T
his is how it begins. It doesn’t take much. Light. Sound. Something out of place. Simple discord is the trigger that detonates the explosion. That sets into motion the series of reactions that occur again and again, the dominos
click click clicking
in a beautiful, organized, and systematic destruction.
It is an illness, they tell Sylvie.
Generalized anxiety, panic disorder, PTSD, agoraphobia.
The labels meaningless, useless to her. And all of it, incurable. It is simply something she must learn to
manage.
To control. But what they don’t realize, these doctors with their bald spots and diagnoses, is that she can no sooner control this than she can control a speeding bullet. Or
they
can control a mutating cancerous cell. It has a life of its own. Her fear is a breathing thing.
It may be a
mental
illness, but its manifests here: here in the hollow of her throat, in the sinews of her neck. In her gut. Sometimes even deep inside her breasts. It can feel like pain. It can also, sometimes, feel like desire. Like hunger. It’s as though every yearning of the body, every extreme physical response is happening at once, hot and cold becoming one new sensation, a frigid incalescence that makes her sweat cold beads and shiver even as her limbs burn. When she tried to explain this feeling, one doctor suggested it was hormonal, only the early onset of menopause.
“I’m thirty-six years old,” she had said.
And he’d smiled, condescended. “You’d be surprised.”
She didn’t bother to go on. To tell him about the way it feels like her heart is a train, a puffing, accelerating locomotive that is racing, but that there are no tracks beneath it. It has derailed inside her body, crashing inside her chest. She didn’t talk about the vertigo that follows, the complete upending of her world. That once, one of the last times she went out in public, she had to lie down in the middle of the grocery store and even then the world would not stop turning. A broken carnival ride, the centripetal force not quite strong enough to keep her from being thrown off. There are not enough metaphors for what her body is doing to her. And despite what they say, it is her
body
that is defying her. It is not her mind; her mind is the only thing that seems to remain calm when her body is failing. It is her mind that saves her, that rights her. That is able to talk her body off the ledge. Her mind is the great hostage negotiator, convincing Madness into relinquishing her body. Into releasing her. She understands that this sounds insane. She is aware that this is not normal. But sadly, in this knowledge is no power.
When the floodlights click on outside, she is jolted from sleep, disoriented for only a moment before the first domino goes down. She knows what to expect. Even as her body begins its panic dance, her mind quietly waits. Stands at the edge of her body holding the megaphone, promising that it will all be over soon. Assuring everyone inside that if they remain calm and listen and do what it says, no one will be harmed.
Harm.
Every inch of her body is informed by the possibility of harm.
She reaches into the drawer only when the locomotive Tilt-A-Whirl fever dream becomes too much, when she fears it has brought her, at last, to the end. When she believes, truly, that her heart will simply cease to beat. That it will retreat. That it will, at last, just shut down, systems overloaded, nuclear meltdown.
Here is the drawer. Here is the gun. Her grandmother’s pistol passed down, like a recipe for strudel. Like brown eyes. Like mental illness. The gun.
The object has ceased to be what it is. It is no longer the symbol of safety it can be for some. It is not an instrument of destruction, a weapon. It is just cold comfort in her palm. The metallic shiver that cools her entire body down to a low simmer. It is just a symbol. An abstract. It is calm. It is calm. It is calm.
I
n the morning, her mother offers her cereal, and Ruby is grateful that she has not made pancakes again. It is as though the absence of pancakes signifies a new understanding between them. Yet still, they sit across from each other at the table and she chews silently while her mother simply stares into her tea.
“Did you hear something outside last night?” her mother asks, softly, finally.
“Probably just the raccoons, Mom,” Ruby says, and tries not to think about the drawer. About the way it made her feel. Sort of tender and vulnerable, like a new bruise.
Her mom nods, but Ruby can tell she doesn’t believe her. Her eyes have that scared wild look they get sometimes. Like they got the last time.
