Hairpin Bridge

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  For a moment, he was a normal person. It was nice. It was also completely false.

  He finally said it. “You . . . drove her vehicle.”

  “Yeah.”

  He studied the taillights wistfully. “I recognize it.”

  “Do you mind if I record you?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She’d waited until now to ask, because she suspected it might be harder for him to say no on the spot. She pointed to the car. “I brought a tape recorder with me. An old clunky thing, you’ll laugh. But my counselor recommended that I . . . I record everything significant.”

  He said nothing. Thinking.

  “Not just this.” She flashed a wounded smile. “I filmed her funeral, too.”

  “Did you watch it?”

  “A few times.”

  He made a sour face. Why?

  “You don’t really die when your heart stops. You die when you’re forgotten. My sister isn’t a person anymore—she’s an idea. I carry her. So every trace I have left of her, every word and smell and sound, needs to be preserved.”

  “Even the negative things?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even her funeral?”

  “I feel close to her. Like she only just left.” It’s like picking a scab, she wanted to add. Soon you start to feel nothing, and that’s terrifying. The pain brings her back.

  It keeps her real.

  Raycevic sighed. Then he nodded once. “Go ahead.”

  She retreated to the Corolla, worrying she’d already blown her cover by using the word counselor. Was it therapist? What’s the difference between a therapist and a grief counselor? She didn’t know, but Raycevic probably did. She leaned into her sister’s car and pulled it out—a chunky black Shoebox recorder.

  She inserted a cassette tape. Clicked the shoulder button. “Testing.”

  “They still make those?”

  “It was Cambry’s. When we were kids.”

  That shut him up. He watched her set the gadget on the Corolla’s hood. Through the plastic cover, the cassette’s spokes turned. “Thank you,” she said, louder for the mic: “Corporal Raycevic.”

  “Call me Ray.”

  “Thank you, Ray.” She looked at him. “Start with how you found her body, please.”

  “I was responding. Someone took bolt cutters to the chain on that gate we passed.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Happens a couple times a year. Truckers use this route to shave an hour off their runs. This was the night of June seventh. Around eleven. And I came up on that bend there, approaching the bridge, and I saw a blue Toyota parked here.”

  “Parked where? Can you be exact?”

  “Actually . . .” He paused. “Exactly where you have it parked right now.”

  She felt a tug in her stomach, but quickly dismissed it: Coincidence.

  “I almost rear-ended it,” the cop said. “I slammed my brakes, splashed coffee all over my radio. You can see the skid marks still.”

  Sure enough, faded markings on the pavement, right where he pointed. Ropy, licorice-black.

  “At 11:44, I approached Cambry’s—your—Toyota Corolla on foot. It was abandoned. No occupant. No signs of disturbance. Driver door was left wide open. Dead battery. Empty tank.” Raycevic wavered, as if he felt foolish. “But you’re aware of all this—”

  “Every detail. Please.”

  “I checked the rest of the bridge, scanned the trees for campfires or flashlights. Then I sat back in my vehicle and called in the plates. Eleven fifty-one, now.”

  He knows the times too well, Lena noted. He’d studied up.

  “I remember standing by while Dispatch ran the plates, gathering my thoughts. Wiping coffee off my slacks with a napkin, looking up at the starry black sky, and being struck with a terrible feeling of . . . wrongness, I guess. I don’t know how else to describe it. Like being here, on this bridge, was the equivalent of sticking your right hand into a garbage disposal while feathering the on switch with your left. Does that make sense?”

  No—but Lena nodded anyway.

  It’s not just past and present that get scrambled in Hairpin Bridge’s prism, she remembered reading. So, too, are life and death.

  “Somehow I just . . .” He chewed his lip. “Cop’s intuition, I guess. Something told me I should step back out into the cold air, cold for June, and look down over the railing. That the woman who abandoned this Corolla would be . . . down there.”

  “The Suicide Bridge,” Lena whispered.

  “What?”

