by Laura McNeal
Carl had left the back door open and was whistling his way, barefoot, to the garage, where he and Fen surveyed five rusty bikes. The air in the garage smelled piney and birds were twittering and cawing and hooing away in the trees, ecstatic about their plans for the day.
“You know they don’t have sailing in Nevada, right?” Fen said. “Or New Mexico?”
Carl just said, “Cruiser or a ten-speed?”
“Cruiser, I guess.”
Carl pointed Fen toward an old black bike and threw a towel into the rusty basket of a red one that was in even worse shape. The tires were totally flat.
“You sure you don’t want me to drive us?” Fen asked. “I’ve still got gas in the truck.” He thought again about the girl on the bridge. Had she been towed to a garage? Did whoever picked her up say, You know, you should probably close the door next time?
“Nope,” Carl said. “It’s faster on a bike. Especially in summer.” He located a tire pump, spun the front wheel until the stem was where he wanted it, and unscrewed the cap. Nothing about the process appeared to irritate him, and he was clearly in no rush. Fen wondered, but didn’t ask, if it was faster only if you didn’t count tire-pumping time.
At last they were both on bikes with fully inflated tires. They rode for thirteen blocks, going “off-peest,” whatever that meant, so his uncle could buy coffee for himself and a donut for Fen at the ferry landing. “I can’t believe this weather,” his uncle said.
The clouds had burned off and the day was just what Fen had expected: sunny and warm.
“June is normally like winter,” his uncle called back. “Cloudy all day. It’s even got a name: June Gloom.”
With coffee in one hand, his uncle pedaled slowly down the wide sidewalk that curved along the bay, weaving around little kids on scooters and trikes at the edge of Tidelands Park, around whole families walking slowly in clumps and stopping to take pictures in front of the blue water and the blue bridge. Fen rode slowly past the skate park he’d gone to once when he was about seven, before he could even flip his board, then past the dinghies beached upside down on the shore, not far from the little neighborhood of sailboats moored in straight lines, the sparkly water slapping them, rocking them, tugging at their hulls, and then he and his uncle passed under the bridge itself to the snap of tires on metal seams cracking like an endless roller coaster overhead. His uncle pointed to the golf course and called back to him, “Maybe we’ll hit a bucket of balls later!” and Fen said, “Yeah!” though he’d never golfed in his life, and Carl said the same thing about the tennis courts, which were full of cheerful women, little kids, and a pretty intense guy his age who was killing balls spat at him by a machine while a Doberman leashed to the chain link slept in the shade.
If only everything were like a ball machine. It never stopped to see if you were getting tired, if you wished you had a sandwich, if you wondered where Thisbe was and what she was doing. The ball machine was heartless, and heartless was good.
Crosscourt, alley, crosscourt, alley, Jerome thought, on and on, stroke after stroke, and if now and then the sound of the ball leaving his racket was Thisbe, there was another ball coming up fast behind it to be struck without cognition until he fell back into the part of himself that had nobody and nothing in it except his racket and the next ball.
The gate opened at the click of Carl’s remote and they coasted under a blue-and-white wooden arch that said CORONADO YACHT CLUB. Ahead of them in the lapping water floated rows and rows of big white beautiful boats with jokey names painted on their hulls: Liquid Assets, Reely Hooked, Vitamin Sea, Job Site. “What’s your boat called?” Fen asked.
“Stacy Mae.”
Fen was trying to decide which boat he’d choose if someone said, Pick one! when a girl on a shiny red board paddled into view. She had blond hair braided like Rapunzel’s. Black sunglasses. She lay flat out and skimmed across the water with the flicking of her long brown arms.
“Can I see your boat from here?” Fen asked Carl, watching the girl appraise him or at least the general area where he stood, and he willed himself to look like the kind of guy who could appraise her, which meant he clenched his jaw a little tighter and tried to look bored.
“No.”
The girl reached the dock, stepped off her board like someone who never lost her balance, and said, “Hey, Barnaby.” She got a “Hey, Ted,” from a tough-looking guy who had his head in a tiny wooden boat, so Fen learned her name, not that he needed it.
