The Incident on the Bridge (28 page)

S
ix. Funny how he didn't even want a six this time.

He stared at the dots for a few seconds, picked up his skateboard, and opened the gate.
Okay. I'm leaving the house.

In the yard across the street, two girls sat behind a folding table that held a pitcher of lemonade. They saw him standing on the step, so he had to wave. He started riding away, but they were looking at him, waiting for him, looking all disappointed because they had no customers. It was a long way to the skate park and he wanted to get there before, like, July.

But he had gotten a six.
Alea iacta est.
Gotta go with it.

He handed over a dollar to drink a small Dixie Cup of highly sweetened, possibly germy lemonade. “Mmm,” he said. Beside the pitcher of lemonade and the jar that said
Pay Hear
was a paper plate holding the three smallest carrots he'd ever seen. Like peeled crayons, except that at the ends they became long threads.

“Did you grow those?”

“Yeah.”

“How much?”

“Ten cents,” the one with hair like a dandelion said.

“Each,” her older sister added.

He set a dime down and ate one whole. “Yum,” he said, though it was like eating old thread. The littler girl smiled her face off but the older one just nodded, like selling produce was a serious business.

There was a certain feeling, an antigravity state, that he liked to reach when he was riding his board a long way, when the rolling of the wheels and the slight bump and jiggle of the pavement began to flow through his legs and arms and the vibration of rolling onward became more normal than standing still. He felt that way after leaving the little girls. The air was cool on his skin like a layer of ice over metal, and it cleaned him, brightening the late afternoon oranges and greens, the rolling road underfoot, the whole earth moving away from him as he traveled.

The air thickened and chilled as he neared the water. Cyclists passed him often on either side of the bike path as he rolled toward the bridge: neon-bright racers in clumps, a kid on a tiny bike, staring all around and wobbling, his helmet like an eight ball, followed by a jogger who looked, for a jarring second, like Fen's dad. It wasn't him, though. Just some other man.

Before him, on water the color of lead, two tall sails coasted in silence, and he stopped to watch. The sun was finally coming out and things were starting to have a shimmer. As a kid he would have run ahead to see the rest of the bay and count all the boats with a tight happiness in his stomach that was like pain, it was so intense.

He didn't feel that happiness now and he didn't run, didn't even care if there were more boats, but he still felt a kind of rightness and calm. A chain-link fence separated the bike path from the rocks that led down to the water and the huge numbered pylons. The two sailboats slid in silence under the bridge, disappearing for a second behind the concrete legs, and he remembered, with a jolt, that Thisbe might or might not be in that water. He shouldn't have come over here at all. Stupid idea. He stepped back on the board and started rolling again. There was a line waiting to pay at the skate park, and he joined it, kept his eyes on the skaters going up and down the little concrete hills of the course, the helmeted heads and confident bodies, letting his mind go dumb in the clatter of wood and steel.

H
is cousin Telma had shown him how to use her computer because he might want to use the free ones at the library. “You could shop for things or look up what other people are doing on their boats.”

“Why would I care?”

“You can look up government agencies.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Remember when your Social Security didn't come? Things like that. Or you could send me a message,” Telma said.

“A message about what?”

She shrugged. “
Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Hey, Telma, I'm coming for a visit!
Anything, Frank. And you can look up news or mooring prices or weather.”

This was the cousin who had thought, when he'd tried to explain about Shiva and the reuniting of lost souls, that he'd become a Jew. “Sitting shiva?” she said. “You're sitting shiva for Julia now?”

She'd stuck by him more than the others, though. They all got tired of hearing him talk about Julia, all of them. He'd heard Telma's daughter say, when she didn't think he was still in the house, that it was creepy how Uncle Frank said that if Julia came back, he would be the exact right age to be her grandfather, and he could raise her the way their dad and mom should have raised them both, and Telma said it was just a symptom of the poor man's grief. He knew even Telma hoped he wouldn't accept when she invited him to Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners. He was seated farther and farther from the brides at weddings.

