“Face it, Carly girl. You lost that tailwind.”
“That was bullshit,” she says. Out loud. The wind snatching her words away. “That was stupid to act like I can know right from wrong by how long it takes to get to it.”
“But you liked that theory fine,” he says, “when it was going your way.”
That knocks Carly fully back into the moment.
She rests again behind the abutment of another overpass. Shivering and cold and holding back tears of frustration. She pulls the remnants of Lois’s bag lunch out of her backpack and eats the other half of her chicken salad sandwich.
Then she steps out into the wind and fog and keeps walking.
Something dawns on her suddenly. It’s just a feeling. She never really matches it with words. But…all the grown-ups who acted like she shouldn’t be out in the world on her own…that she was too young…that she was too small and the world was too big. All of a sudden it feels like they were right.
The wind has mostly died when she sees the exit for Trinidad. The fog is just as thick, though, so she’s nearly on top of the sign by the time she sees it. Her whole body is shaking from exertion. But it really doesn’t matter now.
Dawn is somewhere nearby. It’s hard to track it through so much fog. But it’s definitely getting lighter.
She walks down the shoulder of the exit and follows a sign toward Trinidad State Beach. Somewhere in the back of her head she knows she saw a sign that told the population of Trinidad, and it was only 311. But she can’t remember how long ago she saw that or where.
How hard can it be to find a person among 311?
She walks down a curvy little street, through a town that feels too small to be real. The blank whiteness that masks each building until she’s nearly right on top of it only adds to that otherworldly feeling.
She passes the Trinidad Trailer Court, where huge American flags blow in the wind. Please don’t let Teddy live in the trailer court, she thinks. She wants to see him in a big house looking out over the ocean. But then she remembers he’s not even working.
What if he left town to find a job?
She presses her mind back to the moment. She can’t afford panic now. She’s…well, she’s here. But where is here? How does it help her to be here? When does she get to stop? What’s she supposed to do next?
She comes around a curve in the road and passes an elementary school. It has a play yard, and Carly stops a minute and looks across the parking lot and through the fence. Pictures Jen playing in that yard. All by herself. Too clearly, really. Almost as clearly as she pictured Alvin on the highway. As though she’s lost some grasp of what’s still real.
She turns her face away again. Passes a tiny library that seems also to be the police station. Out front are statues of a mermaid and a dolphin surfing on individual metal waves, side by side.
She passes a bright red volunteer fire station. Really bright.
What she does not pass are people. It’s early, and the town is deserted. Like a ghost town or a movie set. Just buildings and Carly and fog.
It’s getting light fast now, and she looks up to the end of the street and sees what looks like the top of a lighthouse. A white lighthouse with a red roof.
She stops cold and listens, realizing she can hear the ocean. It’s not crashing, exactly. It sounds more as if it’s breathing. Drawing in and out.
She breaks into a run.
At the end of the street, she stands at the top of the stairs that lead down to the lighthouse.
The ocean is stretched out beneath her. Maybe 150 feet below this sudden cliff. A sleepy bay. Dozens of boats float down there, anchored in the fog. Rocks jut up out of the water, like rough pyramids. Some the size of a bus. Some the size of a house. Some the size of an apartment house. There’s a dull, distant bell clanging. It seems to ring in time with the swell.
Carly pulls in a sharp breath, then presses her eyes shut.
Please, she says in her own mind. Please let it still be there when I open my eyes. She can’t help feeling it’s too breathtaking to be real. And yet she can’t believe that her imagination could have created it, either.
She opens her eyes. It’s all still there.
She sits on a bench for a while, watching the scene grow lighter. The bench is wet and cold. But so is she, so it doesn’t seem to matter.
It’s morning. She’s walked all night, and she needs to sleep.
She thinks about getting a room with her eighty dollars. But maybe she should save that for more of an emergency. Anyway, first she wants to walk down the path, through the manicured little park surrounding the lighthouse. See what more there is to see.
