“Very froggy,” said Charlie, shouting to be heard over the big twin Mercury outboards.
“You need to consider your glass house,” said Minty.
“But hey, webbed feet,” Charlie said, wiggling his duck feet before him. “Nice, right?”
Jane glanced back. “I can’t even look at you like that. It’s just like Mom used to say, you’re a freak of nature.”
“Mom said that?” Charlie thought he was pouting, but since he had no lower lip to protrude, it looked more like his jaw was flapping in the breeze.
“Well, she did one time—she was repeating what I had just said when she asked me to drive you to school one day. Still.”
“Not for much longer,” said Minty Fresh, letting them both off the hook of family history.
“Shhhh,” shushed Jane. “We’re harshing Audrey’s chi or something.”
Jane throttled down the outboards a little as they rounded Alcatraz and the current coming in the Golden Gate kicked the waves up.
“Where’d you learn to drive a boat?” Minty Fresh asked.
“Our dad used to take us fishing,” shouted Charlie. “Jane always got to drive the boat.”
“Shhhh,” shushed Audrey, who evidently was not as deep in trance as they thought.
“Sorry,” said Charlie.
“Uh-oh,” said Ja
ne as she steered toward the north tower of the bridge. “That’s not good.”
A finger of fog was streaming in through the Golden Gate; from their position, it appeared to be above the water, but below the deck of the bridge.
Minty Fresh lifted his sunglasses to get a better look. “You can see to steer, right?”
“So far,” said Jane. “But I don’t know if we’ll be able to see the bottom of the bridge from under it. It might be a whiteout by the time we get there.” She checked her watch.
Five minutes later, when they were a half mile out, the fingerling of fog had taken on the aspect of a snowy knife blade, inserting itself between the bridge towers and the water just below the roadway.
“We won’t be able to see the bottom of the bridge,” said Jane, digging in her rain-jacket pocket for her phone. “I’m calling it off.”
Lily was supposed to be at work at nine, and she had actually been headed that way, but after dropping off the defibrillator at Charlie’s store for his sister, and learning that the big gay cop, Cavuto, had been killed, she started to shake, and as her bus approached her stop near the Crisis Center offices she realized she just couldn’t do it. She got off the bus and flagged down a taxi.
“Take me to the Golden Gate Bridge,” she said.
“You want me to take you to the visitor center, or to the bridge. Because if I take you to the bridge, I’m going to have to go to Marin to turn around and pay the toll to come back and it’s going to cost you.”
“Sure, the visitor center,” she said, not really thinking it through.
She got out of the cab at the visitor center and paid, then started running up the trail for the bridge. She hadn’t even gotten to the tollbooths before she was out of breath and had to slow to a walk. She checked the time on her phone: 8:55. Five minutes. She started to jog in the wobbly, ankle-breaking way that drunk girls do, although she wasn’t drunk, just really out of shape.
He was going to jump off from the steel structure under the road, about two hundred feet south of the north tower. She looked up. She wasn’t even to the south tower. She’d never make it. And if she did, what was she going to do? You couldn’t even get to where he was going to be from the walkway; at least she didn’t know how to get there.
But there was fog coming in under the bridge, like a plank or something. He wouldn’t jump in the fog. That was one of the plans, she was sure of it.
She scrolled up his number and pressed dial. This was her thing, this was what she did. This was what made her special. She would get the bridge painter off the bridge.
“Hi, Lily,” Mike said.
“Mike, you can’t do this. Not today.”