Bridge of Sighs (81 page)

Tessa was grateful for the love she’d been given but also understood how it had trapped her. She’d never had the opportunity for what Sarah was doing now, escaping that loving trap, even temporarily. “Go,” she’d said when Sarah started, unnecessarily, to explain her need to get away for a while. “Find yourself. In fact, keep an eye out for me. I’m out there somewhere.”

Which meant that if she gave up and returned home just because she’d lost the knack of being alone, she’d be betraying Tessa as well. No, she’d give it another day here, at least, and then maybe a few more in the city. If all this was foolish, well, maybe something less foolish would occur to her. She ate a bowl of cereal standing up and then went to bed hoping to feel more optimistic tomorrow.

I
N THE MORNING,
however, her sense of futility had, if anything, deepened. Fortunately, this wasn’t the first time she’d suffered from low spirits, which was why she never went anywhere without her sketch pad. It was as a girl, living across the street at the Sundry Arms, that she learned it was easier to draw than to think her way out of confusion. How low she’d been that last summer until she finally gave in and drew Bobby and how easily, how joyfully he’d leapt from the blank paper. Not that it had relieved her anxiety, of course, or solved the fundamental problem. She’d been in love with two boys, in all probability because each offered her something different, something she needed, or at least she thought they did. Indeed, clarifying the problem should have deepened her crisis. Instead she’d felt intense joy in knowing the truth, even if it was an impossibility:
I love two boys.
Its corollary was even more thrilling:
That’s who I am. The kind of girl who can love two boys.
Every other painting and drawing she’d done that summer had been suffused with that confidence. She saw everything more clearly for the simple reason that she knew who was holding the brush or pen. Her mother had recognized her transformation in a glance. “I’m so, so sorry,” she’d said. At the time Sarah thought she was sorry about what the drawing of Bobby had revealed, but now she knew better. She’d been worried about the gift itself and the potential for misery that accompanied it.

Locating the sketch pad in the big sleeve on the side of her suitcase, she left the Sundry Gardens and didn’t realize she was heading back to the Arms until she was halfway across the street. At this early hour the courtyard was oddly peaceful, with only the sounds of sleepy children and televisions on low leaking out the open doors and windows. A low, cinder-block wall surrounded what had been the swimming pool, so Sarah sat down there and opened her pad to a fresh page. She did a quick sketch of the window box outside her mother’s former apartment and felt a little better, if no less foolish, for the effort. She did a couple more sketches on the same page, then got up and moved down the wall to frame the window box within the rusty swingset. That somehow made both objects more interesting. It might be the basis for a painting later, when she returned home.
If
she returned. (“You
want
the LIRR,” the woman had insisted.) She started a new page. She’d only been there for half an hour, but could feel in her blood and busy hand that she was, well,
getting
w
armer.
Again, the child’s game. Was she losing her mind? Wasn’t it enough to just sit here and let her pen fly over the rough paper, instead of indulging a fantasy that had already proved futile? On the other hand, what could she lose as long as she acknowledged that it
was
a fantasy?

Sarah was only vaguely conscious of the passage of time, of doors opening and closing, of children emerging into the courtyard, of snatches of adult conversation. “She doin’ down there?” “Same woman as the other day?” “She crazy?” There was also the sound of a tricycle with big plastic wheels thumping over cracks in the pavement to the cadence of adult instructions:
don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.
Eventually she became aware of someone watching her, close by, and she turned and saw it was the lanky black girl who’d returned her smile the day before, the one who should’ve been in school. She was standing awkwardly on one leg, regarding the sketch pad and Sarah herself with a kind of terrible longing.

“Can you teach me?” she said.

Sarah started to say no, felt the word forming on her lips, and saw the girl accept her answer even before it was given and start to leave. Where had she seen that mixture of longing and immediate resignation before?

“Of course I can,” she said, though in truth she was none too sure what she meant. That drawing was a skill that could be taught? That she herself had been a teacher most of her adult life? That she could spend the rest of the morning showing the girl a few basics, maybe even go out and get her an inexpensive sketch pad and a starter pen-and-pencil set? Or was she suggesting the girl could actually learn, even in a place like this, if she really wanted to?

