by Saskia Vogel
‘I’ve been thinking about Munich or maybe Lake Constance,’ she finished.
She hated being interrupted, but there was nothing she liked more than making a plan, and the anticipation in the run-up, the Vorfreude. This was the best way I knew to apologize: ‘We haven’t been there since Omi died. Does your cousin still have the lake house?’
She tutted. ‘Not for vacation.’
Mom kept talking. Telling me about her plans when the paperwork was done: life insurance and lease policies, transfer of ownership of his business. Paperwork to declare death in absentia. We seemed to have both decided not to bring up a memorial.
‘Won’t it take years?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘The house is in my name.’
I stood at the end of the driveway with a baggie and pipe I’d made out of an apple. I’d found some dry pot from god-knows-when in my closet. It wasn’t good, but it worked. I thought of it like a smudge stick, antiseptic and holy, driving the spirits from me: the what-ifs, the could-have-beens, the where-was-he-nows. I couldn’t ask why because I would only blame myself: if I hadn’t been so nervous as a child, if only I had been less afraid, he would never have been down there. I looked at my skin in the blue light from the film crew and played the air with my fingers. The shadows across the backs of my hands moved like light through water. I imagined pulling him to land.
The dinging of an open car door pierced the night. The sound was coming from the driveway across the road. It was coming from the hybrid. I waited to see the driver. For a second, I thought it might be my dad. Then I saw the silhouette of a woman. She put a box down on the driveway and faced the blue light, and then went back to unloading boxes. I forgot about the daddies. The arms of her T-shirt were cut-off, leaving her ribs exposed, and when she leaned into the car, the T-shirt shifted to show her breasts, small and high. Beautiful. Enviable. So unlike mine. She stopped and looked around. I wished for the cover of night, but she’d already seen me. The woman raised her hand in greeting, and I mirrored her gesture. There was something familiar about her. I was suddenly aware of my heartbeat, but also my cotton mouth.
She smiled and walked to the end of her driveway, across the street from mine.
‘Hey,’ she called out, as if we always talked like this. ‘What’s up with the light?’
But I couldn’t speak. It took everything I had to say: ‘Film crew.’ The words left my mouth, and as they moved in her direction, they left a trail in the air.
‘What?’ She took a step, as if to cross the road.
‘Film crew!’ Louder this time, so she wouldn’t come any closer. I needed to sit down, but I couldn’t tell how far I was from the ground.
We both looked toward the light. Over the waves came a buzzing from the bay. I knew what that was, too.
‘Speedboat,’ I added as a matter of urgency.
She shrugged, like what can you do, this crazy place. I watched her shoulder rise and fall, her beautiful collarbones. My head was nodding slowly.
We looked at each other, the rustle in the palm trees, the film crew working, the speedboat on the waves.
I should have said more, but I could only speak in nouns. I had one more in me and then I needed to lie down.
‘Night!’
Before she could reply, I scuttled back into the house and hid in my bed, staring at the ceiling, hot-cheeked. Hot in the sheets, my body reaching beyond its limits, an anemone waving in the water.
I WAS WATCHING THE SEA, high tide, low tide, pleading with the waves. The news said there were three hurricanes spinning across the ocean, part of a tropical storm. They were whipping up danger on south-facing beaches. In spite of such warnings, the ocean looked much the same.
My mother found me on a bench at the edge of our garden and sat, leaving plenty of room between us. A gust snatched at her hair. Mom started telling me about a cargo ship out in the middle of the Pacific that had been caught in a storm years before. Intermodal containers filled with rubber bath toys were batted off the deck by wind and rain. Tens of thousands of bright bobbing creatures spilled into the ocean: red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks. Within the first year, my mother said, some of these ‘Friendly Floatees’ had washed up on the Alaskan coast, two thousand miles from where the accident occurred. She must have been sorry for what she’d said or how she’d said it and was offering me comfort, even if it was false hope. If a rubber duck could be found, so could my father. I remembered a news story I had read about human feet washing up on the shores of British Columbia. I didn’t want to think of him in pieces.
