The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  The girl in pink boots was Julia, he was sure of it. Her walk, her manner, her eyes were the same! Her concern for creatures. When one dies, another is created. Shiva protects souls until they are ready for rebirth. She knew that, and when she stared into the water, she seemed to be watching for it to happen.

  But how could he make the girl see that he was the same Frank, just older, but that he was different now? That he had been given another chance?

  “Do not expect the Lost One to remember you,” the Seer had warned. The Seer was very cryptic on this point, and the letters, especially of late, were discouraging. “The past is present as the moon is present when the earth is turned away, but can the earth make the moon look at her? Yea, it must.”

  Frank couldn’t go to Julia in daylight, because the ignorant families on the beach, the boaters, the swimmers on the pier would not see the seven signs. They would not see that this girl was his sister come back to life. How could they? He had to approach her in darkness. If he had to be the stronger one for now, it would all be worth it when Julia said, “Yes, I remember now. I remember you.” He would tell her why it took him so long to come back to the cave that day and how sorry he was, and how long he’d been preparing for her return.

  Frank had seen the new Julia many times, mainly on the rocks where she took notes and pictures, but also on her bike, on the docks at the yacht club where he was not a member, and on a catamaran with another girl, perhaps the sister of her new life. With each glimpse he was more certain and more determined. He didn’t want to make another mistake, like he had in Oceano. That girl wasn’t Julia, though she shared some traits, a few, enough to fool him.

  He had learned from his mistake: Don’t be impulsive. Observe. Bide your time. Trust in Shiva.

  He had an inflatable Ribcraft he used for fishing in both bays, the big and the little, plus a dinghy for going back and forth from the Sayonara to Tidelands Park, where he kept a bike for doing errands in town. He had the stun gun, which he would use only if he had to, if she wouldn’t listen.

  Initially he had come to this place off Coronado Island to save money, not just because of the girl in Oceano. Mooring in the bay and living aboard would make his percentage of the inheritance last until he found Julia and bought her a little cottage close to Pismo so she could live near Cousin Telma if something happened to him. It wasn’t bad living on a boat, and when he needed to get off the water, there was a lot of undergrowth along the bike path and on both sides of the hill where the bridge connected with the island—a forest, really, a small piece of wilderness between the golf course and the park, with all manner of trees and dense acacias. He kept a few things there for safety and convenience, wrapped in plastic so the weather couldn’t rot them, buried in the soil so the world wouldn’t steal them, and from the forest he saw women and girls go under the bridge. Cycling, laughing, walking. Julia’s soul did not shine out, though, until he saw the girl with brown hair and pink boots staring into the water and making notes. If he could only be alone with her the way the Seer had instructed, she would remember.

  “Can the earth make the moon look at her? Yea, it must.”

  Maybe tonight was the night. He would do his circuit in town: sort through the trash bins, take bottles and cans to the machines at Albertsons, withdraw cash, buy supplies, check his camp in the acacias. Keep his eyes open for the seventh sign. On the water or on the earth she would come to him.

  Thisbe had never noticed before what a lot of streetlights burned around the library, turning the air yellow, particulate, plus there were a surprising number of people walking around—tourists, it looked like—though that guy on the steps was definitely Jake Grossman, and the girl with him was Mandy Shue, both of whom had been at Clay’s party three weeks ago. They’d see her get out of Clay’s car in her pink rubber boots and remember her lying there on the rocks with her head all bloody. What was she going to say when she got out of Clay’s car?

  Why aren’t you down at the Of, Jake? I think all the cool people are down at the Of.

  Better to cruise for a bit down Orange Avenue and find a darker but still conspicuous place to leave the car. Roll down the window and stop inhaling the weed-coconut-tequila smell that was an extension of Clay’s body, a unique and powerful drug. She breathed Clay Moorehead out of her lungs and turned right on Ocean Avenue, but the pangs rose like the waves that rose and fell in the dark, one following another following another following another. You could have waited for Jerome. Once you knew the fortune cookie was not from Jerome, you should have said no to Clay Moorehead.

