The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  Alea iacta est.

  Experience does not breed optimism.

  He could not find other words to think.

  The day after the funeral, Fen had taken a die from the Yahtzee game he and his mother used to play, driven to the bare, sandy edge of Woodlawn Cemetery, walked to his father’s grave, which he found easily because of how disturbingly fresh the dirt was, and shaken the die in cupped hands.

  “Six,” he said out loud. It was hot in the cemetery. There was not a single dark color in the atmosphere, as if everything living had been faded by the sun, even the grass and the tall palm trees. The die was deep red plastic, a beautiful ruby cube with soft edges and white painted dots, and it felt like a caramel in his hands. He visualized the six, the two rows together like buttons on a coat, and he willed the die to give him a sign that his father was wrong. Fen squatted down, shook it a few more times, and let it fall on the powdery dirt. It tumbled toward the grass and stopped. Four white dots. Fen felt disturbed but not defeated. He came back the next day, and the next, and the next, until all the dice from all the games in the house had been used up: Yahtzee, Farkle, Risk, Payday, backgammon, Clue. Sometimes the dice lay where they’d fallen out of his hand until the next time, and sometimes they’d been picked up and set somewhere else, as happened the day that the flat marble tombstone that said ALAN GREGORY HARRIS, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER, NOW FLYING JETS IN HEAVEN lay newly installed, flush with the ground. The headstone installer or whoever it was had set all the dice in a straight line above his father’s name, the same way someone had arranged toy cars on the nearby stone of a boy who had died at five years, six months, and thirteen days.

  Yesterday, before he drove to Coronado, Fen had taken a die from a friend’s Monopoly game and stood by the grave until he was sweating from his scalp and his armpits and the backs of his knees. The dice on the headstone were different shades of white and red and they were all different sizes. The numbers facing the sky were random, not in any order.

  “Alea NOT iacta est,” Fen said to his father’s stone, then visualized a six and tossed the last die. He felt almost psychic as it tumbled over the dirt, as if he could not only see the outcome but control it: James Fenimore Harris the Magician. But no. He got a three.

  Normally he walked away at that point, but this time he reached down and turned the die over so the six was on top. He turned the others, too, all twenty-one of them, so that he had a colossal set of sixes, and he raised his hands in mock victory before glancing sheepishly around to check if someone had seen. But it was blazing hot. Baking. No other mourners stood at the edges of the green, shadowless, mown-over graves. He wished all the headstones were sticking up instead of lying flat, so the people’s souls or whatever could see out, like invalids propped up on pillows. Then he thought what a stupid, childish idea that was.

  “Bye, Dad,” he said. “I’m moving to Coronado now.”

  The thing about visiting people in the cemetery and thinking them back to life was that you left them all alone afterward. You turned your back on them and walked away into the world, free and heartless.

  “There won’t be anybody here, not for a while, anyway, not right here….I’m sorry.”

  Fen had almost reached out to roll all the dice again and leave them in a more random state, the way the world left things, but he hadn’t, and now he was awake in his uncle’s house, searching the drawers of his cousin’s old desk, pushing aside paper clips, roach clips, pushpins, tarnished pennies, a torn book of matches, broken mechanical pencils, and tangled headphones until he found, at the very back of the bottom drawer, a red- and-white wooden die, which made him feel vaguely hopeful as soon as he cradled it in his palm. “I’m an optimist,” he said, but he didn’t roll the die to prove it. He set the die—which was chipped and dented, as if someone had idly bitten down on it with pointed teeth—inside the top drawer, deliberately choosing the snake eye instead of the six, and then he lay back in the borrowed bed and wondered if he should have gotten out of his truck to help the girl on the bridge.

  The fog on the golf course was waist-high at dawn. Gretchen liked to drop anchor in Glorietta Bay and sleep near the yacht club for a few days because she could use the bathroom in the storage area. Plus, when she woke up every morning, she could stand on the deck of the Broker and pretend the eucalyptus trees on the golf course were a forest in a gray mist that she saw from her castle in the middle of a Scottish loch. She was the Lady of the Loch, and Peek a Boo and Roll Again were human princes trapped in the bodies of cockatoos until she finished some impossible task.

