“Where were you? Where did you go?”
“I think she’s with those other two,” he said, holding the note up like a white flag. “We didn’t know they were friends, but they are. She knows both brothers. Look.”
He almost handed her Alma Levine’s bag. She watched him fumble and then took the note and stared at it.
“This isn’t—who is this?”
“Gwen wrote it.”
“Then why is it here? This is a lie.”
“What?”
“It’s a lie. She didn’t send it.”
“My daughter,” Phil Needle said, “is not a liar.”
Marina widened her eyes.
“I mean, of course she is. But look at it. It’s something.”
“What is something?”
“Nathan is the brother, I’m saying. She wanted to meet him. She’s with her new friends, off drinking together or who knows what. Early rebellion.”
“And where were you?”
“Marina, we’ve gone through this. I drove home because the airports—”
“No, I mean right now, where were you?”
“Upstairs. I was just—in her room. It’s where I found this.”
She looked up, finally. “Don’t give me that. You changed your shirt.”
“And then—”
“And
then
,” Marina said, “
and then, and then, and then
?”
Phil Needle said nothing. Sometimes they’d take Gwen out to dinner and she’d be the bored silent one at the table while Phil Needle and Marina talked and had drinks. Or Marina would be the silent one while he chattered with his daughter. Or they’d all take a turn being the silent one, all together.
“
Answer me.
”
The only answer Phil Needle could think of was that his wife was an idiot, at least sometimes. She had turned the wrong knob on the oven once—that oven, right there—and cooked the Thanksgiving turkey on the self-cleaning setting. She had once purchased a new bra and then, he saw it on her dresser, filled out a promotional postcard that was tucked inside:
Reason for Purchase, circle one: Gift. Impulse. Salesperson recommendation. Saw it advertised. Wanted to treat myself. Needed new bras.
He was sorry he hadn’t flown, and he was sorry about the wrong photograph, and he had said so and still they had to fight. It was like falling off a ladder, twice: you didn’t mean to do it even once, but that did nothing to keep you from doing it again.
Marina walked past him into the living room. “If they don’t find her I’m jumping through the window.”
The window was still speckled with raindrops. Marina was turned away from him, although he could see the ghost of her face in the glass.
“It’s safety glass,” he said finally, and outside the dog snorted. “And the veranda is one floor down. You’d land in the garden with a few cuts.”
“I’m out of here when this is over,” she said. “I’m leaving you. I want a divorce.”
“Really?” Phil Needle couldn’t help saying it.
When this is over?
It was not even clear to him what
this
might be. Surely if they found her alive and well, it would be a flood of forgiveness and tears, and if not, then it would never be over. How could it be that now, with his daughter out of reach and his assistant’s belongings crumpled in his hand, they had reached the timberline of their affection? Marina was already crying, again and relentlessly. Of how little comfort Phil Needle was, even when he walked to her, without hurry but swiftly, and put his hands on her shoulders, to be shrugged violently away. There was nothing to it. It was easy for him, Phil Needle, to shatter his wife.
“I won’t come back to you,” she said, in sobbing rage.
“I know who,” Phil Needle said, surprising himself. “Rafael Bligh!”
“What?”
“You keep in touch with him! I know you do.”
“
Rafael Bligh
?
” It was perhaps the first time she’d smiled since he got home, even though she stopped it right away. “No, Phil. It’s not Rafael Bligh.”
“Who is it then?”
“It’s no one,” she said. “There isn’t anyone. It’s for
me.
” She was pointing to herself like it wouldn’t have been clear otherwise. “I know you think one kind note erases everything, but it doesn’t.”
“I don’t. What note?”
“
What note?
I can’t lead you through everything, Phil.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Then what good are you?”
Phil Needle didn’t answer. He walked away from his wife without a word. He would answer her later, he decided, in the hallway. He opened the door of the office and saw the fake tree, rattling against the fake window. Marina never turned it off. He sat in the chair and reached to turn on the desk lamp, but it clicked to nothing. There is never a good time for a lightbulb to go out. Half-blind, he reached down to open the bottom drawer, deep and cold from being near the outside wall. He moved everything aside to hide Levine’s things when an envelope, forgotten and sealed in a reclosable plastic bag, fell out of a folder and onto his shoe. Inside, with a box of matches and some small papers, was about an ounce and a half of marijuana.
He heard Marina stomp up the stairs and did not hesitate. In fifteen minutes the effects of the drug were well under way, and Phil Needle stood up shakily to go outside. He hadn’t been stoned in at least a year, since he’d bought the marijuana on impulse, when offered it on the Embarcadero. He had been afraid to tell Marina about it, as it meant that it could also be offered to Gwen when she roamed the neighborhood. He had thought then,
Someday I will smoke this, and sit in my courtyard with my mind hazy and silly, as I did when I was a young man.
And then forgotten about it. No time like the present.
(But before he slipped out the sliding door, Phil Needle, as quietly as possible, opened the door to the other room in the hall and looked at Marina Needle’s paintings. Ordinary landscape, ordinary landscape, all ordinary landscapes, either the same paintings he had seen when he’d last peeked, or very similar. Trees and water, hills and sky, sky and trees and water on a hill. She wasn’t getting better, though neither was she bad. The paintings told him nothing, he thought in the courtyard, no more than the stars and the clouds. There was nothing as far as the eye could see.)
