The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  “What are you playing?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” Fen knew that it was hard to let it sink in. Fen’s father hadn’t looked believably dead in the hospital. You had to say to yourself over and over, He’s dead. His nose and one cheek were bruised from falling but not so bruised that you’d think he couldn’t be fine. His running shoes were in a bag like he might want them when he woke up. The piece of toast he’d been eating before he left for the run was still sitting on the plate in the kitchen. It still had jam on it. The jam was shiny.

  Then Ted said, “They’re not going to find her in the water or wherever. She would never do that.”

  “Would never do what?”

  “Jump.”

  He just stared at her. He really, really wanted her to be right.

  “They say she did but they haven’t found her. Because she didn’t do it! She was too scared of stuff. She couldn’t even jump off the high dive! She didn’t like to sail because she was scared when it got windy. She’s not going to jump off a giant bridge.”

  He should say that he’d been there and he’d seen her and she’d told him to go around her car, but that might mess with what Ted was believing, and he didn’t want to be the person who made her stare right at death.

  “Where’d my mom go?” Ted asked.

  Fen pointed toward the kitchen and picked up the dice again, rubbing them against one another, mentally begging her not to go see if that’s where her mom had gone, because that was also the way Carl had gone, and they were probably talking.

  “I wish everyone would just go home,” she said. “No offense.”

  She was leaning her elbows on her knees and turning a braided string bracelet around on her wrist like she’d never noticed it before. He was so glad she didn’t leave.

  “I’m going to make signs and put them up,” she said. “Want to help me?”

  He did and he didn’t. “What kinds of signs?”

  “Missing person signs.”

  He studied the trees in the rug. Making signs could be good, or it could be bad. If Ted was the only one who thought Thisbe wasn’t dead, would Carl be angry with him? “Well,” Fen said, “are you sure that’s the right plan?”

  “Yes. She wouldn’t jump because she’s a chicken, which is a good thing for once. She has to be somewhere. Somebody has to have seen her.”

  He didn’t want to say, Well, she didn’t look chicken when I saw her. He shrugged, like to say, Okay. When she went upstairs, he followed her.

  Ted kept texting him, and Jerome didn’t know what to say.

  No, he said. No no no no no. I didn’t see her. I don’t know where she is.

  Fuck Clay for not answering his text. For not even saying, “Yeah, I heard” or “No, I haven’t” when Jerome asked if he’d heard what happened to Thisbe. On the shelf in his room Jerome had a picture of the two of them: Jerome “Jeronimo” Betchman and Clay “Killer” Moorehead in their soccer uniforms, eleven years old. Jerome ripped the photo out of the cheap frame and tore the two of them into little pieces that he flushed down the toilet. He felt no better so he tried screaming. His mother wasn’t home but the neighbors might be, so he held the pillow over the back of his head and screamed into the mattress. Maddy whined and turned in circles and poked his arm with her nose, so he petted her, but he felt no better. He got his phone out and texted Clay again, right under his own unanswered question. He typed: She jumped off the bridge, you fucker.

  He turned off his phone and dropped it in the trash and went back to lying in his bed with the pillow smashed into his face, but the pillow couldn’t stop him from remembering the way she sat drinking by herself the last time he’d seen her, the night he should have said, If you want, I could give you a ride home.

  Fen watched Ted type words into a computer. The books on the mahogany shelves had all sorts of legal titles he read to himself while she typed: MISSING.

  He couldn’t help asking, “Who’s that?” and pointing to a framed photo of Ted and Thisbe with two muscled-up college guys.

  “Josh and Aaron. Stepbrothers. They go to Duke and Wharton. As my stepdad will tell you if you give him five seconds of your time.”

  She found a digital photo of her sister laughing, and said, “What about this one?”

  “Nice.”

  Ted typed, Last seen, and then stopped. “I don’t want to say she was last seen on the bridge.”

  “How else will you find witnesses?” Fen said. Like me, for example.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s true.”

