Half Moon Bay

by Alice LaPlante

  Sheree sits on one swing. The entire structure creaks. She puts her stockinged feet out and begins to pump so she is swinging back and forth.

  Come on!

  Jane sits cautiously on the other swing. The whole structure is shaking as Sheree goes up and down. She’d hated the playground when Angela was small. She considered it the dullest, most useless, and infuriating place to waste time. The other mothers seemed content to sit there and watch their offspring run around screaming and playing, and to comfort them when they came crying due to a spill or some other minor hurt. Jane couldn’t stand it. The tedium, the boredom. Neither could she stand the small talk of the other mothers—talk of where to buy the best organic produce and the safest toys. Jane knew she was judging them too harshly, that she was critical simply because she didn’t fit in, being only a visitor at the playground on weekends, as Angela was in day care during the week. Another strike against Jane.

  Now she’d give anything to have those interminable minutes back again. To look up and see small Angela clambering up the slide or falling down in the sand.

  You seem a bit melancholy. Somehow Sheree’s voice has changed. It’s less campy, less southern. Deeper.

  I lost someone.

  Recently?

  A year ago.

  Oh, sweetie, that’s like yesterday.

  It’s like last hour.

  Have you noticed how much grief is like fear?

  Yes! Jane tries to sit up straight, but the swing doesn’t let her. The metal is cold against her hands.

  I didn’t think that one up. I forget where I got it from.

  I’m very afraid.

  So am I, my dear, so am I.

  Who did you lose?

  Who haven’t I lost?

  Does the fear ever go away?

  You’re asking the wrong person. Sheree slows down her swinging. Any more of that tequila left?

  Jane passes over the bottle, but not before taking a swig herself.

  Let’s take a little ride, Sheree says.

  You’ve got a car?

  I guess you could call it that.

  Then what are we waiting for?

  Absolutely nothing.

  They somehow manage to locate an old Ford station wagon, patches of rust and indentations covering its body, parked up on the curb on Eighteenth and Valencia. Sheree takes the ticket on the windshield and throws it in the backseat.

  Where are we going? Jane thinks to ask.

  Fort Point. Ever been?

  No.

  Right under the Golden Gate Bridge. You’re in for a treat.

  At this hour, 1:00 a.m., no traffic is left on the road. Sheree manages, with a few heart-stopping lurches, to keep the car steady. Somehow Jane isn’t thinking of her companion as Sheree anymore. She deserves a name with more dignity. More gravitas.

  I’m going to call you Victoria, she says.

  Call me anything but late for dinner. Victoria executes a rather wide right turn.

  Jane of course had heard of Fort Point, but had never gotten around to actually visiting it. It predated the Golden Gate Bridge, having been built in the mid-1800s to defend San Francisco Bay. It was positioned at the immediate entrance to the bay. The Golden Gate Bridge loomed high directly over it, so the fort was always in shadow. It wasn’t a cheerful place and there wasn’t much to see, Jane had always heard.

  Rain is sprinkling down when they turn into the parking lot of the dark brick fort. The Golden Gate Bridge soars directly above the car. Even at this late hour, cars and heavy trucks are roaring across it. The wind has picked up, and the swell from the ocean side of the bridge is causing great waves to crash over the cement bulwarks protecting the fort.

  Sheree/Victoria gets out of the car, stretches, then walks to the edge of the parking lot, facing the water. She stands with her face to the spray, holding her hands up as if welcoming the waves.

  You gotta embrace the elements, she calls. Jane can barely make out her words over the sound of the surf and the wind. It is a good place, she thinks, for her to be on this night of escape. The majesty of the bridge above their heads, the roar of the wind and the waves. The salt spray from the water mixing with the rain. Jane realizes she’s imitating Sheree/Victoria’s stance. They stand there in silence for perhaps half a minute. It feels splendid, like they are conjuring up the storm rather than being battered by it.

  Then, without warning, a large splash sounds about ten feet off the pier. As if a large fish had jumped up and fallen back down again. Or something heavy has plunged into the water.