She finds a long, steep stairway down to the beach. It’s made with pieces of railroad ties and lined with green berry vines and trees. She takes it almost all the way to the bottom.
Before the last set of steps down to the beach, she stops. She can hear seagulls crying, that same bell clanging somewhere, the breath of the bay. She can see some kind of dock or pier far off to her right, but she can’t see it well in all this fog. She could step down onto the beach, but then what? You can walk to one end, then you can walk to the other. But when you’ve spent the night walking sixteen miles in a small hurricane, taking a walk on the beach doesn’t sound all that appealing. She just wants to sleep somewhere. Where she’ll be left alone. Where she won’t be seen.
She looks to her right, and without even thinking it out, dives into the berry vines and heavy understory. Tiny thorns scratch her hands and face, snag her hair, grab on to her jacket. But she just moves them aside as best she can and keeps going. The thorns just mean no one else will be brave enough to tramp into the same spot.
She curls up in the damp foliage and rests her head on her backpack, listening to the gulls and the breathing of the swell.
A couple of minutes later, she’s fast asleep.
When she wakes, the fog is gone. The sky is blue. She can see snatches of it through the trees and berry vines. She looks west at the sunlight glinting off the ocean in a long, sparkly band. The sun’s already on a pretty good slant. Which means she slept most of the day.
She claws her way back to the stairs, scratching herself up further on the thorns.
As she emerges from the foliage, she startles a young mother with a little boy. The woman draws in a sharp breath and yanks the child closer to her side. Then she hurries herself and the boy up the stairs double-time, glancing over her shoulder at Carly. Twice.
Carly can’t help but feel offended. At first she assumes she just startled the woman by appearing suddenly and unexpectedly, and that was understandable. But everything after that seems like overkill.
She eases her way up a few stairs.
The woman with the little boy needn’t have worried. The sixteen miles Carly walked, uphill and against the wind, has taken a toll. Her muscles have stiffened now and feel barely usable. It’s not so bad where the railroad ties are set close together, creating short risers. But now and then there’s a big step up. Carly can’t make those big steps without easing her leg up with the help of both hands. She also can’t do it without letting out a little whimper of pain each time.
When she gets back up to the tiny park around the lighthouse, she isn’t sure what to do next. She figures she should go into a few businesses and ask about Teddy. Find someone who knows him. But—after that experience with the mother on the stairs—she decides she’d better find a public restroom and get a good look at herself first.
It’s pretty shocking.
Carly stands in the gas station bathroom, leaning on the sink. Just staring at her own reflection in the mirror.
Her chin is a mass of blackened scabs. Her sunburn blisters have left a line of scars across her forehead and nose. She knew that. But then there are the scratches. They didn’t seem like much at the time. But she has maybe thirty scratches on her face, and they’re red with blood. And, even worse, they’ve become swollen. And her hair looks almost like drea
dlocks, it’s so tangled.
She reaches up and pulls a few stray bits of berry vine out of her hair.
Then she decides staring won’t help.
She washes her hands and face. She pulls the hairbrush out of her pack and works the tangles out as best she can. It pulls, and she loses a lot of hair. But it has to be done. She looks in the mirror again. It’s not much progress. But there’s nothing more she can do. The rest is not immediately fixable.
“You know Teddy Thackett?” she asks the clerk.
She’s at the check-out station in the only market in town—at least, the only one she’s seen so far—holding a small bottle of orange juice.
The young woman tips her head, like a dog hearing a noise it can’t understand.
“Teddy Thackett. No, can’t say as I do. He supposed to live here?”
“Yeah, he lives here. He has a friend named Linda.”
“Linda Litnipski?”
“I…I don’t know her last name.”
“I know Linda Litnipski. But I didn’t think she was seeing anybody.” She cranes her neck to yell to a guy in the produce aisle. “Hey, Kurt. Is Linda Litnipski seeing somebody these days?”
