A Thousand Steps

16

Laurel’s sixteenth birthday party at Brooks Street beach: a warm summer afternoon, twenty bouncy girls and skinny boys sunning, surfing, skim-boarding, sneaking beers from coolers and disguising them with plastic Coke and 7Up sleeves.

Over hot dogs and potato salad, Laurel opens Matt’s gift box, which he has wrapped in Sunday’s Register color comics page. She pulls the small framed oil painting of herself in the Gauguin tableau from the box, and smiles. His heart seems to expand. He bought new paints and worked hard to get it halfway decent.

Next, the bottle of Heaven Sent perfume he knows she likes, purchased at Bushard’s Pharmacy downtown. Laurel smiles again, blows him a kiss across the loose circle of young people — some reclining in canvas beach chairs, some sitting on towels, some sprawled directly on the warm sand — all slathered in Coppertone or Piz Buin or baby oil right out of the bottle to amplify the tanning power of the sun. The blown kiss makes the teenagers cheer loudly with fake surprise. Laurel, Matt sees, doesn’t look embarrassed at all.

Other gifts: a stereo LP — The Songs of Leonard Cohen — which is left in a bag and stashed in one of the coolers so it won’t melt in the sun, a book of poems by Rod McKuen, 45s from the Beatles and Aretha, a packet of patchouli incense, a tie-dye scarf, a glass bead necklace and earrings, an anklet of small pearls — Laurel’s birthstone — given to her by an obviously admiring Lance Gentry. Even as a sophomore, Lance is a varsity tennis star and a renowned surfer. He’s popular and has long hair and a good complexion. He kneels before Laurel to attach the anklet, unleashing a storm of envy in Matt.

Who sits cross-legged in the sand, blanket over his legs to hide the ugly knee scabs. Furlong and his partner march six handcuffed hippies toward Pacific Coast Highway and Moby Cop. Furlong is smiling and talking to them, apparently happy with his catch.

Matt watches Laurel as closely and often as he can without her knowing. She catches him twice, which, if he’s figuring right, means she could be doing the same to him. Matt’s heart seems to expand, again. He’s had this feeling before, in connection with Laurel Kalina. And sometimes in connection with other people, or animals. Daisy, the family puppy. Calypso, a fluffy calico kitten he found downtown on Forest Ave. one rainy Saturday. Kyle, standing in the batter’s box at the high school playoffs. Jazz, playing her ukulele at the beach that night. He’s pretty sure this feeling is love. It’s much stronger now, the older he gets.

Toward sunset they’re alone, walking the low-tide beach. He has taken Laurel’s hand, which is warm and strong. Her half-Hawaiian skin is already dark, and summer doesn’t even start until next week. Her shoulders are round and her arms are sleek and her breasts are all movement and intrigue within her black and yellow hibiscus print bikini. She’s got her beach towel around her waist, reminding Matt of Gauguin’s native islanders.

“I made those calls I told you about,” she says. “To my friends, about Jasmine. I just got the call I didn’t want to get. I can’t tell you how I know this. There are people I have to protect, good people. But she was at Jordan Cavore’s Sapphire Cove party last Friday night.”

“How do you know?”

“I just told you I can’t say how.”

“But it’s true?”

“One hundred percent. Don’t ask me any more questions about it. She was there.”

“Will you tell the cops?”

“I will not. You can, but leave me out of it. I’ll do anything to help Jazz, but I can’t betray a friend.”

That low thrumming in his ears again. He’d missed Jazz in Sapphire Cove by one day. One day! Confirming what Officer Brigit Darnell suspected as to why Julie’s van was parked there to begin with.

“I feel terrible having to tell you, Matt.”

Not as terrible as you would if you knew what goes on there, Matt thinks.

“Let’s find a place and watch the sunset,” she says.

They find a rock outcropping shaped like a horseshoe, back near the cliff, a good view to the west. The sky has gone gray-orange and the sun is a perfect half circle above the horizon. People stop and watch, their figures almost colorless in the vanishing light.

Matt and Laurel spread their towels side by side in the little cove, and sit with their legs almost touching. His skinned kneecaps burn. He takes her hand. Laurel has sprayed on some Heaven Sent before adding it to her sister’s cooler for transport back home. Matt smells it on her, a sweet, almost powdery scent that Sheila at the pharmacy said was the perfect perfume for a girl becoming a woman.

“Kind of cool tonight,” she says.

Matt sidles closer and puts his arm around her. She leans into him. His knee shrieks with fresh pain. He sees his rival’s pearl anklet and wishes he’d thought of that, but then, it’s way more money than the perfume. He can also smell her salty hair and the Coppertone on her skin.

Laurel talks on about her friends, filling Matt in on some surprising romances he’s been unaware of. His arm falls asleep but he will not remove it from Laurel Kalina’s warm, fragrant shoulder. He cranes his neck so that he can see the sunset, unfolding spectacularly, and still see Laurel’s profile.

She tells him about her writing assignment for the UC Irvine workshop her mom got her into: five three-page, double-spaced, typed character sketches based on people she actually knows. All five of whom were at this party today. Thus her “nosey curiosity regarding their private lives!”

