The Year of Fog (25 page)

59

D
AY 229
. Goofy’s voice on the phone, breathless. “You should get down here.”

“What?”

“A guy says he saw the Rossbottom board at Ocean Beach.”

“Don’t let him out of your sight.”

On the way to Dean’s Foggy Surf Shop, I go twenty miles over the speed limit. When I get there, Goofy is standing outside with two guys who smile and say hello—not just polite, but friendly.

“This is Abby,” Goofy says. “Abby, meet Darrin and Greg.”

Darrin wears a cast on his left arm. Fortyish and clean-cut, he looks like one of those doctor types who can afford to live in Pacific Heights but lives in the Sunset instead, just to be close to Ocean Beach. Greg is a short, muscular thirty-something with long sideburns and a crooked nose. He looks beat-up in that way I used to find attractive back in high school.

“Was it one of you who saw the Rossbottom board?” I ask.

Greg lifts his hand, and I notice he’s wearing one of those WWJD bracelets. “I did.”

“When?”

“Six or seven months back.”

“That’s it,” I say, feeling a rush of nervous energy. “That’s when it happened—July. Are you sure it was a Rossbottom?”

“Positive. It was a cold day, and there was hardly anybody out. I was on the beach, waiting, hoping things would clear, and this guy comes up to me, wants to know about surf spots south of here. The first thing I notice is the size of his board—twelve feet—and then the frog. Couldn’t believe I was seeing an honest-to-God Rossbottom. Pure balsa, it was beautiful.”

“What color was it?” I ask.

“Red.”

“You sure it wasn’t a knockoff, dude?” Darrin asks.

“Well, that’s what I thought at first.” Greg looks at me. “There are only about thirty of these left in the world, so your chances of running into one on any given day are pretty slim. But it had the Rossbottom signature, you know, down on the tail, scratched into the wood. A little
r
, a big flourish on the
m
. Gorgeous craftsmanship.”

“What did he look like?”

“Blond, I guess, thirties, forties. I don’t know.”

I turn to Goofy. “Did you show him the sketches?”

She nods.

“It might have been him,” Greg says, “but I really couldn’t say. People come and go. I know the locals, but the rest all run together after a while.”

“Do you know where he was from?”

He pauses and thinks for a few seconds, twisting the bracelet around on his wrist. “No, but he said he was planning to go see some Tico friends.”

“Pardon?”

“Ticos,” Goofy says. “You know, Costa Ricans.”

“Yeah,” Greg says. “He said something about testing out the Killer Longboard on the Gold Coast.”

“That’s what they call Costa Rica,” Goofy explains, “on account of the yellow sand.”

I think of the elusive bumper sticker from the yellow van, the uppercase T. At this moment, is it memory or imagination that fills out the word—Ticos?

“Did he say anything else?” I ask. “Like about a family or anything?”

“That’s all. He was just this guy, nothing special.”

“Did he say where he was headed in Costa Rica?”

“I told you all I know, sister.”

Darrin knocks his knuckles against his cast. “I’m guessing he’d be on the Central Pacific coast. That’s where you get the best beaches for longboarding. I was down there a couple of years ago, stayed in Playa Hermosa for a whole summer. You get a lot of American surfers in that area.”

“Sure,” says Greg. “If the good Lord smiled on me and gave me a Rossbottom, I’d be itching to test it at Pavones or Boca Barranca. Maybe Tamarindo. Hermosa’s nice because it’s central to everything on the Central Pacific, in the middle of the action.” He crosses his arms over his chest and says, “Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.” Greg catches me looking at his WWJD bracelet. “You know, Jesus was the über-surfer. All that stuff about him walking on water? He wasn’t walking, dude, he was surfing.”

I laugh—a genuine laugh—feeling almost giddy with hope. This is the first real hope I’ve felt in a long time. Maybe it’s nothing, but then again, maybe it’s something.

“You got time for lunch?” Goofy asks.

“Sorry, rain check? I’ve got some packing to do.”

“I did pretty good, huh?” Goofy says.

“You did great. The next number two special is on me.”

Driving home, I find myself singing along with the radio. Finally, I have a next step: Costa Rica. That’s something real. Movement. Not just sitting around and waiting. Not just searching the same old streets, finding nothing. Maybe it’s a tangent, a step in the wrong direction. But there’s the small possibility that it’s none of those things.

I’m thinking about Costa Rica, how I used to want to go there. Ramon spent a month there when he was in college and always talked about how beautiful it was, how trekking through the rain forest was like being on another planet. “Everything’s on a different scale,” he said, “the trees, the flowers, the insects. And the colors are really amazing.” Oddly, it’s one item on a list of hundreds that I used to think I’d check off before my thirtieth birthday. I’d completely forgotten that list, all the things I never got around to. Looking back, it seems that it was somewhere around my twenty-eighth birthday that time suddenly sped up, and the months and years began to pass with frightening speed. My photographs are testament to this fast-forwarding of time—thousands of contact sheets stored in plastic sleeves in more than a dozen three-ring binders, miniature recordings of faces and places, images that, taken together and in their proper chronology, relate the narrative of my life. At the end of each year, taking stock, I’d realize how much I’d failed to accomplish.

