“It’s all about now,” he said. “Let’s always try to remember how we feel right now.”
When we got to the sand I stopped to take off my shoes. Jacob turned around to face me as I ran to catch him, and walked backward until the water was up to his knees. Then he just lay down into it.
“Isn’t it cold?” I said.
“It is a tit nippily.” He laughed and tried to splash my shirt.
It was dark outside, but the moon was almost full, the sky was cloudless, and to the south, the lights of Palos Verdes were bright enough to illuminate the beach with a shadowy, amber glow that gave me the faintest impression I was on another planet.
I walked in until the chilly water was above my ankles. The surface was smooth, but there was a strong undertow that pulled on me and quickly buried my feet with sand. Jacob swam around as the ocean rolled underneath him. It would lift him up for just an instant and then fall my way, making ripples that broke into foam across my legs.
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t go out so far.”
A bigger wave was growing behind him, but he flipped over and dove into it, then popped up on the other side, smiling. He tried to coax me into joining him.
“Come on,” he said, doing a sort of backstroke in place so as not to be carried toward the shore. “Come dance with me.”
There was another wave coming in and I told him to turn around. I recall thinking, in the way your mind replays long stretches of time in a split second, about the first walk he and I had ever taken to the beach, when he’d pounced on me and took me underwater, and I ran back to the shore, shivering, while he stayed in and floated around with the moon wrapped up in his hair.
That’s exactly how he looked the last time I saw him—floating around, entangled in the moon.
The wave wasn’t even that big. It just broke sooner than he’d expected, right on top of him, and pulled him under.
I waited impatiently, thinking he was just fooling around.
“It’s not funny,” I yelled.
Nothing.
I opened my mouth and shouted Jacob’s name again and again, but felt as if no sounds were coming out. Then I began screaming for someone to get help, only there wasn’t anyone in sight.
“Jacob, I’m going to call someone!” I said, but I didn’t know who the right person to call was. A policeman? The Coast Guard? Christ?
I ran to the first pay phone I saw. It was about seventy-five yards behind me, near the bathrooms. It smelled like dead fish and trash near the bathrooms, and I had to hold my nose so that I didn’t retch. I dialed 911 and told the lady who answered that Jacob was in the water, that he’d disappeared. I gave her my exact location, and then I started mumbling Jacob’s name. I couldn’t stop saying his name.
The lady wanted to have a goddamn conversation. She asked me how old Jacob was, whether or not he knew how to swim, and how long he’d been missing.
“There are officers in the area. They’ll be there as soon as they can,” the lady said. Then she continued to chit-chat.
“Is anyone else there with you, Ma’am?”
She was trying to keep me on the phone.
“I have to go,” I told her.
“Try to remain calm. And stay out of the water,” she said, or something stupid like that.
I dropped the phone and bolted back to the shore, thinking I was going to find Jacob, thinking I was going to save him. I ran into the water until it was up to my waist, then I dove down and opened my eyes. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. When I came up for air, a wave hit me head-on and threw me back to the sand. Coughing and gagging, I stood up and tried to move but my legs were like cement blocks. I stared out at the water. It seemed so much darker than when Jacob and I had first arrived.
My head began to shake uncontrollably. My mind began screaming and cursing itself. Why did you let him go in? it said. Why didn’t you stop him?
Rewind! Do over! Take it back!
And then I did what any desperate fool would do. I started to pray.
The only bona fide prayer I could remember was the Our Father, and I recited it over and over, in the hopes that a supreme being, if one did indeed exist, would never be cruel enough to take Jacob away from me, especially if I begged.
I was on my twenty-ninth invocation when two cops showed up and asked me if I was the girl who had called for help.
“Yes,” I answered quickly, because my head was still shaking and I didn’t want them to get the wrong idea.
