The Last Bridge (15 page)

The cake and coffee part was painful. Marty jumped in with sports talk. He and Addison kicked the usual set of stats back and forth as I studied the hundreds of dirt-colored Hummel figurines jammed in the breakfront behind him.

“Tell us about your little one,” Ruth interrupted when the conversation lagged after Addison confirmed that he too believed the Browns had a chance for the championship next season.

“He’s fine,” Addison said.

“How old is he now?”

“Going on ten,” Addison mumbled. He got up and tried clearing the table but he was boxed in by Marty.

If I could have jumped from my skin I would have—here it was at last—the words we had not uttered since my return. The mention of the baby who had become a boy.

“Have you met Addison’s son yet? He’s delightful,” Ruth said to me.

“I have to go.” I leaped up and realized I was boxed in by Ruth. My knees buckled as I struggled to keep myself from flipping the table over to get out.

“Everybody, stand the fuck up!” I shouted.

“Alex, wait.” Addison was running after me. I was taking the hard way home—through the fields and eventually over the creek—but I didn’t care. The air was bitter cold and the ground was quilted in patches of snow and muddy puddles that seeped into a small hole in one of my cowboy boots.

Behind me Addison’s footsteps crunched in the same path a few paces behind.

“For God’s sake, Alex, stop before I have a heart attack!”

I kept walking but turned. “You planned that. You can’t leave well enough alone, can you? I don’t want to see him!”

“I’m not asking you to,” he shouted as he closed in on me. Christ, why did I always have to be so goddamned drunk? I could
move better sober—it was the standing still that was hard. “Don’t you want to know if he’s happy? If he asks about—”

“Does he have a mother?” I shouted. The words rushed out before I could stop them. This was the hardest part of being back—the way my own feelings betrayed me.

And yet, in that instant it made sense to ask. Surely Addison had found a mother for him. What was the point of all that charm if he couldn’t conjure a Mother and Wife?

Addison stopped and put his hands on his knees and caught his breath. He shook his head.

“I’m not married, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’m not asking about you. I’m asking about him. Does he have a mother?”

God, I wanted him to say yes. To say he didn’t even know about me. To say he had a wonderful mother who took care of him from birth, someone he called “Mom.” Someone who couldn’t tell him anything about me except this: “I don’t know why your real mother left you.”

Addison nodded and walked toward me with his arms up in surrender as I backed away.

“You, Alex. You are his mother.”

“S
O WHAT IS WALKING
the plank?” Addison asked the next morning as I searched the room for my mother’s pearls. He was stretched across the bed with his arms behind his head and the sheet loosely draped over his hips. He looked like he was posing for a painting.

I could feel him dripping out of me and wanted to take a shower and get back to the house before they came home.

“It’s this stupid game my father makes us play.” I looked under the pillow I had slept on. “Can you help me find those pearls? Mom’s going to kill me if I lose them.”

“Did you check under here?” he said, as he flipped the sheet off, exposing himself. I didn’t want to look. I had seen one other penis in my life and it was my father’s. I had no desire to compare them.

“Addison, come on.” I felt the nausea of regret. What was I doing?

“So much for pillow talk.” He sat up, pulled on his jeans, and made a halfhearted attempt to get me to smile, but gave up and went to the kitchen.

I followed him. “Promise me you’ll look for them. I should get back.” The pieces of me did not fit back together smoothly. My dress was wrinkled and half-zipped, my underpants were missing, and I couldn’t remember if I had worn a slip. I had woken up in another
body, a different model with controls and switches no one had warned me about.

“You’re so …” He kissed me before I could stop him. He reached for my hand and put it on his crotch. “See what you do to me?”

I pulled away. “I have to go.” I walked to the door and stopped. “At the far end of our property over by Rucker’s Creek, there’s a crack where the land splits. The ravine is deep and rocky and goes for about a mile. There’s a rope bridge that spans the crack that’s been there my whole life. My dad and your dad built it before my parents were married. You can climb across it and get to this sweet patch of wood and grass and a small hunting shack.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Walking the plank, I’m telling you about walking the plank.” I looked at him. All I saw were his flaws, the ragged way his hair fell in his eyes, the small pimples on the back of his neck, and the dirty soles of his feet. How could I have let him touch me like that?

