A one-mile causeway stretches across the shipping channel in Port Lavaca’s corner of the bay; the same massive bridge I watched from the beach that long night of searching for Kayla’s body. The center of the bridge arches upward, rising yards above the rest, allowing ships to pass underneath. We cross that now, gulf dropping away below us.
“Are you from around here?” I ask, spinning the old manual crank to lower my window.
“I’m not really from around anywhere,” Morgan says, pulling rogue strands of brown hair behind her ear as wind rushes through. “What about you? You from around here?”
I smile at her joke. She smiles back. Nice smile, rows of straight teeth. Face and arms dusted with freckles; reminds me of home. Even if she is a little old for me.
“Shame about the view,” I say, nodding at the coastline ahead of us.
“It’s like the beach has cancer.”
And she’s right, Port Lavaca is infected. A growth of metal pipes, smokestacks, compressed gas. Pressurized chambers of toxic gas; burners and steel drums. It’s an industrial town, and the only reason people live here are the five refineries. They emerge malignant from the pale, peach coast. Tanks tower hundreds of feet in the air, connected with labyrinthine pipes. The knotted steel is crowned with flare stacks burning ten-foot red flames.
There is no view of the coast that isn’t spoiled by this metallic mutation, this metastasis of steel and plastic. I’m told that from time to time, the refineries explode, as well. So many great things about them, really.
“Turn here,” she says as we reach the other end of the bridge. I hesitate as I make the left turn, starting then stopping again. She glances at me.
“You all drive on the wrong side of the road,” I comment.
“Is this her truck?” Morgan asks.
“Yeah.” And then I notice her favorite albums, the cellophane from her last pack of cigarettes, a hair brush with a rubber grip. Like being in Kayla’s mind.
I shrink away from it all. She could be dead.
We near a refinery where bauxite is turned to aluminum. The entire area is coated in ruddy dust, so it seems every car and building has been meticulously painted reddish brown. Looks like Mars.
“Turn right, before the gate,” she says.
I stop short of the secure, gated entrance to the plant and turn right on a dirt road. I follow this into a cove, sheltered by a wall of mesquite trees.
Windows rolled down, hand extended. Cat tails and sunflowers knock against my open palm. I can smell the salt of the sea; love that smell.
“Turn here.”
Off this road, another, and finally a narrow path whose presence is only betrayed by the two parallel lines of trampled shrubbery.
I drive down the path; the waves lap at the shell-clad beach a few yards off. Straight across the bay sits the dock where I last saw Kayla.
“Get as close as you can. The car was behind these trees.”
When I reach a thicket, I stop the truck and get out. I walk past the line of gnarled trees and bramble bushes. Baited breath.
Please don’t be here. Please don’t let there be a car sitting here, untouched.
I step into the clearing.
Nothing, just sand and weeds.
“All right, then.” I smile. “So she made it this far. She made it to her car.” A lot easier to accept she may just not want to call me, that Jack is right.
We get back in the truck, and head back the direction we came. Feeling like there may be hope for her after all. If she climbed out of the gulf, landed here and drove away—she must be safe, right? The gulf is the dangerous part, the swimming. This, plus the fact the police haven’t found a body, let me think she might be okay.
The causeway passes under us again, rhythmic bumps of the expansion joints bucking the truck like a train over tracks.
“So, how did you get involved in all this?” I ask Morgan.
She’s silent.
We cross back into Port Lavaca; the sun is setting behind us and casts a neon dusk, a fifteen minute span where the blues, oranges and pinks of the sky seem radioactive.
I try again to engage her. “So what’s this ‘shadow’ stuff Jack was going on about? Kayla talked the same crap. What are they talking about?”
My comment doesn’t seem to register on Morgan’s face. “Jack does love to talk crap,” she murmurs.
The car falls to silence again. Then, moments later:
“Sean, are you speeding?” she asks.
I look down at my speedometer. I’m not; I try not to. Never break the law in a foreign country—advice from Dad, before I left.
“There’s a policeman following us,” she says. “Drive carefully.”
I glance in my rear view. Monochrome suburban, rack of lights and black bull bars. “It’s probably nothing,” I say, though suddenly my body feels tight.
“Listen to me, Sean. Turn right, right here.”
“That’s not the way back.”
“Just turn.”
I do. The policeman follows. Now I’m driving slowly into a neighborhood I don’t know.
Morgan’s voice is tense and low. “Sean, I need you to pay attention to me. I think something has gone wrong. We’ve been betrayed. I think he’s going to turn on his lights. This is very important: You cannot talk about me when you talk about Kayla. You have to keep my name out of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Blue and red lights fill my rear windshield; kaleidoscopic calamity.
“I can help you, but you must trust me. Tell them you picked me up across the bridge, that I’m a hitchhiker. I’m not real, Sean. I’m not a real person.”
“How can a person not be real?”
She doesn’t answer.
I put the truck in park, turn on the hazard lights. There’s a cop standing in front of my open window. He speaks: “Are you Sean Reilly?” he asks.
Getting this question a lot, lately. “Yeah,” I say. “That’s me.”
“We want to ask you some questions. You mind coming with me?”