The Incident on the Bridge (4 page)

F
en Harris didn't feel sleepy at all, just euphoric that he was here, at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, driving over the bridge to the island where he'd always wanted to live. There were only two narrow lanes on his side, no shoulder, and the rail was so low it was like being in an airplane. He kept trying to see, in glimpses, the things he remembered from summer visits—the sailboats he had counted from the backseat, the tiny beach where he'd written his name with a stick, spelling the whole thing out, F-E-N-I-M-O-R-E, and lying down beside it in his swimsuit so his mom could take a picture—but he couldn't see much in the dark, plus it was misty out, and he was stuck behind a white Honda that went slower and slower and then,
putter putter,
stopped. He didn't have time to check his blind spot, so he stopped, too. There was no car behind him, no headlights in the rearview mirror yet, but he was afraid to shift lanes. What if he needed to back up first? His truck literally shook in the wind. How high were they? Two hundred feet? Two fifty? High enough for an aircraft carrier to pass underneath, because he'd watched one do that before.

The door to the dirty white Honda opened, and a girl wearing shorts and pink rain boots (well,
that
was odd) stepped out without looking back or shutting her door. She walked to the rail in front of her own car and faced the black bay and the island with her hands in her pockets except when the wind blew her straight brown hair so that it whipped her face. She kept pulling it out of her eyes, which she appeared to be using to take in the view like this was a turnout, not a bridge lane. She picked the hair out of her mouth and kept staring. Crazy-calm or calm-calm. Only one black car—that's all he registered, the color—zinged past in that time, and it didn't stop, though it swerved in a jerk to avoid the open door of the girl's car. The girl turned in Fen's direction and showed him her phone. She used her hand to scoop the air, as if she were directing traffic around an accident, clearly telling him to go on.

Go on?

His uncle Carl had been expecting him for, like, two hours. Carl was a water cop, so he patrolled the harbor in a police boat. He'd know what to do if Fen called him. Should Fen call him? The dashboard clock said 12:09, and two more cars passed in the far lane, racing in the opposite direction, toward the city. Windshield getting misty. Wind whacking car.

The girl scooped the air again.
Go
on
,
she was saying. She ticktocked the phone like he was a moron who didn't speak Human Sign Language. Overhead, the streetlights formed a blinding, speechless arc.

He backed up a tiny bit, cranked the steering wheel, and eased out, watching his rearview mirror in a state of panic, swinging wide to miss the door she'd left
wide open
—she couldn't even close the door of her broken-down car?—and as he gunned it he gave her a look that said she was a crazy, self-absorbed idiot who could have killed them both, but by then she had turned away.

T
he California Highway Patrol's monitor for pylon 19 had been dead for three days now, an electrical short, the result of some bird building a nest, probably. The coastal commission was supposed to get up there and determine if CHP cameras were a threat to nesting falcons or ospreys or seagulls—Graycie Dunn couldn't remember which—but obviously they hadn't figured it out yet. Graycie watched the working screens and picked at a brownie she shouldn't be eating, and when Kyle Jukesson went to the bathroom, she couldn't help it: she got out her phone. Only time you could even act like you had a phone was when Kyle wasn't in the room. The man had no idea why anyone would communicate with the outside world, and she had to say, given his personality, a flip phone was the right choice for him. Nobody was going to follow that dude.

Graycie checked the monitors first, to make sure traffic was flowing in the same monotonous way. Car, car. Caaaaar. Empty lanes. Car. Long gap. She turned to the phone. No new messages, no picture of baby Genna in her pajamas. No word on whether the runny nose was still an issue. Graycie did, however, have one challenge waiting for her on QuizUp. Guy named Splash in Puerto Rico. What time was it in Puerto Rico?

Kyle brought hunting magazines to read on his breaks—including toilet breaks, because she'd seen him carry one in there. This gave her more time, but how much time, she couldn't recall later. Eventually she heard the toilet flush, which startled her and interrupted her game, and she didn't want to lose to Splash in Puerto Rico, so she answered the final-round question (nailing it in the first second), shut down the app while the YOU WIN! picture was still on her screen, and hurried through the braille of muting her phone. She had just tucked it back in her pocket when Kyle set a contaminated copy of
Ducks Unlimited
on her desk—way, way too close to her face. He took a bite of a brownie before he said, “How long has that car been stopped there?”

