How to Breathe Underwater (14 page)

All along Beach Street there are T-shirt shops and T-shirt shops and T-shirt shops. Three of them have flip-flops displayed out front. Two of these have stuffed animals inside. One of these has otters. None of them has Olivia. Tessa stands on the sidewalk, looking out toward the bay. There, passing between the shore and Alcatraz, is a rust-red oil tanker with the word TANAKA on the side in high white letters. A million gallons of oil. She can almost taste it, bitter and black.

Tessa shuffles along Beach Street. She should tell the cops. She needs help. But look at her, in her crazy outfit, with Devvies and Sallies in her pocket. They’ll think she’s a kidnapper, a criminal. They’ll handcuff her and throw her into a cell. Then they’ll search the apartment. Kenji will be arrested too. She has to call him. Maybe he can make it all stop. Up ahead there is a pay phone, a little man shouting into it. She bounces on her toes, waiting, looking, willing Olivia to walk by. She’d like to take her by the shoulder, shake her, wake her up:
This
is the world, not what your parents have told you. This is what exists just outside the borders of your pretty life. It’s what she’s had to learn herself, the hard way, through Gayle’s slow and steady pulling away, through all that time since college when she didn’t know what to do with herself, the hated jobs in offices, her father’s quiet disappointment, those deadened months at Oracle, and the months since she quit, months of her and Kenji in the apartment during the day, fucking and fighting and tweaking and reading the paper and watching movies and lying to everyone. She knows she’s getting closer to a new kind of truth, a real discovery, a kind of knowledge Gayle will never have.

The little man gets off the phone and runs down the street, cursing. Tessa picks up the phone. She can smell food, sweet and greasy, on the receiver. She can’t speak into the hum of the dial tone or decide which buttons to press. Her head feels like it’s hurtling in fast-forward, her breath coming so fast her vision is going black at the edges. She can’t explain why she’s standing on the street holding this phone instead of searching for Olivia. A recording comes on and tells her what to do if she’d like to make a call.

“Get Kenji,” she says to the voice. “Dial Kenji.”

Please hang up and try again.

Try what? She can’t hang up. Someone else is already waiting for the phone.
If you’d like to make a call.

She jams the receiver onto the hook, then picks it up again and presses numbers.
Please deposit thirty-five cents.
She digs in her pocket for change and finds a quarter and a dime. She fumbles them into the slot and dials again. Seven numbers. She can manage them. She does. The phone is ringing, and then, like a reprieve from everything, Kenji’s voice. She can hardly believe he still exists in this world. She tries to say something but all she can do is cough out sobs.

“Tessa? Is that you?”

“It’s not my fault!” she cries into the receiver.

“Hey,” he says. “Come home. Where did you go?”

“You have to come get me,” she says.

He gives a faint, panicked laugh. “Come get you? I can’t come get you! I’m extremely fucked up at the moment.”

“You have to come,” she says. “Olivia’s gone.”

“Who?”

She hangs up and sits down on the curb. Behind her, someone else picks up the phone and begins punching numbers. There are cars passing in the street just beyond Tessa’s flipflops, almost running over her feet as they pass. Crushed bones, blood, a wreck. She almost wants it.

She stands and crosses the street, making the cars swerve around her. There’s a small park sloping down toward the water, with pigeons coming down like shattering slate. Weathered green benches stand between beds of blue and yellow pansies. She sits down on a bench, looking out toward the flat metallic expanse of the bay. She feels something going wide and empty in her chest, the Devvie slipping out from beneath the Sallie, the cartoon moment just before you fall, when the cliff’s already gone but gravity has not yet got you. A horror goes through her: a child somewhere, screaming, lost. Not just a child, her own niece. She takes the pillbox from her pocket, looks inside. Two Devvies, one more Sallie. She looks at the flower bed beside the bench, then kneels on the grass. With her finger she digs a hole in the loose soil of the flower bed, turning up dirt and curled-up bugs and roots. Then she packs the pillbox into the hole and tamps the soil down on top of it. She fixes this spot in her mind: the park with its beds of pansies, the flower bed near the center of the park. She picks the dirt from beneath her fingernails, then walks down to the beach and washes her hands in the cold water of the bay.

