Bridge Daughter

by Jim Nelson

  The flowers in Hanna’s lap made the car interior cloyingly aromatic to Hanna’s father, who rolled his window down a touch for fresh air. Hanna pinched the bulging stamen of a daffodil laden with pollen and put the yellow dust to her nose. Sweet Heaven.

  Liz Vannberg met them at the door. She accepted the bouquet with delight. “Let me put these in some water,” she said to them both. “Won’t you come in?”

  “Hanna also brought some origami cranes she made for little Cheryl,” Hanna’s father said.

  Hanna took one from the sack and held it up. Mrs. Vannberg nodded with less enthusiasm than the flowers, perplexed at Hanna’s obsession with the little folded birds.

  Hanna tugged at her father’s sleeve. He gave her permission to speak.

  “May I put these in Cheryl’s room?” she asked Mrs. Vannberg. “Alongside the ones I brought last time?”

  “Oh, honey,” Mrs. Vannberg said, crestfallen, “I threw those all out when the baby came home. I hope you understand.”

  “That’s okay,” Hanna said, “but maybe I could put these in their place?”

  “Well, go ahead then,” she said to Hanna. To her father, she said, “Coffee?”

  Her father accepted the offer. Hanna moved quickly down the hallway to Cheryl’s bedroom. The Vannbergs had not painted the room, just as the adage went. Cheryl’s bed was gone though, replaced by a crib with lacy pillows and blankets and a mechanized mobile of cartoony zoo animals. The sour-milk odor of baby powder was strong. She instantly worried little Cheryl might be in the crib sleeping—she dare not waken her and risk her crying out—but was relieved to see it was empty save for the bedding.

  Hanna tossed the paper bag of tsuru on the changing table and went to the closet. She slid back the door and was confronted by its contents: designer misses clothes, teenage outfits, handbags of all shape and color, and shoes, shoes, shoes. All of it was tightly packed in the closet and wrapped in clear keepsake plastic, saving them for little Cheryl to grow to big Cheryl all over again. Such thrift seemed unlike Mrs. Vannberg, but Hanna supposed there was no reason to throw it out when the new Cheryl would slip perfectly into all of it, like interchanging outfits between two Barbie dolls.

  With one hand supporting her engorged belly and another on the closet jamb, Hanna lowered herself to her knees. On all fours, she felt around the back of the closet floor. The weight in her gut swung about and distended her belly even further, making her feel like she’d eaten an enormous indigestible meal.

  “Do you want to take a look?” Mrs. Vannberg called from the other end of the house. She always talked a little too loud for Hanna’s tastes. It sounded as though she was calling to Hanna’s father from the kitchen, probably preparing his coffee while he reclined in the front room.

  Hanna’s fingers found the loose flap of carpeting in the back corner of the closet. She peeled it back and prodded the edges of the exposed floorboards. The rear one remained loose. A small notch gave her a finger-hold to pry it up. She set it aside and dipped her hand once again into the back of the closet, listening intently for anyone’s approach. Her swaying stomach ached. Her heart was beating so hard, she could feel it in her jaw.

  “Carter had someone come out and put it all together,” Mrs. Vannberg called out again, meaning Mr. Vannberg. “You should poke your head in and see. It’s just darling.”

  They were discussing the baby room. Leave it to Mrs. Vannberg to talk up the changes—all they’d done was remove Cheryl’s princess bed and bring in a crib and a changing station. The old dresser and vanity remained in place. They didn’t even bother to strip the shelves of Cheryl’s old travel photos and memorabilia.

  Hanna crawled deeper into the closet. The leathery smell of patent shoes and used-once handbags was overpowering.

  “Maybe I’ll just take a look,” she heard her father say, being polite, as always.

  Her fingers found it—her hand gripped the box. She scooted out of the closet for light. It was the same wooden box Cheryl had shown her months prior at the bridge party. Footsteps approaching, Hanna fumbled with the box’s clasp. The lid sprung open.

  In the box rested the pile of loose green bills with that crisp one hundred-dollar bill on top. She spread the stack in her hands. The twenties and tens revealed themselves like ranks and suits in a winning poker hand.

