The Incident on the Bridge (35 page)

T
he hatch opens. The air is cold and salty and delicious like that moment when you plug your nose and jump off a boat. The man is still there, but he stands still and lets her pass.

“I lost my wallet,” the man says. “It took all day. I couldn't help it. But the motor started. It's working.”

“Get away from me,” she says. She holds the knife and she feels like she could bring it down on him,
slash slash.
The way she holds it makes him back up, so she's doing it the right way. He lets her come up out of the smelly darkness and stand on the deck in the strobelike air. Never has anything felt better than the salty cold. She keeps the knife aloft.

“You don't remember,” he says.

“I remember,” she says, her lips still cracked and stinging at the edges, her mind dizzy from hunger and fright, so that the parrot sitting on the rail of the boat seems a possible figment of her imagination, a figment that keeps saying
crow man.
Where the cat has gone, she isn't sure.

“I remember,” Thisbe says, knife up. “And I don't forgive you.”

“I know,” he says. “It's really you, isn't it?”

“Stop the boat,” she says.

It never ceases to amaze her, looking back. The unexpected obedience. The turning of the boat when she said to stop it. The power seemed to flow out of the knife that she was only pretending to know how to use. He jumped into the water and then two boats came up. One had her sister on it, and the other was the harbor patrol. The creepy man was still down there in the water, and he was waving a gun. He kept saying, “Don't come any closer or I'll shoot,” shouting it over and over again until a policeman shot him, shot him dead.

O
n the day the
Sayonara
is to be towed to a police storage yard, a dockworker removes thirty-two jars from the cabin. His daughter is always hunting for sand dollars, so he sets two of the biggest jars aside to take home, then imagines her asking where they came from, and what kind of story is that to tell a five-year-old? He stands on the deck at midday and opens the lid of the first jar and watches the sand dollars and their beds of fine, dry sand fall into green water at the edge of the beautiful, summer-bright bay, aware that what he's doing would be viewed as inefficient if his supervisor were to pass by. It would be faster to throw all the jars, unopened, into the trash bin, but he can't quite do it, so he unscrews lid after lid and dumps. The sand dollars float briefly, then begin to sink, staring up at him like open eyes until they reach the deeper water and wait for the tide to lift them like ghosts.

Elsewhere: Telma Cardozo is eating clam chowder and a piece of rye bread when the call comes about her cousin. She'd always expected to hear of Frank's death from the police or the coroner, a heart attack while he was alone on his boat somewhere, or him drowned, the boat found drifting, and she'd expected to think,
Well, he's finally at rest.
She wasn't prepared for a kidnapping. A girl who said he called her Julia. Resisting arrest, getting himself shot.

“No,” she says, “we do not have the money for that,” though they do. She simply can't ask her husband for money to bring the body of a man who could do such a thing all the way from San Diego.

“Who was that?” her husband asks, eyes on the television.

“Frank died,” she tells him.

“Well, he's finally at peace,” he says, and she doesn't correct him.

Elsewhere: A boy stands with a girl on a tennis court. Summer, not yet dark. No one is around, so the court feels like an enormous empty chalkboard. The sky is lilac.

“I'm not athletic,” she says. “I warn you.”

“It's okay if you don't get it right the first million times.”

“That's all?”

“Well, that's how long it took me.”

“So we'll be here awhile.”

“Whatever it takes,” he says. A million seems like a small number of times to do something with Jerome.

“Like this,” he says. He throws the tennis ball straight up and then he hits it with stinging precision into the opposing court. It looks possible, like all graceful things. She takes a ball and nods, holds it, then starts to fling it upward.

“Bounce first,” he says.

Bouncing and catching it with her left hand is bad enough. “I can't even do this part!” she says, laughing, but she knows he doesn't need her to do it well. She bounces it again, badly, then throws it too low and far away from her body, and the clumsy way she reaches for it makes her laugh. “That was terrible,” she says, and he says it truly was, a thing he doesn't care about in this exact moment.

Elsewhere: A boy stands on the dock beside a sailboat that a girl is preparing to make him sail. “Here's your bailer,” she says.

“I thought that was to pee in.”

The ludicrous thoughts of nonsailors.

