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  “Don’t feel too poor, obscure, plain, and little,” I said.

  It was the wrong thing to say, and she didn’t even look at me when she told me to fuck off.

  “Who was that curly-haired Rochester you were talking to?”

  She was on her feet now, pulling a pair of khaki shorts up her legs. She paused with them halfway settled upon her hips, chewed her lip, realized she was chewing her lip, stopped, seemed to swallow, all in the space of a second or two. “No. He’s nothing like that. As far from that as a subhuman can get.”

  “Was he bothering you?”

  “Not really. He’s just a guy from a while back, a jackass. One of those friend-of-a-friend situations gone wrong.”

  “So he wasn’t hassling you?” I didn’t know why I kept pushing at it. Just a feeling. If I’d thought hard about it, I would have recognized it as the feeling I used to get when, twenty years or another lifetime ago, I would be talking to a teenage girl, hearing her struggles and requests for prayers, nothing shocking or out of the ordinary, and in a moment, as if from out of the air itself, I knew something had happened with a boyfriend, that he’d been pressuring her, that it had just happened, that they’d gone too far. Then came a queasy kind of pleasure, the kind a doctor must feel at the sight of a body broken in a car wreck that she knows she can fix. But what I did wasn’t fixing. It was discovering the injured person and then administering a kind of spiritual waterboarding. Follow-up treatment was the routine management of the resulting Stockholm syndrome.

  Cindy buttoned her shorts, then rubbed her face and hair, hiding behind her hands. “He’s a fucker but he’s harmless, really.”

  “Someone should tell him to get that tumor of a head looked at.”

  She mussed her hair again, sending tiny flakes of salt floating around her face. With her arms over her head, her breasts made a set of parentheses where they met her armpits. As she brushed away the sand she found there, she said, “Protective rage. That’s a new one.” She raised her eyes to mine.

  I was instantly rendered sheepish. “I’d just noticed. That’s all.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s even a little cute.” She was teasing me, and I felt for a moment fifteen years old and clueless. “I don’t think I’ll have to deal with him again,” she said, “so don’t worry. No threat.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling false and insultingly paternalistic but also caught out, known for the part of me that was attracted to her, too.

  “Ready to leave this hellhole of tourists and crackheads?” she asked, stooping for her bag.

  “Yes,” I said stiffly, now defensive.

  She kidded me: “Aw. My protector.”

  “Where are you headed?” I asked as we walked up the stairs to the parking lot.

  She stopped, so I followed suit. “Not sure,” she said.

  “I can give you a ride home,” I offered. “I’m just a few blocks away.”

  She bit her lip and rocked back and forth on her heels. Her lip went white where the teeth pinched. A moment later, she said, “I, uh, I don’t really have a place right now.”

  My gut cinched. It was like I’d swallowed lead weights. I’d bought her a burger a year ago, sure. But that was more a hazy memory than an ongoing habit of mine. The surf lesson had caught me off guard, but I’d gone with it, I don’t know why. Maybe I do. That complicated dance, caritas and cupiditas, fluttering on the screen door like two lovesick moths. But knowing she didn’t have a home to go back to now, and knowing what would come next, was all the reminder I needed of why I’d spent the last fifteen years avoiding—well, everyone and everything.

  She watched me with half-lowered eyes, waiting to see if I would take up the thread. I did, against my better judgment.

  “What do you mean you don’t have a place?”

  The response came fast. “Things fell through. Guy troubles. You know the drill.”

  “So back to your parents, then?”

  “Ah, not them,” she said in a tempered, brittle tone. “They’re where they are, and my last living situation crapped out is all.”

  “Then where are you staying?”

  She said, “That’s what I was going to ask you.”

  My first response was dread. She rocked onto her toes toward me.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “What, your girlfriend wouldn’t like it? Who’s she?”

  “No girlfriend,” I said. There were plenty of reasons it wasn’t a great idea—I didn’t know her, she didn’t know me—but I couldn’t get one to come out of my mouth.

