By Bruce McKay

Featured Art: “Flower of Love” by John Coey, Cardon Smith, Eric Cranston, and Tanner Ingle (Passion Works Studio)

I went downtown with Fatima sometimes that summer for her big-sistering—San Diego, windows down, the noise from her Mazda just ridiculous. The wind whipping. Fatima in her white sunglasses, laughing, dabbing tears with the back of her hand. Tucking her hair behind her ear. Slapping me on the leg. At Sixth Avenue she’d exit the freeway and park in the yellow zone on Ash Street where electric scooters would be leaning against the meters. My first trip, I thought we were lost—all that concrete, the wide streets. But through a chain-link fence I saw GATEWAY stenciled in fat purple letters on a renovated warehouse. Inside was one of those carpeted gyms with the basketball lines dyed into the fabric. A playdough-and- crafts room. Jump ropes hanging on the wall. Kids screaming and charging around. A tang in the air like old mayonnaise, and the temperature way too hot.

Fatima would sign in at the front desk and chat with the high school kid on duty. He’d squirm in his violet shirt with the Arch logo, self-conscious—not because Fatima was stunning but because she was for you and you felt it, even from the periphery, felt the love. And then Cici would astonish everybody by sneaking into the lobby and throwing her arms around us from behind. We’d be like she’d done magic. “Where’d you come from, girl?!” And she would hug Fatima so hard it was frightening. She was a hundred percent energy, twelve years old, short dark hair, Filipina. Sometimes the mom would be there—slipping away out the side door with an exhausted face. Sometimes not.

Swimming was the passion—what Cici lived for. She’d use her phone and show you pictures of her beaucoup medals, trophies, plaques. It kind of hit your heart how many awards she had because the truth was she was no champion in the water. There was a lot of splashing. She tilted to one side. She humped her back. Her stroke was short, she didn’t get her arms extended all the way. The fussing with her goggles and ear plugs was over the top, and if you prodded her—“Everything doesn’t have to be perfect, Cici”—she’d go into a drowning act. But the euphoria once she got motoring, there was nothing like it. After a flurry of laps she’d fold her arms on the edge, breathing hard, her face wet and shiny. Me and Fatima would whoop at her. “You’re a fish, woman!” And she’d be all smug, like, Tell me something I don’t know.

While she rested between laps she did little comedy routines. There was the joke about the short man who was bald because people stubbed out cigarettes on his head. Another one about getting rid of a tapeworm: “You need three hard-boiled eggs, two cookies, and a hammer. Are you listening, Jeffrey?” She’d tell the whole thing. Then she’d try to wrestle me in the water, but I wasn’t supposed to touch her, I hadn’t signed all the papers, so I’d call Fatima for help and Cici would jump on her while I got out and straightened the wet towels.

It was awkward, because she was twelve going on thirteen and here were all the changes. Like where was it going to stop? It was supermodel stuff. She’d grown three inches. Her shins were furry. There was a glow in the skin of her face, in the bones a trapped radiance trying to shoot out. The smile, the laughing eyes. Scary. She was a lioness, even though mentally about seven.

“Intellectual disability” was the permissible phrase at Gateway. Any other verbiage was appalling. Learn the rules, be a human being. If you said she had intellectual disability—those words—like if you were talking to Overbaugh in his director’s uniform and said, “How’s it going with Cici and her intellectual disability?” you were money. Anything left or right of that and you sucked. Get out. Go back to the yellow zone and sit in the car.

Also it wasn’t a big sister program. “Don’t call it that,” they didn’t own that. It had some other official name which I forget. But Fatima and Cici played Frisbee in the park; they swam at Delphinium; they walked the pier and spooned up ice cream; they played race horses with shells in the sand, watched the sun set. So you tell me what it was. Fatima got high off it, but it was over now. Her name was off the list and she was wrecked—the saddest I’d ever seen her.

We sat in the Mazda in a Trader’s parking lot.

“Overbaugh is the cheese? He calls the shots? Or is it that Lois Bookbinder?” “It’s my fault, don’t blame them.” She cut the engine and stared through the windshield. The hood of her sweatshirt framed her face. “I get so down about myself sometimes.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes.

