Dark Water (7 page)

The Santa Margarita isn’t very deep or fast, so it was strange that I’d never explored the other side. Mostly the other side didn’t look that interesting, but these trees were tall and elegant and protective. I looked down at the river and decided it wasn’t too deep, that I could probably walk across if I rolled my jeans up high enough and used a few rocks as stepping-stones. I ended up soaking my thighs, but it was worth
it: under the oaks it was foresty and dark and spacious. It was so peaceful and level that you could have pitched a tent, and as I walked around thinking about that, I realized that two sycamores in the farthest corner had an actual, genuine hammock tied to them. Not the big ropy kind but the type made of green string that looks like it’d barely hold a bunch of apples.

“Hello?” I said.

Nobody answered. I set my backpack on the ground and spread the strings apart, lost my nerve, and looked around. Who would care, really, if I lay down in an empty hammock? No one or, possibly, the owner.

I listened to a pair of woodpeckers tapping on opposite sides of the river. DOT DOT DASH DOT, one went. DOT DOT, went the other.

Then I just did it. I pulled apart the hammock strings and scrunched in. It was very, very comfortable once I was banana-shaped, and the longer I lay there, the sleepier I got, the more sense the woodpeckers made, and the less I worried about who owned the hammock.

Had this been
Sleeping Beauty
, Amiel would have kissed me. Had it been a slasher movie, I would have awakened to the snapping of a twig. But when my eyes flipped open, the foresty grotto was just quiet: wind ruffling leaves and water tumbling over rocks and a hawk way up in the blue. I unpeeled myself from the hammock and slumped into my backpack.

I had no idea how much farther I had to walk. I passed under bowers strung with wild cucumber, more oaks and sycamores, and the river got smaller and smaller until it was a
tiny creek. The trail led away from the creek into a dry meadow and then to a matching yellow stile and Land Conservancy sign. I had reached the end of the trail and the dead end of Willow Glen Road, which meant I had a long way to go, most of it uphill.

I heard a bicycle, and because sometimes the world gives you what you want, the bicycle that streaked into view held Amiel. He slowed down and I stayed hidden in the shade of a big broken tree. He circled once where the asphalt came to an end, then circled again, and then he hoisted his feet gracefully onto the seat of the bicycle. Once his two feet were poised on the seat, he slowly extended one leg behind him, and then he stood up for one breathless second, gliding away from me with one hand on the handlebar, the other straight up. He brought his leg and hand back down until he was seated again and, after pedaling to renew his speed, tipped both feet back behind him until he was lying flat on the bicycle. He lay very straight, like Superman in flight, and then he arranged himself normally on the bike and headed straight for where I stood.

I don’t see how it helps the reproductive process to be dumb in the presence of potential mates, unless this is one of those leftover primitive responses that made cavewomen easier to subdue.

I think I said, “
Hola.
”

He looked startled.

“That was great,” I said. “You’re really good.”

He nodded slightly and held on to his bicycle. I tried to think how to ask where he lived. “
¿Dónde?
” I said. “
¿Su casa?
”
and he waved his hand to the north. I looked up at the hills and saw avocado groves, a white house, a brown house, and a shed, all of them far apart and none of them connected by driveways to where we stood.

“I’ve been walking,” I said, wishing I knew more Spanish. I did a little head toss to indicate the trail. I was disconcerted by his slender fingers, his bare arms, the flattish angle of his brown cheeks. “I’ve hiked really far, in fact. The bicycle’s a much better way to get around.”

He nodded and watched me with his sepia eyes.

“I’ve got to walk all the way home, too,” I said. “
Caminar.
” More of the universal finger-walking signal and head bobbing, this time in the direction he’d come from.

For some reason, he smiled and I saw that he had teeth like dental masonry, very white and square. He looked back up the first steep hill of Willow Glen and nodded. I was hoping he’d say something to me, though I’d never heard him speak. He reached into his pocket then and pulled out a small piece of paper that was the same piece of paper I’d handed him in the morning. I took the paper from him, and before I could read it, he was doing that casual ride-off move I have never managed on my own bicycle, where you coast a bit on the pedal before swinging your leg over the bar.