  On the other side of the pier, two bikers fired up their choppers with a bang and rip. Cindy flinched and looked for the source of the sound. She tried to pretend she hadn’t, but her neck flushed red and her breathing had changed. She was having trouble calming back down, and it showed.

  She took a breath and smirked at me. “What,” she said, “you’re afraid of me? Fuck off. As the girl, I’m the one taking the risk in this situation. But you don’t seem so bad. Let me just crash a day or two?”

  She’d made a mark out of me, but that was fine. That was my name, and I was only in for a combo meal and a surf lesson at this point. Not that I took her for a true con artist. She was working her situation, with a good deal of caution and very little shame. She had reasons, I was sure. I could tell she hadn’t always done this, but something in her life had turned over on her. I knew how that could go. How if it was bad enough, you might start to see how everything was a construct—an imaginary scaffold, allowing you to climb ten stories high but with no real bars to reach for once you started to fall—and so make your life close to the ground. How you might feel like you have more moves to make there, more control. I’d spent some time there before I saw its flaws and went further, subterranean.

  Now she was angling for a place to stay. Who knew what else, down the line. I didn’t like it but wasn’t alarmed. Maybe that should have been the alarm, that I was letting myself entertain the idea, any idea.

  “I’m used to my privacy,” I said weakly.

  “I’ll stay out of the way,” she said, her voice slipping into a soft, girlish tone without trouble. A memory of my daughter, Aracely, using the same tone crawled up my back like a case of sudden-onset scoliosis, left me feeling weaker, more hunched. I had been working out a tough bit of translation from the Koine Greek as part of a talk I was giving, long since lost in the oblivion of the past, and she came in to ask if she could just sit behind me and play with her small, blue train, she wouldn’t even make a sound. I’d been struggling to keep all the theological implications of the passage clear and in context, struggling not to lose each shade of meaning in that strange alphabet. She wouldn’t interrupt me, she promised. But of course—how could she help it—she had. I’d gotten angry then, my brain got ahead of me, and I didn’t handle it well. Suffice it to say I was buying a new blue train the next day. Aracely never played with it again.

  And here was this other girl, this young woman, and she was in a tough place, and she didn’t seem like a psychopath, was even kind of beautiful, and she needed a hand, and what the hell did I have going on? What, even in terms of possessions, could she steal or destroy that I would miss? It wasn’t the best idea, but I wasn’t making many decisions with words like best or even good in mind—no words, in fact, but more the throaty sound a person makes when shrugging, a croak of resignation. I made the sound now.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ll try it, but if it’s off, it’s off. A couple days. That’s it. Okay?”

  I turned away and walked to my truck, not wanting to see the look on her face, not wanting to read anything into her reaction, not wanting anything she could do or say to call up any more memories, unbidden. I was afraid of them, and so afraid of her, but still I said yes. Why? Fear and memory, desire and self-sabotage. Maybe, only slightly possible, something like intuition, an intelligence that ran deeper than logic. It was hard to know at the time, and even harde
r to say, looking back. Like everything else.

  4.

  WE WALKED TO MY TRUCK, A LITTLE BEATER WITH A WHITE SHELL.

  “A little on the nose, eh?” Cindy said, pointing to the sticker on the back window. It had AMBIVALENT printed over the Statue of Liberty in duotone red and blue. I shrugged off the comment, though I should have paid more attention to how quickly she’d drawn a bead on me. I’d been called ambivalent often enough, by everyone from my ex-wife to the guy taking my order in the Robertito’s drive-thru. There was always an intended dig in it, an insult, but I failed to see what was wrong with it—took a certain pride in it, in fact. People with certainties were the problem.

  When I got in the truck, the wave of scent hit me. It smelled like mildew and rotten seaweed worse than the Tokyo city dump—a good reminder to get the towel I’d been using all week out of the cab.

  Cindy followed and stood at the passenger door. “Get in,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, voice muffled through the glass. She didn’t move a muscle other than to raise an eyebrow. Maybe I wasn’t the only ambivalent one.

