Bridge Daughter

by Jim Nelson

  “I love flowers,” she explained to him. “I don’t know trees, though.” Troy, violating his own request for quiet, often named the trees’ species as they passed by them, as though introducing lifelong friends.

  “Who taught you?” Troy asked her.

  “I like reading books about flowers,” Hanna said. “And I learned from my uncle. He works at the Flower Mart in San Francisco.”

  The girls stirred at this revelation. Troy, usually unaffected, was taken aback.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” she said to them all. “He doesn’t have a degree or anything. He just moves pallets and drives forklifts.”

  “I think everyone’s surprised you read books,” Troy said.

  Hanna looked about, saw all the eyes on her, and shrunk. She did not cotton to being evaluated so, even by other bridge daughters. Many of them could read, they would inform you, but only from absorption of common words encountered in their daily routines. They could read sugar and differentiate it from flour but not The United States of America printed across the face of a dollar bill, a slip of paper they had precious little contact with.

  These walks would last ninety minutes or so. Each bridge daughter carried her own water canteen and a snack provided by Eloise, who brought up the rear of the expeditions. Hanna—a suburban girl lost in the trees—could not determine if they were walking in circles or straight lines, but she did note they never reached the far perimeter of Susanna Glen’s thirty-foot fence. The organization’s holdings must be enormous.

  On another walk, she wondered if the fence truly circled the entire camp. Perhaps the gate and fence near the cabins was a facade, like the fronts of an Old West town, an illusion to assure the parents and their bridge daughters that escape was impossible. If she broke away from one of these paths and headed due west through the redwoods, perhaps she could make it to a highway, or a town, or the ocean. Southern California was a desert, she’d read once. Maybe she could make it to the desert.

  *

  The night after a nature walk, one of the girls of Cabin Two meekly approached Hanna. Her name was Bridget. She wanted to know more about flowers and flower arranging. Delighted, Hanna spread her books across the bed and invited Bridget to look through them. Together they pored over the exquisite hand-tinted Victorian prints in The Symphony of Flowers, the book Aunt Azami had gifted her months before.

  “Are you excited?” Bridget asked Hanna.

  “No,” Hanna said, knowing full well what Bridget was alluding to.

  “You aren’t excited that you’re going to give your mom and dad a new little baby?”

  Bridget’s wide, eager eyes told Hanna she saw her finality as a kind of Christmas morning, and the child inside her was the present.

  *

  One morning soon after, the girls of Cabin Two awoke and discovered Bridget’s bed empty: sheets stripped, pillow missing, the suitcases stored beneath the bed now gone.

  Two days later, a new bridge daughter arrived by car. Eloise assigned her Bridget’s spring bed. The new girl changed clothes beneath the covers, covered her genitals and breasts with her hands while showering, and cried herself to sleep. Hanna, only ten days in camp, felt like an old-timer compared to this fresh, fragile flower.

  Twenty-four

  Every Wednesday and Saturday, Hanna was called to the camp clinic and administered a shot of gefyridol for her Hoff’s Syndrome. Through these ministrations Hanna met the rotating nurses. Nurse Robyns was the younger of the two, bright blond and soft-voiced, and more tender with the needle. Nurse Halper, also blond but a bit older, made the injection feel like her personal inconvenience. Nurse Halper’s breath sometimes smelled of whiskey, a familiar odor to Hanna after a brief lifetime around Uncle Rick’s alcoholism.

  Soft-spoken Nurse Robyns worked Friday to Sunday. Monday mornings her boyfriend picked her up. He sported five o’clock shadow, feathered hair, dusty jeans, and a leather jacket of buckles and snaps. His red Pontiac Firebird announced itself to the camp with a throaty growl. He pulled it up to the clinic and pumped the engine twice before killing it. When Nurse Robyns kissed him in her nurse’s uniform, one leg up and one hand holding her white cap in place, the girls on the cabin porches swooned and gasped. Hanna’s knees also quivered at the sight of Nurse Robyns’ boyfriend. He made her feel funny below her belly, as though she had to urinate badly, but in a good way.

