main one being that I thought the law should be obeyed and he thought the law was a pain in his ass-we had remained surfing buddies, occasional coworkers, and good friends.
He stretched out his legs, the bottom half of his six-foot-nine body unfurling like a damp straw wrapper. His bleached white hair glowed in the dark room, his black eyes shining against his tan skin. The white T-shirt said DO ME in big black letters, and long red shorts hung loosely to his knees. His size-sixteen feet were bare, his sandals most likely buried somewhere beneath the tornado of crap he had created on my sofa.
He lifted a paper plate in my direction. “Nachos?”
“No thanks,” I said, tossing my keys on the kitchen counter. I walked to the fridge, pulled out a Red Trolley, ripped the cap off, and drank half of it.
Carter let out a low whistle. “Dude, if I had known we were gonna be drinking, I would’ve waited for you.”
“We’re not drinking,” I mumbled, staring out the back door. The whitecaps in the ocean did nosedives under the moonlight.
I felt Carter’s eyes on my back. “You alright?”
“No, not really.”
“Gonna tell me?”
“Not now.”
“Cool. You wanna hit the water?”
I watched the ocean shiver and shake a hundred yards away, empty and navy blue in the dark. I knew that some time on my board trying to decipher and outsmart the waves might temporarily salve my wounds.
I finished the beer and set the empty bottle on the counter.
I turned to Carter. “Let’s go.”
11
There is something mystical about surfing between the darkness of the ocean and the glow of the evening moonlight. It isn’t just that you feel dwarfed by the planet in the quiet of the night, but more like you have found the edge of the world and could dive off if you wanted to.
That edge was where I learned to hide when I was growing up.
When I was nine years old, a family down the street was moving out of town and they gave me an eight-foot board that was dinged up and otherwise headed for the trash. I took it down to Mission Bay that afternoon and spent three hours learning to stand on it in the calm, flat water. The next afternoon I took the bus down to Law Street and watched the locals tear up the waves, sucking in their movements and committing to memory how they maneuvered their boards so easily through the water. I waited until about sunset, when everyone else had gone, and paddled out.
On the ninth try, I managed to get myself up long enough to feel like a surfer.
After that ninth try in my ninth year, the ocean became my real home, much calmer than the house in Bay Park. There was no drunken mother passed out on the shoreline, no unknown father haunting me below the surface of the water. I grew up on three-foot, left-breaking sets that you could bounce all the way in to the shore.
The ocean and its waves raised me and I was better for it.
Carter and I rode for forty-five minutes, carving our boards into the black mass of the waves as they rhythmically approached and then left us. In the quiet darkness, the noise of the boards cutting the water was magnified, like the sound of two large hands rubbing together.
We were straddling our boards out beyond the break. People who don’t surf tend to look at this act as some sort of Zen-like activity that surfers do, trying to become one with the ocean or something like that. In actuality, we sit on our boards because we are too exhausted to paddle in.
“So,” Carter said, running his hands through his soaked hair. “You gonna tell me what the problemo is?”
He looked like a giant buoy sticking straight out of the ocean.
I wiped the water from my eyes. “Remember Kate Crier?”
He pretended to think about it. “Vaguely. She was that girl that you wasted an entire year on, dumped your ass right before she left for college because her parents thought you were trash, and you’ve pined intermittently for over the years.” He paused. “Yeah, Noah. I remember Kate.”
“I found her today. Dead.”
He cupped his hands, dipped them into the water, and brought them up to his mouth. Carter is the only human I’ve ever run across who enjoys the taste of saltwater. He swished the water around for a moment like it was mouthwash, then spit it onto his board.
“Well, that’s not so hot,” he said.
I glanced at the dots of light along the shore. “No.”
“You found her?”
I detailed Marilyn�
�s visit and how I had come upon Kate.
Carter nodded in the dark, his enormous head moving slowly against the backdrop of the moon. “I’m sorry.”
I shrugged, listening to the waves die up ahead of us. “Her dad wants me to find out what happened.”
“Same guy that banned your car from his driveway because it looked like it might leak oil?”
“Same guy.”
Carter snorted. “I hope you told him to fornicate solo.”
I chuckled softly, shaking my head.
“But of course you didn’t,” Carter said, knowing the answer.
I leaned back on the board, my head floating on the surface of the water. The sky looked like a black piece of crepe paper that had been poked with several needles, bright beacons of light streaming through the holes. I hadn’t seen Kate in over eleven years, but now I felt as if a piece of me had disappeared.
“Well, at least they’ve got money,” Carter mumbled, patting the top of the water with his baseball glove-like hands. “So we know we’ll get paid.”
“We?” I asked.
He leaned forward and flattened himself onto his board, his long arms looking like small windmills as he began to paddle away. “Well, hell, I can’t have you sulking like one of my ex-girlfriends until you figure it out. I’ll be Hutch to your Starsky.”
I sat up and smiled. “Awesome.”
“Yeah, I am,” he said over his shoulder as he moved toward the shore. “Plus, Kate was my friend too at one time.”
I nodded to myself and wished that she were still alive to hear Carter say that.
12
I crawled out of bed early after our late-night surfing expedition, nursed my small hangover with a glass of orange juice, and headed out in the early morning traffic.
I took I-5 up to the eastern edge of La Jolla and then went east on Highway 52, a concrete artery that bisected San Diego County through the narrow, brush-lined canyons of University City and Clairemont Mesa. The highway had been nothing more than a dirt valley when I was growing up, but as people moved farther and farther to the east in order to still call San Diego home, the 52 became the newest freeway to connect the outer reaches of the county to the coast.