  “Well then,” I said. “What’s your call?”

  “You said you were a decent guy,” she said, and didn’t move. Had I done something wrong? Had she caught me looking at her the wrong way on the beach? She eyed me with that cool, appraising expression again. There was a hint of warmth this time, a degree or two, maybe. She waved her hand theatrically at the door handle and let herself smile, and it was the kind of smile a person couldn’t help but be pleased by. “Aren’t you going to open the door for me?”

  I grunted, annoyed, amused, and leaned across the gearshift to pull the handle.

  After she got over hassling me about the smell, we both fell quiet. Heading down the road, having committed to this plan, there was a new tension in the air. I wasn’t sure what to say next, and Cindy wasn’t offering anything up, so we stayed silent.

  On either side of us passed stereo shops and barber shops and sandwich shops with tiny sidewalk patios, the public library’s stark white and blue facade and oversized square fountains. We crossed Mission Avenue and the specter of the newly built movie theater—the first part of a proposed “downtown revitalization program” that included five-star accommodations (that would maybe rank three when they opened), fine dining (which meant fish that wasn’t breaded and served with french fries), and time-shares (scam opportunities)—in a place forever slouching around in the shadow of Camp Pendleton.

  It was those fresh-faced jarheads, with weekend cash in their pockets and nothing good to spend it on, who would keep the used-car lots and seedy strip clubs and night spots humming, places where every other Thursday a Kentucky farm boy got knifed by a hood from the valley or vice versa, places where it was easier to find the rocks you smoke than the ones made of earth and shell. The chamber of commerce whipped up something like this every now and then, and the results never failed to disappoint, which was fine by me.

  For a minute or two, Cindy’s fingers drummed out emergency Morse code on the armrest. I knew what it meant. Then Cindy asked if she could smoke. I said, “Of course,” and she held out a pack of clove cigarettes to me.

  “No thanks. Quit a couple years back.”

  “Oh,” she said, hesitating momentarily as she held the lighter up to the long black cigarette but then lighting it anyway. “I can wait. I don’t need to.” She inhaled hard, blew smoke out the window, and sank with a little more comfort into the corner between the seat and the door.

  “It’s fine. I still enjoy a little secondhand.”

  “Makes it sound like you have a watch fetish.”

  I turned left on Michigan, off the main drag and into a neighborhood of small old houses, fenced yards, and barred windows, and pulled the truck in at my place. It was a two-bedroom house a few blocks east of PCH, built in the thirties, last properly maintained around V-J Day. The paint was ashy green, and a monstrous bougainvillea grew up one wall, where the wind set it to tapping against a window. On the border of the yard, I shared a sycamore with the neighbor. The dead, yellow grass was all mine.

  I headed up the walk and unlocked the front door where the smell of the ocean from the west and the freeway’s collective exhaust from the east met at my doorstep. Cindy came along after she finished riffling through her backpack in the truck.

  Just inside, I kicked off my sandals. I couldn’t help but give the living room a once-over for anything embarrassing, which was like a porn star asking his prayer-warrior mom if his latest feature had any parts in it that made her uncomfortable. A wobbly metal doctor’s tray held a very small, very old TV against one wall. Next to it was a sagging particleboard bookcase gone yellow with National Geographics, like the whole thing had been lifted straight out of the DAV thrift store, which had in turn gotten it from the death room of a ninety-eight-year-old recluse. I’d personalized it a bit, put a radio and a tiny, fuzzy cactus on top. That made me feel better now. The couch opposite the TV was forest green worn down to lime near each armrest.

  Down the hall was an office and a bedroom, but she wasn’t going that way. The living room opened up on one side into the kitchen, and I went there. Cindy followed, a neutral expression on her face as she weighed the items in the house as if they were words, feeling the connotations come together into a singular expression of the disrepair of my life. Or maybe I was projecting that onto her out of habit. I didn’t ask, didn’t want to know.

