The Incident on the Bridge (8 page)

I
f 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.

T
he 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.

T
ed 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.

C
arl 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 answer 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.