One of the cops was tall. The other one had dark skin and pale eyes. The tall one told me his name was Officer Tim Hopper. He wrapped me in a blanket and helped me sit down. The dark, pale-eyed one didn’t tell me his name, but he knelt beside me and in a gentle, fatherly voice, started interrogating me. He wanted to know my name, and Jacob’s full name and address. He wrote it all down on a pad of paper.
“Now,” he said, “tell me exactly what happened.”
I grabbed him by the shirt. “What the fuck is the matter with you? Forget the questions and get in there and find Jacob!”
“Search and Rescue’s on their way,” he said sympathetically, reaching for my hand. “If anyone can find him, they can. But you need to tell us what happened.”
With as much coherency as possible, I explained the entire night to him.
“Had Mr. Grace been drinking?” he said. “Had he been doing any drugs this evening, that you’re aware of?”
“Jacob quit drinking,” I said. “He quit drinking because he doesn’t want to end up like his father. Because we’re moving and he’s happy. So happy, he hovers a foot above the ground.”
The nameless cop looked at me with pity in his eyes. He patted my shoulder and walked over to Officer Tim Hopper. They began discussing the situation. I tried to listen but I couldn’t hear all the words. I got the feeling they didn’t want me to hear them. Then Officer Tim Hopper raised his voice, probably by accident. He said it didn’t look good. I had no idea what that meant.
I sat on the sand and waited. I was completely, unnaturally calm, still staring out at the water, shaking my head and trying to process the facts. I couldn’t do it. Reality had ceased to exist. I no longer felt like a participant in the world and I no longer cared.
I remember wondering what it would take to get the nameless cop to whip out his Glock 40 and fire a round of hollow-point bullets into my chest.
What felt like hours later, but in reality had only been a few minutes, Officer Tim Hopper came back over and helped me to my feet. “I’m going to take you home now, Beatrice.”
I shook my head harder. It didn’t seem right to leave without Jacob.
“There’s nothing you can do here,” the nameless cop said. “We’ll call you as soon as we know anything.”
Officer Tim Hopper put one hand under my arm, the other around my waist, and with a slight force, began guiding me away from the water. Looking back, I saw the lights of a boat and heard the sounds of a helicopter.
When we got to the pavement, I pointed down the street, to Pete and Sara’s house. I told Officer Tim Hopper to take me there.
Pete opened the door dressed in a pair of blue pajama bottoms. He reeked of alcohol.
Officer Tim Hopper introduced himself to Pete and with a somber, practiced expression, started telling him what had happened.
That’s when I passed out.
FIFTY
It was mid-morning when I woke up on Pete and Sara’s couch. The sun was burning through the window and I let my eyes wander around the room. There was a black guitar at my feet, Sara was half asleep in a chair across from me, and Pete was in another chair against the wall. Joanna, who had rushed over after a middle-of-the-night phone call from Officer Tim Hopper, was standing in the kitchen looking out the back door.
Sara saw that I was awake. She came over, put one arm around me, sp
it some saliva onto her fingers and wiped my face.
“You were born to be a mother,” I told her.
“We’re waiting to hear from the police,” she said. “They went out again this morning. They’re going to call soon.”
Joanna sat down next to me. She held me and told me everything was going to be all right. Then she started jabbering on about God.
“He never gives us anything we can’t handle,” she said. “He knows what he’s doing.”
I realized she was struggling to find meaning and justification for what was happening, so I refrained from telling her what a bunch of bull that was. I wondered how Lucille—the woman on the news who got car-jacked in the Valley—would have rationalized our situation. If I’d remembered her last name, I would have called her up and asked her where her benevolent God was while I prayed for someone to toss Jacob a lifeline.
I started rambling. “They’ll find him,” I told Joanna. “Jacob does this all the time. You know, he just takes off, but he’ll be back. He has to be back by Tuesday. That’s when the movers are coming. They’re coming to take our stuff. They’re going to hold it for us while we find a house in Memphis. Then Jacob’s going to call them and give them our new address and they’ll bring us our furniture and they’ll fill our charm-laden house with it. Because that’s what movers do. That’s their job.”
