The Incident on the Bridge (10 page)

T
he pain is worst in Thisbe's left arm. The arm feels cut open when she wakes in a tiny room with a low ceiling and a cushion. She's on her back, and her hands are stuck together underneath her, which also hurts. Something is tied around her head, her mouth, her tongue. Those are her legs far down, dirty legs, dirty socks. Silver duct tape round and round her ankles and calves. Through the hole in one sock, her big toe is sticking out. Naked. Bright red. Not blood but the red nail polish she picked out when her mother said
I know what will cheer you up
and she took Thisbe downtown to sit in the chair that rubbed little baseballs up and down your back.

It seems like she should be able to free herself. Rub one foot against the other, point her toes, point them harder, slide her right ankle over the left, then left over the right—but no matter how she turns her legs, the loop is too tight, and when she pulls, she rolls back and forth over her stuck-tight hands, and it's like pushing a sharp thing farther into her arm. Panic forms a band around her chest that tightens as she twists and fails at getting her hands unstuck. She can't get enough air or space. The harder she sucks on the wet gag, the less air there seems to be.

Lie still and think.

The plastic ceiling is three feet above her face and smooth. Light comes through a little window, the kind on a boat: therefore a porthole. The porthole is scratched and grimy but through the grime the color is blue. Blue: therefore day. She tries to sit up, but that hurts more, and she cries but it comes out a gurgle.

The way beams of light roll and bubble on the ceiling, the slosh of water, the mildew smell—she knows this. She's slept in a place like this: the aft cabin of a boat. In Hugh's aft cabin, a tiny fan could be switched on. The window could be popped open to let in fresh air. She and Ted had slept in the cabin once when their mother first met Hugh, when they were both little enough to think it would be fun. But this boat is a lot older. There's no fan. The gag in her mouth is disgustingly wet and cold. She rolls back and forth, kicks her naked toe on the slats of the small cabin door. She's a mouse stuck in a box, a beetle upside down. She scoots herself down so she can reach the door with her heels. She makes the gurgling scream and bangs with her heels on the wood.

Only when she hears a click and footsteps does it occur to her that someone coming could be worse than being alone.

The door at her feet swings out to reveal a man, hunched over, elfish, nearly bald, dirty. “You're awake,” he says as if pleased. The dirty elf says, “I'm sorry, Julia. It was the only way.”

He doesn't move to touch her but she scoots back. Her toe feels disgustingly naked, the nail red and glistening outside the sock.

“Do you remember what happened?” His eyes are full of psycho gentleness. He has a blue spot on his lip and brown spots all over his walnut face. She doesn't know him.

She remembers standing on the bridge. A car. Running with her arms around her boots. A gun. The elf-man shot her with a gun.

“Don't worry. This is temporary. Until we get under way.”

Under way is the last thing she wants. The tears make her face feel sticky. If she could put her toe back in the sock, she would do that before she wiped her nose.

“Wheah awh whe?” she asks. She sounds like a baby.

“Going home,” he says. He leans in as if it's an oven she's inside.

“Wheah?”

“Pismo.”

That can't be. Pismo Beach is hours away, in central California. Way past Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. How many days would it take to sail there? Days and days. She says
no
but he doesn't listen and the boat rocks in a world made entirely of water: edgeless, harborless, shoreless, bottomless. Her head aches and her arm aches and she wants to put her toe back in the sock. The snot in her nose globes into a bubble, and he tries to reach in and touch her face with something but she writhes away from him, so the spotted man with the spotted lip turns his back, says he'll check on her again soon, and shuts the aft cabin door.

B
y noon, Ted still hadn't checked her phone, not a single time, though she knew the messages might be piling up, as they always did when she forgot.

The Zonie was sitting with Mr. Harris, so maybe he was a Zonie with native ties. “Greetings, Mr. Harris,” she said. She liked Mr. Harris because he didn't say creepy things to the sailing girls and he remembered not to call her Teddy and that one time she and Thisbe had slept out on the Getaway near Stingray Point and they were moored in the wrong place, he was cool about it and towed them closer into shore instead of calling their parents. He said he'd keep an eye on them because all kinds of lunatics could be out there.