He walks his bike past the police station. No bikes are allowed on the sidewalk, so you have to get off and walk. One block, that's all it is. A long block.

Once he's safely past the station and the giant banyan tree with its strange roots hanging down like hair, he sees that a small crowd is waiting on the walk in front of the library doors. Yet another impediment: the library isn't open yet. A few people, some of them as old as Frank, stand around by the door with bags in their hands. A young woman in tight clothes is rolling a stroller up and down the front walk while her child, sticky and blond, eats crackers. Frank can smell them: cheese crackers. It galls him again that he couldn't get the card. He needs something to eat now and that's how it'll be for ten days. Less and less money to buy things and more and more times that he's hungry. Will they even send the card now that he walked out of the bank? He's not going back. No way. He'll have to ask Telma to watch for the new one. She'll ask where the other card went and if he tells her he lost his wallet, she'll say he's too old to live on a boat anymore, he should live somewhere in town.

The cracker smell hangs in the air and the door stays shut and the people shuffle their bags from hand to hand, trying not to look at him, not saying good morning or anything at all to him, though they speak to each other, say,
How old is the child? Aren't those crackers good? Do you like to read with your mama? I bet you do!

He parks his bike in a rack like all the signs say to do, and sits on a stone bench. Water drips from the rubber trees and gleams in the folds of pink and red roses. A crow eats the orange cracker crumbs the little boy in the stroller dropped on the sidewalk. All is green and lush and simple and cold. At last, a woman inside the library comes to unlock the door.

It's not easy to remember what Telma said to do. He can't remember how to send her a message, but he doesn't want to ask the librarian, who wears glasses attached to a little chain and looks very busy as she types types types. He'll go to the bathroom and wash his face again. The books on the library shelves wait in their plastic sleeves. His shoes make a shushing sound on the low carpet. People settle themselves into armchairs, begin to read. They don't look up. It's 10:15 a.m. and Julia has been alone on the boat for twelve hours. That isn't as long as the last time. That was two or three days. And this time he's given the girl food and water. Soup. A very nice tomato soup.

When he returns to the room full of computers, he still doesn't know what to do. The screen has so many pictures on it, tiny pictures labeled with words that don't make sense. Why is there a Safari?

He turns to the person next to him, a young man in black motorcycle boots and a jean jacket, but he's wearing headphones and watching some kind of film. Time ticks past. He has only one hour, according to the cardboard sign, and he's already used twenty minutes.

He has to ask. He walks to the librarian's desk and waits for her to help someone who wants a book she says is not on the shelf. The librarian's look when she returns to the desk is cold. She might be repulsed. He says, “I want to know how to get a bank card in one day.”

She doesn't smile or say she can help. She acts as if he's come to the wrong building. “Did you try at one of the nearby banks?”

“I have my money in one of them. I need to get it out.”

“Did you ask them?”

“Yes. I need to use that computer there to learn my rights.”

She doesn't want to help him, he can tell. He was fine-featured and handsome once, five foot nine, a good shortstop for the Pismo Diggers, strong as anyone. He used to be able to sing, was a tenor in high school, though his voice isn't the same now. After the librarian tells him what to type into a box she made appear, somehow, on the screen, she goes quickly away, and he reads what's there but it isn't the right thing, it leads nowhere, and he doesn't know how to turn the page or make a new box appear.

He should go back to the boat, but he doesn't have the impeller yet. To get the impeller, he has to go to H & H, where he went last time he needed parts, but that was on Rosecrans, and he'd need to take a cab over the bridge or motor over there on the Ribcraft and tie up at the landing and walk. The Rib and the walk to H & H would take too long, and for all of these things, he needs money, which he can't get.

What might Julia be thinking now? Disappointed. It's just like last time.

You never change.

