by Jim Nelson
“What happened with Mr. Kempt?” Hanna said, aware of Ruby eavesdropping. A brief panic lit up inside her. “Cynthia, did he do something to you?”
“He caught me,” she said, face red and wet. Cynthia pointed at the computer screen. “Some days, that’s all I can think about.”
“You need to stop looking at these sites,” Hanna said.
“The other girls, I want them to touch me,” she said.
Hanna tightened her hug. She rocked Cynthia gently. “Take a breath,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”
“And then Mr. Kempt,” Cynthia whispered. “He caught me.”
“Caught you doing what?”
“Kissing,” she said.
Hanna stroked Cynthia’s hair. “It happens.”
“He touched me,” she said. “He pulled me away from Danielle. And I felt something. Like electricity in me.”
Hanna sighed and shushed Cynthia’s crying. “Would it help if I told you I felt that way too?” she said. “When I was your age? When I was fifteen, I went through this too.”
“Why me?” Cynthia’s oversized hands smeared the tears from her cheeks. “The other girls don’t feel this way. When I smell one of the other girls, the ones who get to wear perfume, I imagine them touching me here.” Cynthia put her hand on her belly. She burst out crying. “They laugh at how I look.”
Hanna crossed the room to close the door. “Do you want to talk to someone who knows what you’re going through?”
“No one knows what I’m going through,” Cynthia said. She collapsed into Hanna’s arms, sobbing and shaking.
The mother’s burden is to endure puberty twice; first with the bridge, then with the child. For a mother with twins, the burden is to endure puberty four times, although Hanna couldn’t imagine Ruby’s suffering being worse than Cynthia’s. Hormones prepared Cynthia’s body to attract sexual partners, other hormones prepared her to give birth. Her own estrogen drove her to older men, the child’s testosterone drove her to young women.
“I hate myself,” she cried into Hanna’s arm.
Hanna rocked her, not knowing what to say. She wanted to tell Cynthia not to worry, it would be over in a few weeks—the meagerness of such cold comfort.
Seven
Pulling Cynthia and Ruby from bridge school was far easier than pulling regular girls from school, public or private. The Coit New Bridge School of Berkeley prided itself in its curricula, principles, and educational emphases. Its unspoken agreement to parents was to keep their bridge daughters under close watch while the parents worked, traveled, or vacationed. No bridge daughter ever flunked out of the Coit New Bridge School. Only bridges with insurmountable disciplinary problems were expelled. Otherwise, the school had no academic baseline for any student to meet.
Friday morning, instead of dropping off the girls at school and heading for the train station, Hanna loaded the Audi’s trunk with packed suitcases as well as a cardboard box of books and games for Ruby. Hanna no longer knew what entertainment she should ready for Cynthia, as she’d not seen her read a book in ages. Hanna also packed three grocery bags of dry goods and canned soda. The trunk was tight with their belongings when Hanna finally lowered the hood.
The first stop was a morning appointment with their gefyriatrician, Dr. Bellingham. He was a striking older man with coiffed gray hair. His orangish skin suggested to Hanna tanning beds and four o’clock tee-offs. Like a grandfatherly general practitioner in a hospital soap opera dispensing aspirin and advice, she also surmised he was devastating in his early years. Hanna certainly appreciated his manner with the girls, his gentleness and his reassuring voice as he examined them one at a time.
First, Cynthia. He concluded a terse examination checking inside her womb. Cynthia handled the intrusion with adult-like apathy, wincing as he felt around inside her but never offering a word of complaint.
With Ruby, Dr. Bellingham was more talkative, asking her about school and movies. “What are you doing this weekend?” he asked while peering into one ear.
“We’re going to Grandmother’s house,” Ruby said.
“Oh? And what will you do there?”
“Grandmother has chickens,” she said.
“Chickens!”
“They give us eggs for breakfast,” Ruby said. “Their eggs are brown, though.”
“Never heard of brown eggs,” he said, winking for Hanna’s benefit.
“They’re the same as normal eggs,” Ruby told him. “They just look different on the outside.”
“Where does Grandma live?”
“Some of the eggs are blue.”
“Blue!”