“I heard she was, yeah. Somebody told me a month or two ago she had a new boyfriend. But I haven’t met him.”
“Was his name Teddy?”
“I never knew his name.”
“Sorry, kid,” the clerk says. “Say, how’d your face get so scratched up? Are you OK?”
Carly doesn’t answer. Just slides the bottle of orange juice closer to the woman, who takes the hint and rings it up. Carly pays her in quarters. It feels good to get rid of some of those quarters. They feel like lead weights in her pockets.
On her way out the door, she feels a hand slap down on her shoulder. She spins defensively.
It’s the guy from produce.
“If you’re looking for Linda and her boyfriend, go by the Whale Tail Lounge tonight.”
“How do you know they’ll be there tonight?”
“Well…Linda’s there every other night of her life. Can’t see why tonight would be any different.”
Carly walks to the Whale Tail Lounge. Even though it isn’t nearly night. It’s out on Patrick’s Point Road, a long paved road lined with giant redwood trees. She can hear the ocean breathing off to her left.
First it seems there’s nothing out on this road at all except trees. But now and then she passes hidden driveways, usually with closed gates. And there are RV parks here and there, and cottages and inns. They surprise her a little every time. Because her eyes keep convincing her there’s nothing here but forest.
She walks nearly a mile before realizing it’s a long walk to this place. She wishes she’d waited in town until it was later. They probably won’t even let her in, if it’s a bar. She’ll have to walk all the way back to town to get something to eat. Then she’ll have to walk back to the Whale Tail again tonight. But she has no idea what hour constitutes “tonight.” She doesn’t even know what time it is.
In another half a mile, she finds it. The Whale Tail Cottages, with the Whale Tail Lounge attached.
She looks at the menu posted in the window and realizes two things: That she’s very hungry. And that it’s a restaurant that serves drinks, not just a bar. So she can probably go in.
Actually, three things.
She looks at the prices and realizes she can’t justify eating here.
She walks all the way back to town.
“Is it always this windy around here?” she asks her waiter.
He’s about twenty, with a face so gentle she wants to sink into his eyes and never come out into the world again.
“Does this seem windy to you?”
“No, not now. I meant last night. Well, this morning, early.”
“It wasn’t any more windy than usual last night.”
“Wow. So that’s, like, an everyday thing? It felt like a hurricane to me.”
“Right here in town?”
“Well. No. I was walking up from Arcata last night. And the wind was so strong I could hardly walk in it.”
“Hmm. We didn’t really get it so much up here. I mean, that I know of. Maybe I slept right through it.”
Then he moves off with her order. A bowl of clam chowder and a glass of iced tea. She promised herself she wouldn’t spend more than the quarters in her pocket would cover.
While he’s gone, she looks out at the ocean. The bay. She can see it from here. The café isn’t exactly poised on the edge of the cliff, but if she looks across the street at the right angle, she can see a sliver of water between the cliff and the horizon. It feels good to be indoors. To see the ocean without the wind and the fog and the cold punishing her while she watches.
What do people do when they’re homeless? she wonders. Do they ever get used to that? Could she ever get used to having no way to get indoors, out of the elements?
Her stomach ices over in fear, bordering on panic, and at first she doesn’t know why. Then it breaks through. She’s about to find out if she’s homeless or not. Not even if she and Jen are homeless. Jen seems to have found a home. Carly seems to be the one out in the world alone.
The waiter comes back with her soup.
“I asked the cook,” he says. “Because he drives up from Eureka every morning early. He said there was sort of a microburst. This little wind event, and then a couple miles later, it was gone. Weather is like that sometimes. You can have these little microclimates. Ten miles away it’s all still. Oh. And by the way. He doesn’t know Teddy, either. But since he lives in Eureka…you know…”
“Oh,” she says. “Well…thanks for asking him, anyway. I never heard of a microburst. Or a microclimate. But anyway, I’m glad that’s not what it’s like here usually. Because I’m hoping I’ll be living here soon.”
