Further Out Than You Thought (31 page)

Her eyes skimmed the page.
Authorities were gaining the upper hand for the first time in three days of the worst urban unrest in Los Angeles history.
There was a photo of looters and a store with smoke pouring from the windows. It was La Brea, the caption said, a few blocks from their apartment. She had breathed this very smoke, watched it fill the air not two days ago. And here she was, on a quiet morning and from a safe distance, reading her life. Some part of her still didn't believe it had happened—in Los Angeles of all places.

For the years she'd lived there the city had lain docile and half-asleep under an entropic smaze of promise. It was the land of dreams that really could come true—not just America, but Hollywood. Had even she—somehow—been still hoping? For what? For some big break to come, not for herself—she'd quit that game before it quit her—but for Leo, for the record contract that would give the world (and, more important, her father) the chance to see in him what she had seen all along. And now the dream was gone. There was nothing more to hope for.

When Wrong and Right Blur. Looting Assumes Trappings of Justice if System Is Seen as Failing, Experts Say.
Did it really take an expert, she was thinking, when it occurred to her—she'd been one of the looters, which meant this article was referring to her. And in her case, wrong and right
had
blurred. She had been caught in a war zone. Normal laws were out the window. She'd needed water and gas. She could have left some cash on the counter, but for whom? How did she know the cash wouldn't have been taken by someone else, she reasoned, wondering where her theft fell on the karma scale. She would tip double for a while, she told herself, until it evened out.

Some Residents Flee to O.C.,
the next headline read. She had to laugh. Here she was, safe behind “the Orange Curtain.” But how many people had gone all the way to Tijuana to escape the grid gone haywire? She supposed they'd been the minority, since popular opinion didn't view Tijuana as any kind of haven.

Dusk-to-Dawn Curfew Continues.
So, no work tonight.

“You buy, miss?” She looked up from the paper. The man behind the counter with his wide, white-toothed grin and his dark eyes reminded her of Jin.

“Frank?” She was aiming at flirtatious, but she knew she'd missed. She was in a serious frame of mind. So why the automatic urge to flirt? Why the instant smile, her eyes crinkled at the corners? She despised that tendency in herself.

The man shook his head, smiling. She folded the paper and replaced it.

A City in Crisis.
Her eyes held the word. “Crisis,” from the Greek
krisis,
meaning decision. By the end, she'd know. That was what she'd told Leo. She would make a decision.

She searched the racks for something more to eat, something for later. If she kept herself from getting too hungry, she could avoid the nausea, or at least keep it to a minimum. All the food (if you could call it that) was sealed in plastic, shrink-wrapped in shiny-clean need, the quick fix of the mini-mart. Zero was a candy bar, and the ineluctable tide of time was summed up in the black and pink candy-coated licorice capsules boxed and labeled Now and Later. Even the Milky Way itself was sealed and shrunk to fit the hand, the mouth, to fit the life for which the modern human hungers. The high strain of the too-bright fluorescent lights was getting to her. Screw food, she'd get her water and her razor and get out.

She found a bottle in the back, under the glowing rainbow of sodas. She took a razor from the shelves. Eventually she'd work again. It might not be tonight, but it would be soon. She couldn't dance for very much longer; one more time, she figured, to say good-bye and to earn what money she could. It would be the end of the fast cash. Another semester and she'd have her degree, she'd be able to teach, but until then, what would she do, what
could
she do, being pregnant? And once the baby was born, it would take two—one to watch the baby and one to work. And if she left Leo, who would that other one be? It was hard to imagine Leo with a steady job, but maybe, if he felt paternal, he'd grow up. Or else he'd be the one at home, cooking and whatnot, and she'd be the one with the job.

Seeing the first-aid section, she thought of the knife wound, and she felt guilty all over again. She should have taken him to the hospital when he'd been willing to go. She added bandages, hydrogen peroxide, and antibacterial ointment to her purchase. She handed a twenty to Jin's twin who was
not
Frank, and when he gave her back her change, she smiled, but not so much as before, and stepped into day.