“Out in the woods,” Ruby said. “Far away.”
“She lives outside Mill Valley,” Hanna said from across the room.
“Didn’t think there were many farms in Marin County,” Dr. Bellingham said.
“Grandmother’s got one,” Ruby said.
“Okay now, young lady.” Dr. Bellingham extended the stirrups from the end of the table, each snapping into place with a clang.
It landed on Ruby like a slow surprise, one she should’ve seen coming. She looked to her mother, aghast.
“Just do as the doctor says,” Hanna said. “It won’t hurt.”
“I don’t like it,” Ruby said to her mother. “We did it last time. Why do we have to do it this time?”
“It’ll be over soon enough.” Hanna sat across the examining room, the girls’ dresses piled on the chair beside her.
“I don’t want to,” Ruby half-whispered, as though the doctor wouldn’t hear.
“You’re a full-fledged bridge daughter,” Dr. Bellingham said. “This is your responsibility to your mother.”
“You can use an X-ray,” Ruby said to him. “I saw that on TV.”
Dr. Bellingham turned to Hanna for assistance, wearing a patient smile.
Cynthia interjected. “Quit being a baby,” she said. Still in her hospital gown, she went to the elevated examination table. Cynthia’s height meant she could look Ruby in the eyes.
“I don’t want to,” Ruby said in a pleading whisper intended only for Cynthia’s ears.
“If the baby is healthy,” Cynthia said, “you’re healthy. It’s sim-bay-osis. If you’re sick, the baby is sick too. So the doctor has to look.”
Ruby leaned forward and whispered in Cynthia’s ear. Cynthia listened, nodding, and then whispered in Ruby’s ear in return. She whispered for a long while. Ruby nodded her head in response as the adults looked on.
Finally, Cynthia stepped back and said to Ruby, “Okay?”
Ruby nodded, eyes wide and quivering. She lay across the examination bed. Dr. Bellingham guided her feet onto the stirrups and sat between them on a rolling stool.
“We’ll be brave together,” Cynthia said to Ruby. She held Ruby’s left hand with both of her own. “Go ahead,” she told the doctor.
Cynthia held Ruby’s hand throughout the procedure. When he prodded inside her, Ruby’s grasp tightened on Cynthia’s hands and her jaw clenched.
Finally, Dr. Bellingham snapped off the gloves and rolled away from the table. “All done,” he announced.
Ruby stared up at the ceiling for a long moment. She struggled to sit up. Cynthia helped her. She tugged at Ruby’s examination gown to keep her covered and squared it on her shoulders when she was standing. Ruby had a devastated look in her eyes, just as she did every time the doctor examined her.
As the girls dressed, Dr. Bellingham led Hanna into his adjoining office. He closed the door behind them. The oiled mahogany desk contrasted with the odor and gleam of the sterilized examination room. Up close, Dr. Bellingham’s spicy aftershave reminded Hanna of club chairs and Scotch in decanters.
“Once again, I’m impressed.” He nodded appreciatively. “They must be a joy to raise.”
“Oh, it has its moments,” Hanna said self-deprecatingly.
She’d never seen Cynthia tend to Ruby in that manner. Ruby, sure. Ruby nurtured out of habit, co
oking meals and cleaning feet and moisturizing Hanna’s ruddy face after an afternoon of gardening. Witnessing Cynthia offer anything resembling emotional support was new to Hanna.
“Cynthia is remarkable.” Dr. Bellingham set aside his clipboard and removed his eyeglasses. “I’ve practiced for thirty-three years and never seen a gemmelius assert itself so strongly. Is she exercising?”
“She lifts weights,” Hanna said. “She was doing chin-ups until a few weeks ago. I know, I can’t believe it myself.”
“The miracles of youth,” Dr. Bellingham said. “It will have to stop, though. I’m all for a little daily exertion, getting the heart rate up and all, but nothing so strenuous. Take her for walks.”
“I don’t think she’ll be happy with that.”
