The Girl in the Water

by A J Grayson

  ‘Double-caf, half-fat, cooled down, no foam latté, as the lady ordered.’ As I approach my corner of the shop, I’m greeted by Mitch Tuttle, one of those collegiate family members and, in fact, the owner of the little shop. He says the words in his usual sing-song style. He’s sporting a tired pair of trousers, untended wrinkles long since transformed into permanent creases that spider out from his crotch and knees. A belt holds them in place, hidden somewhere beneath the paunch of a stomach wrapped in a badly patterned shirt. The stress of managing such a bustling hive of worldly activity, he regularly joked, had ravaged his otherwise classical good looks. A boss with a sense of humour is not the worst thing in the world.

  But his timing is off. Mitch is jovial, now, at 8.25 am – a time of day when this is more or less inexcusable.

  He’s carrying a paper cup in his enormous hands. There’s a smirk, two bushy, unkempt eyebrows coming almost together as a smile wrinkles the whole of his face. Too many wrinkles for a man who hasn’t yet seen fifty.

  Of course, the drink he’s announced is all wrong.

  ‘Shit, Mitch, I take tea. Just black, plain, tea. A miracle this shop makes a profit at all, with you at the helm. You’ve got a memory for details like a sieve.’

  I take the cup, wrapping both hands around its warmth and shaking my head. Tut tut, Mr Tuttle. But it’s a ritual, not frustration. We both know the familiar script and all the gestures that go along with it. ‘Not like it hasn’t been the same order every day since we met,’ I say.

  ‘Thought I’d be spontaneous, force you to try something new.’ He grins, his teeth uneven but spectacularly, unnaturally white. The peroxide blonde of the dental world.

  My eyebrows aren’t as pronounced as his, but they’ll still mount a good rise when the moment calls for it, and I prop them up in mock disapproval. Then a sip of my drink – tea, despite Mitch’s pronouncement, strong and hot and exactly as I like it. Of course. And in a cup from Peet’s, which we’ve collectively decided has Starbucks outgunned on all counts. We’ve all long since grown tired of the coffee we brew in-house. That’s for the patrons. We ourselves will take something a little more refined, thank you.

  ‘Susan still keeping you to the new diet?’ I ask him. The script had run its course, and I’d noticed Mitch had opted out of his usual coffee and sported a cup with a teabag – orange-coloured, probably indicating something herbal and revolting – dangling out of its lid.

  ‘The fascist,’ he mutters, looking defeated. ‘If it hasn’t been brewed from a weed or a berry, I’m not allowed anywhere near it.’

  ‘Commiserations.’ I’m laughing as I answer. ‘I’m still getting smoothies.’ There’s no need to elaborate. Mitch knows the story and shakes his head empathetically. If there were more hair there, it would flop with the exaggerated motion.

  He’s carrying two additional paper cups in a holder, filled with whatever contents are bound for their recipients on the far end of the shop, sighing for good measure but still smiling as he walks away. Big steps, lumbering but confident – a great, heaving land mass on the move. Mitch, needless to say, doesn’t cut the slimmest of figures, and I can see why Susan wants him on a diet. Still, poor thing. I probably shouldn’t refer to him as a land mass.

  I’m momentarily captivated by the motion of this boisterous, generous man, hunting down the prey to serve as the targets of his daily good deeds. I catch the look of satisfaction that covers his creased face when he spots the smiles they offer in response, and for a moment feel the melancholy that comes from wondering why there aren’t more selfless souls like Mitch Tuttle’s in the world. And definitely more bosses. But I also catch the sly sleight of hand that flicks a donut from the counter into his grasp as he saunters back, and my devious smile is instantly back. I feel exonerated from the guilt of the heaving-land-mass reflection.

  ‘I know I said I wouldn’t nag you.’ I let my words stretch out as he approaches. My eyes point to the deep-fried treat poorly concealed in his grip.