The waiting room is plastered with posters of missing children, of wanted men and women wearing numbers. She sits in an orange plastic chair, looking down at her wrists. Uncuffed. Beside her on the floor is a cup of black police-station coffee. This is where the police brought Olivia when they found her wandering the wharf alone, crying for her mother, and it is where they brought Tessa when she told them what had happened. She, Tessa, has not been treated like a criminal; she’s been allowed to sit here while someone goes to get Olivia. She cannot shake the feeling that someone might come in at any minute and take her roughly by the back of the neck and shove her into a cell. Her policeman acted as if things like this happened all the time: children wandering away from their harried guardians at Pier 39, everyone reunited soon afterward. Now the policeman carries Olivia into the waiting room, her small face grim and scrubbed, her pale purple jacket torn at the sleeve, the stolen otter tucked under her arm. When the officer sets her down she looks at Tessa with shamed, fearful eyes. Tessa pulls her close and holds her there. The girl’s arms come around her. It amazes her to think Olivia would trust her after what has happened.

“See that?” the officer says to Olivia. “I told you she wouldn’t be mad.”

She feels Olivia’s breath, quick and hot, against her neck. “I’m sorry,” Olivia says.

“It’s okay,” Tessa says. “It’s okay.”

They step back out into the sun, into the blinding afternoon, and walk down Bay Street back toward the water. Olivia is stunned and silent, holding Tessa’s hand. She seems uninterested in the shops and houses. There are no tourists on this part of Bay Street, only women and men going about the business of their lives. Now would be the time to take Olivia back to the hotel, to get her cleaned up in Gayle’s hotel room, to wait for her sister to be finished with her conference. Tessa and Olivia could both pretend everything was fine, and maybe Gayle would believe them. Or maybe she wouldn’t, and everything would begin to change—the nightmare that has become Tessa’s life might crack open and begin to fall away. Part of her wants to surrender to that, to let Gayle know at last what has happened to her life, to make her have to recognize it and do something about it, finally. Maybe that’s what she’s been hoping for all day, maybe that’s why she let herself lose Olivia: to make things so terrible they’d have to change. But Olivia is back now, and Tessa feels almost as if she’s been tricked. She feels as if she doesn’t have the power to decide anything anymore, as if she’s being pulled along slick tracks by a strong and twisted steel rope underground, like the cable car. All she can think about are the pills in their silver box, dark and safe beneath the soil. She has to have them, and she has to keep having them. She feels like she’ll die if she doesn’t. The Devvie is long gone now, and her nerves crackle with the afterburn of the Sallie. A cold white pain gathers behind her eyes. She hurries Olivia along the sidewalk, toward the park.

“I went to put my animal back,” Olivia says. “I went back to that store.”

“But you didn’t put him back,” Tessa says. “You decided to keep him.”

Olivia looks down at the otter, saying nothing. At an intersection she and Tessa stop to watch the cars pass. Olivia fingers the ripped sleeve of her jacket, trying to hold the edges of the fabric together. “I tore this,” she says. “My mom’s going to be mad.”

“Maybe she won’t be,” Tessa says, not really listening.

“Yes, she will.”

Tessa is at the end of kindness. Her temples pulse with pain. As she looks down at Olivia, a fine sharp cruelty gathers in her chest. “At least you
have
a mother,” she says. “When I was your age, my mother was dead.”

Olivia’s mouth opens and closes. Tessa will not watch her start to cry. When the light changes, she takes Olivia’s wrist and pulls her across the street. As they enter the park, Tessa walks faster. Her flip-flops make their muffled slap against the pavement. In the distance she can see the bay, bright-scaled with afternoon light. She heads toward the row of benches along the park path, each with its crowd of pigeons, each separated by a bed of pansies. The benches are empty now. Tourist families hurry along the path, looking as if they mean to get somewhere before the sun gets any lower.

At a flower bed near the center of the park, Tessa gets to her knees to examine the soil. She can’t tell if this is the right place or not. The bench beside the flower bed looks familiar, but they all have the same weathered green paint, the same brass plaques. She scrabbles through the loose soil. Nothing. She moves to the next flower bed, kneeling down to dig again while Olivia watches, holding the otter.

“What are you doing?” Olivia asks, her voice a dry whisper.