He offered her a glossy color pamphlet from a stack. It was titled Crossing the Bridge: Fitness During Pons Anno. Most of the exercises involved sitting in a chair while moving the arms and lightly twisting the torso. None used any resistance other than a bathroom towel as a makeshift strap. Cynthia would not be appeased. What satisfaction Cynthia got from building out her arms and shoulders, Hanna could not fathom. Of course, she never questioned why Vaughn had worked his arms and abs so hard at the gym. She once loved his devotion to physical exercise. But she was twenty then, too, and carnally inflamed by all he could give her.
Dr. Bellingham picked up his clipboard again. “I recall you told me Hoff’s Syndrome ran in the family?”
“My grandmother’s bridge daughter died from it,” she said.
“I’ll put them both on pseudogefyridol in two weeks,” he said. “So: any questions I can answer for you?”
Hanna thought about asking him about Hagar’s sisters, or any advice for dealing with a bridge daughter threatening the safety of the child inside her. Hanna knew it wasn’t his place. He was a medical professional, not a bridge psychologist.
Still, he’d practiced gefyriatrics for thirty-three years. Dr. Bellingham had seen everything, she reasoned.
“Cynthia is talking about bi-grafts,” Hanna said.
“Nip that in the bud,” he said without hesitation. “Don’t stand for it.”
“But what can I do?”
“Lock her in her room at night,” he said. “Search her room. Search both their rooms, actually. Or send her to a bridge camp where they can watch her around the clock.”
“I thought about saying whatever she did to the child she was only doing to herself—”
“Don’t reason with her,” he said. “It’s your child’s life she’s threatening. Do not negotiate. She will only tell you to look at it from her point of view. There’s no alternative to be discussed.”
“She read about bi-grafts on the Internet,” Hanna said. “She thinks she can live to be an adult.”
“Blanchard’s is an unreliable procedure,” he said. “If the bridge doesn’t die on the table, most are dead before eighteen. None live past thirty. God wired their bodies for one purpose.” He peered over the rims of his eyeglasses. “To produce your child.”
“I think she has some romantic notion of being a Hagar’s sister.”
“Show her Hagar on the Street.”
Hannah dismissed the suggestion the moment Dr. Bellingham mentioned the title. Released in the early 1980s, it was one of those so-called edgy afterschool specials designed to scare kids straight. She heard it had been produced by the Moral Majority, or some other ultra-rightwing group. She didn’t trust anything they said no matter how well-intentioned.
“An intrauterine bi-graft will leave her completely dependent on gefyridol,” Dr. Bellingham said. “She’ll be highly susceptible to viral and bacterial infection. A good cold would kill her. These soothsayers on the Internet, they never delve into the facts, only empty fantasies.”
Hanna hated asking her next question, but Dr. Bellingham’s even, authoritative voice made her wonder if he was more qualified than even her to deal with Cynthia. “Could you talk to her? I think if she heard it from you—”
“It’s not something to discuss with her,” he said. “Discussion suggests there’s room for movement, some halfway point you can meet her at.” He smiled a reassurance. “Hanna, this is about the safety of your child. There is nothing to discuss with Cynthia. Your focus must be keeping your child safe and healthy.”
Hanna, feeling drained, meekly nodded.
“Take a deep breath,” Dr. Bellingham said. He lightly took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “You’re doing wonderfully. You’re raising great bridges, and if I may say so, you’re doing it on your own. You have much to be proud of.”
The flattery raised a twinkle of a smile from Hanna.
“That’s what I want to see,” Dr. Bellingham said. He smiled his movie star smile. “Ready?” He swept the office door open like a thespian making a grand entrance.
The girls, now dressed, stood in line and at attention. They kept their hands behind their backs and their chins up, as they’d been instructed to stand in public since they were five years old.
“Who wants a coloring book?” he announced. Over cries of me, me! he reached for the books and crayon boxes stacked on the laminate counter. Beside the stacks stood an arrangement of plastic torsos, miniature headless bridge daughters sliced open to reveal progressive stages of pons anno.
Eight
Hanna steered the Audi up an off-ramp and joined one of the narrow county roads skirting the border of Wine Country. A tenuous, veiny road, it wound through the hills like a helix stretched taut. No wine grapes in this part of Napa County, just blank fields of yellow grass for grazing cattle and the occasional luxury housing development built up in the empty countryside. The sun blazed with summer intensity. When they waited for the occasional stoplight to change to green, heat vapors rose from the hood of the car.