  She’d tried to tell Jerome it was all a mistake and he could trust her—they could start over—but he wouldn’t talk to her. She didn’t blame him. Why should he? Why would he even be interested in her now?

  You could ask yourself the same questions a million times, but if you didn’t know the answers, you didn’t know.

  The houses along the beach were grandiferous, one of Ted’s made-up words. Also beautiful. You could hate them and think they cost too much but part of you still wanted one.

  She turned Clay’s car inland to cruise past normal-er houses that had soccer nets in the yards, minivans in the driveways, wet suits hung up to dry: Ashlynn Myrick’s house, Eric Feingold’s, and Daisy Koop’s, where a banner that hung down from the porch roof said USC. Meaning, Look where our daughter got in! Five months ago, all Thisbe had thought about was getting a letter that said Welcome to the Trojan Family. She hadn’t known Clay at all except as a boy who took easy classes and drank a lot. Say goodbye to that situation, Thisbe Locke. Grade point average down the toilet. You’re not getting into USC with a 3.5.

  These streets were no good. There were no red curbs along here where she could leave Clay’s car, and his Starbucks French roast weed sitting out for cops to see when they towed it, just quiet houses, one sleeping block after another until she got to Fourth Street, the Way Out of Coronado via the bridge.

  She felt in her hoodie pocket at the red light on Orange and there was her driver’s license—so that’s where she’d left it—and a little slip of paper, one of the stupid fortunes, probably. The light turned green and she held the slip in her hand—just, like, rolling it in her fingers as she floored it to make the car climb up the bridge. Not the strongest car, this one. Kind of weak. Tick tick tick went the streetlights like a picket fence, on and on, up and up, and it felt so different being the driver. When she was a passenger, she could look over the rail at the huge navy ships made small like models in a museum, the water rippling with moonlight and yellow sodium, but she had to concentrate when she was driving and keep Clay’s car close but not too close to the concrete zipper that curved down the center line. Where was she going, anyway? It felt good to leave.

  The road was like a tunnel to the sky, a ramp that went up and up and up, but really she was just headed for San Diego. What was she going to do? Drive north on the 5 until she ran out of gas? She needed to get off the bridge and think, which meant the Barrio. She turned right where the bridge curled slowly into Cesar Chavez Park. The concrete pylons that supported the end of the bridge were painted all over with the faces and fists of angry women and men, Aztec gods, enormous flowers, the Virgin of Guadalupe. The lights were so bright that she could see every color in all its intensity: purple, green, blue, orange, red, and yellow. The grassy playground was empty, and no one sat at a concrete table painted to look like the Mexican flag. She slowed as she approached a crosswalk and came to a full stop before she realized there was no stop sign. A group of men turned to look at her, wondering why she was here by herself at midnight.

  Don’t hurt me, she thought racist-ly. Racistentially. She had to go back to Coronado because she didn’t belong on this side of the bridge. When she went back, everything would be just as she’d left it: Jerome would never talk to her again, and her grades would be too low for an exceptional future, the one that would allow her high school failures to reveal that all along she’d been a swan, not an ugly duckling.
She might even have to stay at home after her senior year and go to a local college if Hugh went on being mad at her. She wasn’t smarter than Ted. Not now, maybe not ever, not in the important ways. That was why she had fallen for Clay, maybe. So there would be senior year with homecoming and prom and parties and hanging out at the Del (not the Of) and everyone getting their college acceptances and bragging about it on Facebook and hanging the flags over the doors. She found her way to the place where she could get back on the bridge. She drove more slowly now, as if dread were a huge trailer she pulled behind Clay’s car.

  It was weird how empty the bridge was. Only one car, a little red truck, appeared behind her, and she slowed down even more, thinking he’d pass her, but he didn’t. She stopped; he stopped. Go away, she told him with telepathy. I am going to leave now. There was no forward and there was no back, so she must go down. Dive like an Olympic swimmer and part the water like an arrow and sink into the Depths. Travel to an underworld of castles and mermaids and turtles like in The Golden Book of Fairy Tales. Well, no. She knew better. Under the water were black sea nettles and ruffled sea hares and leopard sharks. As many as 625 sand dollars per square yard, on edge, their purple cilia quivering as they moved captive sea crab larvae to their O-shaped mouths. All the lost sunglasses in the world. Water bottles and dead phones. At least there, though, she wouldn’t have to think.

