FIVE DOLLARS LONG
“Hey, hey, Belle!”
“Jen?”
A good sign, thinks Jen, because Belle doesn’t always remember her.
Belle gets up, plants her bare feet on the sand, and gives Jen a brief hug. Brief is okay with Jen because Belle doesn’t bathe often. She does try to keep her limited wardrobe clean. Dries her clothes over the painted psychedelic sea wall running south along the cliff from here, a depiction of John Stonebreaker riding a bright, melodramatically perfect wave meant to be Brooks Street. Jen remembers the day she first saw it completed, fresh and psychedelically vibrant. Laguna commissions mural art all over the city, often inspired by or dedicated to local heroes. She stops for a moment, as always, feeling the familiar longing and regret.
Jen sits facing her long-ago best friend and the glittering Main Beach breakers beyond.
Belle’s wearing an old-fashioned hippie tie-dye dress, and of course a sea-glass necklace and earrings. Her dark brown hair is long, tangled, and stiff with sea salt. Gray eyes. Her face is dark and lined, her mouth a nest of wrinkles and ruined teeth.
“You look worried, Jen.”
“I just fired Dr. Parker.”
“Maybe it was time.”
“Apparently.”
Jen introduced Belle Becket to her shrink almost twenty years ago, when Belle began hitting the crack, living in flops, then the downtown alleys, then in the Laguna Canyon brush, really letting go. Belle had seen the psychiatrist, irregularly, for a year, on Jen’s dime, then vanished from Laguna without a word. Five years later she was back, panhandling on the Main Beach boardwalk, scrounging food from the Coast Highway cafes and fast-food joints and dumpsters, marginally cleaning herself up in the tourist rinse-off showers.
Belle Becket, an incorrigible beauty, a once loyal—if troubled—friend, a hot surfer, had returned home a hollowed shell.
Not unlike the scoured abalone halves on the table here, Jen thinks, lifting an all-green sea-glass bracelet from one. She gets five twenties from the wallet in her shoulder bag, sets them in the mason jar.
“Short or long?” The standard opening.
“Do what you do, Belle. Look at me and tell me what you see.”
To Jen, the most surprising part of this arrangement—this crust of a friendship going back to when Jen and Belle were ten years old, in fourth grade together at Top of the World Elementary—is that they still understand each other, still get what makes the other tick.
She wonders how fifteen-plus years of silence, Belle’s mental illness, and brief monthly visits have allowed them to know each other this well. Or, Jen thinks now, as she has thought many times before: Is it just each other’s limits we know so well?
Perhaps not surprisingly, Belle Becket is a very good fortune-teller. She can read a mood in a second, and creep into the future on it.
She moves the lamp for room and takes Jen’s hands in her rough and dirty ones. Stares at Jen with her dark, heavily made-up racoon-style eyes.
“I see your waves, of course. Always waves.”
“The Monsters of Mavericks is coming up.”
“I feel something different is happening inside you. Your mind is cluttered and your blood is unsettled. Does this have to do with the contest?”
“Yeah. I’m competing for the first time since John.”
“Oh, girl. When did you decide this?”
“Six months ago.”
“Why?”
“I’m trying to whup the fear. About what happened. There’s anger, too. And regret. They’re all mixed up and stormy.”
“Like those big waves.”
Silence then, Belle’s rough hands warm on Jen’s on the table in the sun.
“I see a picture now,” says Belle. “A still picture of a future day. Dark mountains of water. A gray sky with rain. I see you on a large wave. Your orange-and-black wetsuit and helmet. Your orange-and-black board. You have just let go of the tow rope and Casey is speeding away on the jet ski. You must see this picture often—”
“Almost every night. I don’t know what happens. If I make the wave or not.”
“You will make the wave if you can see it happen. You will ride that wave only if you let it break in your mind.”
“Will I wipe out on the rocks?”
“Show us. Close your eyes, Jen. Open yourself to this dream, this day that hasn’t happened yet. It is real. Be there. Let Casey tow you. Watch it happen. Give me a film, Jen, not a picture. See.”
“I see black. Nothing beyond.”
“You don’t want to see beyond. Let the black go.”
For a long moment Jen can’t free the wave from its black wrapper.
But then, the black wave turns into blue-green ocean, with a sleek speedboat bobbing at rest.
“Jen, what is this? Something disturbing happened on the water. Not far from here. Recently, but not a wave.”
