by Jim Nelson
—
With the girls in bed, all the lights off, Hanna quietly went to the entertainment room at the front of the house. She softly closed the door behind her and turned on the floor lamp with one twist of the knob, its lowest setting. In the dim amber light, she sat before the sleeping computer and shook the mouse to wake it up.
When they bought the house, the realtor had talked up this front room as an ideal home office. A thin hallway separated it from the active areas of the house and its view of the side garden afforded some privacy. Not long after they’d moved in, Vaughn repurposed it into an entertainment room so he could shut the doors and cheer on his college basketball teams. Hanna knew he watched pornography in there too, on the late nights when she’d awaken and find him absent from their bed.
Before Vaughn left them, she’d found a stash of his DVDs in the back of the TV cabinet. The discovery was not accidental; she’d searched the room to locate them. From the titles and the photos of the women on the DVD cases, Hanna confirmed what she knew from four years of living together followed by marriage. Vaughn liked big-chested women, straw-blond and voluptuous. They all wore far too much makeup and, oddly, evening gowns and farm girl outfits. One title after another, she felt she was looking at women nothing like herself. (She grew up on a farm; she never wore farm clothes.)
She wasn’t angry or disappointed. The marriage had fallen apart by this point, so she was incapable of such reactions to the material. She was ready for him to leave, and in three months, he would be gone from their lives.
A thought experiment Hanna challenged herself to much later: Would she have been happy if she’d discovered the women in his stash did look like her? Hanna did not believe that would have changed the outcome of their marriage. But it did help to see the differences between herself and the women Vaughn fantasized about. It gave her disgust with him—an earned self-righteousness—a foothold of leverage.
After his departure, she decided to keep the entertainment room, not because she found it useful, but out of inertia. Like sending the girls to a pricey bridge school and commuting forty-five minutes a day each direction, the inconveniences and expense simply were easier to maintain than disrupt. Besides, she told herself, where would she put this mismatched jury-rigged assortment of electronics, all different brands, with various sizes and colors of cabling snaking between them? In the room, their household received six hundred cable television stations, a broadband Internet connection, movies streamed and rented, and an FM stereo Vaughn once tuned to the morning shock jocks and anti-feminist talk radio. Hanna did not consider herself a prude, but this room was a conduit of filth, the one room in the house the outside world could flood in and swamp her family with its own agendas. Sometimes she wished there was a single oversized kill switch on the wall outside the room. She wished she could throw the switch and shut down all access at once.
Todd’s instructions worked like a charm. The computer now required a password to use. It was one of those precautions she knew she needed for some time, but like flossing or changing the oil in the car, it was easy to put it off. She wondered if Cynthia would guess the password; she was clever, that one was. She decided to ask Todd the next day about good passwords. No, maybe the day after. No reason to raise his hopes.
Scouring the web browser’s history, she re-visited the web sites Cynthia had read the night before. She clicked one at random and was presented with a page of naked women. Or, rather, a checkerboard of photos, the same woman in progressive states of undress. Thankfully, the photos were fairly tame, but surrounding them were animated advertisements for various pornography web sites, each promising a unique combination of carnal activity, each ad as vivid and eye-catching as a Vegas marquee. Hanna visited a few more of the pornographic sites from the browser history. Each site’s lurid name suggested what theme lay beyond its credit card pay wall: cheerleaders, teachers, nurses, secretaries, grandmothers.
It was bad for Cynthia. The male child inside her was asserting itself more strongly than any bridge daughter Hanna knew. This was beyond youthful curiosity; Cynthia was absolutely fascinated with women’s bodies. Ruby would blanch and scurry off at the sight of a naked body, male or female. Cynthia couldn’t stop looking.
Hanna continued searching the browser history, now selecting sites with names suggesting sisterhood or Hagar or bridges. Sitting in the desk chair, clicking links and scrolling down the pages of text, Hanna began to understand where Cynthia had gotten these ideas about the child within her.
Her mobile phone rang. Absentmindedly, she started to swipe the screen and accept the call. As before, she caught herself in time.
