By the time Christine comes down the stairs to the children’s room, Ruby knows swimming lessons are over, and she has printed out three new bridges to consider as she finalizes her designs.
“You leaving already?” Christine asks as Ruby makes her way toward the stairs.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m staying at my mom’s, and she needs me home.”
“Oh,” Christine says, and Ruby wonders how much she knows about her mom. It seems like the whole town knows about the accident. About what happened. But not everybody knows about all the stuff that happened afterwards. That’s a secret that they’ve managed to keep.
“Well, have a nice day. Looks like that hurricane, Irene, is going to bring some rain. Hopefully it’ll hold off until after the fair,” Christine says. “Are you going this year?”
Ruby nods, but remembering Izzy and Marcy and thinking about going with them to the fair brings back all those bad feelings and so she just nods and says, “See ya.”
Bridges, like ladders and cats and cemeteries, have their own set of superstitions. Hold your breath as you cross a bridge and make a wish. The only way to reverse the bad luck of a broken mirror is to throw the shards into rushing water beneath a bridge. Never say good-bye to a friend on a bridge, or you will never see them again.
There are only two bridges in Quimby: the wide concrete bridge and the covered bridge out by the old mill. The quickest way back to her mom’s house from town is across the covered bridge. And that was the route she used to take, they all used to take. She didn’t used to think about it at all. She hardly even noticed it back then, other than remembering that she should always stop and listen to make sure there wasn’t a car coming from the other direction. The bridge can only hold one car at a time, so you’re supposed to honk to let pedestrians and bicyclists and other cars know you’re coming. She would fly across that bridge coming and going without noticing the trusses or portals, the wing walls or decks. Without understanding the physics of a bridge, how a bridge’s design depends on the laws of motion: on the irrefutable concepts of compression and tension and load. She didn’t think. She didn’t have to. She just crossed the bridge.
She is so angry with Izzy. She wishes she could rewind the last twenty-four hours. Rewind the entire last two years as a matter of fact. If she could do that then she’d just hit
pause
at the place before everything changed. She wants the feeling of the boards of the bridge deck beneath her tires again, feel the cool shade the roof makes. She wants to hear the river rushing beneath her. She wants to pause back at a time when her mom didn’t live like this, back when everything was
normal.
Maybe she’d pause at a night when she was cooking something good for dinner in the kitchen. The homemade mac ‘n’ cheese she used to make with the buttery cracker top or the pot roast that would cook all day in the slow cooker, making the house smell like a holiday. Back when Jess would use her Legos without asking because she wasn’t home and couldn’t say no and they’d wind up wrestling on the living room floor until neither one of them could remember how it started. When their hearts pounded with the effort and despite the brawl, there was this untamed happiness.
Pause:
the grassy smell of his hair, the soft worn corduroys he wore torn at the knee, the smell of dinner and hungry stomachs. Back when her daddy was still a hero, instead of half a man, before the glossy stumps of his knees made her cheeks flush and her stomach turn, when he used to carry them, one under each strong arm, as though they were footballs instead of kids.
Pause.
When their mother would shake her head, but smile, smile, smile. Back when she could ride her bike across that stupid bridge without thinking about anything but getting
home.
When home was a place she actually wanted to be.
Pause.
Just linger for a few minutes longer in this suspended place.
But there’s no pause in real life. There’s also no rewind. And there’s definitely no delete. There’s just
now
running on and on, and you can’t ever stop it, no matter what you do.
Besides, she’s not allowed to go that way anymore, by either her father or her mother. And so she takes the long way home, or what used to be home, and arrives at the house breathless, her legs trembling.
N
essa wakes up and for a few scattered, fractured moments, she has no idea where she is. She struggles to recollect all the places she has slept, all the beds she has shared, all of the floors and couches she has crashed on. Then she remembers Mica and rolls toward him, recalling the certain slant of his bed, the depth and breadth of it. But instead of a body, the hot hollow of his back or the soft skin of his stomach, she is greeted by something wet. Has he just taken a shower? Disoriented, now rising to the surface of consciousness like a diver ascending, she realizes the dampness is dew on grass.