The boy was sopping wet and looked extremely mad, which was natural given how truly terrible his sailing was. She felt sorry for him but not repulsed. He was still kind of cool-looking and manly, like maybe he was good at something else. Surfing, say.

She thought she was going to have to say something adult-ish like, “And who's this young man you've got with you today?” but Mr. Harris finally said this was his nephew, Fin, and he was starting high school here in the fall and he'd narrowly missed exile to Rio, where his mother had a Fulbright, whatever that was.

“Why Rio?” she asked.

Mr. Harris waited for the Fin boy to answer. “She's writing a book,” the Fin boy said.

“About what?”

“Some lady,” he said, still pissed, clearly, about nearly sinking the boat. She was glad Thisbe wasn't here to lecture him on how
lady
was a hierarchical term used to value some women over others.

“Why didn't you want to go live in Brazil? The sailing is supposed to be awesome there.”

“I thought I'd like it here.”

His eyebrows were all squinched. They were cute eyebrows. Bushy.

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” he said, not at all sincerely.

Mr. Harris went to the window to pick up cheeseburgers and she still didn't want to go home, so she stayed where she was and the day stayed where it was, unspoiled, expectant, bright blue.

N
ot a single one of Anne Locke's increasingly angry texts to Thisbe had been answered. Was Thisbe's phone dead again? It was noon, and Thisbe should be home now. She had a piano lesson at two o'clock in Clairemont Mesa. The essay she was supposed to write for her college counselor, the one Hugh said he was about ready to stop paying for, was due tonight. Why had Anne not called Nessa's mother to ask if she could send Thisbe home at nine a.m.? Of course, Anne would have needed Nessa's mother's phone number to do that, and she didn't have it.

Maybe Thisbe hadn't even been at Nessa's house. Maybe she'd stayed with Clay on his boat. What, dear God, had happened to the old Thisbe, and how could they bring her back?

Ted was ignoring Anne's messages, too, but that was normal. Ted barely considered herself part of the family. She needed sun and water, yes, and to get sun and water you needed money from somewhere, but not conversation with the people who funded you. The kind of talk that you engaged in to show people you cared about them and were interested in their well-being was not the kind of talk that interested Ted.

When Anne felt crazy and lost—which she had since the day she'd found blood on Thisbe's towels and her pillowcase and demanded that Thisbe take off the beret she'd been wearing inside and outside the house for two days, whereupon she'd seen a jagged red cut two inches in length that could not have been made (as Thisbe claimed) by a chain-link fence—Anne tried to go someplace in the house and do sun salutations. Anne didn't do yoga class on the beach anymore because Hugh made fun of the way Desiree told them all to focus their third eyes, but sun salutations still felt good when Anne did them alone. She stood in the center of the living room, faced the window and the sun-bleached couch, then moved slightly off center so that she wasn't visible from the street, and raised her hands and pointed them like a steeple at the ceiling, arched her back, closed her eyes, then arched a little more, took a deep breath, and thought of what she was going to do to Thisbe's phone with a hammer when Thisbe finally walked through the door, smelling like rotten wine.
Just be present,
she told her herself.
Take a deep breath. Exhale and stretch down to your toes,
saying it to herself the way Desiree did. Anne leaned over and pointed the steeple of her fingers at her toenails, perceiving with her first, second, and third eyes that the nail polish Thisbe had picked for both of them was peeling off and would need to be stripped, and as she was wondering if she should do that now or later, the doorbell rang.

The dark shape through the glass might be a Jehovah's Witness, but it could also be FedEx with a package.

A middle-aged woman stood on the step. No FedEx uniform. No Jehovah's Witness pamphlet. Long hair like a folksinger, slacks and clogs and a plain green shirt with cuffed sleeves. A lanyard of some kind, as if she were a camp counselor. Behind her, a milk-skinned man with a light brown mustache and his own photo ID on a cord. “Mrs. Locke?” the woman said.

The things on their cords were badges of some kind. A sick feeling spread across Anne's skin and seized her throat.

