Along Came Zoe

Jenny Dixon is dead.

He sat up with a start, shook his head. The phone was ringing.

“Phillip?” His ex-wife, Deanna. “Were you sleeping?”

“No…yes.” He dug his knuckles into his eyes. “I’m fine. What’s up?”

“I was calling to talk about Molly. You said you’d have her this weekend, remember?” A pause. “Phillip. Are you okay? I ran into your brother at the market and he said you’ve been looking like hell lately—”

“I’m fine.” He tried to recall exactly when he’d agreed that Molly, their sixteen-year-old daughter, would spend the weekend; not that he didn’t want her, but things seemed to be getting away from him lately. Nothing big, nothing outside of the O.R., thank God, just conversations, appointments, things like that. He leaned his head against the couch back and closed his eyes. “So what’s the deal? I pick up Molly, or will you bring—”

“Phillip, we’ve already talked about this…I’m concerned about you. Joe is, too. It’s that damn…that Dixon case, isn’t it? Phillip, you’re human, for God’s sake. You go on burning the candle at both ends long enough and something’s going to give. Anyway, why should you blame yourself? I don’t see Stu going aroung wringing his hands—everyone deserves some time off once in a while, when was the last time—”

“So do you want me to pick up Molly?”

“Okay, you’re not going to listen to me, I might as well save my breath. I just want you to think about something. Molly needed you. Needs you. This girl’s death wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault a bus overturned. It wasn’t your fault the paramedics had to drive her around…”

With Deanna’s voice in his ear, Phillip got up from the couch and wandered over to the opened French doors. Straight ahead, the Pacific stretched endlessly. On either side he could see, in his peripheral vision, the balconies of his neighbors. Smoke from someone’s grill wafted briefly into the room.

“…I don’t mean to sound callous or anything,” Deanna was saying, “but instead of dwelling on the what-ifs, why don’t you just think about what it means to Molly that you’re available once in a while. Like her birthday, for example…”

Phillip came back inside, slid the doors shut and returned to the couch. The headline in that morning’s Tribune had asked, Did Jenny Have To Die? Maybe not, he was forced to admit. If he and Stu, his partner, hadn’t decided just weeks before Jenny Dixon’s accident to suspend emergency neurosurgical services to Seacliff’s trauma center…if a tourist bus hadn’t tumbled down a mountainous ravine just east of the city, swamping other local centers with injured passengers…if Jenny had been immediately airlifted instead of being driven around in an ambulance… If, if, if. An endless wheel of ifs circling unmercifully through his brain.

AS SOON AS SHE HEARD the morning weather report announcing a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, Zoe McCann knew that the winds traveling up from Baja wouldn’t be the day’s only storm. The announcer’s voice on the clock radio—specifically his mention of the words historic surf—had woken her from sleep.

Adrenaline coursing through her body, Zoe pulled on jeans and grabbed a flannel shirt from the pile of clean laundry that she’d intended to put away the night before and ran, barefoot, downstairs to the kitchen to grab her keys.

“That bastard,” she muttered to herself as she climbed into her truck. “I swear to God, I’ll kill him.”

Ten minutes later—it would have been five but for the morning commuter traffic—she drove her pickup south on Pacific Coast Highway, the car radio blaring something unintelligible. Jeez. She punched buttons, searching for something other than the punk rock that always screamed from the speakers after her son Brett had used the truck.

“…and the continued fallout from the tragic death of a local teenager has prompted a Seacliff city councilman to propose financial incentives ranging from five hundred to one thousand dollars or more a day to lure neurosurgeons back into providing on-call services.”

Financial rewards to lure neurosurgeons.

Disgusted, Zoe snapped off the radio. Money always took care of everything. A thousand dollars in Dr. Phillip Barry’s hot little hand and Jenny Dixon might be alive today.

She glanced out through the passenger window to the ocean where great feathery sprays of foam were shooting into the air. She’d lived her whole life in California, but she never took the ocean for granted. Whether it was that weird churning green it sometimes turned in winter, or the pale blue silk of early summer, the water inspired her. However cranky she might feel, twenty minutes or so watching the waves generally did the trick. Except, of course, if she happened to notice that another small beach cottage along the cliffs had been razed to make room for some hideous megamansion that blocked views for everyone except the self-absorbed morons who lived in them.

Like Dr. Phillip Barry.

The car ahead had Nebraska plates and the driver had slowed to a crawl while everyone in the vehicle rubbernecked at the view. Zoe moved them along with two quick bleeps on the horn. Fingers tapping the steering wheel, she drove past Diamond Beach—where distant black figures out in the breaking waves might, to the uninitiated, be frolicking dolphins—finally slowing down as she reached the bluffs.

