The Forever Bridge (9 page)

T
he very first bridges in history were the ones made by nature: something as simple as a fallen tree across a ravine making it possible to cross from one place to another. And the earliest man-made bridges were simple: just limbs lashed together, stones. They served a basic purpose: to get from a familiar place to the unknown.

But while the earliest bridges were built simply out of necessity—to get safely from one place to the next—function was not enough. The Romans wanted not only utility but endurance. The oldest bridge that is still in existence, and still in use, is the Arkadiko Bridge in Greece. It was built in 1300 BC, an arch bridge built to traverse a stream, made using limestones, Cyclopean masonry. This bridge was made for chariots. Ruby dreams of going there someday, of traveling along the same stone steps as the Ancient Grecian people. As the gods even.

The Alcántara Bridge, built over the Tagus River in Spain, an arch bridge also made of stone, was inscribed:
Pontem perpetui mansurum in saecula
(I have built a bridge which will last forever). She has studied this bridge that has survived not only the elements but war. This everlasting bridge. She has sketched the arches in her notebook.

This is the kind of bridge Ruby wants to make. Not necessarily one made of stone or even of this design, but the kind of bridge that
survives,
that is immune to natural disasters and to destruction by people. She wants a bridge that won’t crumble. That will last.

She doesn’t need Izzy. She can do this on her own. But there are just a couple of weeks left until school starts. She needs to get the designs from Izzy. She needs to finish them and finalize her plans. The bridge they’ll make at school will be miniature, just a model. But what if she could actually build a
real
bridge? To really test the design before the contest? The mere thought of it, the possibility of it, makes her not feel so bad about Izzy. About Marcy Davidson. And so, after the phone company guy comes and fixes the phone, she decides to take a walk down by the river. That’s one thing she hasn’t thought about, something they don’t really take into account in the contest either. A bridge relies upon what it bridges. Upon the land that will support it.

“I’m going for a walk,” Ruby says. Her mother is sitting at the table with a dead bird laid on newspaper in front of her. The smell of alcohol is strong. It turns Ruby’s stomach.

“What about the fence?” her mother says.

“I’m doing research for a school project. It’s
required.
”

“But school hasn’t even started yet.”

Ruby rolls her eyes even though there is no way in the world her mother would know about the bridge project or about Izzy or about anything that has her stomach in knots.

“It’s a contest,” Ruby says. “We had the whole summer to work on it. But Izzy was supposed to help, and now I’m doing it by myself.”

“Oh,” her mother says, and Ruby waits. For something. She doesn’t even know what it is she wants. She doesn’t really want to talk about Izzy, but she’s mad at her mom for not knowing something is wrong. For not asking. She doesn’t want to tell her about the way it made her feel to see Izzy and Marcy leaning into each other at the pool, the way her heart ached when she noticed that the friendship bracelet was gone. Her mother doesn’t know there was a friendship bracelet to begin with. She doesn’t know the secret language that she and Izzy made up (the one like pig latin but with “izzyuby” instead of “ay” at the ends of words). She doesn’t know that when she spends the night at Izzy’s house, they like to sleep head to toe in Izzy’s big bed. She doesn’t know how much she loves the smell of the detergent that Gloria uses, that she falls asleep with Izzy’s ankles pressed against her cheeks, smelling that smell in Izzy’s extra pillow. She doesn’t know about the times she and Izzy have dreamed themselves grown up, living next door to each other with their families. That they’ve got a name for the company they’ll start together. That they have shared dreams the way other girls share hairbrushes and candy. And so she doesn’t know how it feels like somebody tore her heart out. That she feels like she’s missing something so big it left a sinkhole where it once was. She doesn’t know that she feels, suddenly, like half a girl.

“Okay, then,” her mom says, looking up from the dead bird.

Ruby could say something now. She could go to her, to sit in her mother’s lap, let her stroke her hair. She can see in her mother’s eyes that this is what she wants of her, but she has forgotten how to give it.

And so she does nothing.

And her mother looks down at the bird again. “Don’t be gone long.”

Ruby glances up at the clock on the wall. But the battery died a long time ago, and so it is always 7:21 in the kitchen. Always either dawn or dusk.

“And lock the door behind you?”