  Behind Cabin Two, Rex and Remy sharpened their axes. It was Monday morning, wood-chopping day. While the girls swooned, the men broke down a quarter-cord of wood, backs rippling with each heave, each split cracking like a bullwhip through the fresh misty air.

  *

  One morning Eloise woke Hanna early for breakfast service duty. Hanna, surprised, whispered, Me?

  There was precedent. Twice since she arrived at Susanna Glen Hanna had noticed a bridge behind the serving window. Both times the girl worked the breakfast shift, not the later meal services. Both times she toiled with a frazzled, bewildered expression, indicating either the terror of serving breakfast to ninety-seven impatient girls or the terror of being confined to the kitchen with one of the coarse men. The other was not there, for some unexplained reason. It was never explained to Hanna why the girls worked those two mornings.

  Rex was mixing batter when Hanna arrived. Remy was nowhere to be seen. In curt language, yelling over the restaurant-grade mixer, Rex explained the system. He worked the griddle. Hanna dished up and served plates through the window. When she emptied a serving tray, she was to put it in the sink and call out what she’d run out of. Rex slid trays of hot replenishments across the metal prep table to her. If she needed more of something cold—in this morning’s case, peach slices in syrup—she was expected to pull another jar from the refrigerator. Lift with your legs, not your back, Rex yelled over the mixer, and, For godssake, don’t burn yourself on a tray.

  Hanna did her best to keep up with the gaggle of girls filing into the canteen, each groggy or cranky or demanding in their own way. They sassed her. They talked back to her. They never talked like this to the men. Some complained about the size of their portions or Hanna’s presentation. Some asked for eggs done differently, although Hanna knew nothing was to-order in Rex’s and Remy’s kitchen. She spooned peach slices into melamine dishes and spooned syrup on top for good measure. Hurrying to assemble plates while standing over trays of steaming-hot food, sweat accumulated on her forehead and under her armpits. She came to appreciate the frazzled and bewildered look on the other girls’ faces when it had been their turn to serve breakfast.

  “Flapjacks!” Hanna yelled, dropping the empty tray into the stainless steel sink with a roaring clang.

  Flapjacks! Rex yelled in return, sliding a tray of silver-dollar-sized cakes across the prep table.

  “Eggs!” Hanna yelled. Clang.

  Scrambles! Rex yelled back. Hanna made a mental note to use his lingo next time, and she did, hoping for his approval. He seemed not to notice, which disappointed her.

  He relieved her at ten minutes to nine. Good job he said with a hoarse voice and a slight nod of his unshaven jaw. He dished a plate of flapjacks and scrambled eggs, added a melamine bowl of peaches-in-syrup to the tray, and told her Eat up.

  Famished, devouring the hearty and well-deserved breakfast by the mouthful while the others cleaned, she listened in on two girls at the end of the table lingering over their meals. Someone from Cabin Four was missing that morning. Bed empty, sheets stripped, luggage gone. “She was due,” one of them said to the other. “She said she could tell it was coming any day now.”

  Now Hanna remembered. The last time a bridge had served breakfast, Bridget had disappeared and, for some reason, Rex was unavailable to work kitchen duty. Or was it Remy?

  *

  Every night after dinner, the girls pulled on layers of warm clothes and dragged Indian blankets out from a common closet. They sat side-by-side on the granite blocks around the fire pit sharing the blankets and consolidating body heat. Shivering, they w
atched Troy, Rex, and Remy build a massive fire in the dusk light. When the fire was alive and radiating, Rex and Remy would retire to the staff cabin while Troy led the girls in a nightly talk. Eloise walked the outer edge of the granite block circle in a bulky ski jacket and a wool cap, flicking earlobes to silence gossip and chit-chat.

  Troy started with campfire songs. Then he invited the girls to speak up one at a time, to share their feelings and fears and desires. Some admitted to hoarding their parents’ money and planning to run away from home. Hanna kept quiet during these exchanges, waiting for someone to admit to actually escaping only to be caught, but no one did. No one broached the subject of intrauterine bi-grafts.

