I
t is hard to remember each other. It is hard to recollect the ease and familiarity with which they used to interact. It is nearly impossible to capture the way they used to take each other for granted. The way they used to make each other feel safe.
Robert is damaged. His body ravaged by the accident. He has lost so much, and must be reminded of the absence each time he looks at the place where his legs used to be. At the things he can no longer do. At the cruelties of a world that rarely compensates or complies with his new needs.
“What do you want?” she asks him, wondering when the last time was that anyone asked him this. “Do you want to move to North Carolina?”
He studies her as though he is leery of her sincerity. This distrust is something she will never get used to, but she is the one who has brought it about. She is the one to blame for his inability to believe in her.
“No,” he says. “I thought I did.”
And so she nods.
Robert has always run away. This is what he does. He flees. He seeks. And she hunkers down. She stays; she closes herself up. What they need is a compromise. What they need is to meet somewhere in between. They need to find this bridge, the one that will traverse the chasm that has grown between them.
For now, what this means is that she lives in a rented house in town while he stays three streets over at Bunk’s. Ruby passes between them, spending every other night with her. Robert comes over those nights for dinner. And they sit together around the small wooden table, big enough only for three. And after Ruby goes to bed, they talk. Sometimes, they talk about the future. About where to go from here. But most of the time, they talk about the past. The waters between, the
now,
are treacherous, they both know this and they are still looking for the materials to use to build this bridge. It is not something to be thrown together haphazardly. Bridges built in haste are never safe. This is something that Ruby has taught them both.
One night in October when the moon outside is as bright as the sun, they sit together on the porch, looking out at the leaves that rush across the street like a river. Sylvie turns to Robert. And she wonders at how he can be both so familiar and so unknowable at the same time. How have they grown so far apart?
“I need you,” Sylvie says, feeling her heart pulsing in her throat.
He turns to look at her. She thinks it is the first time he has looked at her, really looked at her since Jess died. And she wonders what he sees. For a moment, she is afraid. Terrified that she has made a terrible mistake. That exposing her vulnerability like this will ruin her. That he could destroy her now.
But his eyes are bright, reflecting the harvest moon that looms in the sky. And he takes her hand, rubs his thumb along the veins that run like rivers on her flesh. And he nods. “I’m here, Sylvie. I’m not going anywhere.”
The night of the contest, Sylvie and Robert go together to the middle school. They park in the brightly lit parking lot and she helps him out of the car and into his chair. He doesn’t need her to push his chair, and so she walks beside him, noting the ease with which he navigates the sidewalks and walkways and ramps. They nod and smile at the other parents who have come to watch their children compete, and Sylvie focuses on each moment. On each breath. She is learning to listen to her body’s responses and to use both her breath and her logic to calm herself. It is not easy, but it helps. She has a long, long way to go. But each outing like this, each trip to the grocery store that ends well, each visit with Gloria, feels like an accomplishment.
Ruby is here already. She’s been here all afternoon with the other competitors. She and Izzy have repaired what was broken in their friendship, but Ruby has insisted on doing this alone. Gloria and Neil and Izzy are sitting in the front row. They have saved the aisle seat for her, and there is room for Robert’s chair next to it.
“Hi,” Gloria says, standing up and reaching out for Sylvie. And Sylvie lets her in, lets her hold her. She imagines Gloria’s arms as something designed to support her, to hold her up. The architecture of elbows and shoulders as something built for support. All of these tricks help.
When it is Ruby’s turn to present her bridge, Sylvie feels something strange in the pit of her stomach. It is not fear exactly, not the crippling anxiety to which she has grown accustomed, but rather a happy sort of tension. Anticipation? It is difficult to locate this emotion on a map that has been dominated by fear. Identify and let go, her therapist says.
I am nervous for her,
Sylvie thinks.
I am excited for her.
As she watches Ruby explain about load, about suspension, about the importance of the design, Sylvie marvels at Ruby’s patience, at her attention to detail. It makes her think of the birds, and she wonders if maybe this is one other gift she has given her.