  He wiped his hands on his trunks and saw that he had sand stuck to both ankles. Also his calf. He was not a complete ass, was he? He could tell her he had been on the bridge and he was a witness before his uncle or her mom came upstairs and said it for him?

  She typed, Last seen beside a white Honda on the eastbound Coronado Bridge. “Is it eastbound or westbound?”

  He definitely had sand inside his trunks, too. He felt sick and light-headed. Sandy, itchy, sick. “What?”

  “They said she was coming back to the island. Is that the eastbound or westbound side? Or maybe north?”

  After she wrote westbound, she stopped again. “I wonder what she was wearing. These things always say what she was wearing.”

  He would tell her, and telling would be the right thing. “Pink boots,” he said. There. It was done. Confessed.

  “Yeah,” Ted said without even turning around. “My mom said she was wearing them when she left here but would she keep them on? They’re so dorky.”

  Pause. Inhale. Exhale. Tell her. “That’s not what I mean. I mean when I saw her, she was wearing pink boots. Also a black hooded sweatshirt. And shorts.”

  Now he was a different type of ass, based on her expression.

  “What?”

  “I saw a girl beside a white Honda on the bridge last night. I didn’t know it was your sister until my uncle told me why we were coming to your house. I didn’t know how to tell you.” Fen turned the dice over in his pocket and watched Ted’s fingers resting on the keyboard but not typing anything.

  “What else.”

  “She, like, waved me on,” Fen said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged miserably. “Like, I’ve got a phone and I’m fine here.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I don’t know. I thought she must have called somebody to tow her or bring a gas can. So I left.”

  “And she was, like, still outside the car.”

  He nodded.

  “Was she crying or anything?”

  “No.”

  Ted frowned. “What about, like, other cars?”

  “Other people passed. Not a lot, but a few. They saw us. Saw her, I guess. They’d have to.”

  The dust on the venetian blinds had been smudged by a finger. A steel fan turned slowly overhead. Fen tried to think of what Thisbe could possibly have done next that would mean she was hiding somewhere and not coming home. Walk off the bridge? With nobody seeing her? If so, why would she hide all the next day?

  Ted typed: Wearing pink rain boots, black sweatshirt, and shorts. He tried to read the back of her head, the way she was sitting, to know if she blamed and hated him as he deserved to be blamed and hated for not going up to Thisbe and asking if there was something wrong and could he help her in some way.

  Ted wasn’t crying. She wasn’t talking. She was telling the print button to print. So he hadn’t killed her hope? He felt like cold juice had just shot up through all his veins and into his brain, but he didn’t know if he should be relieved. Fen rubbed the dice in his pocket and they made small sounds.

  “There,” Ted said. “Now maybe those other people who drove by will say something.” She waited for more copies to slide out, more and more and more, and grabbed two rolls of tape from a drawer. “Let’s go,” she said.

  He assumed they were going to show the flyers to her parents and his uncle and the police, which would be excruciating, he bet, but she pulled a
blank piece of paper from the printer, and while they were standing in the hall, she closed her bedroom door and taped the paper to it. Then she wrote:

  WENT WITH PHIN TO SEE IF ANYONE HAS SEEN THISBE LATELY.

  “Fen,” he said.

  She looked blankly at him.

  “Never mind,” he said. He wanted to hurry. He could text his uncle, which would be so much easier than talking to him face to face.

  “We need to go out this way,” she said, and she took him downstairs and out a side door in the laundry room that he hoped was hidden from everyone else. “Take that one,” she said quietly, pointing to a ten-speed parked under a little roof that protected three bikes. He was relieved to see the tires weren’t flat. Ted gently rolled a cruiser out of the rack and opened the gate, glancing behind her to a yard that was obscured by a flowering bush. She pushed the bike to the road, climbed on, and looked back to see that Fen was following.

  “Stop watching me,” she said to a boy who was sitting on his lawn, throwing a beach ball at a homemade basketball hoop that was nailed to a tree.

  “I’m not,” the kid said sullenly, but he was, Fen was sure of it, and they went on down the road.

