The Incident on the Bridge (17 page)

C
arl Harris was sitting in the backyard, feet up, beer in hand, when he saw that he had two voice mails. Stacy had always accused Carl of leaving the ringer off all the time on purpose to avoid her but it wasn't true. He just forgot to turn it back on, or he couldn't figure out why he couldn't hear it ring, and he hated cell phones, so he never wanted to spend any time learning what he didn't know. This was not the same as hating to hear from Stacy. Before he could punch in his code and get the messages, his phone lit up again.

“Carl?”

“Yes?”

“It's Anne Locke.”

The voice was strained, not normal, something wrong. He thought at first that something had happened to his boat. To Stacy. To Paul. He'd known Anne since high school but they'd never called one another.

“You still work for the harbor patrol, right?”

“Yes.”

“Did you hear about a car on the bridge last night?”

“I was off,” he said. “I heard about it this morning.”

“The medical examiner came.”

He pulled a dead bougainvillea blossom off a branch that was poking his thigh and rubbed it between two fingers. “The examiner?”

“Someone from the office.”

An investigator. Someone charged with notifying next of kin.

“I'm sorry, Anne. What happened?”

“They think it was…” She didn't finish the sentence. Then she said, “Thisbe.”

He knew there were two girls. It was odd that he'd seen Ted that morning. He hadn't seen the other girl since they had camped out on a catamaran one night, not the craziest stunt he'd ever seen and on the sweet end of the spectrum once he saw they were just camping, not hooking up with guys.

“If they didn't find her, she didn't jump. Right?” Anne was saying.

It didn't mean that. Bodies drifted. Sank. Got stuck in places you couldn't see. None of which he could say. “Was there a witness?”

She said something about a camera, but her voice was getting harder and harder to understand. Maybe the Chippies watching the monitors had seen a pedestrian, so they'd called the dispatcher, and the officers—it must have been Elaine—had gotten there too late.

He asked, “But not a witness? Another driver on the bridge?”

“No.”

The search and rescue team could only search for a couple of hours on the surface near the probable point of entry, and then they would have to give up. Wait to see if she refloated. It didn't help to tell families that San Diego Bay was forty to sixty feet deep, depending on the tide, or that the bridge was two miles long, or that the current was fast, or that cargo ships the size of skyscrapers passed through those channels, or that the pylons, though they were solid above water, rested on dozens of subpylons between which bodies could be trapped. Pylons 19, 20, and 21 rested on forty-four subpylons, each of them four feet thick, and to swim between them looking for a body was like swimming through a forest in the dark. Sometimes visibility even in the daytime was zero because of the silt. It could be twenty feet on a really clear day but it was usually about five. You hoped when you were looking for a body that you wouldn't swim right into the face.

He felt the sun on his feet, the dry grass pricking his heels because he hadn't been watering the lawn enough. “When did they find the car?” he asked, and she told him about the boyfriend from the yacht club, which clicked now with what Elaine had said. Each word was hard for Anne Locke to say, so he strained to listen, to push the stuttered words back together.

She said, “We told her to—to stop seeing him. He throws a lot—a lot of parties. He drinks.”

The sky was very blue between the eucalyptus trees. Paul had gone to parties, and Paul drank. It was impossible not to know about it and impossible to prevent. He'd tried.

“But it doesn't make—make sense,” she said. “Does it?”

“Which part?”

“There wasn't a note or anything. The woman at the police department said they do: they leave a note in the car or on the table at home or they text a bunch of people. Right before. So it seems like searching the water is premature, and if they didn't find her, it might be something else, like she ran away. Or someone picked her up.”

“What did they say when you asked that?” he asked. The sun was warm on the dry grass and a dove rested on the power line.

“That it didn't fit the profile.”

“Well, there aren't any rules to this,” he said. Not about who jumped and how good their reasons were. He used to think there was a rule: that the truly serious jumped right away. The ones who sat on the rail or the hoods of their cars, who dropped cigarettes over the side to watch them fall, or who shouted at officers to get back were not serious. They were lonely, desperate, crazy, and afraid. They wanted someone to talk to them, fix them, beg them to live. And then one day a man broke that rule. He dallied and threatened and reconsidered for an hour and a half, and then, while Carl watched, his hands empty, the man sprang for the rail and vaulted over it into empty space.

“Even if she jumped she could have”—long pause—“survived, right?”

He hated this question. Those who were alive when you reached them in the water had massive injuries. They often floated in pools of blood. The force of hitting the water ripped their clothes off or printed the weave of the fabric into their skin. Sometimes they were still conscious, but incoherent, and they babbled. They waved grotesquely broken arms in shock. It wasn't like they were capable of swimming to shore, if that's what Anne was thinking. “It's very unlikely” was all he said.

He was thinking of the crisis guys. They were trained to help people process things. What they said, he didn't really know. What did you say to the mother of a seventeen-year-old girl? “I'll call this guy, his name is Tim Ladow, and he'll call you. Or you can talk in person.”

She said she had Tim's name. “I'm sorry to”—long pause— “bother you,” she said.

“It's not a bother,” he said. He didn't want to leave the sunny warmth of the lifeless backyard, so simple in its state of decay. He could fix it in a matter of days or leave it alone, it didn't matter. “Tell me where you are,” he said. “Are you home?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me where you live and I'll come over in an hour or so.”

The vegetable garden was a tangled mess of dead tomato vines and rusty hoops. It had been Stacy's project, something she did for the planet, with “the planet” in air quotes in his mind. Stacy had all kinds of uninformed suspicions about the food supply, but he'd stopped arguing with her because the food she'd grown had been beautiful to look at from this chair: the shiny red cherry tomatoes, the dark bouquets of lettuce.