  “What do you think?” she asked the birds.

  “Peekaboo,” Peek said, or maybe it was pickeroo.

  “Roll again,” Roll said, or maybe it was roar again or righty then or rid of them.

  “Lady,” Gretchen said. “Say, Lady of the Loch,” and she pulled out their bag of food, which brought them the kind of happiness she wished you could give humans after they grew up, and she hoped Thisbe was sleeping better now, making plans, getting over Clay the way you got over anyone if you waited long enough. That’s what Gretchen should have told her: Just wait, Thisbe. You don’t believe it will, but it will. The pain goes away.

  Two hours after dawn, Ted was coasting facedown on her long board in Glorietta Bay, willing the sun to come out. June was the worst month of the year and the sun wasn’t likely to burn through the fog before noon, if at all, but she wished it anyway. It was supposed to be summer.

  The foghorn was so loud and low that she felt it thrumming through the board and the palms of her hands. The water was cool and soft, and although she could see its true color—swamp green—below her fingers, in the distance the bay was milk pink and milk lavender, a waveless mirror for the ghostly sky.

  When Ted had left the house, her mother had been checking Facebook to see if there’d been a party at Nessa Creevy’s last night, scrolling through useless pictures posted by moms, who did, it was true, sometimes tell each other when a party had been rolled. “Why didn’t you just say no?” Ted asked. She didn’t see why Thisbe should get to have a sleepover if she was still lying about stuff.

  “I don’t know,” her mother said. “She’s been avoiding everyone. I thought it would cheer her up.”

  “It probably did,” Ted said. It was Thisbe’s problem, this situation, and it was kind of nice, honestly, to be the good daughter for a change. Thisbe had always been the brainy-brain, never doing one thing wrong in their parents’ eyes, and then once Hugh had started dating their mom it was even worse because he was obsessed with USC, and so was Thisbe, so it was twisted in a good way that Thisbe had made Ted promise not to tell Hugh about the party that got rolled three weeks ago on First Street, and Ted had agreed, but mostly because Ted was the one who had told Thisbe she should go to parties! If Thisbe was a little more normal instead of so stuck-up, if she hung out with people instead of doing homework on Friday nights, she’d be a better judge of boyfriends.

  Ted paddled with her arms in cold water until she was beyond the slips, and sure enough, Gretchen’s new boat was moored out there, guarded by one of her birds, the green one, which screeched and stuck its chest out in a way that made you wonder where half its feathers went. Gretchen’s parrots were named what they supposedly said most of the time, but they didn’t speak that clearly (B.J. called them Pick Your Boob and Rogaine) and also did a lot of random shrieking, in Ted’s experience, but if Gretchen happened to be on the deck watering her upside-down tomato plants or reading a book or grilling meat, the birds would ride around on her shoulders, which was exactly what Ted would want her pets to do if Hugh would let her have any, which he never would. This time, Rogaine was alone on the top of the mast, watching over the bay, which was turning a summery blue-indigo now that the sun, mahalo-alay-lay, had burned through the fog.

  Ted was always hoping there’d be a chance to talk to Gretchen, who’d been their neighbor a long time ago, and find out if she had really won the boat in a poker game with t
hat guy who was dying, like people said, which was so cool, and if she liked living on the water, which Ted wanted to do when she grew up. A boat like that was worth, minimum, fifty thousand dollars, so it was pretty weird that someone would bet it away. Didn’t that guy have kids? Maybe stepkids who didn’t go to the right college, LOL. Ted let her hands float as she passed, trying to spy without openly spying, but Gretchen didn’t come out to read a book or water her tomato plants, so Ted paddled on.