  Sometimes the weather changed in an instant on summer afternoons. The fog was coming in fast now, whiting out the sky, flattening out the light in the backyard, chilling the air with drops of water that Carl could feel on his bare arms.

  Carl stared at the bark of the ficus tree in the Lockes’ backyard and pressed the phone to his skull as if he were still listening to Howard say there was no point in searching again so soon. He felt relieved that Fen had texted him a few minutes earlier to ask if he could go for a walk with Ted because she’d asked him to.

  Sure, he told Fen. Go ahead.

  Kelp, it looks like. Blocking the water intake and overheating the engine. Frank unscrews the top of the strainer, finds a skewer to poke out the kelp, curses when the water shoots up and soaks his sleeve and pants, picks the kelp out in long stringy pieces and short slimy bits. Edite the cat paces the whole time.

  “What are you looking at?” he says to Edite. She licks a paw.

  Still the motor won’t keep going for more than ten seconds. He has to buy a new pump impeller. Nothing else to try but that. He’ll have to go ashore, find the nearest marine supply, make quick work of it, then sail or motor around the point, head north.

  He has only an hour, maybe an hour and a half before dark. A cloud’s rolling over the water, swallowing boats, sky, jetty, the navy jets sitting on the tarmac. He can no longer see the bridge or downtown, just the choppy little breakers that rise and fall below his bow. Nothing to do but find a marina and go ashore. Shelter Island might be the closest—that or Point Loma. He needs a bank and a marine supply right together. Maybe he has the addresses on a card in his wallet? He puts his hand into his back pocket, but he knows it’s empty before he reaches in.

  His pocket is a blank space.

  He opens the black box by the wheel, the one where he keeps his wallet when he’s working on deck and doesn’t want the bulk to bother him, and inside the black box are spare keys, a flashlight, a few coins, and a can opener. No wallet. Had he worn his coat ashore last night? His coat is flung over the cushions, getting damp in the foggy air. The cushions are wet already, the skin on his face is slick. No wallet in the coat, not the first time he checks the pockets, nor the second.

  Think back. He hadn’t done the whole circuit Sunday night, had interrupted his plans when he saw Julia walking like a vision across Tidelands Park. He had not gone to Albertsons. Had not gone to the ATM. Had only sorted through the first three trash cans, the ones by the playground. No time to do the other things. If he hadn’t taken the wallet out of his back pocket to pay or collect money, how could he have left it anywhere? It might have fallen out of his pocket when he was maneuvering things. When he was sorting the cans. Could it have fallen out in the acacias, where he zipped up the sail bag?

  No cash, no pump impeller. If someone had found the wallet by the trash cans, they would have taken his cash, sixty dollars at least, then gone to the ATM, emptied his account. But he had a PIN code. A thief wouldn’t know the PIN code. Maybe he just lost the cash. Bank would give him a new card and he’d be okay. It would take a little longer, that’s all. The women behind the counter in their jewels and heels would look him over; the men in their gray suits would see his shoes and judge. If the wallet was gone, it would take some time.

  He could just go on to Pismo. Hope for wind the whole way. Make do.

  Or there could be days and days of stillness. Fog or heat. No fresh water, not enough food. Wind pushing him out, a storm.

  A wave slaps the boat as he checks his pockets again. He can see less and less of Cabrillo as a layer of clouds rolls over the point and thins.

  It would be much safer to find the wallet and buy the pump impeller. Within the haze, the old lighthouse suddenly appears, trim as a sugar cube. Then the fleece thickens and the whole hill is blotted out.

  Barely enough wind at present to turn around and sail back. May take hours. Once he gets back to his mooring, he can anchor the boat and row ashore and go to the trash cans and find the wallet if the wallet is there to find. It will take forever, forever, forever. Get the cash and buy the impeller. One more day was all it was, not forever. A day and a night.

  “Frank!” Julia is calling him, her voice surprisingly faint, but he doesn’t answer yet. He doesn’t want her to think he can’t take her home. Still a failure. Still incompetent.

