The Incident on the Bridge (30 page)

T
he skate park was the right thing, actually. He got into a groove after a while, forgot everything. It was better than snorkeling because you had to pay attention or you'd wreck yourself.

But when he stood by the bay again, it came back. The bridge, Thisbe, his failure, Ted. The tide had gone out and the sun had come out and the water was a freakishly pretty shade of blue. It enticed you. It said everything was fine, perfect, living, and good. He walked out on the sand where he was pretty sure he'd written his name with a stick that time with his mom, the whole thing, not just
Fen.
It had seemed like a big beach then, but it wasn't. It was kind of gross, too, how the sand bled into mud, and the rippled mud was covered in what looked like green fur. People were disgustingly lazy, that was clear. Plastic bags and stuff. A cup here, a can there. Pathetic. The more he looked, the more trash he could see, including what looked like somebody's boot.

Fen stopped walking. He could see the boot's color, and it was pink. It could be a coincidence. The wrong size. From a distance, it looked small. If he went out there and it was maybe the right size, he should call his uncle. Or Ted. No, his uncle. Because maybe it was evidence that she was dead. This led to the much more terrible fear that it wasn't just a boot but a body. Nausea bloomed. He couldn't see anything like that, though, nowhere, not in the water, not on the green fur pelt, and he needed to man up. He took his shoes off so he wouldn't slime them and he left his skateboard balanced on the shoes so sand wouldn't get in the trucks, and he walked out a little farther until he was standing right over the empty boot. It was pink. It was not a child's. He would call his uncle now.

A
very skinny man was sitting on her aunt's sofa. Africa-skinny. Fortyish or more, wearing a white dress shirt that was too large in the neck. New member of the Hand of the Living God, no doubt, via the Hand of the Living Estelle. Graycie had no problem with charity but it would have been more relaxing to just sit at Estelle's table by herself and eat dinner rolls and feed Genna mashed lima bean soup until it was time to get ready for her shift.

“This is Awate,” Estelle said, holding Genna on her hip. “Awate, this is my niece that works for the California Highway Patrol. Tell him what happened on the bridge, Graycie. Tell Awate so he can pray for that girl's family!”

Graycie didn't want to tell him anything. She should never have told her mother about the incident, but on the phone her mother had said she'd seen a flyer for a girl who went missing on the bridge, and Graycie had just blurted it out: “We called that in. It happened on my shift.” Naturally, after Graycie told her mother, her mother told Estelle.

Graycie tried not to look at Awate. Maybe he wouldn't show an interest and they could move on to other topics.

“I drive the taxi,” Awate said. “I am all eyes.”

Whatever that meant.

Estelle called from the kitchen, “Tell him, Graycie! He drives that bridge all the time. He knows how high it is.”

“Would you like something to drink, Mr. Awate?” Graycie asked.

He pointed to a full glass and an empty plate.

“That steep hill has parched me out,” Graycie said. “I'll be right back.”

Graycie took time to cut a lemon wedge and squeeze it into her glass of iced tea, throw in some sugar, sneak a roll from the basket draped with a red napkin, admire the hummingbird feeder (
Mm-hmm! Look at that, baby!
) that Estelle was showing Genna on the back patio, but Mr. Awate was all eyes, as he said, when Graycie returned to the dark living room.

“You are saying,” he prompted. “The highways.”

She didn't go all into it, just said it was a bridge incident, car parked up there, harbor patrol called to search the water, nobody found anything. A girl's ID in the car. “We would have seen more if the cameras had all been working,” she said.

Awate had very good posture on the couch. A formal way of sitting, with both of his elegant knees together instead of slouched out, his hands with their long, slender fingers resting on his knees, statuelike, but he now brought his fingers together and blinked.

“You are saying a she,” he said.

“A what?”

“A she.”

“Uh-huh. They found a driver's license in the car. That's how they knew.”

“You are saying a white car?”

“It looked white on the camera. It's not that clear, the colors, leastways.”

“Long-hair girl?” He drew a line below his collarbone, and she shrugged.

“I think,” she said.

“But cameras, they are showing?”

“Well, they have 'em, but they weren't all working.”

“This, it happens Sunday?”

“Yeah. Sunday night, Monday morning.”

“I am picking up this girl.”

“Pardon?”

“I am picking up this girl on the night.”

“You picked up a girl on the bridge?”

“I do.”

“And did what?”

“She say,
I am not having money. Leave me here.
So I am.”

Aunt Estelle was standing in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen when he said this, and Genna was opening and closing her small hand, the light from the street muted by the drapes that shielded Aunt Estelle's red velvet sofa from the rotting of the sun.

“You're positive,” Graycie said. If the man wasn't crazy and what he said was true, it was very, very good news.

He looked startled and offended. “No,” the man said. “I am
not
having AIDS.”

Was he dense? Like, really, really dense? It took her a second to see how he'd gotten from the word
positive
to
AIDS.
Graycie said, “All I mean is, you for sure picked up a girl Sunday night on the Coronado Bridge.”

The man nodded, so she got his phone number, writing it down on a notepad with a not-very-sharp pencil. She needed to call it in for sure.

“I need to go,” she said to Aunt Estelle.

“Not before you eat,” Estelle said. “Not before this little one has her lima beans, right, sugar? Not before you and Mr. Awate and this little angel have eaten my famous succotash.”

F
en stood by the half-buried boot and felt ice-cold. “Should I tell Ted?” he asked his uncle on the phone.

Carl said, “No.”

“Does it mean she's dead?”

His uncle didn't answer.

Fen didn't want to talk anymore.

“I'll send someone out there to get it,” Carl said. “Are you okay?”

He said he was, but he didn't feel okay.

“Wait there until I come or somebody else comes. I think it will be a woman named Elaine Lord. She's very nice. Just wait nearby, okay?”

He said he would, but he didn't want to. He walked back to where his shoes were and stared at his skateboard.

“It's important that you stay because if the tide comes back in, the boot might get covered back up and washed away,” Carl said.

“Okay,” he said. That was different than waiting for someone to babysit him, so he did it. He took his skateboard and his shoes to a bench and waited for his feet to dry, the boot stuck in his mind the way it stuck in the mud, half in, half out.

T
he number Skelly called for Awate Mebrahtu went to a voice mailbox that had not been set up yet.

“Nothing?” Elaine asked.

“Nothing.”

He called Graycie back to see if he'd written the number down wrong.

Graycie had the same numbers.

“Can you ask him again?”

“He went home.”

“Home where?”

Graycie was silent.

“You didn't get his address?”

Hold on while she asked her aunt Estelle.

Aunt Estelle wasn't sure, but she would call the pastor and ask if he knew.

The pastor, it turned out, was not home.