  Bridge daughter dresses only offered utilitarian pockets on their fronts, flappy loose pockets like those found on aprons or smocks. No zippers, no buttons—no way to conceal money or goods from watchful eyes. On her knees, Hanna pulled her dress up and slipped the packet of cash into the front of her underwear. With her bulging belly, she hoped the dress would hang in such a way that the money would go unseen.

  Footsteps padded down the carpeted hallway. Heavy footsteps—her father.

  She snapped the box closed and crawled back into the closet. She dropped the box in the hole, set the floorboard, and patted the carpet back into place. Lacking proper light, she could only hope it would go unnoticed.

  On all fours, she backed herself out of the closet, slid the closed door closed, and the bedroom knob twisted.

  “Hanna?” Her father rushed to her with his hands out. “What’s going on?” Mrs. Vannberg, mouth agape, entered behind him.

  “She kicked,” Hanna improvised, still on all fours. Would it work? “A good one, too. I thought I was going to throw up.” She made a weak apologetic smile. “I wasn’t expecting it, I guess.”

  Her father helped her up. She placed both hands on the egg-shaped outline her belly made through her dress. She rubbed little circles over it, desperate to smooth out the material and ensure the money remained unseen.

  “I’m fine,” she told them both with a smile. “Really.”

  *

  While Hanna prepared dinner, her father explained the afternoon’s events to Hanna’s mother. At the story’s conclusion, Hanna’s mother marched into the kitchen with her father in tow. She turned Hanna away from the stove before Hanna could set down the meat prong. She pressed the back of her hand to Hanna’s forehead and cheek, then put her palm on Hanna’s belly. The cash had long been stashed away.

  “Do you feel sick?” her mother said. “You’re not running a fever.”

  “I’m fine,” Hanna assured her. “A little throw-up feeling came over me.”

  “A kicking baby shouldn’t make you fall to the floor,” Hanna’s mother murmured.

  Hanna’s father held a wenschkind out toward them. “Liz gave this to Hanna before we left. I thought it was generous of her.”

  “Why?” Hanna’s mother said. “Cheryl’s her last bridge daughter. She doesn’t need one anymore.”

  Her father turned the infant doll over in his hands. “She could’ve given this to anyone,” he said. “It’s not cheap.”

  The wenschkind was a realistic anatomic baby doll with skin of fine tan fabric and baby clothes that could be changed. Its hair was soft and fine, but spotty on the crown and not thick, just like a real infant. This was not the yarn-string hair of a Raggedy Ann doll. And the wenschkind’s clothes were modern, not the old-fashioned frilly dresses of the nostalgia dolls Mrs. Grimond displayed under glass in their living room. The wenschkind’s label indicated it was hand-manufactured in West Germany by the Schmidt Family Company, descendants of the brothers who’d crafted the first wenschkinds in Bavaria two hundred and fifty years earlier.

  This indicator of quality and expense softened Hanna’s mother’s cynicism. “You’re right,” she said. “That was generous of her.”

  “Why did she give me a doll?” Hanna had stopped playing with dolls years before. They’d been replaced by dinosaurs, then books on the planets, then bees, before discovering flowers and flower arranging.

  “A wenschkind is a wish child,” her father said. “They’re for bridge daughters your age.”

  “I don’t like dolls,” Hanna said. She couldn’t imagine Erica playing with them either. It even seemed beneath girly-girl Cheryl, who may have loved plush a
nimals, but baby dolls? Those are for children.

  “You don’t feel anything for her?” Hanna’s father said.

  “Who? That?” Hanna said, meaning the doll.

  “Little Hanna,” her mother said. “Inside you.” She returned her firm hand to Hanna’s belly. “You don’t care at all?”

  Hanna, reproached, stepped back toward the stove. The pork chops in the pan sizzled their desire to be turned.

  “You’ll start to feel things for her soon.” Her father held the wenschkind out to her. “Don’t you want to know what it’s like to hold little Hanna in your arms?”

  The doll’s face was uncomfortably human, with glassine marble eyes and a dainty hard nub for a nose. Its mouth was slightly agape, ready to receive a nipple for nursing. Both arms were flopped wide, desperate for a hug from someone, anyone at all.

  “I didn’t ask Mrs. Vannberg for it,” Hanna said.

  “It’s yours anyway,” her father said. He quivered it with his hands to entice Hanna, like shaking a stick before a dog.