The peppertree dropped dead curls into the webs of tent spiders all around the Victorian gazing ball: a big pink mirrored globe on a pedestal that cast back his reflection as a fat, lonely dwarf.

He finished the beer, now warm, and wondered if he should call the sergeant of the dive team first and ask what he thought of the situation. He closed his eyes and saw the man who had not seemed serious falling headfirst from the bridge, arms reaching out for what was already gone.

G
raycie's aunt Estelle did not approve of a single mother working for the highway patrol. Before she agreed to help babysit, she asked Graycie a thousand times: Did Graycie want to leave Genna a motherless orphan? Get shot by a crazy on the I-15? But Graycie was good by then at not listening. Unsolicited scriptures had been raining down since Day One. What did her mother and Aunt Estelle know about life outside the chapel? Graycie could have forged her own way with Danny, moved away from San Diego, even, but Danny had turned out to be exactly what her mother called him: a flight risk. What was Graycie going to do now? Turn down every meal offered by Aunt Estelle, who lived within three miles of Graycie's apartment and was a full-on baby hypnotist? When Genna started crying for no reason and arching her little spine in a rage, which happened almost every day, Graycie would walk her for a while, outside or inside, depending on the hour, then set Genna down in her crib, then pick her up, then set her down in the living room with some toys, but after a couple of hours of that she always thought of Estelle. Estelle could take over, fix things, let Graycie sleep. So Graycie would force Genna into her car seat (were you abusing a child when you made her stop arching her spine so you could strap on the seat belt?) and drive over to Estelle's house. Genna would cry and the stoplights would turn red as if to hinder them, and Graycie would will time to collapse like it did in movies,
cut cut cut, scene over,
but Genna would keep on crying, no deliverance, until Graycie was standing with Genna on Aunt Estelle's porch and the door opened. The second Aunt Estelle held out her skinny arms, Genna was cured. Blessed peace. Nothing but hiccups in Genna's tiny chest.

“It's like you're a witch,” Graycie said.

“Hold your tongue,” Estelle said. “Nothing but God ruling over this world.”

Peace came at a price, though. When you went to Aunt Estelle's house, anytime, day or night, you were going to meet Real Africans. Aunt Estelle's mission, revealed to her in a waking dream, was to minister to the diaspora. She gave no end of help to the recently arrived Eritrean and Somalian Christians who attended her church, the Hand of the Living God. When Graycie accepted an invitation to dinner at Aunt Estelle's, she always asked, under the pretense of buying the right amount of cake to share (not that Aunt Estelle liked or even ate a single bite of your store-bought cake, but Graycie's mother said she didn't care if the hostess told you you didn't have to bring anything. You did.
Bring something
), how many mouths to buy for. Aunt Estelle would say it could be any number God saw fit to send, so Graycie got to the point where she just bought one of those big old bundt cakes, one time cinnamon cream, the next time chocolate swirl.

On Monday, June 8, when Graycie was still worrying herself to a nub about what would happen if the girl who had jumped off the bridge had a lawyer for a dad, someone who might sue and make Graycie testify in court about what she had been doing when she was supposed to be watching the bridge, Graycie decided that the last thing she needed was a long chat with Real Africans in Aunt Estelle's red velvet living room, so she stayed home with Genna. She fed Genna sweet potatoes and rice with the little spoon that was all covered in rubber so Genna could chew on it between bites and not cut her mouth. Graycie took Genna for a long walk even though she was ex
haust
ed, because sometimes when you carried Genna through the pastel streets of Paradise Hills she went quiet as a nailhead. She even pushed Genna in the swing at the park where that homeless guy gave her the creeps, because swings were the only other Genna Hypnotist. Yes, Graycie ate two entire Danishes when she got home, and she felt terrible, but at least Genna stayed asleep when Graycie set her down, and that was a full-on miracle. Maybe Graycie shouldn't have called up Kyle Jukesson on his cell before she lay down on her own bed, but she did. She couldn't help it. “Did they find a body?” she said.

“Nope,” he said.

“So maybe she didn't jump.”

Kyle made a sound that might have been a sigh.

“Did that woman from the Coronado police call you?” she asked him.

“No.”

That was good. A piece of good news, finally. It meant she wasn't digging around some more.

“I have been half in love with easeful Death,”
Kyle said.

Was he drunk? Since when did Kyle quote poetry to her? Since when did Kyle even
know
poetry? When she didn't answer him, he made a weird laughing sound.

“What?”

“Keats, Graycie. The po-et.” He dragged it out like she might not know the term.

“I'm not stupid. I know who Keats is. I just don't see the relevance.”

“Oh, sorry.”

Long silence in which she hated him.

“People who want to die want to die,” Kyle said. “They found a letter from her stepdad. He gave her some sort of ultimatum, I guess. And that was her boyfriend's car. He broke up with her.”

She felt bad for the girl. She felt bad for the family. What could Graycie have done, though, if she'd seen someone step out of that car and climb up on the rail? It's not like she could have run out of the building and driven a patrol car up there and shouted, “Stop!”

“I'm going to sleep now,” Graycie said.

“Good idea,” he said. “This isn't over.”

“What do you mean?” He really knew how to stoke up the fear, get it good and hot.

“Until they find the body, I mean. The parents are in denial.”

“Yeah, I get that,” she said, and when she hung up the phone, it was a long while before she fell into an uneasy sleep.