Desperation Reef

41

Belle Becket has her fortune-teller’s table set up near the sea wall just south of the Laguna Hotel. The wall has the painting of John Stonebreaker banking off a comically perfect wave at Brooks Street — just a few blocks south of here. For the first time, the painting shows its age to Jen: the gray cement divots, the weakening colors, John’s hair fading from yellow to white.

Belle has on the same tie-dye hippie dress she was wearing last month. Her hair is its usual tangled mess, her gray eyes piercing, the racoon makeup lurid.

The November day is sunny and blustery, and the breeze wobbles her sign. Jen notes that Belle has raised her prices. Now the short future forecast is five dollars and the long one ten.

Belle comes around and Jen hugs her gingerly, tries not to breathe. Since almost drowning she dares not hold her breath. Sends a panic through her — her body just won’t do it. She breathes in Belle’s sharp, wild-gourd scent.

Belle steps back, taking one of Jen’s hands in both of hers. Gives Jen an alarmed look.

“I’m sorry about the Barrel! I’m so glad they arrested Jimmy Wu! Good police work.”

With a lot of help from Bette, Jen thinks.

“I walk past it every day,” says Belle. “The rehab is going faster and faster.”

“I got the loan and the builders are good.”

“I see a beautiful Barrel there by summer.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’m always right. Short or long today?”

Jen has five twenties balled up in the pocket of her jeans. Pushes them into Belle’s almost-empty mason jar.

“Long, Belle. Tell me what you see.”

“Sit.”

Belle moves the shadeless lamp that holds her handwritten grocery-bag sign, then takes Jen’s hands and stares at her as Jen closes her eyes.

Then Belle.

“Now I’m underwater with you, Jen. Seeing through you. Feeling what you feel. You are frightened and alone and rolling over a reef. You hit a rock but your helmet stays on.”

“It was terrible, Belle. I almost died.”

“I read your story.”

A long silence. Jen knew that Belle would read her piece. That was one of the reasons she wrote it.

“You push off the rocks for the surface. You break into the light. You gasp for air but the whitewater hits your face and mouth.”

Jen concentrates on this. It’s another memory that has stolen back into her. It’s like seeing it happen for the first time. She feels the terror again, those cold, bony fingers trying to take hold of her.

“Now I see nothing but black,” says Belle. “You have stopped seeing.”

Black indeed. Thoughtless silence, forever.

But now Jen opens her eyes to the breezy gray light of Laguna. Colliding with death has changed her. She can face the memories of it, and feel the fear — but she can also banish them from her inner eye. Replace them with the bright, living world around her.

“The black can’t hold me down anymore, Belle. I can make it. Make it to the surface and breathe.”

“It is the euphoria of survival. And congratulations on Casey winning. You must be proud. Your mother, too.”

They share a look over Eve Byrne’s invincible will to win. Especially for her surf and swim and water polo teams, of which Jen and Belle were once a part.

A long silence.

Belle opens her eyes and folds Jen’s hands to the tabletop, palms down. Pulls her tie-dye scarf snug around her neck. Crosses her arms and fixes Jen with a serious look.

“In your article, the New Year’s Eve party scene in Laguna Canyon was a real bummer. I could feel your heart breaking when you were in that bathroom.”

Jen’s imagination arcs back to that night. Over twenty-five years ago, in a flash. She closes her eyes again, lets the memory play.

“I saw and heard you in the words,” says Belle. “The people making love in an upstairs bedroom. You recognizing a voice. And a familiar moan. You, hiding in a bathroom and the door is cracked and the light is off. You waiting. John walks past. Moving with purpose. Then Ronna Dean. Your school friend, the singer.”

“I wasn’t planning on revisiting that today,” Jen lies. “It still hurts like the night it happened.”

“But why did you write it this way, Jen?”

“What way, Belle? What do you mean?”

Belle’s eyes are steel gray and unblinking, framed by the heavy black-and-white makeup. The breeze blows a tangled strand of hair across her forehead.

“You lied,” she says. “Right there in Surf Tribe.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You saw me. Belle Becket. Not some make-believe Ronna Dean.”

Jen stands and walks away from the table. Regards the silver ocean mirroring the gray sky, the tiny waves forming and breaking. Pictures exactly where she’d be if she were just one foot tall on an eight-inch surfboard, riding a little monster like that. She’s been doing this for forty years now, since Mom and Dad started taking her to this very beach.

Then she turns and considers the sea wall, where fading John rides a fading wave as a fading sun shines down.

Belle joins her. Stands a good six feet to one side, pushes some sand with a dirty foot.

“I didn’t know you knew,” she says. “That’s how I was able to keep doing this. This thing with you. I wondered but I didn’t know. Sure didn’t see you when I walked past that bathroom. Did you hate me then?”