  Jane opens her eyes. She can’t see much in the dark. What was that? she asks.

  Perhaps another lost soul, Sheree/Victoria says calmly. She hasn’t changed her stance, is still welcoming the rain and spray to her ample bosom. More than two thousand have jumped since the bridge opened.

  Are you serious?

  Never more so.

  Do they die instantly?

  Most do, but those that don’t suffer horribly. It’s not a nice way to go. But don’t worry, honey, that was probably just a fish. If it had been a person, we’d been hearing sirens by now. They keep a close eye on this bridge.

  How do you know?

  Sheree/Victoria is calmly wiping rainwater from her eyes. I work on a suicide hotline, she says. The one thing they all say is I’m gonna take the bridge.

  That’s terrible!

  Oh yes. In fact, I have to get to work in—she checks her watch—less than two hours. I gotta get dolled up and go out to the movies to take my mind off of what I hear, day in and day out.

  A rogue wave arches up at least five feet above the cement and crashes down, soaking both of them.

  It’ll be dawn soon.

  Time for bed for you, and work for me.

  Yes, says Jane, reluctantly. For some reason, she feels a little better. Less like terror. More like plain fear. The weight in her chest is still there. But then it will always be there.

  Did that remind you of your loss? Sheree asks, pointing to where the splash had occurred.

  I don’t need to be reminded.

  Oh. That bad, huh?

  Then, Where’s your wheels? I’ll drop you off.

  Jane is tired and cold and hungry by the time she is left at her motorbike, but when she thinks of the alternative, which would have been sitting in her cottage alone, thinking of the strange early-morning visit from Alma, she is glad she got away. Off Nineteenth Avenue, she pulls into an all-night McDonald’s and devours a chicken sandwich and some limp fries that had clearly been sitting around for some time. Then she heads home.

  She sees the headlights in her mirror just south of the tunnel. She hadn’t met any traffic going either way for at least twenty minutes and was beginning to feel like the last person on the planet. Here she is, all the way on the left side of the country, with only the highway separating her from the rocks and beaches, the luminous waves coming in and out of focus as the fog thins and thickens again. She could be at the end of the world.

  The car is coming up fast. It has its brights on—Jane can see the four lights, two stacks of two. She moves deliberately over to the center of the lane—it sounds counterintuitive, but Jane always operates on the premise that being in the middle of the road made her more likely to be seen, less likely to be hit. The car keeps coming. Because of the brightness of the lights, Jane can’t see into the car. She doesn’t know if she’s been seen.

  A small motorbike wouldn’t be expected driving the Pacific Coast Highway at three in the morning. The car is now ten yards behind Jane and isn’t slowing down. Jane unconsciously presses on the gas and speeds up. Fifty, sixty, sixty-five miles an hour, and the car is still gaining, Jane sees that the driver is wavering a little, sometimes going over the yellow line in the middle into the opposite lane. Five yards, then four. Jane pulls over to the right to let the car pass, but realizes if the driver doesn’t see her, that won’t do any good.

  Jane doesn’t want to go onto the soft shoulder, so she swin
gs into the opposite lane, seeing, as she does so, a car clear the crest of the hill in front of her. Jane is directly in its oncoming path. Frustratingly, the car behind now seems to have slowed down, even as Jane wills it to pass. Come on, come on, Jane mutters as she keeps an eye on the oncoming car, which also has its brights on. The fog clears momentarily, and Jane is nearly blinded. The driver of the oncoming car finally sees her and lets out a loud, prolonged blast of its horn. Jane slows down to twenty-five miles an hour, brakes, and waits until the car behind her—a red Range Rover, as it turns out—finally whooshes by. She pulls over back into the right-hand lane behind it, just in time, just before the other car passes, its horn blaring. Jane slows down and pulls over, stops. She doesn’t trust herself to drive. So she simply sits there for five minutes. The alcohol still in her bloodstream makes the whole experience seem surreal. She wonders if she imagined the whole thing: Sheree, Fort Point, the splash in the water, this near-death on the Pacific Highway. Then she turns the motorbike on again and heads home.