And that's when she first saw it. Monitor 3, which had a pretty bad angle for pylon 19, showed a definite stoppage.

“It can't have been that long,” Graycie said.

“You didn't go anywhere, did you?”

“No.” She wanted to say that nobody could take a break if Kyle was reading in the restroom, planning a duck vacation, but she didn't. She was new.

“You
were
watching the screens.”

“Yeah.” It's funny how lies felt the same when you were grown up. Like you were the child.

“Did you see anybody get out?”

Guilt flowed, spine to fingers. “No.”

“So it just stopped? The door didn't open?”

The car was a grainy blob of grainy bits.

“Not that I saw,” she said. “I mean, it's the worst camera for that part of the bridge, right? If the one that's supposed to be working were working, we could see what's going on.”

He called for patrol cars, saying “incident on the bridge,” not “jumper,” because jumpers made the news, and when jumpers made the news, more crazies got the idea to haul their desperate selves to the top of the bridge. Plus, maybe it wasn't a jumper at all. Maybe somebody was just sitting there waiting for help. It might be no big deal at all, what had just happened.

An undercarriage scraped the road, a foghorn blew. All the windows reflected the mostly empty room, the desks, herself, Kyle.

Kyle watched the white blob on the screen where nothing moved, so she watched the dots with him. She hoped Kyle wasn't going to tell her again about the tiny red Nike shoe with the clean white laces untied—“no bigger than this,” he always said, holding his finger and thumb two inches apart—left on the seat of a taxi the night a man jumped off the bridge holding a baby, but he didn't speak, just finished one of her aunt Estelle's brownies, and Graycie ate hers, too, though her appetite was completely gone.

H
oward Accorso steered the harbor patrol boat with one hand and popped a piece of gum through the foil onto his tongue with the other.

“Why isn't Carl on tonight?” Chrissy Truesdale asked.

“Nephew coming in.”

“That's a mistake,” she said. She sighed and shook her head, so he asked, “What?”

“Bringing a sixteen-year-old boy into your house to live. Carl just barely got through his own kid's craziness.”

“I guess it's his brother's, though. The brother that died.”

“That just makes it worse. There'll be, like, suppressed grief.”

“Did the Chippies say there'd be a spotter on the bridge?” Howard asked. If an officer didn't stand up there to show where the jumper'd been, you didn't even know where to start. The CHP was in charge of the bridge because it was a state highway, Coronado usually got to the scene first, and then it was group
numero
tres,
harbor patrol, on the water. One bridge, three forces. Messy.

“Nobody saw a jumper. There's just the car.”

The moon was half-full or half-empty, tooth-colored. Wind blew hard from the southeast. Ahead of them in the water, Howard saw a darker darkness skim by, one tiny red light on the bow, no light on the stern. “Is that Gretchen Ryman again?” he asked, and Chrissy said, “Looks like.”

They'd nearly cited Gretchen once for mooring too close to the bridge. Usually only drunks moored like that, where you could be pegged for a terrorist, but Gretchen wasn't drunk, just a sharp-eyed, skinny chick with curly blond hair who hadn't even stood up when he got on the megaphone. She had leaned back on her elbows and stared into the searchlight while two big birds, cockatoos or parrots, flanked her on the rail, squawking.

“What the—” Chrissy said, low down so only Howard could hear. “She used to be on dive patrol.”

Howard remembered her, barely. She'd gone on only a few dives and then quit because the bodies freaked her out. The night they first saw her cruising around, Chrissy had told Gretchen, nicely, that she needed to moor back at Glorietta with a three-day or rent a buoy at the flats, and she had moved her boat, no problem, but they still saw her roaming at night, as if she, like them, were working graves.

They were close to the bridge now, and the pylons looked the way Howard's son said they looked: like twenty stone giants with no heads. He slowed way down and began to coast into the black-and-white ripples that when he was young he would touch with the palm of his hand, thinking how soft water was, softer than anything else on earth.