The Ted girl lifted her board out and slid it into a rack of other long, skinny boards and kayaks. She was wearing a bikini top and tight board shorts, and to distract himself, Fen asked his uncle when they could take the Stacy Mae out. His uncle said, “Soon, pretty soon,” and kept walking until they were standing next to the Barnaby guy, who still had his head down and was doing something to a metal pulley. He wore a white veneer of unabsorbed Zinka sunscreen, sunglasses, and shorts that looked like they’d been dredged up from the sea and dried on a bush.
“Hey, Barn,” his uncle said. “Why are the police here? Did somebody’s boat get robbed again?”
They all looked at the police car parked in the red zone by the club door. “Don’t know,” the Barn guy said. “Thought you might tell me. They’ve been there awhile.”
His uncle stared a second longer at the police car, then turned back around, introducing Barnaby as an Olympian, which made Fen dread the lesson even more. “I hear you like to sail,” Barnaby said.
On a grassy place by the ramp, Ted was rinsing her tanned feet and long brown legs with a hose.
“What’s your favorite boat?” Barnaby asked.
“I don’t know,” Fen said, hoping Ted couldn’t hear a thing over the splashing hose.
“Did you start in sabots?”
Fen looked to his uncle for guidance about what a sabbit might be, but Carl was moving off toward the yacht club, saying something about paying for the lesson. “No.”
“How about Lasers?”
“Not those, either.”
Barnaby had been very intense with the pulley, but he came to a full stop. “You can sail, right?”
“My uncle may have oversold that. A tad.”
Barnaby didn’t say anything. He just rolled the dolly to the edge of the dock and showed Fen how to thread the sail onto the mast, talking the whole time about where to put this and tighten that. Vang and leeboard and rudder and tiller were pointed out to Fen, and he knew Barnaby saw he didn’t know what anything was and couldn’t remember half of it two seconds later—rudder, maybe, but not vang. He had no idea which part was the vang. Barnaby said, “You’re going to want to sit athwart most of the time” (athwart?), and handed him a sawed-off plastic AriZona tea jug, saying, “That’s your best friend,” and Fen wondered if he was supposed to pee in it. When Barnaby said, “Ready?” Fen lied and said he was.
Ted was aware of the boy on the dock, who was about her age, she guessed, and was idly curious about how moronically he would sail. He was probably a Zonie, one of a zillion tourists who came every summer from Phoenix, but even so he was cute. If she ate a breakfast burrito from the snack bar, she could take the Bic out while Barn and the Zonie were still on the water and avoid being home when Thisbe walked in (would she be hungover?) and her mom went apocalyptic.
Ted ducked her head to get closer to the window and said, “Extra bacon, no cheese.”
She sat down at one of the picnic tables with a cup and a straw and pushed her sunglasses closer to her eyes, as if getting ready for a 3-D movie. She didn’t look in her Torka bag for her phone because Ashlynn was the only person she felt like talking to and she was at sleepover volleyball camp, where you couldn’t use your phone during the day.
Carl sat at the bar, drinking a fresh coffee, staring out at Fen on the dock and hoping he’d done the right thing. Fen was not sarcastically aloof, as Paul and his friends had been from fifth grade on, surfing or playing full-contact sports and sneering a lot. “He skates” was the only a
nswer Ellen had given him about Fen’s hobbies. Then there was the stuff, revealed by Ellen at the last minute, about Fen cutting class to snorkel in the swimming pool of the Isle of Capri Deluxe Apartments, which was actually just some run-down housing complex, where apparently some mother had turned him in as a truant, which was why his latest grades were anything but stellar. Cutting class to snorkel in a germy swimming pool was either (A) a normal reaction to your dad dying of a heart attack under an overpass or (B) the first sign of maladjustment to a world in which you preferred not to play your assigned role. Carl thought it was probably option A, but the one thing he’d learned firsthand as a father was you didn’t know and you couldn’t predict.