“
Gracias,
” I said.

He turned his head slightly, waved, and kept riding slowly in the direction of a dirt road that curved away from the trail and around an aloe field. I still couldn’t see how that road would lead toward the houses north of us, but I was desperate
to read his note, which for a while made walking up Willow Glen feel like floating:

Below the question that I hoped was
What is your favorite food?
he’d written in a curiously foreign printing,
cangrejos
.

After
Where did you learn to juggle?
he’d just written,
México
.

How did you lose your voice?
was followed by:
Tuve un accidente
.

What kind of accident? In a car? For at least five minutes the fact that he’d written back to me at all kept my mind off the walk, but the road went on and on and up and up. Like most roads in Fallbrook, it led mostly to no-trespassing signs and electric gates and watchful dogs and fruit trees. I gave up hope of walking all the way home and turned on my little black phone, which held four increasingly irate messages from my mother. When I called her, she said she’d pick me up so that she could personally kill me. I said those were terms I could accept.

After all, I had in my pocket a conversation with Amiel.

C
angrejo means “crab,” my Spanish dictionary informed me. I would eagerly and promptly have told Amiel how much I, too, like crabmeat, but I had no way to reach him and I was grounded. My mother didn’t find my father’s phone call much of an excuse, as it turned out. The second I got in the car, she said, “Where did I go this morning?”

“The high school.”

“And the day before that?”

I wasn’t positive where she’d been subbing the day before. “Potter?” I said.

“And the day before that?”

“I don’t remember, Mom. I don’t remember every school you went to in the past week.”

“Work,” she said. “I went to
work
. I didn’t go to the river
or the mall or the movies or the beach because I was depressed and didn’t want to face people.”

“Okay.”

For cutting school and not answering my phone and wandering loose among mountain lions and would-be rapists (“did you know there are
squatters
camps out there?” my mother asked, so I didn’t mention the hammock), she grounded me and took away my phone. The next morning, she refused to make Icelandic pancakes, which were the sacred centerpiece of our Saturday mornings.

“Tell Robby I said
joyeux anniversaire,
” I told my mother when the catering trucks began to arrive at ten, filling Hoyt’s driveway and the patio with white-shirted men and women. My aunt Agnès was throwing a party for Robby’s seventeenth birthday, and I could hear her voice as she told people where to set up chairs and where to chill the Perrier.

My mother appeared to be thinking it over. “You can go to the party,” she said, “because I’ll be there.”

I hoped hopelessly that my uncle might have hired Amiel to do some of the work. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

My mother and I walked through the grove in our new summer dresses, my mother’s hair pulled into a bun, her mouth similarly tightened, at six. We braced ourselves because a party thrown by Agnès was so elegant that you could only enjoy it if you were, say, invisible and yet able to eat. I was always charmed, at first, by the food and the flowers and the little sparkling lights, her handsomeness, and the waiters with trays. Agnès stood at the far edge of the patio, holding a champagne
flute, her dark hair curling up just a little at the back of her ageless neck. I saw immediately that the summer dresses my mother and I had chosen were frowsy and countrified and that we would always and forever be that kind of people. Agnès had that effect on me. The evening sky was periwinkle, and white roses glowed at the edges of a world that smelled of grilled meat and caramelized sugar, where heaps of impossibly perfect strawberries cascaded over one another on silver platters and arrangements of incandescent lilies floated in the center of each round table. The pool water flowed over its vanishing edge, one I had approached from within too many times to be taken in by the illusion.

I doubted Robby was very pleased with the offering. For my fifteenth birthday, my mother, father, Robby, and I had driven to Oceanside and walked the length of the old wooden pier to Ruby’s Diner, where the red and white booths seem to float over the water in a shimmering light that’s the best part of winter in San Diego. The ocean below our windows was mint blue while we were twisting our straw papers and sucking chocolate milk shakes out of tall fluted glasses, and my father was in a cheerful mood because he’d just sold a condo, I think. Then one of the men leaning over the rail with a fishing rod just outside our window caught a bat ray. I remember that part because when we walked out of the restaurant and stood looking out at the hammered pools of silver light where the late sun touched down, Robby asked what the point was of killing a bat ray.