Ruby checks to make sure she has her key, and then she locks her mom inside. As she walks across the backyard, she wonders when the last time was that anybody mowed the grass. Something about this makes her angry. She thinks about Izzy’s lawn again, about the tulips and irises that pop up in the spring, the yard littered not with trash and debris but daisies and black-eyed Susans. She starts to kick a beer can that has washed up onto the yard from the river like seashells on a beach and then instead, she stops, mid-kick, and picks it up. She tries to crush the can in her fist the way she’s seen both her dad and Bunk do, but she’s not strong enough. It just dents in on one side a little bit. And so she chucks it back onto the ground and takes off.

The river isn’t wide enough here to make a bridge necessary. With a good run, she can leap across it. The water’s pretty shallow here too, though if she’s not running fast enough she might land in the marshy edge and get her feet wet. There’s not much on the other side: just woods. Beyond that there’s a farm and a cemetery. Sometimes Izzy and she used to go there and play. It’s the old cemetery where everyone’s been dead for a hundred years or more. The gravestones are crumbly. You can’t even read the names on some of the stones because they’re covered with moss. Jess is buried in the town cemetery by the high school in the new part where the stones are so shiny you can see your reflection in them. She’s only been there once, for the burial. She spent the whole time staring at her shoes so she wouldn’t have to look at that tiny white casket.

The river divides the people who live out here in the boonies from the rest of the town. They’re almost like an island, she thinks, which is actually kind of nice. A bridge would change that though. The kind of bridge she plans to make anyway.

The idea behind a bridge is getting somebody safely from one place to another. But she wants her bridge to be more than that. The best bridges aren’t just about function but about beauty too. Over forty million people either visit or cross the Golden Gate Bridge every single year. Of course, most of them are the people who are driving to and from work; those are the people who drive across without even thinking twice about it. But then there are those who go all the way to San Francisco just to see the Golden Gate Bridge, just to drive or walk across the 4,200 feet of the San Francisco Bay.

She walks along the river’s other bank, studying the land at the edge, taking notes in her notebook. She worries a little that Izzy still has all of her designs on her computer. She can’t imagine she would steal them, but you just never know. That’s one thing she’s certain of. People do surprising things. The people you trust the most are sometimes the ones who betray you the worst. And the people you love more than anything are the ones who will break your heart.

It’s another windy day today, which is a good thing. It reminds her that building bridges is not just about designing something that will keep your feet dry. It’s also about creating a structure that will withstand the elements. Rain, wind, snow, and ice. Vermont gets all of that and more. That’s why covered bridges are so popular here. That’s why every calendar of Vermont you ever see has one on the cover.

Finally, she gets to a place upstream where the river is wide, where its current is strong. The wind blows hard here, whipping through her open notebook, nearly yanking the pages out. She nods, feeling something scary and wonderful. She starts taking notes, continuing to walk up the river when all of a sudden she feels a cold shock as her foot dips into the water. She steps on a flat rock that’s about an inch under water, but it’s slippery and she is starting to go down. She clings to her notebook; the last thing she needs is to drop that in the river, and her whole body tries to stay upright. Finally she lurches forward and catches a tree branch, which extends itself like a hand to hold on to, and she is able to brace herself. Her heart is pounding hard in her chest.
That was close,
she thinks.

Instinctively she looks up then, as though somebody were watching her. And when she peers across the river toward the dense forest, she sees something move in the distance. She peers harder, shielding her eyes from the sun, which is blinding now. And beyond the trees, through the green of leaves, she can make out the outline of something. A cabin? An old sugarhouse maybe? It could simply be her imagination, but it looks as though there are shadows moving behind the broken window. She wishes she could cross the river here, go check it out. But she’s afraid it’s too wide, and dangerous. Her mother would be furious if she knew that she was even this close to the water’s edge.

She closes up her notebook and starts to walk back down toward her mother’s house, looking behind her a few times to make sure nobody’s come after her with a shotgun to shoo her off their property. She thinks of her mother, the drawer.

Even by the time she gets back to the house, she can’t shake the feeling that somebody saw her slip in the water. She gets that feeling other times too though. Like somebody’s keeping an eye on her. If she believed in God, she would say it was Jess, that maybe he was her guardian angel now. But she doesn’t believe, not anymore anyway. God was something else she lost that night.

T
he birds occupy Sylvie’s hands, but they cannot cease the buzzing of her mind. Not for long anyway. Despite being focused, fixated on the task (on the parting of feathers and splitting of flesh, the separation of sinews and the extrication of the innards). Despite the combined beauty and gore, her own fascination with the incredible complexity of the avian anatomy, the delicate bones serve as little more than reminders of fragility, of preciousness, of vulnerability.