  “Hairpin Bridge’s other name.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “According to the ghost stories, I mean.” She twisted her hair, embarrassed to have brought the word ghost into this. “People on the internet, paranormal nuts . . . they say drivers used to jump to their deaths off this bridge. Five or six suicides back in the eighties. Enough that it became semifamous as a place where solitary, troubled people are drawn from all over to end their lives.”

  “Huh.” The cop shrugged. “Never heard of that.”

  “Like the forest in Japan.”

  “Never heard of that, either.” He walked to the railing, and Lena followed. He put both palms on the guardrail. His big hands were knobbed with calluses. “I was standing exactly here,” he said, “when I saw Cambry.”

  This gave Lena a shiver.

  He pointed straight down, to the mosaic of pale boulders far below. The arroyo was a bed of loose rocks tilled by the turbulent seasons of Silver Creek. Flash floods in March, drought in July.

  “Where?”

  “Right there.”

  She joined him at the railing and tried to visualize Cambry’s body down there as part of the mosaic. Crumpled, limp, doll-like from two hundred feet up. But she’d been trying for months. She wanted, needed more details: “Was she on her back? Or her stomach?”

  “On her side.”

  “Right or left?”

  “Left.”

  “Was there any blood?”

  He turned. “Excuse me?”

  “Did you see any blood on her?”

  “How is this helpful?”

  “I want to know everything.” Lena tried not to blink. “All the upsetting, nasty details. If I don’t have details, what I imagine at night when I can’t sleep is far, far worse. It’s unfinished, and I can’t stand unfinished things. It’s a problem I have. My brain works relentlessly to fill in blanks.”

  She wasn’t sure he was buying it.

  “It’s . . .” She tried this: “It’s like a monster in a movie. When you can’t see it, it’s terrifying. But seeing the monster plainly, in full daylight, takes away its power. Makes it known.”

  “Depends on the monster,” he said finally.

  “I’ve got a hell of an imagination, Ray.”

  “And your . . .” He squinted. “Your counselor signed off on this?”

  “I know what I’m asking.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m certain.”

  “A hundred percent?”

  “A million.”

  He sighed and looked away. “You’re making me uncomfortable.”

  “You’re uncomfortable?”

  “The fall killed Cambry,” he said abruptly. His voice rang in the thin air, and Lena instinctively shrank back. Hearing men raise their voices had always frightened her. “I don’t have any gory details to share about the state of her body after her suicide, because I don’t think it’s appropriate. Is that okay?”

  She felt like she was being scolded. Her eyes watered, despite herself. Hold it together.

  “After I saw your sister’s body, I called EMS and descended on foot to render aid, if possible. As I expected, I found she had no pulse. No breathing. Her body had been down there for at least a day.”

  Don’t cry. She bit her lip.

  “Dying in that way . . . it’s fast. Faster than the brain can experience pain. It’s like an off switch inside you, flipped in a mic
rosecond. Whatever her problems were on June sixth . . .” He exhaled and glanced back at her, softening. “Your sister didn’t suffer, Lena.”

  She bristled, like an icy fingertip had stroked between her shoulder blades. This was the first time Corporal Raycevic had used her first name. She wished he hadn’t.

  She didn’t suffer was a new one, too. Because when someone decides to jump off a bridge, no one has the audacity to claim they weren’t suffering.

  She tried to focus on the moment. On here, now, herself and Raycevic. But to be here and stand where it happened was to be plugged into a strange energy, and her restless mind kept whipping back to it, trying to reconstruct details: It’s June 6. After dusk. The air shivers with electricity. Cambry Lynne Nguyen is driving alone on this closed road. And after driving an unknown distance, from an unknown origin, she reaches this bridge. And she stops her car here.

  Right where Lena had unwittingly parked it, in an eerie coincidence.

  And she steps out into the cooling night, nine o’clock now, leaving her engine running, her door ajar. And she walks to the bridge’s edge, right here—Lena gripped the guardrail with both hands, perhaps in the same places Cambry had three months ago—and my sister hoists herself over this railing one leg at a time. Then she steps off, or maybe she hangs by her fingers before letting go, or maybe she takes a reckless running leap into the void, like how she seemed to leap into everything.

