North Fork (12 page)

Though I didn't expect to have a bike here, I've used it a lot. The part of this city I move around in most is made for a bike. It's pretty flat between the house and the park, and between the house and work only the last few blocks are uphill. Some streets are really congested and riding can be a little dangerous, but it's a pretty good way to get around and a lot of people ride, so I don't feel out of place.

There are always better bikes nearby when I have to leave mine parked in a rack downtown or at the park, so if someone is looking to steal one, he wouldn't choose mine, but I bought a good lock anyway. The bike has special significance, like my Garfield doll when I was a kid. It has brought me luck, both kinds. It's worked both as transportation and as a prop for the role I'm playing, the character I've had to become.

I've definitely changed. I think about going back, and sometimes I imagine the end-of-year stress and excitement at school, and the Valley, and driving around in Bonnie's Taurus. My old life seems like another dimension, not very real and a million light years away, the way Corey described his sense of going to college. Here, I go to work at the restaurant and the rest of my time is my own to manage for better or worse.

I'm sort of pretending my life is a play. The part I had in the play at school last year was only a few lines, but while we were rehearsing, I listened to Mrs. Packard talking to some of the other actors about how you get into character. It all ties in with this being like one of those kid fantasies that has become real. I've
gotten used to this role I'm living, and it's gotten easier to stay in character.

At the restaurant, I have different hours each week and I don't always work the same shift as Trudy, but I see her often enough and she helps me feel like I'm part of a team. The work gets hectic during rush times and I'm glad when the shift is over. It isn't something I imagine myself doing for very long, but I don't hate it. The customers seem to like me and the tips aren't bad. All in all, it's not that hard. I get to feel like I belong when I'm at the restaurant, and knowing in the back of my head that it's temporary may be what has helped me to keep from feeling that I'm trapped in a crappy job, the way I would if I was Trudy's age.

At first, when I wasn't at work, I would hang out with my roommates, Ian and Char. I liked going to bars with them. It was like a party scene, only in a bar instead of at someone's house. It could be pretty expensive even at the cheap places we went, but I don't drink much, and because I'm a girl sometimes guys would buy for me. I started to get to know a few people, not like I was making real friends, but there were faces I'd recognize, people I'd say hi to. Even so, I still spent a lot of time alone.

I went to the history museum. There's so much there you can't take it all in without going back, but it is too expensive, so I just went once. By the entrance to the harbor where the park ends, there's this giant cement breakwater that protects the ships and barges that come to be loaded or unloaded at the big warehouse on the dock. You can walk out to the end of the breakwater, and on the ocean side, the open water changes moods with the weather. On the sheltered side, over at the dock, there's usually a lot of noise and activity, with forklifts racing around and men shouting. I love walking out to the end of the breakwater. When it's not windy, I see a lot of mothers and grandmothers pushing baby carriages. Being next to the ocean gives you this sense of being lonely and sort of melancholy, only happy, and it feels safe.

The park runs along the water for miles and most of the time feels like a family place. When the weather's good, people jog, walk their dogs, ride their bikes. Families go for walks in the evening. I've spent a lot of time there. Most of the park is on a bluff above the beach, but there are some stretches of beach with stairs going down to it. At high tide there isn't much exposed, but at low tide you can have a nice walk between two of the stairways. I sit on a log or on the gravel with my back against a log and look at the water. It calms me. But I'm obviously not the only one who gets something good from it.

I wasn't a dedicated jogger back in the Valley, but before Grant, I went jogging a lot here. I even bought some running shoes with tip money. They were on sale and aren't anything I would wear in the Valley, but they suit the new me just fine. I would ride the bike to the park and lock it into one of the racks, then go for a run. Sometimes I sat on the beach first, before I got sweaty. The day my bike broke, I had done that. It was a grey day, kind of misty, and you couldn't see across the Strait. There was a little breeze but no rain yet, and I got cold just sitting so I didn't stay long. I like moody, dark days almost as much as bright, sunny ones, but I don't like being cold, so I climbed back up the stairs and jogged the mile or so to the lighthouse at the east end of the park. There's a hill to climb coming back, so I was pretty tired when I got on the bike.

