“Get out.”
Matt steps forward, knees shaking, but holds the sketch up for the man to see. “That’s Jasmine Anthony and she’s my sister. You need to tell me if you’ve seen her.”
“I don’t need to tell you shit.”
“Have you seen her?”
Cavore looks at the drawing and the trespasser, then snatches the sketch, crumples and drops it. Matt reaches for it as Cavore swings the bong into the side of his head, which sends shards of glass into the lights. Matt hits the deck, braced on one hand and holding the other to his head. A light smear of blood on his fingers.
“You are on private property,” says Cavore. “Now beat it and don’t say one word about any of this. I can find you. And no, I’ve never seen that girl before.”
Matt grabs the wadded drawing, flies down the stairs and across the property the same way he’d come in.
He stuffs the drawing in his pocket then tries to wrestle his bike from the poisonous oleander. Really has to wrench it. His rope bounces from the basket and gets caught up in the spokes. Finally, he jumps aboard and hauls butt along Cove View toward the guard booth and Coast Highway.
As he speeds around the lowered gate arm, the guard stands for a better look at him. Matt flips him off.
The next thing he knows he’s down hard on the Sapphire Cove sidewalk. He rolls twice, then pops up and runs back to his bike. The guard comes fast. Matt remounts and pedals away with all his might.
Skids into the turn at Coast Highway and heads for home, cars swooshing past him just a few feet away.
It’s almost 2 A.M. when he turns on the garage lights and gets a good look at the damage: elbows and knees scraped badly, bloody at the edges, pink in the middle. His palms are gravel-ground and feel bruised. In a hand-mirror he checks his head where the bong hit him — swelling and a few nicks.
His mother appears behind him in a kimono, sleep-faced and bed-haired. “What happened?”
“Nothing, Mom. I’m tired and need a shower and that’s all.”
“But where have you been?”
“With Ernie at the hotel. Don’t worry. I slid out on my bike. I’m fine.”
“But you didn’t come home like Jazz hasn’t come home. I waited up and saved most of the spaghetti and meatballs for you.”
“Thanks, Mom. I’ll eat it later. Now leave me alone. I’ll be in to take a shower in a minute.”
“Did someone hit you?”
Matt is rarely angry but when he is, it owns him. It’s like a switch gets thrown. His facial expression is tied to that switch and his mother knows exactly what it means. He forces her out of his garage with it.
The next thing Matt knows he’s in the shower, warm water gurgling through the old plumbing while images of this night flood through him. He’s short of breath and there’s a clenching knot in his throat. His ears roar and his balls ache. The soap and shampoo scald his palms, knees, and elbows. While inside him, the incomprehensible currents mass and separate and mass again — Laurel and Jazz and Bonnie and everything he saw at Sapphire Cove.
11
Monday morning, as Matt browns a scrawny peanut butter and jelly burrito in a skillet for breakfast, his father calls.
Bruce Anthony’s voice is soft and clear and he’s developed a drawl over the years.
“How’s my son?”
“Good, Dad.”
Matt’s mind still swarms with memories of Saturday night, and his knees and elbows are still raw and fiery. His palm heels are now showing bruises from breaking the fall. Other than that, the rest of his body and soul are starting to feel about half-right again, and the ding in his head from the bong barely hurts. But the images of that party agitate him greatly.
With the phone clamped between his head and one shoulder, and the long cord uncoiling out behind him, Matt pours the burrito onto a plate, gets a fork, and heads for the tiny breakfast nook by the window. The PB&J burrito is his invention, probably the cheapest way to fill an empty stomach, depending on how much peanut butter you’ve got left, and how much milk to chase it down.
“And your mother?” asks his dad.
“The same. But Jasmine hasn’t been home for four days. We filed a police report.”
Matt gives his father a general account of Jasmine’s disappearance from home, and some of what little he knows about where she was and who she was with. No way he’s going to mention Austin Overton or the water polo muscleman or anything about Sapphire Cove. Bruce Anthony has a short fuse and he doesn’t take bad news well.
“It’s what she gets for staying in that evil town,” he says. “I’ll make some calls. I’ve still got friends with the sheriffs. Tell me what happened again. I’m going to take some notes.”
Matt repeats the story, hears the flap of paper and tap of pen.
When he’s finished, Matt says he’s worried about Kyle, and Kyle’s idea that short-timers have a higher chance of dying the closer they are to coming home.
“That’s nonsense,” says Bruce. “But fear can get into a soldier’s head and make bad things happen. A self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Bruce was Air Force in Korea. Military police, at just nineteen. He’s never talked about it to Matt like he did with Kyle when Kyle joined up.
“I’m unhappy about your sister. I’m tempted to come back and put things right. Tear that rotting town apart and get my girl. I’ve seen the hippies on TV in Laguna and San Francisco. You can practically smell them. The Summer of Love. Christ, what an abomination that was. Now Laguna’s got the overflow, from what I read in the papers.”
“It’s not so bad here. The fishing is still good.”
“Those were great times, you and Kyle and me. The best hours of my life. Those, and shooting doves out in Juan Acuna’s groves with you boys.”
Matt pictures the three of them fishing off the rocks in Laguna, or catching bass and perch and halibut off the sandy beaches when the tide was right. He was one hundred percent happy. Even had some aptitude for it that Kyle didn’t. His dad called him “fishy.” Juan Acuna managed an endless grove of navel oranges in Tustin, just inland from Laguna Canyon, and for a case of beer and a few dollars he’d let the Anthonys shoot doves in September. Matt was one hundred percent happy doing that, too.
Now as his mother pours coffee, he sees from her dark look that she knows who’s on the line. She takes the coffee back to her bedroom and he hears the door close. His burrito is long gone but there’s no tortillas left. Milk.
“I’m still willing to send money to you kids,” says Bruce.
Six years ago, Julie had torn Bruce’s first check to pieces and washed it and the letter down the garbage disposal as Matt, Kyle, and Jasmine watched. And done the same with the next few, until they stopped coming. For a year after that, each of the Anthony children got occasional notes containing five-dollar bills but these ran out too, due to Bruce’s financial setbacks. His stated main reason for leaving Laguna and his family was a sheriff’s position in Clay County, Texas. But there was more, Matt came to learn. Such as his father’s belief that Laguna Beach was not reality, that it was tempting his wife and children with a way of life they could never afford. There was also his affair, and the deputy job that had “gone to hell in a hurry.” Since then, there have been yearlong spans of time when Bruce Anthony hasn’t been heard from at all.
“I don’t think she’ll take money,” Matt says quietly, thinking his dad probably doesn’t have any to spare anyway.
“Too much thickheaded Irish in that woman,” says Bruce.
But Matt wishes she would take it. He rarely sides with his father against his mother but he can’t help himself now.