by Laura McNeal
“I guess it’s his brother’s, though. The brother that died.”
“That just makes it worse. There’ll be, like, suppressed grief.”
“Did the Chippies say there’d be a spotter on the bridge?” Howard asked. If an officer didn’t stand up there to show where the jumper’d been, you didn’t even know where to start. The CHP was in charge of the bridge because it was a state highway, Coronado usually got to the scene first, and then it was group numero tres, harbor patrol, on the water. One bridge, three forces. Messy.
“Nobody saw a jumper. There’s just the car.”
The moon was half-full or half-empty, tooth-colored. Wind blew hard from the southeast. Ahead of them in the water, Howard saw a darker darkness skim by, one tiny red light on the bow, no light on the stern. “Is that Gretchen Ryman again?” he asked, and Chrissy said, “Looks like.”
They’d nearly cited Gretchen once for mooring too close to the bridge. Usually only drunks moored like that, where you could be pegged for a terrorist, but Gretchen wasn’t drunk, just a sharp-eyed, skinny chick with curly blond hair who hadn’t even stood up when he got on the megaphone. She had leaned back on her elbows and stared into the searchlight while two big birds, cockatoos or parrots, flanked her on the rail, squawking.
“What the—” Chrissy said, low down so only Howard could hear. “She used to be on dive patrol.”
Howard remembered her, barely. She’d gone on only a few dives and then quit because the bodies freaked her out. The night they first saw her cruising around, Chrissy had told Gretchen, nicely, that she needed to moor back at Glorietta with a three-day or rent a buoy at the flats, and she had moved her boat, no problem, but they still saw her roaming at night, as if she, like them, were working graves.
They were close to the bridge now, and the pylons looked the way Howard’s son said they looked: like twenty stone giants with no heads. He slowed way down and began to coast into the black-and-white ripples that when he was young he would touch with the palm of his hand, thinking how soft water was, softer than anything else on earth.
When the bridge call came in, Elaine Lord followed R. P. Skelly’s squad car over the bay, descended into the Barrio, shot through the park with its murals of roses and Aztecs, and ascended the westbound ramp to pylon 19, the very tip-top, where Skelly was already getting out of his car.
All the doors were closed and the car was empty. No one in the front, no one in the back, no one standing anywhere in sight.
“Didn’t they see anyone?” Elaine asked.
“Nope.”
“How did that happen? Somebody called it in while driving?”
“Dunno.”
Skelly stood at the rail and looked down, talking into his handheld, and once she shut herself in the car, she couldn’t hear his voice, just the wind as it tried to come in. The car was still warm. Not the seat, but the air. Breathed in and out by someone who was not here anymore. At least the driver’s side door wasn’t open. Jumpers left them wide, the ignition on, the world askew, as if they had no time. The ignition was off, but the key was here. Dangling by her knee was a dirty green plastic key tag, nothing written on the paper inside it, water damage and grime on the paper and the rubbery green edge. Only one other key on the ring.
Nowhere in the car did she see a suicide note.
Skelly opened the passenger door and stuck his head in. “Jukesson says one of the cameras is broken. The good one for this spot. They couldn’t see much.”
“Who’s they?”
“Him and somebody new. I think he said Gracie.”
“But they didn’t see anyone walking around?”
“No.”
“How could that be?”
Skelly shook his head. He was so tall and broad that he made the car seem like a toy. She wanted him to shut the door again so the wind would stop blowing the air of the missing driver into oblivion. “They gotta look,” she said. “In case.” She meant the dive team, and she knew he understood.
“I’ll call,” he said, and she saw the tow truck heading east. It would pass them, circle around, and return.
She wrote everything down as she went. No purse/wallet/backpack in the front seat, glove compartment, console, or back. Gas tank half-full. 46,701 miles driven. Sticky Bumps air freshener, tiki doll, two Corona bottle caps under the driver’s side seat, a straw wrapper from In-N-Out, a tiny wad of paper she did not pick up, sand, crumbs. She didn’t write down that the car smelled like Axe and coconut, but she noted it. She copied down the name on the registration—Renata Moorehead at 714 First Street, Coronado—and then she stood with Skelly beside the back bumper.
