The Incident on the Bridge (22 page)

W
hile Fen waited for his uncle in the Lockes' house, he sat in their living room wishing he could go back to the car. The coffee table was the kind with a glass top, and he stared through it, wondering if he should pull out one of the giant books and pretend to read, or if it would be weird to check out the board games. Five minutes passed. Then six. His uncle didn't reappear, and no one else came in. He could hear muted voices upstairs—a girl's, a man's, a woman's. Creaking sounds now and then, as if people were walking. He quietly opened the Monopoly box and took out two dice, one white, one red. He closed the box and put it back under the glass, then set the dice on the table so it was clear he wasn't stealing them. He'd have stuffed them in his pocket if he meant to steal them. Then he turned a picture frame on the table beside the sofa so he could see it better. One of the girls was the Ted girl he'd met at the snack bar, but younger and smaller and flat-chested, her dress pink with skinny straps. He was brushing dust from the glass with his thumb when he heard footsteps on the stairs. Ted came into the room and caught him looking at her picture. He didn't know what to say to her. Had his uncle told her parents yet? This was a freaky-bad situation.

She was still wearing her board shorts and he could see the bikini lines under a white shirt. “Hey,” she said, not smiling.

He wished he hadn't grabbed the dice out of her Monopoly game, but they were in his left hand now, so—

“Did your uncle make you come over?”

He shook the dice in his hand a little. “No.” When Fen's father had died, the school secretary and the principal and all his teachers had said, “I'm sorry about your dad,” but only one student besides his friend Greg had even mentioned it. Hillary Tieran had walked up to him at the cafeteria and said, “Sorry about your dad. That sucks the worst.”

So Fen said, “I'm sorry about your sister. That sucks the worst.” Then he wondered what she'd think about him saying that once she knew he'd been up on the bridge and had done nothing to help.

Ted stared at the floor for an uncomfortably long time. What she was looking at was a red-and-blue Persian-type rug, and in the part of the rug where she was looking, a tree grew out of another tree and flowed into another tree. Finally she said, without looking up from the tree chain, “She's not dead.”

This wasn't what he'd expected at all. It wasn't what his uncle had said. Carl had said she jumped. Fen rolled the dice and they stopped on four and two.

“What are you playing?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Fen knew that it was hard to let it sink in. Fen's father hadn't looked believably dead in the hospital. You had to say to yourself over and over,
He's dead.
His nose and one cheek were bruised from falling but not so bruised that you'd think he couldn't be fine. His running shoes were in a bag like he might want them when he woke up. The piece of toast he'd been eating before he left for the run was still sitting on the plate in the kitchen. It still had jam on it. The jam was shiny.

Then Ted said, “They're not going to find her in the water or wherever. She would never do that.”

“Would never do what?”

“Jump.”

He just stared at her. He really, really wanted her to be right.

“They say she did but they haven't found her. Because she didn't do it! She was too scared of stuff. She couldn't even jump off the high dive! She didn't like to sail because she was scared when it got windy. She's not going to jump off a giant bridge.”

He should say that he'd been there and he'd seen her and she'd told him to go around her car, but that might mess with what Ted was believing, and he didn't want to be the person who made her stare right at death.

“Where'd my mom go?” Ted asked.

Fen pointed toward the kitchen and picked up the dice again, rubbing them against one another, mentally begging her not to go see if that's where her mom had gone, because that was also the way Carl had gone, and they were probably talking.

“I wish everyone would just go home,” she said. “No offense.”

She was leaning her elbows on her knees and turning a braided string bracelet around on her wrist like she'd never noticed it before. He was so glad she didn't leave.

“I'm going to make signs and put them up,” she said. “Want to help me?”

He did and he didn't. “What kinds of signs?”

“Missing person signs.”

He studied the trees in the rug. Making signs could be good, or it could be bad. If Ted was the only one who thought Thisbe wasn't dead, would Carl be angry with him? “Well,” Fen said, “are you sure that's the right plan?”

“Yes. She wouldn't jump because she's a chicken, which is a good thing for once. She has to be somewhere. Somebody has to have seen her.”

He didn't want to say,
Well, she didn't look chicken when I saw her
. He shrugged, like to say,
Okay.
When she went upstairs, he followed her.

T
ed kept texting him, and Jerome didn't know what to say.

No
, he said.
No no no no no.
I didn't see her. I don't know where she is.

Fuck Clay for not answering his text. For not even saying, “Yeah, I heard” or “No, I haven't” when Jerome asked if he'd heard what happened to Thisbe. On the shelf in his room Jerome had a picture of the two of them: Jerome “Jeronimo” Betchman and Clay “Killer” Moorehead in their soccer uniforms, eleven years old. Jerome ripped the photo out of the cheap frame and tore the two of them into little pieces that he flushed down the toilet. He felt no better so he tried screaming. His mother wasn't home but the neighbors might be, so he held the pillow over the back of his head and screamed into the mattress. Maddy whined and turned in circles and poked his arm with her nose, so he petted her, but he felt no better. He got his phone out and texted Clay again, right under his own unanswered question. He typed:
She jumped off the bridge, you fucker.