  “You could try holding it,” her mother said. “Ma Cynthia used to make her own wenschkind. She sewed them from old denim pants and worn-out shirts. And old pantyhose for the skin. I don’t know where she got it, she never wore any.” Her mother tapped a dull red fingernail on the doll’s face. “She painted the eyes with tempera on seashells that she’d gathered at—“

  “Whose wish is it?” Hanna said. “Who’s wishing for the child?”

  Hanna stared up at them defiantly, meat prong in hand. She rubbed her free hand over her belly. She admired its ovoid tautness, tight like an overinflated tire.

  Her father retracted the doll. Hanna faced the stove and turned the browned chops in the pan. Her parents’ dinner was almost finished and she wasn’t going to allow her parents to ruin it.

  *

  At the conclusion of every meal, Hanna’s father produced a toothpick from his shirt pocket and cleaned his teeth at the table. He never seemed without a toothpick, even if they were eating a hot dog at a walk-up stand. Over the years she’d seen him pocket two or three of the complimentary toothpicks from restaurant greeter stations on their way out the door. When Hanna washed the family laundry—another of her new bridge daughter duties—she learned to remove forgotten toothpicks from his shirts before tossing the load in the machine.

  As he began to work the pick between his teeth, Hanna started clearing the table. “Don’t do that yet,” her mother said. “Sit down.”

  For all her mother’s determination to fall back to traditional bridge daughter duties and roles, Hanna continued to eat at the table with her parents rather than in the kitchen standing, as Erica did every night.

  “Your father and I have been talking,” Hanna’s mother said. “How would you like to go to the mountains?”

  “There’s a place with cabins,” her father said. “Very outdoorsy. Lots of flowers.”

  “Do you mean Susanna Glen?” Hanna said.

  Hanna’s mother, surprised, nodded once. “That’s right.”

  “Erica told me,” Hanna said. “She said it was a church thing.” Hanna assumed that would immunize her from Erica’s prediction, as her mother recoiled from anything associated with organized religion, and her father didn’t seem particularly inured to it.

  “It’s nondenominational,” her father said. “Sort of a co-op between a lot of churches and nonprofits in the Bay Area.”

  Hanna’s mother went to the china hutch in the entry hall and returned with a glossy brochure. It featured color photography of birds in trees, towering redwoods, a stream running full, and a cluster of wood cabins in a clearing. The cabins surrounded a great fire pit ringed with granite blocks. A photo on the front of the brochure was of a semicircular birch sign over high metal gates. SUSANNA GLEN was burned into the wood in a fancy script. Below it was burned:

  “And the bridge provided.” – Matthew 1:25

  On the back of the brochure were photos of sanitary bright-white examination rooms and expensive-looking medical equipment of uncertain purpose. Hanna peered at those photos the closest. Susanna Glen, the accompanying text gushed, featured a state-of-the-art clinic with a staff of doctors boasting thirty-five years combined experience in gefyriatrics and a team of round-the-clock nurses.

  “We’re going to live up there?” Hanna asked.

  Her father peered across the table at Hanna’s mother, indicating she needed to answer. “We won’t be staying with you,” she said to Hanna. “We’ll be there for the finality, though.”

  “They have good doctors,” her father said. “And the food is supposed to be something else. They told us there’s a soft serve machine in the dining room, and you’re allowed to have seconds.”

  Hanna turned the glossy brochure over again, looking for anything she might have missed. The meager amount of text printed alongside the oversized photos offered nothing substantive. No mention of bridge daughters, only the euphemisms she’d learned to spot, pons and passerelle. No mention of guards at their crow’s-nests with spotlights and German shepherds prowling for pregnant thirteen year-old girls who flee into the night.

  “So I don’t get to come home,” Hanna said.

  Her mother said, “No, you won’t.”

  Hanna pushed the brochure aside. “What did I do wrong,” Hanna said. “Just tell me.”

  “You did nothing wrong, honey,” her father said.

  “It’s the decision we’ve made,” her mother said.

  Hanna breathed for a few moments, pouting, her hands folded on the table. She felt a hot swelling under her cheeks and behind her eyes, tears on their way, but, confusingly, she felt not a drop of sadness in her. “This is because I went to Uncle Rick’s and Aunt Azami’s,” she said, her wet mouth making bubbles in the corners. “You’re punishing me because I ran away.”

