The Incident on the Bridge (26 page)

B
efore she's aware of the daylight, it seeps into her dream. The dream is memory, early spring. Outside the tennis court where Jerome is playing, Thisbe stands like an animal that wants not to be seen. If she gets closer to the mesh, trying to see Jerome better, the light splits and bends to the shape of his body waiting for the ball. He's a crouching shadow, an animal that waits to pounce. The ball comes so hard she doesn't think he can possibly hit it but he does. She can't see the other court well enough to know where it lands but the far shadow of a boy hits the ball back with a popping sound, and Jerome runs for a spot he must be able to predict, because he's there,
pop,
and she creeps to the place where there's a gap between the giant pieces of green mesh that make the tennis court a cage. Jerome is so intent on protecting himself from the balls that keep coming like bullets that he won't notice her there with her face unshielded, nakedly watching him. Then he stands still. Nothing between her and the sight of him holding the bright neon ball as he stares down at the ground. He bounces the ball once, twice, a third time, and then he throws it straight up. She knows it's called a serve, everyone knows that, but the serving they did in PE was not like this. When he throws the ball, it goes straight up out of his hand and the palm of his hand goes flat like he's offering it for benediction. It seems to her that he doesn't so much throw the ball as summon it from himself, and all the straightness of his body then coils and his other arm comes down to hit the ball hard over the net to a place she can't see through the narrow chink. It is not returned. “Sooo
big,
Jeronimo!” someone says from the bleachers, followed by a cackling laugh, a clap, and a cry of “Let's go!” Jerome smiles slightly, more of a grimace, but she thinks he was amused, and she knows that voice later, knows that the voice cheering him on was Clay's.

The next time I see Jerome,
she thinks, she'll tell him that she dreamed about his serve, his hand open like a water lily, the ball suspended high above him, hovering, beyond gravity.

No, she won't tell him. It would sound weird. She'll just say his serve is awesome. Really awesome. And then she's awake, a box of pasta wheels on her chest, the light gluey and grainy, the wooden shelves dull and dark, the world when she parts the curtain lost in fog.

A
t breakfast, Ted's mother wanted to know what Ted knew. What had Thisbe told her?

Nothing.

What had she seen on the Internet?

Nothing.

Why had she printed up all those flyers that said
MISSING
?

Ted didn't lift the flyer off the table, but she didn't answer yet, either. Her mother sounded upset but not angry. She held a pale blue coffee cup. She offered to make toast, and when the toast popped up, she spread butter on it and the butter melted. Normal things. The day outside was white and still, the lawn furniture glazed with dew. The sky was featureless, the air like a struck gong.

“There must be something,” her mother said. “Something you know.”

“There is.”

“What?”

“That she couldn't do it.”

Her mother didn't take a sip of her coffee. There wasn't any steam rising from the cup so maybe her mother had been sitting there not drinking it for a long time.

“She'd be too chicken,” Ted said.

Her mother shook her head and looked like she was going to cry but didn't say anything.

“Mr. Harris's nephew saw her,” Ted said. “The boy who was here yesterday.”

Her mother nodded.

“He saw her on the bridge and she was standing there awhile. Long enough to make him go away. So she would have had to think about jumping.”

“I know. Carl told me.”

“So the high dive. Remember?”

Everyone in line for the high dive had had to wait and wait for Thisbe. She was ten. Ted had been jumping off the high dive all summer and she was only seven. On and on, Thisbe stood there, until pretty much the whole pool was watching. Ted was annoyed at first, then ashamed. “Just jump!” people said. “It won't hurt!” Thisbe was probably the only person in the history of the world to climb back down.

“Do you think it's the same?” her mother asked.

Hugh came into the kitchen all dressed up, as if for work, slippery-smooth white shirt, tie knotted. Ted braced herself for what he would say about the flyers.

“So you put these up around town?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Did you tell the police you were doing that?”

Ted shook her head. It wasn't a crime. It was a factual fact that Thisbe was missing.

“We're going to talk to the police right now.”

Ted waited. She was required to pay attention when Hugh was talking, and to keep her eyes basically trained on him, but he couldn't make her smile.

“Don't post any more of these while we're gone.”

Ted's mother would have finished that sentence with a question. It would have been,
Don't do this, okay?
Hugh never talked like that, though.

