If You're Lucky (6 page)

I rode shotgun in Sonia's mom's car as we made our way along the winding Coast Highway to a café in Bodega. Sonia called earlier and asked me to come along with her. The band playing at the café were Lucky's friends. I'd met them weeks ago at the party, though I hardly remembered. Sonia told me I'd like the music and that it was time we got out and did something. She was right. The open wound of Lucky's death had started to heal around the edges and I was glad to get out. I also wanted to know what she was doing in Fin's truck on Thursday. I wanted to know if he'd touched her like he'd touched me. And had he pulled away from her too or was she the reason I got taken home early? I looked over at Sonia as she navigated a curve in the road. Some of the color had come back into her face and she seemed almost excited to be going somewhere on a Saturday night. She'd even managed to throw together some clean clothes that showed off her figure; nothing special: a long-sleeved black sweater and jeans, but for weeks now she'd been wearing clothes that said
I don't care.
I smelled perfume on her too. That was new. I never knew her to wear perfume. Maybe it was her mom's. I desperately wanted to question her but I also wanted her to
want
to tell me what had happened. I mean, why wouldn't she?

“So, I called you Thursday but you didn't pick up. I saw you in Fin's truck, though.”

Sonia looked over at me. Her eyes narrowed a bit like she was trying to figure out what I already knew. “We drove down to Jenner.”

“Yeah? What did you do there?”

She looked back at the road. “Not much, had a glass of wine. Then we went for a walk on Goat Rock Beach.”

“Guy likes to walk on the beach a lot, doesn't he?”

She didn't say anything for a few seconds and then she turned to me.

“It's not like you're thinking. I needed to talk to him.”

“About what?”

“About Lucky.”

“You can talk to
me
about Lucky.”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “I know,” she said, and then she seemed to remember that I'd lost Lucky too. “I know I can. I'm sorry. You've been great.”

We drove along in silence for a minute.

When I thought about Fin with Sonia, I was envious. Were my trips to the beach with Fin about getting to Sonia? I'd made it very clear that I was interested in him, but not much had happened. Why had he been so tender with me? And what about the champagne trick? Wasn't that just for me? Plus, he'd shared so much about himself with me. I'd thought about little else but him since that night.

The day before, there had been an e-mail in my inbox from another friend of Lucky's, a guy named Jesse, back in Australia. I remembered Lucky mentioning him. In the e-mail, Jesse said that he and Lucky had been “the best of mates” even though Lucky hadn't been in “Oz” long. He said he couldn't afford to fly out for the party but that they had their own Aussie-style memorial on the beach for Lucky with a bonfire and lots of singing and playing Lucky's favorite songs. He wanted to tell me and my mom and dad how sorry he was and that Lucky was a hell of a nice guy. He said Lucky could “carve” like no other surfer out there and that was a tough thing for an Aussie to admit, being that Lucky was American. He also said that it still “boggles the mind” that Lucky, of all the surfers he knew, could die like that. There was no one who knew water better than Lucky, he said. I wrote back and thanked him. And though I'm not sure why, I asked him if he knew a friend of Lucky's named Fin. I already knew the answer to that question but I couldn't resist finding out more about him.

Sonia slowed the car down and steered it inland toward Bodega and now we were driving along redwood-lined roads. The light was quickly disappearing behind us. The fields on either side of the road turned to forest and the approaching twilight swallowed us up. Sonya slid her sunglasses onto the top of her head. It was a rare fogless evening. Normally by this hour, an inky-gray mist would be unfurling itself like a fist slowly opening, creeping further and further inland, but not tonight.

I looked up at the sky through the windshield and broke the silence. “There's going to be a billion stars out tonight.”

Sonia looked up too. “At least a billion.” She smiled at me. She wanted us to be okay. I did too.

The dirt parking lot was jammed with cars. This area is rife with musicians and music people and tiny clubs and cafés. I'd never been to this club before but Sonia told me that she came here lots of times with Lucky. It was one of their favorite spots.

