Tessa sits down on the toilet and puts her head in her hands. From all up and down the row of stalls comes the roar of flushing, the banging of metal against metal, the raised voices of mothers and children. What would her own mother think if she saw Tessa now? Sometimes it almost seems better that she died when she did, when Tessa was four. Tessa remembers her mother playing with her in a kiddie pool, holding her on her knees as Tessa splashed. She’s sure she remembers this, though Gayle always said she only thought she remembered it because they had a picture of it. It was one of the photographs they’d had in their secret closet altar, back in their room at home. They also had a pair of their mother’s dancing shoes, silver; an old pink plastic hairbrush with strands of her hair; an empty wallet with a broken snap; a pair of malachite earrings. For years they kept finding small things of hers around the house, and at night they’d sneak into the closet and add them to the altar. There, crouched in the dark, they’d talk about her in whispers and see who could remember more. Gayle always won, of course.
There were times when Tessa would go into the closet by herself and look at the photos, try on the shoes and earrings, feeling as if that might help her remember something. It was hopeless, though. Tessa could never catch up. And after a while it all began to seem beside the point. As Gayle grew older she seemed to think about their mother less and less. Instead of creeping into the closet with Tessa, she would stay up late with their father in his study. She’d brew weak tea, which Tessa wasn’t allowed to drink yet, and she’d sit on the leather ottoman and talk about what had happened at school or what she’d read in the newspaper that day. Their father would talk to Gayle almost as if she were another adult, asking her opinions and listening to her responses. A few times he even let Gayle come to the political science classes he taught at the university. When Tessa had finally asked him, a few years ago, why he’d never taken her to his classes, he’d looked at her with surprise and said he never knew she was interested.
Tessa can feel the Sallie beginning to come on, but it’s coming on wrong because she’s sitting here in a bathroom stall and thinking about the wrong things. The Sallie ices her veins and makes her toes cramp up. She needs some water. She needs money. Her skin prickles cold. Something is happening and she cannot make it stop.
From outside the stall Olivia calls something, words Tessa cannot make out. Hold on, she tries to say, but her voice is not working properly. A wave of shudders breaks over her, and then another, and then they keep on coming. She has to get her niece and get out of there. They need to go someplace quiet and alone. She is ready for that. She will open the door on three.
One.
Two.
Three.
But where is Olivia?
Not in the corridor between the line of stalls, and not in the open stalls, and not by the sinks washing her hands or by the dryers drying them. Not hiding under the Changin’ Station or in the utility closet. She must be outside, waiting by the entrance. That is where she has to be. Tessa steps into a blinding crush of sun, a cataract of men and women and children. She looks beside the restroom door, behind the trash can a few feet away, behind the planter with its tiny sick palm. She sits down on the bench beside the palm. Under the surge of the Sallie she can feel the rhythmic thwick of panic in her chest, the wingbeats of an insect. Maybe this is a game. Ass me no more questions, tell me no more lies. Tessa goes back into the restroom and makes her way up and down the row of stalls. Women are staring at her, she realizes, giving her looks of concern or fear, pulling their children away. They think she’s crazy, and why not? Her hair is a wind-nest, her jacket a bulky male thing, her shirt half untucked from her tweed skirt, her feet dirty in pink flip-flops.
“Olivia,” she screams. “This is not a joke!”
The noise and bustle of the restroom continue around her. She waits, but her niece does not appear.
She has to look outside again. She shoulders through the door and out into the wind. The fronds of the sick palm tree rustle like paper. What color jacket is Olivia wearing? Is it blue? Purple? Is that her, standing by the rail? No, a different child, an older child. The sea lions. She must have gone back to see them, to wait for Tessa there. How to get back to that place? She remembers a confusion, a frantic search for rest-rooms. Where did they end up? She can hear the sea lions’ sound, their fretful barking, and she follows it through a twist of shops and wooden staircases and restaurant patios, looking for that jacket all the while, the jacket that might have been light blue or lavender or pale green; something green, maybe the dress underneath. She should never have let Olivia go into a stall alone. How could she keep it straight, what you were and weren’t supposed to do? There are things she should be doing now, smart ways of trying to find Olivia. She has to think of what they are. If she could just lie down somewhere, in a cool dark room. But she cannot lie down.