This was the problem. To me she was St. Julian of Norwich. Wisdom and sanity. A river running through my life. She hated that, though. If I said her soul went back thousands of years, she joked instead about her twenty ounces of celery juice every morning, crushed from the stalks, it was her heroin, she said, it answered all her questions. But in reality she was a partaker of the divine nature. She just was. I don’t know how you get what she had.

“Are you hungry?”

“No, I’m so good right now,” she said. “Only search the vegetable aisle for me.” The celery bins were empty in the Ralph’s and Albertson’s, everybody in California on the same kick.

Ten minutes later I came back with a bag full of almonds and Greek yogurt and three bundles of celery, organic with the red metallic twisties.

“You fucking hero.” Her head was against the window, her ears full of music.

“Let Love In?”

She smiled, peeking through closed eyes. “Obsessed.”

Before I knew Fatima Ruiz, just seeing her around, I wasn’t sure. She had a NorCal stoner vibe, hella-chill, maney. She was scrawny with a pale complexion, short blond hair, a nose ring. She wore combat boots once a week. She wore denim overalls with one strap undone. A damselfly tattoo on the back of her neck. Clumsy hand-eye coordination, couldn’t catch a thing—literally could not. Toss her the car keys and they went down the storm drain. A high five—try to dap it up and her fingers took out your eye. You worry that maybe things like that are affected, no real person there.

Then I saw her with a kid (who turned out to be Cici) up at Kate Sessions, that sweet park—a grassy bowl, kind of a mini Mission Dolores. Super local, mellow. I was sitting in my spot, in my weightless aluminum lawn chair. They ran around on the grass and I saw how the big-sister thing was holy, a sacred activity.

Cici, she had a way of flinging the Frisbee so it would go sailing, and Fatima, her boots kicked off, running barefoot, would weave underneath. She would jump and clap the air, trying to smash the saucer in her hands. Meanwhile, Cici would twirl in the sun, doing some kind of tic that stretched her neck—chin on her shoulder, then lifting her face to the sky. Shoulder, sky, shoulder, sky. Then Fatima would throw the Frisbee and it would turn perpendicular. It would plunge to the ground as if gripped by a magnet and wobble through the grass in a giant semicircle. Cici would see it rolling past. She’d go stomp it. Stomp it again to make sure. Pick it up. Fling it. It hurt a person, to watch them play. It was beautiful from one point of view, but it made you ache.

The Frisbee thudded near my ankles and clipped the chair, so I grabbed it. In my hand it was warm, a maroon veteran, 141 grams, faded, almost see-through, scuffed on the edges like a chew toy. The sunlight coming off it was to drink, like raspberry water. I flipped it to Fatima, then wandered over to make conversation. I tried to low-key it. I tried not to plow through the guardrail and fly off the cliff like I usually do.

We met later at the pier, then went up Dawes Street to the Fat Bat and already in that little span I was thinking okay I’m just going to level up with this girl. Inside it was crowded, noisy, we had to lean in close, and her smell was just right, which is so critical, and I mean it was absolutely right. And then she just drew everything out of me, everything I bottle up, all the shit I never say to anybody, like about Boomsma Senior, she got me talking, the walls fell down like Jericho. We stayed there for three hours and after that night she started writing me letters. She lived half a mile away—on Felspar, by the walk-in clinic—so we only lived four blocks apart, but she wrote me letters that came in the U.S. Mail. Little notes of Zen positivity. On the envelopes she drew designs: blue bodhisattvas, green clouds, stars. And she put the stamp wherever the hell she wanted, in a bottom corner of the envelope, or on the back, or buried in the address like a Cyclops eye. Jeff Boomsma, 488 Garnet, Apt. 3 STAMP San Diego, CA 91113. Insane. I didn’t know you could do that.

I had an upstairs apartment. Beneath the window the street was loud. Drunken conversations echoed up from the twenty-four-hour-laundromat. Breaking bottles at all times of the night. Motorcycles at 3am. I liked it, though—I needed it. I kept the light on above my bed. That summer I was in crisis mode with sleep paralysis. That thing where the demon sits on your chest and puts his tongue down your throat. It was bad, it had me terrorized. I assume you know all about it. The demon is on you, knowing you, piercing your mind, violating you. You try to call for help, but you can’t wake up. Can’t move a muscle. He owns you, possesses you. It’s more real than life itself. How can that be? But it’s true.

