The Incident on the Bridge (25 page)

H
e doesn't sleep. The cars diminish but never cease. There is always, after a long pause, the clattering of weight on steel, the whine of acceleration. The light stays the same, a haze beyond the branches, artificial and cold. Water drips from the leaves. Now and then he's seen a tortoiseshell cat in the urban forest, wandering where it shouldn't be, but it doesn't come into his cave. There aren't many spiders, and he isn't afraid of the ones that walk over his knees, the spindly ones that want nothing but to disappear. Tonight a possum comes waddling and sniffing. Ugly little pointy face, bright frightening eyes. It hisses before it runs.

His mother, Francisca, was the daughter of a Portuguese fisherman. A Serafim was supposed to marry the man picked out by her father, but she fell in love with Bruno Le Stang, a boy she met at the cannery, and they eloped. It was his hair that was yellow-white, his skin that was too pink for sun. Frank took after their mother, Julia after their father. They all lived upstairs in Cousin Telma's house, but their mother had an idea that she could be a movie star if she only lived in Los Angeles, and Bruno Le Stang thought so, too. They left Pismo, when Frank was eight and Julia was four, promising to fetch them both when things got going. Julia looked for Francisca Le Stang in all the movie magazines their grandmother bought until Telma said, “You're never going to find her in there, you know.” In the summers, Frank and Julia and Ben Crames started playing pirates down at Harlow's Cove.

The neon sign was visible from Frank's grandmother's attic window. He asked what
Seer
meant and his grandmother answered him in Portuguese. She pointed to the white neon hand containing in its center a blue neon eye and said it was a house of evil. He should pray if he wanted divine knowledge. Never, never to go to that false prophetess. To visit the
adivinho
would be a mortal sin.

But maybe the
adivinho
knew if Julia, when she was resurrected, would still be eight years old and if she would know what had happened to her and get to live as herself again or only as an angel, and most importantly if she would blame Frank, as everyone else did. Maybe if he couldn't visit the
adivinho,
he could send a letter. He could mail the letter from a mailbox where nobody he knew would see him, because the Seer's house was right on the busiest corner in town, one hundred feet from the church, in full view, night and day, of his grandmother.

The hardest part was figuring out how the Seer could write back. The letters couldn't come to his grandmother's house. He told the Seer his trouble, though, and the Seer understood. When the first letter came to Frank with the return address of Iron Mike's American Fitness, Santa Monica, California, he was lucky to be the one who was sorting the mail. That way he could open it by himself and act unsurprised when the next one came and he had to explain that he was tired of being so puny and weak, getting beat up by older boys; that he could earn more, too, if he built himself into a man, and that's why he'd been doing so many push-ups in his room. “Iron Mike” never failed to write as long as Frank never failed to send money from what he earned fishing and clamming. It was quite a shock when Frank visited ten years later and found Iron Mike was an old woman. It didn't take away from her wisdom, though. Far from it. Are not many things an illusion? Is not the physical world a mask?

He sleeps and wakes, sleeps and wakes. It's important to come out of the urban forest before the sun rises, before the runners and bikers might see him, so in the dripping black hour before dawn he goes to the park bathroom and washes his face, so old now, so different from what he really is, no wonder Julia can't remember.

K
nowing that she's close to home makes her stronger. Either that or the duct tape is more clumsily attached. This time she doesn't stop pointing her toes and sliding her ankles up and down when she feels the tight panic that stops her breath. She keeps pointing and sliding, stretching and wiggling, up and down, side to side. She chews on the gag in case chewing will work. She grunts like a pig and chews the wet edges of wet cotton. The skin is raw on her right calf when she finally frees her ankles. It stings when she stands up and looks in the moonlight for something sharp. The knife she pointed at him is not on the table or the floor but there must be other knives. She can walk now and she can open drawers by standing backward and groping at the handles behind her back.

There are other knives, but she's no contortionist. One after the other she drops them. Her hands are cramped, her fingers are cramped, her head is cramped. She thinks of things that would never work—light a match and burn through the tape (match after match falls without lighting, then one flares only to burn her fingers, nothing else), rub the tape against the side of a drawer (hurts and doesn't work), rub the tape against the metal edge of the counter (hurts even more and doesn't work)—but maybe all the wriggling and chafing and scraping has made the glue dry up, because she's jumping up and down in a semihysterical state, chewing with sore jaws on the disgusting gag, when a hand tears free. One hand, then the other. All she has to do now is take off the gag; she can untie it and throw it down.