“I hope that works out for you,” he says and fills her glass with iced tea.
Her stomach clamps tight and then freezes up again.
She thinks, Yeah. I hope that works out for me, too.
She sits for hours, staring at the ocean and nursing iced tea after iced tea. Because she has no place else to go. The waiter keeps coming by and filling up her glass, and when she apologizes for taking up the table, he assures her that it’s fine because they’re not busy at all.
It means a great deal to Carly to have someplace she feels welcome. The fact that it’s just a cheap, touristy seafood café is not the best part of that feeling.
Carly doesn’t know exactly what time it is when she gets back to the Whale Tail, but she figures it’s too early. If she had to guess, she’d say it was seven or seven thirty. What if this Linda—she can’t bring herself to think “Teddy” somehow—doesn’t come to the lounge until nine? Or Ten? Or later? Or…at all.
She doesn’t think she can go in, because she doesn’t want to waste money ordering anything. She’ll have to find a place outside to sit where she can see the front door.
But first, she sticks her head inside.
Then she takes two steps in.
The bar area is on the left, but the angle of the line of patrons sitting at the bar blocks her view of most of the faces. So she walks right into the bar area for a better look.
She’s busted immediately.
A waiter taps her on the shoulder and says, “Excuse me, miss. You have to be twenty-one to be in the bar.”
But she doesn’t answer him. Because there, in the mirror behind the bartender, is the perfect reflection of Teddy’s face. She squeezes her eyes closed, the way she did when she first saw Trinidad Bay. When she opens them, Teddy’s reflection is still there.
She opens her mouth to call out to him. She wants to say, Oh, my God, do you have any idea how far I’ve come to find you? Do you have any idea how many times I’ve watched this moment play out in my head?
The waiter taps her shoulder again, but she ignores it.
She calls out to Teddy. But all that comes out is just that one word. “Teddy!”
It’s much too loud. Every diner, every bar patron, stops talking and turns to look at her.
“Miss, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the waiter says.
“I just have to see Teddy.”
And then, Teddy is there. Towering over her.
“Carly?” he asks. As if it might or might not be her. As if she might be some sort of cunning Carly imposter, sent to trick him.
She throws her arms around his chest and holds him so tightly he makes a wheezing noise.
“Carly, what’re you doing here?”
But she can’t make words happen. She can’t even open her mouth.
“Ted, what the hell is this?” a woman’s voice says.
Carly doesn’t have to look up to know she’s about to meet Linda Litnipski.
The waiter is getting less patient. Carly can hear it in his voice.
“Take this outside, Ted,” he says, “whatever it is.”
Teddy peels Carly off and leads her outside. Back out into the misty cold air. How can anyplace be cold in late May? It’s a thought out of context, but it’s what she thinks.
Linda Litnipski follows. She’s blonde, maybe as tall as Teddy, or taller. Built solid. With a long, horsey, not particularly attractive face.
“You better start explaining, Ted,” she says.
“It’s nothing,” Teddy says.
The two words hit Carly like a torpedo.
It makes her think of Delores Watakobie, telling those little Wakapi girls the same thing about Carly. “It’s nothing.” Or…maybe Delores said, “It don’t matter.” But the feeling is the same. She can even see a flash of the old woman’s face. Too clearly. Like Alvin on the freeway. Like Jen playing on the monkey bars at the Trinidad Elementary School.
“What kind of nothing, exactly?” Linda demands.
“Just the daughter of a woman I used to know. It’s not what you’re thinking, Linda. I swear.”
“Well, what’s she doing here, then?”
“Here’s a thought,” Teddy says. “Let’s ask her. Carly, what are you doing here? Where’s your mom?”
“She’s gone, Teddy.”
“She took off and left you guys?”
Walk Me Home Page 27