  She plunges two hundred feet.

  She impacts the rock floor at the speed of—

  “Fuck,” Lena whispered.

  What else can you say? Raycevic had stepped back to give her space.

  And now the questions. Endless questions in Lena’s mind, racing, scratching, clawing, begging to be let free: What were you doing out here? Where were you driving? Why did you stop? Why did you get out of your car here, of all places, on this remote bridge?

  And of course, the old classic, a terrible refrain: Why did you kill yourself?

  Why did you do it?

  “I’m sorry,” Raycevic whispered behind her. But his voice sounded oddly tinny, as if filtered through a distant phone line. All Lena saw was the voided space beneath her feet, the ravine far below, the vast gravel bed of Silver Creek littered with fallen white trees.

  Cambry . . .

  In your final hours, what was going through your mind?

  Chapter 2

  Cambry’s Story

  I swear to God, Cambry thinks, I better not die today.

  Seeing an owl in daylight is a dire omen. She can’t remember where she learned this.

  He’s perched in the branches like a brown lawn gnome. A great horned owl. His tufted feathers, the eponymous horns, form a devilish silhouette against the blue sky. These horns are the hardest to draw without overdoing. She’s using ink, not pencil, and it’s already botched—this poor guy looks like Batman. She wants to tear off the page and restart.

  If you weren’t the harbinger of my death before, she thinks, you probably are now.

  Downhill, the campground is silent.

  Or it was—until thirty seconds ago, when the couple in the Ford Explorer arrived. Now she hears the crinkle of nylon, zippers, car doors opening and shutting, murmured voices. She tries to focus on her sketch. The owl cocks its head, perhaps equally annoyed.

  The couple is arguing. From Cambry’s spot in the sagebrush fifty yards uphill, she can’t discern words, but she recognizes the tempo of their voices. The rises and falls, the whispered cuts, the reflexive snaps. The music of conflict. She knows every note.

  The man slides a cooler out of the Explorer and lets it hit the dirt with an emphatic thud.

  Cambry sticks out her tongue as she draws—habit, since age five—and keeps shading the owl’s outline, Batman ears and all. Sometimes you can rescue a sketch. With enough crosshatching, she makes the exaggeration look intentional. Her subject has lost interest in the couple and now stares back down at her with bright yellow eyes. Unsettling in their alertness.

  The Explorer’s cargo door slams. The couple is leaving now for their campsite. Their voices fading into the pines.

  Now she remembers—an eighth-grade museum trip, where a curator told the class that Native Americans considered owls to be harbingers of death. Guardians of the afterlife, venturing into daytime hours to meet the souls of the soon to be departed. Sure enough, this one is still studying her with those binocular eyes, a strange and powerful attention.

  Silence again. The couple is gone.

  Finally.

  Cambry claps her notepad shut and quietly hurries down to the road. She unslings her backpack beside the couple’s Explorer, pulls out a three-gallon fuel can, and gently pries the vehicle’s gas cover open so she can feed in several feet of plastic tubing.

  The owl watches her the entire time.

  * * *

  When we were kids, I always promised Cambry I would write a book about her adventures. This—what you’re reading now—is not what I had in mind.

  Obviously.

  But there’s some painful catharsis in telling my sister’s story. Reconstructing the facts of her final hours feels like setting a million fractured bones. Every word hurts, but my parents deserve to know what really happened to their daughter on June 6. And I’ll be up-front: I’ve taken liberties in imagining certain details, as no one can claim to know a dead woman’s thoughts.

  But who better to try than her twin?

  And before we proceed, a special note to Cambry: Here’s your book, sis. At long last. I’m so, so sorry that it’s fifteen years late.

  And that you die at the end.

  * * *

  Cambry’s spiral notebooks are a hand-drawn history of her past nine months.

  September is Oregon. Through the concrete and chain link of Portland to the watery evergreens of Crater Lake. Then Medford, home brews and couch surfing with one of her boyfriend Blake’s friends—an easygoing guy who shared a potent hallucinogen he’d grown in a shoebox. Hairy tarantulas had dropped down on her like paratroopers for the next three hours. Eventually they stopped being frightening and she just swatted them away.

