A Thousand Steps

28

He opens Kyle’s letter as he sits on a beach chair in the Third Street driveway, waiting for Tommy to bring his papers. He’s been sketching angrily. It infuriates him to be drawing his mother in her bathtub like she was, entombed in hash and opium, oblivious to the world around her. It also infuriates him that his deadbeat father can’t show up to help his own daughter. It’ll be a relief to hear about the war.

Kyle’s penmanship leans hurriedly forward.

Matt is finishing his letter back to Kyle just as Tommy arrives with today’s papers. In the letter, Matt does not mention Bonnie, just as he hasn’t told Kyle abut Jazz. On half a sketchbook page, he dashes off a quick drawing of the house that will no longer be Kyle’s home by the time he gets back. Matt thinks of telling Kyle about losing the house, but it might be distracting. Although not as bad as hearing that Jazz has been missing for nine days and that Laguna is papered with her police missing-persons flyers. He creases and tears off the drawing, folds it carefully and puts it in the envelope with the letter.

Welcome home, Kyle.

Matt tears through his paper route like a kid on fire. His ridiculous parents, his inability to find his sister, Furlong’s dull disbelief, the growing probability that Bonnie was murdered, all fuel him. He pedals as hard as he can. His turns are tight and his skids are controlled. He treats the traffic with contempt. His accuracy with the papers is the best it’s ever been. Checks his Skindiver: 2:47 minutes, a record.

He’s dripping sweat, panting hard, and still angry by the time he’s finished, way up in Bluebird Canyon, looking down on the houses and the descending hills and the heaving white-capped Pacific. A yellow biplane pulls a Coppertone banner slowly up the coast, south-to-north.

He thinks about his sister. He thinks about Om. He remembers telling Mahajad that he’s looked everywhere for Jazz. Is there a different way to see? But wait a minute: how could he make such a claim? He has not looked everywhere.

He has not looked everywhere.

An idea begins to form in his angry mind.

That evening he’s eating fresh-caught perch alone in the Third Street house when the phone rings.

It’s Jazz, her voice a caged whisper.

“I can’t get out!”

“Where are you?”

“In Laguna! I’m in the...”

Then the sharp crack and the muted ring of a bell. Then dial tone.

Ten silent minutes.

Thirty.

He pictures her in a cage. A cell. A dark garage.

He calls Darnell, who answers on the first ring.

“Do not leave that phone,” she says.

They sit in the living room for the next hour, Matt telling Darnell what happened until there isn’t one more question she can ask or one more answer he can give. He repeats Jasmine’s nine words exactly. And how she said them: in breathless terror.

Matt stares out the window as Darnell’s assuring voice fills the little room. It’s important to know that she’s here, says the officer. That she’s close. That’s the hope.

“Do you believe me now?”

“I believe you now.”

“Furlong won’t. McAdam won’t.”

“I always believed you. But maybe not quite enough.”

“Belief plus doubt is not belief.”

“I believe you now, Matt. One hundred percent.”

Matt feels numb, but in a good way. He’s too afraid of what’s happening to his sister for nonsense, frivolity, or anything like pride to enter his mind. He feels purged. Pure. As if he’s broken through to another way of seeing things. Another connection to Jazz.

Suddenly, it comes to him: the way to find her.

It has clarity and logic, simplicity, and a dose of can’t-miss. Like certain moments fishing — timing the surge, then the cast, the pause, the retrieve — it’s all perfect and you know, you know. You just know.