She could feel the sun on her skin. It had to be afternoon. One or two? She didn't own a watch, she never had. For as long as she could remember, she'd had her own relationship with time. She couldn't fall asleep to the ticking of a clock, nor could she write to one. Rather, she preferred to regard time as a fluid—water or oil, depending on her mood. She was afraid if time lived on her wrist, it would replace her very pulse, and she wanted to move to her own rhythm.

She crossed the street and the railroad tracks and was on the warm sand, her flip-flops in her hands and her toes sinking. The small flag flying from the pier flapped in the breeze. Today it was yellow, meaning caution, rough water. The waves looked big enough, but not jagged, nor wind-tossed. They were falling in even lines. Looking beyond the red waves to the horizon, she turned the past few days over in her mind, returning to the dream she'd not resolved. There was more to it. More than she'd had time to make sense of. Her mother's words repeated themselves.
You have your whole life.
Gwen had her whole life—which meant, she now saw, that her life was whole, and not any of it, not one jot, could be removed for the rest to exist. For
her
to exist—which was what she wanted now, to be here on this earth, right where she was, walking through the cold shallows. How much time had she wasted trying to throw her life away?

She stepped on a shell, half buried in the sand, a white, spiral shell. She picked it up, shook off the sand and held it to the sky. There was a hole spanning the length of the shell, a window through which she could see the spiral, the pink, glossy tongue curling in on itself, tighter and tighter, disappearing into the spire. The sky brightened. She turned the shell so its smooth interior shone, and then tucked it into the pocket of her sweater.

Leo stood by the boulders. Wearing just his knickers—wet and, like his legs, covered in sand—his hair dripping with the ocean, he looked like an illustration from a book of fairy tales come to life. He was the prince dressed in rags, having sailed through centuries in search of his one true love. His cherub necklace flashed in the sunlight. And he, too, was golden, his face turned toward the sun, his dimples and curls soaking in the light as if his body might burst forth with new life—with wings maybe. He had made it home. It was clear this was where he belonged.

When he saw her he ran to her, his arms wide. He lifted her like a child into the air and set her back down. “Tink!” he said. “Tink! You came. I didn't think you'd ever be here.”

“I'm here,” she said. His eyes were wild, his pupils big, and she imagined he was seeing the world through a crystal prism rainbow. Inside it, she was sure she appeared consummate, glowing and sublime.

“You know what you look like, Tink? You look like a queen. Will you be my queen?”

She hesitated, unsure of her answer, but as he kept right on talking she realized it didn't matter. He was in monologue mode. Her answer was assumed and she was playing the part of the girl in his story, the girl who was queen because he'd dubbed her as such.

“Listen, listen,” he said. He took her hand in his, their fingers interlacing. “Close your eyes.” She heard the tide rush in and back out again, taking the small rocks with it, enfolding them with a great hiss, like breath exhaled through the teeth.

“It's so easy,” she said.

“Sprezzatura,”
Leo said. “Studied carelessness. There's no better music than this.”

“It's just itself,” she said more to herself than to him. And then she had to be in it. She wanted to feel the ocean around her, moving her as it moved.

“Tink,” Leo was saying. “Do you feel it? Do you feel the sun? It's a star! Think about it. The sun is a star—so close we can feel its heat on our skin.”

She dropped her purse and the bag from the mini-market. She pulled off her sweater and sundress and ran for the waves. Stumbling into them, she could hear, behind her, singing. “The sun is a star, a star, a star,” he sang. And then she was swimming, feeling strong, amphibian. Her legs snapped open in a frog kick and her arms parted, too, pushing the water back behind her, and she was sleek and primeval, parting the curtains of water and kelp, moving to where, deep beneath the churning waves, the water was still and quiet, asleep, maybe, on the ocean floor. The yellow flag had to be wrong. Up again, she floated, and her eyelids thinned to tissue-paper lanterns—the sun seen through skin, bald and sanguine. She squinted through the reflection shining off the water and saw Leo, tiny, sitting in his place in the sand.