Sailing was the only sport Carl could think of that had cachet but very little public exposure. Maybe Fen was one of those people who did better on water than on land, who knew? But Barnaby would never have agreed to give lessons to somebody who’d never touched a boat before. He’d have fobbed Fen off on one of the kids on the high school team, who would have made Fen nervous, and it would have ruined Fen’s chances to make a decent impression on kids his own age.
“Hey, Carl,” a woman said. It was Elaine Lord in her uniform, heavier than she’d been in high school but with the same friendly, forgiving face, the same slight overlap of her two front teeth, like someone crossing her fingers for luck.
She looked over his head at the nearest drinkers, then led him to the patio where a crumpled napkin rested in a glass of ice. She went through it all: how the registered owner of the car on the bridge was a member of the club but out of town, how she’d called the number in Mexico (no answer), checked the boat (nobody on it).
He didn’t know Renata Moorehead.
“Husband’s name is George. Or maybe Hor-hey.”
Again he shook his head. “Nope. But then, I don’t hobnob that much.” He smiled. “Need a fresh cuppa?”
“Nah, I gotta go.”
“Did Howard find anything?” Carl asked.
“No.”
An egret stood in the mud below the deck, perfectly white, as if it had just come from a wedding. Stacy always used to say it was a shame Carl’s job ruined so many beautiful mornings.
“Nice seeing you,” he said to Elaine, and she started to shake his hand, which was not like her, and then she pulled him into an awkward hug.
“God, I’m sorry,” she said. “I heard about Stacy.”
“No big deal,” he said.
If you pointed a bicycle west, you went west, but if you wanted to sail west, evidently you had to go north, then south, then north, then south, and half the time you still weren’t west enough to round the buoy that Barnaby called the mark. Plus, Fen kept tipping over while the Ted girl watched. She’d gotten into a boat with a bright orange-and-silver sail and zoomed past him like a wasp.
He trimmed poorly and he didn’t pinch enough, apparently. He still didn’t know what the hell reach meant. Barnaby stayed nearby in a motorboat the whole time, circling him like a killer bee, telling him things he didn’t understand until finally Fen had to say flat out that he’d never sailed before, which he was pretty sure came as no surprise whatsoever to Barnaby.
Far off at the edge of the golf course, where the bay opened out and started flowing toward the bridge, the girl sailed back and forth.
When they finally got back to the dock, Barnaby was forced (because it was his job) to show Fen how to wash the boat Fen couldn’t sail, then wheel the boat in a dolly to a parking spot, and Fen was forced to shake hands, say sailing was very, very fun, awesome, in fact, and thank you very much. Only then could he sit alone at a snack bar table.
“Fen-omenal!” his uncle said. His face was always so cheerful. An annoying characteristic just now.
“Hey.”
“How was it?”
“Horrible.”
“Really?”
“Why did you say I knew how to sail?”
“I thought you’d be a natural.”
“I’m not.” All those times he’d counted sailboats from the shore or the backseat of his parents’ car. It had looked like the most incredible thing in the world, the coolest and richest and awesomest. What a crock, he thought. Then, I am an optimist an optimist an optimist.
Silence. “Want a cheeseburger?”
“No.”
“I’ll get a couple.”
You know who the optimist was? Carl. “Okay,” Fen said. The girl was back. If she tied up her boat, she might come this way. His fear that she’d say something about his sailing (or refuse to talk at all) made him want to run, but then he might not see her again.
“I’ll get us some cheeseburgers, Fensterman,” his uncle said. “You’ll do great next time. You’re a natural.”
Despite the crappy thing that sailing turned out to be, the water rocked everything, even the floating piers, and what rocked in it gleamed. People wheeled little yellow carts to yachts they probably knew how to sail, even if he didn’t. And now the Ted girl was coming toward them with her finely cut, sunlit shoulders. She definitely was. Or toward the snack bar. One or the other.
“Let’s go over the things we know,” R. P. Skelly said. “The awesome party house is rented to people with ugly pajamas. The Mooreheads are in Mexico, not answering the phone. Or we have the wrong number.” He was looking at the computer screen, not at Elaine.