“What do you say to pump people up in this situation?” he asks.

“Win or don't come in,” she says, and then laughs.

“Perfect,” he says, and in a peculiar way, for that moment, everything is.

Elsewhere: Clay Moorehead walks through the
jardin
at ten minutes to five. The trees have been trimmed with machetes into these giant cube-type things that are very surreal and remind him every second that he's in Mexico, not at home. As does the smell of burning corn.

He's mailing, like, ten things for his mom because he has to work for her now, and forget about going back to Coronado High, because,
What
? she says,
everybody is going to forgive you just like that? No. They're all going to think you are a criminal!

Clay is not a criminal. He's a fighter, man. And Jerome won't answer his emails or his chats, so Clay picks out a postcard in the mailbox place that shows a superhot woman in a supersmall dress, comic-book sexy but that's what makes it cool. On the part that says
Escribe tu mensaje aquí,
he writes:

JERONIMOOOOO!

What's up? I miss you bro! I'm really sorry. I mean seriously. I didn't mean to make Thisbe feel that bad and I'm really glad she's okay. Don't cut me off bro, okay?

Your besto amigo, Claymo.

He sticks one of his mom's American stamps on it and the lady takes it and puts it with all the other mail someone is flying up to Texas to make sure it gets there quick, and when he walks back through the garden of giant cube trees, a zillion black birds are flying into them and disappearing but you could still hear their crazy screams.

Elsewhere: The boy digging in the sand near the golf course at Stingray Point submits to the sunscreen being rubbed into his shoulders for approximately five seconds before he resumes excavation with the small, rusty shovel his father nearly cut his foot on when he waded into Glorietta Bay. The sharp blade is excellent for moats and canals, so the boy goes deeper than he's ever gone before, so deep that he's kneeling down and leaning his head way down into a hole when he hits the hard top of something that looks like a plastic bowl full of cash, or maybe just old salad, but he yells as loud as he can to his mother, lying facedown on a towel, and his father, lying faceup on a towel, taking yet another boring nap: “I found it! I found the treasure!”

Elsewhere: The groundskeeper at Woodlawn Cemetery of Las Vegas, Nevada, sweeps the dice into his hand. They've not been moved for a long time and are dusty, cracked, and faded, the sort of grave decoration that makes people feel their loved ones are neglected and lonely, not tended and duly recalled. He means to throw the dice in the trash with all the torn and faded artificial flowers he has collected that day, but to throw out dice seems unlucky, so he puts them in his desk drawer one at a time, sixes up, for luck.

Elsewhere: Awate Mebrahtu's taxi contains one passenger, a blond woman on her way to Coronado Island. Awate can see all the way to Mexico from the peak of the bridge, and the air coming in through the vents is seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, a good thirty degrees cooler than Assab this time of year. Awate stays in the inside lane as part of his plan to avoid, always, the lane where a person might pull over and climb out. The woman says she's on her way to see her teenaged son, who's been living here since his father died. Because many people tell Awate many things about their lives, whether he understands them or not, he nods and says he's very sorry for the lost, but it's a good island, very happy for the weather time.

I'm deeply indebted to the San Diego Medical Examiner and the police officers on and off Coronado Island who spoke to me in detail, but anonymously, about law-enforcement procedures and the corporeal and emotional effects of bridge suicides. The compassion and resilience of those who work on and under the bridge continues to inspire and humble me.

Many thanks are due to the junior sailing program of the Coronado Yacht Club for its inclusive and transformative programs.

To my friend Janet Reich Elsbach, editors Nancy Hinkel and Erin Clarke, husband Tom McNeal, and agent Doug Stewart, who instantly read drafts of this manuscript every time I sent up a signal flag, thank you.

Big thanks to Peter Bulkley for doing a nautical edit and delivering the manuscript to me by bicycle, to Doug and Maggie Skidmore for owning and sharing a Hobie Getaway, to Sam McNeal for reading the whole thing and not disowning me, and to Cara Ryan Irigoyen for stopping to pick up the unbroken sand dollars. Lastly, I think the world would be a more coherent place if my copy editors, Steph Engel and Diana Varvara, were in charge of it.