When she opens her eyes, the first thing she sees is the silvery shimmery filament of a spider’s web. She blinks and blinks, trying to focus, to make sense, and then her eyes adjust, bringing the images into sharp relief. The bright red of her sleeping bag, a large willow tree making a canopy of branches and leaves around her, sun struggling through the green. She pulls her arm out of the sleeping bag and stares at the face of her grandfather’s watch. It is enormous on her tiny wrist, like a cartoon watch. It is almost nine o’clock. She cannot believe she was able to sleep so late, especially outside. Especially curled up in a sleeping bag under a tree.
When she hears the sound of tires crushing gravel in the distance, she starts and struggles to get out of the sleeping bag. Her instinct is to run. Her instinct is always to run. But she is stuck, a fat caterpillar inside this bloodred cocoon, and so instead of trying to escape she burrows deeper, clutching the hard round pouch of her stomach, and feels the baby stir, just the small flutters she started to feel months ago. Like an insect’s wings beating against her insides.
Inside the closed sleeping bag, she can smell herself, the impossible funk of her own flesh. She remembers the last shower she had at Mica’s, the day before she left. She recalls the delicious heat of the water, the way it massaged her aching shoulders and back. She remembers the clean minty scent of the shampoo, working it into her dreads, and then rinsing them clean. She remembers the steam filling her chest, as though even her insides were getting clean. But she also remembers the dirty grout between the cracked tiles, the filthy washcloth draped over the faucet, the missing
COLD
handle. And she remembers the pubic hair, the black hair curled on the sliver of soap. That comma, causing her to pause for a moment, to hold her breath.
She is blonde. So is Mica. And yet.
The whole summer had been a series of
and yets
. Speculations, silent accusations, explanations. Until this dark hair, this private punctuation mark causing her this one final, awful, lingering pause. It was the last straw, so to speak, this tiny little hair, this private thing shed from
who-knows-whose who-knows-what.
It really was as simple as that: a black, wiry anonymous hair on a bar of Ivory soap. It was enough to send her packing again. Onward.
But as she shoved her dirty T-shirts and crinkly long skirts into her backpack, she realized that her whole life she has been nothing but a ball stuck inside a pinball machine, racing intently toward nothing, meeting obstacle after obstacle along the way, walls she smashed into. Bouncing from one place to the next—never resting long before being thrust from whatever small comfort she has found. This comfort, that comfort, each no more permanent or reliable than the next.
But she had no money, none of her own anyway. And so in a fit of rage and desperation, she’d raided Mica’s drawers, where she knew he kept his cash. He’d gotten the idea earlier that summer to grow weed in the attic of the rented house. There was a hidden crawlspace upstairs near the bathroom. And so he’d bought some seeds from some guy he knew,
magic beans
he called them, and spent every last cent he had on grow lights and timers, some primitive hydroponic equipment. Ten plants under hot lights hidden in the recesses of the house. And soon, the entire house smelled like Christmas. The pungent green scent seeped into the air, the misty air that filled the upstairs where they slept. All summer long he’d cared for them. At the worst moments, she was jealous of the plants, envied the way he nurtured them, the gentleness of his touch. At night he would check on them as though they were sleeping children. (She had even been foolish enough to think that this was evidence that he might make a good father.)
It took eight weeks before they were ready to harvest. And now, all that tenderness had offered its rewards. He’d harvested nearly three pounds of weed, which he’d hung to dry in their closet. Every item of clothing she owned was saturated with the scent of it. Earlier that week she knew he’d sold at least a pound of it, but he hadn’t told her how much he got. “Enough to pay the rent,” he’d said. “And the electricity bill.” He’d laughed, the grow lights pulsing like something alive through the cracks in the attic crawl space door.