“So that doesn’t even count as a thing we know.”
Skelly went on. “Clay sometimes lives aboard a boat called the Surrender, but not always, and not right now. So he’s either in Mexico or somewhere else—we have no idea where—or he took the tackiest car in the family fleet and jumped without leaving a note.”
“He wasn’t the jumper type,” Elaine said. “More like a nascent international playboy.”
“Nascent?”
“Beetdigger Word of the Day,” Elaine said. Skelly had made the mistake of telling Elaine once that his high school mascot in Utah had been Digger Dan the Beetdigger.
Skelly tapped his lip with a pencil. He was a habitual lip tapper. “Who do you know at the Yotta Yotta Yot Club? Any old prom dates who might do raft-ups with the Mooreheads?”
“Just Carl Harris,” she said. “And I already asked.”
Tap tap.
“Maybe someone stole the car,” Elaine said.
“And then the poor guy thought, Why didn’t I steal a better one? and jumped?”
“The girl at the front office said you can’t open the auto gate without a clicker or a key. Can’t get out of the parking lot.”
“Wouldn’t the clicker or key be in the car?”
“I checked the front pretty well,” Elaine said. “What did the Chippies say when you asked why they never saw a person? Did they run back the video?”
“It’s not video you run back, remember? It’s just you watch, you see. You don’t watch, you don’t see.” He paused. “Or it’s busted and you don’t see.”
“So they’re going with the busted-camera defense.”
“Yeah.”
Elaine couldn’t decide whether she wanted to drink more coffee or lie prone in a dark room. “Let’s go look in the car some more.”
It was easy to miss stuff in the dark, but she didn’t think she could have missed a clicker. The car was cold now, and the grime stood out more. “I’ll do the back,” Skelly said, and Elaine kept sticking her hands in disgusting crevices until she found, pressed up against the lowest part of the console, the driver’s license of a pretty girl with long brown hair and dark brown eyes that were probably not bad at brooding. Or maybe it was her lips that made her look pensive. They looked swollen, almost. Thisbe Jessica Locke, the license said.
On the floor between the brake and the gas pedal she saw again the tiny ball of paper, like a spitball, with red printing on it. She picked it up, prying an edge until she saw the word Luck printed in red, and carefully spread the thin slip of white paper on her knee: Lucky Numbers 25 29 66 on one side, I AM CLAY AND YOU ARE HANDS on the other.
> Skelly stopped what he was doing to look at the fortune. “I never get fortunes like that.”
“Me neither,” Elaine said.
“Kind of weird that it’s the same name.”
“If you found your name by chance in a fortune cookie,” Elaine asked, “would you wad it up afterwards?”
“If I found a cookie that said I AM R.P. AND YOU ARE HANDS, I’d frame it and put it on my desk. Or yours.”
Elaine kept squatting beside the car, the girl’s driver’s license in her hand. “When do you take just your license in the car, without your wallet?”
“When I’m going running.”
“You run?”
“Hypothetically. Also when I go to the beach.”
“So when you’re going to drive a car but you don’t need money.”
Elaine was pretty sure they both filled in the blank the same way: you wouldn’t need money if you were going to jump off a bridge, but you wouldn’t need your license, either. “Goddamn it,” Elaine said. She stood up and felt her head drain like a bottle held upside down.
“The girl might have dropped her license in the car a long time ago,” Skelly said. “I dropped my house key between the seats once and found it a century later.” He went back to searching the rear compartment, and she watched him lift a lid that fit over a spare tire. Smashed flat over the tire was a brown Starbucks bag. Inside the bag, ten little plastic bags of weed. Priced. Little labels on them, white stickers, handwritten. $12 in ballpoint pen.
Jesus, her vest felt tight. That’s what happened when you took a week off from running and allowed yourself salt-and- vinegar chips at lunch.
“Intent to distribute,” Skelly said.
Elaine had to take off all her gear to pee, the whole gun belt, and it always felt a little like getting undressed for bed, which cleared her mind. “I have to go to the bathroom. Why don’t you take that up and log it.”