When I was sitting on the beach I was wearing a dark blue anorak. I'm pretty conscientious and don't leave things lying around or lose things very often, but I must have been distracted. By the time I got to the lighthouse I'd worked up a sweat, so I took the windbreaker off and sat down at one of the picnic tables to catch my breath. Then I left without it. I wore it a lot and didn't want to spend another thirty dollars for a new one, so I went back on the bike. Luckily, it was still there.

I had to pump hard to get the bike back up the hill and needed
to shift to a lower gear or get off and walk. The bike is the old kind of ten-speed that doesn't click to let you know when the chain is lined up to shift, and I'm not very good at judging since I wasn't a bike rider before. There were people around and I didn't want to embarrass myself by having to get off and push, so I tried to shift while I was pedaling hard. Well, the chain jumped off the front sprocket. This would have been bad enough, but then it got caught between the pedal crank and the frame as I was pushing down with all my weight.

It broke. I mean it really broke; instead of it being a loop that I could try to put back on, it was one long piece with loose ends. I came down pretty hard. Luckily it's a girl's bike with no bar to hit, but my foot slipped off the pedal, and I rolled my ankle trying to keep from falling. I stayed up, but it hurt. It turned out I had an audience.

I pushed the bike off the road onto the strip of lawn between the curb and the jogging path. My foot was really sore when I put weight on it. The chain fell off and I picked it up and wrapped it around the frame under the seat. I was wiping my hands on the grass to get the grease off them when he said,

“Are you hurt?”

I was pretty preoccupied, so I didn't focus on him right away.

“I'm all right,” I said. “The bike's not, but it can probably be fixed.”

“How's your ankle? You came down hard. You're limping.”

That's when I actually looked at him. He was clearly an adult, probably in his mid to late thirties, and was dressed for jogging, the way you'd expect someone with money to go jogging. He had on nice warm-ups and his running shoes were expensive. I've learned to recognize expensive clothes from shopping with Bonnie. He was good-looking in an old guy, James Bond sort of way.

“Can I give you a lift?” he asked.

“I'll be okay,” I said, and I thought I would be, so I raised the kickstand and started pushing the bike up the hill. It was maybe a mile and a half to the house. I didn't look back and didn't think much about him until about ten minutes later when my ankle started to hurt worse. It needed ice, I needed to not be walking on it, and I still had a mile and a quarter to go. So when his white Cadillac SUV pulled up next to me with the window down and he said, “Are you sure I can't take you home?” I said okay.

He had to take the front wheel off the bike to get it in the back, but it came off easily. The car was spotless and the bike wasn't, but he had some clothes from the cleaners hanging behind the driver's seat and he took a couple of the plastic slip covers off and put them under the bike to protect the car from the grease. Aside from his clothes, there were a dress and a woman's blouse on the hangers, so I assumed he was married.

While we were driving, he asked me if I was going to school. I told him I'd graduated and was working at a restaurant for now, but planned to go to university next year. I'd picked that up, the way they say university here instead of college. I ended up saying the name of the restaurant too, which I thought was harmless because it's a public place and not like some big secret or anything. It just seemed part of the conversation. He seemed like this family guy, like he probably had a daughter at home and helping me would somehow make the world safer for her too.

He dropped me off in front of the house. I thanked him and he drove off. I didn't expect to ever see him again.