I had it the first time and it knocked me sideways. I had it the second time about three weeks later and it was much, much worse. He dragged me out of the apartment down the back steps to the alley door. I couldn’t see O’Reilly Auto Parts, I couldn’t see the Funky Monkey. But out on the street was a vehicle. The father devil waiting for me. I knew the third time would be forever.

At bedtime I’d shake the sage around, in the closet, around the window sill. I used a high grade of herb from the health shop on Ocean, I paid good money for it and it was pure. The green-haired lady, Demeter, she swore the sage was a wall, guaranteed to work, and as I shook it I closed my eyes and squeezed my faith. You have to press down your faith, compact it like a coiled spring, pep talk it, baby it, love it, prime it, pump it, get it ready, and then like letting doves free you release it into the atmosphere. So I’d do my faith, then shake the sage packets, then I’d shake Fatima’s envelopes. Then I’d stuff packets and envelopes both inside my pillowcase and try to sleep.

We kept it at “friends” on the dial, me and Fatima, nothing physical. I’d made one little play, but she wasn’t having it. “Too much in my head right now, baby,” she told me, her hands smoothing my hair. Overbaugh, the cat at Gateway, with his pompous walk, he told me she was misandrist, meaning she hated men, which was so preposterous. Ridiculous word. Give it up, he said. “She’s gone over the western cataract.” Arched eyebrows. Like I was expected to ask what he meant. Right. Keep waiting for that, nimweed.

There was a lot of trouble in Fatima’s background, that’s all. A lot of hurt. Things she wanted to forget.

So it was a temporary no. Too soon, early days. But she was everywhere with me, she was all I thought about.

At the end of the summer in August is when we ruined it with Gateway. August 29th. Just a phone conversation. Fatima saying, “What do you think about junior lifeguards? For Cici.”

I didn’t take her seriously at first. I was walking down Garnet, going for coffee before my shift at Fleming’s. “How do they work it? What’s the policy?”

“You sign up online.”

I laughed. “But what’s the policy? For kids like her?”

“I don’t know. Fuck the policy.”

That wasn’t good. I slowed down to hear better.

“Are you there?”

“What about the mom?”

“She’s okay with it.”

“She said that?”

“She didn’t say it. She’s whatever. Doing her helpless thing, waving her hands.”

“Overbaugh?”

“Sure.”

“He thinks it’s a good idea?”

“He will after it’s over.”

It was ninety degrees outside. Sun low in the sky. Thick traffic. In the middle of the street standing on the median was a Pacific Beach homeless person. He wore a khaki beanie. No shirt. Tanned face and shoulders, years of sun, a neck like leather. In front of his belly he held a dirty styrofoam ice chest with a dollar sign marked on it in red. The red marker had faded to pink, so he’d gone over it with black. He peered into the cars and when he caught a driver’s eye he shook the ice chest with both hands, like, Cough it up you selfish bastard. I still see him a lot and it’s raw, the association. It’s how you get driven away from a place, right? Eventually. Because everywhere you go there’s a painful reminder of your own shit, until finally you can’t even walk one block. So you have to up-and-out, do your exodus.

“It starts tomorrow,” said Fatima. “9am. Last session of the year.”

“What does Cici think?”

“Oh my God, she’s going nuts. We’re at the pier right now. Waiting for the sunset.”

It’s not training to get a job, junior lifeguards. It’s a throng of kids going out in their red suits learning how to deal with the ocean. Conquering their fear. They run distances on the sand. They swim out past the break. It’s no joke, it gets gnarly. In the summertime you see a hundred kids in the early morning swimming out beyond the pier into deep water and they’re busting it, they’re young barracudas.

I turned around and went west on Garnet toward the beach. Fatima and Cici were sitting on the benches at the end of Emerald Street, Cici licking her fingers after an ice cream cone. Running her tongue around her lips. Making faces at me. By then the whole sky was lit on fire, orange and crimson and purple. The waves sounding. Wet towels strewn on the beach from the tide. Neon green toy buckets tumbling in the surf. Folding chairs knocked over, coated in wet sand. Kids crouched in twos and threes, still making driftwood forts in the twilight. It was one of those dusks where it hangs on forever and nobody wants to leave.