When his time on the computer is up, he goes to sit in one of the carrels way in the corner, where no one will look at him with disgust, and after some time has passed he can have another turn and ask a different person how to find his rights and get a new card. The room is absolutely still except for the whiskery sound of turning pages. He sets a large book on his lap—pictures of England, it appears to be—and he opens it to the first page, but he feels so tired now, tired all over, and he lets his eyes close so he can get a minute's sleep.

C
amilla was already sitting at a table by the window when Jerome got to Panera at 6:10.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It's okay. Want to order something?”

The line to pay for food was gargantuan. “Nah,” he said.

“You can have half my sandwich, if you want.”

He wasn't that hungry.

“I feel so terrible,” Camilla said. “I couldn't sleep last night.”

He didn't say,
Join the club.
He didn't want to say anything, but she looked so uncomfortable, rolling her bangles around her wrist, that he muttered, “I didn't know you guys were friends.”

“We weren't.” Her food came: a grilled sandwich with cheese spilling out from the cut edge.

Why do you care, then?
is what he thought, but why did
he
care so much, given that he hadn't really gone out with Thisbe?

“Do you want half?” Camilla said.

He said no. She had a very nice smile, which he'd forgotten about, and pretty hands. The year before, when they'd done the Spanish project, her hair had been coal black and she'd worn goth clothes and scowled all the time. Now she was wearing a tight ballet top under a military vest that was open so he could see lots of cleavage. He wondered if that was what made him think she was nice, but he hoped he wasn't that much of an animal.

“Did you get one of these?” she asked. She unfolded a paper that revealed itself to be a flyer. Thisbe smiled out of it.

“Yeah.”

“So do you think it might have been, like, the party?” she asked.

He shrugged. “What do you mean, the party?”

“I mean why she'd go to the bridge? My mom says she probably jumped if she went up there.”

He didn't want to have this conversation or these thoughts. “Her sister doesn't think she jumped.”

“Yeah?” She seemed to think this was sad, not happy.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You're best friends with Clay, right?”

How to answer this slowed him down even more. There was the truth, and he didn't know exactly what that was, and then there was what you should say to people who would repeat it to other people. “Used to be.”

“You were there that night, right?”

He didn't see how he could lie about it.

“I thought I saw you. I don't normally hang out with those people, but I went because Nessa—you remember her, right?—heard Jason Elwood was going to go.” She took a small bite of her sandwich, chewed, and swallowed. “You sure?” she said, pushing her plate toward him. “I'm never going to be able to finish it.”

He took half of the sandwich and put it on a napkin, and while she talked, he ate.

She said the first weird thing had been Thisbe showing up at the party alone. She walked in solo and poured herself a drink, light on the margarita mix, heavy on the Don Julio, and stationed herself for a while in one of those mega-white chairs out on the deck, sipping way too fast, like someone with a goal.

Jerome had seen Thisbe, too. He stayed inside the kitchen so he wouldn't have to talk to her, but when people weren't in his way, he got glimpses of her downing the whole cup, getting really wasted like she said only idiots did. Clay was out there, too, off to the side, laughing with a whole group of people, and it looked like Thisbe was waiting to talk to him. Thisbe just stared and stared at Clay until Jerome felt sick. The two people who were sitting closest to Thisbe, Mandy Shue and Jake Grossman, talked only to each other, all snuggly-cozy, arms and legs intertwined, completely ignoring her, and then they left, so she was alone. Clay walked right past her to go into the house and Thisbe said, “Aren't you even going to talk to me?”

Clay just ignored her while everyone watched.

“I would definitely have gone home if I were her,” Camilla said. “I mean, you know? Clay dissing her like that. I went to see where Nessa was, and, whaddaya know, she was sitting down on the rocks with Jason Elwood, so Nessa's night was going superwell. Thisbe's chair was empty when I came back and I thought,
Thank God.
That's over.
I felt kind of guilty that I didn't figure out a way to talk to her but at least she wasn't embarrassing herself anymore. Honestly, she never talked to me once we started high school and I was in the normal classes and she was in AP all the time. Not that I care.”