“First Street, huh?” Skelly said, leaning down to flick the red duct tape over the broken taillight with his giant index finger. “So, what, a ten-million-dollar house? Plus this car?”
It hadn’t seemed like a woman’s car, Elaine thought. Wrong kind of messy.
“Tragic lack of automotive priorities,” Skelly said.
Skelly was just like her nephews. Money was for buying nice cars, plain and simple. She hadn’t wanted to work with him at first because of his various childlike views and because he was a twenty-five-year-old Mormon the size of Sasquatch. It had turned out, though, that he gave her a little of the old hope and ardor. Not a lot of hope and ardor, but a little.
The wind was blowing harder now, cutting into her ears like December, and the vest under her shirt was pinching her stomach again, so she’d probably gained back those five pounds. She didn’t go to the rail and look over, but Skelly leaned his torso way out while the tow truck driver cranked away.
“Are they down there?” she had to shout at him.
“Yup,” he shouted. He leaned backward over the rail and smiled wickedly at her, waving his hands like he’d lost his balance. Then he stopped kidding around and got on the radio to confirm the location for Howard. A few cars passed on the eastbound side, slowing down to looky-loo. She willed them to keep their windows and mouths shut, shut, shut. “Jump!” people liked to say if it was daytime and they’d been forced to wait for negotiators to arrive and do their stuff. This time there was no one to reason with or be mad at. Just the car like a coat dropped in the forest.
I remember all of mine, Chief Grody had said to Elaine the first time, as if once you witnessed a suicide, it was yours. She had been coming back from the courthouse the day she saw her first, March 2, same day her nephew Mike was born. She was thinking about how fast she could get to the hospital after her shift ended and whether she should get a perm and whether it meant something that the sexy electrician she’d met at the Water’s Edge hadn’t called yet when she saw a middle-aged woman, ink-black hair, sweatshirt with a picture of a kitten on it, big sunglasses, standing by the rail, her car stopped behind her like it had broken down. It was a red car, she remembered that. Something new and foreign. Elaine had parked in the emergency lane that used to go down the center of the bridge and said, “Hi, I’m Elaine!” So optimistic back then, so chirpy! “You should step back from the rail, okay, ma’am? It’s safer inside your vehicle.”
March 2, sunny and warm, a perfect spring day. The woman in the kitten shirt took a step closer to the rail and said, “Get away from me or I’ll jump.”
“Okay, ma’am, I’m stepping back, everything’s okay,” Elaine said, but the woman still climbed onto the rail with stunning speed, plugged her nose like a child, and bent her knees a little.
It was true, what Chief Grody had said. You did remember all of them, and they were yours.
At 1:15 a.m., Elaine stood with Skelly in front of a locked gate on First Street. All the houses on that side of the island faced out, not in, toward the bay and the towers of downtown, as if the only reason their owners lived in Coronado was for the view of somewhere else.
“No party here tonight,” Skelly said.
It was quiet and the lawn was clean. The metal panels of the house’s front wall—or was it the back?—looked like silver ice. The last time she and
Skelly had been here, the gate was ajar because some kid had put duct tape over the latch. The front door had been open, so they could walk right in, right past the red lacquer table and bottles of vodka, tequila, Coke. Kids everywhere, voices loud, skirts short, red cups in hand.
“What was that, a month ago?”
“May seventeenth.” Skelly had a weird talent for dates and times. “Boy named Clay.”
“His sister bailed him out,” Elaine said. “Was she Renata?”
“No. Something similar. Renee.”
“Could be short for Renata.”
“Yup.”
The boy who had thrown the party hadn’t been arrested, merely “detained,” which was how they did things in Coronado so the kids wouldn’t be too traumatized. The detention room in the new police station was nicer than some hotel lobbies, and Clay had certainly not been traumatized. More like indignant, as if he were the one who’d been wronged.