“Looking for something,” Tessa says. She turns up clods of dirt, but her pills are not there. She leads Olivia along the path, then stoops beside the next flower bed. She thinks she remembers these flowers at the edge, these yellow pansies with their dark velvet hearts. Olivia sits down on the grass and holds the otter, her eyes glassy with fatigue. The wind is sharp against Tessa’s neck as she kneels beside the flower bed. Her fingers are going numb, her nails are packed with soil, but she lowers her head and digs.

Stars of Motown Shining Bright

Lucy waited in her room for Melissa to arrive from Cincinnati. They would drive in Melissa’s old Cadillac, that sleek white boat, forty miles east to Royal Oak, where they would spend the night with Jack Jacob. Lucy was fifteen and no longer a virgin. The teen magazine articles pondering the question of whether one was ready to give it up no longer applied to her. She could, at that very moment, be pregnant. Not that she was pregnant. She had been careful, and so had Jack Jacob. Still, there was a possibility. And now she was off to see him again, to spend the night with him in Royal Oak, and it was all right with her parents because he was a boy she’d met in youth group, and because they were staying at his parents’ house, and because Melissa would be there too. These friendships were important, her parents had told her. These friendships could last a lifetime.

The trip had been Melissa’s idea. She liked road trips and she liked adventures in which she and Lucy did something they could tell everyone about afterward, with lots of dramatic detail. But she didn’t know about what had happened between Lucy and Jack. Lucy hadn’t told her. It felt too private to talk about over the phone. Maybe if Melissa had lived closer, Lucy would have gone over to her house and whispered it to her in the dark. On the other hand, maybe she wouldn’t have. She wasn’t sure how Melissa would react. Melissa liked Jack too. She and Jack had even fooled around once at a youth group convention. While everyone else was busy at the Saturday-night dance, Melissa and Jack had snuck away to the high-vaulted sanctuary and made out for half an hour on the floor between two rows of pews. Lucy knew because she’d been there, guarding the door in case any of the youth leaders came along. She remembered trying not to listen but listening anyway. She remembered the bronze Eternal Light flickering in the half-dark. At one point Melissa sat up to twist her hair into a ponytail, and she shot Lucy a self-satisfied smile. Lucy knew what that smile was about: Jack, a senior, liked
her,
Melissa. Not tonight, though. Things were different now. Lucy was the one Jack wanted, and Melissa would have to live with that.

There was the white Cadillac at last, rolling long and smooth into the driveway. It had once belonged to Melissa’s mother, but now it had daisy decals on the hood and a Barbie dangling from a tiny noose on the rearview mirror. Lucy watched Melissa climb out, tall and lank in a short white skirt and sling-back shoes, her hair caught in a high ponytail. There was something about the sheen of her legs, the slowness of her walk, that made Lucy sick with envy.

Lucy went downstairs and tiptoed to the door. Through the peephole she could see Melissa practicing nonchalance, swinging her keys on one finger and moving her hips from side to side as if to music. She tilted her head back, blew a pink gum bubble, and sucked it in as it burst. Lucy opened the door.

Melissa leaned forward coolly and kissed Lucy first on one cheek and then the other, European style. She smelled of nail polish remover and black-cherry lip gloss and beauty salon shampoo. At her feet was a large black shoulder bag stuffed with clothes.

“Where are your parents?” she said.

“Gone,” Lucy said. “Neighborhood Watch meeting.”

“Good.” Melissa brushed past Lucy and led her upstairs as if this were
her
house, as if she owned Lucy’s room and everything in it. She threw her bag on the bed and opened the doors to Lucy’s closet, flicking her way through Lucy’s shirts and pants and skirts. Every now and then she would extract a garment and regard it with distaste, then replace it on the bar and shove it aside. “You have no clothes,” she concluded.

“Don’t remind me,” Lucy said.

Melissa sat down on the bed, just inches from the place where Lucy had slept with Jack Jacob, and then she opened her overnight bag and pulled out something that looked like a clot of black yarn. When she unrolled it, Lucy saw that it was a crocheted dress with short sleeves and no back.

“I couldn’t wear it over here,” Melissa said. “Your parents would freak.” She peeled off her shirt and skirt and tossed them to Lucy. She was wearing white stockings that ended at the thigh with a band of elastic lace. These too she took off and tossed to Lucy. “You can wear my clothes if you want,” she said. “Don’t spill anything on them, though.” From her bag she pulled out another pair of stockings, black with lace at the top, and put them on. In stockings, panties, and brassiere she posed in front of Lucy’s full-length mirror, bending forward to look at her cleavage. She was the only girl Lucy knew who actually loved her body.