  ‘A promise I’m glad you consider as inviolate as the oath that put that ring on your finger,’ he answers, motioning towards my hand, before I can go further. He steps into his small office at the side of the shop, divided from the floor by a glass wall, and plops his overweight frame into his seat. I can hear the donut drop onto the desk next to his herbal tea.

  A second later, I’m quite certain, it’s gone.

  Libra Rosa is hardly the largest bookshop in our part of the world. Even in a society where they’re fast disappearing, the Bay Area still has its share of some of the greats. Green Apple in San Francisco has branches scattered around the city, some covering multiple storeys and bringing in authors and speakers while cultivating book-sharing and the lovely art of the second-hand. Johnson’s in Berkeley caters to the hip. Iconoclasm in Marin fosters the new age, as do a half-dozen others like it. There’s a little bit of something for everyone. The only thing the shops share in common is the Californian-liberal ideal that they should be nothing at all like the high-octane bookstores of New York and ‘the big cities’. They’re quiet little holes-in-the-wall with small-town vibes and a pace deliberately laid-back to suit the pot-happy lethargy of the NorCal literary culture.

  Libra Rosa is, among the mix, pretty standard. A tribute to its location in Santa Rosa – an oversized town just fifty-five miles north of San Francisco and the last opportunity for residence that San Fran careerists can reasonably consider for a daily commute – the shop has been shaped by Mitch into his vision of a perfect, if miniature, out-of-town literary tribute to the old Haight-Ashbury days. Rows of new books, stacks of classics, and a small section for the second-hand, with beanbags in corners, vinyl LPs on the wall and an overall atmosphere of being committed to life in 1965. Most of what we sell can be bought on Amazon, but Mitch has ingratiated himself with enough of the local community that the shop has a decent following who come in dribs and drabs throughout the day, never more than a handful at a time, though the addition of the coffee bar and seating area two years ago upped the daily visits a little.

  In one corner of the shop, on the far left as one enters and barely visible from the glass frontage onto the street, is the periodicals section. My terrain. I have a small desk surrounded by rotating racks for the newspapers and fixed shelving for the magazines.

  Periodicals are even less viable these days than books, given that almost every smartphone in existence carries their content in full colour and with instant access, but keeping up the periodicals corner is something of a hobby horse for Mitch. ‘It’s called print media, and print requires paper and ink.’ God love the man for more than just his kindness. I’m not a technophobe, and I browse the Net with the best of them. But the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times are just never the same on the screen. You need to be able to hold them, get the ink on your fingers. It’s a life experience not to be dismissed.

  So I arrive each morning. I unbundle the packs and boxes, which feels almost like working in a proper, big shop in the city – except that I know the mailman who delivers them is called Bruce, a wooly-haired gentleman who’s been on the downtown route for twenty-six years and who delivers our items ‘promptly at the exact time I get here’, and follows the delivery with a twenty-minute linger over a double black coffee, which doesn’t quite seem full octane to me. Nevertheless, I set the papers into their assigned racks, glancing through the magazines as I place them on the old shelves. It’s a job with a slow pace, deliberately as much as a simple function of location, but with an upside: it allows me to read as I go and catch glimpses of the world’s reporting on life outside.

  It usually takes me an hour or two, and then I settle into the routines of maintenance, selling, curating. And simply being present, as a shop without attendants is nothing more than a warehouse. Though a shop without customers is, too, and some days we barely pass that test. So I sit at my small desk, smile as guests enter the shop, answer questions when they have them – which on rare occasion are about books
or papers, but more often about their children’s recent sporting success or a vague complaint about the state of politics, or another pothole on Main Street – and spend the many quiet moments between browsing the Internet that still has stories to tell even once I’ve read all the day’s papers through.

  I have my own computer for that task, and I have to admit that as much as I cherish paper and ink, I do love this thing. The latest model, thinner than my calculator and an elegantly understated shade of what Apple optimistically calls gold. I can’t say that my previous model, whatever it was, had been all that bad; but I do love a shiny new thing, and the shinier the thing that’s new, the darker the memory of what it’s replaced. God bless Apple for keeping the shiny things coming. If I weren’t happily married and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, hadn’t announced himself as being the other way inclined, I could see myself having an extraordinarily torrid affair with that man.

