Under the Bridge (9 page)

Megan drew another scene from nature, this time a sparse and elegant tree, with thin branches, rendered in a delicate line. Yet out of place were the dark birds she added almost as an afterthought. One dark bird was nestled in the branches, slightly camouflaged, by the arch of the bough. Another emerged from behind the trunk—neither raven nor crow, but a black predatory bird rising under the pale tree toward the white moon. This was the end of October at Shoreline, and Megan could not have known that soon, under the tree by the Gorge, dark figures would commit an act of savagery. On this day, the “evil of others” was just a word, and death and grief were but minor motifs in their art and poetry.

H
I,
C
OLIN?”
There was a giggle, soft breath, and then the girl said: “Colin, hi. I have a crush on you!”

Colin glanced over at his girlfriend, who was sitting on his bed, applying pink nail polish.

“Who is this?” Colin asked. He'd never heard the girl's voice before.

She told him her name. She said, “Don't you remember me?”

No,
Colin Jones thought to himself,
I don't know who the hell you are.

Her voice was so boisterous and hopeful, without sarcasm or guile. “I've got a crush on you. Don't you remember me?”

And then she said, her voice trembling slightly, “Do you want to go out with me?”

The bold need of his secret admirer startled him. Colin Jones just hung up the phone, uneasy. He could not help feeling that a trick was being played on him, even though the girl sounded very sincere. The phone rang again.

“Colin,” his mother yelled from downstairs. “It's for you.”

He returned to the phone, reluctantly. She spoke before he even said hello. She said, “Colin, I think you're really cute.”

“Look,” he said. “I don't know who you are.”

“I met you at Mac's.”

He tried to think, and his memory was often slim and dusky, perhaps from his days and nights of smoking weed, burning off brain cells. That's what the kids said, you burn brain cells, you get burned out. But
girls,
he always remembered, and he did not remember giving his phone number to any girl nor did he remember meeting a girl at the Mac's who sounded like she was maybe, at the most, thirteen.

“I like you,” the girl said, “Let's get together.”

“I don't think that's—”

“Come on. Please. Come on.”

When she said that,
Come on, please,
she—this girl, whoever she was,
this insistent, flattering girl—reminded him of the other girls: Nevada, Kelly, and Josephine.
Come on, please. Colin, please.
Both aggressive and immature, these girls who demanded, and begged, in their soft, girlish way, weak, and insistent, and highly annoying to him now.

“I'm sorry,” he said, and he hung up, and just then, his girlfriend raised her blue eyes and smiled, turning her palm to show him her nails like pearls. “Who was that?” she asked.

“I don't know,” he said, truthfully.

She scraped polish off her thumb.

He went downstairs.

“When's Dad home?” he asked his mom. He wanted to talk to his dad about the loan for taking a welding class. He'd been working at Scott Plastics, and it was starting to be a drag, dealing with the assembly line, and he'd rather hold that flaming gun in his hand, scorch and transform machinery.

On the 6:00 news, Murray Langdon was saying, “Stay tuned. Coming up we'll tell you why Bill Clinton will soon be in British Columbia.”

The phone rang again. Colin picked it up, already sure.

The young girl giggled. She said her name was Rhea.

He remembered then. He remembered her! She'd been in the Mac's store in the rows of candy while he bought a Slurpee. She'd been with Ali, who lived up the street. She was Ali's cousin, he believed, and he couldn't remember her clearly. He had a vague impression of a chubby girl, a large nose, long, black hair down to her shoulders. She'd smiled at him shyly, and he'd said, “Hello.” Certainly there had been no chemistry, no flirtation. He had picked up a pack of Export A's, and headed out to Tommy's car, and never thought again of the girl. He had never given her his number. So how did she get his number? For Christ's sake, his last name was Jones.

“I like you,” she said again. “I have a crush on you,” as if this was reason enough. It was the logic of a teen girl.

And it was not his way to be rude or mean, because he was laid back, and seemingly incapable of rage. He felt bad for the Rhea girl, and so he just mumbled something before hanging up the phone.