  October is California. Highway 101 down past Eureka to Glass Beach. The neighboring residents of Fort Bragg used to dump their trash into the ocean for decades, unintentionally creating the world’s largest reserve of sea glass. Blue and green glittered wetly among the dark stones. Pencil and ink couldn’t do it justice. She took a handful and stored them in her console.

  November is foggy coasts, slick docks, and bridges. The biggest: Golden Gate.

  December and January are New Mexico, Arizona, Texas. Things were still good between her and Blake, the money lasting on pace. They played Frisbee in an apocalyptic expanse of bleached desert called White Sands. Pale waves whipped into fifty-foot ripples. One night under a galaxy of stars, Blake asked her what she’d do when this grand pilgrimage was over and they’d finally looped back to Seattle.

  Her answer: Kill myself.

  He laughed uncomfortably.

  February and March are Louisiana, Georgia, Florida. She drew white mansions with half-mile driveways, lightbulbs in trees, scaly alligator heads. She and Blake fought more frequently, their arguments coming as fast and fierce as the storms. Around Fort Myers, hailstones cracked the Corolla’s windshield like gunfire. Things were souring now. At the repair shop, Blake sullenly told her he was walking to the gas station to buy cigarettes. She waited thirty minutes, then went after him—and the 7-Eleven clerk said he saw a man matching Blake’s description meet a friend and drive away. He’d stolen four thousand dollars and their palm-size .25-caliber pistol. Cambry had seventeen dollars in her purse and a freshly repaired windshield.

  She kept going.

  Why not?

  She would find her way back to Seattle without him. The entire yearlong journey had been her idea. Not Blake’s. She’d find her way back home—if she even wanted to—and get there on her time.

  April is the Virginias, and then through
the deep green Ozarks, under the decayed smokestacks of rust-eaten paper mills and factories, and northward to the Dakotas. The sketches get more numerous without Blake touching her arm like an impatient child. She downsized without him and sold the trailer. The Corolla’s mileage got better. Odd jobs refilled the money. She didn’t like to steal, but she did on occasion. Mostly food.

  Now June. Montana.

  Her last notebook is almost full. From Magma Springs, Seattle is within a tank or two of gas. Her old life beckons, and she misses its comforts. Running water. Electrical outlets. Her toothache has gotten worse this month. She keeps seeing blood on her toothbrush.

  But she’ll make it to Coeur d’Alene tonight, she estimates. If she leaves now.

  On the hike back from the Dog’s Head campground, she takes the public trail before cutting through thick and hilly forest. Her backpack is heavy now with sloshing gasoline. When she siphons this far into the boonies, she takes only a gallon or two. She doesn’t want to strand anyone.

  The temperature is pleasant in the late evening. The sun orange behind the pines, the sky a bruised purple. No more feuding voices—just the buzz of crickets and the crunch of yellow grass underfoot. She likes the quiet, the smell of pine needles and berries. She’s on the final leg of her hike, maybe five minutes from the highway where she parked, when she notices the column of smoke.

  My car is on fire, she thinks.

  Her mind roils lately. Since Florida, she’s lost control of her anxieties—her furies, her psychologist used to call them. An owl means impending death. A toothache is cancerous. Smoke means her Corolla is a flaming husk.

  The smoke, it turns out, originates a short distance off her path. Several plumes rise in smeared trails against the white-capped Rockies. She’s curious, so she stops and squints through a screen of branches.

  A grass fire, maybe?

  She spots the source a quarter mile downhill: a naked cement foundation, as white as bone. Like a building that never was, now choked by weeds. A trailer and a rusted-out truck. A dried-up well. Heaped lumber and gravel. The soil is raw, dark, freshly churned.

  The smoke trails emanate from four fires. They’re arranged in a perfect row across the bare cement floor, and each fire is caged in a pyramid of stacked rocks. Like little hearth ovens. The flames are contained to cracks of trapped orange.