Desperation Reef

“I see a beautiful Barrel there by summer.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’m always right. Short or long today?”

Jen has five twenties balled up in the pocket of her jeans. Pushes them into Belle’s almost-empty mason jar.

“Long, Belle. Tell me what you see.”

“Sit.”

Belle moves the shadeless lamp that holds her handwritten grocery-bag sign, then takes Jen’s hands and stares at her as Jen closes her eyes.

Then Belle.

“Now I’m underwater with you, Jen. Seeing through you. Feeling what you feel. You are frightened and alone and rolling over a reef. You hit a rock but your helmet stays on.”

“It was terrible, Belle. I almost died.”

“I read your story.”

A long silence. Jen knew that Belle would read her piece. That was one of the reasons she wrote it.

“You push off the rocks for the surface. You break into the light. You gasp for air but the whitewater hits your face and mouth.”

Jen concentrates on this. It’s another memory that has stolen back into her. It’s like seeing it happen for the first time. She feels the terror again, those cold, bony fingers trying to take hold of her.

“Now I see nothing but black,” says Belle. “You have stopped seeing.”

Black indeed. Thoughtless silence, forever.

But now Jen opens her eyes to the breezy gray light of Laguna. Colliding with death has changed her. She can face the memories of it, and feel the fear — but she can also banish them from her inner eye. Replace them with the bright, living world around her.

“The black can’t hold me down anymore, Belle. I can make it. Make it to the surface and breathe.”

“It is the euphoria of survival. And congratulations on Casey winning. You must be proud. Your mother, too.”

They share a look over Eve Byrne’s invincible will to win. Especially for her surf and swim and water polo teams, of which Jen and Belle were once a part.

A long silence.

Belle opens her eyes and folds Jen’s hands to the tabletop, palms down. Pulls her tie-dye scarf snug around her neck. Crosses her arms and fixes Jen with a serious look.

“In your article, the New Year’s Eve party scene in Laguna Canyon was a real bummer. I could feel your heart breaking when you were in that bathroom.”

Jen’s imagination arcs back to that night. Over twenty-five years ago, in a flash. She closes her eyes again, lets the memory play.

“I saw and heard you in the words,” says Belle. “The people making love in an upstairs bedroom. You recognizing a voice. And a familiar moan. You, hiding in a bathroom and the door is cracked and the light is off. You waiting. John walks past. Moving with purpose. Then Ronna Dean. Your school friend, the singer.”

“I wasn’t planning on revisiting that today,” Jen lies. “It still hurts like the night it happened.”

“But why did you write it this way, Jen?”

“What way, Belle? What do you mean?”

Belle’s eyes are steel gray and unblinking, framed by the heavy black-and-white makeup. The breeze blows a tangled strand of hair across her forehead.

“You lied,” she says. “Right there in Surf Tribe.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You saw me. Belle Becket. Not some make-believe Ronna Dean.”

Jen stands and walks away from the table. Regards the silver ocean mirroring the gray sky, the tiny waves forming and breaking. Pictures exactly where she’d be if she were just one foot tall on an eight-inch surfboard, riding a little monster like that. She’s been doing this for forty years now, since Mom and Dad started taking her to this very beach.

Then she turns and considers the sea wall, where fading John rides a fading wave as a fading sun shines down.

Belle joins her. Stands a good six feet to one side, pushes some sand with a dirty foot.

“I didn’t know you knew,” she says. “That’s how I was able to keep doing this. This thing with you. I wondered but I didn’t know. Sure didn’t see you when I walked past that bathroom. Did you hate me then?”

“Oh yes.”

“Now?”

“Not now.”

“No one knows, Jen. And now that you’ve blamed it on a phantom, nobody’s ever going to. But what if someone remembers that party and asks about the singer?”

“I never went to a New Year’s Eve party in Laguna Canyon. The one with you and me and John was... well, you know where it was.”

“The rich old people in Newport. What if your magazine finds out you created a character to cover up a truth?”

“To protect another truth.”

“Why all these years? Of this, with me?”

Jen has asked herself this for over twenty years, the anger and the pity fighting inside her like alley cats.

“I saw what happened to you. Your... coming apart. I believed some of it was what you did with John. Guilt and maybe shame. And that you felt responsible for what happened to him — in some way. Distracted him, maybe. Confused him. I wanted to help you. Not totally lose a terrific friend, who surfed with me, and made me laugh, and made me happy to be around.”

“You pitied the pathetic, filthy crackhead who slept with your husband.”

“You weren’t that then. You’re not that now.”

Belle watches her foot in the sand.