The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

I’ve oiled and braided my hair into a frizzy crown at the top of my head. I feel like crying.

  “Come. Make the best of it,” Narn says, eyeing the food that the waitress brings us.

  I poke at a gray dumplings and sip some watery tea, my thoughts flying to our little porch that smells of jasmine and rabbit stew.

  Narn chomps down a dumpling and clear fluid dribbles down her chin. “Crappy twin brought back from the dead at birth—not long enough for death to get hooks in but long enough to give twin Dead-See.”

  This is the first time she has referred to my stillbirth. I poke at a plate of what looks like stick figures from a game of Hangman.

  “Chicken feet,” Narn says.

  I push the plate away.

  “You can see the future, Narn.”

  She shrugs.

  “Don’t lie,” I say.

  She spits out the bones with pointy teeth. “Most times.”

  “So you knew Kai would be the one to kill the Father?”

  She nods. “Hoped but didn’t know.”

  She blows on the cup of tea cradled in tremulous hands. Her left works just as well as the right one now—neither perfect but good enough. There is a jagged scar across her wrist from where she tried to hack it off.

  “And what did you hope for me?”

  For a moment that stretches into much longer, her lips are a grim line.

  “Crappy twin would protect brave sister. Keep him alive.”

  “Well I failed spectacularly at that.”

  “Father too strong.”

  A cleaner wearing a hairnet slops liquid into a bucket, swishes a mop around.

  “Why was he so strong, Narn?”

  “Turbo charged.” She shrugs. “Father has extra power.”

  “Tiff you mean.”

  Power of a goddess and power of a man, power to the power of power.

  A lady in white comes up to the table and asks if we’ve seen her children. She isn’t speaking English, but there is no mistaking the meaning of her words, the urgent flow of her tears. Her breasts sag with milk gone bad, and lacerations swell across her translucent brown back.

  I give my chicken foot to an emaciated ghost dog skulking at our feet.

  “Kai changed,” I say. “She was different when she came back. Like she wanted to tell me something but couldn’t. Like she was afraid.”

  She sucks her teeth, stalling. She’s smoothed down her clown hair for the occasion and Mag has smeared pink lipstick across her mouth.

  “Death was in her then,” Narn says. “Blood isn’t everything.”

  “If your sister came back”—I top up our teacups from the chipped pot—“what would you say to her?”

  She spits gristle into a napkin, blinking both eyes—the real agate one and the fake one. She is trying not to cry. Neither of us want to cry. “Would tell sister, sorry.”

  It’s not what I was expecting. “If Kai came back, I would tell her the same thing.”

  She gets up to find the bathroom. Narn’s depth perception has been getting worse, and I watch her bang along the walls toward a door at the opposite end of the big silent dining room. The light is watery, the color of tears. The cleaner has started to drag the mop across the floor. Coarse black hair wisps from her hairnet. A skin-crawl begins beneath my belly, works its way up. She bumps into the table, and Narn’s empty chair jumps on its legs. I look away, anywhere but at the cleaner. She pulls off her hairnet.

  “Look at me.”

  “Kai?” I am appalled at the baby weakness in my voice.

  It is and isn’t my thirteen-year-old twin sister, deathly pale and heart-stoppingly lovely. Her black hair is tied back in the faded ribbon and falls down her shoulders and her deep blue eye flashes like an electrical storm.

  “You’re all grown up,” she says reading my mind. There is a cruel set to her mouth, a tearful hardness. “You turned out pretty tough.”

  Her speech is muffled and I don’t know if she says “pretty tough” or “pretty enough.”

  “And you don’t stink anymore.”

  She looks at the chair as if unsure of whether to go or stay, as if unsure what she should do. “I don’t feel up to much,” she says. “I can’t remember how I got here.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  “I’m not like me. I think I’m more like you now.”

  A lump rises in my throat—pushes the horror back a little. “Is it you? Really?”

  “In the not-flesh,” she says, miming a grotesque twerk.

  The ghosts cock their heads to listen in. “Maybe that’s because the memory of who all of you are exists in those you left behind,” I swallow painfully. “I’ve kept you alive.”

  “Thanks. I guess.” She wrinkles her chalky brow. “Remember killing the Father? That was—”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “—a total rush!” She sits down, and if I focus with one eye, I can’t see the lines of the chair through her body. “It was all winged vengeance, the world gone red. I’m Dani and not Dani. I am a bird!” She looks at me with both wonder and triumph, like someone who pulled off the unthinkable and doesn’t quite know how they did it. “Seize! Seize!” she caws.

  “How did you do it?”

  “Dani let me in. I became her. But me too. Power from the ravens, the whole murder of us—just pure feathered fury. And power from you, Meera. You killed him too!”

  She leans forward so her pale see-through hands are almost touching mine, and I will not pull away from their fiery chill. “You ate his eyes, Meera. They popped like grapes between your—”

  “Beak?” I finish off.