“Really?” the girl said, not quite sure she’d heard right, her eyes now big and round.

Really?
That’s what the Mock boy had said, in exactly that same way. “Really? You would? With me?” In fact, she hadn’t even said yes. What she’d said was that she’d ask her father, then warned him not to get his hopes up, because she was never allowed to go out with boys. At the time she thought she was being kind by allowing him to believe the only impediment was her father, that she would’ve gone with him to the matinee if the choice had been hers, but it wasn’t. It had nothing to do with him personally. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, or that what he was proposing wasn’t permitted because he was a Negro. He’d been expecting one kind of no and she’d given him another, a no that had some yes in it, and didn’t include the humiliation he’d expected. But a moment earlier the look of yearning and surrender on his face was the same as the one on this girl’s in the split second before Sarah changed her mind. How awful it must be, she thought, to ask for something you knew you’d be denied. How much courage it took to ask anyway, instead of just slinking away and adding this new refusal to the stew of countless others.

“When?” the girl said, thinking perhaps this was where the no would come.

Sarah turned to a fresh page in the sketchbook and motioned for her to sit down on the wall. “How about we start with that window box? The one by the blue door.”

The girl took the pad and balanced it on her knee like she’d seen Sarah do, then took the pen almost fearfully.

“Like this,” Sarah said, showing her how to hold it. “Don’t worry about making a mistake. We’re going to draw it over and over.”

“What comes first?”

“You’re the one holding the pen. That means you get to decide.”

Sarah couldn’t remember seeing anyone more terrified. Finally, the girl drew a tentative horizontal line and immediately looked up at her, as if to ask if the time had come already to give up.

“Good,” Sarah told her. “But maybe you’d better tell me your name.”

I
T WAS
K
AYLA.
And her daddy? “Well, her daddy is anybody’s guess, but even if you guessed right, then what?” This was according to Miss Rosa, the small, round black woman who’d spoken to Sarah the afternoon before. “Her mama? Got the HIV. You know where and how. Whole lass year, this girl been bouncin’ from one relative to the nex’ till they brung her to me. Bringin’ me children now, like a cheap toy the wheel come off of. Seventy-three-year-old woman. You tell me,” she said with a hint of bitterness that made Sarah like her even more. “You tell me what Jesus thinkin’ this time, ’cause I doan know.”

If asked to guess Miss Rosa’s age, Sarah would’ve said late fifties, not seventy-three, and she’d been living here for more than thirty years. In fact, she’d been the Sundry Arms’ first black resident. Ten years ago, after she’d been “feeling poorly,” her doctors had found a tumor the size of a grapefruit in her abdomen, but she’d prayed to Jesus and the tumor shrank and then disappeared altogether. Since then Miss Rosa just left everything to Jesus—money worries, health problems, all of it—and He provided, and not just for her either. She began to use her apartment as a used-clothing distribution center for young neighborhood mothers, most of them single. Many worked as hotel maids or at other menial jobs on the more prosperous North Shore or in the city while their own mothers, forty-year-old grandmas, looked after their kids. That’s why Miss Rosa’s apartment was stacked floor to ceiling with all manner of clothing and shoes. She’d traded in her double bed, which she didn’t need now that her husband was deceased, to make a little more room. Then people started bringing her other things, too, furniture and food and broken toys, and suddenly she was full to bursting.

Then Jesus provided again. The next-door apartment went vacant, and the very first night there was a fire. The complex’s owner had let his insurance lapse and was unwilling to spend what it would cost to clean and repair the damage. Sarah found that fire suspiciously convenient but didn’t say so to Miss Rosa, who explained that since the place was just sitting there and she was by then something of a local celebrity, the owner succumbed to public pressure and allowed her to expand her operation, rent-free—in the hopes that this act of generosity might prevent another fire? Sarah wondered. The nearest food pantry was miles away, but Miss Rosa persuaded the staff there to make twice-a-week deliveries of whatever they were thinking about throwing away. Soon the second apartment, too, was crammed from top to bottom.