  “Now, Hanna—“ Her father reached an assuring hand toward her.

  “No, we won’t sugar-coat this,” her mother said to him. “Hanna, it’s not punishment. We’re doing this because we don’t trust you.”

  Hanna gasped at the accusation.

  “Dian—“ her father said.

  “Don’t,” Hanna’s mother said to him. Then to Hanna, “You’ll never understand what your father and I are going through. We’ve waited over thirteen years for our child. You are carrying my baby. How can we risk you running off again and putting our child in danger?” When Hanna started to protest, she said over her, “We raised you the way we did to avoid everything you’ve put us through these past months. You forced us into this.”

  Hanna dropped her head onto her folded hands and began crying. The wetness flowed, covering the back of her hands and pooling in the corners of her eyes. It all came out so hard she had trouble breathing, and she started wet-coughing. Her mother massaged her back. Hanna shrugged her off.

  “What can’t you have another one?” Hanna said into her hands, voice wet. “Just have another one.”

  After a long pause, her father said, “Your mother had complications when she had you. She can’t have another bridge daughter.”

  Hanna raised her red swollen face from the table. “Really?”

  “Really,” he said softly.

  “As soon as you were born, they took you away from me,” her mother said. “They thought I was sick. They didn’t want you exposed.”

  “They removed your mother’s uterus,” her father said. “For her safety.”

  The short sleeves of Hanna’s bridge daughter dress prevented her from making mittens from them. She wiped her eyes clear with her fingertips, as the backs of her hands were soaked.

  “When I held you in my arms,” her mother said, “I wanted you to be my daughter so badly. You were so precious. I didn’t want to wait fourteen years. I wanted to start raising you as my daughter at that moment. I understand why Liz did what she did to Cheryl. To raise her as her daughter and not the bridge. It is so tempting, Hanna.”

  She swallowed and continued. “I gave up a
career, you know. My master’s degree, just collecting dust now. Or the piano.” She swept one hand toward the stand-up piano in the living room. Its top and bench were covered with green potted plants Hanna watered every other day. “I used to practice every morning and after dinner. Now I’ve lost my touch.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me I was a bridge daughter,” Hanna said quietly. “Erica’s known for a long time now.”

  Hanna’s mother reluctantly nodded. “That was our mistake. I see that now. We were going to tell you when you reached ponte primus.”

  “It’s my fault, actually,” her father added. “I liked the little Hanna that got excited about dinosaurs and flowers. I thought when we explained the facts of life to you, I’d lose that Hanna.”

  “You’re the one chance we have,” Hanna’s mother said. “We’ve done everything we can to protect you and keep you healthy. Thirteen years. That’s why we need to send you to Susanna Glen. We can’t risk all of that now.”

  Finally, after she’d dried her face, Hanna said, “I don’t want to go to the mountains. This is my home too.”

  Her parents stared at each other for a long while. Her father broke the impasse.

  “I say we sleep on it tonight,” he said to Hanna’s mother, “and discuss it over breakfast.”

  Her mother closed her eyes. She ran her hand over the middle of Hanna’s back, as though divining the future within her.

  Finally she opened her eyes. “We’ll discuss it first thing in the morning.”

  *

  The mauve alarm clock on Hanna’s bed stand started bleating at six-thirty. It reeled her up from the watery depths of dreamy slumber to the world of oxygen and sunlight and blood and bile. The emotional force of the prior night’s argument and her mother’s revelations had sapped her little body, and she’d slept well.

  Head slung from bleariness, she trudged to the hall bathroom. The cold floor gave her tender feet. She peed and washed her face and pushed a brush through her brown hair. Her hair had thickened over the past few weeks. Its mousiness had faded and a golden sheen had emerged, the color of pancakes perfectly done. Her fingernails, usually brittle and chipped, were each now firm and pearlescent. Her hips had rounded. Even her breasts had begun to fill in with pockets of fatty tissue behind her nipples. Hanna was undergoing pubescence and pregnancy simultaneously. Her body was swerving one direction to attract sexual partners and swerving another direction to nurture and deliver the double within her. There was no logic to Hanna’s biology, but there it stood in the mirror staring back at her.