R
uby scans the room with the flashlight, terrified that Nessa has tried to leave on her own, gone out into the storm to find help. She sweeps the room with the light, as if she has missed some dark corner where she might be cowering, hiding. But there is nothing in here. No girl. It’s as though she never existed. As though she only dreamed her.
“She was just here,” she says to her mother, who stands shivering in the doorway. “I swear. Her water broke right here,” she says, gesturing to the floor. She drops to her knees and presses her hand against the floor. And it is wet. But it could just be rain that has come through the cracks in the roof overhead.
Ruby feels like she might vomit. She looks at her mother, afraid that she will think that she was trying to trick her. That she will be angry. But her mother just kneels down next to her.
“Where do you think she’s gone?”
“I don’t know,” Ruby says. “I don’t know why she would have left. I told her you were a midwife, that you could help her.” Ruby feels her entire chest expanding, her heart swelling inside of it. She sits down on the floor and looks into the dark abyss of the shack.
Her mother sits down next to her, puts her arm across her shoulder, and says, “It’s okay. We’ll find her.”
Ruby sets the flashlight down on the floor. It creates a narrow beam of light which points outside into the storm, into the night. “I’m sorry I brought you here,” she says.
Her mother shakes her head. “No, no . . .”
“I know you didn’t want to leave.”
“It’s okay,” she says and pulls Ruby in tighter. “Listen, we’ll find her. She’ll be okay.”
Ruby breathes the scent of her mother, and the scent of woods and rain and river transport her. She is sitting on the embankment as they pull Jess’s body from the river. That night, her mother had stood at the edge of the river by the broken bridge, refusing to go home. Finally, Bunk came and pulled her away, and she fought and fought.
“You don’t understand!” she kept screaming. “There was another car! There was another car! It was coming toward us, but then it just disappeared.”
Ruby had not seen another car. She had been so lost inside her book, so lost inside the story, she hadn’t realized they were falling until she saw the river outside her window, until she heard the horrific sound of her father screaming. But her mother insisted that there was another car, even as her father said,
No, no.
She must have been mistaken. It must have been the way the rain hit the streetlights. An illusion. Because there was not a single shred of evidence that there had been any other vehicle near the bridge that night. It was an accident. That is all. Robert had been distracted. There was a storm. The tires were bald, and the bridge was old. That is all. Sometimes the world is cruel. Sometimes it conspires against you, no matter what you do.
“What’s her name?” Ruby’s mother says softly.
She looks up at her mother’s face, sees how this year has changed her. There are lines around her mouth and at the edges of her eyes. The deep circles beneath her eyes are like strange shadows.
“It’s Nessa,” she says.
She nods then and stands up. “Okay. Then let’s find her. I’m sure she hasn’t gone far.”
T
hey go back out through the front door of the shack, calling her name. They circle the shack, widening the perimeter like any good search team. But it feels as though they are looking for a ghost. The sky is furious, and the wind is nearly deafening now. The entire world seems to be made of water. Below them the river rushes with a new purpose, toward what, she isn’t sure.
Even if they were to find her, Sylvie doesn’t know what they can do for her. This was not part of her midwife training. Every single child she has brought into this world has been ushered into clean sheets and warm arms. Into soft light.
She tries not to think about the possibility that there is no girl. That this is all just a dream of Ruby’s, a delusion. She tries not to think about the distinct possibility that she has passed on her own paranoia. That she has infected Ruby with her own irrational fears, her terribly vivid imagination. She needs to believe her, because the alternative is unbearable. But still, there is nothing here but woods and rain and river. The entire search seems ridiculous, futile. They are chasing a dream girl, a chimera, a ghost.
Ruby slips around to the back of the shack, taking the only light with her, and Sylvie is enveloped in a roaring blindness. She relies on sound alone to guide her back to her daughter. She runs and trips on a stump. She hears the fabric of her pant leg rip, and then feels the shocking cold of the rain against her exposed skin.
“Ruby!” she hollers, stumbling blindly toward the place where she disappeared. She uses the edge of the shack to guide her, and then she is on the other side, staring at the back of Ruby’s head. She is squatting on the ground. She turns to Sylvie, and cries, “Mom. Come here.”
