The Humanity Project (23 page)

She leaned on him to steady herself and managed to get the shoe off. “Thanks.”

He hadn’t meant anything by it. But it took on some kind of meaning, touching her, if only because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched anyone. The girl was looking out at the ocean, scowling. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

He watched her roll up her pants legs. “That water’s cold,” he said.

“Sissy.”

“Fine. Knock yourself out.”

She took a few steps until she was ankle-deep in the surf, then set off walking the length of the beach. Conner kept pace with her from above the tide line. He pulled out his phone. You couldn’t get service out here, but maybe his dad had left a message. He checked but there weren’t any calls. They hadn’t talked for a couple of days. His dad was still doing his pissy act, where everything was Conner’s fault. He was welcome to keep it up and see where that got him. But the phone being turned off was something new.

At the end of the beach the girl came out of the surf and sat down in the sand to put her shoes back on. After a minute Conner sat down too, on a ridge of sand just above her. “Was that fun?”

“Oh yeah. Big fun.” She was brushing sand off her bare feet.

“Why don’t you want to go to school?”

“I got my reasons.”

“What are they? Come on. Did you flunk math or something?”

She was still wearing the white sunglasses, but they were a little too big for her and kept falling down. She pushed them up to the top of her head. “I thought I wanted to go. I really did. Because it would be all new, a new place. I don’t know.” She was still picking grains of sand from her toes.

“Don’t know what?”

“If I can . . .”

“What?” Conner said, because she was mumbling.

“Can be around other people.”

“You’re around other people right now,” he pointed out.

“Not really.”

They watched the ocean for a while. He thought he saw something dark rise above the white collar of a distant wave. A seal? But he didn’t see it again, and he wasn’t certain enough to mention it, and anyway it was one of those times when talking embarrassed him, made him feel he was going right off the edge of a cliff.

After a while she turned around to look at him. “So, Conner”—it was a mild shock to hear her use his name—“I need to ask you one of those theoretical, hypothetical questions, like, if somebody had a small amount of marijuana right here and right now, would you smoke it with them, or would that freak you out?”

“You little druggie.” He was relieved that she was back to her more or less normal, smart-ass self.

“It’s just the one jay.” She dug into the lining of her purse and held it up.

“Why don’t you either smoke it now or get rid of it so it’s not in the truck.” He didn’t think Mrs. Foster would appreciate any police actions involving vehicles registered to her.

They climbed up on some rocks at the far end of the beach, away from the others, not that you figured any of them really cared. Conner let her smoke most of it herself, and only palmed it for a quick couple of hits. It gave his head a pleasant, spacious feel.

They got back in the truck and the girl tucked her legs underneath her and said, “You know all the drugs in the world, the ones people invent, there’s not a one of them that does as much good as the all-natural kind.”

“Penicillin.”

“That grows from a mold. Where are we going?”

It hadn’t occurred to Conner to go anywhere else, but now he considered. “I don’t know. You want to just drive around for a while?”

“Yes yes.” She pulled out a set of earbuds and fiddled with them. “Do you have any extra? These are shot.”

He was trying to concentrate on his driving, he was just high enough that it was making him stupid. “What? No.”

“That’s the problem with people now. They aren’t natural enough. They’ve lost their natural, ah, natures. You shouldn’t need some machine to listen to music. You should sing, or play an instrument.”

“What are you talking about? This is your brain on drugs, I’m thinking.”

“Are you some evil character I shouldn’t be riding around with? Huh? I guess you probably wouldn’t tell me anyway. Never mind. Sorry. Don’t mind me. I’m just practicing my people skills.”

“You need to calm down some.” He had an intimation of the many bad things that might come from his original bad idea of letting her into the truck.

“Sure, OK. Sorry.” She shook her head, then looked out her window. “This is pretty here, wherever it is.”

They were back on the Shoreline Highway, headed north. The ocean was now at a little distance from them, a flat silver in the hazy afternoon sun. There was more traffic now, people heading out to Stinson Beach. “If you want to see more of a beach beach, you know, people lying out on towels in swimsuits, there’s one coming up.”