“Dad takes us there to camp. The game is getting across. The bridge is old and there are some gaps. We draw straws; the one with the shortest straw gets blindfolded and has to cross on their own.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“No pain, no gain,” I said.

“What’s the point?”

“Dad says it builds character, plus it’s thrilling to watch your loved ones quiver in fear. The reward for getting across, aside from the obvious one of being alive, is that you get first dibs on searching for the treasure.”

“Treasure?”

“Dad claims there’s money buried somewhere but I don’t believe it. Jared and Wendy have never found anything.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve never made it across. I’m petrified. I tried once and didn’t make it. Dad punished me but it was worth the bruises not to have
to go. After that Jared and I worked out a system: if I pulled the short straw he would go instead of me. We only had to do it once.”

“Jared doesn’t mind?”

“He hates it but he said he’d rather be blindfolded than to watch someone else cross.”

“Is that the only way to get over?”

“I think the land connects again on the Palmers’ property—and you could navigate back to the patch but we never do. That would defeat the purpose.”

“Right.” He put his water glass on the counter.

I had to say something. I had to be clear how it would be. I took a breath as I faced the broad stretch of driveway that connected our house to his. “If you tell anyone what happened, I’ll kill you.”

I reached for the latch as I felt him moving toward me. He put his hand on my cheek and turned me back to face him. “I won’t tell anyone,” he whispered in my ear as his hands reached for my breasts. His mouth found mine before I could process what was happening.

We kissed for the last time.

“All clean?”

My father was standing in the doorway of my bedroom when I came out of the bathroom in my robe. I had scrubbed my skin raw trying to remove the memory of Addison. Steam billowed around me as I stood dead still in the hallway with my brush in my hand.

“You look different.” He inventoried my body like a landowner surveying his property. He was most dangerous when he was intensely sober. “You missed the fun. Jared almost didn’t make it.” If he were an animal, he would have sniffed me, checking to see if someone else had marked his territory.

I looked down. His boots were covered with mud. Late spring rains had made the area slick. The slope to the rope bridge was slippery when it got wet. The first and only time I tried to cross, I slid and fell while blindfolded. The distance of the fall from standing to
the feel of cold mud against my cheek felt longer than the sum of all the moments I was captive to my father’s wandering hands. That was when I discovered there were worse things than being touched.

“Jared!” I called out, without taking my eyes off my father.

“I sent him to the store with your mother and Wendy.”

I waited for him to make his move just as I had since the first time he pulled me on his lap and put my hand in his pants and said, “Touch me like this. Don’t look at me while you’re doing it.”

I was seven.

“I hope there’s hot water,” he said, as he came toward me and pinched my cheek. I winced and stepped aside as he unbuckled the straps of his overalls. I fled to my room, closed the door, and lodged my desk chair under the knob.

The afternoon sun was riding full and high, beaming a white hot light into our bedroom. I looked around as if I were seeing it for the first time. Wendy’s bed was neatly made, with two heart-shaped pillows resting side by side. Above it was a bulletin board where she taped pictures of models she thought she looked like and articles from magazines on how to be the best damn girl she could be.

Wendy’s desk was empty except for her math book and an open issue of this month’s
Mademoiselle
. Her side of the closet was full of neatly pressed dresses and coordinated skirts and blouses. Her clothes took up most of the rod, except for three hangers that held my warm-weather dress, a cold-weather one, and my dress for the summer dance that Nell gave to me. It was hers from last year.

My bed was bare except for a white flat pillow and an old red and green Christmas afghan folded at the foot for when I got cold from the drafty window above my head.

I reached under my bed and found the small duffel bag I used whenever I was allowed to sleep over at Nell’s, which wasn’t very often. I put it on the bed and went to the dresser Wendy and I shared. I took out my underwear and socks and as many pairs of jeans and shirts as I could fit. I left just enough room for my two sketchbooks: the crappy one I carried with me every day and the
beautiful embossed book Addison gave me. The crappy one was in my schoolbag. Addison’s was hidden in the barn. I would have to get it before the dance.