Cici was like a foal, new to the world, her nose and mouth moving, smelling the air, tasting it. She was breathing like crazy—the fire pits and the salt air and the barbecue and the fishy Pacific. And in her temples those two matching depressions. Two shadows.

It was horrible the next day. I’ll tell you that right now. A fiasco. Then the other shoe dropped, at Gateway, when we learned Fatima had been shit-canned. Nobody died, nobody got raped. But they could have died. They could have been raped. So you are repellent. You have no business being a big sister in our big-sister-type-of-program.

So the summer ended, and it was September, with the Santa Ana winds whipping up fires in the hills.

Boomsma Senior, I mentioned him. He was known around Pacific Beach. Infamous really. More than once, after a “Boomsma!” from Kai or Tina behind the polished steel counter at Better Buzz, I’d heard low voices start up, people at tables wondering why my name sounded familiar, tapping their phones for information.

After a few seconds they’d hit on Rev. Boomsma. “Oh, that guy. The pedo.” The perv pastor. While I stood frozen, pretending to study the menu board.

I wrote it in here—a description of what he did—then I took it out, because it’s too awful, the detail makes me sick. But he spent six years in prison. Six years, then he was free again. On the street, preaching. Reverend Jack Boomsma.

I’d see him sometimes, very conservative in his faded jeans and short-sleeve button-downs. The seediness was around the edges. The scruffy Converse, the roving eyes. A trucker cap that said “LOVE.” Mondays were bad because probation obligations brought him into my neighborhood, some box he had to check. Fridays, too. On Fridays he preached at the beach, on the boardwalk. The tourists, who didn’t know up from down, they’d take pictures of him, maybe stuff a dollar into his California bear flag coffee can. But the locals could be rough. He was smart enough to disappear after sunset. In the daytime, though, he’d still get jeered. Cussed out. And then some dude with a few Modelos in his bloodstream would hit him as hard as he could with an open hand across the face. I saw it one time—heard it. I was drinking a Modelo myself at the fish taco place by the pier. No warning. No “Heads up, Pops.” Just a thunder-smack from nowhere. It was always the same measure meted out, a collective sense of justice—the sex offender gets clouted. One vicious slap. Up the side of the head.

Anyway, this day, leaving Trader’s after getting our celery, Fatima was taking me to the Clerk of the Court to finish the business of my name change. I was doing it legally. No turning back. Boomsma was the mark on my forehead and I had to erase it. I’d printed out the forms, NC-100 and NC-120. Petition for Change of Name and Order to Show Cause for Change of Name. It was very doable, which kind of surprised me. The state of California didn’t make it all that hard. At first I’d been thinking Bimsell. Bamsell. Maybe Bloom or Bland. I didn’t care honestly. And then I thought, Well, if you don’t care, just make it Johnson. Jeffrey Johnson. I’d been standing on the beach watching two fluffy dogs chase each other in circles, out of their minds with joy, and Johnson came to me. And I was happy for the first time in a long while.

In the Mazda, Fatima drove with two fingers on the wheel, body leaned over to the right. Her elbow mashing the center console. It was kind of gangster girl, definitely sexy. I watched her, never mentioned it, just stared while she did her cruising.

She had a burn on the back of her upper right arm. A scar like a brush stroke, colored like pink grapefruit. Another burn on her throat. That one was round and more like salami, mottled. She didn’t know how they happened. No idea. No memory. Not in foster care, she said. Before foster care, it was why she’d been in foster care. And then she’d been adopted by the family in San Mateo. And then the father, et cetera. All that.

But she was strong. She didn’t pass it on. She said beautiful a lot. I haven’t had a chance to report it in her conversation, but she said it a lot, and it was actual. She was actually loving, actually caring. She said “heartbeat.” She said, “How’s the heartbeat of the group right now?” The group was DBT mostly, the co-ed Buddhist fraternity at her college, where the slogan was “for the benefit of others.” DBT was also real, as an extension of her. Even smoking pot was discouraged in DBT. “Not discouraged,” Fatima would say. But it was definitely discouraged. “We don’t forbid it,” she’d say. Everybody just stopped needing it. That was the idea, because you had Buddhism as a daily practice. You had the six paramitas, the four noble truths, the five precepts. You had it all.