The voice that answered Elaine on the call box was groggy and female. “Hello?”
“This is Elaine Lord of the Coronado Police Department.”
“Is something wrong?”
Of course something was wrong. “Could we come up to the house?”
“Jim, it’s the—” the woman said, and there was an electronic bleep, a loss of connection.
The heavy man and woman who stood beside the black Foo dog statue looked nothing like the party boy and his sister, but Elaine still hoped.
“We’re looking for Renata Moorehead,” Elaine said.
The man tightened his wine-colored velour robe and said, “Join the club. I’ve been trying to call her all day to say that the guy who was supposed to fix the shower never showed up.”
So they were renters.
“Twenty thousand dollars a month and I can’t get the damned shower to work.”
“What did she do?” his wife asked Elaine, excited.
Elaine ignored the question.
“I thought there was something fishy,” the man said, talking to Skelly, not her, like most men.
Skelly asked, “Have you ever seen a white Honda Accord parked here? Two-door?”
They shook their heads. “Nope,” the guy said. “She drove an Escalade. Newest model.”
“Where do you send the rent check?” Elaine asked.
“A PO box,” the woman said to Elaine.
“Located where?”
“Here. Coronado.”
Elaine asked for the address, wrote it down, and said, “We’re sorry to wake you.”
“Are they in trouble?” the woman asked, still excited at the prospect, rolling the belt of her terry cloth bathrobe with one hand and making Elaine hate her.
“No,” Skelly said. “Just go back to sleep, ma’am.”
There was something about the hours after midnight that still brought you back to age seventeen or eighteen, when you were up only to have fun, to be older, to see how far you could go. That feeling still hovered in the fog on First Street, somewhere above the empty lawns and damp streets, but it was out of Elaine’s reach. She stood by her car and felt heavy. “Where did they go if they rented out their house?” she asked Skelly. “Did you see the car Clay’s sister drove when she picked him up?”
Skelly shook his head, and she thought briefly about driving to the CHP station at the base of the bridge, where she could maybe look at the monitors that showed the bridge lanes and see what the clarity was like. She could ask what kind of a gap there might have been between when they first and last saw the car. Either the newbie or Kyle had looked away, Elaine bet. Doing something besides watching, when watching was the whole job.
“Let’s see if Renata Moorehead owns another house,” Skelly said. “Maybe she’s living somewhere else on the island and renting the bay house for the big summer bucks.”
This seemed more productive than grilling the CHP, so Elaine said okay, and she heard the sound of her door slamming, Skelly’s ignition, and two cars making U-turns on the wet street as disturbances, aberrations, minor interruptions to a sleeping world.
Shiva lives on Mount Kailash. He has a thousand names and a thousand faces. He is woven into all that the eye can see: the urban forest, the body of the girl, the bag once used to carry sails.
Frank opened the bag in the acacias, where a sign helpfully said NO TRESPASSING. He settled Julia’s head and body first, then her feet in their white socks, dirty now, a hole in one toe. The gun was a terrible thing in the short term but Julia was just sleeping, a heavy sleep, the weight of her body as he pulled her to the trees surprising. If she awakened too soon, she might overturn the dinghy and drown, so he wrapped pieces of an old T-shirt, torn into strips for this purpose, around her ankles and slim wrists. No one passed on the jogging path as he wrapped tape over the ribbons of shirt, once around, twice around. No one but Shiva was watching him in the urban forest. There was a man near the skateboard park sitting on the hood of his cab to have a smoke, but he was too far away. Other side of the bridge. Only Shiva could see Frank and Julia, and Shiva understood.
But Julia’s boots. They were too big. No place for them in the bag with Julia. One hand for the boots, one hand to pull the sail bag to the dinghy.
The black man who was smoking on his taxi, what if he could he see the boats from the parking lot and thus would see Frank lifting the bag that held Julia? Frank walked out of the acacias to the chain-link fence, under the bridge, and out to the beach, just a sailor with empty hands, every right to be there, to observe the dark water, inspect the sky. It was normal to turn and face the park, the general direction, normal to see if the man who had sat with his knees raised, skinny as a monk, sat there still.
