Authors: Eve Bunting
"If you can think of anything, Jesse. Anything."
I shook my head numbly. But there was a small, flashing signal at the edge of my brain. I had seen something. What?
N
ONE OF US
went to bed the night Bry was killed. We sat, huddled together in the living room, going over and over what had happened. Dad called all our relativesâour grandparents in Minnesota, Aunt Lila and Uncle Fred. I don't know how he did that. I felt so sorry for him, having to tell them. Sorry for them, for all of us. I gnawed at my fingers, living and reliving those awful last seconds. If only, if only...
At five in the morning I slipped away to my room and put on my wet suit.
Surfing has always been one of my major comforts. There's something about sitting out there on my board, way early, before the sun comes up and the world is just beginning, that brings a kind of peace. Ever since I can remember I've surfed in the mornings, sneaking past Bry's room so he wouldn't sense me there and tag along. I was sneaking past this first morning when it hit me all over again. Bry wouldn't tag along behind me again. Ever.
I opened his closed door. The bed wasn't made. There was still a dent in the pillow. On the desk was a scattering of white cardboard cutouts. He'd probably been in the middle of making something. A flannel shirt lay in a rumple beside the bed. I picked it up, folded it, and jammed it into a drawer. I closed the door carefully behind me.
Mom had gone outside. She was sitting all by herself in the wicker chair on the deck staring at nothing. Or maybe she was staring at the bird feeder by the hedge, or seeing through the hedge, beyond, it, over the trailer roofs and trees to the gray stretch of highway.
"Mom?" I said softly. "I'm going surfing for a little while. What time does Grandma's plane get in?"
She didn't answer.
"Mom?" I put down my board and went toward her and touched her shoulder.
"I loved him so much, Jesse," she said in a dead kind of voice.
"I know." I knelt and put my arms around her, and we were rocking back and forth, both of us crying and moaning.
"Your father wanted me to have an abortion, you know, when I was pregnant and got the German measles. There was always the chance there would be something wrong with the baby."
"Sh!" I whispered. "Just sh."
"I wouldn't even go for the tests. I'm glad I didn't, though. It's better. Bry had sixteen good years, didn't he, Jesse?"
"Yes, Mom. He was great."
"But if he hadn't been deaf, he'd have heard when you yelled at him, Jesse. He'd still be alive."
"Mom! Stop it!" I cradled her head against my wet suit and put a hand over her ear so she wouldn't hear what she was saying. I wished I couldn't hear what I was thinking. If I'd just jumped forward instead of sideways. If I'd taken him to safety with me. "How far ahead would you say Bry was?" Officer McMeeken had asked.
How far?
Mom pulled herself gently away, fished a Kleenex out of the pocket of her robe, and blew her nose. I couldn't believe her face. It was puffy and covered with little red marks. Her eyes seemed to have disappeared into the flesh around them.
"Do you want a cup of coffee? I'm going to make a pot." Her voice seemed more normal. "Your father will need some. He went up to the gazebo a while ago. I think he needed to be alone." I nodded. The gazebo, perched right on the edge of our high green, is a good place to go to be alone. You could be almost as alone there as out on the ocean.
Once I'd found Bry up in the gazebo. He was about eight at the time, and he was smashing at the wooden walls and seats with the Basher Club Aunt Lila had bought for him. The Basher is Styrofoam and can't hurt anything, even if you use it to bash yourself. I remember how Bry had been saying words, not accurately but close, words you wouldn't think a kid would know,
especially a deaf kid. And I understood how rotten things were for him a lot of the time, and how he kept it to himself. He hadn't heard me coming, of course, and he didn't hear me leave.
I never forgot Bry in that gazebo.
And that's where my father was now. He could probably have used the Basher, too.
Mom stood up. "I need to get started anyway. There are things I have to do. Aunt Lila said they'd stay in the Coast Motel, so we wouldn't have to ... I mean, there
is
the bed ... I mean..." She was talking about Bry's bed. He and I always shared my room when any of the relatives came.
"No," I said. "No, no, no."
She sank down again. "They understood. They loved him, too. They wouldn't want his room."
"Look." I put my hands one on each arm of her chair, my face close to hers. "I'll help you. What do we have to do? Cook, or what?"
She sighed. "Nothing. Really. Go surfing, baby." She closed her eyes. "I think I'll just sit here for a while."