  Pinned to the wall beside my desk is a photo of David and me, taken a year and a half ago near Lake Berryessa, and another of David and Sadie both lying on their backs, bellies up, out in the backyard. Two frozen moments of happiness I keep right at eye level. Tacked around them are notes and posters and all the usual fare of a bookseller’s trade; but right in the centre, right at the core: two manifestations of bliss, and both with furry bellies.

  I wrap my hands around my tea. One of the boxes from this morning’s delivery has already been cut open by someone else, and I reach over and grab out a copy of the Chronicle. I have a few minutes before I need to get to my chores. Right now, tea and a paper – a morning crafted for happiness.

  And I’m at work.

  Life is sometimes truly good.

  A sip, and the tea is warm on my tongue. With a jostle of the newsprint page the day’s headlines leer up at me in bold black. Single-phrase proclamations, shouting their way into my attention. Speaking of the weather, the traffic, the political climate. Some of it interesting, most of it routine.

  Ordinary.

  Normal.

  That’s usually how it is, just before the world changes.

  3

  David

  Looking back, staring into the past from all that my present has become, I can honestly say that the world we inhabit is a mystery. I’ve never in all my life had to come more to grips with that fact than now. A mystery, and a puzzle.

  I met her on Tuesday morning at 8.25 a.m.; I remember the timing exactly. The contours of my watch’s face, the position of its hands, I remember them in the same way poets remember the flowers on hillsides or the scents in the breeze on the days they experience love. Impossible to forget.

  I’d been told a little about her. I was familiar with the kinds of details shared about individuals on a printed page, cutting a lifetime of reality down to basic facts: the length and colour of her hair, her height. Weight, at least approximately. As if these things mattered. Yet they were there to be had, and I had them in hand as I first walked in to meet her. Everything a man could possess to go on.

  Except her. The experience of her simply couldn’t be compared to what I’d imagined. Or anything I’d ever experienced before. She was altogether more.

  The first thing I noticed were her eyes. I’d never encountered eyes like those. I’ll never forget how they first moved me.

  I think she knew, even then, that I saw something in them. That the sight of her captivated me. But, despite their potency, their vivid hue, it wasn’t their colour that captivated me. There are only so many colours eyes can take, and I’ve never found the variations to be all that engaging – whatever she or others might think.

  It was their intensity. God, staring into them was like beholding a cry that had been given physical form. Her eyes were her plea, and they seemed to hold, just behind the shine of their lenses, an entire world that was screaming to be set free.

  And then we spoke, and reality began to fall apart.

  4

  Amber

  The change today came in an instant. My headache had been getting worse, despite the tea. It was still early, but the throbbing at my temples was becoming more than a mere distraction. It’s like this too often, though, and I’d already swallowed two pills to combat the customary. I’d be a Tylenol addict if they didn’t tell me it would melt my liver into goo, so I’m an ibuprofen addict instead, popping two or three at a time throughout the day, for the little good they do me.

  I’d downed them in a single swallow, then set about my morning tasks. They hadn’t taken long, and the papers – which I’d already skimmed through – were now racked and the latest editions of the magazines placed prominently on their shelves. The boxes they’d come in were flattened and out back with the recycling, and I’d managed a handful of sales to the business types who wanted a paper to go with their croissant as they headed off to the office.

  And then I was alone. The bliss of the job. I’d opened my laptop at a moment when the ebb and flow of the shop had been mostly flow, and called up a familiar selection of news feeds. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m in this little shop in this little city that makes me so keen on keeping up with the news. It hardly matters to me, most of it, but I read it with diligence.