“Really, Mom. It’s nothing. Bunk set the traps. We’ll catch the mama soon.”
Her mom nods, agreeing with her, but she’s still wringing her hands. “You know, I read in the paper that people are going around stealing copper. Ripping pipes right out of people’s houses,” she said. “Wires.”
Ruby tries to imagine someone coming to steal the house’s innards. It’s ridiculous. The last time she was here, the time when the ambulance came, started this way too. Her mom had convinced herself that somebody was trying to break in then as well. The whole time Ruby was there, she kept talking about vandals, about trespassers. When she misplaced her good scissors, she had made Bunk install motion lights on the back of the house. Never mind Ruby found the scissors under the bathroom sink a week later when she was looking for Q-tips; her mother still insisted that somebody had an eye on the house. That they had to be vigilant unless they wanted to lose everything. Ruby didn’t remind her that everything was already lost.
“It might just be the wind,” Ruby says. “Maybe from that storm everybody’s been talking about.” Ruby
has
noticed a shift in the air, and it’s not just autumn coming on. She’s sensitive to that sort of thing since the accident. They lost a lot of things that night: Jess, her daddy’s legs. And even her mom too in a way, though not right away. But Ruby was the only one who seemed to
gain
something. Because instead of getting numb to things the way people sometimes do, her senses seemed to get all fired up. Raw. In the fifth grade last year, Mrs. Lawson brought in a book written in braille. She made them close their eyes and run their fingers across the bumpy pages. The world is like that for her now. Textured. She can feel it, and, sometimes, if she pays close enough attention, she can even make out what it’s trying to tell her. Last night it was telling her that something is coming, but it isn’t burglars. It isn’t as easy as thieves.
Her mom nods into her tea, but Ruby can still tell she’s not convinced.
“I think maybe we need to build a fence.”
“A fence?” Ruby says, and for some reason she thinks about the fence around Izzy’s house in Quimby. It’s a storybook fence, like
Tom Sawyer,
like
Dick and Jane,
protecting a storybook house. Going to Izzy’s house is like heading right into the pages of a book. Even the sky in town is a fairytale sort of sky with cotton candy clouds, a bright yellow sun. Sometimes she half expects the grass itself to feel like paper under her feet. That somebody could turn the page, and Izzy and she would just disappear.
“Mom, I really don’t know anything about building a fence.”
“Oh, come on,” she says, smiling. “Remember that time we helped Daddy build that fort for you and Jess?”
Jess. This is the first time she has heard her mother say his name in a long time. It stuns them both.
Ruby nods, thinks of Jess giving their dad instructions (
It needs a roof and a trap door and, and, and . . .
). She remembers her mother standing in the woods with them, watching, blowing warm air into her hands. It was fall, and the leaves were gone from the trees, lying in scattered heaps on the ground. Every step they took into the woods was so loud. Each crush and crumble amplified. And something about this memory, something about the recollection of that sound, and the memory of her mother making hot chocolate for all of them afterwards, the way their hands were chapped and pink from the cold, makes her nod.
“Okay.”
“I think there are some sheets of plywood in the shed,” her mom says, clearing the dirty dishes, carrying them to the sink. She turns her back to Ruby and says, “It can’t be hard. We’ll figure it out. Maybe after swimming lessons.”
Swimming lessons. All summer long she’s been spending five mornings a week at the town pool, but what her dad doesn’t know, what her mother doesn’t know, but what every other kid and all the teenaged lifeguards at the pool
do
know, is that Ruby has not once gotten into the water. For the entire summer, she has ridden her bike to the pool, gone to join her classmates, and then sat on the cold concrete edge, her feet dangling into the water, shivering, teeth chattering, boys jeering, teacher coaxing and then pleading and then finally retreating. Defeated. All of them. Whispers swirling in the chlorine-scented, cold-water mornings,
Her brother . . . I heard she almost drowned too . . .