  * * *

  Jane wakes to pounding on her door.

  She looks at her clock. Eleven a.m. How did she sleep so long?

  She stumbles to the door, peeks through the curtains. Two men in suits stand there. Their faces are grim. One of the men points to the door and gestures for her to open it.

  Jane unlocks the door, and the men push it open, come in without asking. One casually flashes his badge. FBI.

  Where were you last night?

  Jane is still half asleep. She has to think before she answers.

  In the city, she concludes.

  Until when?

  Jane tries to concentrate. She remembers Fort Point, vaguely. She remembers the splash in the ocean. She remembers Sheree. The rest is blank. She doesn’t know how she got home. She thanks God she got here safely.

  Late, she says. She sees her overcoat lying on the floor. It is still wet.

  The detective notices that too.

  Out in the rain?

  I suppose. What is this about?

  Instead of answering, the detective says, Where were you between midnight and six a.m.?

  I told you. Up in the city. Then home.

  Anyone can verify this?

  Of course not, Jane says, but then thinks of Sheree/Victoria. But she didn’t even know her real name, much less her address. They’d been in that dark movie theater. Would anyone remember Jane? Her hair, her most distinctive characteristic, had been tied into a tight ponytail and hidden beneath the hood of her jacket and her scarf. You probably couldn’t have told if she were male or female.

  No, she says again. No one.

  Then you need to come down to the station with us.

  * * *

  A third girl has disappeared. From Half Moon Bay itself. Stolen from her house sometime in the night. The mother had looked in on her at midnight. Her daughter was there, neatly tucked in under the blankets and sheets. Then the mother had gone back to the room to wake her up for school at 6:30. Empty.

  It was one of the ranch houses, all rooms on the ground floor. The window had been forced, but it hadn’t been difficult, the wood rotted from the salty sea air and continuous dampness from fog. The bushes below the window trampled. Because of the rain the night before, no clear footprints. The house was the last one on the block, the window facing a wild field directly fronting the sea.

  No witnesses. Jane, among other people, gets questioned, then released. Once again, the fact that she has no car seems to save her.

  We’re not unsympathetic to your situation, one of the FBI agents told her. We know about what happened in Berkeley.

  Do you? Jane thinks, but doesn’t say anything except No one here knows about . . . what happened . . . except Helen Smithson. And I’d prefer it stayed that way.

  We’ll try, ma’am. This was the second FBI officer. Bad cop. But as you know, this is a small town. Word gets around.

  My daughter had a different last name. Most people wouldn’t put the two of us together.

  Yes, but your own name is in the public record as the mother of the victim. And a perp herself. A quick search and it’s all there.

  Whatever. Jane knows she sounds rude, but she’s upset. Her cover has been blown?

  It raises a lot of questions, ma’am. You lost a daughter yourself. You move here, and shortly thereafter other people’s daughters go missing.

  What’s the logic? That I’m acting out some kind of revenge fantasy?

  It has occurred to us.

  But they did nothing, after all. They let her go with the usual warning not to leave town.

  * * *

  More posters. More headlines. Everyone dreading the eighth or ninth or tenth day when this third missing child, Amy Cross, would show up. Only four years old. Checkpoints materialize on the roads at night where men and women in dark clothes and with badges intermittently stop cars, shine their flashlights inside them. On occasion, they asked for trunks to be opened. The ACLU published a letter in the Moon News notifying the citizens of their right to “reasonable” searches, but most people are happy with the roadblocks, feel the intrusion is worth it. Since the first two children had been found north of Pescadero and west of Route 1, the bulk of the FBI and police activity takes place in that area.

  The FBI spokesperson is quoted in the Moon News: We have a limited window of time if the perpetrator follows his usual M.O. More search parties are organized.