Matt wonders again exactly how Laurel came to know of Jasmine’s Sapphire Cove appearance on Friday night. Wonders too if Laurel knows what really goes on there. She certainly might. She’s talked to somebody who was there, someone who knows Jasmine, right? One thing he’s coming to know about Laurel is her fierce curiosity about the people around her. Her eye for detail and nose for facts. Like she’s compiling characters for a book.

Matt realizes that he can tell Laurel very little of what he’s learned or done since his sister vanished from home. Not Bonnie Stratmeyer’s mysterious injuries and presence at one or more Jordan Cavore parties. Not Jazz’s sleeping with Austin Overton up in Big Yellow after his Sandpiper show. Not that he’d been in Sapphire Cove Saturday night at an orgy, was hit in the head with Jordan Cavore’s bong, and later crashed his bike near the guardhouse on PCH. He doesn’t like lying or omitting to Laurel Kalina. What he really wants is to unload everything, every detail and discovery, so she’ll have his secrets too. To have a secret sharer.

“They found Mom’s van parked in Sapphire Cove without a guest permit,” Matt says. “The cops towed it.”

“But no Jasmine?”

“No. And I don’t see why she would just leave the van for so long it gets towed. Unless, you know, she planned on getting back to it and wasn’t allowed to.”

“Like, prevented?”

“Not like prevented — prevented.”

“That’s scary.”

“She left her ukulele in it. And some good eight-tracks.”

Through his fallen-asleep arm, Matt can feel Laurel take a long deep breath. She turns to look at him, their faces very close. “What if she ran away from home and doesn’t want to go back? Doesn’t even want to be found?”

Of course, Matt’s been asking himself those same hard questions. But he just can’t make his sister’s disappearance from home into something she did on purpose. Sure, she’d run away with a girlfriend when she was eleven, given all of them a scare when they rode their bicycles to a movie theater twelve miles inland and got picked up by the cops. Each girl had had a rucksack full of clothes and food, and confessed that they’d run away to see the world but maybe made a mistake and decided to see One Hundred and One Dalmatians instead.

But that was different. Since then, she’d never talked of doing anything like that. Never seemed sick of it all. Never furious. Never so down she couldn’t function. Maybe she wasn’t happy like a girl can be happy, but Jazz at eighteen wasn’t a girl anymore. And so what if she’s arrogant and aloof and acidly critical of herself and others? So what if she calls her mother a delusional stoner right to her face, and her father a redneck asshole, and Matt a zit-faced jack-off? And so what if she sneaks beers and throws the empties under the bed? So what if she’s had sex? Her just running away still didn’t add up. Wouldn’t she have taken more clothes? Her suitcase and hair stuff and makeup and records and books?

Coming from Laurel, though, the idea of Jazz running away sounds more possible.

“I just don’t think she ran away,” he says.

Her face is still so close he can feel her exhale on his skin. Eyes like black ponds. He feels a shudder go down Laurel’s back.

“I don’t either, Matt. But if she didn’t run away on her own, then maybe she’s been lured away.”

“By Cavore?” he says. “To his parties for rich old men?”

Again, this notion collides with Matt’s belief that Jordan Cavore and his friends would truly disgust his sister. And send her running for... where? For who? Not back to her drafty bungalow on Third Street with the starving pantry and a bathroom shared by three — soon to be four again. No, not home, apparently. Not to a friend’s, either — he’s called every one of them he can think of, many of them twice. Motels and rooms for rent? Too expensive. Could Jazz endure Sapphire Cove for money? If so, then she could be almost anywhere, hiding out, impossible to find. Jazz as a prostitute is not imaginable.

“I can’t picture her in that scene,” says Laurel.

“Lured,” he says. He hadn’t thought of that word to explain what might have happened to his sister. To a fisherman it has a specific, deadly meaning.

“You can kiss me if you want,” she says.

“I really want.”

His first kiss, not counting spin-the-bottle at Carolyn Plath’s party on Linden Street in the eighth grade.

So, he like, knows what he’s doing.

Two hours later, his tongue and throat muscles sore and his balls aching mightily, Matt treats Laurel to another wallet-busting ice cream sundae at the Sunshine Inn.

Then walks her home and hugs her awkwardly good night on her front porch. The smell of Heaven Sent coming off her is one hundred percent unforgettable, he thinks.

“This was the best birthday of my life,” she says.

“Me too.”

“I like you. If you were a story I’d sit up in bed tonight and read you.”

“I like you too, Laurel.”

“You can call me anytime. I’m in the phone book, you know.”

“I’ll call.”

“We’ll get Jazz back. She’s too smart to get tangled up with bad people.”

Ten minutes later he’s walking into the weekly program at Mystic Arts World on Coast Highway, where — as hundreds of dizzying, pink, yellow, and orange Flower Power posters hung all over town have proclaimed — Dr. Timothy Leary, pictured on the poster, smiling widely, will tonight present:

Matt thinks that his chance of finding Jazz here is one in a thousand.

He’ll take it.

One of these posters is the one on her bedroom wall.