BLOCKED. The phone rang and rang. Call missed. She waited for the voicemail indicator to appear. The absence of a voicemail alert gnawed at her, like not hearing the final note for a catchy jingle.
—
Hanna spent her lunch hour sweating and showering at the fitness center downstairs. She took her lunch at her desk, picking through a deli Caesar salad for cold chunks of herb-roasted chicken and chopped bacon.
Todd knocked on the entry to her cubicle. “That work out for you?” he asked.
Mouth full and cream dressing on the corners of her mouth, she dabbed with a napkin to avoid smudging her lipstick. “Perfect,” she said, cheeks like a chipmunk’s. “Thank you.”
“Glad to hear.” He lingered. “Well, ah, then, I’ll—” And he started to head off.
“Todd—” Hanna called. She set her salad aside. “You grew up in the city, right?”
“Ingleside,” he said, meaning a western San Francisco neighborhood not far from the ocean. “I was born in Denver. My parents moved there when I was little.”
“Have you ever heard of Shur Spring?”
The name raised his eyebrows. “Not since high school,” he said.
“Where is it?”
Todd looked down to his shoes, hard-soled and dull leather, the aglets of his shoelaces frayed. He had the manner and expression of a person debating how forthright to be. “Why are you asking about Shur Spring?” Before Hanna answered, he snapped his fingers. “Your bridge daughter read about it on the Internet.”
“These sisters of Hagar web sites, they’re all jargon and abbreviations I don’t understand,” she said. “But it was Shur Spring she kept reading about.”
“You’ve really never heard of Shur Spring?”
He was a bit younger than Hanna, thirty-two or thirty-three. The tone of his question made her feel like he was amazed she never heard of Nirvana or Pearl Jam. Of course, Hanna rarely did listen to that music, and not until she left the farm her mother had raised and schooled her on.
“Hey, I’m not a city kid like you,” Hanna said, trying to be jokey about it. “I grew up in the country.”
“A farm in Marin County,” he said, needling her a bit more. “Hardly Iowa out there.”
“It was secluded,” she said. “Come on, quit it. Tell me where this Shur Spring is.”
“It’s not a ‘where,’” he said. “It’s a ‘what.’”
Todd dragged an office chair from an empty cubicle across the way. Sitting a touch too close to her, he sketched on a writing pad the outline of a water jug. It was the shape of clay jugs used in Mediterranean cultures centuries ago, a curvy slender urn with elongated ears for handles. He tapped the drawing with the tip of his pen.
“Hagar’s sisters,” Todd said. “This is their symbol.”
“I’ve seen it before.” The parenting blogs Hanna followed warned mothers to be on the lookout for their bridge daughters drawing the symbol. Hanna gave it short shrift. The tone of these blogs smacked of the Satan-worship panics that came and went in her youth.
Seeing the symbol on Cynthia’s web sites gave her pause, however, just as it would if she discovered Cynthia drawing pentagrams and reading Anton LaVey. Hanna wasn’t worried about devil worship per se, but she certainly would worry if Cynthia became fascinated with it.
“It’s like the old hobo codes,
” he said. “Hobos would chalk symbols on the sides of buildings and train cars. Safe places to sleep, where to find food, friendly restaurants, that kind of thing. Hagar’s sisters mark buildings with this jug to alert other Hagars they’re in the area. Or that someone nearby is sympathetic.”
“Like who?”
“Like doctors who perform Blanchard’s Procedure. Pharmacists who sell gefyridol without a prescription. People who’ll give a Hagar a job or a meal, no questions asked.”
Hanna didn’t understand the lingo on the web sites Cynthia visited—the slang and acronyms got pretty thick on some of the message boards—but she did glean who visited these sites: bridge daughters who’d undergone intrauterine bi-grafts. With the fetus in a coma and its development arrested, the symbiosis between the bridge daughter and the child remained intact. The bridge would never deliver the baby and thereby avoid her finality. As long as the bridge received routine gefyridol injections, she could live into adulthood, maybe as old as twenty-six or twenty-seven before her biology collapsed and she expired. Bridge daughters, it seemed, were not designed for long and vigorous lives. No matter how healthy they stayed, their DNA unraveled before age thirty. Their bodies had evolved to focus all energies on protecting and bearing the child within them.