Then came Jake, and Emma, and I began to feel that I was
doing
something again, going somewhere. Until that moment on Ocean Beach, when everything suddenly stopped. No more pictures, no more story. Just a terrible dead end.

I
go over to Jake’s without calling first. The house smells like eggs and bacon, his favorite evening meal. I find him in the kitchen grading papers.

“Hungry?” he asks, casual, as if the argument at La Cumbre never happened.

“No, thanks.”

I sit down across from him. He needs a haircut and a shave. Still, he looks good. I see what I saw in him that first day at the school, the deceptively disheveled look of a guy who, in truth, has it all together. But he’s different now, too. Older. Less at home in the world. His confidence is gone. I can see it in the way he sits, shoulders slumped. The way the pen rests in his hand—loose, without conviction.

“What’s the topic?” I ask, nodding toward the stack of papers.

“Plato’s dialogues—How can Socrates’ disavowals of knowledge be reconciled with his confident action and bold moral assertions?”

“They get that stuff?”

“You’d be surprised.” He shuffles through the papers, then stops, as if forgetting what he was looking for. A plate of food sits by his elbow, untouched.

“I’m going to Costa Rica,” I say.

“What?”

“It’s about the Billy Rossbottom board. There’s a decent chance the couple from the yellow van is in Costa Rica, or at the very least have been there recently.”

Before he can say anything, I explain my encounter with Goofy and the guys outside the shop. He sits with his arms across his chest, listening silently. When I’m finished, he stands up and walks over to the sink, as if he has something he needs to do there. But he just stands with his back to me, looking down at the dirty dishes. “Why are you doing this?”

“I have to. This is the last detail I can remember from that day, the last lead I haven’t explored. I have to follow it through.”

“Some stoned surfer thinks he might have seen a guy with a frog on his surfboard, and that’s enough for you drop everything and head to Central America?”

“The guy wasn’t stoned, and he didn’t just
think
he saw the board, he remembered it in detail.”

“Okay, let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that it’s the same guy. That was a long time ago. If it really was him, and he really was going to Costa Rica, it’s not likely he’d still be there now.”

“Maybe not. But if these people are kidnappers, they’re not going to be itching to get back to the States. They’d probably want to lay low, just kind of disappear. And if he’s serious enough to have this rare, expensive Rossbottom board, then it stands to reason he might want to surf these famous longboarding spots.”

“That’s a lot of
if
s. You have to remember what Sherburne told us on the very first day. There are only 115 long-term kidnappings of children by strangers each year. That’s out of almost 797,500 reports of missing children—.0014 percent.”

“This isn’t about percentages,” I say. “It’s not like your Rubik’s Cube. Numbers are irrelevant.”

“I wish that were true, but it’s not. You want Emma to be alive, so you’re taking every detail you can possibly fit into your belief system and using it to corroborate your theory.”

“Is that so different from what you’re doing? You have to believe she’s dead, so you ignore any evidence to the contrary.”

“You’ve got to let this go, Abby.”

“Why don’t you come with me?”

“To Costa Rica,” he says, incredulous.

“Yes.”

He turns to face me. “Every morning, I think I can’t get up and face another twenty-four hours without Emma. But the memorial service did something, it helped somehow. And now I’m able to get through each day by reminding myself that Emma’s not suffering. Do you know the things that went through my mind before that man found her shoe? Every day, every night. The horrible things I imagined?”

“I know. I imagined those things, too, and the problem is, I still do.”

Jake flinches as if he’s been struck, but I can’t back down. This is too important.

“If there’s any possibility at all that she’s still alive,” I say, “how can we sit here and do nothing? I’m able to get through the days because I let myself imagine what it will be like when we have her back with us. I think about the first time we see her—what we’ll say to her, where we’ll take her. I think about how she might have changed.”

He bites his lip. His glasses have little spots on them, like they haven’t been cleaned in a while. “I love you, Abby. Through all of this, I never stopped. But I’m serious when I say you have a choice. Go on this crazy trip, or stay here and try to make a life with me.”

“Why does it have to be a choice?”

He turns away and starts unloading the dishwasher. One by one, he moves the glasses from the rack into the cabinet.

I go over to the dishwasher. “Let me help.”

He doesn’t look at me, just says, “I’ve got a lot of work to do. You should go.”

“Please don’t do this. I just need more time. I’m still the same woman you wanted to marry.”

“You’re wrong. Neither one of us is the same.”

And he’s right. I know he’s right.

