Jana draws in as much breath as she can manage. Jesse left a note the only other time he ran away.
“He was getting into his friend Gene’s car. He plays—pinball while he’s waiting for his friend to get off of work,” she manages, though she chokes on the word “pinball.” Jesse has never been good at sports or excelled in school, but he is very good at pinball, and she used to take pride in the way all the other kids looked at her son with admiration whenever she picked him up from the arcade.
The operator pauses.
“Ma’am?”
“Are you going to let him treat you like this?” Michael yells without looking away from the commercials. “Just let him treat you like shit, like this?” There’s some spit or phlegm caught in his throat, which gives an ugly granular quality to his voice. Jana stares at a fixed point on the carpet.
“Yes?” she says.
“Can you tell me what kind of car Jesse’s friend drives?”
She scowls; there’s more in this question than she’s able to parse before answering. “Yes, I think so. It’s a blue—it’s a Ford. It’s a nice blue Ford. It’s kind of a race car,” she offers.
“I’m going to hand you over to Detective Haeny,” says the operator.
* * *
IT’S A LONG WAY FROM THE DUNES to the shore if you’re pushing a heavy wheelbarrow across the sand. It has been a long day of desperate errands and hastily improvised solutions. The interior of your apartment is a catastrophe: the carpet, the walls, the kitchen and bathroom sinks, all that smeared and sticky linoleum underfoot. You have vague plans for cleaning: a vision of your home’s restoration to its earlier state has occasionally brought you mild comfort throughout the day. Mopped floors. Clean cutlery. A relatively spotless couch.
You try to hide yourself somewhere within the folds of these visions as you drag your burden down to its destination, hoping that no one notices the woman alone on the beach who might be searching for treasure or cleaning up trash but seems bent by her labor, stopping every few feet to catch her breath, and leaning, when she stops, pointedly away from the wheelbarrow she’s pushing ahead of her. Of course, this is not a private beach, and your being alone on it means that certainly someone will see you, at least in passing. You have no spell of invisibility to cast. You are nobody’s witch.
When, at last, you come to stand in the water, physically exhausted, sobbing aloud, the moon is high. The Pacific Coast is such a beautiful place, this far outpost that’s always made room for the exile, the fugitive, the wanderer. You are none of these. Your position is primary, absolute. Outlaws and desperadoes are stock figures from story and song; you are a young schoolteacher who has had to defend herself using deadly force, and who now must try to dispose of human remains. You ache. You feel it in your forearms the most, but your entire body is stiff, sore, racked by tension. You need rest. You have needed rest for too long now. You can rest when this last leg of your journey is done, you think. And so you stand in the surf holding a leaky garbage bag, sobbing aloud for what feels like the forty-eighth consecutive sleepless hour, trying to calculate how to empty the bag without once again letting its contents splash onto your clothes, your skin.
It’s such a simple problem to state, but the physics of it, at this late hour, are too much for you. When you hold the bag away from your body, it sags, and you lose control of it. It feels important to remain in control. But if you should undo the knot in the bag and empty it out too near to you, its contents will likely splash against your body as it empties, the solid pieces catching the current around your legs. You want to avoid that, but you can’t untie the bag with your arms at full extension. You stand in the surf trying to come to a decision: it will only take the effort of the first try; after that, the remaining bags in the wheelbarrow back on the shore will be easier. The byways of your life have not prepared you for this passage.
You are not strong enough.
Today you have summoned strength from reservoirs you hadn’t known were present in you—strength whose nature you’d never had cause to contemplate; strength whose character had been, until these days came, a subject of idle contemplation, of outward wonder. People tell passed-down stories about mothers lifting up school buses with their bare hands to free their children pinned under the wheels. The foreman in a mine single-handedly holding up the beam that allows the men in his charge to escape before the walls collapse. From an early age, every kid on the block knows stories like these, and swears she got it firsthand from her mother, or an uncle, or a close friend of the family. You know these stories probably aren’t true: but you also know that you’ve sawn through more bone today than the hacksaw from the gardener’s shed might otherwise have been thought capable of splitting, hoisted more weight than anyone might have guessed your slight frame could bear.
It has not been enough.
They find you at the shore.
7.
THE FLASHING LIGHTS down in the Oakside Court parking lot draw several early risers to their windows; were you looking up, you’d see them looking down at you through gaps in their curtains, but you’re not. You’re looking into the eyes of the arresting officer, your hands cuffed behind your back; you are asking him for the third time if there will be food at the station. They will use this against you in court. But you’re light-headed, confused by hunger and exhaustion. Officer Quinn, mindful of how lost you seem, has told you several times that you don’t have to talk to him until you’ve called a lawyer. “She seemed like she was in another world,” he will say, later, under oath.
There’s seldom any action around this place. Who knows how the rumor begins floating through the building this early in the morning, but gradually people begin to emerge from their apartments. They keep their distance from the squad cars, and at first they seem also to be avoiding each other, like congregants observing a rite or trying not to break a spell. Through these mainly silent ranks, officers are leading you down the asphalt to their cluster of cars, whose blue and red lights dance across your face and body; having arrived, you stand, still as a statue, awaiting an answer from Officer Quinn. He has stopped responding to your questions. He’s waiting for radio dispatch to tell him whether to proceed without further backup. The circumstances of your arrest are unusual. He wants to be mindful of protocol.
“It’s that teacher from the high school,” someone says when the quiet has grown oppressive.
“What did she do?” someone asks.
Everybody gazes out into the wash of red and blue light, wondering, their imaginations seeking out and finding places they would normally never visit.
“They sent a lot of cars, whatever it was,” says the first voice. It’s Don from your hallway. He’s a little tipsy from the night before, and he can’t believe his eyes. He thinks briefly about how nothing like this ever used to happen in the neighborhood where he used to live when he was married.
He and the others all watch as you are helped into the back of the cruiser, hands behind your back. In the absence of any information to work with, the onlookers begin asking themselves what they know about you, and using what answers they find to tell themselves stories about what they’ve just seen.
People are awful, even when they’re not trying to be. None of the stories they tell themselves are good.
* * *