M
aybe it is just this overwhelming pain, but the only memory Nessa has now, the only one there is room for, is of the night she left. It was the reason for leaving, but now it is the reason for coming home. It has driven her back here. It has
pulled
her back like some sort of invisible thread. Each day since then like a bead, but the thread is too short, and she has to keep pulling and pulling to get more slack. And now, here she is, all those beads have slipped off the strand, and she is somehow back where she started, at the hard metal clasp that holds it all together. She is delirious, covered in wet leaves, but she knows that this is her only job now: to fasten this metal clasp. To bring things, everything, full circle.
When she opens her eyes again, they fill with rain, but she sees that Ruby has come back. She is overwhelmed with relief. Gratitude. This girl, with her ratty braids and tiny hands and gentle eyes. She kneels down next to Nessa on the wet ground and puts her hand on her forehead, as though she is Nessa’s mother. Her skin is so cool against the furnace that is Nessa’s flesh. She smiles, even as the pain rips through her again.
“I brought my mom,” the girl says. “She can help you.”
Nessa focuses her eyes on the place behind the girl. Into the dark abyss of the storm. She can see the dark shape of a person, a woman. Ruby turns to her and shines the flashlight so that she is illuminated. She is wearing a jacket with a hood, and she can only see her face. But in the bright beam of light (
the headlights, flicking on suddenly, suddenly
) the recognition is absolutely certain.
She can taste the metal in her mouth. She can hear the
click, click
of her teeth. The pain is beginning to take the shape of a connection, and she is electrified as the two points of metal touch. She bites down, bites hard, her teeth grinding into each other, her mouth flooded with the tastes of gold, silver, platinum, and rust. She squeezes her eyes shut, bears down, concentrates on the clasp, holding it open just long enough to slip the loop in, and releasing it. And at once, everything is connected.
H
ere is the night the world changes, your world changes. A night of passages. From summer to fall. From childhood to adulthood. From careful whispers to total silence. You have left so much behind already, but tonight you will leave the rest behind for good. You will burn bridges tonight. You will barely stop to wonder at the flames.
Here is a man. Here are his hands. Here is his face you can barely recollect anymore. Here is the cold seat of his car, the cold wind through the crack in the window. Here is a song on the radio that sounds like the hollow insides of a tin can. Here is the joint he passes you that you put to your lips. It crackles and hisses, and the fire burns your throat before the calm descends.
Here is your body, though it doesn’t feel like it belongs to you. He has claimed it somehow, made it his own. He has annexed your ribs, your skin. Here is your body sore and weeping.
Seeping.
You can smell him in your hair and on your hands.
Here is the book he has given you, his words pressed into the fleshy paper. A souvenir? A token. A reminder. Even before it is over, it has already begun to end. He thinks he will let you go quietly. That this letting go will be an easy thing. He doesn’t know then that it will not be gentle, this severing, but violent. How could he?
Here is a river. Here is rain and a girl and a man in a car. Here you are, realizing that one day soon he will drop you off and never come back to get you again. And because you have been left before, this feels inevitable, though certainty and predictability doesn’t make it hurt any less; it only makes it hurt more.
The rain taps its condolences, its reassurances against the glass. And as you lean into the cold window, it could be any window at all. It could be the window of that one apartment where you lived with your mother, with its black-and-white floors like a checkerboard, the brown cookie jar, the curtains with the pom-poms on the hem. It could be the place you stayed when you were seven: the room in the big yellow house next to the school, where you sat at the window and watched the children get dropped off by their parents. Longed for those kisses and the brightly colored lunch boxes and rain boots. It could be the window in the motel where you stayed one summer, the one that smelled of cigarettes and mold, but that also had a broken vending machine where you could get free Pepsi whenever you wanted one. It could be the window in your classroom, any classroom, in any of the towns and cities where you lived. It could be the window in the classroom where you first met him when he came to talk to your class. Where until the day he walked in, you’d spent most every day staring out the window, waiting for the scenery to change.
Here is a man who does not belong to you. You should be accustomed to this, to this borrowing. To the temporariness of all things. Everything you have known has been yours only on loan, on lien. Your mother has taught you that anything, everything, can be repossessed.