We sat down at one of the last open tables, to the left of the stage. The people sitting at other tables were your usual mix of year-round, off-the-grid, coastal dwellers; pretty girls who looked high, wearing no makeup and out-of-date dresses from India, the kind you buy in stores that smell of incense. The men were ruddy cheeked with messy beards and the children had dirty faces and looked too young to be up this late. We ordered from a hippie girl in a ruffled peasant blouse and a long skirt. I was dying to get a real drink but I ordered iced tea. I didn't want to risk her asking for ID and embarrassing me. Sonia ordered a beer.

“It's nice here, isn't it?” she said, looking around. She waved at someone she knew across the room.

“Uh-huh.” I felt a rush of anxiety like I always do when I'm in a crowded room. I took some deep breaths, in through my nose, out through my mouth. Dr. Saul taught me this. I soon felt calmer and I smiled at Sonia, who was watching me with concern.

“Okay?”

“Yup.”

The musicians, two guitarists and a stand-up bass player, stepped onto the stage. The audience clapped and whooped the way they do when the person onstage is their neighbor or their brother-in-law or their plumber or Bruce Springsteen. The band started in on a warm-up, a brisk little gypsy jazz guitar tune. They were very good. One guitarist played lead and the other played rhythm, but then the rhythm player took a lead and showed off a bit. He nodded when the crowd clapped. At the end of the song, after the applause died down, the lead guitarist, a serious-looking guy with small glasses and feminine features, spoke into a microphone.

“Thanks very much. That was ‘Minor Swing' by Django Reinhardt. We're The Hot Club of the Lost Coast and we'll do our very best to entertain you with some tunes tonight. We've got a special treat for you now. A new friend of ours is going to join us up here for a set. Please help us welcome him. Come on up here, Fin.”

Sonia and I looked at each other. She seemed as surprised as I was. Fin approached the stage from the back of the café. I hadn't seen him back there. How was it possible that he'd already endeared himself to these people? He looked quite different from the Fin I'd met several days ago. He was wearing a porkpie hat, a black vest, and a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It was more of a costume than an outfit. He sat in a chair next to the rhythm player and picked up a small weathered guitar from a stand next to him. There was an expectant air in the room. He was the new kid and everyone, including me, wanted to see if he had the guitar chops to keep up with this crowd.

Fin said nothing to the audience, but he nodded his head to the other musicians and counted them in. When they started to play I immediately recognized the tune from one of my mother's many Django Reinhardt CDs, the ones she puts on when she wants to gaze out her studio window moodily and smoke. Fin's long fingers flew deftly up and down the fretboard. The other two guitarists were smiling as they tried to keep up. Fin kept time by tapping his pointy black boot on the wooden stage. He made it look so easy, like he was born to play. Sonia laughed and looked at me. She leaned closer. “Can you believe this?” she whispered in my ear.

“Did you know he was coming?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “No, I swear.”

I looked around the room. The energy had shifted and intensified. Everyone was leaning forward in their seats. All eyes were on Fin, even the little kids were mesmerized. I was pulled in with the rest them. Where had he learned to play like this? Then I remembered that he'd said his dad played guitar. But hadn't he also said that his dad died when Fin was still a kid?

Fin looked like an angel up there on the stage, a beautiful, mysterious, smooth skinned, dark-eyed angel. I watched Sonia's face. I could almost feel her falling for him. How could she not? Fin looked up and he nudged the other players into solos and took over the rhythm. His eyes traveled around the room and landed on me. I felt myself blushing. I looked down at my iced tea. Then he looked at Sonia. She didn't smile but there was something there, like they shared a secret.

The song ended and the crowd let loose with applause and cheering. Fin nodded and smiled like someone who's used to playing for crowds, someone who knows he's good.

On the way home, driving through the darkness, I thought about how those people reacted to Fin's playing. When the set was over, Fin moved through the room, ruffling a toddler's hair, shaking hands, thanking people. As we were on our way out, Fin took Sonia's arm. I waited by the door. They had their heads together, talking. Sonia shook her head but Fin kept talking and eventually she nodded. I knew that they must be planning to meet up later. I felt cast aside. He caught my eye as I was leaving and smiled but I gave him my stoniest expression. How did he
think
I would feel?

Sonia was preoccupied as she drove through the darkness.

“Did you tell Fin where you were going tonight?” I asked.

She looked at me. “I'm not sure. I guess I may have.”

“I wonder why he wouldn't tell you he was playing with those guys.”