“Oh yes.”

“Now?”

“Not now.”

“No one knows, Jen. And now that you’ve blamed it on a phantom, nobody’s ever going to. But what if someone remembers that party and asks about the singer?”

“I never went to a New Year’s Eve party in Laguna Canyon. The one with you and me and John was... well, you know where it was.”

“The rich old people in Newport. What if your magazine finds out you created a character to cover up a truth?”

“To protect another truth.”

“Why all these years? Of this, with me?”

Jen has asked herself this for over twenty years, the anger and the pity fighting inside her like alley cats.

“I saw what happened to you. Your... coming apart. I believed some of it was what you did with John. Guilt and maybe shame. And that you felt responsible for what happened to him — in some way. Distracted him, maybe. Confused him. I wanted to help you. Not totally lose a terrific friend, who surfed with me, and made me laugh, and made me happy to be around.”

“You pitied the pathetic, filthy crackhead who slept with your husband.”

“You weren’t that then. You’re not that now.”

Belle watches her foot in the sand.

“It wasn’t John that did me in, Jen. It was my guilt. My greedy heart. It was him drowning up there in the cold. Hundreds of miles away. After that, it was just the pipe, taking over. One puff at a time. Throw in some schnapps. Some bad company.”

“More than that one time with John?”

“A few.”

“Did you love him?”

“Did I ever. I’d been loving on him since I was twelve, just like you. I lost his baby. Not on purpose. Two months after he died.”

Jen has wondered about this, and how she would react. Wondered if there might be someone walking the earth now, about Casey and Brock’s age, someone with John’s looks and his direct, seeking spirit, maybe Belle Becket’s gray eyes, loopy humor, and desire to get high.

“Did he talk about leaving me?”

“No. He was in love with you. But I was... present and persistent.”

“Fuck, Belle. Such loss. All that for this.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

“Thanks for protecting me and my good reputation,” says Belle. “I hope no one puts two and two together, after that article.”

“Too many stoned and drunk people at too many New Year’s parties. Twenty-five years ago. I think we’re safe. Walk, Belle?”

“My jar!”

Belle trudges to her table, stuffs the mason jar money into a tattered bead purse and hikes it over her shoulder. They head north.

“I’ve gotten lots of emails and letters for that last article,” Jen says. “Mostly sympathetic, but some people said he’d be alive if not for me. And I should take full responsibility.”

“You did that.”

“I thought so.”

“What did Casey and Brock say?”

Jen watches a young family, bundled against the cool day, pants hiked above their knees. A boy and a girl run ankles deep in and out of the water, screaming in the breeze. Mom and Dad watch closely.

“Casey said, don’t feel bad, Mom, you didn’t really hate him. Brock said John would have died whether I’d stopped to curse him or not. They look at me differently, Belle. More curiosity. They’re asking more questions about their dad. And me. It’s like the article freed us somehow — John and me. Made us more... real? The boys’ socials have been lighting up with this. Everybody’s got an opinion about me.”

“I saw Casey last week but we didn’t talk. How is he?”

“Tied up with a woman I don’t much like. She’s using him.”

“Let me guess. For his good looks, talent, and sweet heart? And Brock? How is your dark missionary?”

“Driven as always.”

“It’s so strange that Brock got his grandfather Mike’s religious pep, not Casey. Maybe something to do with him almost dying, like his dad did.”

“I’ve thought about that. Casey wants to believe. Brock wants to be believed.”

“What about you? Since almost drowning?”

“Religious pep? No. None for me. I’m just a protect-and-serve kind of girl — because of Dad.”

“Such good boys. Do they still call you Momster behind your back?”

“Face to face now. I take it as a compliment.”

The women stop to watch the waves crash in at Rockpile.

“Where we first saw him,” says Jen.

“We were lucky, Jen. But John was, too.”

Heading back for the fortune-telling table, Belle has a customer waiting. He’s a cool-looking surf dude with a board propped in the sand and a leashed Malinois sitting attentively at his feet.

Belle stops and whirls and gives Jen an exaggerated, big-eyed racoon stare. Fusses with her hair.

“How do I look?”

“Convincing.”

Jen kisses her cheek.

“I’m still up on Castle Rock in the canyon, Belle, if you ever want to shower or crash awhile.”

Not for the first time, Jen takes an awful gut punch at the idea of Belle and John in her bed at home on Castle Rock. Will probably never ask that. The truth may set you free, but right now she doesn’t want to be that free.

“Careful what you wish for, Jen.”

“I mean it.”

As if on cue, they both look back at the John painting on the sea wall.

“I’ll be seeing you around, Belle.”

“You’re awesome, Jen. John said that all the time.”