The woman who sat with the dead ray at her feet said, “Have you ever eaten scallops, kid?”

“Yeah,” Robby said.

“Then you’ve probably eaten a ray. Restaurants cut them with a cookie cutter, see, and call them scallops.”

I didn’t believe her at first, but Robby did.

“That doesn’t happen,” I said when we walked away.

“I’ll bet it does,” Robby said.

“I don’t see what difference it makes,” my father said when we were all strolling down the pier past the fishing rods and tubs of bait and men standing with their hands in their coat pockets, waiting for a catch in the cold, late-evening wind. “You’re eating something that used to be alive, one way or the other.”

“But you cut it up and leave all those extra bits,” I said, “and those parts go to waste.” The cookie cutter thing reminded me of making sugar cookie trees at Christmas and trying really hard to use up all the dough, though you never could.

“Plus, they’re lying,” my mom said. “They’re saying it’s something it isn’t. That’s the main thing.”

“I wonder what they make shrimp out of,” Robby said. “Sharks?” He was joking, trying to turn the conversation away from morals. “Hey, check that guy out.”

Beyond the fishing lines, a
V
of black-suited surfers bobbed up and down on their boards, eyes on the next swell, hoping to eke out one more ride before total darkness. The boy Robby pointed to had just risen, and he stood in perfect balance as the wave held him and carried him for a long beautiful time, and when the boy saw that the ride was over, he stepped off the board.

Looking at Robby beside the tea lights and the swimming pool, his pants tailored and his shirt pressed, I thought he looked like someone who could ride a long way without falling off.

“Shoot me now,” he told us, giving my mother a hug.

“Not when you’re looking so princely,” she said, full of her usual love for him. She handed over the box that I knew contained a small statue of a red-kilted Tintin and his terrier, Snowy, standing in a rowboat as they prepared, according to the catalog description, to set off for L’Ile Noir.

“Thanks,” Robby said, and before I could say anything more, my uncle was there, smooshing me pleasantly to his granite chest, his face cut a little from shaving or crashing through bushes on his motorbike.

“Come eat,” Hoyt said. “Agnès brought you some of those chocolates, Sharon Magoo. From Par-ee. Plus we have scallops wrapped in bacon.”

I raised an eyebrow at Robby.

“Real ones,” Robby said. “Or so they promised.”

When my uncle walked away with my mother, Robby pulled me back and hissed into my ear, “There’s an Avalon in the driveway. I think it’s the one, but I couldn’t check it out when everybody was still arriving.”

“He invited his girlfriend to your party?”

Robby shrugged.

“Why would he do that?”

Robby widened his eyes to show that logic had no place here. “Just come check it out with me,” he said, giving me the
sweet old Robby look, the one that said I was his best cousin of all. He led me past various neighbors and friends, all of whom he nodded to with what I have to say was his mother’s charm, and then dragged me through the darkened wisteria arbor to the gravel drive, which was crowded with cars and trucks that gleamed in the fading light. “There,” he said, checking to see that no one was watching or listening to us. He let go of my arm and approached the car as if it were an alien spaceship, which I suppose in a way it was. Stars glittered like moving water overhead.

“Keep watch,” he said. He leaned forward to peer through the windows. “It’s the same one,” he said, “and it’s unlocked.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “Then get in.”

“Get in?”

“Nobody’s coming. Just get in and find the registration.”

Robby climbed into the car and opened the glove compartment. The car’s interior lights lit up the whole scene like a fish tank, and at that moment I heard my uncle calling, “Robby?”

I couldn’t see where Uncle Hoyt was, exactly. There was a catering truck to one side of us and somebody’s Dodge dually on the other side, and though I could see most of the front lawn, I couldn’t see my uncle, so I ducked.

The voice came closer.

“Robby?”

The light in the car went out. I had no way of knowing whether Robby had also heard the voice and ducked.