Authors: Eve Bunting
Bry would have loved this, I thought. He'd have been here, probably sitting with Chloe, and I'd have been with them, because it would have been OK to have been with her if he was there, too. It wouldn't be OK now.
I asked a woman in front if I could borrow her binocs for a couple of minutes and when she handed them over I checked the crowd again, sweeping the glasses the length of the beach and back. I didn't think the guy I was looking for was here.
Each time the glasses swung toward Chloe I let them linger for just a second before I pulled them away. Strange, sort of sneaky, spying on her like this. She gave a great, wide yawn and stretched. I could see the smooth line of her throat and my own was suddenly dry. "What was the matter with me? So she was a cute girl. The beach was full of cute girls. The one standing in front of me, leaning against me, was a cute girl. "Why didn't my throat go dry for her?
Out on the surf Dan McClure was going for it, showing us his backhand on a hollow left break. The crowd roared its appreciation, but I was having trouble getting into it.
By noon, when the quarterfinals got under way, the sun was blazing hot. Debbie had stripped down to white shorts and a bikini top, and I'd shucked my sweat shirt and tee and tied them around my waist. When I borrowed the glasses again I saw that Chloe had discarded her warm-up top and was wearing a silky red bikini.
"See all right?" Debbie asked, moving her head to the side.
"Yeah. I can see."
Deb held our places while I got us hot dogs and drinks, and after we'd wolfed them down I told her I thought I'd go check out the beach and did she want to come?
"No way," she said. "I'm not giving up this spot. You come back, huh? Don't miss the semis."
Last year at the semis a dog swam out into the waves, barking its head off, and a bunch of us plowed in after it. Bry had grabbed it first. Last year.
I told Debbie I'd for sure be back and took off. MTV was carrying the contest live and there were cameras and wires everywhere. The day was full of the smells of suntan oil and summer bodies, the exact kind of day my brother would have loved.
Not everybody on the beach was that interested in the surfing contest. There were people milling around far back in the sand, tossing footballs or just cruising, looking for happenings. Some of them were setting off firecrackers. A knot of guys stood in what might have been a football huddle and I had just passed them when I heard, from somewhere in the middle of the huddle, a girl's quick scream.
"No," she yelled. "Quit it, will you?"
Heads turned and the lifeguard scrambled down his ladder, heading for the group, which had grown somehow, and there were arms flailing and something was tossed out on the sand, grabbed up, and tossed in again. A red bikini top! Chloes? I felt sick. Couldn't be. Not Chloe's!
Now
I
was yelling, hurling myself against the outside bodies. "Let me in. Let her go!" I was clawing at heads and shoulders when somebody grabbed me. "Cool it, man! What's your problem? The girl's OK. Nothing happened to her. She crawled out. There she is."
I jumped so I could see over the heads, and I saw a girl with a white towel wrapped around her top, brown skin between the towel and her red bikini bottoms. She was at the side, laughing, covering her mouth with her hand. Not Chloe. Definitely not Chloe.
The guy who had talked to me grinned. "Thought she was your sister, huh?" I didn't have the strength to grin back "They were just messing around. She was sunning on her stomach without her top, and they were telling her to roll over and take the rest off. Nothin' serious." He had blue zinc on his nose to match his blue surfer Jams. "But now she's not even there and they're fightin' like maniacs. It's getting more serious by the minute."
I took a deep breath. Not Chloe. I'd have punched out every single one of them if it had been Chloe. I was panting and covered with sweat. Where
was
she anyway?
The TV people sensed a story and were juggling their equipment across the beach, and the lifeguard was trying to push his way through the mob, which swayed back and forth, oozing in all directions, growing even as I looked at it.
A beer bottle was thrown, and then a beach chair, then all was chaos. The pier was emptying fast. People rushed like ants, spilling down onto the sand. A beach umbrella sailed like a parachute, and a firecracker ricocheted between the running legs. I heard the beat of the police helicopter.
Police cars roared up, but somebody on the beach had flares, the kind they put on the road the night Bry was killed, and they were lighting them and tossing them into the crowd.
"Oh, my God!" The guy in the Jams pointed to smoke in the parking lot and I saw a police car burning.