“Help me!” she screams. Her voice is still wrong. Crackly and faint. The only sounds are of distant machines: foghorn, train horn, train wheels on staccato tracks. A weird chirping bird noise. Or is it bats? Owls? It goes on and on, a kind of far-off shrieking. She cries till she's even more hoarse, till her voice sounds like crackled paper. Outside, the light is pewter. She can see one streetlight and the edge of the island, the square lights of hotel rooms, shadows passing now and then, water dipping and cresting, hollows of moonlight, the night. Out the other side of the boat, the bridge like a smeary crown.

Her lips sting at the corners where the gag made sharp cuts she can't help licking. The boat has never been cleaned. The dirt of it makes her scared and sick but it's like when you have to do something gross, like unclog the toilet or reach into the disposal; you just say what her mom always says, which is you can always wash yourself afterward and you'll be clean again. She finds pasta pinwheels in a box and sucks on them like cough drops. Cans of tomatoes and cat food and Mrs. Dowder's Major Chowders. Books she would make fun of if she saw them in a store:
Same Soul, Many Bodies.
Reincarnation and Karma.
The Path to Wisdom Through Past Lives.
She looks on the shelf where Frank put the picture of the little girl. A zippered book, fake leather starting to tear, is full of envelopes from someone named Iron Mike. Iron Mike is a cartoon muscleman showing his pecs. Lines radiate from his arms as if he's the Virgin of Guadalupe. There's a business card that says
SEER:
Reuniting Souls in Transit, Pacific Coast Highway, Pismo Beach.
A picture of a large covered porch where a woman stands with her face in shadow. She might be pretty, based on her figure, the clear skin of her chin, and her slender neck.
Serafim House,
someone has printed neatly on the back.

A newspaper clipping that has been cut out and folded says:

PISMO, CA: A girl, 8, was found with her hands and feet bound at Harlow's Cove around 6 p.m. Monday and could not be revived, having been buried by an apparent rockfall. The girl's brother, 12, and another boy, 11, came running after the collapse, as did Agostinho de Ferro, a Grover City fisherman, who answered the boys' calls for help. The three children had been playing a pirate game, according to the testimony of both boys, and had dug a cave into the side of the cliff, leaving the girl with her hands and feet bound while they went to “gather the ransom.” Due to the age of the two boys and the instability of the cliff, the death has been ruled an accident. The city is urged to make plans to block off Harlow's Cove, which is accessed by a footpath known to locals. “It is a tragedy for all concerned,” said the investigating officer.

He'll come back, won't he? Frank will come back and unlock the door and she'll be ready to lunge out and grab the gun. She lies down with the box of pasta and tries not to lick the corners of her mouth, tries to stay awake, closes the white jewelry box over the ballerina, imagines the stingray, the sea in darkness, the sand dollars 625 to a square yard, purple cilia quivering.

O
n Tuesdays, Jerome hit with Rolf at ten o'clock, which he couldn't cancel, not without telling his dad why he didn't owe the money, and if he told his dad he canceled, what reason would he give?
The girl I liked but who didn't like me and who I never mentioned to you is dead somewhere in the bay?

He went to the courts and played horribly, which made sense if you thought of what might happen to your game if you no longer cared about your game. He played Brian Banks after that and beat him 2 and 0, which felt better because winning always felt better than sucking even if you were a monster for caring about a game on a day like this one. Neither Rolf nor Brian knew anything about Thisbe so at least Jerome didn't have to talk about it.

When he got off the courts, though, there was a message from Camilla Waller, who wasn't even a friend, asking if he'd meet her at Panera at six o'clock. She said she had something to tell him about Thisbe.

Camilla was a CoSA girl, meaning she went to the school of the arts part-time, and her hair was currently sherbet orange. At first he couldn't even figure out why she had his phone number, but then he remembered they'd been forced into the same Spanish group last year.
OK
, he typed, because he hated it when people just said
k,
and he fell asleep in his tennis clothes even though he never napped unless he had a fever, and then he took Maddy to the dog beach and threw the Kong into the water about a hundred times because the new manager of the apartments hated Maddy and always looked like she wished she could revoke permission to have dogs, so it was important to tire Maddy out.

The ocean was gray and the beach was gray and he found himself watching the low curl of the surf like it owed him something. A lady throwing tennis balls for her Lab said what at least one person always said at the dog beach: “I thought Dobermans hated the water.” “Not this one,” he said, and threw the Kong again. There were no dolphins. Nothing but pelicans, their bodies like swords as they pierced the water.