Jerome didn't say that he'd been sitting on the counter in the Mooreheads' kitchen when Thisbe made her drunken way to the door. She hadn't noticed him, as far as he could tell, so he hadn't gone after her to see if she had a car or a bike or was on foot. She wasn't there to see Jerome. That was obvious.

“So Nessa asked me to go with her to the bathroom, but we somehow wound up in the parents' giant bedroom,” Camilla said, and Jerome could picture the wrong turn in the hall. The house was confusing and the walls in the upper hallway were dark green so it felt kind of foresty. At the far end of the hall, behind a closed (but not locked) door, was a giant bedroom where there was the most magnificent bed, so tricked out with embroidered cotton that Camilla said she had touched the edge of it to see if the thread count was a million or two million, and beside that room was a closet with a dozen glossy white cupboards, a room Jerome had been inside only once, when he was young enough to play hide-and-seek, and he had hidden in one of the white cupboards where Clay's mother's shirts hung in perfumed darkness.

Nessa wanted to get back to the rocks because she was afraid Jason would leave, so they left the master suite before Camilla could do anything stupid, like try on some of the epic shoes. When they got down to the bay, the tide was up a little more and Jason and four or five other people were standing around Thisbe. She was facedown—they said she'd slipped—and when Nessa used the light on her phone to check and see if Thisbe was awake or unconscious or what, blood was like red paint all over her forehead.

“It totally freaked me out. It was like a horror movie, I swear. Like, here's the ax-murdered person. So I'm like, ‘Go get Clay. We have to call an ambulance.' And they're all like, ‘If we call an ambulance, we're screwed,' and Nessa's like, ‘What if she's in some sort of coma and she dies, asshole?'

“Viviana goes, ‘I'm out of here,' which is just typical of her, and she ran off with two other people I didn't know, and I guess they told Clay what happened on their way out. I'm patting her on the face, going, ‘Thisbe? Thisbe?' and Jason's like, ‘Jesus. Can't she even drink right?'

“Then Nessa holds a tissue to Thisbe's head and it gets soaked, and I'm about to barf because I do not do well with blood, and we're trying to decide how to pick her up safely, you know, and more people come down to gawk at her, like, a whole bunch, and they're all saying what they think Clay ought to do, because Clay's suddenly standing there, and that's when somebody on the patio goes, ‘The cops are here.' People above us start, like, running into glass doors, swearing, and Clay just stares at Thisbe from the edge of the rocks—he doesn't even go up close, like he would be contaminated—and he goes, ‘Get her the fuck off my property.' ”

The glass over the smeary painting of a light-blue-and-yellow piece of toast had splatters of something on it, and the crumbs all over the table made Jerome's skin feel dirty. He saw Thisbe again as she had looked that day walking across the quad in her white skirt.

“Wait a minute. Clay said that?”

“Exact quote.”

“Then what?” he asked.

“I didn't want to move her just because Clay told us to get rid of her, right? But, what, we're going to leave her there? So Nessa asks Jason to help us, and I go get Nessa's car while they carry her, and they get her into the car without the cops seeing us because I parked behind one of those big construction bin thingies, and of course Thisbe barfed as soon as they stuck her in the backseat, facedown, like Nessa said we had to because her mom's a nurse and her mom's always freaked out about people choking on their vomit. It's practically the only thing her mom says when we go out the door on Friday nights: ‘Don't choke on your own vomit, girls!' ”

This would have been funny at another time, he imagined.

“Then Nessa's like, ‘My purse! The cops will find my purse!' and Jason's like, ‘We have to get out of here now.'