Ruby stands in front of her model bridge, this impossibly gorgeous and delicate construction, and Sylvie holds her breath as the judge places first one brick on its slight deck and then another and another. And
this
feeling, the one swelling inside the place where the chasm used to be, like a flood, like a rushing river, is not fear but rather
wonder
and
pride.
Because their daughter, despite everything, has built something both beautiful and indestructible.
T
here are a million stories and poems about bridges. Mrs. Jenkins, her sixth-grade English teacher, says that writers and poets have always been drawn to bridges to help them explain the distance between people and places and how those gaps can be traversed. There is a mystery about bridges. A good bridge evokes both respect and wonder.
Ruby reads about the people who built the bridges. She studies their lives, reads about their dreams. Santiago Calatrava, Thomas Telford, Christian Menn, Gustave Eiffel. She studies not only their architecture, their designs, but their lives. She thinks that everything that has happened to them influences the way they solve the problem of how to traverse a chasm. How their lives are the beams and trusses, the cantilevers and arches.
She imagines herself one day building a bridge that floats across a large body of water. A bridge that is both beautiful and indestructible, that relies on nothing but the water beneath it. She thinks about the people that will walk across its deck, who will drive over its incredible expanse. She imagines how it will connect one place to another, make the journey one that people will talk about long after they have crossed the bridge.
She reads the poems about bridges as well. Nessa gave her a Longfellow poem she found, and she told her to read it aloud. To feel the way the words trip across your tongue. Sitting on the edge of Nessa’s bed as she feeds the baby, Ruby reads aloud to her. Wren is quiet, suckling and cooing, and the air is still around them:
Yet whenever I cross the river
On its bridge with wooden piers,
Like the odor of brine from the ocean
Comes the thought of other years.
And I think how many thousands
Of care-encumbered men,
Each bearing his burden of sorrow,
Have crossed the bridge since then.
She thinks about a procession of men, each with their own sorrow, what sort of design might help bear that impossible load. She dreams the architecture of forgiveness, of understanding required to endure those burdens. This is the kind of bridge she’ll make one day, she thinks, as both Nessa and the baby drift off to sleep. This one, right here.
Discussion Questions
1.
Discuss Ruby’s obsession with bridges. How does the theme of bridge building manifest throughout the novel? What is meant by the title,
The Forever Bridge
?
2.
How does the author depict the mothers in this story (Sylvie, Nessa, Nessa’s mother, Gloria)? Compare Ruby’s relationships with Sylvie and Gloria.
3.
Sylvie suffers from crippling agoraphobia, but explains that her anxiety began long before the accident. Have you ever felt such debilitating fear?
4.
Discuss how Sylvie and Ruby individually remember Jess throughout the novel. How did his death in particular affect them separately and as a family?
5.
Nessa returns to Quimby for a number of reasons. Discuss them and the resolution for each. Do you think she’ll stay this time? If you were Nessa, would you seek out your missing mother?
6.
This novel is about mothers and daughters, but it’s about female friendships as well. Discuss the rift that grows between Ruby and Izzy. Between Gloria and Sylvie. Have you ever experienced the loss of a female friend?
7.
Fate plays an important role in this story. How does it factor into the relationships between the three main characters? Do you believe in destiny?
8.
Throughout the novel Sylvie practices taxidermy, specifically on birds. What is the significance of this hobby for her and as a metaphor in the novel? What do you think she gets out of it? After Hurricane Irene washes away her home and all of her careful work, do you think she takes it up again, or have its benefits been exhausted?
9.
Nessa comes to redefine the idea of “home” throughout the course of the novel. What does “home” mean for each of these characters? What does it mean to you?
10.
Another theme of
The Forever Bridge
is loss: Nessa’s voice and childhood, Jess, friendship, and, after the storm, shelter. What else has been lost? Have all of these things been found again? Do you think that everything that is lost can be recaptured?
11.
Discuss silence in this novel, particularly Nessa’s mutism. Is her silence a weakness or an assertion of her own will?
12.
The men are largely absent from the story, but they have an impact on these characters nevertheless. Discuss the roles that Robert, George, Mica, and Declan play in these women’s lives.
13.
A few chapters (the “here is” chapters) are written in second-person point of view. Why are they written in that style? What effect does that point of view and the “here is” style have on those scenes? What effect does it have on you, the reader?