Lucy pulled on the stockings and stretched them up to her thighs. They were a tight fit around the tops. She struggled into Melissa’s skirt and shirt. When she looked in the mirror, she thought she hardly looked like herself at all.

“Much better,” Melissa told her. “Though you should have straightened your hair or pulled it back or something.” She herself was cool and lean in the black crocheted dress, the tops of her stockings and her pale thighs visible through the fabric. “We don’t have time now, though,” she said. “Do you have your stuff?”

Lucy had packed an overnight bag. In it was a pair of satin pajamas she’d bought without telling her parents. She imagined entering Jack’s room in those pajamas, his eyes traveling over her, Melissa looking at her in envy. Was it possible that Melissa could envy her? Maybe when she told her what had happened.

They’d become friends at last year’s Regional Convention, when Melissa had told her about the date with Adam Moskovitz. She and Melissa had found themselves sitting next to each other in the synagogue social hall during a long panel discussion about Tikkun Olam, which meant Healing the World. Adam, a senior and the vice president of Midwest Region, had been one of the panelists. Every time he made a point about how important it was to spend time helping out at your local soup kitchen or collecting clothes for Russian immigrants, Melissa would roll her eyes and make a little sarcastic huff. Finally she took Lucy by the sleeve and they went to the ladies’ lounge. This was a big Cincinnati-synagogue ladies’ lounge, with tailored chintz sofas in a pink-carpeted anteroom. It smelled of rose soap and ammonia, and the plumbing hummed in the walls. Melissa unfolded herself onto a sofa and closed her eyes. Then she told about the date with Adam, how he’d taken her out to a Japanese restaurant and then to his parents’ private box at the symphony, where he’d shoved a hand under her skirt and told her he wanted her
right then.
He’d pulled her up against the wall, in a tiny space between the box door and a velvet curtain, and he lifted her skirt and did it, not even using a condom. Melissa cried a little as she told the story, though the way she described the sex itself, with anatomical details and language that sounded like a porno magazine, made Lucy feel as if she were bragging—or lying.

In comparison, Lucy’s night with Jack would sound plain and undramatic. She had wanted to do it, first of all. She’d known Jack since she was twelve and had always thought he was nice and not unattractive, though maybe slightly greasy, with his hair gelled back and his dance-club shirts in every color. He was even famous, in a small way: He’d been in a movie,
Streets of Detroit.
In his one scene, Jack, the troubled younger brother, had gotten shot by mistake. Still alive, he lay on the sidewalk looking tragic and vulnerable. The stricken older brother knelt beside him. Jack looked up at him, eyes clouding.
It’s not your fault, Tommy,
he said.

The problem was, Melissa had always liked him too. It was obvious she couldn’t wait to see him tonight. Lucy had never seen her acting so nervous. As she drove along I-94 toward Detroit, she did not sing with the radio or talk to Lucy. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the other clenched around a small pearl-gray box in her lap. The way she kept opening it just a little and peeking inside seemed calculated to create mystery, so Lucy forced herself not to ask what was in it. Instead, she leaned over and turned up the radio. It was DJ Baby Love, at WLUX.

“The stars are shining bright above Motown tonight,” said DJ Baby Love in his plush baritone, “and it’s Diana Ross with ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.’ ” Lucy sang along, making up lyrics when she didn’t know them.

“You’re loud,” Melissa said. “And bad.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Lucy rolled her shoulders and sang with Diana.

“You are so not black.”

“But I’m beautiful,” Lucy said. She tried acting carefree and fifteen, entirely uninterested in Melissa and that pearl-gray box. She had other things to think about, things of greater importance. Somewhere beneath the stars of Motown, Jack was waiting.

