The Incident on the Bridge (31 page)

F
or a long time she was obsessed with shells. Broken, chipped, jagged, smooth. All the broken bits mattered. Then she got choosy and brought home only sand dollars that had survived everything.

“They're just skeletons,” her cousin Neil had said when he came to visit. “You're picking up bones! It's gross.”

“They are not!” she said, because she actually thought they were seeds, like pinecones or maple keys or acorns. She went on looking for telltale circles in the wet sand where a wave had just come and left a long puddle, sucking things back into itself. Nine out of ten sand dollars were crushed in some way. All the joggers, walkers, and Navy SEALs running in boots, the lifeguards' Subarus, stupid Neil dragging his stupid boogie board, Ted playing smash ball with their mother—they shattered them underfoot without even looking. She developed a magic sense that told her when she was going to reach down and find the saucer whole. It gave her a shiver, the premonition.

Her mom would bring tissues and wrap the dollars like they were teeth that had fallen out at school.
Don't hold them too hard,
she would say.
I won't,
Thisbe would say.

Sometimes they were little like dimes, and those were her favorites.

“Lady Locke,” a bird is screaming. Her name. It's screaming her name.

Through the grimy porthole, the ocean is gold and promising, but she can't get there.

“I'm in here!” she says to the bird, but her voice is like a hiss now, so she kicks at the door.

The next time she hears the sound, it's farther away, and she sees a gull swoop over the water. Just a gull, like all the others.

T
he flyer isn't unexpected. It all took too long. If he hadn't dropped the wallet, if the impeller hadn't broken, if he hadn't been such a screwup from the beginning.

The flyer on the pole by the library says:
MISSING: THISBE LOCKE. LAST SEEN BESIDE A WHITE HONDA ON THE WESTBOUND CORONADO BRIDGE.

Not
under,
but
on.

There's another one by Spreckels Park.

He needs to hurry, hurry, hurry. He rides toward his camp in the acacias, and he sees three more flyers before he gets there, Julia's face looking out at him from poles and trees, smiling and young, still trusting him, though she shouldn't have, she shouldn't have. He fell asleep and stayed away too long. He will lose her again.

I
t's the dirtiest, oldest, funkiest set of signal flags she's ever seen. The kind all connected for running to the top of the mast and down again, flapping on holidays in the summer sun. It almost makes her laugh. It makes her want to say,
HUGH! YOU WERE SO RIGHT!

Other people know the distress signals, more than just her and Ted and her stepdad know them, right? People learned them, didn't they?
I am on fire and have dangerous cargo.
This is a code, people!

She feels the metal edge of the porthole again but still can't find the handle to unlock it. Either it's not the kind of porthole that opens, or it's grimed shut. If she smashed it, someone could hear her better. She could hear if the bird is still calling her Lady Locke.

A can opener doesn't work. Too small. Likewise the cutting board, which slips out of her hands when it thunks the glass. But she can get enough velocity with a three-legged chair. The glass cracks and she swings the chair again with all her strength. It crackles and some glass falls out. She uses the can opener to push the pebbled glass out onto the deck, and she touches air. Cold air like fresh watermelon. Sounds are louder now: the clear ring of metal against the mast as the boat rocks. She sets the whole slippery pile of flags on the shelf and pushes one out the gap of the broken porthole. There's a deep wrinkle in the nylon that makes the flag fold in half and flip up all crooked, and this fills her with despair.

She remembers how she said to Hugh, “What's the point of a distress signal that tells people to
stay far away
from you?”

Something moves on the deck—is it Frank?—and she retracts her hand. It's the cat, though, just the cat. It draws closer and sniffs. It paws at the flapping signal flag, plays with the curl of it in the window. She tells the cat with her mind to go away and fall into the sea. It pauses, pats the bent tongue of the flag, sits like a figurine, licks a paw, stares at the universe.

In time, the cat pulls itself forward, stretches out like a rug and falls asleep. Above the cabin the wind makes a tinging, pinging sound like a child playing the triangle in a school play. She can't shout, so she goes to the galley and gets a can of Mrs. Dowder's Major Chowders and throws it over and over again at the locked door.

The next sound she hears is the scream of the cat. A green bird swoops toward the deck, wings spread out over the cat's head, and then rises at the last second to miss the cat's swipe. The cat crouches and stalks out of sight. Now the tinging, pinging sound is punctuated by the rusty hectoring of the bird.

“S
o, like, I thought we would look around here,” Ted says to Jerome.