“I'm Mary Price from the medical examiner's office, and this is Gordon White. Is Thisbe Locke here?”

The water that flowed one direction, strong and fast, for all the years of your life changed direction and flowed the other way. “Why are you here?”

“May we come in?” The man stepped up behind the folksinger type but Anne didn't move to let them in.

“It's probably nothing,” the woman added, “but I'd prefer we all sat down.”

Medical examiners. Where had she heard the term before?

She let them in, and the woman named Mary said she was here because the Coronado Police Department had found Thisbe's driver's license in a car. “Is Thisbe here?” she asked.

Anne shook her head. The window behind Mary's head framed the unaltered summer street. As recently as yesterday, she'd looked at that view and felt that things had gone well at dinner, that Thisbe had joked and eaten a whole taco so maybe she would play a board game later or watch a movie and things would be normal.

The woman took a driver's license out of her purse. “Here it is.”

Thisbe's.

“We found it in a car parked on the bridge. The keys were in the ignition.

Not the bridge. Not a thing that involved the bridge.

“Do you know Renata or Clay Moorehead?”

Anne nodded.

“The car was registered to Renata Moorehead, but it seems it was his car. Generally, when a car is found on the bridge like that it means something.”

Anne didn't want them to tell her what it meant. She saw Thisbe on her bicycle, her face either sad or defiant—hard to tell anymore—hair loose over her shoulders, long legs in shorts that were a little too short but Anne had decided not to fight about that, just let her go out the back door to fetch her green-and-white bicycle, on which she'd coasted out of the garage and flicked on the lights only because Anne had come to the steps and said, “Lights.”

“Are you going to hang out with somebody?” Anne had asked. Touchy subject lately. To ask it was to imply that Thisbe
should
be hanging out with somebody. They wanted Thisbe to do that, the hanging out, but not if that person was Clay, or if the hangers-out were drinking themselves into oblivion in the dunes or having a party (for the sole purpose of drinking into oblivion) in a house where the parents weren't home. So it had been a relief, a good sign, when Thisbe had texted later to say that she'd gone over to a friend's house after all, the house of that new friend, Nessa Creevy, whose mother was a nurse.

“I'm just going down to the bay,” Thisbe had said before that, in her room, through the door she didn't open.

“But it's almost dark. I thought you were finished with the tide project, anyway.”

“I just like it there.”

Thisbe had not seemed upset. Her eyes had not been red; her face had not been puffy.

Anne looked at the woman from the medical examiner's office and wished that she hadn't started to cry, because if she was crying, Mary Price and the silent guy would think they were right, and they couldn't be right. “She was riding her bike when she left here,” Anne said. “She was going to check on the marine life she'd been monitoring for a while. Then she went to a friend's to spend the night.”

“Are you sure?” The woman waited with so much calm sadness that Anne wanted to kill her. “What time did you see her last?” Mary asked Anne.

“Around sunset. It was still light.”

“Could she have gone out with this Clay person instead?”

The tears were still undermining her confidence. “No, she's not seeing him anymore.”

“We haven't been able to reach him or his parents.”

“They're out of town a lot.”

“Maybe we could call the friend. If that's where you think she might be.”

Anywhere on the entire island, that's where she might be. On the ground, walking, two legs and two arms, beautiful long hair, sweet brown eyes. Passed out in the dunes, even, would be preferable. In Clay Moorehead's fancy house. Not on the bridge, though, not ever beside a car on the bridge.

“Did Thisbe call or text anyone else in your family since you last saw her?” the man asked.

“Ted, maybe.”

“Is that your husband?” he asked.

“Our other daughter. It's short for Theodora.”

“Where is she?” Mary asked.

“Sailing. The phones, they just…”

“Maybe we could check with her?” the man asked.

She could explode. She could implode. That's what she wanted but couldn't do. Her mind ate everything in its path like Lady Pac-Man. It rode over the woman on the sofa and the man on the sofa and the phones in her daughters' hands and she took them away and said,
From now on you are grounded,
but everything she didn't want to see anymore stayed there, and Thisbe didn't call.