That night with Jack, she’d known exactly what was going to happen. They’d gone to see
The Birds
at the Michigan Theater, and they’d shared a bowl of mint chip at the Home Dairy. And then they’d gone back to her house and sat in the driveway in Jack’s Continental for what seemed like hours, taking burning swigs from Jack’s silver flask. She hated the taste of whatever it was, so most of the time she was just taking pretend swigs, tipping the flask up to her mouth and blocking the liquor with her tongue. She tried acting like she was getting a little drunk. Jack had a hand on her thigh, just in the same place, for a long time. It was early June and cool, the crickets making their shrill dry sound in the box elders beside the driveway. Upstairs the light in her parents’ bedroom was still on. Jack told her about California, about the women at the fitness club in Bel Air where he taught Pilates and weight training. A few of the women had offered him money for special favors, which he’d declined to perform. He talked about trying out for sitcoms. He talked about looking for an agent. He talked about living in a shitty bungalow three blocks from the beach, and about going to Compton on Saturday nights with a black friend from Detroit, and almost getting his ass shot off, and consequently having to buy a gun for self-protection. It was a double-action Kel-Tec .32. He had it with him, in fact, and he showed it to her. It was brushed steel, blunt-nosed, small enough almost to disappear in his closed hand. He pulled the slide back to show her a cartridge in the chamber. This gun had no external safety, he said, so she should never touch it unless they were in Detroit some night and she had to protect herself. She’d held guns before, had taken riflery at summer camp, but it frightened her to see this small sleek pistol in his hand, right there in the driveway of her house. She didn’t want to touch it. He put it in the glove compartment, and she tried to forget it was there.

She told him about how she was volunteering at a shelter for runaway teen girls and their babies, a place where her parents would never have let her work in a million years. She’d lied to them, saying she was working as a candy striper at the hospital, and her father would drive her downtown and she’d go into the hospital and wait until he drove away before walking to the shelter. She told him about finding packets of crack stashed in diapers, which hadn’t actually happened to her but to Lynette, one of the other volunteers. Jack removed his hand from her thigh.

“You’re too serious,” he said. “You should try to act like a fifteen-year-old sometimes.”

“How?”

“You could kiss me,” he said. “You could climb right onto my lap.”

She laughed. “Is that what fifteen-year-olds do?”

“Sometimes.”

“And then what would happen?”

“And then I’d take you inside and make love with you. Nice and sweet.”

She said she’d think about it. She was trying to act casual, though really she’d been thinking about it for nearly a month, ever since she’d gotten the postcard saying he was coming back from California for a visit. She’d even taken condoms from the shelter. So she was ready to do it, and here he was. Her parents’ light was off now. They’d have to be quiet. She climbed into his lap and kissed him.

Later they went inside and upstairs to her room, where she locked and double-locked the door and got undressed, folding her clothes neatly on a chair as if she were at the doctor’s office. She listened for movement from the direction of her parents’ room and heard nothing, so she crawled into her bed and waited. She expected it to be painful and brutal, like the unprofessional extraction of a tooth. But when Jack was in bed with her, breathing quiet into her hair, touching her everywhere, getting her to touch him, she forgot to worry about the pain.

When it was over, she felt good. Not a virgin anymore, but better. He kissed her goodnight and went to sleep on the couch downstairs. The next morning he thanked her parents for their hospitality and took Lucy out for pancakes and eggs. As they were leaving the diner, they passed a plant nursery where tiny fir trees stood in a row along a wooden fence. Jack said he wanted to buy one for Lucy to commemorate their night together. She laughed, but he said he was serious, and so they bought the tree and planted it beside a rock garden in Lucy’s backyard. The whole time she moved as if through syrup, feeling warm in all her limbs. Now he was planning to leave for California sometime that week. She hadn’t thought it would make her sad, but it did.

She’d been waiting to tell Melissa the whole story in person, but now she didn’t feel like talking about it at all. How could she describe it, anyway? She didn’t want to use the kind of details Melissa had used when she’d talked about Adam Moskovitz, and she didn’t want to make it sound romantic, either. But she wanted to talk about it. She wanted to say his name.

“What do you think Jack’s doing right now?” she said, trying to sound bored.

“I don’t know,” Melissa said, rubbing the pearl-gray box with her thumb. “Showering, maybe. I’m always asking myself that same question. I’m always like, ‘I wonder what he’s doing right now?’ I think about him all the time.”

“You think about him all the time?”

“There’s something I should tell you, actually,” Melissa said. “Something important.” With a serious look, eyes flinty and small, she put a hand on Lucy’s arm. “You have to swear you won’t tell anyone about this.”

“What?” Lucy said. Her scalp prickled with sudden cold.