He was still sleeping, so she went quietly back into the bedroom, trailing water across the dusty floor, and she told herself that he owed her this. That she had somehow earned it. Stupid cheating motherfucker.
There should be at least a couple thousand dollars, she thought. But when she reached stealthily into the drawer, pushing aside the ragged pairs of boxer shorts and threadbare socks, just four hundred dollars remained. The rest of it was already gone. And this, almost more than anything, infuriated her. The first of the month when all the bills came due was weeks away, but he’d already spent it.
Only four hundred bucks, but it was enough to pay for a bus ticket. Enough to go home.
She’d been running away when she left Vermont. But no one had followed. Though it killed her to think about it, her mother had probably been relieved. She was caught up in so much of her own shit back then, dealing with Nessa was just one more headache. But it had been two years; maybe things had changed with her mom, wherever she is. Nessa is practically an adult now. She’d be eighteen in just two more months. She wasn’t a child anymore.
She’d walked out of Mica’s, clutching the fistful of cash, not even glancing back up at that falling-down house as she made her way to the bus stop. She knew she didn’t have long. As soon as Mica woke up and realized she’d stolen the money, he was certain to try to find her at all their haunts. She didn’t have a single friend in Portland who wouldn’t tell Mica exactly where she was. She had nowhere to go. No one to go to. The realization of this should have hit her in the gut like a fist, but instead she felt nothing. Her whole life, just bounced around like a pinball, aimless, pointless.
Ding, ding, ding.
She cupped the growing mound of her stomach and hung her head down to her chest. She felt nothing. No fear. No sadness. Not even any anger anymore.
She’d stood in the bus station at Pioneer Courthouse Square watching as each bus screeched to a halt, huffing in a strange exasperation, its doors opening, one impatient driver after the next waiting for her to make up her mind. And then she’d reached into her bag and pulled out the note. It was tattered now, worn from sitting in the bottom of her purse. The ink smudged. She touched her fingers to his name and tried not to think about the last time she’d been thrown out, hurled into the darkness by someone with such carelessness and thoughtlessness.
Maybe all of this, the pubic hair, the money, the baby, were all signs that it was time to go back home and deal with this. To go back to her mom. To find him. To make things right. She didn’t believe in fate, but she did believe in being a decent human being.
Now, she peers out of the sleeping bag, which is too hot, the smell of her own body unbearable. The morning air smells clean, green; her nostrils flare with relief. She peers through the shaggy leaves of the tree, feeling like a child hiding under a table, peeking out from under the tablecloth. She can see a man in a uniform climbing a telephone pole. It’s just a telephone man. An ordinary man. A man in a gray-green uniform with a job to do. A man who fixes things. The simplicity of this vision hits her hard. Like a whack on the back to someone with something lodged in his throat. The simple image of this man dislodges a blockage, and she can suddenly breathe again.
None of the men she knows are like this. None of them honest, purposeful, hardworking men. It’s no wonder she’s been so directionless. She has been surrounded by aimlessness, by purposelessness, her whole life. Her grandfather was the only decent man she ever knew, but he’s long gone. Even Mica, who she wanted to believe could one day be this kind of man, an ordinary man, turned out to be as substantial and trustworthy as dust. The things she found attractive about him at first became the things she most despised. His tenderness became weakness. His affection toward others became betrayal. His easiness was really just apathy. Because while he seemed to care about everything (everyone), he really didn’t care about anything at all. And this, more than that black hair, that dirty black coil on that clean white soap, was why she left.
She is afraid to move, to make a sound. She wishes her sleeping bag were green instead of red. She is hardly camouflaged here in the woods. She is like a crimson blood spot among all this green. But the man on the pole is so intent on his job, he does not notice her. She imagines herself an apple fallen to the ground. She is only a maple leaf, a wild strawberry, a poppy. She dreams herself a chameleon, blending into her surroundings, becoming one with her environment. Blending in.