Driving home, the cool ocean air blowing in through the windows, I feel the full weight of my choice. I remember how, on the night of our first date, I called Annabel when I got home and gushed about Jake for over an hour. I was too excited to fall asleep. At dawn the next day I was still sitting on the sofa, staring out the window, fantasizing about a future with this man I’d just met. I knew he felt something, too, and I couldn’t quite believe my luck. I still remember clearly how the phone rang at eight a.m. sharp, and even before I answered, I knew it would be him.

“Did I wake you up?” Jake asked.

“No. I never even fell asleep.”

“Neither did I,” he said. “Can I see you this afternoon?”

“Of course.”

Everything, it seemed, was falling into place.

60

I
SPEND THE
next day on the Internet, making flight reservations, printing out bus schedules and city maps, researching the most popular surfing spots. The Frommers website says one can get by in Costa Rica on thirty-five dollars a day. Based on my current bank account, that gives me three months. And then there are the regular monthly bills. A cash advance on my Visa will cover two months, but after that the credit card will be useless. I still have some money due from clients, but not much. When I’m forced to actually sit down and do the math, the numbers aren’t encouraging, and I can’t keep accepting money from Annabel when she has a new baby on the way. My only choice is to sell something.

Most of the art in my apartment is my own, or work by friends for which I’ve made a trade—nothing that I’d be able to sell for a significant sum. But I do have one piece that my friend Janet has been coveting for years. Janet collects the work of Randolph Gates, an early-twentieth-century photographer known for his Southwestern landscapes. The photograph is called “Light in Arizona,” and it was a gift from Ramon the day before I left for college in Knoxville. Back then, I loved the way the photograph captured the eerie quality of the desert beneath a quarter moon, but I didn’t know anything about its worth. I had admired it many times in Ramon’s apartment, where it hung above the old brick fireplace. On our last night together, while I was lying in bed, Ramon got up, made some noise in the living room, and returned a few minutes later with a big, flat package wrapped in butcher paper.

“To remember me by,” he said, laying the package at the foot of the bed. Before I even opened it, I knew what it was.

“But you love this photograph,” I said.

“So do you, and I want you to have it.”

“We have forty-five minutes before my curfew,” I said. “Come to bed.”

He set the package carefully against the wall, then told me all the things he was going to miss about me, promising to love me until I was in my grave. I tried to think of words that would hold some equal weight, but they came out sounding false. I drove to Knoxville the next day with the photograph in the back seat, swathed in bubble wrap. It has been with me ever since. I’ve never grown tired of it. It’s not just the beauty of the photograph that makes me so attached to it. It was Ramon’s final gift to me, and as such it has served, somehow, to freeze him in time. The photograph probably has less to do with the real Ramon—the man I did not love enough, the one I left—than with some idealized version of him. Like Magnani’s paintings of Pontito, the image I’ve created of Ramon in my mind is not about the subject—Ramon—so much as it is about the person I was when I knew him.

The first time my friend Janet saw the photograph hanging in the entryway of my loft, she offered me six thousand dollars. “Ask me again if I’m ever really desperate for money,” I said.

Janet did ask again, on two separate occasions. Each time, I said no without a second thought.

“It’s a good offer,” she said. “The most you’d get from a gallery would probably be five.”

“I’m beginning to think I could never sell it.”

“Let me know if you change your mind.”

I find her number in my address book and make the call. “Wow,” Janet says. “I haven’t heard from you in a while. Not since—” She clears her throat, embarrassed.

“I don’t think I ever thanked you for attending the memorial service.”

There are voices and music in the background on her end of the line, and I realize she must be having one of her famous parties. I used to be invited to every one of them, but over the past few months most of my friends have gradually stopped calling. This is my fault: in order to receive phone calls, you have to make them.

“It was a beautiful service,” she says. “How are you holding up?”

“Good days and bad days.”

“You know, if there’s anything I can do…”

“Actually, that’s why I’m calling. Remember the Randolph Gates photograph?”

“Of course.”

“Still interested?”

“Definitely.”

“This is kind of urgent. Can I bring it over tonight?”

“Sure.”

I hang up feeling a bit shaky. Cheap. As if I’ve just sold a part of my personal history for a song. The truth is, I’d sell far more than a photograph to find Emma. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do, no bargain I wouldn’t make. Years ago, when my father divorced my mother for a younger woman he met on a business trip in Germany, I asked him how he could do it, how his conscience would allow him to simply abandon her. “We all have a little Robert Johnson in us,” he said. “We’re all capable of bartering away our soul. The question is whether or not we chance upon the devil.” At the time, I thought he was just making excuses, but now I know he was right.

There’s one thing I should do before I wrap the photo for Janet. I go upstairs and get my Leica. Then I adjust the lighting in the foyer, straighten the photo. I feel somewhat ridiculous, standing in my own apartment like some silly tourist, taking a picture of a picture. But if I develop the photo just right, striking the correct balance of light and shadow, I can maintain something of the original’s character. It won’t be the same, I’ll always know it’s a fraud, but it might at least be a comforting facsimile.