Thick tears dripped from Joanna’s eyes like wax from a candle. “Beatrice, he’s gone,” she said quietly. “He’s gone.”
She pronounced it like she knew it as fact. As if, just because she was his mother, because he’d grown inside of her and fed off of her body for nine months, that gave her some kind of holy right to intuit his extinction. I had news for her, he’d been feeding off my body for twice as long as he’d fed off hers, and I didn’t feel it. Not a thing. If Jacob was really gone, I thought, I’d feel it. For Christ’s sake, I’d know.
That’s the moment I became conscious, for the first time in my life, of clinging boldly to the sensation of hope; of wishing desperately for something I had absolutely no control over; of having faith. But it wasn’t the superfluous blind faith of miracles I was believing in. It was a metaphysical perception that an end could never come to a person who was more alive than anyone I’d ever known.
Still, I had yet to shed a tear. Because tears come from the eyes and eyes are of the body. I was imploding in spirit. Exteriorly, I was perfectly composed. Inside, a bomb was discharging, but in slow motion.
It was just a matter of time before the shrapnel began to rip my guts to shreds.
Real annihilation happens from the inside out.
FIFTY-ONE
The police didn’t call until 5:29 that night. I know exactly what time it was because right before the phone rang, Sara asked if anyone was hungry. No one had eaten all day and she said it was time for dinner.
It didn’t feel like dinnertime to me. I looked at the clock to see if Sara was telling the truth.
5:29.
Pete picked up the phone on the table, but he walked into the kitchen before he answered it. We didn’t hear him say much to whoever was on the other end of the line. He just mumbled a few inaudible responses and then said good-bye. The phone was still in his hand when he came back into the living room. You could have heard a flea land on a dog while we waited for him to speak. Only he didn’t have to. We all knew, by the look on his face, what he was going to say.
In the quietest voice I’d ever heard Pete use, he said, “They, uh…they think they found him.” He stared at the phone, bewildered, as if all the fault lay inside that little plastic rectangle.
Pete turned around and gazed out the window. About a minute later, his back still to us, he said, “They need someone to go down there. Someone has to identify the body.”
If I had been teetering on the fence of denial, the tangible image of the word body began to push me right over the edge, face-down into reality.
Pete was the one who went to the morgue. I thought maybe I should have gone with him, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to see Jacob like that.
That’s not what I wanted to remember.
As soon as Pete came home, the minute he walked through the door, I shot up from the couch, sort of involuntarily, and moved his way. Pete’s face was blank, the color of cement, and when he opened his mouth to speak nothing came out. He just stood there, jaw agape, like he was waiting for a dental hygienist to scrape plaque off of his teeth. Then he took hold of my left hand. He turned it face-up, reached into his pocket, and pressed Jacob’s watch and necklace firmly into my palm.
“I thought you’d want these,” he said.
He grabbed a half-empty bottle of vodka off the table, went into the bedroom, and shut the door.
From where I stood, in the middle of the living room, I heard Pete crying.
The second hand on Jacob’s watch was still moving. Something about that seemed painfully, nefariously wrong to me. I flipped the watch over and checked for the engraving behind the face. Seeing his name there, his address and phone number, and smelling the ocean between the metal was like a right hook to the jaw.
I tucked the jewelry into my pocket.
“I have to go home,” I said.
Later on, I thought about how the party didn’t turn out the way I’d imagined at all. But I guess nothing ever does.
FIFTY-TWO
I’ve heard it said that when a person drowns, a strange and pleasant euphoria comes over them before they die. Supposedly it’s kind of like going back into the womb. Once you stop fighting for air and your lungs fill up with fluid, there’s only peace. With all my heart I hoped that was true. The idea that Jacob could have suffered, even for an instant, hurt me so bad I thought I might expire just thinking about it.