Hanna generally ignored roadside fruit sellers. She found herself at a loss for other people’s mania for fresh fruit, fruit no less fresh than what’s stocked in a quality supermarket’s produce aisle. This afternoon, however, she passed a fruit stand with a giant hand-painted billboard overhead, STRAW BERRIES & BLACK CHERRIE, and realized at seventy miles per hour she’d not remembered a gift. She slowed and turned the car around at the first intersection.
The fruit stand’s gravel lot offered space for three vehicles and no more. Hanna parked farthest from the stand’s entrance. A step-side truck with flaking greened-copper paint and bright chrome bumpers was parked beside them, and a late-model white minivan beyond it. Cynthia, napping, murmured she wanted to stay in the car. At Hanna’s insistence, she made a deep yawn and unbuckled. Ruby, practically bouncing in her seat, scrambled out of the back of the car. The three entered the covered stand together.
The plywood fruit stand offered more than strawberries and black cherries. Also on sale were a selection of plums and nectarines and bags of candied California almonds. Thankfully, the stand was roofed with corrugated green plastic and the interior was cool.
An older man with tousled auburn hair stood at an old-fashioned vending machine drinking a slender bottle of root beer. He wore a plaid cotton shirt with the sleeves ripped off and dusty black jeans. He maintained a leering expression Hanna did not appreciate. With one more glance, she realized he was not older after all, but her age or even younger. Sun, not age, had pruned and browned his skin.
On the other side of the stand, a pretty girl in a blousy T-shirt and cut-off jeans selected nectarines. She tested their firmness one at a time. Those passing muster were added to a paper sack. A well-worn mountaineer’s backpack was strapped around her shoulders with a rolled-up sleeping bag swinging from the bottom of the pack. A mustard-yellow plastic strip hung limply from the top corner of the pack.
Hanna knew a hitchhiker when she saw one. Growing up in the outskirts of Mill Valley, not far from Highway 101, plenty of vagrants wandered onto the farm thinking they could get a night’s sleep under a tree or beside the creek. Hanna expected the girl would ask for a ride. Hanna though
t herself a fair person—most everyone does—but the mild sour dread of having to say No gurgled up within her.
Hanna caught the sounds of laughter and sharp, loud whispering, the kind of whispering done to draw attention rather than avoid it. Cynthia had wandered away from Hanna. She’d joined two girls about the same age at a rack of novelty hot sauces. The girls laughed into each other’s faces, practically falling on each other. They must be sisters, Hanna surmised, although best friends at that age often melded too. Dirty blond hair, colorful Polo shirts, and stark white denim shorts, they appeared en route to a round of tennis or croquet. Cynthia had attempted to introduce herself and make friends. From their trim waists and pert waspy faces, Hanna wondered if Cynthia was motivated by something more elemental.
Cynthia returned to Hanna, wiping at her eyes. “I just said ‘hello.’”
Over Cynthia’s shoulders, Hanna witnessed one girl mime Cynthia’s aping walk and bowed, thickened arms. The other recoiled, laughing, and in return clenched her jaw to stiffen her neck tendons. Only when they saw Hanna’s disapproval did they stop.
“I want to go home,” Cynthia said frowning.
“We’ll leave in a minute,” Hanna said. “It’ll be okay.”
The girls sniffled unapologetic grins. Their parents had purchased their goods. The four exited for the minivan.
Cynthia spoke low so no one else could hear. “I hate myself,” she said to Hanna. “Why can’t I be like them?”
Hanna kneeled on one knee and brushed back Cynthia’s bangs. “You don’t want to be like those girls. Trust me.”
“Why do they have to laugh at me?”
“Spoiled little girls,” Hanna said. “Everything comes back around. When they grow up—”
Cynthia pushed her away. “That’s right. When they grow up.” Shoulders up, arms flexed, she backed up a step. “They get to grow up and have their own bridge daughters.” She backed up another step. “Just like you.”
Hanna, on her feet, said, “That’s enough.”