“I dunno. Maybe he wanted to surprise us.”

“You. Maybe he wanted to surprise
you
.”

She looked over at me. “Okay.”

“You seem totally into him.”

“Do I?” She looked flustered. “It's just the music, I think. It got to me.”

“Did you know he could play like that?”

She paused. I'd started noticing that whenever she answered a question about Fin, she seemed to choose her words very carefully.

“I guess I knew he could play, not like that, though.”

I sat back in my seat and looked at my reflection in the window. Sure, lots of surfers play guitar. But players like I saw tonight are the kind of people who practice for hours a day and study under virtuosos. Players like that think of little else but their playing. And why didn't he play at Lucky's party, I wondered.

Sonia dropped me at my house. I felt very much like the little sister, sent home so the big kids could play. I had feelings for Fin that I probably shouldn't have, but so what? Maybe he was just a welcome distraction from the gloom that had descended on me since Lucky died. Maybe I was hungry for that kind of attention. It felt nice for a minute.

I poked my head into the living room. My mom was curled up on the sofa reading a book. She looked up at me and smiled. My dad dozed in front of the TV. Rocket lifted his head for a second and went immediately back to sleep on the braided rug. Even though everything looked perfectly normal, something about that scene made me feel unbearably sad. There was a hole in my family I could never fix by myself.

I went to my room and checked my e-mail before I pulled off my clothes. There was a message from Jesse. I clicked it open even though I felt a bit guilty, poking around like this. But I couldn't get the image of Fin up there onstage out of my head.

Georgia,

Of course I remember Fin. He was part of our merry throng. Hell of a nice bloke. You could ask Sonia about him if you're in touch with her. I think she and Lucky and Fin might have taken a road trip down to Sydney to do some surfing there together. I reckon she could tell you all about it if you asked her.

Cheers, Jesse

I stared at my computer screen. So . . . Sonia, Lucky, and Fin had gone on a road trip together? Why hadn't Sonia mentioned it to me? And hadn't Sonia told me that they barely knew each other?

I opened up my laptop and started sifting through all of Lucky's e-mails again, dragging all the letters that contained an attachment into a folder. The only attachments he ever sent were photos. Once I'd divided them up I started clicking on them, one at a time. Fin's face started popping up a couple of months after Lucky had arrived in Australia. In the photos he didn't look much like the Fin from tonight at all. He fit right in with the rest of the surfers. There were lots of photos of him standing on a beach with a bunch of Lucky's surfer friends. I stopped on one of those and zoomed in. Fin looked disheveled. His chin was sprinkled with beard stubble and his hair was pulled into a hasty ponytail. I zoomed back out. It must have been the end of the day. Everyone had their wetsuits peeled down to their waists and they looked sunburned and spent and each of them held a can of beer. This was the sort of thing I envied most about Lucky, this talent for making friends. Fin stood on the far left of the group while Lucky was on the far right. Everyone was grinning at the camera except Fin. Fin was grinning at Lucky.

The next morning, walking down the hill to the highway, I was thinking about Fin and Sonia. I was still wondering why Sonia had lied to me about how well they knew each other. Something strange was going on.

A damp mist in the air was falling invisibly onto my hair. I shivered and pulled the hood of my gray sweatshirt up over my head and started up the highway toward Katy's.

Common sense told me I shouldn't ask Sonia about any of this yet. I knew there was a good chance I'd end up feeling hurt again, but when I got to Katy's I impulsively called her.

“Did you sleep with him?” I surprised myself by blurting out a question that I knew was none of my business. I hated the way I sounded like a jealous girlfriend.

“No,” said Sonia. “And, by the way, it's not really any of your business.”

It was childish of me to even ask but I needed to know. I pictured her rolling her eyes and wanting to get off the phone.

“Is he there?” Another dumb question. I'd just walked past her house.

“No. Of course not.” She sighed. I was humiliating myself.

I tried to rationalize everything that was happening: Lucky was Sonia's first boyfriend. Lucky is dead. Fin knew Lucky. Sonia knows Fin. If I thought about it like that, it made perfect sense. And could I really blame Sonia? I saw Fin last night too, up on the stage. I'd have done the same thing if he'd asked me instead of her. I'd have gone home with him.