For an hour every single weekday morning for the whole summer, she has watched the other kids, most of them at least four years younger than she, jumping and splashing and swimming. Blowing bubbles and floating on their backs and clinging to the edge of the pool while kicking their feet gleefully. And when the hour finally ended, she’d stand up, wrap her towel around her, meet Izzy, who is in the Junior Lifeguard class, and they’d go to the locker room where they would both stand under the weak spray. As long as she came home with wet hair, her dad didn’t ask questions.
Today, she goes through the motions again, arriving at the pool just before the lesson is about to start. She leaves her bike with all the others on the grassy area outside the pool gate. She wraps her towel around her waist and goes to the entrance where some pimply teenage boy who smiles too much finds her name on the checklist and then says, “Have fun!”
She can see Izzy at the deep end of the pool. The Junior Lifeguard class all wear red Speedo bathing suits, but even from here she recognizes Izzy by her long blond hair. Today they are learning CPR; she can see the dummy lying at the edge of the pool, the line of students waiting to revive it.
Marcy Davidson is in the class too, though until today Ruby hasn’t thought twice about her. The best policy, the
only
policy that works with Marcy, is to pretend she doesn’t exist. To acknowledge her at all is to make yourself vulnerable. Both Ruby and Izzy have learned that the hard way. But today, instead of ignoring Marcy, Ruby watches her. She watches the way Izzy and she lean into each other, bare shoulders touching, heads touching, as they whisper.
Ruby walks as quickly as she can to her spot with the other Tadpoles and takes her usual seat at the edge. Her teacher, Nora, walks over to her and tickles her feet, as though she were seven (like the rest of the class) instead of eleven.
“Coming into the water today?” she asks Ruby (as she has asked Ruby every single day this summer). And Ruby shakes her head.
“Okay, you let me know if you change your mind,” she says and moves on to the next kid. Ruby knows Nora has given up on her, which should be a relief, but her lack of effort today makes her feel even more like a lost cause.
From here Ruby watches Izzy and Marcy in their matching red suits, and feels her heart sink. The friendship bracelet that Ruby gave Izzy for her ninth birthday, the one she made (their favorite colors—purple and green—woven together with little wooden heart beads with their initials), the one that Izzy hasn’t taken off once for the last two years, is gone. Her brown wrist is bare, leaving only the fluorescent white tan line where the bracelet used to be. She thinks for a minute that it must have finally broken, that the threads, eaten away by chlorine, finally snapped. But she knows how strong it was. Her dad let her use some of his fishing line to reinforce the delicate threads. She also knows that when it started to break before, Gloria helped her fix it. Izzy never takes it off. Not ever.
Ruby stares at Izzy as if she could communicate how mad and sad she is through telepathy (they used to practice reading each other’s minds back in the fourth grade too). But Izzy is busy with Marcy. She doesn’t even look Ruby’s way. Ruby feels her eyes begin to sting and suddenly she realizes she can’t sit through another swimming lesson. Not today. Not any day.
Besides, her dad is gone, and what can her mom do to stop her from just leaving? They might call her father, but he’s in North Carolina. And the phone at her mom’s is still out. She can leave. She can just go. And so that is exactly what she does.
She stands up, wraps the towel around her waist again, and walks to the kid at the gate. “I don’t feel good. I’m going home,” she says. It’s as easy as that.
He looks at her, still grinning that stupid, pimply grin, but he doesn’t stop her. And she wonders why she didn’t think of this sooner.
She untangles her bike from the pile, kicking the pedal loose from somebody else’s chain, and then takes off, wobbling until she gets momentum and then rights herself. She pedals furiously, realizing she forgot to wet down her hair, but doesn’t care. She’s leaving. But to where? She can’t go home, not yet. She cranks her head around to look back toward the pool, on the off chance that Izzy might have noticed and decided to come after her. But she can’t see anything except for a blur of red bathing suits, all trying to bring that stupid dummy back to life.