“Hagar was…Adam and Eve’s bridge daughter?” Hanna asked.
Todd chuckled. “You didn’t go to Sunday School, did you.”
Hanna made a sheepish shrug. “Our neighbors were Buddhists,” she said. “It was Marin County,” a valid explanation in the Bay Area.
“I’ll have to tell my mother,” he said with laugh. “All that CCD she put me through finally paid off.”
CCD—Some Catholic thing, Hanna thought.
“Hagar ran away from Abraham and gave birth in the desert,” Todd said. “God killed her for her sin. That’s why all bridge daughters die. At least, according to the Bible.”
“On these web sites, the bridge daughters brag about being Hagar’s sisters,” Hanna said. “They’re proud of it. It’s like they revel in it.”
Todd shrugged. “I’d say life looks a little bleak from where they’re standing.”
“When I was a girl, bridge daughters saw themselves as blessed.”
Todd shrugged. “Some don’t.”
“I was always a little jealous when I saw bridge daughters in town,” Hanna said. “They get so much attention when they were expecting.”
“Some just want to be left alone,” he said.
This was the life Cynthia so craved, a life like the Depression Era hobos wandering from city to city scrounging for shelter and food. With each stop, these wayward girls had to mask their identity from the authorities and nosy citizenry. One phone call to the police, one tip-off from an observant taxi driver to Bridge Protective Services, and the bridge daughter would be taken away. On the run, hitchhiking from town to town, avoiding the police, living life on the edge—of course Hanna could see the allure for Cynthia. The temptation would be immense for any teenager.
Except those teenagers weren’t carrying Hanna’s son. Cynthia didn’t merely want to run away; she wanted to put Hanna’s son in a coma before setting off. As Todd sketched other Hagar symbols on the pad, Hanna began to simmer at his stupid little smile, the smug satisfaction of a man explaining the forbidden underworld to a woman he viewed as fresh off the farm. This was her children at stake.
“How do you know all this?” she said, interrupting his drawing.
“I knew a few Hagar’s sisters,” he said. “When I was in high school.”
“They were in high school?”
“Naw, they lived on the street. We hung out with them.”
Hanna sputtered a cross, exasperated exclamation before getting out, “You didn’t tell someone?”
“Tell someone what?” he said. “It’s not like you can reverse the procedure.”
“They just lived here in San Francisco? Out in the open?”
“When you grow up in the city, you learn where Hagar’s sisters hang out,” he said.
“Didn’t the police know?”
“Probably. I don’t know. Maybe the cops had more important crimes to worry about.” Sensing he was indicting himself, he put up his hands in soft surrender. “Look, I didn’t know any of them before they got a bi-graft.” Seeing this brought no satisfaction to Hanna, he added, “I would’ve told an adult if I found out a bridge was going to get the child stapled up inside her. Of course I would have.”
Fuming, Hanna said, “But these girls you knew. They were runaways? What about their parents? You didn’t try to contact them?”
“They didn’t tell us their real names,” he said.
“But you were friends with them.”
“Besides,” he continued, growing a bit heated, “do you really think their parents wanted anything to do with them? After what she’d done to their child? They would have her put away.” A spark of realization crossed his face, a sense he’d overstepped a boundary. “I mean, that’s what most parents would do,” he said, voice lowering. “I’m not saying that’s you.”
Hanna soaked in her own heat. She glanced about her desk to indicate he needed to leave.
“I was sixteen,” he said. “I hung out with them. I thought it made me cool.” He added, “I even dated one. I kind of fell in love with her.”
The idea curdled in Hanna. Romantic love with a bridge daughter was taboo, obviously. She’d never dreamed of boys falling in love with Cynthia or Ruby. Those dreams were reserved for the children inside Cynthia and Ruby.
“Of course you did,” Hanna said. “You wanted to save her.” She gave Todd a pert smile. “That’s what men do. Try to save women.”