  “He’s gunning for you, college girl. Be careful.”

  We stare at each other and then smile. It’s hard not to.

  “How will I know what to do?”

  She flicks her hair from her shoulders. “Muscle memory. Up here.” She points to her head.

  “If I don’t? If my brain-muscle misremembers? I don’t want to keep failing.”

  She leans in confidentially, and I smell blossoms on her breath, but that can’t be right because she isn’t breathing. “Then here.” She touches me on the breastbone. “That muscle never forgets.”

  Where she touches me, on my heart, it stops. I open and close my mouth like a fish. No air. I look down at my chest, at Tiff’s sweetheart neck. I can see the shadow of my heart through my skin. It looks like a clenched fist. My vision begins to darken at the edges. Then abruptly my heart unclenches. I gasp and draw in hard gulps of air. “Neat trick,” I finally say.

  The pretty barmaid from downstairs has come in on her dinner break and walks to a table. Kai swivels and grins blackly. “We play Scrabble sometimes. She isn’t bad.”

  “I missed you.”

  “I missed you more.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  She winks, mimes I-C-U. Then she reaches above her head and unties her ribbon. “I want you to have this,” she says.

  “No way.”

  “It’s not really your style is it?” She looks doubtful and shoves it across the table. “Keep it for a snowy day.”

  I run my finger up and down the ribbon. It’s faded and the silk feels impossibly warm.

  “Why are you here now, Kai?”

  She looks confused. She fades and jerks back into form, her head bent so low that her hair drags on the table.

  “Last supper and all,” she says in a voice at the wrong speed. “Three’s company.”

  I looked at my uneaten food. “You hate dumplings.”

  She lifts her head and lets her tongue hang out in a gag-face. Behind that curtain of hair she says, “Meera, you need to find that bitch-sister and put her out of our misery. Everything depends on that.”

  “Tell me how. Something’s missing, Kai. I feel like t
here’s this gap, this breakage between what I am and what I need to be. I can’t get there. Stay. Stay and help me.”

  But her empty eye looks right through me, and she starts to speak but I can’t hear more than a frustrating whisper just below range. I lean in.

  “I can’t hear, Kai. I can’t begin the end until I know what the middle is. You came back to tell me, and then you went away again, and this is my last chance.”

  “Third one’s the charm. I’ll give you that.”

  “Please?”

  She has all but faded except for her hands riven with thick black veins—without warning she pounds these down on the table. “It was your fault! You shouldn’t have hero-worshiped me like that. You thought I was like an angel or something. You didn’t see me. You only saw yourself. Your sad and lonely self.”

  I grab both of those terrible familiar hands in mine. I pull with all my strength, holding her here with me. “What is the middle bit? You need to tell me what I need to know. If you leave without telling me now, you’ll just be lost forever. I don’t want you to be lost, roaming, stuck in some middle place.” I lower my voice. “That must be hell for you.”

  She struggles against my grip but I am the stronger one now.

  “What was so important to this whole thing, the story of you and me, that Narn brought you back from the dead to tell me? Save yourself, Kai, please. Because I can’t.”

  I’m concentrating so hard on keeping her with me that at first I don’t notice Narn shuffle back to the table, and pull up a third chair. “It’s time,” she nods, “for middle bits.”

  Narn’s words bring Kai back but so distorted and monstrous at first that I yelp and drop her hands. Her shoulders slump until her neck is stretched and extended like a raven’s, her chin almost on the table. Her too-blue eye ratchets open and closed. “I was going to leave without you, okay? When I started to bleed, and I knew that I had the bad lady-bits, I knew that the game was up with the Father, pardon the pun. Narn had told me about the secret place where she and her sisters were from and I begged her to get me out of there or I’d tell the Father that she was a spy. I was scared. So scared.”

  “You were going to leave without me?” My voice is shrill with disbelief.

  “I didn’t care. All I cared about was myself. Some twin, eh.” She sits up straight and she is Kai again, beautiful liar, a horror.

  “You didn’t know, though,” I beg. “You didn’t know we were twins.”

  Nightfall darkens the windows. The Excelsior ghosts have taken their places in the dining room, scattered at tables, undone and expectant.

  “I knew.” Kai rocks back and forth on her chair. “I always knew. Didn’t you?”

  Hadn’t I known that the teller of those bunkroom tales was intricately, intimately bound to me? Like seeking like, and even then, how proud I was of her, clever gutsy Kai, even before I knew that I had a reason to be.

  “Yes,” I whisper. “I always knew.”

  Narn is snoring gently.

  “I thought you were weak enough to pass for a normal Made. That the Father wouldn’t harm you if he never found out.” Her voice drops to a low percussive whisper, like a snare drum. “I told myself I’d come back for you.”

