She makes a dismissive noise, and I hear her light a cigarette. The cigarettes she thinks I don’t know she smokes. “Well, what’s the next step?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
“Maybe you could take a picture around to the businesses in the area. Ask if anybody knows her.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“Crime TV has its uses.”
I laugh. “Well, if you come up with more tips, feel free to text. This is not exactly my forte.”
“If anyone can find her, you can,” she says.
“What if I don’t?”
“Then you don’t,” she says firmly. “All you can do is try.”
Across the immense miles, I hear a blue jay cawing in my backyard in California. It reminds me acutely that I am a very, very long way from home with no one but myself to keep me company. The loneliness of being unmoored from my little patch of geography, without the cat and—okay, I admit it—the mother I am used to seeing every day is stinging. “I will do my best,” I say. “Please keep trying with Hobo. He needs love.”
“I will. I bought him some tuna last night, and he did stick his nose out to get some.”
I laugh. “Good idea. Thanks, Mom. I’ll call you soon.”
I settle cross-legged on the bed with a cup of tea on a tray. The cups in the apartment are tiny, and I will need to buy a mug somewhere today. I saw a Starbucks on my travels, but it seems kind of pathetic to visit a brand I know perfectly well when I’m seven thousand miles from home.
Opening my laptop, I bring up a map of the area around the nightclub and scan the names of the shops in the buildings nearby. I’d already seen that it was an area of high tourist volume, with cafés and restaurants of all kinds and shops full of postcards and T-shirts. But off to one side is a shopping area that looks more upscale, the Britomart, and it seems to have a higher grade of restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques, and such things. Would that be Josie’s kind of place?
It’s hard to even imagine who she’d be now. As emotion—anger and fear and a weird sense of hope—starts to gurgle low in my gut, I don my scientific hat. How do you age a person who actually faked her own death and started fresh in a faraway land? Why did she do it? What has she done with the new life? How might she have spent the past decade and a half?
Sipping my tea, I watch a cleaning crew vacuum a floor full of offices in a building across the way. Ponder the possibilities.
One of the last times I saw Josie, she’d come to visit me in San Francisco. I was in med school, studying day and night, and she blew into town the way she always did, calling me on a pay phone from somewhere near the beach. “Can we get together?”
I close my eyes. It had been at least six or eight months since she’d been in town, but I didn’t have time. She would want to party all night and eat everything in my meager kitchen and then go out to get more takeout and she’d expect me to pay, even though I had zero money and mostly ate baked potatoes with whatever crappy leftover veggies I could find on special at the supermarket, or else ramen noodles by the truckload. “I’m on rotations, Josie.”
“Just a cup of coffee or something? It’s been a while, Kit. I miss you.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said by rote, but I didn’t. I’d missed her fiercely a hundred times in my life, but on those long, lonely days in Salinas after the earthquake, when she dived entirely into her dual addictions of surfing and getting high, I’d finally realized she was never really coming back to me. “I just have a lot of studying to do.”
“That’s cool. I get it. Med school, dude. I’m so proud of you.”
The words plucked a string somewhere deep in my gut, and the reverberation released a thousand memories, all reminding me of the ways I loved her. I took a breath. “I’ll meet you somewhere. Where are you?”
“That’s okay, sis. Seriously. I get it. If you don’t have time, you don’t have time. I just wanted to say hi.”
“Where are you going after this?”
“Um. Not sure. The waves are great in Baja, but I’m kind of over Mexico. Maybe Oz. A bunch of us have been talking about finding space on a freighter or something.”
The more she talked in her raspy, beautiful voice, the more I wanted to hug her. “Look, you know what? I can spare a couple of hours.”
“Really? I don’t want to interfere with anything.”
“You won’t. It might be ages before you’re back in San Francisco. I’ll come to you. Where are you?”
We met at a burger joint not far from Ocean Beach. Some guy with a tangle of blond hair and at least three leather bracelets on his arm dropped her off. Josie tumbled out of the truck looking like a creature from a Charles de Lint novel, an urban sprite or fairy walking amid the mortals. She was deeply, deeply tan from her year-round surfing, her hair impossibly long, cascading over her lean arms and past her waist. She wore an India cotton peasant blouse over jean shorts and sandals, and every male from the age of six to ninety-six stopped to admire her. A backpack, battered but strong, hung from her left shoulder.
When she saw me, she broke into a run, stretching out her arms, and I found myself moving toward her, allowing her to fling her slim, taut body into my arms. We hugged hard. Her hair let loose the scent of a fresh breeze, a scent that made me ache to go surfing, to leave this grind I’d put myself in and run away to the beach with her. “Oh my God,” she breathed in my ear, her arms fierce around my neck. “I miss you so damn much.”
Tears stung my eyes. By then I had my guard up with her, but within twenty seconds, she swept me into her realm. “Me too,” I admitted, and this time it was true. For one minute, two, I held on to her, dizzy with love and no thought, only her lean body against mine, her hair in my face. I stepped back. “You look really good.”
“Fresh air,” she quipped, then touched my face. “You look tired.”
“Med school.”
Inside the diner, still in touch with the seventies with its red Naugahyde booths and chrome appointments, we sat by the window and ordered cheeseburgers. “Tell me everything,” she said, sipping Cherry Coke through a straw.
“Umm . . .” I floundered, trying to think of something that wasn’t a grind of books, rotations, notes. I was third year, on the floor for the first time, and it was both exhilarating and devastatingly exhausting. “I don’t know what to say. I’m working hard.”
She nodded eagerly, and I noticed how red her eyes were. High, as ever. “Well, what did you do yesterday?”
“Yesterday.” I took a breath, trying to remember. “I got up at four so I could get to the hospital in time to do early rounds; then we had rounds with our team, which is surgical, so I’m working with surgeons and residents. I scrubbed in for a gall bladder removal and an emergency appendectomy.” I paused, feeling sleep, like a hook on a slow-moving train, start to reel me under. I blinked hard. Shook my head. “What else? I met a study group before dinner, then ate, then went home to read for rounds this morning.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Dude. Do you ever get to sleep?”
I nodded. “Sometimes?”