by Robin Reul
“How do you know all this stuff?”
She shrugs. “I watch a lot of Dr. Phil.”
My phone buzzes in my pocket again. I keep ignoring it. The more persistent the attempts get, the more annoyed I am by the intrusion. I reserve the right to not want anyone else getting in my head right now. It’s one of the few things I have control over.
“Let me handle it,” she says and holds her hand out, palm up for my phone.
“Wait—what are you going to do?”
“Will you please trust me?”
I hand her my phone, and she busies herself reading.
“Who was it?”
“A missed call and voicemail from Mother Ship, another text from Emoji Girl, and one from someone named Ajay telling you that Emoji Girl is having a meltdown trying to reach you and that he beat your high score on Pac-Man.”
“Did he say what his score was?” He’s been trying to beat mine unsuccessfully for years.
“I’m glad to see you have your priorities straight,” she kids.
“Did you know that Pac-Man was originally called Puck Man but when Midway started manufacturing the game in the United States for Namco, they changed the name to Pac-Man because they were worried about vandalism and people changing the P into an F?”
“I did not.” She types something on my phone and hands it back to me. “I sent each one a thumbs-up—the response that needs no response.”
“A thumbs-up?” I raise my eyebrows and laugh.
“It’s positive acknowledgement that lets someone know you’re alive, and that’s all you really owe anyone at this point.”
She’s not wrong.
She takes a bite of her food, and a dab of sour cream remains on her lower lip. I fight the urge to reach over and wipe it off. Instead I point to my lower lip in the universal mirroring pantomime for “you’ve got stuff on your face,” and she removes it with her napkin.
“Do you ever think about that?” I ask her. “How much you owe anyone?”
“All the time.”
“I mean—none of this is supposed to be happening. I’m not supposed to be here right now. You’re not supposed to be here right now. But the thing is—why not? Shouldn’t we be wherever we want to be, doing whatever we want to be doing? Within reason, of course.”
I pour some Cholula on the edge of my burrito.
“Define reason.” She pulls out a wad of napkins from the metal dispenser on the table.
“I can understand it in certain contexts. Like—if your parents are paying for college, don’t fuck around and party for four years and get all Ds. You’re in a relationship, so don’t sleep with someone else. You decide to have kids, so show up for them. But does my brother owe me something for saving his life? Do I owe it to my parents to go to Columbia or become a doctor? Do I owe it to Natasha to be friends?”
“Exactly. It’s like everything else we’ve talked about. At some point you need to let go of what you thought should happen and live in what is happening. Like with Emoji Girl.”
I’m giddy at how much she would hate that nickname. “Natasha?”
“Whatever.” Hallie smiles and takes another sip of coffee. “If she’d been open to giving the whole long-distance thing a shot—if your conversation with her had gone another way—I bet you wouldn’t be standing here right now.”
I rock my head side to side, evaluating that. “True. I most likely would have stayed at the party with her, maybe gone somewhere else after. Probably not San Francisco though.”
“Exactly. But you are here. So maybe it’s like Oscar said: she was a catalyst for moving you toward where you are supposed to be. I believe people come into our lives for a reason, but it doesn’t mean they’re supposed to stay there forever.”
“Oooh, you’re good. My therapist would love you,” I compliment her.
She beams, encouraged. “Maybe this girl hasn’t figured out yet that even if the odds are against things working out, it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying. She doesn’t realize that everything is temporary. You—me—this burrito.”
“Especially this burrito,” I say and tear off another piece.
“The real question is: What do you owe yourself?” Hallie shifts in her seat and tucks one leg under herself, staring at me.
“Oh—is that an actual question you’re asking me?”
“Like the whole college thing. It sounds like it’s a big deal to your family for you to go to Columbia. Did you always want that too? Or did you feel obligated, like you owed it to your parents to go if you got in?” She adds another creamer to her coffee. I seriously don’t understand how she can drink it like that. At least she’s not adding sugar.
“The idea of doing anything else was not even up for discussion,” I say. “I bought into the whole idea that certain schools are better than others and that if I didn’t get into Columbia, it meant I’d failed somehow. But now I’m realizing that’s bullshit. It doesn’t matter where you go; there are great teachers and opportunities anywhere. It’s what you put into it. And I don’t necessarily believe that success equals happiness.”
“Depends on the person’s definition of success.”
“Exactly.” This girl freaking gets me. “But I think you’re giving Natasha far too much credit for why I’m here. Like I couldn’t handle the rejection and so I went off the deep end. It’s not like that. But it certainly made it easier to leave.”
I yawn, and it makes her yawn.
She points her fork at me. “If you hide away what you think and feel and are just who others want you to be, it’s not the real you anyway.”
I could never have this sort of conversation with Natasha in a million years.
After breakfast, we spill back out to the street. There are still a solid four and a half hours before she has to be back. “Where do you want to go?” I ask.
“Let’s just walk,” she says.
So we do. And when we step off the curb and jaywalk, dodging traffic like we’re in a game of Frogger, she takes my hand.