Olivia is not standing by the rail watching the sea lions. Tessa leans forward over the rail, staring into the lapping water. A child, leaning out too far, could fall in. Would anyone notice? Would anyone notice if she, Tessa, dropped herself into that black-blue, if she let herself sink to the bottom?
What about the otter, that toy she made Olivia steal from the T-shirt shop? That must be where she is, in the shop, putting that thing back on the shelf. That can be the only place. She knows where it is. Back in the direction of the cable car. Olivia would have remembered. And Tessa can find it. It’s the only T-shirt shop in San Francisco that has her broken shoes. She slaps along the pier in the direction of the shop, her flipflops threatening to fly off her feet, the rubber thongs cutting into her skin. Get out of her way. She is a woman in a hurry, a person trying to beat fate. She scans the crowds for a glimpse of purple, for a head of tight dark curls, a ponytail, a sea-green ponytail holder. Her sister, sitting in a conference room in a hotel downtown, has no idea what is happening. Perhaps Olivia is headed there right now, running to tell her mother what Tessa’s done. Here’s what Tessa knows: No child of hers would run off into a crowd, lose herself in a strange city.
All along Beach Street there are T-shirt shops and T-shirt shops and T-shirt shops. Three of them have flip-flops displayed out front. Two of these have stuffed animals inside. One of these has otters. None of them has Olivia. Tessa stands on the sidewalk, looking out toward the bay. There, passing between the shore and Alcatraz, is a rust-red oil tanker with the word TANAKA on the side in high white letters. A million gallons of oil. She can almost taste it, bitter and black.
Tessa shuffles along Beach Street. She should tell the cops. She needs help. But look at her, in her crazy outfit, with Devvies and Sallies in her pocket. They’ll think she’s a kidnapper, a criminal. They’ll handcuff her and throw her into a cell. Then they’ll search the apartment. Kenji will be arrested too. She has to call him. Maybe he can make it all stop. Up ahead there is a pay phone, a little man shouting into it. She bounces on her toes, waiting, looking, willing Olivia to walk by. She’d like to take her by the shoulder, shake her, wake her up: This is the world, not what your parents have told you. This is what exists just outside the borders of your pretty life. It’s what she’s had to learn herself, the hard way, through Gayle’s slow and steady pulling away, through all that time since college when she didn’t know what to do with herself, the hated jobs in offices, her father’s quiet disappointment, those deadened months at Oracle, and the months since she quit, months of her and Kenji in the apartment during the day, fucking and fighting and tweaking and reading the paper and watching movies and lying to everyone. She knows she’s getting closer to a new kind of truth, a real discovery, a kind of knowledge Gayle will never have.
The little man gets off the phone and runs down the street, cursing. Tessa picks up the phone. She can smell food, sweet and greasy, on the receiver. She can’t speak into the hum of the dial tone or decide which buttons to press. Her head feels like it’s hurtling in fast-forward, her breath coming so fast her vision is going black at the edges. She can’t explai
n why she’s standing on the street holding this phone instead of searching for Olivia. A recording comes on and tells her what to do if she’d like to make a call.
“Get Kenji,” she says to the voice. “Dial Kenji.”
Please hang up and try again.
Try what? She can’t hang up. Someone else is already waiting for the phone. If you’d like to make a call.
She jams the receiver onto the hook, then picks it up again and presses numbers. Please deposit thirty-five cents. She digs in her pocket for change and finds a quarter and a dime. She fumbles them into the slot and dials again. Seven numbers. She can manage them. She does. The phone is ringing, and then, like a reprieve from everything, Kenji’s voice. She can hardly believe he still exists in this world. She tries to say something but all she can do is cough out sobs.
“Tessa? Is that you?”
“It’s not my fault!” she cries into the receiver.
“Hey,” he says. “Come home. Where did you go?”
“You have to come get me,” she says.