‘Rubber duckies. Thanks, Mom,’ I said.
‘It’s ancient history,’ she said and lit a cigarette.
Since she’d stopped working, instead of stories about ships and tariffs, she seemed more interested in women being ruined by divorce. Cautionary tales, like the one about the woman she had met in a parking structure near Rodeo who lived in her car. A divorcée who kept her hair in rollers, so she would always be ready for her day in court. In my mother’s eyes, I saw my father being flung around the North Pacific Gyre.
The idea of selling the house had whipped up my castaway dreams again, my hope for his return. Maybe Dad had made it to San Nicolas Island. There, in the early nineteenth century, Aleuts hunting for sea otter decimated the local tribe. A rescue ship, the Peor es Nada, arrived to spirit the remainder of the tribe to safety on the mainland among the missions, but they left one behind. And maybe like this Nicoleña, who lived alone on the island for years, my father could also find a way to survive. The island was now a naval base, and that gave me hope. I imagined him being washed ashore on any one of the Channel Islands and being found. Maybe with amnesia. He might be in a hospital. In critical condition, in a coma, but alive. I was scanning the news. Making calls. Nothing.
Later that afternoon I drove to a small bay guarded by a group of locals who had surfed its break for generations. They’d know about this ocean, these currents, the stretch of coastline where it had happened. The waves were mushy, and only a few surfers were out. I wasn’t carrying a surfboard, but still they shouted at me to go the fuck away as I came down the bluff. The one I recognized recognized me and hushed the others up. I found a spot on the rocky beach and watched the men in the water. The pack left the sea before dusk, and Krit and I hung back. He asked me about Ana and I told him we’d lost touch, which was true.
The last I’d heard from Ana was about a year after we graduated high school. I’d finally found a permanent place of my own and was still settling in, still getting in a rhythm of paying my own bills. It was good to hear a familiar voice, someone who knew me well. It was like old times until she started telling me about someone she was seeing, a classmate at university.
‘What do your parents say?’ I asked.
‘They don’t know. They wouldn’t approve of him.’
‘Oh.’
‘We had sex,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I said. I wondered if she thought of me as the person who took her virginity. I thought of her that way.
‘I didn’t come.’
This wasn’t a friendly phone call. I could hear what she wanted, and I couldn’t give it to her. I wasn’t ready.
‘I can’t help you,’ I said.
It was silent for a while, and then she said: ‘I’m sorry.’
And that was it.
Krit built a fire in ‘the fort,’ a rock-and-cement shack with leantos thatched with palm fronds. The structure had gotten bigger since I’d last seen it. When we met him, he had been living between this beach and his van and did things for money that our parents never would’ve done. Ana had said she liked him because he was free.
I wanted Krit to tell me if my dad could’ve reached land, but instead I asked about the Catalina Channel. He lit up. Krit had swum it for the first time this year. He’d just missed his own deadline – his thirty-eighth birthday – but he completed the swim in record time. Had he always been so old, I wondere
d as he spoke. How young we were then. Her skin.
‘I’m famous,’ he said, catching my attention. ‘People know me now. They got my picture up at Bizny’s and everything.’
He mistook my expression and sweetly explained the secret of his success: it was all about luck meeting preparation. It had taken him longer than he expected to build up the endurance: races and open-water swims, day and night. Working his way up, mile by mile, fifteen, then twenty, then a few more for good measure because it was likely he wouldn’t be swimming in a straight line. He’d gathered his support team and taken the boat to Catalina Island. Waited for the neap tide. The exhilaration of stepping into the ocean at midnight, body greased for heat. He swam toward the mainland with only the glow sticks on the escort vessels to guide him. One vessel trailed a rope on which his water bottles and mouthwash and energy gels were stuck with duct-tape and thick rubber bands, like cluttered kelp.