14.
How does the storm both threaten these characters and force them into action?
Have you read all of T. Greenwood’s critically acclaimed novels?
Available in trade paperback and as e-books.
BODIES OF WATER
In 1960, Billie Valentine is a young housewife living in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, treading water in a dull marriage and caring for two adopted daughters. Summers spent with the girls at their lakeside camp in Vermont are her one escape—from her husband’s demands, from days consumed by household drudgery, and from the nagging suspicion that life was supposed to hold something different.
Then a new family moves in across the street. Ted and Eva Wilson have three children and a fourth on the way, and their arrival reignites long-buried feelings in Billie. The affair that follows offers a solace Billie has never known, until her secret is revealed and both families are wrenched apart in the tragic aftermath.
Fifty years later, Ted and Eva’s son, Johnny, contacts an elderly but still spry Billie, entreating her to return east to meet with him. Once there, Billie finally learns the surprising truth about what was lost, and what still remains, of those joyful, momentous summers.
In this deeply tender novel, T. Greenwood weaves deftly between the past and present to create a poignant and wonderfully moving story of friendship, the resonance of memories, and the love that keeps us afloat.
BREATHING WATER
Three years after leaving Lake Gormlaith, Vermont, Effie Greer is coming home. The unspoiled lake, surrounded by dense woods and patches of wild blueberries, is the place where she spent idyllic childhood summers at her grandparents’ cottage. And it’s where Effie’s tempestuous relationship with her college boyfriend, Max, culminated in a tragedy she can never forget.
Effie had hoped to save Max from his troubled past, and in the process became his victim. Since then, she’s wandered from one city to another, living like a fugitive. But now Max is gone, and as Effie paints and restores the ramshackle cottage, she forms new bonds—with an old school friend, with her widowed grandmother, and with Devin, an artist and carpenter summering nearby. Slowly, she’s discovering a resilience and tenderness she didn’t know she possessed, and—buoyed by the lake’s cool, forgiving waters—she may even learn to save herself.
Wrenching yet ultimately uplifting, here is a novel of survival, hope, and absolution, from a writer of extraordinary insight and depth.
GRACE
T. Greenwood’s extraordinary novels deftly combine lyrical prose with heartrending subject matter. Now she explores one year in a family poised to implode, and the imperfect love that may be its only salvation.
Every family photograph hides a story. Some are suffused with warmth and joy, others reflect the dull ache of disappointed dreams. For thirteen-year-old Trevor Kennedy, taking photos helps make sense of his fractured world. His father, Kurt, struggles to keep a business going while also caring for Trevor’s aging grandfather, whose hoarding has reached dangerous levels. Trevor’s mother, Elsbeth, all but ignores her son while doting on his five-year-old sister, Gracy, and pilfering useless drugstore items.
Trevor knows he can count on little Gracy’s unconditional love and his art teacher’s encouragement. None of that compensates for the bullying he has endured at school for as long as he can remember. But where Trevor once silently tolerated the jabs and name-calling, now anger surges through him in ways he’s powerless to control.
Only Crystal, a store clerk dealing with her own loss, sees the deep fissures in the Kennedy family—in the haunting photographs Trevor brings to be developed, and in the palpable distance between Elsbeth and her son. And as their lives become more intertwined, each will be pushed to the breaking point, with shattering, unforeseeable consequences.
NEARER THAN THE SKY
In this mesmerizing novel, T. Greenwood draws readers into the fascinating and frightening world of Munchausen syndrome by proxy—and into one woman’s search for healing.
When Indie Brown was four years old, she was struck by lightning. In the oft-told version of the story, Indie’s life was heroically saved by her mother. But Indie’s own recollection of the event, while hazy, is very different.
Most of Indie’s childhood memories are like this—tinged with vague, unsettling images and suspicions. Her mother, Judy, fussed over her pretty youngest daughter, Lily, as much as she ignored Indie. That neglect, coupled with the death of her beloved older brother, is the reason Indie now lives far away in rural Maine. It’s why her relationship with Lily is filled with tension, and why she dreads the thought of flying back to Arizona. But she has no choice. Judy is gravely ill, and Lily, struggling with a challenge of her own, needs her help.
