The tracking dot says I’ll have to go into the thicket up ahead, an area dense with eucalyptus trees and tall brush, and if I take the first step toward it, I’ve officially crossed the border between dumb and absolutely insane. I head down a narrow path between two thorny bushes, my dress catching on needles. It’s really not good at this point, this getup I’m wearing, so I stuff my phone in my cleavage and fold the petticoat in with both arms to make me skinny enough to joggle through the scrub until I reach a clearing. I pull the phone from my boobs. The signal is strong now, fanning across my screen in rippling blue waves. Up ahead, a dirt footpath crosses a ravine and a large concrete drain cutting beneath it. I skitter down the embankment, almost slipping on a wet patch, all alone with the sound of trickling water and the nervous pounding of my heart. I grab the drain’s upper lip, steady myself, and peer inside, nearly gagging as I’m met with the stink of sewer algae and human shit. The red LED blinking at the end of the tunnel tells me that I’m on the mark, but when a pair of opal cat eyes pokes through the dark, it’s clear I’ve been had.
I click my tongue and beckon the kitty. “Come here,” I say, my words all sugared up. “I’m not going to hurt you.” I’m fearful the cat is going to bolt, so I crouch at the drain’s opening with my fingers clipping my nose, begging and breathing in that dreadful smell for a full ten minutes before the darn thing saunters toward me and sweeps my gown. I snatch Daddy’s bio-band off its neck and shoo it away (sorry, I’m a dog person), then sprint back to the car, my petticoat hiked high, supremely irritated, my head stuffed with a load of nasty words that I’m going to unload on the captain when I meet him face-to-face.
I turn the Charger over. The V-8 roars, waking up the concrete before I hit the gas. Fifty feet of hot-scarred rubber ribbons the street, and it’s off to the captain’s for a little intervention.
When I roll up to his house, the lights are on, and really, it’s the first place I should have checked, even after seven texts and five unanswered phone calls. He’s so erratic lately. He could have been in that sketchy park or wandering on the moon for that matter.
I walk right through the front door—which he never locks, even in this day and age of super crime, police attack drones, and random mass killings. It’s almost as if he’s inviting danger with the sick hope that some intruder will take him down once and for all, relieve his pain, and finally set him free.
I’m hell-bent for the den and stomp through the hallway with my petticoat scraping the walls to find Daddy barefoot in a Navy tee and those stupid basketball shorts, slunk in his lounger with a tumbler to his lips, and a bottle of Billy Little’s Reserve at his side. What I’m not prepared for are the holes punched in the den’s wall, which I presume were made by the chalk-dusted sledgehammer leaning against the sofa. Broken drywall is all over the wooden floor. There have to be more than a dozen holes, two of which were punched through to the outside, causing dust and cool bay air to breathe into the room. Jax is engrossed in some TV documentary about Nigerian oil-well fires and the plight of the desert pit viper, and I get the sense that I could jump right in his lap, and he still wouldn’t notice me.
“Jax!” I say, but he doesn’t respond. “Captain J. Xavier Long, U.S. Navy, retired!” I say, holding up his bio-band to emphasize my point. “Is this how it’s going to be? Because if it is, tell me right now!”
“Why, may I ask,” his words slow and tinted with disdain, “are you dressed like a tart?”
“A wedding. I told you that. Do you even hear me anymore?”
“Loud and clear,” he says, iced bourbon to his lips. “And where are my guns?”
“Floating in a far-off universe.”
“Well, then, do me a favor. Call NASA and send a search-and-recovery team up there to get ’em. No guns, no sunshine. Follow?”
I don’t even entertain the so-totally-wrong subject of having guns around someone who’s clinically depressed, so I ignore him and get to the point.
“This thing says you didn’t take your meds,” I say, tossing the band in his lap.
“I’m taking them now,” he says, reaching down and raising the bottle of bourbon. “It’s your uncle’s blend.”
“You know you can’t drink and take antidepressants. And what the eff is going on in here?”
“Remodeling,” he says, staring at the punctured wall. “Rejiggering my view on life.”
“Perfect. How the living heck do you expect me to keep it together when I have to leave for Sydney Monday night?”
“Ah, Christ,” he says, waving me off, his face hazy with booze. “You’re one of the best surfers in the world. Tough as rhino hide.”
“I can’t do it,” I say. “I can’t look after you, train, and keep my head on straight for the Olympics—which, in case you don’t remember, are in six weeks—and handle all the other junk I’m dealing with right now. I just can’t.”
“Then don’t,” he says. “You can’t control the situation, but you can control your reaction to it. Isn’t that what Ruttonjee says?”
This comment pushes me to the brink, across the thin line from love to hate.
“Oh yeah!” I bite back, “Then why the hell don’t you start taking his advice!”
The whole looming lot of it: Daddy’s attitude, his wandering episodes, that bogus doping rumor, which will surely unravel in the coming weeks, has me in an absolute fit.
Enough is enough.
I charge out of the living room and down the hall. In the kitchen, I rustle up a plastic bin with half-full macaroni boxes, dump them on the butcher’s block, and raid his booze. I hit his main stash behind the glass cupboard, pulling bottles off the shelf one by one, full fifths of Kentucky bourbon, the half-empty blended scotch, his silver-and-crocodile-hide flask—all of it, including the little airline bottles of Jack Daniels I suppose he hoarded on a dead-end flight to Phoenix, where he set off to with wild-eyed anticipation to meet a woman who turned out to be not the svelte forty-six-year-old blond comptroller represented in her online profile, but a weathered, out-of-work divorcée hoping to lure a man to support her chronic Zappos habit.
“Please take your meds,” I yell from the kitchen. No answer. “Jax? Daddy?”
When I peer down the hall, Jax is passed out, mouth open to the ceiling, snoring. I wonder what I’m going to do with him. I feel like the tables have turned: that’s he’s the troubled and unpredictable child I once was, and I’m a weary and teen-torn parent. But for now, at least, in the waning hours between here and dawn, I can exhale, knowing that he’s somewhere in dreamland with no other place to go.
9
Sunday morning.
The sun punches above the eastern hills and meets the beach in a sudden light that illuminates my white rash guard and forces me to squint. It’s just me and my surfboard and a few stray beach joggers with dogs at this early hour of 5:45 a.m. After last night, with its heavy turbulence, it’s just where I want to be: my church, with all its natural religion and a morning baptism that I know will make the world right again. Gulls caw overhead. Marine clouds break open to blue. I kneel and apply coconut wax to my board in fast, swirling circles. The sand-sprinkled kelp around me buzzes with fleas. The waves are not bad today; yes! Pounding, soothing—a miracle,