He gives a faint, panicked laugh. “Come get you? I can’t come get you! I’m extremely fucked up at the moment.”
“You have to come,” she says. “Olivia’s gone.”
“Who?”
She hangs up and sits down on the curb. Behind her, someone else picks up the phone and begins punching numbers. There are cars passing in the street just beyond Tessa’s flipflops, almost running over her feet as they pass. Crushed bones, blood, a wreck. She almost wants it.
She stands and crosses the street, making the cars swerve around her. There’s a small park sloping down toward the water, with pigeons coming down like shattering slate. Weathered green benches stand between beds of blue and yellow pansies. She sits down on a bench, looking out toward the flat metallic expanse of the bay. She feels something going wide and empty in her chest, the Devvie slipping out from beneath the Sallie, the cartoon moment just before you fall, when the cliff’s already gone but gravity has not yet got you. A horror goes through her: a child somewhere, screaming, lost. Not just a child, her own niece. She takes the pillbox from her pocket, looks inside. Two Devvies, one more Sallie. She looks at the flower bed beside the bench, then kneels on the grass. With her finger she digs a hole in the loose soil of the flower bed, turning up dirt and curled-up bugs and roots. Then she packs the pillbox into the hole and tamps the soil down on top of it. She fixes this spot in her mind: the park with its beds of pansies, the flower bed near the center of the park. She picks the dirt from beneath her fingernails, then walks down to the beach and washes her hands in the cold water of the bay.
The waiting room is plastered with posters of missing children, of wanted men and women wearing numbers. She sits in an orange plastic chair, looking down at her wrists. Uncuffed. Beside her on the floor is a cup of black police-station coffee. This is where the police brought Olivia when they found her wandering the wharf alone, crying for her mother, and it is where they brought Tessa when she told them what had happened. She, Tessa, has not been treated like a criminal; she’s been allowed to sit here while someone goes to get Olivia. She cannot shake the feeling that someone might come in at any minute and take her roughly by the back of the neck and shove her into a cell. Her policeman acted as if things like this happened all the time: children wandering away from their harried guardians at Pier 39, everyone reunited soon afterward. Now the policeman carries Olivia into the waiting room, her small face grim and scrubbed, her pale purple jacket torn at the sleeve, the stolen otter tucked under her arm. When the officer sets her down she looks at Tessa with shamed, fearful eyes. Tessa pulls her close and holds her there. The girl’s arms come around her. It amazes her to think Olivia would trust her after what has happened.
“See that?” the officer says to Olivia. “I told you she wouldn’t be mad.”
She feels Olivia’s breath, quick and hot, against her neck. “I’m sorry,” Olivia says.
“It’s okay,” Tessa says. “It’s okay.”
They step back out into the sun, into the blinding afternoon, and walk down Bay Street back toward the water. Olivia is stunned and silent, holding Tessa’s hand. She seems uninterested in the shops and houses. There are no tourists on this part of Bay Street, only women and men going about the business of their lives. Now would be the time to take Olivia back to the hotel, to get her cleaned up in Gayle’s hotel room, to wait for her sister to be finished with her conference. Tessa and Olivia could both pretend everything was fine, and maybe Gayle would believe them. Or maybe she wouldn’t, and everything would begin to change—the nightmare that has become Tessa’s life might crack open and begin to fall away. Part of her wants to surrender to that, to let Gayle know at last what has happened to her life, to make her have to recognize it and do something about it, finally. Maybe that’s what she’s been hoping for all day, maybe that’s why she let herself lose Olivia: to make things so terrible they’d have to change. But Olivia is back now, and Tessa feels almost as if she’s been tricked. She feels as if she doesn’t have the power to decide anything anymore, as if she’s being pulled along slick tracks by a strong and twisted steel rope underground, like the cable car. All she can think about are the pills in their silver box, dark and safe beneath the soil. She has to have them, and she has to keep having them. She feels like she’ll die if she doesn’t. The Devvie is long gone now, and her nerves crackle with the afterburn of the Sallie. A cold white pain gathers behind her eyes. She hurries Olivia along the sidewalk, toward the park.