Chapter 15
Jack
Saturday, June 5, 8:03 a.m.
A few blocks down by the waterfront, the vibe is totally different. It’s more upscale and alive with a different sort of pulse. Money juxtaposed against raw poverty in full display. We join a stream of early riser tourists, joggers, and vendors receiving deliveries. The city is waking up. I’m wired despite the lack of sleep.
“I like the idea of having no particular destination. Then I’m never disappointed if I don’t get there,” she tells me.
I pull the hood up on my sweatshirt against the chill. Hallie smiles and takes a final sip of her coffee and throws the remainder in a nearby trash can as we pass it.
I steal a glance at her. Hallie makes me want to talk about stuff I never discuss with anyone. I feel safe to open up to her, like I know she’s not going to use it against me or judge me. But the thing is, if I want her to know the real me, I need to tell her the whole truth about what happened the last time I saw Alex. The part that I’ve never told anyone.
“So…remember how I told you the last time I saw my brother, I found him on the floor OD’ing?”
“Yeah.”
I cast my eyes down to my feet; I can’t look at her as I say it. “The thing is—when I found him—I didn’t call for help right away. I stood there in the doorway thinking how much less stressful everyone’s lives would be if he weren’t here—specifically mine—and I could make it happen. I felt drunk with power. It was only a few seconds, but it felt a lot longer.”
After what seems like an eternity of silence, I finally dare to look at her. Her face is a blank slate. Not even the slightest reaction. “So, what stopped you?”
“He saw me. He looked right at me. He knew I was there.”
“And if he hadn’t?”
�
��I honestly don’t know.” I’m not proud of my answer, but it’s the truth.
“You guys didn’t get along?”
“No, we did—for the most part, anyway. He didn’t get along with my parents, my mom specifically, and every time he’d act out, he amplified the tension at home. It put a lot of pressure on me. In the moment, something in me snapped.”
She takes that in, and then shakes her head as if refuting it. “But you obviously chose not to let him die. You did the right thing. So why are you still beating yourself up about it?”
“Because I have to live with the knowledge that I’m the kind of person who’d consider letting my brother choke to death in a pool of his own vomit so my own life would be simpler.” It comes out in one big burst sounding a little more defensive than I intend. I look directly at her. “Sorry. If I’ve freaked you out now and you want to go back to the bus station, I totally get it and zero offense taken.”
“If I haven’t been freaked out by this point, do you think confessing you’re human will push me over the edge?”
I crack a smile, relieved. We keep walking and talking, putting distance between the bus terminal and us. That felt good to get out. I’ve been carrying this around a long time.
Hallie rubs her arms for warmth, shivering against the cold. I offer her my sweatshirt, which she eagerly accepts.
“Can I ask you a kind of personal question?” I ask her as I hold the left sleeve for her to feed her arm into it.
“Ask away.”
“Are you scared of dying?”
“Scared? No. Angry maybe, for all the things I might not get to do or that might not happen and for how it affects my family. How about you?”
“I don’t know. It’s inevitable. No one gets out of here alive, right? It seems like lately all I’m doing is getting through the days, and when it’s like that, I’d almost welcome it. Not so much that I want to die as much as I want to stop feeling so shitty, you know what I mean?”
“I do.” I knew she would. “And sure—there’s a whole extra layer to it because of the cancer, but the truth is the odds of my dying young or suddenly are probably not that much higher than yours. You could get hit by a bus crossing the street or struck by lightning. You never know when your number is up.”
“True. So, what keeps you going?”
“It depends on the day. I suppose if all I did was focus on that I’m sick, I might never get out of bed. And I’m not gonna lie: I have those days too. A lot, actually. No matter what I do, what pill I take, what surgery I have, what foods I eat, it can keep coming back. Sometimes it all seems pointless and I wish it would just happen so it’s over and everyone can get on with things. I’m incredibly good at feeling sorry for myself and raging at the universe.”
“Yet another thing we have in common,” I say.
She smiles and stops walking. “But then there are the days between—the ones where I feel okay, great even, and I remember how cool life is and am grateful to be here. To get to watch an amazing sunset, run barefoot on the grass with the sprinklers on, eat ice cream on a hot day, cook with my mom, make a new piece of jewelry, experience something new for the very first time, laugh until it makes my stomach hurt, or walk around a strange city talking to a cute boy.” She blushes, and we exchange a smile before she turns away and starts walking again. “That’s the stuff that keeps me going.”
The compliment warms me more than my missing sweatshirt ever could.
“I think that’s what’s missing for me—there are no days between.”
She looks at me questioningly. “You never have a good day? Surely everyone has good days. Even the guy who is cleaning the shit out of the porta-potties at Coachella has good days.”
“I mean—yeah, I guess, but I’m never completely happy.” I shrug. “To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve ever been. There’s always some part of me that’s dissatisfied. But it’s worse since my dad died.”