But then she wouldn't leave him alone. She must have called him fifteen times. Her calls reminded him of the neighborhood girls, just coming over “like lost puppies.” Just bothering him, hanging around him.

Please.
She said
please,
and she just kept calling, and calling. Seven
times, maybe seventy times, just all the time, all day and all night, all the fucking time.

And finally he said, “Okay, meet me at Mac's at 6:30.”

He'd never had any intention of meeting this Rhea girl, and he felt a little bit bad about lying and setting her up for disappointment, but he didn't know what else to do. What else could he have done? He'd asked her not to call, asked politely, and she'd just kept calling, again and again and again. He thought this was the kindest way to get rid of her.

He imagined then Josephine giving his phone number to this Rhea girl. “Here,” she must have said. “Call up Colin Jones. He has a crush on you.” He had no idea why Josephine would do such a thing. Maybe she found out he'd ratted her out on the stolen car. Maybe she'd found out he'd told Nevada to stop hanging out with such an untrustworthy girl. Maybe she just thought it was funny. Certainly she was a twisted little troublemaker. He felt bad for the Rhea girl, waiting in the Mac's hopefully. He was going to talk to Josephine the next time he saw her on the street.
Don't give out my phone number,
that was all he really planned to say.

I
N THE STORE,
Reena waited in the aisle of candy. How much sweetness there was in the world, in this one aisle alone. Snickers, Mars Bars, Toblerone, Reese's Pieces, Coffee Crisp. Her mother forbade chocolate. It was impure, like nicotine and gin, all the sweet, bad poisons Reena craved. Only yesterday, she'd felt so lonely she'd wanted to die, but now she was still alive, surrounded by all this sweetness, waiting for Colin Jones.

Colin Jones had not yet arrived at the Mac's.

Her crush was so strong. Girls wrote the names of boys in notebooks two hundred times. They stared at posters of Leonardo DiCaprio and watched
Titanic
three hundred times. Was it in the genes, a sudden rush of hope? Please. Colin. Please.

Perhaps Syreeta and Marissa were in the store, waiting while their boyfriends bought cigarettes. The cashier would ask for ID, and Marissa would be giggling when Warren strolled out, his baggy pants starting to slip off his hips, the white hems dragging on the concrete. Warren would put his arm around Syreeta, and Dimitri would hold Marissa's left hand, and they'd head up to the tracks like this, entwined.

They would not have noticed Reena, for they did not attend Shoreline with her, and she'd never been to the parties on the beaches or soccer fields.

Perhaps all of View Royal passed through the Mac's, as they would so often, buying cigarettes and candy and magazines, and the things you forget until the last minute and don't really want but still somehow need. They would get what they needed and return home.

Nobody noticed the girl wandering in the aisles, staring at her blue nails, afraid to look at the numerals on the red clock, a gift of Du Maurier Cigarette Company. She had gotten there so early, and besides, Colin was cool, and cool guys were usually late.

These comings and goings were so random and common that the
town kept no record. A boy skates across a bridge, his arms out-stretched. A mother buys milk for her family. Young couples in love hold hands and head for the train tracks.

In the Mac's, Reena raised her eyes as the door swung open, the bells made a faint sound on the glass. Hope kept her there, waiting, but Colin Jones, he never arrived.

•   •   •

Syreeta was wondering how to tell Warren of the denial. Really, it was no surprise. Her mother said, “Rita,” when she asked her, and already then, she knew, the answer was no. There would be no argument, because Syreeta respected the decision.

“You know I like Warren,” Syreeta's mother said, “but he just can't move in here.”

“Why not?” Syreeta asked.

She did not ask, “Why not” because she was defiant, but only because she wanted to have a good reason to provide Warren. Tonight she would see him. He would say so hopefully, “Did you ask your mom about me moving in there?” And she would have to say no, and he would ask why.

Her mother wore an apron; the ties around the back dangled down over her plaid dress. Sometimes her mother looked like her twin, as though they were sisters, with the same length between their waist and the rest of the body. There was white flour on her mother—s hands. She dusted sugar on the berries, then picked up a napkin, wiped the sugar and flour from her hands.

