We Run the Tides(57)

I go to bed early again. My mother rubs my back with her long nails and I hear my father turning the pages of a book in the next room, the playroom. Ewa is still elsewhere. I can’t remember him ever sitting there before. I can see only his knees and the tips of his socks, and watch his feet tapping until I fall away.

*

I WAKE UP EARLIER THAN USUAL that morning. The clarity of truth is invigorating, I tell myself. I try not to think about the fact that I might be expelled. I go outside in search of the newspaper, to see if any part of Maria Fabiola’s story made it into print.

My parents aren’t currently subscribing to the Chronicle so I have to walk up the street until I find a copy I can read. Almost at the top of El Camino del Mar I find a paper in the bushes. I open it. “SEA CLIFF TEEN STRANGLED—BODY FOUND IN PANHANDLE.” I collapse on the sidewalk and scan the article out of order. “Police have no leads . . .” “The death of Gentle Gordon . . .” “Troubled young woman abandoned by her mother . . .” “Struggled with substance abuse . . .” “Body showed signs of struggle . . .” “Found next to the seesaw . . .”

I sit up and read it from start to finish, all the while not believing that it’s not me and not Maria Fabiola. Then I have a terrible thought: Of course it was Gentle. The rest of us were never at risk. Of course it was Gentle. The words become a mantra I can’t end.

My legs begin running downhill. I run past the house where Jefferson Starship used to live and where China’s long swing used to hang above the ocean, but the swing is gone and so is Starship. I run past the house that used to give out King Size Hershey’s candy bars every Halloween, and past the house that belonged to Carter the Great and is now rented out by the president of a bank. I run past the house where a classmate’s hair caught on fire when she was blowing out her birthday candles. I run past the house with the turret, the house where, briefly, I took in the newspapers. I race past the house where the mom uses a wheelchair—we never learned why. I see my own house on the right, looking so compact between the immense houses that border it. I turn away and keep running.

I run past palm trees and I run past gardeners with their trucks and loud leaf blowers and grating rakes. My body is sweating and cooled by the fog as I approach China Beach. My feet make a galloping sound as they race down the ninety-three steps. The beach is empty this gloomy morning. Once on the sand, I hastily remove my shoes and socks. I run to the water’s edge and the cold ocean licks my toes. Without touching my face I can feel that it’s wet with fog and tears and sweat. I stand there, on the cusp of the ocean and listen to its loud inhale. And then it recedes and takes everything from my childhood with it—the porcelain dolls, the tap-dancing shoes, the concert ticket stubs, the tiny trophies, and the long, long swing.





2019


We are almost fifty years old and the streets of Sea Cliff are no longer ours. The houses that follow the curve of the bay belong to the new San Francisco, to the tech giants, to buyers from abroad who, rumor has it, paid cash and bought the houses sight unseen. The “For Sale” signs were not up for long, and now the driveways remain empty and the curtains stay closed. Our parents’ generation laments the new money that’s changed the neighborhood, and we and the rest of the world roll our collective eyes.

The venture capitalists have taken over Pacific Heights. The young tech workers have claimed Hayes Valley, Mission Bay, and Potrero Hill—neighborhoods close to the freeway so they have easier commutes to Silicon Valley. But the CEOs and the names behind the companies live in Sea Cliff, where there is privacy and unobstructed views of the Golden Gate. Sea Cliff is for solitude, for when you want to protect yourself from people. Of course, everything is extra fortified now—there are more gates, more cameras.

But the kitchens are too small. The Silicon Valley pioneers want bigger kitchens, bigger closets and windows, higher ceilings, and their new homes in Sea Cliff are always under construction and never finished. They are encased in white plastic, roof to foundation—to hide the location of their tunnels and panic rooms?—while the drilling and hammering drown out the foghorns and crashing waves and every sound of our childhood.

The houses of Sea Cliff no longer belong to our parents—they have passed away or downsized to smaller homes. We don’t live in Sea Cliff either. None of us who grew up there, or in almost any other neighborhood in San Francisco, can afford to live where we were raised—not that we necessarily want to. Symphonies of tiny violins play themselves to shreds.

The disappearances of Sea Cliff girls in the eighties is still part of the lore. The newspapers called what happened the Sea Cliff Seizures, and the name stuck. Before the internet I was able to remain fairly anonymous and, upon meeting me, few knew I had been one of the three missing girls. After being expelled from Spragg, I went to Grant High, Gentle’s school. Sometimes I imagined I saw her in the hallways and I’d follow her until a head turned and I realized it wasn’t her—of course it wasn’t. At Grant I sought out friends who were studious and steady and my four years passed unremarkably. At UC Santa Cruz I found the work of Fernando Pessoa and took up Portuguese. Another excuse not to learn Swedish, my mother said. She was probably right.

I married early (he was a fellow undergrad, from San Diego) and we realized our mistake on our honeymoon. We had spent months planning our modest wedding at a sheltered cove north of San Francisco. But after our friends and family departed, we quickly learned we had little to say to each other. We ate meal after meal at the same unsteady table in the same small wooden lodge overlooking the Pacific. In the span of a few days we’d become one of those couples who sit across from each other and eat in silence. We quickly grew tired of listening to each other chew.