Jerome waits with the dog called Maddy, the one he calls a softie, though the dog is sharp-eared and Nazi-ish. The three of them are blocking the bike path and Ted has to scoot over while Jerome is showing her what a softie Maddy is by stroking and patting the dog's head. It being a summer evening, plenty of runners are chugging themselves along, and bikers in neon shirts are going
zip zip zip.
Ted picked the bike path to begin the search because she thought,
Okay, if you didn't jump, where would you go? You would walk. Would you walk to the city or the island? The city is gnarly. Gangs and all. Homeless. If you were a lone girl, you'd walk to the island, and if you were Thisbe freaking out, you might go to the troll house.

This is what she has to tell Jerome now while making it seem intelligent. Which is hard because he seemed to think there would be a whole lot of people doing the search, and the police would be in charge.

“The troll house?” he asks.

She points. He stares at the weird little shingled shack on the side of the fence where you're not supposed to go. Built for the bridge workers, maybe, back when there used to be a toll. There's a tall, tall chimney thing all covered with shingles, and the house/shack is covered with shingles, all homeylike, and there's one window and one door. “Thisbe had a whole story about it. When we were younger.”

Jerome doesn't speak. He's probably thinking she's nuts.

“It was just stories she made up about trolls who live under the bridge.”

Jerome says, “Won't people wonder what we're doing over there?”

He has a point. They both face the chain-link fence that divides the paved trail from a long gutter and a hillside with trees and bushes and dead leaves and stuff. The foresty part leads to the troll house.

“Oh, well,” Jerome says, and even though he seems worried about breaking the law, he starts walking to the place where you can go around the little chain-link fence if you totally ignore the
NO TRESPASSING
sign. Ted's glad Maddy is one of those scary Nazi dogs, even if she's a softie at heart, because if they go into that underbrush or perchance yank open the troll door, whatever might be living there will have to face the dog first.

Superlarge amount of brush around. Huge, thickety mounds that are more like overgrown bushes than trees. Her heart is thudding like when a horror movie is getting bad and she has to turn the sound off.

No music to turn off here, though: just
crackle crackle snap snap.
She walks directly behind Jerome's large, comforting back. The dog's tail nub and pointy ear tips float in the golden air. The extendo-leash creaks as Maddy gets farther ahead, goes sniffing up the bank.

Should she call out? Should she say,
Thisbe?
like she's calling for a lost pet?

Maddy sniffs herself into a thicket-place that's like a cave of dead vines and branchy stuff and might be where a homeless man makes his poos. You can't see Maddy anymore, just the leash line. If Maddy weren't a Nazi dog, Ted would be afraid for her.

The thicket-place explodes with barking, followed by the strangled voice of a man shouting, “NO!” Scared look on Jerome's face as he jerks on the extendo-leash to reel Maddy back like a fish from the thicket-place and whoever's in there. Passersby on the bike path are definitely staring. They definitely are. Best to act like you belong in the no-trespassing zone.

A man pops out of the brush, holding his wrist, where there are definite bite holes, bright red and bruisy blue. “I'm so sorry,” Jerome says, his face blotching red. “She doesn't normally bite, I swear. She never has.”

“I'm fine.”

The man has a blue spot on his lip. White hair in a circle around an elfy bald head. Dirty clothes, so maybe homeless. A gazillion dark brown wrinkles from a gazillion hours in the sun. But what's he doing here?

“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Jerome is asking him.

People on the path slow down as they see what's happening. They don't stop completely but they almost stop. They listen and stare.

The man says no, he has a first aid kit. He talks like he's in a hurry to go.

Ted waits to see if he goes back into the thicket. Does he live in there? Do homeless guys have Band-Aids?

“It's on my boat,” the man says.

So he's a rich guy? “Oh,” Jerome says.

“I'm fine,” the man says again, though red blood is dripping from one of the bite holes. He wipes it on his not-clean pants.

“You guys okay?” a runner on the other side of the fence is asking, a middle-aged guy like Hugh, bald and sporty, his shirt dark from a good sweat. “You need anything?”

“No,” the wrinkled elf-man says. “I'm fine, sir. It's fine.”

Instead of going back into the thicket, the elf-man turns toward the bay, and along the gutter that Ted and Jerome followed, he begins to walk really fast with his dog-bite arm not bent in any special protective way, just hanging down almost normal, and it's kind of like how Ted pretends sometimes when she's sailing that she isn't hurt when she is—and it's weird—it really is—how he isn't mad at them for the dog bite.