I feel a crushing sensation in my chest as I picture my father. But not like his hospital staff photo with his perfectly combed salt-and-pepper hair and starched white coat. I picture him in his Pink Floyd T-shirt and basketball shorts grilling some burgers and dogs in the backyard for the Fourth of July or wearing his absurd blue-and-white wig to every Dodgers game, even the ones he watched at home on TV. I can’t believe I’ll never see him like that again.
“Everything feels broken,” I continue, “and not the kind of broken that can be fixed. Like the kind of broken that stays broken.”
“But sometimes broken things can be put back together differently. It may not be what it was before, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be something else potentially good.”
“I don’t know. I’ve spent the last year and a half existing in this foggy state, going through the motions, trying to get through the day. I’d been so depressed and anxious that I’d often go to sleep and not care if I woke up. Right after my dad died, I started having panic attacks, and I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, which is a fancy name for saying I constantly worry about things, even when there is little or no reason to worry about them. The world suddenly became an unstable place. I can’t seem to find the same joy or meaning in anything, and I’m scared it’s always going to feel this way. I’m just sort of lost.” I take a deep breath and puff out my cheeks. “To be honest, right now, with you, is the best I’ve felt in a long time.”
“Me too,” she says and squeezes my hand.
“I feel like I can say anything to you. Maybe that’s because we’re not planning on being in communication after this, and while I’m sad about that, there’s also something in it that’s very freeing. So, thank you. I’ll take it.”
“I feel exactly the same way.”
I try to shake it off and lighten the mood. “We’ve still got a few hours, and we’re in this amazing city. We should do something cool, go somewhere.”
“I’m up for anything,” Hallie says with a smile.
And then suddenly I know exactly where we need to go.
The wave organ is not as close as it looks on Google Maps. I spring for a cab to save some time since otherwise it’s a good thirty-minute walk. I’m going through money alarmingly rapidly.
Once we get to the entrance, we still have quite a hike because the wave organ itself sits on the end of a jetty that juts out into the bay. The long path is lined with some sort of weed with yellow flowers that smell like black licorice. The path appears to disappear into the water.
“Are you sure this is it? I would think we would at least see it,” I reason.
“That must be Alcatraz.” Hallie points toward an island in the middle of the bay. The prison sits atop it like the imposing fortress it is. “I hear the bay is infested with sharks. They say that’s why even if the prisoners managed to escape, they would most likely not survive.”
“Yeah, but they’re mostly leopard sharks and brown smoothhound sharks, which don’t have much interest in attacking people. Great whites tend to stay farther out in the Pacific Ocean.” Hallie cracks a smile. “Sorry, was I being Human Google again?”
She points toward our left where the bottom half of the Golden Gate Bridge rises from the bay and disappears into the clouds. “I wonder why they call it the Golden Gate Bridge when it’s actually orange.”
I nod in agreement. I could tell her it’s actually named for the Golden Gate Strait, the three-hundred-foot-deep stretch of water that runs under the bridge linking San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean, but instead I say, “Amazing how many things don’t make sense but we are forced to accept them anyway.”
Even if we never find this thing, it’s worth the walk for the view. As we draw closer to the end of the jetty, stairs appear as if out of nowhere leading us down a good six or eight feet. The land here isn’t visible from above. In a radius around us, carved granite and marble slabs are interspersed with PVC pipes that p
op up like periscopes at varying elevations. It looks like something out of a science fiction movie.
I smooth my hand over the cool granite and remember that Hallie had said it was built out of stones from a demolished cemetery. Markers of people that died, long forgotten. Repurposed. Someone has graffitied one of the slabs of marble nearby with something unreadable in red spray paint.
We are the only ones here. I don’t hear anything that sounds like an organ, just the cries of seagulls and barks of far-off sea lions blending with waves slapping against the jetty.
Hallie climbs on top of one of the granite-and-stone benches and leans in to one of the periscopes. She grins, calling me over excitedly.
“Put your ear against it. It’s like listening to a seashell.” She moves aside for me to take her place and positions herself at another tube.
Mostly I just hear the sound of the water swirling along with the distant sound of a ship’s horn and the cacophony of the birds. I keep my ear there and close my eyes and think about a time when I was with my family in Hawaii when I was little. My dad held a seashell to my ear and then to Alex’s and told us to listen for the ocean. Instantly it conjures the weight of a brick on my heart, and I open my eyes again.
“It’s not high tide,” Hallie says. “We probably aren’t going to hear much. That’s disappointing.”
Add it to the list. “It’s a cool place though. I bet a lot of people don’t even know it exists. They’re busy wasting their time on all the touristy stuff.”
We climb lower and see the intake pipes nestled amongst the mossy stones. We follow them back up again to a large, partially enclosed alcove with numerous tubes leading into it. It’s called the Stereo Room because the sound rushes in from different sides all at once. We stand side by side listening to the muffled rumble of the water, hoping the universe gives us a break and rewards us after our having come all this way. It’s very peaceful and hypnotic.
I turn to look at Hallie. Her eyes are closed, and her forehead is lined as if she was making a wish. And then as if sensing my eyes on her, she opens them and we just stand there looking at each other, not saying a word, listening to the muffled rumble of the water, and energy passes between us.