Candle Hours
It was somewhere near midnight, and Jeff and I were over at the cemetery bombing the hill on our longboards. That was a typical Friday night for us. Some college kids got bombed on beers or Grey Goose, we grabbed our longboards and bombed some hills. We made urgent prayers to the wind with each trip down. We were in command of the candle hours.
A kid we’d never seen before called out to us as we trudged back up the hill, longboards under our arms. We hadn’t even noticed him sitting on the bench by the overlook. “Hey,” he said. “Have you seen a girl named Kendra around?”
Neither of us had. He nodded like he’d expected the response. “Kendra’s my best friend,” he said. “She was at a party and was going to text me before she left. She was going to her friend’s place to crash. I haven’t heard from her and she isn’t answering her phone. I’m getting anxious. You guys are sure you haven’t seen her, right?”
We were still carefree kids. We told him her phone probably just died, that she was at her friend’s home sleeping, that she’d text him in the morning and ask if he wanted to do brunch or something. It’d be fine, we said. We asked him what his name was.
“I’m Bacary,” he said. “Like that soccer player, Bacary Sagna. The one with the beads in his braids.” We were Arsenal fans; we knew about Bacary Sagna. “Bacary, do you know which friend she was going to see?” we asked. “No,” he said. “You guys want to help me look for her?” “Yeah,” we said. “Sure.”
Longboards in hand, we trooped off down under the highway overpass behind Bacary and headed towards Brown’s Isle. “Bacary,” we said, “wasn’t she going to a friend’s house? Why would she be down here?”
“This is the way,” he said.
We kept walking. Eventually we got down to Brown’s Isle, to the retaining wall in front of the little gravely beach and the rope swing tied to the train tracks. Jeff and me, we knew that braided rope swing, the murky water beneath. We’d seen guys that looked like cigarettes launch themselves off the rope, turn double backflips in the air. We’d seen a guy try to climb the railroad joist, lose his grip, and make himself a second knee when he landed. We’d seen a lot.
We peered over the retaining wall and saw something in the summer summer night air. What we saw was a man and woman on the gravely sand of the beach, naked and unashamed. Carnal lust, dogs in heat. Bacary was unfazed. He raised himself up and shouted, “Hey! You guys seen a girl named Kendra?”
We could see the man’s bare ass gleaming in the moonlight. He raised himself up off the woman and turned his head. “No,” he shouted back. And just like that he returned to the cadence he was making.
We walked on, up 5th Street, all the way back to the freshmen dorms. That was where Bacary lived. “Bacary,” we said, “we gotta leave you here. Text us in the morning, OK?”
The next morning, we texted Bacary to get an update. We hadn’t experienced loss in a big way. We figured everything would be good.
Bacary texted back after a few minutes.
“Hey guys,” he wrote. “Her phone had died, but she’s all right.”
“Cool,” we wrote back. “Fine. Glad to hear it.”
That night we went back to the cemetery. One of us joked that we should text Bacary and ask if we’d see him and Kendra down on the Brown’s Isle beach tonight. But we didn’t. Instead, we brushed the hair out of our eyes as our late teens flew past us in the cool night breeze.