Can you change the past? I wrestled that question up and down. Whether Fatima could somehow change all her shit. Whether I could change it with my dad, get his taint off me. That September I felt like I was on the cusp of some secret knowledge. I mean I had my eyes open, hanging out with Fatima. Because you have to ask. You have to importune. The door will be opened. But you have to knock, pound at the gate. I was determined about that. Even if nothing changed for me I wanted people to say over my dead body, But he pounded the fuck out of the gate.

The court offices in Point Loma smelled like wet closet. Damp cardboard boxes and air freshener. The roof apparently leaked in the winter because running down the walls were dried streaks like pancake syrup.

There was no line. Nobody anywhere. “Excuse me,” said Fatima. She slapped the counter. Her thumb ring banged the glass.

There was a stir from the behind the filing cabinets, someone coming.

Fatima stood on her toes, searching, impatient. She really had an engine inside her. “Priscilla? Thomas? Who’s here?” She knew everybody everywhere.

“Wait a second, Fatima. God.”

And before you knew it we had it all fixed up. Forms signed, stamped, filed. I just had to wait for it to be official. Ninety days.

Back in the car I was peeking into the back seat at some swim caps from the Goodwill that’d been meant for Cici’s collection. One was brilliant green and yellow and said BRASIL. The other was a cartoon character like a human squirrel with enormous teeth. Fatima was waiting to cross over Hyacinth, traffic heavy. My boba was in the cup holder. I made fiddling sounds with the straw in the plastic lid. If Fatima had to wait ten more seconds she’d just gun it and I was a little nervous.

So many people said to me, “You’re too sensitive.” But she never said that. They’d tell me, “You have to create some ironic distance for yourself.” And I would think, What the hell are you talking about? Life is real, it’s urgent. I never had to explain that to Fatima.

But I was looking at those caps when she flicked me on the leg.

“You’re beautiful, Boomsma. You know that, right?”

And I felt warm, like a sun bath. Just drenched with warmth, all the way through.

So there’s a park up in the hills above Pacific Beach—kind of a secret, I hesitate to mention it, but I don’t want to clutch it too tight either, so it’s Kate Sessions. Nobody knows a thing about Kate or what she did. But her park is perfect and she gets lots of gratitude. Prayers come into your mind and you launch them upward. Like the line from the psalm, “Ponder the record of the Lord’s enduring love.”

You drive along Beryl Street then climb Lamont. You get high on the ridge and you rim out. You see the view and you forget to steer the car. The curb is black with tire marks. A sign with yellow letters hides in the eucalyptus trees: “Kate Sessions Public Park.” You cut in, because it’s a sharp turn, and facing you is a tiny parking lot, one or two empty spaces always waiting. You get out of the car, gaze around, gaze down, and the world seems kindly because you’re at the top of this grassy bowl. A meadow. A big basin like you could ski down, except it’s all San Diego green and sunny. A few olive trees stand solitary in their circles of earth. Some magnolias also, with giant flowers that drop to the ground and turn brown and get crusty and archaeological.

People slack-lining, people with their hackey sacks. A lot of yoga. Couples who bring their dog and sit on a blanket to have a talk. It’s a haven.

There we were this September afternoon. Fatima on her soft quilt with the stripes of green-and-cream. Me in my aluminum lawn chair. The smell of smoke in the air from the wildfires. The white sky sinking into dusk and turning lurid orange like a dirty basketball above the flaming hills. The world seemed to be ending that very day, and it was written with the iron stylus on the tablets of stone that I would kiss Fatima for real. I knew it, Fatima knew it. It would happen. We just didn’t know what the tablets said next—that was all dark. But I felt really good about it. I could feel my heart filling my chest.