‘You lose time if you have to swim up to the boat,’ he said. Time was a matter of life or death. He said vertigo had set in at mile twelve. He started to freeze three miles out from the mainland. But: ‘I rallied.’
The firelight danced on his powerful body. I wanted to be close to it. I wanted to know what it felt like to be in it – everything it contained and had accomplished, all it was capable of.
DEATH WAS A FEATURE along these cliffs. There were more or less permanent installations of flowers along the railings with their notices of slippery and unstable surfaces, the danger of death. By the time one bouquet of flowers, real or plastic, had been battered by the sun and wind, another would appear nearby, alongside faded Sacred Hearts and statuettes of the Virgin of Guadalupe. It wasn’t only locals. People came in from all across the city to end their lives on our stretch of coast. It was what happened. Sometime in the nineties, the only other time I remember really feeling like we had neighbours, a group of concerned homeowners, including my mother, banded together to encourage the city to install warning signs along the cliffs. Clearly the railing wasn’t enough, they argued. It didn’t do much, but it was something: an action for the powerless to take. And when my father disappeared, the neighbours banded together again. When I came back from the bay that day, there was a casserole on our front doorstep, the first in a long while. Like the other notes, this one avoided his death. ‘We’re here if you need anything,’ it said. I was grateful that someone was still thinking about our grief, even though there was nothing they could do. The casserole dish was still warm. I looked across the road and saw that there was a light on in the retired longshoreman’s house.
I walked right up to the front door and rang the bell. I heard steps inside the house. A bolt, a chain, a simple lock.
It was her. Everything about her was clean and confident, take-me-as-I-am. She was a little older than I was, in her thirties, and looked like she had it all figured out, down to her bedhead hair. She was wearing sparkling silver platform shoes. And her denim shorts and cut-off T-shirt. Her body in those clothes in a house with all those daddies. I wondered how they looked at her. If she was wearing those shoes for them, the fantasy men I half expected to be lounging in her living room.
‘Is this a bad time?’ I caught myself staring at her shoes.
She bent her knee and grabbed the top of her foot, stretching her muscular thigh. I followed the line from hip to shoulder to eyes. She didn’t seem to mind me looking.
‘No.’ She smiled.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ I said. ‘I was…’
‘Totally baked.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘I know.’
I wished I hadn’t brought the casserole. I didn’t want her to think I was some casserole-making suburban stoner. I pulled the dish closer to me, and she snatched the note taped to the tin foil.
As she read it, the front door drifted open. No men to be seen, just an open-plan living area with panelled walls and the old dusty pink carpet.
‘They keep leaving these for us,’ I said.
She squinted at me. ‘I’m Orly,’ she said and reached out to shake my hand. I rearranged my grip on the casserole, but I freed the wrong hand and only managed to tickle her palm. I told her my name. She repeated it, then smirked and as she asked: ‘Who’s “they”?’
‘The neighbourhood committee.’ The very idea of it made me feel self-conscious. I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of person involved with a neighbourhood committee either.
‘What do “they” do?’ The idea seemed to amuse her.
‘Nothing really. It’s just a bunch of, um, housewives freaking out about people ruining their view, but you don’t have trees on your property, so…’
The silence between us. I hadn’t noticed how close we were standing to each other. I felt myself sway.
‘You smell like campfire,’ she said.
I blushed.
‘I was at the beach.’
‘Here?’
I nodded, and regretted it immediately.
‘I didn’t know there was beach access here.’
‘Technically it’s trespassing, but there are some spots.’
‘Will you show me?’
My head clouded with possibility: of being near her, that she was making plans with me already, and fear. When I said ‘spots,’ I was picturing the place my father disappeared. No, I can’t take you there, I thought, while nodding yes.
She took the casserole from me. Her hands grazed mine. Orly lifted the foil from the dish and sniffed. The smell of tuna and onions rose between us. Something – potato chips, maybe – formed a jagged crust.