  Clay Moorehead hadn’t seen Thisbe for a week. He hadn’t answered her texts or Facebook messages so why did she think he’d take her phone calls? His mother had decided to rent out their house all summer, 20K a month for three months, almost enough for the E-class coupe his sister, Renee, wanted, because it just wouldn’t do for her to drive a piece-of-crap Honda and plus she was the one who went to San Miguel for the summer, which their mother had asked Clay over and over again to do, but there was nothing to do down there. So he was flying solo for three months while his mom found folk art for her shops and Renee played perfect daughter and his dad did whatever he did with the hotels. Clay had planned to sleep on the boat, because, hey, as he’d put it once to Jerome while they stared at the Surrender from the dock, “What you see before you is a boat and what I see is a floating motel room,” but, God, it was loud out there, especially if the Parrot Lady and her freaking birds were moored in the bay for who knew how many nights, and besides, Thisbe didn’t understand how pathetic it was to be banging on the door of the cabin when he was in there with someone else.

  Because of the parrots and Thisbe, Clay barely slept on the boat at all and stayed instead at Mark’s. Mark was okay, but he wasn’t much of a wingman. Jerome had a kind of presence, almost too much, honestly, for wing duty, which might’ve been why he’d gotten so cheesed about Thisbe. Anyhow, Mark’s parents were never home, never as in never ever, and if Clay absolutely had to come to the boat for clothes or private time with girls, he kept the lights off and used a flashlight and locked the cabin door. He was sure Thisbe had knocked last night, though. Twice. Then the mistake had finally gone away.

  Morning felt like summer, the night wiped clean. He studied the surfing posters on the wall, the window with its view of white sky bisected by a power line, the unfinished pack of Newport cigarettes his cousin, Paul, had left behind (which Fen might or might not smoke), and tried to remind himself of the unbelievably awesome fact that he lived three blocks from the beach. A beach on an island in California. Perfect added to perfect equals perfect, except maybe he shouldn’t have rushed off when that girl was standing by her car.

  Fen hadn’t even told Carl what had happened. He could have said, This stupid driver nearly caused an accident, or I was late because this car stopped right in front of me, but he had the feeling he’d done the wrong thing. When he’d been a kid, it was kind of cool seeing his uncle in a police uniform, hearing about weird stuff people did at the marina, but nobody had really wanted Fen to drive from Las Vegas by himself, and it was his uncle who had said, “I trust him. He’s got sense!”

  Fen started putting his stuff away, shuffling around. Carl stuck his head in and said, “How are you doing?”

  “I’m good.”

  Carl came all the way in, and Fen was glad he wasn’t wearing his police stuff. He was dressed for the beach, it looked like. Shorts and a very old T-shirt. His expression was serious, though. Man-to-man talk coming up, that was clear.

  “I mean, like, really doing. About your father. All that.”

  He sat down on the bed and waited.

  Fen still didn’t say anything.

  “Your mom said they screwed up, the police or the hospital, I don’t know which.”

  “Didn’t she tell you the whole thing at the funeral?”

  “Her view of it, yeah. I meant yours.” Carl had come for the funeral, of course. He’d flown in one day and back home the next. It was during that single day that he had offered to take Fen for the year so his mom could use the funding she’d been awarded to do research in Brazil. The “Full Bride,” Carl called it, not the Fulbright, even though Carl knew what it was really called.

  “Well, yeah, they did screw up.” Fen didn’t mind, really, going through all that again. There’d been a phone call from the police saying Alan Harris had been in an accident. Not Alan Harris has had a heart attack and he’s dead now, but Come to the hospital, there’s been an accident. Two totally different things.

  They’d driven to the hospital in a panic and this woman, an old lady at a desk, said his dad was in room 411, and they raced to the fourth floor, the end of a green hall, and the room was…empty.

  The blanket smooth, the pillow clean. Like nothing had happened there lately. Fen said, “So a woman who was not a doctor came out to talk to us in the waiting room and asked us to come with her to what turned out to be an office, and I knew by the way she said she was Marie LeBeau and asked if I was Fenimore Harris and my mother was Ellen Harris that we weren’t in a hurry anymore, you know? She wanted us to sit down, and she looked us both in the eyes, one by one. Then this Marie LeBeau person said, ‘I have terrible news.’

  “Right after that, this heavy guy in green hospital clothes, he came in, and he took my mom to make the ‘identification.’ I went on sitting with Marie LeBeau, and we’re facing this giant picture on her wall, which was a photo of the ocean with sunlight all over it, the kind that’s like wallpaper. She sat beside me with her hand on my arm. She goes, ‘You can see him if you want.’

