Chapter Three Tessa
Chapter Three
Tessa
Light bleeds through the curtains. I reach over to Gabe’s empty side of the bed.
He’s already left for his morning surf. Last night was an unprecedentedly good night of sleep, free from the early-morning wake-ups that have plagued my third trimester.
Somehow, it makes me even more exhausted.
I roll onto my side, trying to squeeze in a little more rest. Immediately, a whine echoes down the hall.
I ignore it, hoping Jasper will fall back to sleep.
He starts screaming, and I groan exaggeratedly, even though Gabe isn’t home to hear it.
It’s my gift to him, these mornings. Once the baby’s here, Gabe won’t get to surf each day.
In his crib, Jasper stands in a sleep sack, bouncing his knees, eager for an escape. He casts me one of his toothy grins.
“Mama.” He reaches for me, and the frustration dissipates.
We head downstairs for breakfast. Outside, a crowd has gathered on the walkway beyond our garden.
Normally, the canals are empty this time of morning.
More surprising, Gabe’s still here, the top half of his wet suit unzipped and hanging from his waist, his hair and smooth back dry.
He faces away from us, along with everyone else on the path, monitoring the canal.
Right away, I feel dread. Something’s happened.
I carry Jasper, still in his sleep sack, outside and stand behind Gabe. There are too many people gathered to see the canal’s basin.
“What’s going on?” I ask him.
“They found something in the canal.” He snaps out of his trance. “What time is it?”
I squint to read the clock in our kitchen. “Six forty-five.”
“Too late for a surf now.” Gabe locks his surfboard in the storage shed, kisses my forehead, then Jasper’s, then mine again, a back-and-forth that makes Jasper giggle.
After Gabe bounds into the house, I carry Jasper through our gate onto the walkway, where the surfers who live in the wannabe frat house next door huddle together beside the always-shorts guy with his Yorkies, the wispy-haired woman who paints the waterways most days, her easel propped under her arm, and others I don’t recognize.
Across the canal, our neighbors on the next island have collected too.
I don’t know any of them other than Claire, who holds Summer, and her husband, Dan, standing possessively at her side.
He always hovers over her. It bothers Gabe—part of why, as close as Claire and I are and despite Jasper and Summer sharing a part-time nanny, we aren’t family friends.
I shrug my shoulders at Claire, and she shrugs back, equally unsure what’s happened.
The police have laid yellow tape along the saltbushes.
Half a block up, two cop cars obstruct both sides of the bridge over Linnie Canal, forcing commuters to reverse and retreat. The sirens on the cruisers are off. The lights are blazing. The three men who clean the canals stand in the flashing lights, talking with a police officer.
“Mama, luz. Luz.” Jasper points at the police cars. Jasper’s nanny, Marisol, speaks to him in Spanish. He’s latched on to the words that are easier in the Romance language than they are in English. Luz. Agua. Más, más, más.
“The lights are pretty, aren’t they?” My tone is upbeat as I try to hide my worry.
There’s no broken glass, no signs of a robbery at any of the houses.
The cops wouldn’t show up if a dolphin got caught in the basin.
They wouldn’t block off the bridge if someone’s boat was stolen or their dock was vandalized.
There are police officers guiding traffic, police officers monitoring the crowds, police officers wading knee-deep in the drained but not fully empty canal.
A man in white disposable coveralls stands at the center of the basin.
He bends down to inspect something at his feet.
On the periphery of the crowd, our next-door neighbor Judy leans against her dilapidated gate.
Judy’s been here since the ’90s and hasn’t done a thing to her house other than let the paint peel, and has instead devoted her days to pacing the walkways from Carroll to Sherman.
Every island along the canals has one: a local busybody.
But Judy is in a league of her own. If anyone knows what’s going on, it’s Judy.
I wind my way through the crowd, headed in her direction.
A pregnant stomach and a toddler in my arms help with this.
One man lifts his surfboard above his head so I can scoot by.
Another angles his bike for me to step over, the child seat mounted to the front making it unwieldy.
It clangs against the ground, and he curses under his breath.
I hate when people bring bikes onto the narrow sidewalks of the canals.
“Dede,” Jasper shouts as we approach. Judy perks up when she spots him.
Her posture, like everything else about her, is too eager.
It hits me with a pang of guilt how mismatched our interactions are.
Gabe and Claire think she’s a troublemaker.
They blame any dock violation reports, every noise complaint, on her, even though they’re grateful when the beach bros’ parties are broken up.
Her nosiness reads more pathological to me, so I generally keep my distance—except now, evidently, as we make our way toward her.
Jasper’s legs kick against me as he tries to break free and run to Judy, the limitations of his sleep sack notwithstanding.
She pokes her tongue through a gap where she’s missing two side teeth and crosses her eyes, causing Jasper to roar with laughter.
He’s always gravitated to Judy. It should make me more charitable toward her, but I can never shake the suspicion that she knows too much.
About us. About everyone who lives along the canals.
When we reach Judy, she holds her hand out for a high five, which Jasper takes as an invitation to keep slapping.
“What’s going on?” I ask over the whacking of Jasper’s small hand against hers.
“A body,” she whispers.
“Of a person?”
Judy raises an eyebrow. When else do you call it a body?
One of the police officers passes a body bag to the medical examiner standing in Linnie Canal.
I pull Jasper away from Judy, disrupting their game, and thank Judy before rushing home.
Even if he won’t understand, today will not be the day my son sees a dead body.
I can’t protect him from everything, but I can shield him from this.
Inside, I shout for Gabe. The house is quiet. His keys aren’t in the bowl by the door. My phone buzzes from the kitchen peninsula.
Had to run! Early consult. I’ll pick up dinner tonight. .
It’s forty-five minutes before he normally leaves, but some of his patients are so famous, they won’t visit during regular office hours. I observe the crowd outside, trying to decide how I feel about the fact that he’s unfazed by the morning’s events, and realize he didn’t see the body bag.
When I call him, he picks up on the first ring.
“Hey, T. Sorry, one of those patients I can’t tell you about is having—”
“They found a body,” I interrupt. “In the canal.”
“That can’t be right,” Gabe says, so certainly that I momentarily believe him. But I saw the body bag. I saw the police, the medical examiner.
“Gabe, it was right outside our house.” I shiver. Right outside our house. Whatever happened, however they died, it occurred while we were asleep upstairs.
Gabe doesn’t say anything for a few moments. “I’ll be home in fifteen.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Of course I do. I’ll just—” He pauses. If it’s an egg retrieval or an implantation, it can’t be rescheduled.
“Seriously, we’re fine. I’m sure it’s some drunk guy who decided to take a nap in the canal.
” I do a physical scan, hunting for fear.
It probably was some guy who wandered down from the bars on Abbot Kinney Boulevard or the tents that line Pacific Avenue.
This doesn’t feel dangerous. It feels tragic.
Preventable. Another mother’s heartbreak.
“If you change your mind, call and I’m there.
Even if it seems silly, you and Jasp are priority number one.
” Lately, Gabe has been responding to me with pregnant-lady gloves on, where he’s trying to anticipate my needs rather than listen to what I’m saying.
Though it comes from a good place, I hate how, when you’re pregnant, people try to interpret rather than hear you.
“We’ll be fine.”
“I just pulled up to the clinic. I’ll call you at lunch? Maybe take Jasper to the skate park, get your mind off all this?”
The mere thought of walking to the skate park fatigues me. I settle for the playground instead. We head out the front door to the alley rather than through the French doors to the canals so I can keep Jasper from the crowd that lingers. The police lights are still blazing.
When we arrive at the playground, Claire and the other mothers are huddled by the swings.