“There would be complications,” her mother said, “and what if you got pregnant? It's just not a good idea.”

“I don't know where he'll go,” Syreeta said, but she did not argue.

Her mother put the pie in the oven. On the television, they were talking about Bill Clinton coming to Vancouver. Syreeta wasn't listening. She was just feeling really bad for Warren, just wondering where he would go now. If he left her, she thought, she would die. If he moved to California to be with his mean dad, or back to Nanaimo with his drunk mother, she would die. She would die. She would die. She rushed through her dinner. She wanted to call Diana, Marissa, Tara, and Felicity and ask them what they thought. It was unusual. Syreeta was the one everyone came to for help; her quiet and definite air of competence unusual in a girl so young, but this was her boyfriend, her first love, and
they all loved him. All her friends loved him too, and nobody would want Warren to leave. They would die too. They all loved him so.

•   •   •

She is so young, Amy thought. She's someone who doesn't know the ways of the world.

They were walking along the beach though the sky was gray and sunless. Often she'd have her meetings with Reena on the beach, because they could talk more easily away from the counselor's office. Reena's hair was so long now, Amy thought, and she was wearing an Adidas jacket, which she said belonged to her boyfriend, Jack Batley.

Reena said Jack was a Crip, and because he'd given her the jacket she was a Crip too. Later, in her notes, Amy would write that Reena was “affiliating herself with the Crips because they were people who had respect.” But on the beach, she just listened, thinking,
Reena's so young, she doesn't know the ways of the world.
Was that such a bad thing though? Some of the girls she saw knew too much about the ways of the world. They were so savvy and jaded and hard.

Days before, Amy had given Reena a diary with birds and the tree of life on the cover. “You need to have a voice,” she'd said. Amy believed that girls should have a voice—it was a kind of feminist cliché, she supposed, the subject of all those books by Virginia Woolf and Carol Gilligan, and yet, she liked the idea of Reena writing in the journal. She'd been working as a counselor for only a year, and her own reports on Reena seemed perfunctory and official. Words like
naive
and
cultural and religious struggles with family
did not quite capture the yearning quality, the goodness she observed.

“The Crips are hassling me,” Reena said quietly.

Amy heard Reena say this, but she was noticing the waves. The winds were strong; the waves were rolling in; they should leave the beach, she thought, before the storm of cold wind and rain.

Reena leaned down, and she searched in the sand. Amy's boyfriend collected glass shards—the shards worn and smooth from the waves. Reena found some small blue pieces of glass, and smiling, she handed these to Amy.

“You're so thoughtful,” Amy said, and she tried to think of what she could say about the Crips. Were the Crips even real? Weren't they some gang in LA? Instead, she asked Reena if she had written in her diary.

“You should write about everything that's going on with your family. It just helps sometimes to write your thoughts down.”

Reena nodded, but she seemed distracted. White foam on the waves; white clouds in the sky. Amy suggested they leave the beach and go for a drive or a coffee. As they walked over the sand, Reena laughed because the wind was filling up Jack's coat, and her body seemed as if it was shrouded in a billowing sail.

Once they'd reached the parking lot, Reena reached into her pocket and drew out something shiny. Reena handed Amy the shimmery object, looked down at the concrete, shyly, as if her kindness might be met with indifference or mockery. “Because you've helped me so much,” she said.

The ring was gold with three white stones set into a little cluster, like a small flower.

“I have one too,” Reena said. “It's a friendship ring.”

Amy slipped the ring on her third finger and hugged Reena, and Reena said the same thing again, which made her feel guilty and grateful at once. “Because you've helped me so much,” she said, and for some reason, they both began to cry. The wind may have caused their tears, as sometimes the winds of View Royal could bring tears to your eyes.

•   •   •

Colin Jones did not set out to find Josephine in a vengeful, deliberate way, nor did he pursue the girl by chucking rocks at Nevada's window or even phoning Kelly Ellard's home. Once he saw Kelly's big brother drive by in his Monte Carlo, with the windows tinted and the silver trim, and he felt a vague pang of envy for the vehicle but neither motivation nor passion to yell, “Where's your sister and her little troublemaking friend?”