  “Hey!” she says, as if from far away. He looks to see if there are boats nearby, but the nearest is fifty yards, a day-tripper heading back.

  Edite the cat jumps down to her cushion. She doubts him, too, from the way she stares.

  He will have to bind Julia’s feet and hands again. Tell her it’s necessary. Tell her to pretend it’s part of the game.

  “Frank?” she shouts.

  The water flows hard and fast around the boat.

  Her boots aren’t here. She wasn’t wearing them when she first woke up, and they aren’t on the floor. If he put her in a car to bring her to this boat, did he bring the boots?

  “Hey!” she shouts. Maybe she dropped the boots and he forgot about them, and right now her boots are lying near the bike path, where a jogger or a cyclist will see them. What’s this? the jogger or cyclist will say. A pair of pink boots? Suspicious! They will call the police.

  The boat turns hard and she falls against the table. She gets up and kneels on the cushion, pushes jars aside. The long, narrow window is covered with a ruffled cloth, stained and dusty like everything else on the boat. She forces it aside and sees drops of water on the glass, a misty world, the choppy white waves of a wide choppy sea. Then a thing comes to the window: dirty ivory fur, the face of an animal. A cat looks in at her and she looks back. The cat goes away and she sees reddish land. A cliff without a beach, mist floating, clouds gathering thickness and weight. Houses appear on the hillside: colored boxes and roofs, everything silent, as if asleep. A long white building that must be a hotel, not a soul on a single balcony, not a sign that she can read. Where, where, where, where. She can hear Frank moving on deck, can hear ropes and sails and rudder. She finds the knife in the drawer—how silly he was to leave it there—and she holds it while she watches the cat stalk back and forth outside the porthole, waiting for a sign.

  “Whose house is this?” Fen asked.

  “Clay’s,” Ted said.

  It was weird how fast the fog was moving. He could see it floating along the street, cloudlike and cold. They were near the bay now, and Ted was shoving one of the flyers into a mailbox on a locked gate. Behind the locked gate stood a strange house with a gleaming silver wall. All over the wall were metal swirls. The fog made him cold, but he didn’t say anything, just turned his bicycle around and followed Ted when she said they were going to Albertsons next.

  The fog changes color but that’s all. It gets darker as night falls, and they�
��re moving—why or where, it’s hard to know, because certain lights look the same: a gold blob sharpens into focus and becomes BEER and then it’s a gold blob again, first behind the boat, then ahead of it, as if they’re going to it and away, then to it and away, the boat swinging and rocking until she’s sick to her stomach and sweaty and prickling and she lies down to make the nausea stop.

  It’s a long time before she can stand up, but when she looks through the little porthole, things have changed. There’s no gold light that says BEER, but stacks of lights. Towers of lights. Rows that are floors and stories. They glimmer green and red, white and gold, in familiar patterns. San Diego. She knows the shapes of the buildings, the big gray wedge of the Midway, the aircraft carrier with a number the size of a house: 41. As the boat wheels around, she has to grab the wooden rail to keep from falling, and the bridge appears. Where have they been? It doesn’t matter. They’re home now. The bridge gleams like an arc of candles on a giant cake.

  “Help me,” she says to the cat, but the cat walks away, and the longer she holds the knife the more she worries that it’s no use.

  “Hey!” she says, but he doesn’t answer. She says it over and over until she’s hoarse. She can hear the chain, the low, steady clink of a sinking anchor, feet scuffing, feet stumbling, weight on one side, then the other, and when she tries the door, when she pounds and pounds and says, “Let me out, Frankie! Julia wants out!” he doesn’t hear or doesn’t care. Whatever he’s doing, he goes on doing, and when at last there’s no noise on deck, she hears the foghorn. Then a train. Then nothing. The sounds are faint, so does that mean her voice is fainter? From the outside, do they hear nothing, as if she were in a freezer? It reminds her of what she used to wonder when she closed the jewelry box over the dancing ballerina and the ballerina bent over in the dark. Did the ballerina feel scared in there? Scared that you would never open the box again?