She realized she couldn't touch. She'd gone further than she'd thought, gone out with a current, a riptide, and out here each wave was bigger than the last. Like everything else, she thought. You make a choice you think is right, you move in a direction, and before you know it, you're treading water in some mad effort to stay afloat.

Wave after wave, she swam down, to the deep colder water, and kicked hard toward shore. With a rip, you move sideways, she remembered. It was what her mother had taught her. To get out of it, you don't swim straight in; you move parallel to the shore.

She caught her breath again, quick, before the wall of water, fast and high, collapsed in on her. She went under, but it took her anyway, took her with it—heels over head over heels—into its tumble and churn. Letting her breath go, slowly, she waited for the calm. Up for air, she opened her eyes to a wave. And then it was on her, sucking her down, into its whirl. Strands of kelp, impossibly long, snaked around her waist and tightened their grip. She pulled them off, gasping water.

Flotsam and jetsam are gentlemen poeds
. The line of the poem came to her, these lines from poems at the oddest times. The lines themselves like flotsam in the ether, floating in and out of brains like memories, floating like her, at the mercy of the ocean. She was no more real than a line from a poem, and she could be gone as easily, forgotten, pulled into the black, into the depths. She was flotsam.

In a lull between waves, she saw Leo, still sitting on the sand, singing most likely, although she couldn't make out his flapping jaw, and the song she was in was all ocean—hiss and churn and slap. He was looking out, but did he see her? She waved and he waved back.
Not waving,
she thought,
but drowning.
She'd have laughed if she'd had the energy. She yelled and he didn't budge. He sat there.

Leo alone in the sand—what was wrong with this picture? Something was missing.

Fifi. Where was Fifi?

Gwen was closer to shore now, in a current swift as a river carrying her up the coast. She let it take her, let herself be taken. She reached down and found her toes could touch the sand, thank God. Her toes and fingers had lost all feeling, but she wasn't done with the ocean. Not yet. She liked the speed of this ride. She was in the blue, and the blue was in her; it was a truth she now understood. The depths—the icy, lightless, breathless black—she knew were inside her, too, they'd be there always, but it wasn't where she needed to live.

She could let the current take her. She could be buoyant. She could float.

She rode the river down the cusp of shore, and the houses on the shoreline—the row of beachfront houses with their clear storm walls, their bay windows facing the wide, windswept Pacific—the houses drifted by like seconds, like hours, brief days, like years when you look back and see all you might have done. In these houses, no one seemed to be home. The houses looked lonely, and she thought she could enter one like Goldilocks, just open the door and go inside, help herself to a bowl of cereal, look in the mirror, and find she was home. In the mailbox, the letters would be addressed to her. Gwendolyn Griffin. Letters from the magazines that wanted her poems at last. And in the moment she thought it, she knew she'd got it wrong. The houses weren't what might have been, but what would be. A life by the sea, maybe not in a beachfront house, but in some apartment like Sam's up the street on a hillside, a life with her child. The life of a writer, on her own terms—a life she'd know was hers by the words she'd put on the page.

She looked back down the beach. Leo was gone. He was a dark speck blending with the sand and the railroad tracks.

Gwen stepped from the water and walked up the incline, lay down flat on her back on the warm, dry sand, her hands outspread. Her body felt heavy as it soaked up the heat from the sand and the sun. She was, she realized, beginning to take up space. To take, to seize, to claim . . . to claim space.
I am here,
her body declared and would declare. I am here. It was nothing less than an affirmation.

I am here.

FIFI LICKED HER face—her lips, her cheek, her eyelid. It was dusk. Orange dusk. She must have fallen asleep. Overhead, a few palms rustled in the light breeze—like hula dancers flicking their hips, she thought. And here, barking and wagging her tail, was the little white dog, the dog she'd lived with long enough to call hers. Fifi with her leash dragging the sand. She took it, brushed the sand from her backside, and they ran along the tideline, kicking up colors—orange and blue, pink and green—the colors of gasoline, quick and ardent.

Fifi pulled her faster, faster. Gwen could see him, the shipwrecked prince, tiny at first, like an action figure, and then coming clearer, coming into focus, full-sized and made of flesh, running toward them.