The line of parked pickup trucks and battered cars with oxidized paint jobs started halfway up the hill and ended just opposite the power plant on the other side of the street.

Zoe parked at the bottom of the hill, turned off the ignition and drew a deep breath. “Please,” she prayed, imagining Denny’s goofy grin, “just this once let him surprise me by not being a selfish, irresponsible idiot whose mental development was arrested sometime around the age of seventeen.”

She grabbed the key from the ignition, slid out of the truck and walked briskly along the line of vehicles. Breeze from the ocean tossed her hair around, blowing hunks of it across her face. She glanced at her reflection in the passenger window of a parked car and wished she hadn’t. On its rare good days, her hair had this long, curly, just-fallen-out-of-bed look about it; the rest of the time it was a dense, kinky uncombable mess that she usually controlled with combs and scrunchies or whatever else was on hand. Today, it looked vaguely like a collie’s coat.

Her ex-husband’s battered red pickup truck, surfboard sticking up like a dorsal fin from the truck bed, was right where she knew it would be. And so was her ex-husband. Burly—and that was charitable—wearing black-and-gray-flowered Bermudas and a white tank top, his feet encased in flip-flops. A pair of binoculars in hand, he gazed out at the water.

She took another breath. Everything about Denny McCann, from the black tufts of hair on his big toes to his stupid goatee, annoyed Zoe, but what was sending her out of the stratosphere right now was the confirmation of her suspicion. Standing there beside his father—both of them towering above her—was her sixteen-year-old son, Brett, a towel wrapped modestly around his waist as he shimmied into his black rubber wet suit. Neither of them saw her coming.

She noticed Denny had shaved his head, a pathetic attempt to cover a bald spot, but, to give him credit, better than a toupee or a comb-over. He had set his binoculars on the cab of the truck and was tugging at the zipper of Brett’s suit. Brett, adolescent skinny, had his back to her.

She tapped her son on the shoulder.

“School?” she inquired, and he whirled around, eyes wide.

“Mom, just let me explain, okay?”

“Get in the car,” she said. “Now.”

“I’ll handle this, son.” Denny eyed Zoe cautiously, as one might a rabid dog. “You gotta understand—”

“No, I don’t gotta understand anything.” She jerked her head in the direction of the parked cars. “In the car, Brett. Now.”

“But Mom, the surf is, like, historic. Tell her, Dad.” He looked at his father. “There haven’t been waves this big since—”

“In the car.” Zoe stared him down until he headed, slump shouldered and sighing noisily, toward her car. The sight of her son’s skinny brown back, knobby spine poking between the unzipped sides of the wet suit, swelled her heart. Brett lived to surf, a passion shared by his father. Slight difference though between a sixteen-year-old kid living for monster waves and a forty-year-old delayed adolescent whose failure to hold a steady job could be largely attributed to his practice of calling in sick whenever surfing conditions warranted it.

“This is the last time he stays with you on a school night,” she told his father. “Got it?”

Denny had his arms folded across his chest and a look on his face that said he’d be damned if he’d let his nutcase of an ex-wife dictate the way things were going to go. Still, his eyes lingered long enough on the front of her shirt that she thought maybe a breast had broken free. She was going through a Mother Earth phase, all hips and boobs—a side effect of some recent experimentation with bread baking and, of course, tasting. A quick glance confirmed nothing more revealing than a bunch of cleavage and some strained buttons, but it was vintage Denny to argue with her and ogle at the same time.

“Don’t go giving me a bunch of crap, Zoe,” he was saying. “I was going to take him to school. He said there was nothing much going on this morning, so I figured it was no big deal if he missed an hour or two.”

“Well, you figured wrong.” Zoe stabbed her index finger at his chest. “If you ever pull this again…if you ever keep him out of school—I don’t care if it’s for five minutes—without clearing it with me first I will personally shove that goddamned surfboard down your throat—and don’t think I couldn’t do it.”

“You need to get a life—”

“And you need to send me last month’s child-support check,” she shot back. “When can I expect it?”

“If you took him out of that goddamned snob school, you wouldn’t always be short of money.”

Zoe cupped a hand to her ear. “I can expect it when?”

“What the hell’s wrong with public schools?”

“I’m sorry.” Zoe smacked the side of her head. “My hearing must be going. You said you’re going to write me a check right now?”

“Damn it, Zoe.” He opened the passenger door and ducked his head inside. “You’re not the only one with expenses.”

“Need a pen?”

“Go to hell.” He fished a checkbook from the glove compartment and made a big performance out of writing the amount. “And while we’re talking about this, don’t think I’m footing the bill for some Ivy League university. No reason he can’t go to community college like I did.” He signed his name with a flourish, and held out the check. “Brett tell you about his girlfriend?”

Zoe took the check. “He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”