Where was Chloe? I pushed against the traffic of running bodies, heading for where I'd seen her last.
She wasn't there. Had I expected her to sit through this?
Two surfers still rode the waves and the announcer still talked. But he wasn't describing the surfing. "Ladies and gentlemen, please stay in your seats. You came to watch the all-pro finals. Please stay in your seats."
I ran along the edge of the surf among the abandoned chairs and towels and coolers, calling Chloe's name.
And then I heard her. "Jesse! Jesse, over here."
She lay on the sand on her side, and some guy knelt beside her. "She's hurt her foot pretty bad," he said. "I was just about to go for help."
"It's OK," I said. "I'll take care of her."
"So stupid!" She held up her foot. "Look!"
I saw the bright blood dripping, the gash about an inch long.
"Glass," she said. "I didn't think I should walk. Not in the sand." Her face under her tan was gray.
I unknotted my T-shirt from my waist and tied it on her foot. I don't like blood and I could see it beginning to soak through the pale blue cotton already. My stomach got that fast, empty feeling. My stomach's always the first thing to go anyway. I concentrated on Chloe. "I thought it was you in the middle of the mob. I thought they'd pulled off your top. I was trying to get in. I'd have killed them, I swear." I stopped, aware of what I'd been saying and how ferociously I'd been saying it. "Do you think you can stand if I help you?"
She pulled herself up, holding onto my arm. "You thought I was in there? And you tried to save me? Oh, Jesse!" Her face had that tender, angelic look again. But this time it was for me. It made me feel strange. That was her Bry look.
"It might be better if I carried you," I said.
She had a big, white canvas purse that banged against me as I lifted her. "What about your other things? Didn't you have a chair?"
"Forget everything. Let's just get out of here."
The parking lot was a milling mass of people and police and smoke. I staggered up through the soft sand. Guys carry girls easily on TV and in the movies. They must fake it. This wasn't easy at all. Chloe was heavy. My arms got tired and she'd slip lower and lower and I'd have to keep hiking her up. "I'll hop. Just put me down," she said about a million times. I puffed and blew like a big, old whale.
At the far edge of the parking lot I circled round the back. Once I glanced down at her foot and wished I hadn't. Black smoke drifted lazily around us but down closer to the beach it was thick and dense, billowing into the blue of the sky, hiding the palm trees and the roof of the restrooms.
"How could something like this happen?" Chloe asked. "It was going so well. Everybody was having such a good time."
"Who knows? Some loonies. That's all it takes." Never in all my life had I been so glad to see Dads car. "Can you stand for a second, Chloe? Hold onto the roof."
I found the keys, unlocked the door, helped her to get in. The outside of the car was coated with a fine, gray ash and the inside was blistering. The seat must have been killer hot when she slid onto it, but she didn't say anything. I gunned the motor and backed out.
"Hang in there," I said.
"Will my car be all right?" she asked.
I looked across at her tight, hurting face and down to where the bloodsoaked T-shirt rested on the black rubber mat. "Let's worry about you now and your car later," I said. "And what happened to the people you were with anyway? Why didn't they stay with you?"
"They ran up to see what was going on. I told them not to, and I sat in my chair like a good little girl." She fingered wearily through her hair. "And then some firecrackers jumped in my direction. I got up, and I didn't see the glass."
Traffic was jammed at the exit and I had to stop.
"Was he here, Jesse?" Chloe asked.
"Who?"
"The guy in the black jacket. I figured he's the one you came to look for. I figured otherwise you'd never have come."
"Right." I edged the car in front of a van that almost took my ear
off
with the blast from its air horn. I'd forgotten about the guy in the black jacket. I'd carried Chloe through the sand and it hadn't been easy, but every second I'd been conscious of her hair against my cheek, of the feel of her skin, of the way I could see the pale swelling where the top of her swimsuit had moved. In all of that I'd forgotten him. And I'd forgotten Bry.
"I don't think he was there," I said at last.
"I don't think so either. Jim had binocs. I kept checking people out. I saw you," she added, "on the pier."
I had a sudden flash of Chloe watching me while I watched her. Crazy!
"I hope you didn't have to abandon the girl you were with because of me," she said, in a cool, casual way.