“Not really.”

They were both quiet then. Conner let the road decide for them, carry them along past the Stinson turnoffs, along the lagoon and the unmarked road to Bolinas, into the trees then out again on the other side. It had been a long time since he’d driven out here and he waited for landmarks he recognized, a crossroads, a sign for horseback riding. “If you keep going,” he said, “you reach Point Reyes, which is like a big ocean park, with beaches and hiking trails and a lighthouse. It’s a peninsula, and it’s on a fault line. They figure the next really strong earthquake, it’ll probably just break off.”

“Then let’s go there and hope we get an earthquake.”

At Olema, Conner made the turn onto Sir Francis Drake Highway. Cows grazed in pastures edged with blackberry bushes and white and yellow wildflowers. The girl pointed to a house set back along the road, with a front porch made out of timbers. “That’s where I want to live.”

“Yeah? What would you do there?”

“I could be an ecoterrorist.”

“A what?”

“You heard me. Burn things down or blow them up if they hurt the environment. Like, housing developments and ski lodges.”

He thought that was pretty funny, but just in case she was serious, he kept his mouth shut.

They stopped at the grocery at the last little town before you entered the Point, to get bottled water and a couple of bags of snacks, since there seemed to be some munchies in play. Conner stood outside next to the car, waiting for her to get done with the restroom. The narrow bay behind him was at low tide, ribbons of water laid out along stretches of mud and kelp. His head still had blank spaces in it, so that he had to make an effort to link one thought to the next. He knew the sequence of events that had brought him here, and he knew what was before his eyes, but he couldn’t fathom any particular reason for his presence.

But where should he be instead? Nowhere else made much sense these days. He was an amateur thief, an odd-jobs man, a hustler, and maybe he was something even worse and hadn’t yet found it out.

The girl came around the front corner of the store. He couldn’t tell what was different until she came closer. She’d washed all the heavy black makeup away. Her eyes were pink and scrubbed. “Hey, no more raccoon,” Conner said.

“I can put it back on, you know.”

“No, don’t. You look better without that crap.”

She opened the truck’s door. “Wow, you’ll probably be buying me a corsage next.”

The sky had been blue above them, but as they headed toward the ocean once more, the air turned to a kind of gray glare, a layer of clouds that seemed to barely hold back the sun. The hills and woods gave way to long sandy flats, a branching lagoon, and in the distance, the ocean. The road straggled on ahead as far as they could see. A single car approached them; they saw it coming from a long way off, then closer, then it passed them and was gone. The road was now the only thing visible that had been built by the hand of man, and it seemed like a place where anything could happen, something from a movie, or a fairy tale, or a dream.

They’d been quiet for a while. When Conner looked over at the girl, she was watching the horizon where the ocean came into brief view beyond the hills. Conner said, “You know, when you go to school, they’ll have to call you some kind of name. So why don’t you tell it to me. It’s sort of freaky that you won’t.”

“I will, OK? Unless you keep bugging me. Don’t make such a big deal out of it.”

“Fine, mystery passenger.”

She rolled her eyes but didn’t answer. A little while later she said, “I want to live out here. Right here.”

“Sure. You could dig a hole in the sand and eat seagulls.”

“Do you think people are naturally bad? You know, evil?”

“Why are you asking me?” Did she never stop saying bizarre things?

“Because you’re the only one here,” she said, reasonably. “Because I wonder about it. If people start out that way, or if things happen that aren’t their fault.”

“It’s always their fault,” he said, angry at her for never shutting up.

“What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?”

“I have a headache from answering dumb questions.”

He felt her looking at him, then she said, “Can we get closer to the ocean? Can we see it from up close?”

He sighed. He couldn’t win with her. He’d been thinking of heading all the way to the lighthouse at the end of the Point, but instead he took the turnoff to South Beach, the road curving around small, sandy hills until they reached the parking lot. There was one other car parked at the far end, and it had a broken-down aspect, as if it had been there a long time.