She tries not to think about Ruby out there, doing whatever it is that she is doing. If she allows her mind to wander down that forest path, she may get lost in the terrifying woods of her own imagination. It seems Sylvie is constantly building fences between reality and possibility. It is her life’s work now.

She thinks again about a fence for the backyard. She is vulnerable out here, the backyard accessible to anyone: the unfinished room providing opportunity for anyone at all to come into the house, only a hollow-core door and a flimsy locking doorknob keeping intruders out. Before Ruby came she was able to put this out of her mind, somewhat. To erect that wall between herself and the dangers lurking beyond the trees. What would anyone want with her anyway? But somehow Ruby’s presence has made her aware of how very susceptible they are, how exposed.

On the table, the spotted sandpiper lies splayed, its freckled chest carefully dissected. Everything that once made it alive, all those exquisite diminutive organs (heart, lung, brain) are now gathered in a ziplock baggie on the table. She will toss these entrails outside later, let the mother raccoon find them. Maybe she should throw them near one of the traps. She picks up the tweezers and goes about the painstaking venture of removing its eyes.

The banging on her door startles her, yanks her sharply from her project. She feels her knees grow weak and she looks around the room, but for what she doesn’t know. (A weapon? An escape route? Help?)

When the knock comes again, the sound is like gunshots, not the tentative knocks of the lady selling Avon or even Robert and Bunk. This knock is aggressive, threatening.
Bang, bang, bang.
Her hand flies to her chest as though it can keep that cage door shut, keep that wild creature inside. Under her fingertips, it beats and beats and beats. She stares at the door as the person knocks again.

She can see him, his silhouette behind the curtain, shifting his weight from one foot to another. And then he leans forward, his face pressed to the glass, and she feels as though she might vomit. He shields his eyes to block out his own reflection, and his features come into focus behind the sheer curtain.

She stares back at him, because she doesn’t know what else to do.

“Ma’am?” His voice is muffled behind the glass.

She doesn’t answer. Can’t. Moments pass. A minute? Slowly. Time is so cruel, she thinks. So very cruel.

She watches him move away from the door, the dark outline of his body moving up and then down. The screen door on the porch opens and closes, opens and closes. She wonders if maybe Ruby called Animal Control and he’s come to get the babies. But then she hears the sound of something tearing, and her heart starts to pace again, back and forth, like a tiger. Like a terrified and dangerous beast. And then he presses something against the glass. But it’s just a piece of paper. He is writing something, using the window as a hard surface, the way one might use a book or someone’s back. When he is finished, the screen door from the porch outside slams shut again, and she can hear his tires on the gravel of her drive, feel the bass of his stereo, and then there is nothing but the rhythmic aftermath of her own body.

She realizes as she stands that her muscles have been clenched this entire time, that she has not been breathing. She nearly collapses, her limbs like rubber bands that have been stretched too tight. Cautiously, she walks to the door. Even though she knows it is safe, that he is gone now, she distrusts his absence.

She tries the knob, fearful, even while knowing that it is locked. (She remembers the deadbolt sliding into place. She checked it. She always does: at least ten times every evening before she goes to bed. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night to ensure that the deadbolt is turned, that the chain is latched tight. Throughout the day, it is one of her many, many rituals.) And it
is
locked; of course it is. There was never any real danger. She knows this, but that doesn’t change the way her body feels as though it has just suffered a great trauma.

He has left the groceries in the bin on the porch, just as he has for the last couple of months. She has had at least a half dozen grocery boys, but this one with the fast car is new this summer. She has never seen any of their faces, except for this one’s, pressed against the glass of her window.

She lifts one of the bags out of the bin and realizes he’s left a note on top of the groceries.

In addition to the usual three paper bags of groceries, there are four gallons of water on the porch floor and a small plastic bag with candles and batteries and an inexpensive flashlight. She plucks the receipt, which is stapled to one of the brown bags, and stares at the predictable list of items: milk, orange juice, oatmeal, ground beef, bananas. She scans the list, searching, but there are no extra charges. It is, to the penny, the same as it is (and has been) every single week. Suddenly the creature in her chest begins to swell, rising upward to her throat, nearly choking her. She swallows hard to push it back down into the place where it belongs. And it resists.

She brings the bag of items into the kitchen first and dumps its contents onto the part of the table that is not occupied by the sandpiper. She studies these ordinary objects as though they are arcane artifacts. And she supposes they are. Proof that someone somewhere still cares that she is here. That she is safe. That she is alive. It makes her feel something between comfort and unbearable shame.