A dog trotted up the hill to check us out. Some kind of shepherd. Fatima held out her open hand. The dog kissed her fingers. We’d seen him before. “Whaddup, Boaz,” said Fatima. She tousled his head. Dogs were everywhere, dragging their leashes around, wearing bandanas. In the parking lot an ice cream truck was jingling a Michael Jackson song.

“Sensation,” laughed Fatima, indicating somebody with a nod of her head. It was one of those prowling thirty-somethings. Walking around in board shorts, bare-chested, his bulldog tugging the leash. Scripture in a strange language tattooed on his oblique. His scapulohumerals popping. But he couldn’t help it, because the dog was jerking so hard on the leash. He was grinning. This crazy dog—what can I do? So everything was flexing left and right.

He started eyeing Fatima, of course, this douchelord. He came our way, all confidence. Didn’t matter that I was sitting there in my lawn chair. He started hitting her up. Pretty soon he’s on about Eastern religions. Lo and behold he’s been to Tibet, he’s been to Kyoto, he’s waded in the freaking Ganges. “Oh, my God,” says Fatima. He keeps it up, talking the talk, swaybacked, looking around for a mirror to admire his posture. Still shirtless, there’s no shirt appearing out of anywhere.

That day at junior lifeguards was the hottest of the year. By eight o’clock in the morning the sun was punishing our skin, like it was coming through a magnifying glass and we were ants. As soon as we climbed out of the Mazda we were suffering, Cici especially. Everything was strange anyway, and then the awful heat—it got her out of whack.

Fatima had a clipboard full of Cici’s papers—birth certificate, release forms. She was looking for the right person to slide it past. She was very good at that kind of thing. But the scene that morning was chaos. So many people, hundreds, kids and parents, everybody trying to get their shit together. Parents rubbing lotion on anything that moved, kids screwing around, knocking each other over.

Fatima disappeared into the crowd. I turned to Cici and immediately I knew we’d fucked up. I was perched on the metal table, my feet on the bench. Cici had a nasty red party cup from the trash can and she was scooping up sand and piling it on the table. Not mad, not saying anything, just methodical as hell. There was an empty umbrella hole in the middle of the table. She dumped the cup, then bulldozed the sand to the hole so it fell through like an hourglass. Another cup, bulldoze the sand. Her face a mask.

Then she sat down in a hurry and started rocking on the metal bench. Then came the clams, opening and closing her knees, then she started whimpering she needed to pee.

The public restroom was fifty yards away, a bunker in the sand. We went that way and she stayed right on my heels. I yanked on the Women’s and the door didn’t budge, locked like a bank. I went around to the other side and stuck my head in the Men’s. Three occupants, plus it stank to high heaven, infested by flies. Against the wall an eight-foot-long aluminum trough. One guy with a stream like a fountain, splashing off the metal insides and back up at him. Holding an empty pint of Fireball cinnamon whiskey. On the other wall four steel toilets, no stall doors. Two guys with their belongings spread everywhere, socks and shirts and tubes of lotion and plastic bottles, one sitting on a bowl, one standing. On the floor-wads and clumps of wet dirty toilet paper from their sponge baths. We went back outside and Cici started crying. She had pee running down the inside of her thigh. Then she had blood, too. Maybe. I’m still unsure on that, honestly. Neither one of us knew what was happening. Both freaking out.

“Sit in the sand,” I said. “Do it through your suit.”

But it was too hot, too hot even for bare feet. It was 94 degrees already. We had to get closer to the water. I took her hand, but Cici bolted, running across the barren waste. It’s a hell of a wide beach right there, a desert. She ran all the way to the ocean, me following. She waded into the waves and stood there, getting buffeted, crying. Standing in one spot like a tree, her hands covering her face. Just crying and shivering. And Fatima somewhere in the crowd on the boardwalk, her finger poking the chest of some junior lifeguard bureaucrat who was telling her no way, not happening.

Once we got reunited Fatima stayed calm, for Cici’s sake obviously. But then they ditched me, and as it turned out Fatima went crazy and road-tripped with Cici in the Mazda all the way up to Newport Beach. That was the part that really pissed off the Gateway people. That’s a 90-mile trip. Across the county line. No communication back to home base. Selfish and irresponsible, and you are not a righteous sister.