“My life one gift after another,” Miss Rosa said. “Every time I turn aroun’, there’s Jesus with somethin’ new, somethin’ I didn’t even know I needed till He give it to me. Say to myself,
What my gonna do with this?
But finally I figure out everythin’s a gift. That tumor was the first. Takin’ it away was the second. You a gift your own self. To me and this child.” This was a week or so after Sarah started giving Kayla lessons. “Doan be givin’ me that hairy eyeball like you doan believe, ’cause I know better. You too nice a lady to go through life a heathen. Maybe you doan believe now, but you will ’fore you die. You jist got to ’just your thinkin’, then you see everythin’ clear.”

Food, clothing, small appliances, pots and pans. It all turned up in apartments 108 and 110. “Throw it away? Don’t. Miss Rosa know what to do with it.” She had half a dozen elderly women helping her a couple hours a day each, along with several ancient-looking black men who lugged things and were good at mending toys. The few young men who lived at the Arms were useless at anything other than drug dealing. You seldom saw them before late afternoon, scratching their skinny asses and wondering why there wasn’t anything to eat. An odd group, they at once feared Miss Rosa and held her in high esteem, and out of respect, they never conducted their business on the premises. When she gave them a piece of her mind, which she did regularly, they stood and took it, though when she was done they sometimes asked if she’d been born a crazy old woman or grew into it. “Seventy-three-years’-worth-of-smart is what I am,” Sarah heard her tell them once. “You all gon be dead ’fore you’re thirty, so you tell me who’s crazy.”

The woman had an amazing memory. Nothing came in that didn’t immediately get cataloged in her brain somewhere, somehow, though items often didn’t light for long. She’d hold a pair of toddler’s sneakers up and say, “I know juss where you-all’s goin’, doan think I don’t. I got me a system,” she told Sarah. “Problem is, doan nobody but me know how it works. I juss pray I doan never die or get no Altzeimers, ’cause it’ll take ten people smarter’n me to do what I do. That’s why Jesus ain’t took me yet, I ’spect. Made myself…what’s the word?”

“Indispensable?” Sarah suggested.

“Thass it.”

Do people ever bring you things you wish they’d keep? Sarah asked her one day.

“Not often,” Miss Rosa said. “Sometimes.”

Kayla was sitting on the wall with the second sketch pad Sarah had bought her that week. Miss Rosa looked at her and nodded.

W
ARMER.
That’s how Sarah continued to feel each morning when she went across the street. Which was why, at the end of the first week, she again gave the horrible woman in the Sundry Gardens office her credit card. “Another whole week?” she said, clearly suspicious. Her grandson again was stretched out, motionless, on the sofa in the next room. Did he ever get up? “You mind my asking what you do over there every day?” she added while waiting for Sarah’s card to be approved.

“Not at all,” Sarah told her. “Do you mind my not telling?”

The woman shrugged, but she clearly had something else on her mind. “That girl?”

Kayla had accompanied her into Sundry Gardens the day before. Sarah had made them a simple lunch of sandwiches and canned soup before setting off on their afternoon drive. Two days ago they’d gone all the way out to Montauk, where Kayla had filled half a new sketchbook with drawings of the lighthouse. Afterward they’d eaten an early supper of mussels and clams and fried calamari, none of which the girl had ever tasted before. Her real appetite was for information about Sarah herself, especially her Long Island summers with her mother, so they drove through the old neighborhoods and Sarah told her about the families she used to babysit for. To Kayla, these now-shabby houses looked palatial, much as they had to Sarah at that age. She listened to the stories of who lived where as if she expected to be quizzed on them later, though Sarah quickly learned that
she
was the one who’d be quizzed. Kayla would go anywhere Sarah wanted to take her, but she preferred going back to places and having her repeat the stories she’d told earlier. If Sarah added a new detail, she’d frown and say, “You never said that before.” She was equally intolerant of gaps and omissions. “The little sister had golden hair,” she’d interrupt peevishly. “That’s what you said before.”