The Last Bridge (17 page)

“I’m getting help.”

“Don’t leave me.” I reached for him as I began to cry.

“I’ll be back.”

He walked to the door and came back and held my hand.

“Dad’s gone. You’re safe.”

Jared carried me back across the bridge slung over his shoulder, like a fireman. My pelvis ached against his shoulder. I wanted to vomit but convinced myself I wouldn’t as there was no way I could get my mouth open wide enough.

Addison was at the other side with his truck. They made a bed in the back for me out of sleeping bags. I threw up on Addison when he tried to wrap me in a sweater.

“D
OES IT STILL HURT?
” Addison asked, as he massaged feeling back into my legs. His hands felt like a warm salve on my chapped skin as his fingers kneaded my muscles, willing them to respond.

I shook my head. After the bridge, my leg was fractured in three places. I wore a cast for two months and had lingering stiffness whenever it was cold or rained. It wasn’t the leg that hurt.

“This ankle is larger.” His index finger outlined the bone.

I pulled away.

He got up and tossed me a dish towel to dry my feet off. “I’ll help you to bed.”

“I’m not tired.”

“I am, and I have to relieve the babysitter. I’ll get you upstairs.”

“I can crawl.”

“I don’t want you to.”

I started to cry again. Addison walked to the counter by the phone and found a piece of scrap paper and a pen and wrote something down and placed the sheet in front of me on the table.

“This is our address and phone number. Come anytime. I won’t tell him who you are. You can if you want.”

I tried to say something but it was too late for that. Too late to say, “I have not forgotten him.” Too late to tell him why.

“I wish I was different,” I said. We looked at each other. He smiled.

“Put your arm around my shoulder.” He reached for me. “Take it a step at a time.”

I woke up and knew it was time to go. I didn’t have much to pack. I’d been taking stuff out of the car as I needed it and I didn’t need much.

On a long shot, I checked my hiding place in the barn to see if my red sketchbook had magically reappeared. It hadn’t. Of all the things I had tried to forget, I couldn’t let go of the image of my drawings flying across the ravine in the blinding rain.

My ankle was sore, but not so bad that I couldn’t push through the pain. I hobbled to and from the barn and the car. The sun made a brief appearance before retreating behind a gang of nasty-looking rain clouds.

I had the safe-deposit key in my pocket. I would make my stop at the bank, get the papers, limp to the post office, and mail everything to Jared.

I was bone-tired and numb. I focused on the relief I would feel after a long pull of something 80 proof and tried not to think about Addison.

Pam Cassidy, the mousy-haired bank manager, introduced herself after offering her condolences for my loss. “Your mother said you would be coming.”

“She told you she was going to kill herself?”

Pam shook her head. “She said she was moving to California and you would be handling her affairs.”

“California?”

We walked to the back of the main floor, which was as empty as my stomach. Her spike heels clicked against the marble tiles. The bank, with its dark-paneled walls, big mahogany desks, and sourfaced tellers, was desperately in need of an update.

“Did she say where in California?”

Pam stopped and looked at the fluorescent light above her. She shook her head and continued leading me down the long hallway.

“In here.” I entered a room filled with tightly rowed banks of drawers. Pam scanned the numbered columns, found my mother’s box, slid in our keys, and took out a long tin drawer and put it on the small table in the corner.

“I’ll be outside if you need me.”

I opened the box, expecting it to be empty except for the deed, and found it stuffed full of documents in a big ziplock bag. I took out the bag and pulled out the documents. The deed was on top, along with a note.

My hands began to sweat.

I opened the deed to the signatory page in the back. I didn’t recognize the handwriting. I looked at the name printed in block letters beneath it:

Addison’s father owned our farm. He had since 1979, the year my parents were married. I dropped the deed and pressed my palms against my eyes and rocked back and forth. I took a breath and put the bag into my purse and left the room.

“Jared owns our farm,” I said to my Jared on the phone.

“I’m sorry, someone is in my office; what did you say?”

“Jared owns our farm.”