Outside, the air felt elderly, reluctant to move and cranky at him. He hadn’t called his father back. Sorry, everybody. Phil Needle sat on a bench and “(Water on a) Drowning Man” flowed into his head, the tinny, ringing guitar and the full-throated croak of an American legend. It was why he had enshrined it as his ringtone, so everyone reaching him was heralded first by this outlaw. It was his favorite Belly Jefferson song, and he had always wished, whenever he heard it, that he had bigger troubles, real blues troubles, so that it could not be said he was listening to Belly Jefferson undeservedly. But in truth his troubles had always been enough. He hadn’t wanted any more, not ever. He wanted out. To vanish like a thief in the night, like it says in the second verse, no, it was the actual song. Phil Needle looked down at his phone. It was real. His own name blinked back at him, as it did whenever they called him from work. Phil Needle Prod, it showed, because there wasn’t enough space.
“Hello.”
“Phil, it’s all of us,” came Allan’s voice, in the cheap echo that happened when you put someone, in this era, on speakerphone. Past the glass, the kitchen was lit and still like a boring museum. “Barry, EZ, Dr. Croc, and this is Allan.”
“I can’t,” Phil Needle said, “hear about anything about work right now.”
“No, no,” Barry said, over the chatter of everyone saying “no, no.” “Everything’s fine. In fact, Incredible Cleaners sent a case of Scotch, the ad’s gone so well. But we heard about Wren.” Somebody muttered something. “
Gwen.
Sorry. And we’re so sorry, Phil. You’re in our thoughts.”
They were in Studio B, probably, and Phil Needle could not help but think of Allan masturbating.
I want to kiss you and other things too.
He did not want to be in anyone’s thoughts. Toby II sniffed near him like a snooty waiter.
“But also we had an idea,” said probably EZ.
“It’s a good one,” Dr. Croc said. “Today’s consumers like it.”
“We were thinking you should go on the radio and make an appeal,” Allan said. “I could get you on KUSA tomorrow.”
“Those guys are amateurs,” Dr. Croc muttered.
“Highest-rated morning show. They’d have you on, Phil, if you wanna do that. They owe me a favor.”
“A favor?” Phil Needle asked. “How do they even know you?”
“I have a show,” Allan said, “once a week.”
“Three
a.m.
,” Barry said.
Gwen’s note was on the counter, next to the yogurt. Phil Needle tried to work it out. “You work at KUSA?”
“We all do,” Barry said.
“All of you?”
“Yeah,” Dr. Croc said, even him.
“You don’t pay us enough,” Allan said quietly. “Sorry.”
Dear
Renée, is that what it was? Money? Aren’t you ashamed of yoursel
f
?
“It’s okay,” Phil Needle said. “I guess it’s true, I should pay you more probably.”
“That’d be great.”
“I’ll make a note about it, clear it with Leonard Steed.”
“Sure. Do you want to come to the station tomorrow?”
“When?”
“Eight? Eight in the morning? Seven thirty.”
Phil Needle looked at the happy cow. He was free at eight, of course he was. “Okay,” he said, and then, so quick it was almost instinct, “Thank you.”
“Of course, Phil. What good are we, right? If we can’t get our radio boss on the radio.”
“What good,” Phil Needle said, and hung up. Levine’s things moved in his hands, and he left the courtyard in a steadfast blur. In moments they were in the drawer, underneath even the drugs. (He tried, he tried, not to think about the day his father found the cocaine.) Toby II ran around in the kitchen, half-enthusiastically, at all this hubbub. Would they fight over the dog if there was no child? Would he really be divorced, would more young women’s toiletries rattle into his life? Or would Marina just be standing next to him on Independence Day, as if nothing had really happened? It was what he could imagine, but so what, what good was that, his wandering mind, the grand late-night schemes of his crew, his straying body in a faraway suite? “No good,” he said, answering his wife’s question at last, but nobody knew he had even said a word.
Dawn came with a helicopter, chipping through the sky around the bridge. Gwen and Amber woke right quick, staring at each other wrapped in sweatshirts. Treasure Island, Gwen saw, sitting up, was where they were. Cody was curled against a shrub with his arms around his knees, like an urchin in a folktale. Errol was off a ways, standing quietly over a puddle. The noise kept up, chopping around the rising sun.
“What is that?”
“Duck,” Amber said. “We’d better duck down here.” She had already crouched off the concrete into some bristly shrubbery. Gwen could see a small twig scraping at the space between the end of Amber’s pant leg and her muddy sock, a patch of skin already prickled and red as a rose garden. They had all suffered.
“I don’t think they’re looking for us.”
“Of course they are, wench.”
“They’re angled toward the bridge. Traffic, I think it is.”
“Like for a radio report? It’s Sunday, I think.”
Gwen looked up, squinting and wondering where those sunglasses had gone, and then put her hood up and curved it down. “Church traffic,” she tried, with a wavery smile.
“We should warn the others.”
Others
, she said, like there was a teeming band. Manny’s departure had made the group into a small batch of parts. Even the rescue boat, still covering their meager supplies, looked smaller now. “Cody,” she said, and he rocked back and forth a little. “Captain.”
“Aye?” Errol called over, and Gwen pointed to the sky. Errol glared up. “Wings,” he said, walking closer.
“We’d best take shelter.”
“I’m not afraid of birdlife, grommet. We had a parrot in our crew, did we not?”
Gwen took his sleeve. It was a bad sleeve, wet and torn, but it served the purpose of tugging him into the brush. Cody stood shakily and tried to crawl in after them, his arms and legs every which way. Gwen could not help thinking that Nathan would have done it better. Errol growled a little and knelt down, a puddle rippling around his knee. This looked like nothing, where they were hiding. Tall plants, reeds or just ruined leaves, crossed high in front of them, with shrubs circling their wagons against the wind and grime. The air scutted noise above them. No one would look for them here, Gwen thought, because nobody would look for anything here. Cody sat down next to her. His teeth were dirty and chattering. “Can I talk to you?” he whispered.
“You don’t have to whisper it,” Gwen said. “They can’t hear from up there.”
“I woke up with a sore throat.”