Desperation Reef

The doctor looks over her blue glasses at Jen, writes something in her notebook, then sets the readers on her table and stands.

They meet halfway across the Persian rug and hug a long time. Jen can feel their heartbeats.

“I think we should continue here together for a few more sessions,” says the doctor. “I think you should discontinue the Xanax and really put your foot down on the alcohol.”

In Jen’s silence, the doctor considers her with pursed lips and sympathetic eyes.

“These narratives that you’ve been piecing together with me over the years, Jen,” says Dr. Parker. “Are they complete? Is there more?”

“There’s more. That’s what I’m writing. I’m so tired of falling. I’m ready to fly, Penelope.”

“You don’t seem ready to fly at all. More like a young bird, crouched on the lip of its nest, terrified.”

“I’m going to make those waves at Mavericks. I’m going to help my boys survive and compete. If I dream at night, so be it. Well, thank you again.”

“I’m disappointed. But I’ll be reading every word you write. I know you’ll find your way. I’ll leave this two o’clock open for a few weeks, in case you change your mind. And remember — sometimes fear is a friend, and caution a teacher. Tell your whole truth, Jen Stonebreaker. Confess it to the world and yourself. And for heaven’s sake, don’t move into the Barrel upstairs and try to guard the place with a gun.”

Jen feels like she’s been punched in the stomach by Mike Tyson.

Confess it...

Nods and hugs Dr. Parker again, then breaks free and walks out.

Heart pounding, stomach aching, knees uncertain.

14

Jen tracks Belle Becket to the beach behind the Laguna Hotel. Belle moves her business around a bit. This is Jen’s monthly three o’clock and she’s as faithful to it as she’s been to Dr. Parker — until ten minutes ago.

Belle sits at her flimsy card table in the shade of the old hotel, just outside the roped-off section of beach reserved for guests. A small yellow batik tablecloth is held down at all four corners and in the middle by big abalone shells brimming with smaller shells. Sea-glass necklaces and earrings dangle from driftwood hangers. Jen thinks of John every time she sees sea glass. Just one of those memories in the legions of memories that don’t go away.

Belle’s sign is written in her small, graceful calligraphic hand, on a brown paper Ralphs bag inverted over a shadeless brass lampstand with no cord:

PACIFIC VIBRATIONS

PSYCHIC INTERPRETATION

FORTUNES TOLD

TWO DOLLARS SHORT

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.