"No. I wasn't really with her. We met by accident." But I
had
abandoned Debbie. I'd told her I'd be back and I'd forgotten her, too.
Chloe shifted and groaned. More than anything I wanted to take her hand and comfort her. But I couldn't. At least we were moving now, picking up speed.
I was just as glad to see the hospital as I'd been to see Dad's car. I helped Chloe out, fished her sweat shirt from the big, white bag, held her as she struggled to get her arms into the sleeves. Printed across the front were the words
CALIFORNIA, WHERE LIFE'S A BEACH
. It didn't quite come to the top of the bikini pants. I put my own sweat shirt on, too, so I'd look a little more respectable.
They took us right away in the emergency room, though there were people ahead of us.
"Bleeders first," the nurse said cheerily. "What happened here anyway? Were you at that riot on the beach?" She brought over a wheelchair and eased Chloe into it. "Bunch of rowdies, those surfers," she said.
"It wasn't the surfers." I touched Chloe's hand. "Are you OK? Does it hurt a lot?"
"Not too much. And Jesseâthanks."
"Do you want me to come with you?" I asked.
The nurse butted in. "Are you her husband? Her father? Maybe you're her grandfather?" This nurse had wiggly eyebrows and a sense of humor.
"No."
"Sorry. Boyfriends don't count around here."
Chloe's eyes met mine.
"I'm actually not her boyfriend either," I said. "She's actually ... she's ... she was my brother's girl."
"Oh.
Was?
" The eyebrows wiggled again and the nurse grinned and swung Chloe's chair in a sort of wheelie. "She won't be long. You can wait."
I waited.
C
HLOE HAD THREE
stitches in her foot, a pad, and strapping. She carried my bloody T-shirt in a plastic bag.
I eased her into the back of the car, and she sat with her leg along the seat. That's probably where she should have been on the way in.
The Fourth of July traffic was bumper-to-bumper on Coast Highway, with pedestrians on the crosswalks and straggling across the street headed for an afternoon on the beach.
I spoke over my shoulder. "Does it hurt a lot?"
"Some. The doctor gave me a prescription for painkillers if I need them."
We were stopped at a light in the center of town right across from Main Beach Park with its picnic tables and swings. Guys leaped and jumped, smashing a ball back and forth across the volleyball net. They could all have been in suntan lotion commercials. Spectators jammed the tables and benches.
"One thing about Laguna Beach," I began, "there's always something going on." And then I saw it: the new restaurant that had opened on the bluff overlooking the beach. For some reason restaurants up there don't do well. They're too expensive, maybe because the rents so high. This one had a new black glass sign, riding high on wooden stilts,
THE WINDMILL
. There was an etching, a white windmill on the black glass. I stared at it, seeing the back of the guy's black jacket. Not airplane propellors after all.
Behind us a car honked impatiently.
"He works there," I said softly.
"Who? Where?" Chloe struggled to lean across the front seat.
I pointed. "The restaurant."
"Jesse! I bet you're right. Pull around. See if he's there."
"I can't. That's a one-way street. And I've got to get you home."
"You do not. I'm OK."
"Your foot!"
"The heck with my foot. If you could only find somewhere to park."
There wasn't anywhere, of course. Not within a five-mile radius of the center of Laguna, not on the Fourth of July.
The blaring behind me was an angry chorus that stretched back and up the hill.
"Move it, man! Get that crate out of here!" In the rearview mirror I saw a bunch of girls in a convertible.
Blam! Blam!
That was one of them leaning on the horn.
"Hold on!" I told Chloe, and swung the car into a space by the curb clearly marked red for no parking.
"Chloe? Honest now, can you handle it for a couple of minutes while I check the Windmill? You see, if I find him it'll start getting easier. It won't bring Bry back, but I'm going to feel so ... so vindicated!"
"Go, Jesse!"
I got out and ran back, past the summertime shops, pushing through tourists with their mounded ice-cream cones, throwing "sorry's" and "excuse me's" to right and left as I jostled toddlers and parents, jumping the sprawled bodies in the park. Jeez! Was I crazy? I'd be lucky if they didn't impound Dad's car and take Chloe to the slammer. Nobody parks on red in Laguna Beach.