  Instead, I opened a bag of coffee, the smell of which calmed me. I asked if she drank coffee, and she said of course she drank coffee, so I put a pot on. She sat at the small enamel kitchen table.

  “Make yourself at home,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I went out to the truck, took the nine-foot board and wetsuit still dripping from my early morning session from the bed and the ratty stink of a towel from the cab, and walked through the side gate into the backyard. The yard was small, with a stunted palm in one corner and a square concrete pad under a rotting wood pergola. I lay the board on the concrete, hosed off the wetsuit and towel, and dangled them from slats overhead.

  I went back in through the sliding glass door to the kitchen. Cindy had gone through my mail and was reading a catalog—reading at this point in history meaning to flip through a series of pictures and price tags.

  The coffee was done, so I poured two cups, gave her one, and asked her where she was from.

  She took a sip. “This coffee is intense. The good stuff. You might have trouble getting me out of here.”

  She watched me, smacking her lips like a woman in a Folgers commercial, waiting for me to remember my line, but that didn’t stop me from finding her evasion irritating. I didn’t say anything until she got the hint that it was my only question, that I’d just stare now.

  “In the city. Originally,” she said with a derisive edge. “But that was a long time ago. The last place wasn’t too far from here. That place, whew. A dump, compared to this one.”

  “That’s saying something,” I said.

  She tucked her head in embarrassment. “Oh, no. That’s not what I meant.”

  I gestured my thumb toward the living room. “I don’t get a lot of guests, and I’ve stopped trying to impress myself.”

  “Don’t think twice about it,” she said. “I’m not looking to be impressed.”

  Her fingers drummed out a slower rhythm than before, more a leisurely bossa nova. The other arm stretched out along the chair back, limp at the wrist. She held her chin up, taking a good full look back into my eyes. She was trying to be somebody’s darling, but it was all a little much. She’d only taken a sip of coffee, but her energy had shifted again. I wondered what was in that backpack and how much of it she’d had while I’d been outside.

  “Oceanside is sketchy, though,” she said. “Why do you live in such a sketchy place?”

  “You come for the beach. But it’s the people who offer a hit off the crack pipe if you’ll let them smoke it in your car that get you to stay.”
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  “Oh, you know Bruce, too?”

  I smiled. She was quick. “Why are you here?”

  “I’ve been bouncing around. My South O family got weird.”

  “Oh, so your family moved here?”

  “Ha, no, God. This guy and his two kids. Said I was like their aunt, but he just wanted free child care. Who knows what else. Well, I mean. It’s not hard to know.”

  “Sounds like a winner.”

  “You should have seen the jarhead before that. Kinda fun to stay on base, though. Trip to walk around at night, all these killing machines everywhere. You feel like you’re doing something important—like everything’s a movie—even if you’re just drinking Pabst and watching The Matrix a hundred fucking times.”

  I laughed. “What happened with him?”

  “Let’s just say there’s a red pill, a blue pill, and then there’s weed and Doritos. He was really into Doritos. So much for the brave and the few.”

  There was a lull then, enough time for the feeling of this all being a serious mistake to fill the air like smoke.

  “What’s the plan now?” Cindy asked uncomfortably.

  “No plan for me,” I said, swallowing the black coffee in big slugs. The twitching, dry need in my stomach began to go slack. The hum in my nerves went quiet. “I work nights, and I haven’t slept since five o’clock yesterday. Before I go back tonight, I have to get some rest.”

  She motioned at the mug in my hand. “But you’re drinking coffee.”

  I made a noise. “That’s what works for me. Strange nerves.” In truth, with the fresh caffeine running through my system, this was the most tired and calm I’d felt in hours.

  “What’s your gig?”

  “Security.”

  “Rent-a-cop?”

  “More like paid book reader, sometime walker, and occasional flashlight waver.” I went to refill my empty cup and offered her another by pointing at the pot. She shook her head, waved her hand over the top of her still-full mug like a blackjack player committing to stay.