After they left, Ted tried watching TV but the laugh track was too weird. She caught the Greenbaugh kid watching her close the curtain. She ate two pickle spears and eight Rolos but what should have made her feel better made her feel worse. She had to go somewhere, learn something. She called Clay again. Again. Again.
The voice mailbox of the person you're calling is full or has not been set up.
She texted and got the red exclamation point: undelivered.

At noon, her parents weren't home. House screaming with emptiness, so she sent a message to her mom:
Going for a bike ride. I can't just sit here.

Keep your phone on
, her mother said back. That was it.

She saw people she knew, Camilla Waller with her freaky orange hair, and Mr. Peck, who always did race committee and bought about eight dinners from her when they were doing fund-raisers at the club, but she didn't stop, even though Camilla turned her bike around midblock and Mr. Peck held out his hand from the car and clearly expected her to come back. At Clay's metal-and-stone megahouse the entry gate was locked (of course) and the windows were like mirrors for trees, for the misty sky, for knowing nothing. She pushed the buzzer but no one came. The flyer was still in the mailbox.

The bay was choppy, a muddy, ugly, freezing abyss. She wanted to drain it like a tub, part it like the Red Sea, fly over it like a pelican that knew what to kill.

If only she could find Jerome and get his help. She checked the high school courts where she'd stood with Thisbe between the green mesh of the fence and the prickly hedge.

Today the high school courts were empty. Wind rolled an empty tennis ball can into a pile of leaves. Across town, the Glorietta courts were crowded with not-Jeromes. Old guys playing some sort of mini-tennis with plastic balls. Tiny kids hitting oversize balls into the gloomy white sky. Ted found a new green ball in the hedge and held it, squeezing it, rubbing the white seam, until she noticed that a high school–ish girl in a pink spandex dress was looking at her. Ted tossed the ball over the high fence, and the girl in the pink dress said, “Thanks,” with a normal smile, but then she must have figured out who Ted was because when she leaned over to say something to the girl she was playing with, she definitely said,
Thisbe's sister.
They must have seen her flyers.

Before she could stop feeling strange, Jerome stood before her, his huge tennis bag like the shell of a hermit crab on his back.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“What is going
on.
” More like a demand than a question, and she was suddenly afraid.

She'd stuck a flyer in between the screen and door of his apartment but she hadn't knocked. For one thing, she barely knew him, and it was weird that she even knew where he lived. She couldn't explain that she'd seen him there once, opening the door with his tennis bag on his back, and remembered which door as if marking it with an X in her mind. She wanted to explain things to him now but her mouth screwed up in a funny way. She had to un-tense all her muscles and all that came out was, “Thisbe's missing.” Which of course he'd already read on the flyer.

The popping sound of tennis balls and the squeak of shoes went on. Cars passed on the street. “I thought she jumped,” Jerome said.

Ted heard something raw in his voice. She didn't know what it was. Intensity, anger, relief, pain. Something of hers went out to meet that feeling and she found it hard to talk. “She wouldn't jump. The police don't know her.”

“So where is she?”

She normally didn't have trouble talking to anyone, but she didn't know how to answer him. She just stood there. Finally she said, “I don't know.”

“Is there going to be a search or something?” he asked.

This was a good idea. She could do that. “Yeah,” Ted said. “Later on. Would you come?”

“Yeah.”

It got easier to talk now. “You have a dog, right? I saw him through the window.”

“Her. It's a her.”

“I thought she was going to, like, break the window and kill me.”

“Nah. She's a softie.”

“You could bring her to help.” A silly idea, something you got from watching hounds in the woods on TV. Ted blushed. She normally never blushed.

“Where is it? The search thing.”

She wanted it to seem planned out. People followed when you had a plan, but she didn't know yet. She had to stall. “I'll let you know, okay?”

She noticed he was thinking all kinds of things he didn't say. She could see doubt or resistance in the way he didn't look at her, in the way he clicked a tiny flashlight on the key in his hand, which flashed red and went out again. His hair was sweaty under his cap. She was glad he didn't ask her the questions a normal person would ask, because she didn't know the answers to anything, but she was afraid of him turning away from her. “Near the bridge,” she said. “We're going to search near the bridge.”

He looked down at her with his pale green eyes.

“I mean, where else?”

“Right,” he said, and she felt balanced again, like when you saved a boat from flipping by leaning your whole body out.