I wondered if Jacob had been scared in those last moments. I wondered what his final thoughts had been. Did he think of me? Of Memphis? Of all the sorrow he’d leave in his wake? Of his father waiting with open arms at the pearly gates? Did he think of making love under the stars? Of Madeline and Simone and the charming porch we’d never sit on?
I hoped his last sensation was the euphoria. The peace. The love.
I had to believe it was the love.
I walked into our apartment and all I saw were boxes. Almost everything we owned was buried inside cardboard. The first realization I had was that my closet was empty—I didn’t have anything to wear to the memorial service. I dialed Kat’s number and left her a message. I asked her, if it wasn’t too much trouble, could she please find me something nice. Then I told her to call Pete and Sara for an explanation. I couldn’t bring myself to say any more.
I examined all the rooms and observed evidence of life everywhere.
Jacob’s New York Times crossword puzzle was spread out on the table, five clues away from completion, next to a cup of day-old, muddy coffee. Looks like the Mississippi river, I thought. Not that I knew what the Mississippi river looked like. Not that I’d ever know now.
There was an envelope on the couch. It was filled with the cash Jacob got for selling his car. He’d drawn a dollar sign on the front of it.
“Food and gas money for the drive,” he said.
Jacob’s computer was still on.
“Why don’t you just let the movers take that?” I’d said a few days earlier.
“Trixie, what if some brilliant story strikes me in the middle of Oklahoma?”
“You’ll have your notebooks.”
“What if I need to type the story?”
Jacob’s screen-saver was the image of a deformed clock, a`la Salvador Dali. It made a ticking noise every second.
“Doesn’t that drive you crazy all day?” I once asked him.
“I like it. It reminds me that time is always moving.”
The razor Jacob left on the sink formed a small puddle of water, crusty foam, and tiny hairs.
/> His olive-green cut-off shorts lay at the foot of our messy bed. It was the same pair he’d taken off the day before when he came into the bedroom looking for me.
“What are you doing?” he said, a child looking for a playmate.
“Taking a nap.” I’d gotten up early and didn’t want to be tired for the party.
“Shouldn’t you be sucking my dick?”
He was only teasing, but it sounded like a good idea to me.
“Whip it out,” I said.
An adolescent grin spread across his face. “You’re one badass girlfriend, you know that?” He slipped off the shorts.
I had to get out of the bedroom. It smelled too much like us in there.
In the kitchen, the first thing I saw was that fucking piece of paper on the refrigerator.
“If your intentions are pure
I’m seeking a friend
for the end
of the world”
I was certain that no one, with the exception of myself, could ever comprehend the magnitude of the unequivocal truth contained in those four little lines. I tore the ad down and ripped it into as many pieces as I could. I threw the shards in the disposal and ground them up. I turned on the faucet and let the water carry the words straight into the bowels of the city.
Then came more questions: Why didn’t I feel it when it happened? Weren’t Jacob and I soulmates? Weren’t we connected by blood and veins? Siamese soul lovers? Then why didn’t I know when he was gone? Why didn’t I lose my breath as he gasped for his last one? Why didn’t I sense his departure from the world like a strike of lightening surging through my nervous system? Why did it feel like Jacob was still out there, somewhere?
I demanded an explanation; a sign. “I’ll wait forever for a sign,” I shouted, even though I knew damn well no one could hear me.
And that’s when it hit me. I collapsed down onto the floor and at a sluggish, Memphis-in-August speed, my whole body started to tremble uncontrollably. My lungs tightened and convulsed in my chest, and the tears began to flow. Jacob’s never coming back, I tried to tell myself. I’ll never see him again. That didn’t make sense. Nothing did. And I knew nothing would for a long, long time. I cried so hard that the tears stung my skin like cat scratches down my face. Only it wasn’t tears, but the sandy fluid of the Pacific that scraped my cheeks as the water gushed up and over my lids, just like the waves Jacob had danced on the night before.