But the sting of your body echoes the sting of all those other departures. And for a moment, you wonder if you might still have a chance to change everything.
Here is the rain, here is the river, here is the man who does not love you. Here is a girl, a stupid girl, clinging to the words he has offered as consolation.
Here is the bridge.
I
n this body made of pain, Nessa is once again sitting next to him in the front seat of the car that night. She is not wearing her seat belt so that she can sit closer to him. He is bringing her to the barn where he lives; his hand is up her skirt, playing. She can feel his fingers parting her, as though he is trying to find something. It hurts and feels good at the same time. And as they approach the bridge, she can feel the crescendo that precedes the diminuendo, the thrumming ache across her abdomen.
She sees the headlights coming, but she is caught up in her own ecstasy. She is high too, they are both stoned on the weed they smoked in the ice-arena parking lot. And now, as his fingers continue to push and probe and he grabs her hand and presses it against the hard knob in his lap, she is too high to remind him that he needs to honk. To warn the car that’s coming through.
The bridge is only wide enough for one vehicle. And as they round the corner, she can see that his headlights have dimmed again, because he hasn’t bothered to get them fixed. He is careless, careless, and so it is a ghost car. Invisible in the night as they move toward the bridge, but then, just as they are about to enter the bridge, his lights come on, illuminating the faces of the people in the car. She can see the small
o
’s of their mouths as they materialize, as they realize what is happening. She sees the woman and watches the man yank the wheel as though he can still right things, as though he can change their trajectory, their destiny with one precise correction.
But it is too late. Declan hits the brakes, but the other car swerves to avoid them, and she hears the crush and scream of metal as it strikes the side of the bridge.
She watches through the rain-splattered windshield as the car teeters at the edge of the bridge and then as all of it collapses: as the walls break, as the roof caves in, as the car plummets into the river.
“Stop!” she screams at him. “Stop!”
She has
spoken,
she is sure of it, but for some reason he cannot hear her. It’s as if she has not spoken at all, as if this one word—this demand, this plea—this desperate utterance is completely imperceptible to his ear. Because he does
not
stop.
Instead he backs up, as though he could just reverse everything that has happened, as though he can simply rewind. And then, he flips the car around and accelerates.
She scrambles into the backseat and stares through the odd viewfinder that is the rear window. When she turns back to him again, he meets her glance in the rearview mirror, looks her in the eye, sees the wreckage he has caused, and keeps on going.
Now, for a moment, she feels like she has returned. That instead of fleeing she is
inside
that covered bridge, enclosed in darkness, on the edge of disaster. The wind howls, the rain is beating down now, and she is worried the roof will collapse. That this is the world’s way of punishing her, or exacting its perfect and precise revenge.
S
ylvie peers into the girl’s face. She is able to tell simply by her pallor, by the way her eyes have gone blank, unfocused, far away, that she is inside herself now. It won’t be long. She is both absent and fully present. Her body is doing the work now, while her mind disappears.
They need to get her back inside the shack. It is wet and filthy out here. It is too dark to see. Somehow Sylvie is able to coax her onto her knees and the girl crawls, like an infant, like an animal, back into the shack. Inside she rocks and moans. Sylvie has seen women give birth in this position. She readies herself for what will come next.
“I need to check your cervix,” she says to the girl, who nods, nods. She is compliant; she will do anything Sylvie says. And so she eases her onto her back on the floor, slipping the rolled up towel that Ruby brought under her head. She uses hand sanitizer that Ruby has also brought to clean her hands, and she reaches inside the girl whose body convulses and resists. Despite the frigid air around them, the girl’s body is furiously hot. Feverish. She tries not to think about infection. About what could go wrong.
She is fully dilated. The baby is coming.
Her hands remember. All of this. Sylvie is in a fugue state as she goes through all of the necessary motions. She layers the floor beneath the girl with clean towels. She takes the Thermos of hot water and pours it onto another fresh towel. She will use this to clean the baby. She takes a lighter from her pocket and sterilizes the scissors. And then she does what she has always done best. She calms the girl, she assures her that she can do this. That there is nothing, not a single thing, in the world that she should fear.