“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.
“It wasn’t John that did me in, Jen. It was my guilt. My greedy heart. It was him drowning up there in the cold. Hundreds of miles away. After that, it was just the pipe, taking over. One puff at a time. Throw in some schnapps. Some bad company.”
“More than that one time with John?”
“A few.”
“Did you love him?”
“Did I ever. I’d been loving on him since I was twelve, just like you. I lost his baby. Not on purpose. Two months after he died.”
Jen has wondered about this, and how she would react. Wondered if there might be someone walking the earth now, about Casey and Brock’s age, someone with John’s looks and his direct, seeking spirit, maybe Belle Becket’s gray eyes, loopy humor, and desire to get high.
“Did he talk about leaving me?”
“No. He was in love with you. But I was … present and persistent.”
“Fuck, Belle. Such loss. All that for this.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
“Thanks for protecting me and my good reputation,” says Belle. “I hope no one puts two and two together, after that article.”
“Too many stoned and drunk people at too many New Year’s parties. Twenty-five years ago. I think we’re safe. Walk, Belle?”
“My jar!”
Belle trudges to her table, stuffs the mason jar money into a tattered bead purse and hikes it over her shoulder. They head north.
“I’ve gotten lots of emails and letters for that last article,” Jen says. “Mostly sympathetic, but some people said he’d be alive if not for me. And I should take full responsibility.”
“You did that.”
“I thought so.”
“What did Casey and Brock say?”
Jen watches a young family, bundled against the cool day, pants hiked above their knees. A boy and a girl run ankles deep in and out of the water, screaming in the breeze. Mom and Dad watch closely.