“He gets a set of copies,” Jared said, away from the receiver.

“Listen!” I shouted. Pam put her fingers to her lips to shush me. It was bad enough I asked to make a long-distance call, but screaming
was not in the charter for good customer relations even if there were no other customers around.

“I’m sure there’s a reason,” Jared said. “Can’t you sort it out?”

“There’s nothing to sort out. He owns the farm; call him,” I said, and slammed down the phone.

I did not go to the post office as planned. I ended up at Walt’s Tavern at a table in the back with a pitcher of beer, four shots, and the pile of my mother’s papers. It was hard to remember the last time food tasted good to me. I took another shot and pounded the table as I swallowed hard.

“I thought you’d be gone by now.” Andrew Reilly sat on the bench across from me holding a frosty draft.

“Are you following me?” I asked.

“I saw your car in the parking lot.”

“It’s two o’clock; aren’t there toes that need tags?” I said. I lifted my mug and chugged it.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, lifting his mug in the air. “There is something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Great. Bring it on. I leaned forward but Andrew said nothing. He looked at his mug and slid farther down in his seat. I surveyed the stack of papers and wondered if I had the balls to go through them. I took a shot and waited for him to speak.

“I miss her,” he said, in the confessional tone of afternoon drunks at a bar. “Your mom was …” He hung his head and shook it back and forth. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

I laughed. “You’re not even in the zone.”

His eyes met mine and studied my face.

“You look like her.”

I struggled to steady my hands long enough to light a cigarette.

“I saw pictures of both of you when you were younger. You could have been sisters. You probably knew that.”

“You sure know a lot about my family.” I exhaled and felt the
heat of menthol in my throat. As much as I smoked, I never got used to the initial burn.

“We got close toward the end.”

The wind blew the front door open. The bartender asked one of the regulars to close it. He shielded his eyes from the light as he walked to the door. Daylight and bars don’t mix; drinking is best done in the dark.

“Did she tell you she was going to kill herself?” I asked, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible.

“No. She said she was going to—”

“California?”

“Yeah.”

“Did she say why?”

He shrugged. “She said she wanted to be somewhere nice. I told her it was. I grew up there.”

She wanted to be somewhere nice? Since when? I wanted to puke.

One of the barflies put a dollar in the jukebox and queued up more country songs about cheating lovers and wasting time.

“I’m adopted!” Andrew leaned over and shouted over the song as it ended. The jukebox stopped; a barfly kicked it to start it up again.

“Recovering junkies aren’t supposed to drink,” I said as I watched him sip his beer. “It’s not part of the twelve steps, is it?”

“No.”

I took a pull of my own and stared at the brown paneling lining the wall behind Andrew.

“Did you hear me? I said I’m adopted.”

Our eyes met. His searched mine for recognition as if he were communicating to me in code. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I watched him.

“You weren’t her sponsor, were you?” I said, as a picture started to form in my head.

“No.”

I took another shot.

“I got transferred to Wilton on purpose.”

He took a long pull on his beer. The frosty crust of his mug had long ago melted, forming a sweat that dripped on the table when he drank.

“I was looking for my father,” he said, as he put the mug down.

He isn’t who you think he is …
.

“I’m going to throw up.” I tried to stand but landed back on my seat. It wasn’t the drink that was making me dizzy.

“What does that have to do with me?” I said. “Oh, God, is it my father?”

“No,” he said, in a way that felt more like a precursor than a resolution.

“Her,” he said, after a pause.

He reached across the table and grabbed my wrist as if he were trying to stop me from spinning away. I looked at the peach complexion of his slender, delicate fingers and followed the line of his wrist to his arm and shoulder across the hollow crevice of his collarbone up to his chin and the pencil-sharp edges of his nose. The left side of his smile creased down rather than up. I scanned the small details that made a body part of one family and not another. I had missed them until that moment.

“She was my mother,” he said.