  When a girl from Cabin Three admitted she was afraid of passing away, Troy told them, “We don’t use words like ‘pass away’ here. We never use the word ‘finality’. You’ll never hear that from me, or Eloise, or from Dr. Wynn. That is our promise to you.” Troy spoke from the inner hub of the granite circle, close to the fire. “When you all give birth, you will die.” It was the first time Hanna had heard an adult use the word die in reference to her fate. “But you will also be giving life. That is your role in this world, your responsibility.”

  Another evening, one of the girls started crying and complained it was unfair. Without rebuke, Troy said, “The only fair thing in this world is to learn how unfair the world is.”

  Troy peppered all his talks with the words interlocked and correlated. He emphasized the universe and the world, he taught them about future generations, he emphasized how change occurred slowly but surely.

  “Hagar ran away to live with God and to find solace in Nature,” Troy told them one evening. “She was very brave to do that. All of you are. The tragedy is, you’ll never know just how brave you all will be when the time comes.”

  *

  Hanna used her precious spare time to complete her senbazuru. The rotating duty board sometimes included free hours. Most of the girls took advantage of them in the rec room, which had a black-and-white television set with rabbit ears. Hanna folded origami. Nighttime too, Hanna could get in forty-five minutes between showering and Eloise’s mandatory lights-out.

  The tsuru her mother had bagged and stored in the garage had been packed in her suitcase. Although slightly crushed on the ride up the mountains, they counted toward her one thousand. Taking a census of them on her bed, Hanna accounted for seven hundred and six cranes. She’d given away almost three hundred of them. How many of them were tossed out, she wondered. How many had she wasted on other people.

  Her program of folding cranes at Susanna Glen was far more productive than at home. No television to distract her, no mother interrupting her to start cooking or to vacuum the house. Regimented time at Susanna Glen meant true progress toward her string of one thousand paper cranes.

  The girls of Cabin Two took a natural interest in Hanna’s project. Some of them had heard of Hiroshima. All of them knew of the atom bomb. None had heard of Sadako Sasaki. Hanna explained to them the legend of a thousand paper cranes.

  “What are you going to wish for?” one of the bridge daughters asked.

  “It’s just for fun,” Hanna said. “You don’t really get your wish.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  Hanna shrugged and said, “Because maybe I will get my wish. Maybe.”

  “When I blew out my birthday candles,” another said, “I always wished for money.”

  “My own room,” another one said.

  “I wanted to sit at the table when we ate,” another said. “But I never got a birthday cake.” So, no candles to blow out, no wish to make.

  One of the girls shied away. Hanna said, “What would you wish for?” The girl shook her head. The other girls persisted until she said, “To read,” as though embarrassed by it. Then, opening up, “I always wanted to read Judy Blume books.” And the other girls went quiet.

  The first girl asked Hanna again for her wish. “It doesn’t matter,” Hanna insisted.

  Before folding each crane, Hanna would turn to her notebook. The numbered lines with no name, she could account for those cranes, they were in the grocery bag, smooshed. The numbered lined with names, the ones she’d given away, she crossed out the name for each crane she folded on her spring bed. She crossed off Mrs. Vannberg and Cheryl Vannberg. Erica Grimond, Viv Grimond, The Grimonds as a family, she lined through their names. Dr. Mayhew, Mr. Cullers, all the neighbors Hanna visited with tsuru gifts. Her mother, her father, even Maureen. She ran a heavy line of ink through their names until they’d all been crossed out and replaced by a new paper crane.

  *

  Troy abruptly halted the line of bridge daughters before the broad trunk of a staunch redwood. He crouched to the springy black soil and spread his hands. Speckles of alabaster-colored chippings were scattered underfoot.

  “These are seashells.” He picked up three shards and set them in his open palm for the girls to gather around and see. “Millions of years ago, this area was underwater. These shells are the fossils of ancient sea creatures.”

  Some of the girls bent to pick up a bit of shell, holding their backs or cradling their bellies while doing so.

