A Thousand Steps

2

At home, his mother sits at the dinette in a green silk kimono, working on her morning coffee. The smell of weed has wafted in from under the closed door of her bedroom because Julie Anthony will not be seen smoking grass by her own children. Matt wishes she didn’t get high so often.

Home is a clapboard bungalow that huddles in the shade of the phone company building at the bottom of the Third Street hill. Three tiny bedrooms. It was built just after World War II as a summer home for a Pasadena banker. Or so says the landlord, Nelson Pedley, who sometimes tries to shame Julie into paying her rent on time by complaining to Matt about people meeting their obligations first and their pleasures second. Pedley claims to be the banker’s son-in-law. But, a banker’s second home or not, this is a drafty and uninsulated one-bath box held together by loud plumbing and temperamental electricity, dwarfed by two-story apartments on three sides, and the looming General Telephone & Electronics building across Third. The rent is remarkably cheap, for Laguna. Julie gets the tiny “master,” while Matt’s sister Jasmine gets one of the bedrooms, and Matt — beginning with high school two years ago — has moved from his and brother Kyle’s room to the garage.

“Honey!”

“Hi, Mom.”

“How’d you do?”

“Two good bass. Bonnie Stratmeyer washed up on the beach early this morning, Mom. She’s dead.”

“Oh my goodness,” she almost whispers. “Why? How? Was she swimming?”

“It only just happened. Nobody knows anything yet.”

“What a terrible thing. Jasmine is going to be seriously blown out!”

Matt says nothing. He dislikes his mother’s sometimes antic behavior while high.

Matt puts the bass fillets in a baking dish and pours in enough milk to cover them. It isn’t a lot to eat but it’s fresh and free. He sets the fishy newsprint in the trash can outside and washes his hands in the groaning kitchen faucet.

“I’m freaked out,” says his mother. “Bonnie’s been missing two months, now this? Her mother will be so totally bummed.”

“Probably her dad, too.”

His own dad being a sore spot around here, Matt dries his hands on his shorts and goes to wake up his sister, maybe break the bad news about Bonnie, and see if she’s up for the beach later.

No Jasmine, which is a bit of a surprise. First time she hasn’t come home after a night out, Matt thinks. She left last night in Julie’s old hippie van. Which wasn’t in the driveway when Matt left to fish early this morning, and isn’t in the driveway now.

In her room he looks at her senior portrait, crookedly thumbtacked to the wall above a big psychedelic pink-yellow-and-orange Dr. Timothy Leary lecture-in-Laguna poster. Flanked by her Buffalo Springfield and Sandpiper nightclub flyers. On the bedstand is her diary and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. No cans or bottles in the wicker trash can.

Jazz. They’re close in the friendly-enemies way that brothers and sisters are close. If Matt had to answer Furlong’s nosey questions about Bonnie Stratmeyer on behalf of Jazz, he’d have to say his sister is more in-crowd than a head, though he has seen empty beer cans in her trash. She’s also an effortless straight-A student, a former cheerleader, wiseass, and an all-around bitchen teenager. Plays a ukulele and writes her own songs. She makes ugly faces that crack him up.

Back in the dining room, little more than a windowed alcove off the kitchen, he asks his mother where Jasmine went last night.

“Miranda’s, I think. She took the van again. We, um, had some words about her attitude towards her mother.”

Not the first time for that, thinks Matt. “She’s never not come home.”

“She’s also just graduated and blowing off steam,” says Julie. “She was angry. Feeling her oats, though I’m not sure what ‘oats’ are in this situation.”

Out in the garage Matt stashes his fishing gear and takes off the poncho for the warming June day. He leaves the big door up to let in some sun. The garage has two windows, the heavy spring-loaded door for cars, and a narrow convenience door for people.

His mattress, sleeping bag, and pillow are on the floor. There are orange-crates stacked for his books and painting supplies, a desk and a chair. One overhead light operated by a wall switch. There’s a pulsing blue lava lamp, a gift from Jazz. His current painting is a mess of a seascape, half-done if that, propped on a wounded thrift-store chair. Matt keeps his garage clean but creatures get in under the doors, mice sometimes, earwigs and spiders, and once in a while, a scorpion.

Now his mother stands just outside the garage, framed in sunlight. Julie’s wearing her Jolly Roger Restaurant waitress uniform — a red wench’s blouse with a plunging neckline and off-the-shoulder sleeves, black pantaloons, red socks, and hideous black buckled slippers. Her dark hair up. Matt thinks she looks too young to be his mom.

“I’m off to work, Matty. Are you copacetic with what you saw?”

“I’ve never seen a dead person before.”

The dead frogs in biology were bad enough. The smell of formaldehyde. Bonnie looked so cold.

Julie strides into the garage and throws her arms around her son. “I know, Matty. I know.”

Then she backs away, takes both his hands and looks up at him with teary eyes.

“You said Miranda’s,” Matt says.

“Miranda’s?”

“Jazz, Mom. You said she went to Miranda’s last night.”

“I think that’s what she said. Miranda lives on Cress.”

Matt has delivered newspapers to Miranda Zahara’s driveway every day for two years and four months, so he knows exactly where she lives. He knows exactly where hundreds of Laguna Beach’s thirteen thousand people live. He also knows which customers give him bonus money at Christmas. Which last year helped to get him the new black Schwinn Heavy-Duti delivery bike with the cantilever frame, heavy-duty saddle, drop-forged crank, and pannier rack.

“Matt, don’t worry about Jazz,” says Julie. “She’s just testing her freedom. And me. She’ll be home any minute with a big old hangover.”

Julie lets go of her son and heads down the driveway, the buckles of her slippers twinkling in the sun.

Cress is a short bike ride. Miranda’s mom says that Miranda was supposedly at his house last night. Matt thinks of the double-reverse play in football. Very much like his sister to pull something like that over Julie’s eyes.

“Miranda came home late,” says Mrs. Zahara. “She’s still asleep.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“The Sandpiper maybe? That singer they like was there last night, and the bouncers usually let them in.”

Matt nods. He knows what singer she’s talking about and doesn’t like him. Jasmine has a crush on him. He also knows that Jasmine’s fake ID is pretty good because he made it for her, carefully doctoring the date of birth and expiration date numerals after she had reported her CDL stolen and gotten a replacement. The fake is pretty obvious in sunlight but indoors or by flashlight you had a chance of getting away with it.

“Is everything alright?” asks Mrs. Zahara.

He thinks of Bonnie Stratmeyer but nods anyway. Wonders why moms don’t keep track of their kids better. “Pretty much.”

She says that Miranda would probably be out of bed by the time Matt came back here to deliver the paper. He could talk to her then if he wanted.