I
WOKE UP IN A
hospital bed. My eyelids were swollen, leaving just enough room to see the pale green paint peeling off the ceiling and dangling above me like tongues wagging. My room contained a bed, a nightstand, and a chair to my right that was pushed against the only part of the wall not covered by a picture-frame window. It had the cozy institutional feel of a janitor’s closet.

The smell of ammonia and piss perfumed the air, one attempting to disguise the other. Beeps and intercom sounds came from the ceiling. “Dr. Kramer, Dr. Kramer, please call extension twelve.” Sometimes it was clear, and other times it sounded like marbles rolling across cobblestones.

My mouth felt like it had been wiped dry with steel wool. The insides of my cheeks were scraped as if I had been gnawing at myself in my sleep. My teeth throbbed and felt confined in my gums. My upper lip was split.

He beat the shit out of me
.

I curled my fingers into fists and felt a strain of soreness between my legs. My body felt dense from my neck to my pelvis, like I had been deboned and prepped for butchering. My hips resisted movement when I tried to shift my weight. At first I thought I was restrained, until I saw a cast covering my right leg from my toes to the middle of my thigh.

“Bad break,” a voice said from the doorway. I looked toward
it, unable to lift my head more than a few inches off the pillow. “I’m Dr. Kramer,” he said as he walked into the room.

“You need to dial extension twelve.” The dryness of my mouth combined with my puffy lips made it sound like I said “You bead tension hell.” Dr. Kramer smiled as he came into view. He was old, with dark, kind eyes couched by baggy eyelids. He looked like a basset hound with a stethoscope. His hair was silver and combed neatly off his face with what might have been the aid of VO5.

“There seems to be some discrepancy about what happened to you.” His tone was friendly, as if he were asking me my favorite color. I didn’t know what Addison or Jared had said when they brought me in.

“I fell,” I said, making a conscious effort to speak clearly.

He reached for the bed controls and pressed a few buttons to adjust me to a sitting position. “There,” he said, as he put his stethoscope in his ears and warmed the bottom with his hands. He put it into my gown and listened while staring at the wall in front of him.

“Did you fall on a fist?” he asked, as he moved the stethoscope to different places on my chest and then gently eased me forward and held me as he checked my back. I was too weary to care about anyone touching me. He lifted the sheet and looked at my leg, touching my cast. “It’s almost dry. What’s your name?” he said as he moved around the bed checking different parts of me. It was hard to swallow.

“Why is my throat so sore?” I said. My eyes watered from the pain of speaking.

Dr. Kramer took a mirror from the nightstand drawer and held it in front of me. “There’s your trouble,” he said, pointing to two hand-shaped bruises around my neck.

The mirror reflected a face I did not recognize. I gazed into my own eyes and did not feel the visual handshake that happens when you see yourself. My face had morphed into someone different. I turned away.

“Name?”

“Alex.” Cat was gone. I would never see her face again when I looked in the mirror. All I would see were the dead eyes and split lips.

“Age?” Dr. Kramer lifted my hand and felt for my pulse. His fingers warmed my wrist as he counted my heartbeats to the second hand on his watch. He smelled like licorice.

“Seventeen.”

He put my wrist down. “You have a strong heart,” he said.

I shook my head and turned away from him. A beating heart is not necessarily a strong one.

He pulled up the chair and sat down and cradled my hand between his; maybe he was trying to heal me, but I was through being touched. Through with men trespassing on my body.

“Let me help you. You’re a minor.”

Dr. Kramer handed me a cup with a bendy straw and lifted me by the shoulders to get a better angle for drinking. The water was warm and wet on my lips and tasted a little like the inside of the plastic pitcher it had resided in for God knows how long. I wanted ice-cold water that sweated down the sides of a glass. I wanted lemonade with extra sugar, iced tea with mint and honey; I wanted something to burn away the flashes of memory I had been having since I opened my eyes. I wanted something to take away the taste of blood that ran down my throat as he pressed my head into the ground.

“Hello, Bug,” my mother’s voice rang from the doorway. She hadn’t called me Bug since I was a little girl. “Can I come in?”