  My headache notwithstanding, I refocused my eyes on the computer screen. Minutes, maybe fifteen or twenty, had passed since I’d started my usual scanning, and thus far the online media wasn’t proving itself much more enticing than the day’s print versions I’d already perused.

  The headlines were hardly works of art. I know a lot of effort goes into them by the poor saps whose job it is to dream up one-liners that make the boredom-inducing sound enticing. But effort isn’t always enough to breed interest.

  STOCKS TRADE DOWN – BROKERS KEEP HOPES UP.

  That, in the journalistic world, is apparently what passes for catchy. The down and the up; directional contrapposto. Whoever wrote that got full marks in Journalism 101.

  BART TRAIN DELAYS THROW PASSENGER PATIENCE OFF THE RAILS.

  This attempt to convey poignantly uninteresting content about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system under the guise of a catchy tagline – it’s an art. Like a record producer fronting an album with one catchy tune and filling the remaining eleven tracks with artless crap. By the time anyone hears them, the’ve already bought the record. (Though I can hear Tim Cook yelling at me now: ‘No one “buys a record” any more, Amber. It’s all about streaming, about personalized subscription!’ then smiling seductively and somehow charging me another $9.99 a month.)

  CRACKS IN BRIDGE DIVIDE COUNTY OFFICIALS.

  I’d paused at that one, tapping to see the paragraph-length summary. The concrete of a sixty-year-old bridge outside Napa, in our neighbouring county to the east, was suddenly the cause of ‘grave concern’ amongst the county administration (note the adjective ‘grave’ in a story that might involve tragedy: I read enough to know that’s strong copy), despite the fissure in the concrete having been visible for more than three decades.

  I tapped my keyboard again, my waning interest spent.

  Then, without any deliberate intention, my glance wandered upwards. A few headlines above the one I’d clicked, less than an inch away from scrolling off the top of the screen, a different caption grabbed me.

  I can’t identify precisely how it did it – how it affected me. It was a spark, and it launched a fire in my spine that shot through me like badly wired electrics. Before I’d even taken full account of the words, I could feel the voltage in my head change.

  I shoved my tea aside with a jolt, slammed the palm of my hand against the spacebar to stop the feed scrolling off the screen, and glued my eyes to the headline. I was barely aware that I had all but stopped breathing. My eyes didn’t want to focus.

  The words were simple and unadorned.

  WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON SHORELINE. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED.

  And there it was, that buzzing at the surface of my scalp again. Electrics. An immediate tension in my chest.

  There was nothing in the headline that
should have caused such a reaction. It presented none of the witty word play of the other titles (wit, I have often observed, is generally disapproved of in writing about death, since almost nobody successfully navigates the line between banter and respectability). It was unfussy. A simple statement of fact.

  WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON SHORELINE. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED.

  I read it again, and again, and gradually became aware that my spine had gone rigid. I’m sure there was a thin film of sweat between my fingertips and the etched glass of the trackpad.

  The noise of the bookshop seemed to have vanished, and if there was anyone left in the store, they had become invisible to my attention. My mind, drawn in by this headline for reasons I couldn’t explain, raced through the limited details that could be inferred from such a minuscule amount of text. ‘Foul play’ means possible homicide. Fine. I mean, horrible, of course; but comprehensible.

  But my reaction, it was not comprehensible at all. I blinked, and my eyelids left trails as they rose back into their folds.

  WOMAN’S BODY FOUND ON —

  The words grabbed hold of me. Assaulted me. Inexplicably, at that instant, I wanted to scream out from the very depths of my belly.

  Isn’t that the very strangest thing?

  Then, with the shift of no more than a second, the agony fled. The headline was just a headline, clear and crisp on my screen with a stark lack of factual detail, and I was disinterested and dismissive and —

  And it was back, as quickly as it had gone. My breath outpaced my pulse, my eyes clamped closed, and in an explosion of the unexplained, I couldn’t even make out the conclusion of my own thoughts. Though for a moment, just for a moment, I thought I heard them telling me that my world was coming to its end.