At Kate Sessions, the pilgrim Adonis finally got drawn away by a seventy-year-old in a rolled-down wetsuit, a regular. The old guy was smoking a blunt of enormous magnitude. I knew him well. He’d come up, tell you his life story, then say, “But we’ve talked, right?” People called him Roger, or Roger Daltrey, and you get it once you look up The Who. That whole era. This Roger was no fun, there was no reward in his company, but the thirty-year-old had to show his serenity, his compassion, so he was caught in the net and dragged away, giving Fatima a wink.

And then from my aluminum chair I saw all of Pacific Beach. The yellow roof of Fleming’s where I bussed tables, balancing eight plates on my arm during my break so I could graduate to serving; a tiny trash truck moving past Fatima’s apartment; the bay shimmering; the Pacific Ocean in a mist; the pier like a straight twig on the blue water. The whole thing at my feet.

And then this thing happened where for a moment I was lifted up, like a song lifts you to another place. I was lifted up, and Fatima was with me.

“Hey, Boomsma.”

Her eyes were shining. So it was time.

I leaned toward her and she nodded, smiling. Like she was saying, I’m falling for you, son. We kissed. Her perfect smell. Literally the slowest, softest kiss in the history of the world. We pulled back to gaze a little bit and she was still smiling, then she couldn’t maintain it and she started to cry. Her hands went to her face. She lowered her head. Her big red SDSU sweatshirt muffled her up, but there was no hiding it. She was crying, crying, then sobbing, and she couldn’t get it to stop, her body shaking.

It was to see the statue of Ben Carlson, a lifeguard who drowned. That was why Fatima drove all the way up to Newport Beach with Cici. The statue is about nine feet tall. The wind and the waves can’t hurt him. The weather only makes him more beautiful. He’s extremely silver, not bronze, and he’s a giant, as I said, and he gazes out at the water constantly, constantly, you can never catch him not doing it. A plaque tells his story, how he died making a rescue on a high-seas day when he’d already made four other saves.

People would throw seaweed necklaces over his head—leis from the ocean. They put seashells by his big, silver toes. The locals didn’t fuss about the seaweed on their statue, they did not care. It was all very laid back. In the evening, the sun setting, kids got on their parents’ shoulders and draped their creations over Ben Carlson, the giant. They hugged him around the legs and knocked on his hard trunks with their knuckles. Fatima was gaga about him and she wanted Cici to meet him. So they drove like hell to Newport even though it wasn’t wise.

“Would you ever want a statue?” I said.

We were back in the Mazda, heading toward the freeway. She had a box of crap she had to return to Gateway—name tags, visors. As for us, it was finished. The tears were gone, removed, put away.

“I mean a statue of yourself? If they wanted to give you one?”

“No.” She didn’t have to think about it. “Would you?”

“I guess not.”

“I’d chop it down.”

“Me too.”

“I’d blow it up.”

It was true. She would refuse it. She would chop it down. It would be a lot of work, she would need a blowtorch or an earthmover, and she wasn’t super-mechanical. But she would chop it to the ground.

It bothered me about Newport. After the junior lifeguard disaster I thought we’d huddle up, find a booth at Green Eggs and eat some pancakes, our little trio, I thought we’d reflect, recap, process. It bothered me that they drove ninety miles instead to see nine-foot Ben Carlson.

In the Mazda we were on Grand where the Shell station seems to split the road open. Where you veer right to get on the long ramp that dumps you onto the 5 going south. I knew she wanted to say goodbye, had to, I knew it was coming. But it was the way she did it, that’s what cut me. Whipping past the oleander shrubs. The windows down, wind beating, she was blasting off, gunning it so she could merge onto the 5. She yelled my name right then, hair in her eyes.

“Jeffrey!”

We looked at each other and she christened me. “Jeffrey Johnson!”

So it was accomplished, I was newborn. After that I just remember freeway noise. Her music cranked up. The Mazda jolting over every little thing.

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Bruce McKay was born in Los Angeles and grew up in LA and St. Louis. His fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, The Sun, Southwest Review, Cutbank, StoryQuarterly, The Missouri Review, and other journals and magazines. He lives in Southern California with his family and teaches at the University of California, Irvine.