They asked me if I wanted to see Smith. They took me to the office of the guy who runs this place, and he said Smith requested it. Since Smith isn't my parent, it wasn't a normal situation, but because he was my teacher, if I wanted him to come, they could let him. I said yes because my first thought was that he was always a fair guy, but after I got back to my room, I was lying on the bunk, staring at the mortar lines between the painted cement blocks that the walls are made of, and I started thinking, and I got kind of paranoid. I started thinking that the cops are probably using him to try to get me to confess. They've tried everything else. They all believe I killed her. It would be easier to confess than to keep telling the truth. Since I don't know what happened and didn't have anything to do with it, I would have to make up a good story. I would have to say I dumped the body out in the bay somewhere, like off the Deception Pass bridge where the water is deep, and it could have drifted out into the Straits where it disappeared. People have jumped from there and have never been seen again.

In a way, it would be easier to confess to Smith than to the cops because it wouldn't feel so much like giving in, like being beaten, like at the end of The Crucible, a play we read in his class. When this guy, John Proctor, confesses to being a witch because that's what people want to hear, and by confessing he gets to live, he tells his wife that it's hard to give a lie to dogs. His honesty matters a lot to him and he's trying to find a way to do right in a really bad situation. Proctor screwed up in a big way, but he
wasn't a witch like the judges said, so I'm kind of like him in that way.

But it would be hard to lie to Smith. The cops have lied to me, so lying to them would have a kind of fairness to it. I mean it would be ironic that their feeling of justice and the relief they would get from thinking they had their bad guy and the world was safe again would be based on a lie. He's coming today, Smith, and I'm nervous. My heart is beating too fast, which makes my mouth dry, and my voice will crack if I try to talk, which makes me look guilty as hell. I don't know why I'm getting this way. I mean he's just a teacher and can't really do anything more to me than they've already done.

By the way, Proctor tore up his confession and was hung. I don't know if I have that much integrity, and I'm really not very brave, but I'm also not sure what I'm more afraid of, being sent to prison and having my butt reamed every day by some animal or getting out of here and having to live in a world that believes I'm a psycho killer. I think Smith would probably like it that I remembered all the stuff from the play.

Thinking about going back makes me think about trying to be Kristin again. It really is just a phone call away, but it seems like a million light years.

From being here, I've learned that if you don't know what to expect, and you don't build up some idea ahead of time about how you want life to be, and just roll with what happens by deciding whether you have any reason to be miserable right now, like are you cold or hungry, or too tired or in pain, most of the time you're either all right or could fix it pretty easily if you want to. Kristen's life felt more like a tangled web of lies than this life does.

I know I don't want Bonnie and Sterling's life. Sterling makes lots of money, but I don't think he's happy, at least not in the way I see happiness or want it for myself. Even though he tries to be nice to me, I don't like him. I don't respect him. It's like his god is money. He and his partners bought up the part of town where there used to be canneries and warehouses. Our town is really small, so the deal isn't as big as this description might make it sound. The part they bought has quite a lot of waterfront but it's zoned wrong for what they want to do, which is build condos and put in more shops, like at Whistler. If they get their way, it will change the town completely. He says it will make it better. A lot of the people who live there like the town the way it is, but since they didn't have the money to buy the property, he says they don't have the right to complain. The hitch is that the project can't be built unless the zoning is changed, and he expects the town
to change the zoning for his project. But you can use his logic against him. He knew what he was buying and if he didn't want property that's zoned the way it is, he shouldn't have bought it. Why should they change it?

He probably really believes that the town will be a better place with all the new buildings and businesses and all the new people they will bring, but a lot of people disagree, and Sterling wants to shove his plan down their throats so he can make more money. I've heard him on the phone with his partners and people he thinks are insiders. They're pretty arrogant and sometimes downright nasty. He's completely different with the newspaper and with people who might disagree with him. He can really turn on the charm. He expects Bonnie and me to agree with him because it's his money that pays for the way we live. Bonnie goes along with it, but it's hard for me to tell what she really thinks. Even though I've never said it aloud, I don't buy any of it. I think Sterling is a greedy hypocrite, but he takes care of Bonnie, so I've kept my opinions to myself.