In Arizona, faced with Lily’s hysteria and their mother’s instability, Indie slowly begins to confront the truth about her half-remembered past and the legacy that still haunts her family. And as she revisits her childhood, with its nightmares and lost innocence, she finds she must reevaluate the choices of her adulthood—including her most precious relationships.
THIS GLITTERING WORLD
Acclaimed author T. Greenwood crafts a moving, lyrical story of loss, atonement, and promises kept.
One November morning, Ben Bailey walks out of his Flagstaff, Arizona, home to retrieve the paper. Instead, he finds Ricky Begay, a young Navajo man, beaten and dying in the newly fallen snow.
Unable to forget the incident, especially once he meets Ricky’s sister, Shadi, Ben begins to question everything, from his job as a part-time history professor to his fiancée, Sara. When Ben first met Sara, he was mesmerized by her optimism and easy confidence. These days, their relationship only reinforces a loneliness that stretches back to his fractured childhood.
Ben decides to discover the truth about Ricky’s death, both for Shadi’s sake and in hopes of filling in the cracks in his own life. Yet the answers leave him torn—between responsibility and happiness, between his once-certain future and the choices that could liberate him from a delicate web of lies he has spun.
UNDRESSING THE MOON
Dark and compassionate, graceful yet raw,
Undressing the Moon
explores the seams between childhood and adulthood, between love and loss....
At thirty, Piper Kincaid feels too young to be dying. Cancer has eaten away her strength; she’d be alone but for a childhood friend who’s come home by chance. Yet with all the questions of her future before her, she’s adrift in the past, remembering the fateful summer she turned fourteen and her life changed forever.
Her nervous father’s job search seemed stalled for good, as he hung around the house watching her mother’s every move. What he and Piper had both dreaded at last came to pass: Her restless, artistic mother, who smelled of lilacs and showed Piper beauty, finally left.
With no one to rely on, Piper struggled to hold on to what was important. She had a brother who loved her and a teacher enthralled with her potential. But her mother’s absence, her father’s distance, and a volatile secret threatened her delicate balance.
Now Piper is once again left with the jagged pieces of a shattered life. If she is ever going to put herself back together, she’ll have to begin with the summer that broke them all . . .
THE HUNGRY SEASON
It’s been five years since the Mason family vacationed at the lakeside cottage in northeastern Vermont, close to where prizewinning novelist Samuel Mason grew up. The summers that Sam, his wife, Mena, and their twins Franny and Finn spent at Lake Gormlaith were noisy, chaotic, and nearly perfect. But since Franny’s death, the Masons have been flailing, one step away from falling apart. Lake Gormlaith is Sam’s last, best hope of rescuing his son from a destructive path and salvaging what’s left of his family.
As Sam struggles with grief, writer’s block, and a looming deadline, Mena tries to repair the marital bond she once thought was unbreakable. But even in this secluded place, the unexpected—in the form of an overzealous fan, a surprising friendship, and a second chance—can change everything.
From the acclaimed author of
Two Rivers
comes a compelling and beautifully told story of hope, family, and above all, hunger—for food, sex, love and success—and for a way back to wholeness when a part of oneself has been lost forever.
TWO RIVERS
Two Rivers
is a powerful, haunting tale of enduring love, destructive secrets, and opportunities that arrive in disguise....
In Two Rivers, Vermont, Harper Montgomery is living a life overshadowed by grief and guilt. Since the death of his wife, Betsy, twelve years earlier, Harper has narrowed his world to working at the local railroad and raising his daughter, Shelly, the best way he knows how. Still wracked with sorrow over the loss of his lifelong love and plagued by his role in a brutal, long-ago crime, he wants only to make amends for his past mistakes.
Then one fall day, a train derails in Two Rivers, and amid the wreckage Harper finds an unexpected chance at atonement. One of the survivors, a pregnant fifteen-year-old girl with mismatched eyes and skin the color of blackberries, needs a place to stay. Though filled with misgivings, Harper offers to take Maggie in. But it isn’t long before he begins to suspect that Maggie’s appearance in Two Rivers is not the simple case of happenstance it first appeared to be.