‘Thank you for this.’ She pinched the foil back in place. ‘But one of my clients told me about a bar with a famous burger. I’ve kind of got my heart set on it tonight. You hungry?’
I knew what she was talking about, and I thought it was incredible that of all the places to eat around here, she wanted to go there. It was so late I’d been thinking I’d make a meal of hunger and let hunger put me to sleep, but instead I said, ‘I’m starving.’
My parents weren’t the kind of people who’d go to what they called ‘the biker bar’ by the park near the port. My interests, my friends, had taken me to different parts of town: large houses with no parents at home, busy beaches up and down the coast, and later, other large houses on other hills in a part of town that promised transcendence, but I hadn’t been there. It was really more a café with a liquor licence on a street that was supposed to lead to a development of ocean-front homes that never got built. When they started laying the foundation nearly a century ago, the cliffs slid. Now what was left were broken concrete slabs bright with graffiti. There were lots of places to be alone, to build a fire and drink and hide. Once I’d seen a raccoon watching a cat looking at a blood moon while the buoys moaned.
Orly ordered the burger, a thin patty with American cheese. I liked how she ordered, no special requests, but she asked what made it famous and listened intently as the waitress explained. I ordered toast. Even though I was hungry, being here with her made me feel unable to eat. She had soda, I had a decaf coffee. She caught sight of something out the window and smiled. ‘He’ll only stay a minute,’ she told me.
Then the screen door creaked as it swung open and a man with a skateboard tucked under his arm came in. The place was so small that this was all it took to make it feel crowded. The men at the bar turned to look at him and went back to watching the game. The man ordered a beer, and then sat next to Orly. There was nothing about him that I liked. He seemed to have a lot going on, a sort of agenda. Orly looked at him expectantly, but he just smiled and got comfortable. His name was Jordy.
Jordy looked me up and down as he said, ‘Does anyone ever tell you you look like that actress…’
I shrugged.
He was so close I could smell the day on him, tar and stale tobacco. His skin was full of sun, hardened, and his gaze rested on me, like a drunk who uses his stagger as an excuse for being handsy. He wouldn’t take his eyes off my breasts. Orly wasn’t pleased. I could see he
r getting irritated as he made small talk. And yet, she didn’t tell him to go away.
Eventually she said, ‘Our food’s getting cold,’ to which he replied, ‘Pshh.’ Orly seemed to be reaching for him under the table. He held her gaze, smirking. Then he said,
‘All right,’ and put his hand in his pocket. Their hands met and she pulled away.
Jordy got up with a laboured sigh and picked up his plastic cup. It left a pool of condensation on the table. ‘I guess I’ll take this to go.’ He lingered, looking at me. ‘Nice to meet you, princess.’
From behind the bar, the waitress said, ‘You can’t take alcoholic beverages off the premises.’
Jordy shook his head, downed it in one, and left his cup on the windowsill. He let the screen door slam behind him.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Orly whispered. ‘He’s the only dealer I’ve found who’ll deliver here and get me what I want. Who cares about him. You’re going to love his stuff.’
I tugged at my bra, making sure my breasts were contained. It was a gesture of habit, one I’m not sure I would have been aware of had Orly not commented on it.
‘Those,’ she said, gesturing at my breasts with a French fry, ‘are gifts from the Goddess. They deserve to be admired, but men need to know their place.’ She leaned in, and in a low voice she said, ‘He does.’ She waved at the youngest guy at the bar, who blushed when our eyes met.
Orly ate her burger in four bites, and I nibbled on the toast, just to have eaten something. The butter was margarine and the raspberry jam was little more than red sugar.
Orly could see I was nervous. She was being careful with me, careful to let me know that I could be quiet if I needed to be, but soon enough I was telling her about my father. She listened. Even if I hadn’t been talking, I think she would have understood. When I felt the tears coming, I thought it might overwhelm her, so I changed the subject: ‘Do you live alone?’
