There was a man standing by the railing ten feet ahead of me. He wasn’t even a particularly hard guess. He was pretty obviously homeless, skin leathery from sun and wind and maybe drug use. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular, and he was too caught up in his internal weather to notice me approach.
The men were usually easier than the women. They could usually be softened by a young woman taking interest in them. The women were sometimes hostile. They told me that someone like you couldn’t understand their problems. It was never quite clear what they meant by someone like you.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
He was a big man, maybe six-foot-six, with shaggy hair and a shaggy beard. I could imagine him, at a happier point in his life, dressing as a pirate for Halloween, scaring little kids and then making them laugh.
“Are you hungry?” I said.
He looked at me flatly. “No,” he said.
So much for the easy way, getting him off the bridge first, under a pretext. I said, “I thought you might want to get something to eat.” I paused. “You know, instead of jumping.”
He blinked, startled.
“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” I said, “but that’s the plan, isn’t it? Jumping?”
“So what?” he said, and it wasn’t hostile. He was probably too depressed to get really angry anymore. At least I hoped so. He was big enough that even if he wasn’t in shape anymore, he could still pick me up and throw me off the bridge without much effort. I thought of the edged ripples of iron-colored water below, of Jonah’s prayer: You cast me into the deep, and all the flood surrounded me.
I said: “I’m not here to tell you I understand all your problems or that everything’s going to be okay. But I’m hungry, and I’ve got enough money to buy two breakfasts. If you’re hungry, too.”
And then, at the worst time, my cell phone began to ring. I really should shut it off when I’m up here. I knew who it was: work. Someone had called in sick, or just hadn’t shown up. I was needed. And normally I’d have answered, except that right now the guy in front of me was about to make a life-or-death decision and I couldn’t just say, Hold that thought, I have to take this.
The man in front of me was curious: “Don’t you want to answer that?”
“Not really,” I said, and it stopped ringing, going into voice mail. I persisted: “What do you say? Breakfast? And you leave the bridge alone at least one more day?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”
I’d like to tell you that Todd’s story-that was his name-was original and fascinating. It wasn’t. I’d heard it before: A good and happy life in an average way, until the onset of a chronic illness, exacerbated by drink. He went on disability until the money ran out. His marriage failed. He was unable to pay child support, so his wife saw no reason for him to know where she’d moved with their two kids. He’d stayed with a buddy until the buddy’s wife wouldn’t have it anymore. That left no one to care that he was standing on the bridge, ready to jump.
Todd and I made a plan for him that involved having only one drink and going to the VA to look up the brother he hadn’t seen in twenty years, but who just might take him in. To level the playing field a bit, I told Todd part of my story-the part about going east to school and why I came back. Without that, the potential jumpers usually looked at me like some idealist who’d read a few too many inspirational books. Like if I weren’t doing this, I’d be at the mission feeding the homeless, or in Africa doing medical work.
In someone else, what I did on the bridge would be philanthropy. For me it wasn’t. A shrink would probably have a field day with it, trying to put the pieces together, how it fit with the reason I came back from the East Coast, and the reason I had to leave L.A. Those are two different stories, by the way. I’m getting to that.
I hadn’t left Todd behind at the diner for more than three minutes when my cell rang again, and with a stab of guilt, remembering the call I’d ignored on the bridge, I immediately brought the Motobecane to a stop.
“It’s me.” Shay Clements was the owner of Aries Courier. “Fabian just radioed in. His crank’s busted, he’s stranded on Market Street. Can you go meet him, pick up his packages, and make his drops?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, right now?”
Shay wasn’t being pushy. A courier service stood or failed on its on-time performance, and that in itself gave me a twinge of confusion: The hour that had passed between the phone call on the bridge and this one was far too much time for Shay to wait. But there wasn’t time to wonder about that. “I’m on it right now,” I said. “I’m literally standing over my bike.”
“Thanks,” Shay said after giving me the intersection where I was to meet Fabian.
“It’s no problem,” I said.
And it wasn’t. This was my work now, and I did it with the great humility life has taught me since I washed out of the United States Military Academy at West Point, just two months before I would have graduated and become a second lieutenant in the United States Army.
two
My name is Hailey Cain. I’m twenty-three and have one of the most popular first names for girls of my generation. Every year in school there were half a dozen Hailies or Haleys or Haileys in my class.
I’m Californian in a way that a lot of people are Californian: I was born somewhere else. My father was Texan, my mother from West Virginia. I was born in an off-base hospital near Fort Hood, Texas, where Staff Sgt. Henry Cain was stationed at the time. I missed being born on the Fourth of July by one day; my birthday was the fifth. Maybe I was born to be a failed patriot.
I take after my father in looks; I have his straw-blond hair and open face, except that mine is marked by a port-wine birthmark high on my right cheekbone. In my one photo of him, he’s a big guy, shouldery, and I have a similar mesomorphic build at five-foot-seven. My only really good feature is my full lips. In high school, reading beauty-magazine articles about the power of a sultry movie-star gaze, I’d wished I could trade my good lips for thick double-fringed eyelashes. My cousin CJ had waved that off, saying, Guys don’t fantasize about how eyelashes will feel wrapped around the johnson. CJ could get away with saying outrageous shit like that because he had never fully lost his Southern accent, and it gave everything he said a good-old-boy innocence.
After Texas, my father was posted in Hawaii and Kentucky and then Illinois, where he died in an accident, a truck rollover on the base. I was eleven at the time. The Army’s death benefit wasn’t going to keep my mother and me solvent very long; Julianne had never been what you’d call a career woman. So we went to California, where her sister Angeline had already moved with her husband, Porter Mooney, and their four kids.
Porter was a guard at the federal prison in Lompoc, and the Mooneys had a big falling-down house outside of town that recreated the way they’d lived in West Virginia. There were always half a dozen cars in the yard-Porter and his oldest son, Constantine, were mechanics par excellence. They didn’t just fix up cars and trucks; they worked on farm equipment, too, when people brought it to them. Behind the house was a half-acre of kitchen garden, and a dozen chickens roamed the yard. Angeline sold the eggs they didn’t need at the farmers’ market, along with sunflowers from the garden, and she gave piano lessons to local kids. There were always people who would sneer at how the West Virginia Mooneys lived, but the fact that six people got by comfortably on just one full-time salary and a few sidelines shamed the debt culture that most of middle-class California was mired in.