  “These shells are not only the past, they are the present and the future,” Troy said. “Slowly but surely, change is happening all around you. Millions of years ago, we would be standing on the bottom of the Pacific ocean. Today we’re at four thousand foot elevation and four and a half miles from the ocean.”

  Troy windmilled his arm to shape a giant letter O in the air. “The universe is interlocked. All of life is connected. The redwoods make oxygen for us to breath. We make carbon dioxide for the redwoods. The redwoods shed their dead leaves and branches. Insects and slugs convert that dead material into compost, which in turn becomes the nutrients the trees need to grow.” He wiped the broken shells from his hand. “The past is interlocked with the present. The choices we make today decide our world’s future.”

  Hanna slipped one of the shards into the pocket of her bridge daughter dress as a souvenir.

  “You can’t take that, honey,” Troy said to her. Frightened at being singled out, she dropped it to the ground. “Take nothing, leave nothing behind,” he told them all.

  On the walk back, Hanna, flush with embarrassment, avoided eye contact with the other bridge daughters. You can’t take that, honey, she aped Troy’s words in her mind. You’re all so brave. Think of your responsibility. There is nothing unfair in this world.

  Of course we’re to take nothing and leave nothing behind, she thought. If we did, they might have to think of us as people and not just the soil for planting their seeds.

  *

  One day after lunch, Hanna finished stacking trays early. The fire exit door was propped open by the ashtray but the two men were not to be seen. Hanna poured a glass of ice water for herself and wandered outside to enjoy it in the sun. Redwoods stood in an erect row behind the canteen. Idle, bored, Hanna trailed along the edge of the building. She came to another building, one she’d not noticed before, tucked behind the canteen and the clinic.

  It was a garage, taller and wider than the garage at her home in Concord. A pale violet delivery van was parked halfway out of the garage with blocks under its wheels to prevent it from rolling. One of the men stood on the front fender with his head down in the engine block. The other lay on a mechanic’s creeper under the van, only his legs showing. Both wore dark blue coveralls. With their arms covered and faces obscured, she couldn’t tell Rex and Remy apart.

  Hanna had never noticed the delivery van before, although she’d been at Susanna Glen for over two weeks now. It bore no markings, not even the camp’s swirly logo. On closer inspection, the van resembled a small hunchbacked garbage truck, right down to the rear hydraulic lifter stowed against the back doors. Through the van’s side window she saw steel racks inside.

  The man on the creeper rolled out from under the van. It was Rex. He sat up and looked straight into Hanna. What’s this? he mu
mbled.

  After that one morning with Rex—“Flapjacks!”— she’d been thinking of him a great deal. She had started searching for him through the serving window as she passed with her tray. Rex and Remy switched places in the kitchen with each meal. When Rex served, she was shy and voiceless, his captive, as she accepted a sectioned plate of food from him. Now so close to him, the funny feeling returned to her belly, like she had to urinate, but in a good way.

  Hanna stepped forward and offered him the glass of ice water. Puzzled, still seated on the creeper, he accepted it with an offset grin and a nod. For a moment they held the glass together. The auto oil and tobacco smoke and his body odor—he smelled delicious.

  Laughter erupted behind her. Hanna spun around, startled. Standing on the fender and leaning around the hood, Remy said, You got an admirer I think. Rex laughed with him. Hanna, purple with shame, heard their laughter all the way back to the fire exit, waddling side to side from the weight she carried.

  *

  All the girls went to the clinic once a week for checkups. It was listed on the compound board as a duty, like anything else. Hanna and the other girls wearing purple bows swung their legs in the waiting room chairs until their name was announced.

  Dr. Wynn was paunchy and balding, with a meager web of gray hair combed over the bare spot. He made no idle conversation with Hanna. The vomiting sensation had left Hanna months earlier, and she’d not had a fainting spell since her birthday party. Dr. Wynn seemed to neither approve or disapprove when she informed him of this. The gemellius kicked often, but Hanna had grown used to it, almost tired of it. Alright, alright, she told it, you’ll be out of there soon enough. Again, Dr. Wynn seemed indifferent.