“I went to put my animal back,” Olivia says. “I went back to that store.”
“But you didn’t put him back,” Tessa says. “You decided to keep him.”
Olivia looks down at the otter, saying nothing. At an intersection she and Tessa stop to watch the cars pass. Olivia fingers the ripped sleeve of her jacket, trying to hold the edges of the fabric together. “I tore this,” she says. “My mom’s going to be mad.”
“Maybe she won’t be,” Tessa says, not really listening.
“Yes, she will.”
Tessa is at the end of kindness. Her temples pulse with pain. As she looks down at Olivia, a fine sharp cruelty gathers in her chest. “At least you have a mother,” she says. “When I was your age, my mother was dead.”
Olivia’s mouth opens and closes. Tessa will not watch her start to cry. When the light changes, she takes Olivia’s wrist and pulls her across the street. As they enter the park, Tessa walks faster. Her flip-flops make their muffled slap against the pavement. In the distance she can see the bay, bright-scaled with afternoon light. She heads toward the row of benches along the park path, each with its crowd of pigeons, each separated by a bed of pansies. The benches are empty now. Tourist families hurry along the path, looking as if they mean to get somewhere before the sun gets any lower.
At a flower bed near the center of the park, Tessa gets to her knees to examine the soil. She can’t tell if this is the right place or not. The bench beside the flower bed looks familiar, but they all have the same weathered green paint, the same brass plaques. She scrabbles through the loose soil. Nothing. She moves to the next flower bed, kneeling down to dig again while Olivia watches, holding the otter.
“What are you doing?” Olivia asks, her voice a dry whisper.
“Looking for something,” Tessa says. She turns up clods of dirt, but her pills are not there. She leads Olivia along the path, then stoops beside the next flower bed. She thinks she remembers these flowers at the edge, these yellow pansies with their dark velvet hearts. Olivia sits down on the grass and holds the otter, her eyes glassy with fatigue. The wind is sharp against Tessa’s neck as she kneels beside the flower bed. Her fingers are going numb, her nails are packed with soil, but she lowers her head and digs.
Stars of Motown Shining Bright
Lucy waited in her room for Melissa to arrive from Cincinnati. They would drive in Melissa’s old Cadillac, that sleek white boat, forty miles east to Royal Oak, where they would spend
the night with Jack Jacob. Lucy was fifteen and no longer a virgin. The teen magazine articles pondering the question of whether one was ready to give it up no longer applied to her. She could, at that very moment, be pregnant. Not that she was pregnant. She had been careful, and so had Jack Jacob. Still, there was a possibility. And now she was off to see him again, to spend the night with him in Royal Oak, and it was all right with her parents because he was a boy she’d met in youth group, and because they were staying at his parents’ house, and because Melissa would be there too. These friendships were important, her parents had told her. These friendships could last a lifetime.
The trip had been Melissa’s idea. She liked road trips and she liked adventures in which she and Lucy did something they could tell everyone about afterward, with lots of dramatic detail. But she didn’t know about what had happened between Lucy and Jack. Lucy hadn’t told her. It felt too private to talk about over the phone. Maybe if Melissa had lived closer, Lucy would have gone over to her house and whispered it to her in the dark. On the other hand, maybe she wouldn’t have. She wasn’t sure how Melissa would react. Melissa liked Jack too. She and Jack had even fooled around once at a youth group convention. While everyone else was busy at the Saturday-night dance, Melissa and Jack had snuck away to the high-vaulted sanctuary and made out for half an hour on the floor between two rows of pews. Lucy knew because she’d been there, guarding the door in case any of the youth leaders came along. She remembered trying not to listen but listening anyway. She remembered the bronze Eternal Light flickering in the half-dark. At one point Melissa sat up to twist her hair into a ponytail, and she shot Lucy a self-satisfied smile. Lucy knew what that smile was about: Jack, a senior, liked her, Melissa. Not tonight, though. Things were different now. Lucy was the one Jack wanted, and Melissa would have to live with that.
How to Breathe Underwater Page 14