It’s been a long time since she’s been this intimate with nature. When she left Vermont, she went as far away as she could, arriving in LA where she met a couple of girls who were driving to Portland. And on the way north from California, they slept inside coves and under piers, awakening each morning to the sound of the surf and the squealing squawk of gulls. She camped among the redwoods, slept in the back of pickup trucks, in backseats, in vans. When she first arrived in Portland, she lived with another girl in Woodstock Park for three weeks before she met Mica. Though in Portland, even in the park, it seemed like there were always others like her around. A community of wanderers. But now that she is back here where she started, there is no longer the illusion of friendship, or companionship. Even her mother is gone, and she is alone. Well, almost alone.
The baby kicks her hard just under her breastbone and she gasps at the pain. The man on the pole turns his head, as though looking for the source of the sound. She holds still, presses her hand against her stomach to still the baby. To still her own heart as it clangs and bangs inside her chest. She remains motionless, a statue, a tree, afraid to move even an inch. And soon he goes back to work, but she knows she needs to keep moving. She can’t stay here, not in the naked light of morning. She needs to keep moving or to find proper shelter. A good place to hide until she can figure out where, exactly, to find him. How to go about this.
And so as soon as his truck pulls away, she scurries out of her sleeping bag, rolls everything back into her pack, and then takes off up the river’s edge, thinking she will bathe here later. Tonight when the sun goes down again. She imagines the water taking the debris of the last week, the detritus of a lifetime disappearing downstream.
She has blisters on her feet from her sneakers, and so she slips them off and shoves them in the side pockets of her backpack. She doesn’t have any socks, so her feet are bare. Tanned and dirty. The silver toe ring she lifted from a bikini shop in Venice Beach sparkles in the sun. Her heels are callused, conditioned to the elements: hot sand, burning pavement. She feels primitive without her shoes on,
free.
Her flesh barely registers the pine needles and branches, the twigs and stones and pinecones underneath her. She could belong to a different time, she thinks as she claws her way through the thick foliage. To a time before shoes, a time before clothes.
She only walks for about ten minutes before she sees the structure, and she can barely believe her luck. It looks like some sort of shack, a hunting cabin, she thinks. It is falling down, nobody’s house. Abandoned. There is one window, but it is broken: a hole at the center of the glass from which an intricate pattern of spidery cracks emanates. The roof is caved in on one side, and the foliage has grown around it, camouflaging it. It is perfect. But it’s on the other side of the river, which has, somehow, gotten wider here. It doesn’t look deep, but the water is moving fast. One wrong step and she could get swept away, or at least dragged across the rocks. Her center of balance has shifted with the baby. She used to be agile, strong. Now she feels clumsy, uncertain in her own skin. But what choice does she have? And so she tentatively tests the first flat stone she can find. The water is freezing cold, and the rock is slippery, but her toes are strong and she has to trust her calluses. She grabs a low-hanging branch to steady herself and she holds on tightly as she makes her way to the next stone and the next. The shock of the water is somehow both violent and assuring. She is alive. She is awake. She is making progress across this body of water. By the time she reaches the opposite bank, she is trembling with adrenaline, and her chest swells with a sense of accomplishment. She looks around, as though waiting for approval from the trees. As though someone should applaud her efforts. But she is met only with the silent stare of a thousand invisible eyes. All creatures besides herself hiding in the dark green shadows.
She runs, the backpack slamming against her back. The tendons beneath the swell of her stomach stretching, aching. She knows this baby isn’t going to wait much longer; she can only hope she’ll wait long enough. She wonders for a moment about that midwife the waitress mentioned, and her throat swells. She hasn’t seen a doctor since she slunk into the Planned Parenthood this winter and had her fears confirmed. And she has refused to do the math, to count backwards to figure out how close she is. But the baby reminds her, whispers and nudges.
Soon,
it says.
Soon.
The door to the shack is hanging from one hinge, but it is unlocked. It is open. It is hers. And it is home. For now.