But then there was the matter of Fin just showing up in False Bay . . . and staying. Was I the only one who thought that was a little weird?

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Look, it wasn't like you're thinking. That music was so . . . I don't know, but it got me talking about Lucky. So, that's what we did. We talked about Lucky. I've just felt so numb till now. But last night I cried. It felt good to cry. Fin cried too.”

I dropped the phone by my side for a few seconds and squeezed my eyes shut, imagining that. I hadn't cried yet. Was I numb like Sonia? Or was it the meds? Several times I'd punched the wall with my fist until my fingers felt broken and I was exhausted. Then I passed out, and then I had the nightmares.

I heard Sonia's voice and brought the phone back to my ear. “I'm here.”

I watched out the window as Sharona's beat-up Toyota wagon pulled off the highway into Katy's tiny parking lot. I glanced at my watch. She was forty-seven minutes late. Not that it mattered. It was gloomy outside, not the kind of morning where kites and taffy spring to mind. I'd had three customers. Even though we were officially on the summer schedule, one person could handle Sundays like these. I touched my hand against the side of Sharona's latte. It was lukewarm.

“I'll call you later,” I told Sonia.

“Sure. But don't be mad. It's crazy to be mad.”

“I'm not mad,” I said. And I wasn't. I guess I was just jealous.

I clicked the phone off. Sharona's car door swung open, and she threw a cigarette butt onto the ground and stepped on it. She exhaled a plume of smoke into the wind and yanked her handbag out of the car, throwing it over her shoulder. The bell on the door jangled.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.” She breezed in, dropping her handbag next to the cash register. “I would have called but my freakin' cell phone died right after I got a flat on the Coast Highway. This mine?” She grabbed her latte and gulped it. “Mmmmm.”

“You want me to put it in the microwave?”

“Nah. So, I'm on the side of the highway, pulling the spare out of my trunk, though God knows what I intended to do after that, and that guy, what's his name again? Fish?”

“You mean Fin?”

“Yeah, that guy is
so
nice. Is he seeing anyone?”

I shrugged.

“Anyway, he pulled over and just like that, he changed my tire for me. It was like he was my guardian angel. I get a flat and boom! He's right there. I coulda kissed him. I think I did, actually.”

Was there anyone around here who hadn't been dazzled by Fin yet?

Sharona stepped into the tiny bathroom and left the door open. “Look at me. I'm a mess.” She rearranged her hair and applied lipstick. “Did Katy call yet?”

“She did. I covered for you. I told her you ran out to get change.”

“You're awesome.”

“Hey, was there anyone with Fin when you saw him?”

“No, just his dog. A sweet black-and-white mutt. He looked a lot like your dog, actually.” She blotted her red lipstick on a tissue and tossed it into the trash.

Wait, Fin doesn't have a dog. That
was
my dog, I mean Lucky's dog. What was Fin doing with Rocket in his truck?

Sharona started chattering away like she always does. She liked to catch me up on the highlights of her Saturday night, which was always eventful. The cast of characters in Sharona's life was colorful and her circle of “friends” seemed to extend far out in every direction. I only half listened to her. I was still preoccupied with Fin and how every time I turned around, he had dug himself just a little bit deeper into my brother's old life.

Was I being paranoid? I winced as I thought about something that happened a couple of years ago. I had noticed that a drifter I'd seen around town looked just like a guy wanted for murder in North Dakota whose picture I saw on a poster hanging in the post office. Apparently, I'm the only person in town who actually reads those. I tried to convince everyone I spoke to that we had to turn him in. By then the drifter had been hired by Ralph at the gas station. The guy turned out not to be
that
guy, and I had to avoid the gas station till he left town a year later.

I dug a bottle of aspirin out of my backpack, popped the top off, and shook one out.

“You got a headache again?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed it with the last bit of my lukewarm coffee. The headaches always started at the base of my neck and crawled up my scalp to the backs of my eyes. That's when I couldn't stand it anymore and I had to take an aspirin or two.

“Hey, Sharona, would you mind closing alone today? I've got a lot of baking to do at the Inn now that they're selling the cookies in the ‘gift shop.' ” I used finger quotes.

“Sure, no problem. I owe you big time.”

“Thanks.” I massaged the back of my neck, lost in thought.