Nothing, no one, pavement, light.
The time was now. Sweat covered his entire chest, slicked his arms. He carried the sail bag until he reached the sand, then dragged it. The strap tore right off. No good. He needed both hands for the last thirty yards. He laid the pink boots over the bag and hurried: twenty-five yards, twenty yards, fifteen, ten. Achieved. He turned the boat right-side up as he always did. Removed the oars as he always did. Dragged it to the water because the extra weight would be impossible unless the boat was already afloat. Thinking! Always thinking. He was too impatient, though. He thought he could lift the sail bag and balance the boots, but the boots slid off, kerplunk kerplunk. One floated and one filled as he arranged the foot end of the sail bag in the dinghy, his eyes dry and over-open, his back tight with panic, the silver light on the white dinghy inhumanly bright, as if disgusted. He felt in the water for the boots, both submerged now. It was high tide. Headlights raked the bay, skimmed the bushes, streaked his hands. He needed to climb in the boat now, look normal, begin to row. Somebody’s car turned in the parking lot, toward, then away.
Go. He’d just go. Come back for the boots if he had to.
Row, row, row your boat.
It was simple now. It was a matter of rowing, water, and balance.
Whoever had been in the parking lot was not there now. No one stood on the beach. No one stood on the sidewalk. The Sayonara was moored on the far end of the first row, the outer edge, and four of the five nearest boats never had a soul on them, not even on weekends, just parked, collecting slime. Nobody was home as he passed, not even the Parrot Lady, who was out cruising again, probably sailing around in the dark with no lights on, the way she liked to do.
There were flashing lights up on the bridge, something happening up there, a jumper, maybe.
One more stroke, and he was home. All he had to do was carry Julia aboard.
Fen Harris was tired but he couldn’t sleep. The highway still seemed to be going under him the way it did when you’d been on your skateboard for a long time. You moved, but the bed didn’t go anywhere and you couldn’t slow your mind down. Again and again he saw the girl on the bridge wave him on, her hair like a flag in the bleaching light, and the poles of the streetlights ticked past uncounted.
“Alea iacta est,” his father used to say when they moved
to a new town or he bought a new car or signed a check. He even said it when he and Fen did something silly but irreversible, like ascend the first hill of a roller-coaster ride. Alea iacta est. “The die is cast.”
Moving to a new town was like getting to cast the die again, in Fen’s opinion. No matter how disappointing the last town had been, and Las Vegas had been bad even before his father got depressed, Fen had always felt that this time when the die stopped, the number he wanted would be right there on top.
It was easy to feel this, because he was lucky. The second time he’d broken his arm, his dad asked for a description of what Fen had been doing at the skate park, and when Fen gave him a slightly modified version of the truth, his dad said, “You know what, Fen? You don’t weigh the risks. That’s your problem. You do what you want, and you think it’ll be fine, you’ll always be lucky.”
“I’m an optimist,” Fen said. “Why do you hate that so much?”
“I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Whether I like it or not doesn’t matter. It’ll end on its own.”
“What will?”
“Optimism. It’s a thing that ends with experience. Experience does not breed optimism.”
Fen felt sick inside, the way he always did when his dad talked like this.
His dad said, “What, you think it’s not true?”
“I don’t want it to be true.”
“I’m not trying to depress you, Fen. I’m trying to prepare you for real life.”
Fen would have preferred his father to say goofy, cheerful stuff like The world is your clam, the way his uncle Carl in Coronado did. Carpe diem, maybe, if he had to use high-horse Latin. That would have prepared Fen better for things like his father dying by the side of the road. Wasn’t it bad enough that his father had been mistaken at first, or so they presumed, for a homeless man under an overpass, car after car driving on while Alan Harris, fighter pilot and father of one, lay gasping in the cold shade until one driver thought, Why is that guy wearing new shoes and nice shorts? But by then all hope of reviving him had passed.