  Jane studies the picture of Amy on the Three Sisters community board. She is, finally, a poster child for missing children. Blond and blue-eyed, with shoulder-length curly hair and a wide smile, looking straight into the camera. At whom? Jane wonders. It is someone the child loves and trusts, that is for sure. Jane remembers what Alma had said. Even if Amy had not been taken, that look would not last. It would be gone as certainly as if Amy were dead.

  Jane is not stopped as she rides her motorbike along Route 1 between Half Moon Bay and Princeton after work. It is growing dark as the sun sinks below the horizon of the ocean, and the unmarked sedans are starting to congregate and form checkpoints. There are two, three, no four of them in the three miles between where Route 92 intersects with Route 1 and where Jane turns off to get to her cottage. No one would get anything—or anyone—past. She notices a tripod with a black box set up near each of the checkpoints. The FBI is photographing each vehicle as it passes, Jane’s motorbike included.

  * * *

  Jane thinks about what Alma has said, about losing your children. She thinks there is truth there. Jane first lost Angela when Angela was thirteen. The shock was brutal. The shrinking away from physical contact. The slammed doors. The hostility soaking through every word in every conversation.

  Did you eat your breakfast?

  No.

  Did you do your homework?

  Duh.

  You’re so stupid.

  I hate you. So much.

  I can’t believe you said that. You’re a moron.

  Don’t speak to your mother like that. That would be Rick, spared the hostility himself, but ineffectual in protecting Jane from it.

  Silences. When not abuse, silence.

  Jane hated in return. There was no other word for it. She went to bed earlier and earlier to escape the ugly battleground her house had become. This was before Angela had her driver’s license. That was a completely different story. Then she stayed up later and later.

  You know your curfew is midnight.

  Everyone else can stay out until 2:00 a.m.

  That’s too late.

  Everything that’s fun happens after midnight.

  Everything that can hurt you happens then.

  As it turned out, Jane was wrong. Bad things happened before midnight too.

  * * *

  Edward comes to her the night after her San Francisco adventure. She doesn’t know if he tried to find her the night she was out. It doesn’t matter. Sinking. She is sinking into something, and it’s not unpleasant. She is being asked to let
go of her inhibitions, her cynicism, the irony that had permeated even the nursery. I suppose you’re going to lie there while I do all the work, she’s saying to Angela as a baby lying on her changing table. She is being anesthetized cell by cell, getting to a feeling of glorious numbness.

  * * *

  Sleep is important. If you can’t sleep, do something productive. Jane remembers this advice from her mother, who also suffered from chronic insomnia. Their toilets were never so clean, their school lunches never so elaborately prepared, as when Jane’s mother was struggling with her sleep issues.

  Two evenings after her trip to San Francisco, Jane tries to go to sleep. Goodness knows she’s tired enough. When that doesn’t work, she takes a page from her mother’s book and cleans, gets down on her knees and clears out the kitchen cabinets, washing the pots and pans and putting them back in exquisite order. By then it’s 2:30 a.m., and her body seemingly has no intention of slowing down.

  She gets on her motorbike and rides down Route 1 in the opposite direction of San Francisco, to Santa Cruz. It is damp and foggy, but she doesn’t feel cold at all. If anything, she wants to strip down further to feel the wind against her bare skin, to have the wind cool down what Edward’s hands had touched earlier that afternoon. In love. What does that mean? I’m in love with you is different from I love you. The latter implies rights, societal approval, conventional relations. Marriage. Family. The former has no such niceties. Wilder. More possibilities.

  She is in love with Edward. Which didn’t mean she likes him or trusts him. His face above her, his hands stroking her, his scent. She is intoxicated. She can barely drive straight. The sun is beginning to rise when she reaches the outskirts of Santa Cruz. She stops at an all-night café on Seabright, orders a full breakfast, and finds she is unable to eat any of it. Eating is beyond her abilities right now. Her throat is constricted; there’s a tingling in her chest that extends out to her arms, as if an electric current were emanating from her heart out to her extremities. She reaches out and touches her fork, half expecting a shock on contact.