“We drove to Nessa's to see if her mother thought we needed to take Thisbe to the hospital, and Mrs. Creevy was mad as hell and said, ‘Yes, absolutely, you need a doctor,' and Thisbe said, ‘No, no, no, no, please don't make me, please don't, my stepdad will be so angry, please no,' and Mrs. Creevy said, ‘She should at least go to urgent care because Thisbe might not have thrown up all the alcohol yet, and if she still had a lot of it in her stomach, it would keep getting into her bloodstream and, like, toxify her, and in addition to that, she probably should get a couple of stitches,' and Thisbe said, ‘Please no, he'll be so mad and my mom will get in trouble,' and Mrs. Creevy was like, ‘Why would your mom get in trouble?' and Thisbe said, ‘That's just the way it is. I'll never do it again. I'm not drunk anymore. See? I'm not. I'm talking just fine.'

“She was sobbing but she was pretty sober, it seemed to me, and Nessa said, ‘Maybe she can prove she's sober by helping clean the barf off my car!' Then Mrs. Creevy looked at all of us and said, ‘I am never doing this for you again. Remember that, all of you,' and she called Thisbe's mom and asked if Thisbe could spend the night with Nessa because we were watching a movie and having such a good time. Thisbe's mom said yes.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, I know. I said to Thisbe that everybody knows Clay's kind of a jerk and he treats girls like they're disposable or something, so she shouldn't care what he said about her, but she just said that made it even worse. I don't know.”

Jerome looked out the window at a family walking by with their two little kids on leashes.

Camilla sounded like she was about to cry when she said, “I didn't know she would kill herself over it.”

Jerome felt like he hadn't slept in a month. His stomach hurt. He didn't want to tell Camilla what he had said to Clay before he left the party, when Clay saw him crossing the lawn to the front gate and said, “Hey, bro, where're you going? We're just getting started.”

“Home,” Jerome said.

“Why? Are you mad about Thisbe still? I'm not seeing her anymore. Somebody said she went downstairs with some guy from Point Loma, though.”

“I'm done, Clay.”

“What do you mean, done?”

“With this. With being here.”

“You mean with me?”

“Yeah. That, too.”

“Because of Thisbe? I didn't know that you wanted to go out with her. You told me you didn't care.”

“And then you asked who I would pick, remember?”

“Yeah,” Clay said. “I remember.” The party was loud, but not so loud that somebody couldn't overhear. Jerome was worried about running into Thisbe again, especially if she was cheesing with some cheesing Point Loma guy.

“I'm out of here,” Jerome said.

“See you tomorrow, right? I'm going to drive over to Barnes for your match.”

“Don't bother.”

Clay didn't move while Jerome walked over to where he'd locked his bike, and Clay might have still been standing there behind the gate when Jerome rode by, but Jerome didn't turn his head.

“Why do you think this says that Thisbe is missing?” Camilla was asking him, holding up the flyer again.

“What?”

“I mean, other people said she jumped.”

“Ted made it. She's the one who told me they were searching.”

Jerome broke a potato chip in half and then crushed both halves with a fingertip. He rubbed the crumbs off but the oil stayed. He remembered when he had first started playing tournaments against kids who wanted to win as much as he did, or whose parents wanted them to win so much that the kids were scared witless, how hard it had been to referee themselves. No umpire, no ref, no parent could call the balls in and out. Just you and your enemy deciding what was fair. There was this one boy with white-blond hair and ears that stuck out on either side of his cap, just a pusher, but in those days, when Jerome was still playing in the under-tens, pushers beat Jerome all the time. They just kept lobbing the ball back over and over and over until Jerome couldn't stand it anymore and he smashed the ball hard, trying to end it all, but it usually went into the net or way over the baseline, which made his dad go, “Ah!” really loudly and cover his head with both hands. But that one kid, Benson Hart, was a pusher and a poker. If Jerome called a ball out, he'd say, “Are you sure?” “Yes,” Jerome would say, but the more times Benson asked, “Are you sure?” (and he asked every single time Jerome called an out ball out), the more unsure Jerome got, until finally Jerome was returning serves even when they were a foot out and his dad was practically wearing both hands on his cranium and his face was purple. Jerome lost to Benson Hart 4–6, 6–4, 0–6 in the finals and cried on the court.