  She felt in her pocket for the fortune she’d been fiddling with. Whichever one it was, she would know it was a sign. A harbinger. Synonym: omen. From within the car she breathed coconut and it did make her want Clay a little bit. Wind huffed the car and the glass rattled. Still the red truck behind her shone its headlights at the back of her head. She unrolled the paper and read, I AM CLAY AND YOU ARE HANDS. Oh, God, the stupidest one of all. It had seemed a sign of his poetic nature at the time. She had snuck out of her bedroom, ridden her bike to the yacht club, knocked on the door of his perfectly named, how-could-you-be-so-stupid boat! Enjoyed most of it, some of it, well, the beginning, but mostly the way he looked at her before. Kissed him the next day in Spreckels Park, middle of the day, people everywhere, even though Clay was acting really weird. She kissed him the second time and looked where he was looking, and they both saw Jerome. “I gotta go,” he said, and he practically sprinted across the park, but Jerome didn’t let Clay catch up.

  Such a fool.

  She put the fortune on her tongue and found that it tasted of nothing but sour paper and sour ink. She chewed it a few times to compact it into something small and hard she could spit onto the floor. Then she shifted the gear into park and opened the door and stepped onto the Coronado Bridge.

  Fen Harris didn’t feel sleepy at all, just euphoric that he was here, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, driving over the bridge to the island where he’d always wanted to live. There were only two narrow lanes on his side, no shoulder, and the rail was so low it was like being in an airplane. He kept trying to see, in glimpses, the things he remembered from summer visits—the sailboats he had counted from the backseat, the tiny beach where he’d written his name with a stick, spelling the whole thing out, F-E-N-I-M-O-R-E, and lying down beside it in his swimsuit so his mom could take a picture—but he couldn’t see much in the dark, plus it was misty out, and he was stuck behind a white Honda that went slower and slower and then, putter putter, stopped. He didn’t have time to check his blind spot, so he stopped, too. There was no car behind him, no headlights in the rearview mirror yet, but he was afraid to shift lanes. What if he needed to back up first? His truck literally shook in the wind. How high were they? Two hundred feet? Two fifty? High enough for an aircraft carrier to pass underneath, because he’d watched one do that before.

  The door to the dirty white Honda opened, and a girl wearing shorts and pink rain boots (well, that was odd) stepped out without looking back or shutting her door. She walked to the rail in front of her own car and faced the black bay and the island with her hands in her pockets except when the wind blew her straight brown hair so that it whipped her face. She kept pulling it out of her eyes, which she appeared to be using to take in the view like this was a turnout, not a bridge lane. She picked the hair out of her mouth and kept staring. Crazy-calm or calm-calm. Only one black car—that’s all he registered, the color—zinged past in that time, and it didn’t stop, though it swerved in a jerk to avoid the open door of the girl’s car. The girl turned in Fen’s direction and showed him her phone. She used her hand to scoop the air, as if she were directing traffic around an accident, clearly telling him to go on.

  Go on?

  His uncle Carl had been expecting him for, like, two hours. Carl was a water cop, so he patrolled the harbor in a police boat. He’d know what to do if Fen called him. Should Fen call him? The dashboard clock said 12:09, and two more cars passed in the far lane, racing in the opposite direction, toward the city. Windshield getting misty. Wind whacking car.

  The girl scooped the air again. Go on, she was saying. She ticktocked the phone like he was a moron who didn’t speak Human Sign Language. Overhead, the streetlights formed a blinding, speechless arc.

  He backed up a tiny bit, cranked the steering wheel, and eased out, watching his rearview mirror in a state of panic, swinging wide to miss the door she’d left wide open—she couldn’t even close the door of her broken-down car?—and as he gunned it he gave her a look that said she was a crazy, self-absorbed idiot who could have killed them both, but by then she had turned away.