I edged back and stood against the side of the trailer, watching her. In a few minutes, when her hands unclenched and her breathing got heavier and I knew she slept, I picked up my board and left for the ocean.
The tunnel that runs under the highway had some new graffiti on it. Bry's name and mine were still there, though, up close to the top curve. So was my friend Alexander's. I remembered when we'd put our names there, me on Alexander's shoulders, Bry on mine, all of us staggering around and Bry trying to write with the spray can. Alexander is real strong. Alex the Ox we call him. God, he wouldn't even know about Bry yet. Hardly anybody would know.
There was traffic on Coast Highway already. I could hear it rumbling over my head and feel the small vibration of loose sand under my feet. Just along that highway a bit ... last night ... I began running. It's hard to run with your board.
Usually I can't wait for that first glimpse of bright blue ocean when I come out of the tunnel gloom. Today I didn't notice. I hurried over the soft, cold beach, my eyes blurred. Had Bry felt anything? Had he known, in those last seconds, that this was the end?
My breath was coming in great burning gasps as I ran toward the ocean and some sort of easing of the pain.
But the easing didn't come. I sat on my board between the blueness of sea and sky and I was crying again, though I hadn't known there were tears left. A diver duck, scared by my sounds, fluttered away in a splash of wings.
Every time I lifted my head I could see that damned highway, the morning traffic cruising soundlessly in a shimmer of pink sun on windshields. Would I ever be able to surf here again?
"Mostly I surf at Trestles," I'd told Chloe. I remembered the way I'd tried to act cool, tried to impress her. Why had it seemed so important then? Nothing was important anymore. Did Chloe know yet? Maybe all the kids who'd been at the party knew, the phones ringing off the hooks. "Did you hear about Bry Harmon? Yeah, dead. No, his brother is OK.
He
jumped."
A wave lifted me and floated me gently up and over.
"How far ahead would you say Bry was?"
I paddled for shore and waded out. Up under the lip of the sandbank, someone moved, stood. I knew who it was OK. Sowbug, our resident beach bum. He sleeps here a lot, curled up under a ratty gray blanket, hugging a big old jug of wine. Ours is one of Sowbug's three or four private beaches. Everything he owns is in a cardboard box that he stashes behind the big rock by the tunnel entrance when the police throw him into jail for a night or two. The kids get a kick out of playing tricks on old Sowbug. Once a bunch of them put rocks and stuff in his box while he was sleeping and busted a gut watching him stagger over and try to lift it. Another time when the Bug was sleeping, Pete Carboneri emptied out what was left in his jug and filled it with window cleaner. Sowbug would have swigged it down and never known the difference, but Alexander was there, and he grabbed the stuff and poured it into the sand with Sowbug trying to save it and hitting at Alex with his fists. I wasn't there, but somebody told me. I don't know if window cleaner would kill you or not. Sowbug seems to be able to drink just about anything.
The minute he saw me coming out of the water he began weaving toward me, waving his arms. "Hey, boy. Come here, boy." Sowbug always wants to talk. Old times, old politics dating back to the time he lived in Chicago, all of it muddled and senseless.
I never like talking to Sowbug. He turns me off and it's hard to be sorry for someone who's stoned all the time. I for sure felt no sympathy for him today. "Boy, wait up!" he yelled, but I pretended not to hear and went as fast as I could away from the tunnel area and up across the ice plant and the tufty grass to the highway. Over there was where it had happened. Jeez! Why was I doing this? Why was I looking like this? Was I morbid or something? On the other side, gleaming on the asphalt, was a small, dark stain. My heart began thumping. Not blood. Why would I even think that was blood? There were blobs of tar and everything on this road. The police had had lights here last night and they'd taken photographs and measured the skid marks. They'd have noticed blood. But maybe they wouldn't have said.
I was running across, the weight of the board pulling me on one side, the highway hot already and sharp with pebbles. I stood looking down at the stain. Just oil. If it had been blood I'd have had to wipe it up. There was no way I could have left it.
A car came fast behind me and I scrambled sideways and leaped the way I'd leaped last night, sprawling in the long grass on top of my board. Another car whizzed by, and I stood and hefted my board through the wire that divides the highway from the ranch on the other side. The ranch is private property. Cattle graze here and sometimes you can see a real cowboy on a horse, his dog running beside him. The grass was full of prickles and hidden thistles where I crawled through, but I didn't care. The traffic was outside. In here I was safe.