  “I didn’t, really. I didn’t answer her or move my arm, just went on looking at that ocean wallpaper.

  “ ‘I understand he was a pilot,’ she goes.

  “I didn’t tell her he flunked an eye test, so he wasn’t a pilot anymore, just a guy working in the command post, hating life.

  “She goes, ‘It’s fine not to talk. I’m going to give you my card in case you want to talk later. Anytime later. Tomorrow, in a month, six months, a year, you can call me.’ She kept her cards in a big shell on her desk. It looked like a real shell, and I thought maybe she was obsessed with beaches, which made sense if her job was living in the desert and talking to people about death.

  “My dad and I were going to take a trip this month, did he tell you? Just the two of us, to this island he’d read about in the Caribbean that’s about thirty yards around. It’s just sand, apparently, and one umbrella made of coconut fronds, and the shape of the sandbar changes with the tide and storms and waves, so sometimes it’s oval and sometimes it’s a circle and sometimes it’s kind of a wedge, but it never completely disappears. ‘L’île Morpion est un banc de sable,’ it says on the website, which is all in French because a lot of the big islands in that area used to be French colonies. My dad showed me a picture of Lyle Morpion—that’s the way we said it: Lyle Morpion, like the name of some kid on the debate team—on Christmas morning, and the water surrounding Lyle was the most incredible shade of green. It was awesome. We both made Lyle the background on our computers so we could visualize being there in six months. It was weird because my dad was being optimistic about that. Superoptimistic.

  “So I’m sitting there with the social worker, and my mom hasn’t come back. I ask Marie if my dad said anything right before he died—you know, like people do in movies. That’s when she told me about the underpass, how he had the heart attack and someone stopped, a guy who was or used to be a paramedic, so he knew what to do but it was too late. My dad couldn’t say anything to anyone because he was already dead.”

  Fen paused. “That’s it. Finito. The End.”

  Carl sat for a while on the bed that was way too small for him. He looked heavier and older and Fen felt older and heavier, too. Carl was tanned on his arms and legs but his forehead was white, like he wore a hat most of the time. “Crappy way to handle it. But there’s not a good way, most of the time. It’s never something people want to hear.”

  “Do you have to tell people?”

  “What?” his uncle asked.

&n
bsp; “That their relatives are dead.”

  “Sometimes. Usually the MEs do it. The medical examiner’s office has people.”

  Fen hoped his uncle didn’t tell people there was an accident if really the person was already dead. “That sucks,” he said.

  “Hey, I’ve signed you up for a sailing class that starts next week,” Carl said. “My friend Barnaby says he can give you a little refresher course on the water today, so what say you put on your suit?”

  Refresher didn’t seem the right word for a person who’d never sailed, but Carl stood up and hugged Fen really hard and it made Fen want to cry, so he didn’t talk. Then his uncle went down the stairs, saying, “Let’s get out of here.”

  The house was tiny and creaky and old. From the front it looked like something in a picture book by Arnold Lobel, the one where the mice flooded the house and the water rose up in little C-shaped waves. It had thick pink shutters and light green window boxes (with dead geraniums now that his aunt Stacy was gone), a pink plank door that was curved on top, and two more windows that stuck out of the roof on the cramped second floor and let him spy on the street if he was lying on Paul’s bed. When Fen was little, he’d pretended the three different colors of roof tiles were Necco wafers: pink wintergreen overlapping black licorice overlapping brown chocolate in sugary rows. Now he saw that they had bird poo all over them and the edges were caked with moss, but that did not mean he was a pessimist. It was just a fact about roof tiles, was all.

  “Where are we going?” Fen called down the stairs. It was good that all of Stacy’s stuff was still there, he thought, such as the yellow-and-orange ruffled curtains in the kitchen, and the bookcase full of mystery novels, and her gardening gloves in a basket by the back door. All the board games were still there, too, a whole stack stuffed into the shelves by the TV, the cardboard lids tattered and split at the corners. A whole lotta dice in there, he thought, which made him wonder if he was turning into a freak of some kind.