He turned off his phone and dropped it in the trash and went back to lying in his bed with the pillow smashed into his face, but the pillow couldn't stop him from remembering the way she sat drinking by herself the last time he'd seen her, the night he should have said,
If you want, I could give you a ride home.

F
en watched Ted type words into a computer. The books on the mahogany shelves had all sorts of legal titles he read to himself while she typed:
MISSING
.

He couldn't help asking, “Who's that?” and pointing to a framed photo of Ted and Thisbe with two muscled-up college guys.

“Josh and Aaron. Stepbrothers. They go to Duke and Wharton. As my stepdad will tell you if you give him five seconds of your time.”

She found a digital photo of her sister laughing, and said, “What about this one?”

“Nice.”

Ted typed,
Last seen
, and then stopped. “I don't want to say she was last seen on the bridge.”

“How else will you find witnesses?” Fen said.
Like me, for example.

“Yeah,” she said. “That's true.”

He wiped his hands on his trunks and saw that he had sand stuck to both ankles. Also his calf. He was not a complete ass, was he? He could tell her he had been on the bridge and he was a witness before his uncle or her mom came upstairs and said it for him?

She typed,
Last seen beside a white Honda on the eastbound Coronado Bridge.
“Is it eastbound or westbound?”

He definitely had sand inside his trunks, too. He felt sick and light-headed. Sandy, itchy, sick. “What?”

“They said she was coming back to the island. Is that the eastbound or westbound side? Or maybe north?”

After she wrote
westbound
, she stopped again. “I wonder what she was wearing. These things always say what she was wearing.”

He would tell her, and telling would be the right thing. “Pink boots,” he said.
There.
It was done. Confessed.

“Yeah,” Ted said without even turning around. “My mom said she was wearing them when she left here but would she keep them on? They're so dorky.”

Pause. Inhale. Exhale.
Tell her.
“That's not what I mean. I mean when
I
saw her, she was wearing pink boots. Also a black hooded sweatshirt. And shorts.”

Now he was a different type of ass, based on her expression.

“What?”

“I saw a girl beside a white Honda on the bridge last night. I didn't know it was your sister until my uncle told me why we were coming to your house. I didn't know how to tell you.” Fen turned the dice over in his pocket and watched Ted's fingers resting on the keyboard but not typing anything.

“What else.”

“She, like, waved me on,” Fen said.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged miserably. “Like,
I've got a phone and I'm fine here.
”

“Then what happened?”

“I don't know. I thought she must have called somebody to tow her or bring a gas can. So I left.”

“And she was, like, still outside the car.”

He nodded.

“Was she crying or anything?”

“No.”

Ted frowned. “What about, like, other cars?”

“Other people passed. Not a lot, but a few. They saw us. Saw her, I guess. They'd have to.”

The dust on the venetian blinds had been smudged by a finger. A steel fan turned slowly overhead. Fen tried to think of what Thisbe could possibly have done next that would mean she was hiding somewhere and not coming home. Walk off the bridge? With nobody seeing her? If so, why would she hide all the next day?

Ted typed:
Wearing pink rain boots, black sweatshirt, and shorts.
He tried to read the back of her head, the way she was sitting, to know if she blamed and hated him as he deserved to be blamed and hated for not going up to Thisbe and asking if there was something wrong and could he help her in some way.

Ted wasn't crying. She wasn't talking. She was telling the print button to print. So he hadn't killed her hope? He felt like cold juice had just shot up through all his veins and into his brain, but he didn't know if he should be relieved. Fen rubbed the dice in his pocket and they made small sounds.

“There,” Ted said. “Now maybe those other people who drove by will say something.” She waited for more copies to slide out, more and more and more, and grabbed two rolls of tape from a drawer. “Let's go,” she said.

He assumed they were going to show the flyers to her parents and his uncle and the police, which would be excruciating, he bet, but she pulled a blank piece of paper from the printer, and while they were standing in the hall, she closed her bedroom door and taped the paper to it. Then she wrote:

WENT WITH PHIN TO SEE IF ANYONE HAS SEEN THISBE LATELY.

“Fen,” he said.

She looked blankly at him.

“Never mind,” he said. He wanted to hurry. He could text his uncle, which would be so much easier than talking to him face to face.

“We need to go out this way,” she said, and she took him downstairs and out a side door in the laundry room that he hoped was hidden from everyone else. “Take that one,” she said quietly, pointing to a ten-speed parked under a little roof that protected three bikes. He was relieved to see the tires weren't flat. Ted gently rolled a cruiser out of the rack and opened the gate, glancing behind her to a yard that was obscured by a flowering bush. She pushed the bike to the road, climbed on, and looked back to see that Fen was following.

“Stop watching me,” she said to a boy who was sitting on his lawn, throwing a beach ball at a homemade basketball hoop that was nailed to a tree.

“I'm not,” the kid said sullenly, but he was, Fen was sure of it, and they went on down the road.