As Jane searched for swim fins and Livvy and Mona robbed the linen closet of towels, I watched Mike. I thought he had given up smoking, but there was a cigarette in his mouth. He bent each match outside the matchbook cover, lit it, and waved the book until it went out. As he stood there, I was aware that the deck looked more like a container than an open platform.
The house was right on the beach and the visibility was good that day. The coast runs west to east midway between Point Conception and Port Hueneme. The ocean is due south and in the summer people prop their chairs, slather up, let their toddlers go nude, wrestle with kayaks. Kids line up their boards like Cadillac Ranch. Dogs run in packs.
It was low tide, so there were fifty feet of beach at most and coastal access for all. Of course sometimes the beach disappeared entirely and the water pounded the lower decks. A newspaper left out could turn to a bit of papiermâché stuck to a railing. The houses ranged from the substantial to the badly weathered, mostly wood framed. There was the pseudo-Spanish one of stucco, and a couple of blue-and-white nautical designs with overloaded themes.
Franny had owned her place down to the retaining wall. In winter she heaped sandbags around the pilings to keep her house from being carried out to sea. The lower deck had been rebuilt three separate times after bad storms. Flooring and carpet ripped up and replaced. Yet each summer when we arrived, her house was back in order.
I was eight when I met Jane. She was nine. My parents and I stayed at a rental a few doors down. It was always different at our house. Impermanent. Fragile. The kind of place where you could stiff a landlord on the last month’s rent.
It was important to keep everything picked up, especially between my bedroom door and the bunks, so Lois, my mother, wouldn’t trip in the dark. When she came home, she sometimes woke me to say good-night, sending out an exhaust of salt, peppermint candies, and gin as she spoke. She asked if I had spent time on my workbooks, if I had kept myself out of trouble. I said yes and yes, and when I attempted to sit up in the dark, she put a cool hand on my forehead, as if I might have a temperature.
I could make out the outline of her hair, brittle from the ocean, and I knew her lips were stung by weather. In daylight they were almost white, sometimes blistered. If she had something to say about children who hide in abandoned refrigerators or men who fall into elevator shafts, this was where she whispered to me, often drifting off and not quite finishing her stories. My mother gave me this advice: If you have to jump from a burning building, leap second. Let someone else go first. This gives the men with the nets a chance to study the wind direction and velocity.
Once she held up a piece of paper. There was a wheel in the center, my name in the upper left-hand corner, my birth date. Lois said: I talked with a woman today. And she looked at your chart. She wants you to know that something will happen around travel . . . or a car. That was it. A car will change your life. It has to do with the planet Pluto. You’re overloaded with Pluto.
While she pointed to the black ink marks, I lay still, imagining a wheel rolling over me, flattening me to sleep. You understand, don’t you? This woman knows a good deal about these things. You should hear what she said about me. Then Lois pulled herself up and receded into the hall, as if she hadn’t been there.
For years I pictured a collision that would slow traffic around me. I saw where my lungs would puncture, heard the radio I couldn’t turn off, stared at my foot impaled on the brake. I was aware that the orange reflective triangles would be placed around my car. I didn’t understand at the time that predictions swerve and take on whole other meanings. There was a car, but no accident, no death. Unless you call love an accident. I don’t.
three
The morning Jane left, I crawled into bed with Mike and didn’t wake up until the midmorning express vibrated the French doors of the second-floor deck. Mike was propped up on one elbow, watching me. He looked amused, probably thought Jane and I were having him on. Maybe he was employing that simple carnival trick of his: to guess the weight of a head. Mike had worked on a midway one summer during college, and he had gotten pretty good at sizing up a person by the pound. But he wasn’t reliable then and gave away too many stuffed cats and cloth dolls.
—Holding Jane’s place? he laughed.
I sat up against the bolster, and launched into a nervous rap about the Jaguar. He leaned into me as I talked openly about the canvas top and the broken mechanism. We both liked machinery, how a good piece of equipment works, but I could only distract him so long, and I ran myself out detailing that car. Mike unraveled his pajamas from the covers, slipped into the bottoms, and got out of bed.
—Shout if I get warm.
He looked under the dust ruffle, stepped in and out of the bathroom, checked behind the yellow stuffed chair. When he came back to bed, he took my hand and said:
—I give.
—I tried to stop her.
He looked at my head again. I felt it lift off my neck and go onto the scale.
—She left the girls’ insurance cards. Took two bags. I should have woken you. I haven’t slept for . . . She’s probably in San Luis Obispo by now. Paso Robles. This looks so bad. I couldn’t think.
I watched the gill-like movement of his jaw, the small muscles tensing and relaxing. He balled up his pajama top and threw it across the room, and said:
—Fuck.
Then he laughed to himself.
—It’s okay, Mike said. I lifted the receiver on the old white princess phone sitting on the bedside table, but it slipped from my hand and dropped to the rug.
—I’ll try her cell, I said, unwinding the cord and starting over.
—She won’t answer.
I hung the phone up.
—Did she go north?
—No. I mean, I don’t know.
—Which car?
—The Jaguar.
—Is it too early for a drink?
He knew where Franny had kept her gin and brought it back to bed. I took a sip, watched him, waiting for something other than the weary, almost luminous look he gets after being up all night editing. For years Mike had made documentaries. Exquisite, quirky things. My favorite was the man fixing a VW Bug who talked about his six ex-wives while he gapped the plugs and set the timing, his lone voice working like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. He said:
—You have to feel like you came out here for nothing.
—Don’t worry about me. Maybe the police could . . .
He touched one of my eyebrows, as if it were out of place.
It’s okay? I thought. Sometimes Mike suffered from the same kind of melancholy that overtakes me, so I understood that at least. And I understood his way of protecting me. He lost his sister when he was fifteen. But, it’s okay? The blue bottles on Franny’s dressing table sent out light. The fog had burned off a good deal. It was the first clear sky since our arrival, but that was how June was, unlimited fog with a few breaks. I hoped it would be all right where Jane drove.
—This is what she does. She drives off, he said.
I realized his eyes used to be a true, faded color. Now they looked blue like laundry soap. I looked for contact lenses as he gazed toward the islands, but I didn’t see any. I couldn’t understand the way he’d aged. It wasn’t that his face was waxy or taut, injected or stitched into place; it was unchanged. Changed, unchanged. I played with this like a power surge—lights coming up, blacking out.
—Aren’t you blind without your glasses?
—I can see you better this way, he said.