I'd walked maybe fifty yards when I saw it. I was almost at the entrance to Del Mar, but if I hadn't been on this side of the wire I'd have missed it altogether. There's a lot of junk in here, mostly thrown from passing cars. There are old beer cans and wine cooler bottles and Colonel Sanders chicken bones, black with ants. Lying beside an empty Doritos bag was a brown leather loafer.
Bry's shoe.
I picked it up. How did it get here, so far from where he'd been hit, from where he'd thumped onto the hood? Could it have sailed through the air like a thrown baseball, tumbling over and over to land here in the middle of the garbage? I was shaking and my stomach began to hurt. I stared across the wire at the highway and suddenly I knew. This was where the car had stopped. This was where those faint black skid marks ended. Somehow, Bry's shoe had come off on the hood, and whoever was driving had opened the window, reached out, and thrown the shoe over the wire. How could anyone
do
that? What kind of monster? I stood looking down at the blur of brown leather, and I moved my fingers carefully so they held only the heel.
"Prints," I said out loud. "If we can find him we've got him, Bry. And I'll find him."
I
COULDN'T CARRY
the shoe home with me because Dad or Mom might see it, and I couldn't leave it lying there, either. I couldn't. If I'd had a backpack, or even pockets ... But there was only my wet suit, sleek and tight and useless. At the gates into the park there's a little cubbyhole of a place where a guy sits and checks ID cards to make sure you live here and don't just use the parking area for the beach. It was too early for him to be on duty. I put Bry's shoe behind there, carefully out of sight of the entrance. It looked so lonely and abandoned I almost started bawling again. But there was something strong taking over inside of me now, an anger that eased my guilt at being alive while Bry was dead. Already I was finding anger a lot easier to handle.
The park was coming awake as I walked slowly between the rows of trailers. I saw Mrs. Daniloff, who lives in Number 1A, moving around inside her living room. She spotted me and came running out. "Jesse! Jesse!" Her arms were around me and I was breathing in her warmth and comfort along with the strong smell of bacon. She must have been cooking breakfast. "I'm so sorry about Bry," she whispered. "So sorry. Tell your mom I'll be up in a little while, and not to worry about what you're going to eat tonight. I'll bring a chicken casserole that will put you over for two or three days."
"Thanks," I mumbled. "I'll tell her."
It was strange. Everyone in the park knew already. Actually, it wasn't strange. We all know stuff about each other almost as soon as it happens. Somebody leaves his wife; somebody's pregnant; somebody's kid gets into college, we know. The park has its own instant grapevine.
I was stopped every few yards as I walked home.
"They'll get the bastard that did it, you'll see," the Captain told me. He wasn't wearing his braided captain's hat. I don't think I'd ever seen him without it and I hadn't realized his head was totally bald.
The Strathdee sisters brought out their little dog, Fluffy, and Ernestine said, "Fluffy says he liked Bry a lot. Fluffy says he hopes they catch the bad man who hit him." The sisters always talk through Fluffy.
I nodded. "Thanks, Fluffy."
Mom's right,
I thought. The park people are wonderful. It is like being part of a big, caring family.
Later she and I drove to the airport to pick up Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Lila, while Dad took the bus into town to make the mortuary and funeral arrangements. The Captain had volunteered to go with him, but Dad said thanks anyway, he thought he could manage on his own.
It's awful how many horrible business things you have to do when a person dies.
The plane from Minneapolis was late. They gave us some reason about bad weather at the other end, so Mom and I sat waiting. After a while I wandered out to the parking lot and walked up and down between the rows of cars, hoping. Not that I'd find the death car. That would be asking too much. But hoping I would see something that would jog my memory. I had a pen and I found a stub of a parking ticket on the ground and made myself some notes of things that might make one car different from another seen from the back in the half-dark There were a few bumper stickers, mostly with the kind of political statements you'd expect at John Wayne Airport in Orange County. I saw expensive-looking cars, all right, Mercedes and Cadillacs and BMWs. But none of them and nothing on them rang a bell. What
had
I seen last night? And if I couldn't remember now, what chance was there that I'd remember later? I sat on the wooden fence, staring blankly at the hot sheen of cars in front of me, thinking that the mind is a strange machine. I seemed to have shut off whatever I'd seen on that car, and yet I could remember so clearly the things about last night that I wanted to forget.