Taken aback, Todd stood. He wavered at the cubicle entrance. “If you say so.”
Hanna turned back to her meal. The wilted browning salad was even more unappetizing than it looked in the deli’s display case.
“Shur Spring isn’t a place,” he offered. “It’s an event.”
“An event?” Hanna said. “Like a concert?”
“All the Hagar’s sisters in a city will sometimes come to meet in one place,” he said. “Usually, it’s to share news of something important, like if the police are cracking down or sweeping Tent Town. They’ll hold a Shur Spring if one of them needs a lot of money. You know, to pass the hat.”
“You make it sound like an emergency meeting.”
“It’s rare,” Todd said. “It’s risky to get everyone together like that. If the cops or Bridge Protective Services find out, they can bust the whole thing.”
He continued to linger at her cubicle entrance. She wondered if he was waiting for a thank you. He shrugged and nodded goodbye.
“Did she love you back?” Hanna asked before he left. “The Hagar’s sister.” It was a weak concession, her way of smoothing things over between them.
He chewed on it for a moment. “She was kind of distant. Most of them are.”
“Did you ever…?”
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t like that. They can, you know. They can do it.”
Any pregnant woman can have sex, Hanna thought. It annoyed her when men found such an act unthinkable, or worse, the rare man who considered himself worldly for knowing it.
“A word of warning.” He pointed at the writing pad with Hagar’s jug drawn on it. “Once you start looking for that symbol, you’ll see it everywhere.”
—
After dinner, Hanna told Cynthia to join her in the entertainment room. She demonstrated the computer was now password-protected. She brought up the browser history and showed Cynthia the sites on Shur Spring and Blanchard’s Procedure. Cynthia, standing stiff and mute, watched the damning evidence appear on the screen one page at a time.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Hanna said.
Cynthia bowed her head. She said something so softly, Hanna couldn’t make it out.
“These web sites about Hagar’s sisters—”
“I heard about them
at school,” Cynthia said. “And I listened to the tape in your purse.”
Hanna deflated a bit. “What did you hear?”
“Your bridge mother stole money to have a Blanchard operation,” Cynthia said, glum. Quietly, she added, “Since you’re alive, I guess she was too scared to do it.”
“Why do you think she was scared?” Hanna asked. “Maybe she was caught.”
“Grandmother talks about her sometimes,” Cynthia said. “She was really smart. I don’t think she was caught. We can ask her if Hanna got caught.”
Hanna stiffened. “We are not asking your grandmother about bi-grafts. I swear, Cynthia, if you bring this up in front of her—”
“I think Hanna didn’t have to die,” Cynthia said. “She got scared is all.”
Her reasoning was as Hanna feared. Cynthia did not see the tape as evidence not to have a bi-graft. Rather, she thought the decision required more mettle than the first Hanna could muster, just as a boy would boast Evel Knievel wasn’t revving his motorcycle hard enough when he crashed in the parking lot of Caesars Palace.
Hanna returned to the computer. She clicked another of the browser history links. A page of naked women loaded, hair up and styled, thick red lips and diamond necklaces and polished high heels shining in the studio lights.
“I don’t like this kind of thing in the house,” Hanna said.
“I’m sorry,” Cynthia said with a wet voice. She sniffled and coughed, head bowed. Her mild slouch caved in. Her arms hung like limp rope. Her back began to quiver.
Hanna approached her. She put her arms around her. “I’m not mad at you.”
Cynthia began jabbering unintelligibly, the word kept reappearing in her stream of words. Kept…kept…kept. Hanna told her to calm down, to slow down and take a deep breath.
Not kept; Cynthia was talking about Mr. Kempt, one of her instructors at the Coit New Bridge School. In his thirties, trim, dark-haired, and bearing a permanent five o’clock shadow, he was one of the well-liked teachers. Cynthia shook and said his name again.
Looking over Cynthia’s shoulder, Hanna spotted Ruby at the doorway peeking inside. One cross look and Ruby scurried away, although the door remained open.