In the back of my closet, under a broken floorboard, I had $234 hidden. I started saving it the night he first touched me. Every chance I got, I stole what I could from him; sadly, it wasn’t very much.

I stuffed the money in the side pocket of the duffel and slid it back under the bed. Tomorrow was the dance. I would get Mom to let me stay at Nell’s. Dad would get drunk and pass out after they got home. This was the best chance I had. I was going to take it.

“You look …” Addison was sitting at the kitchen table when I came down the stairs dressed for my last night with my family. I was wearing Nell’s pale lavender dress, which fell above my ankles in a sweeping bell skirt. The bodice was fitted with a scooped neck and a small bow that rested at the tip of my breastbone. My mother lent me a pair of white-heeled sandals that she said hurt her feet.

“They’ll look better on you anyway. Your father hates it when I look too pretty,” she’d said as she crawled around the perimeter of her bed looking for the mate. She offered to get me the pearls, but I told her they would be too much. I would be gone by daylight; now I would never have to explain what happened to them.

“Shhhh,” I said, looking upstairs, where everyone else was finishing getting ready. This was the first time Addison and I had been alone since we had slept together. He had spent the afternoon with my dad working in the barn—which had precluded me from getting the book. I was hoping to get it before we left.

As the day unfolded, I thought of nothing else but how I would get out of Wilton. I had gotten permission to sleep at Nell’s and was planning on sneaking out in the middle of the night and taking her car. I would leave her a note and promise to pay her back when I got settled. My plan was to drive as far as I could and lie about everything else.

Jared and Wendy came down next. Jared was wearing a suit my mother got at Goodwill. In spite of its poor fit, he looked handsome. His chestnut hair was slicked back and smooth. He winked at me when he caught me smiling.

Wendy wore a slim, straight black dress she had also bought at Goodwill but had altered to suit her figure. She wore black stockings and a pair of plain black pumps. Her hair was pulled up in a French knot. Her schooling in magazine fashion paid off, as she looked like she belonged on a runway in Paris rather than at the Wilton Jaycees’ summer dance at the Elks Lodge.

Mom wore the dress she always wore for weddings, which had gotten baggy as her stomach problems had gotten worse over the years. She doused herself in the Charlie perfume Dad bought her every Christmas. Wendy tried to get her to put on some lipstick, but she wiped it off when Dad told her it made her look cheap.

In his midnight-blue funeral/wedding suit, my father looked like he was wearing someone else’s clothes.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” he said, as he came down the stairs. He had small dabs of white tissue on his face from shaving. He was smiling and sober and happy. Every year the summer dance brought out this kinder man. And like the spell cast on Cinderella, it was beautiful while it lasted. I imagined this was the man my mother loved.

“I’m going to get a dance with each of my girls tonight,” he said, as he peeled the tissue paper from his face. “You two are on your own,” he said, pointing to Addison and Jared.

“Good, because I wouldn’t be caught dead dancing with my sisters,” Jared said in disgust.

“What about a dance with your mother?” Mom asked, with just a hint of hurt in her voice.

“What kind of a pussy do you think he is?” Dad answered.

Wendy and Jared rode with Addison. I stashed my duffel in the back of his truck and figured I would grab it on my way home with
Nell. There was no time to get the book from the barn. I squeezed in between Dad and Mom and took what I thought was my last ride in that red pickup truck.

The theme of the party was Starlight Serenade, which basically meant the ceiling was decorated with twinkling foil-covered stars cut from shirt boxes. The refreshment table was covered with silver glitter that left a trail on everything that touched it. The esteemed Wilton community spent most of the evening either dancing to songs spun by Hal White, future sheriff, or standing by the punch picking silver glitter out of their food.

I found Nell instantly. We stood together and chatted, not expecting anyone other than our fathers to ask us to dance. The evening was warm and humid with a threat of storms later. I had checked the weather earlier and was worried that my amateur driving skills would not be a good match for an Ohio downpour.