  The California Highway Patrol’s monitor for pylon 19 had been dead for three days now, an electrical short, the result of some bird building a nest, probably. The coastal commission was supposed to get up there and determine if CHP cameras were a threat to nesting falcons or ospreys or seagulls—Graycie Dunn couldn’t remember which—but obviously they hadn’t figured it out yet. Graycie watched the working screens and picked at a brownie she shouldn’t be eating, and when Kyle Jukesson went to the bathroom, she couldn’t help it: she got out her phone. Only time you could even act like you had a phone was when Kyle wasn’t in the room. The man had no idea why anyone would communicate with the outside world, and she had to say, given his personality, a flip phone was the right choice for him. Nobody was going to follow that dude.

  Graycie checked the monitors first, to make sure traffic was flowing in the same monotonous way. Car, car. Caaaaar. Empty lanes. Car. Long gap. She turned to the phone. No new messages, no picture of baby Genna in her pajamas. No word on whether the runny nose was still an issue. Graycie did, however, have one challenge waiting for her on QuizUp. Guy named Splash in Puerto Rico. What time was it in Puerto Rico?

  Kyle brought hunting magazines to read on his breaks—including toilet breaks, because she’d seen him carry one in there. This gave her more time, but how much time, she couldn’t recall later. Eventually she heard the toilet flush, which startled her and interrupted her game, and she didn’t want to lose to Splash in Puerto Rico, so she answered the final-round question (nailing it in the first second), shut down the app while the YOU WIN! picture was still on her screen, and hurried through the braille of muting her phone. She had just tucked it back in her pocket when Kyle set a contaminated copy of Ducks Unlimited on her desk—way, way too close to her face. He took a bite of a brownie before he said, “How long has that car been stopped there?”

  And that’s when she first saw it. Monitor 3, which had a pretty bad angle for pylon 19, showed a definite stoppage.

  “It can’t have been that long,” Graycie said.

  “You didn’t go anywhere, did you?”

  “No.” She wanted to say that nobody could take a break if Kyle was reading in the restroom, planning a duck vacation, but she didn’t. She was new.

  “You were watching the screens.”

  “Yeah.” It’s funny how lies felt the same when you were grown up. Like you were the child.

  “Did you see anybody get out?”

  Guilt flowed, spine to fingers. “No.”

  “So it just sto
pped? The door didn’t open?”

  The car was a grainy blob of grainy bits.

  “Not that I saw,” she said. “I mean, it’s the worst camera for that part of the bridge, right? If the one that’s supposed to be working were working, we could see what’s going on.”

  He called for patrol cars, saying “incident on the bridge,” not “jumper,” because jumpers made the news, and when jumpers made the news, more crazies got the idea to haul their desperate selves to the top of the bridge. Plus, maybe it wasn’t a jumper at all. Maybe somebody was just sitting there waiting for help. It might be no big deal at all, what had just happened.

  An undercarriage scraped the road, a foghorn blew. All the windows reflected the mostly empty room, the desks, herself, Kyle.

  Kyle watched the white blob on the screen where nothing moved, so she watched the dots with him. She hoped Kyle wasn’t going to tell her again about the tiny red Nike shoe with the clean white laces untied—“no bigger than this,” he always said, holding his finger and thumb two inches apart—left on the seat of a taxi the night a man jumped off the bridge holding a baby, but he didn’t speak, just finished one of her aunt Estelle’s brownies, and Graycie ate hers, too, though her appetite was completely gone.

  Howard Accorso steered the harbor patrol boat with one hand and popped a piece of gum through the foil onto his tongue with the other.

  “Why isn’t Carl on tonight?” Chrissy Truesdale asked.

  “Nephew coming in.”

  “That’s a mistake,” she said. She sighed and shook her head, so he asked, “What?”

  “Bringing a sixteen-year-old boy into your house to live. Carl just barely got through his own kid’s craziness.”