She doesn’t have any other friends she can go to, not really. There are plenty of girls she gets along with at school, but in the summertime it’s just her and Izzy. Which was fine until now.
With her dad and Bunk gone, she really only has one other place she can go. And so she rides her bike to the library. It’s not open yet, but she knows the children’s librarian, Christine, sometimes comes early. And if she knocks, she’ll let her in.
“Well, good morning, Ruby,” Effie, the lady who drives the bookmobile, says, smiling at her. She can see she’s got one of her daughters with her today.
Plum,
that’s her name. She’s in the first grade at Ruby’s school. “Go ahead downstairs. Christine should be here any minute. I’ll let her know you’re down there. Do you know how to turn on the lights?”
Ruby nods and smiles, moving past them to the stairs. Downstairs in the quiet children’s room, she immediately begins to feel calmer. More rational. She finds her favorite spot in the computer area and writes her name in careful cursive on the sign-in sheet even though there isn’t anyone else here. The computers aren’t on yet, so she turns each one on. She knows the password to get online and so she makes sure all of the computers are ready for when the library opens. Christine told her she’s always welcome in the library, that she trusts her. This makes her feel grown-up, important. She doubts there’s a single kid her age that has the same privilege.
It is here, in the musty children’s room, all summer long, she’s studied the world’s most famous bridges, examined the photos, read about their designs. She’s spent hours at the long counter of computers, exploring: traversing the great bodies of water via the most beautiful structures of all time. She’s sat in the library for hours, clicking through the images of bridges, reading their specifications, their histories, their myths. Christine lets her print out some of the pictures, which she takes home and hangs in her room. The wall behind her desk is pocked with thumbtack holes from the photos. There must be a thousand bridges by now. She thinks about the One Direction poster on Izzy’s door, and she feels that sinking awful feeling again. Maybe she should have seen this coming sooner. Maybe she should have realized that Izzy wasn’t nearly as excited about bridges as she was.
Is.
Ruby loves the great suspension bridges, of course. Everybody does. The Golden Gate Bridge. The Tsing Ma. The Ikuchi in Japan. She wonders at the cable-stayed bridges with their fans or harp designs: the Zhivopisny, the Machang, the Queen Elizabeth II. She is awed by the architecture of arches, the magical geometry of cantilevers and trusses. She has dreamed herself across rivers and lakes, bays and inlets, estuaries and straits. In that musty, dark basement she has stood in the pavilions of the most beautiful wind and river bridges of China. She has peered down from the deck of the Millau Viaduct in France to the River Tarn below. She has walked through the caterpillar-like Henderson Waves in Singapore, felt dizzy atop the Trift Bridge in the Swiss Alps and the Hussaini Hanging Bridge in Pakistan.
The language of bridges sounds like poetry to her.
Bascule, brace, caisson. Camber, cantilever, catwalk.
She recites the terms like words on her vocabulary lists from school, as if there might be a test and that these are the answers:
diaphragm, gabion, lattice pylon.
This is her lullaby at night. It is her song.
Riprap, roller nest, strut, truss, vault.
She hates Izzy for ditching her. There’s no way they can get the bridge design done in time if Izzy is busy with Marcy Davidson. She’s going to have to do this one alone. The bridge she wants to build is one that’s never been made before. At least she doesn’t think it has. Izzy says there’s no way of knowing. With all the bodies of water and all the bridges in the world, there’s bound to be one like the one in her dreams. But she doesn’t think so. Because it feels like it belongs to her. Like it’s hers alone. There aren’t many things she can say that about, but this is one of them. She doesn’t have a brother anymore. She doesn’t really have her mother. Now she doesn’t even have Izzy. But she does have this. This magical bridge, a bridge that will traverse any body of water. That combines the strength of the best suspension bridges with the beauty of the wind and rain bridges. That will seem to break the laws of physics, even as it depends on them. It will be a structural miracle.