They got out of the truck and stood on the overlook above the beach, a straight expanse of shoreline in both directions as far as they could see. The wind was strong enough to make them squeeze their eyes shut against it. The ocean beyond was enormous and wild. Huge gray-green waves broke and re-formed again and again and again. It was cold in the wind, and the girl jumped up and down and hugged herself. “Whoo-oo!”

Conner went back to the truck and found one of his old sweatshirts. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. She looked at it as if she didn’t know what it was. “Put it on.”

She pulled it over her head and poked her hands out of the too-long sleeves. “Thank you.” She studied the signs posted along the overlook, warnings about sneaker waves and sharks and cliff erosion. “Do they really have sharks? Let’s get down by the water.”

The path wound through the ice plant and beach grass. There were steep places where they skidded in sand. At the bottom the wind was less. Up against the cliff face, driftwood logs had been dragged into a space for sitting around a fire pit. “Come on,” the girl said, trudging toward the waterline.

“Look, they aren’t kidding about sneaker waves and rip currents. Don’t go in the water.”

She started running. “Hey,” Conner shouted. “What did I just tell you?”

Once she’d put some distance between them, she turned around, walking backward, and shouted something he couldn’t hear. “What?”

“Never mind. Another dumb question.”

“Don’t be that way,” he said uselessly.

She cupped her hands around her mouth. “. . . something really, really bad.”

He started toward her, walking slow and deliberate so as not to seem he was chasing her, in case she was out to do something stoned and stupid. “I can’t hear you.”

“I said, do you think if you do something really, really bad, that means you’re always going to be bad, from then on?”

“Now that’s an interesting question. Come on back and sit down so we can talk about it.”

“I’m looking for more of an . . .”

“What?”

“. . . off-the-top-of-your-head answer.”

She was skipping along the frill of water where the waves ran in. He counted ten of his heartbeats. Maybe she was one of those mental health cases who tried to kill themselves five times a week. Maybe she was just screwing around. Conner looked one way and then the other along the beach, saw no one. The waves rose up behind her. For a few moments the ocean’s force balanced their immense weight far above her head, then they broke and came booming down. Again he had the sense that anything could happen, as if the huge sky and the huge ocean were a kind of theater they had wandered into without knowing.

He raised his voice over the noise of the wind and surf. “Hey, I’ll tell you what I think if you’ll tell me your name.”

“You first.”

“I think”—he didn’t know what he thought but he kept on talking—“you don’t have to go on being like that. Like whatever shit you did. It’s just what happened. Hey! You know when’s the only time you can’t fix shit? Make up for it? When you’re dead.”

The girl was a good twenty yards away. She began moving toward Conner, not in a straight line, but angling and dawdling, as if to hide any intention of reaching him. But when she did, she looked him full in the face, and her eyes were roughened from the wind and stinging sand. “My name’s Linnea.”

“Linnea.” He’d never heard it before as a name. “Well that’s nice.”

She was curling herself inside the sweatshirt, trying to get more warmth from it, and there was a blue tint to her lips that didn’t look good. He stooped down and used his arms to warm her and they kissed, just once, confusing them both, and then they started back up the slope to the truck without saying more.

Once they reached the parking lot another car was there, with an older couple just getting out, and another car pulling in, and Conner thought that whatever had just happened between them, it would not have come about if anyone else had been there to see.

When they had driven back as far as the turnoff to Route 1, Conner said, “Do you have time for a detour? I wanted to swing up north a ways, stop at my dad’s.”

Linnea—he had to keep the name in front of him—lifted her head. “I’ve got time. I think I’m still supposed to be in school. So, do you live with him? Your dad?”

Conner said yes, because that was the simplest answer, and she said, “Me too. I mean, I live with my dad, not yours.”

He was relieved that she sounded just as casual and offhand as he did. He guessed he should ask her about her mom, and she could ask him about his.

But they could save that for later, once they decided what else to ask and to tell, and he would have liked to think some more about the kissing, but for right now it was best to act as if none of it had really happened.