  Narn lifts her mutilated wrist, holds up two fingers in the peace sign. “Truth or dead.”

  “Is that all?” I say. “Is this what you needed me to know? Because it doesn’t matter. I would have done the same.”

  “No you wouldn’t.”

  No, I wouldn’t.

  “No more lies!” Narn howls, and the ghosts cower. “Truth or dead!”

  Kai does not cower. She unfurls, as if having come to a decision, or having one come to her. She stretches black lips in a squishy smile. “But then everything changed.”

  “What? When?”

  “You know. The Assistant that time in the Blood Temple.” She sticks her finger in her mouth and fake-gags. “The way you fought him off when he tried to turn you into a specimen.”

  “What?”

  “It was intense. Such fury. Such rage. You kicked him with your bare feet and kept him down and kept kicking. Extreme gore between your toes—the evidence. But you didn’t care. You just kept kicking where it counts. That’s when I knew I could never leave you.”

  I feel my chair lurch. The dining room bulbs flicker. Narn rattles from her throat.

  “No! It was you. It was you who brought him down. With your heavy brown shoes.” I kick the leg of her chair under the table. “You who saved me.”

  She wobbles her head and smiles sadly. “You saved yourself, sister. Didn’t need shoes. You were always the strong one. The dangerous one.”

  “Shhhhh,” Narn surfaces from her dreaming pool. Her painted mouth serene as a bronze goddess.

  “I stomped him? With my bare feet? I was like, twelve years old.”

  “Almost thirteen. And look again.”

  I lift the tablecloth, slip one of my feet out of the brown shoes. Oh horror! The passerine talons—engineered for perching, retract as soon as I look at them. I get a glimpse of a stumpy hallux. My mouth hangs open. Narn watches me from behind a slitted eye. Kai looks away, bloodlessly whistles.

  “Why haven’t I noticed before?” I can barely speak. Weightless with shock.

  “Maybe because you haven’t known what to look for.” Kai points to where in the place of her missing blue eye, there is now a new brown one. It’s bigger than the blue one, and it looks wrong—like a human eye on an animal, or a cat’s eye on a dog.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I look between them. “All this time I thought I was . . .”

  “Crappy twin,” Narn says between stagy snores.

  “Because then I knew you’d do something stupid and heartfelt because that’s who you are. That’s what makes you a danger. You live in how you feel.” Kai brings her hand to her heart again. “I live in how I think.” She points to her head. “You do first, ask questions later. And I couldn’t let you do anything that would make you dead meat in a jar.”

  “But you could have been instead. That was . . .”

  “Brain dead,” Narn wheezes and wakes up suddenly.

  “I took the blame because the shoe fit.” Her white face darkens and there is a note of doom in her confession, like the slamming shut of a cage. “When we first started playing boardgames, it was a novelty, but then he began to see my noncompliance, my non-perfectibility, as the original sin. I knew that if I took the blame for what you did to the Assistant, he’d see that he had seriously blown it. He’d created a monster, and he wouldn’t be able to forgive me anymore than he could forgive himself. That was the only thing that got me through the unmaking. It did hurt him more than it hurt me. Almost.”

  “Men!” Narn says something else in her language, and it sets my teeth on edge.

  “Besides,” Kai says with a dread coyness. “I knew you’d save me.”

  “Why don’t I remember?”

  “Why do you think?” Kai makes a finger-gun and shoots herself in the head. “The Father’s Forever Code—memory wiped clean as a whistle.”

  She begins to whistle that song she started. When I ask her, she says it’s from a different time, a different place. “Like birds of forever, “ she hums in perfect pitch, “to be or not, yeah yeah.”

  Now it is Kai who is crying. The three of us are holding hands.

  “Do I have to be dead for my memory to come back?” I ask.

  Ghostly tears run down her face. “It helps but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  I wiggle my toes to make sure they’ve gone back to normal.

  “Sorry,” Kai says.

  “I told you she’d forgive you,” the witch says, and both Kai and I stare at her. It is the first time we have ever heard Narn use the correct pronouns.

  And then Narn does that clicky thing in
her throat and my sister is gone.

  * * *

  I headed to the bridge after the last FiFo class, thinking I would retrace my steps to find the notebook, when a text came in from Pagan.

  You left your little book behind. S will return to you next Gatherum. X-mas party afterward at Sweeney’s—you’re coming!

  CHAPTER 26:

  LOST AND FOUND

  For the rest of the week, I went to every class. I comforted Lara—helped her arrange her flight and we said tearful goodbyes.

  On the Sunday evening of the last Fearsome Gatherum before the Christmas break, I texted Marvin and said I was going to get a drink. I didn’t wait for him to text back. I dressed without really thinking about it. I laced up our old brown shoes. From the windowsill, I took a yellow sprig of Letharia vulpina and ground it carefully into powder using the handle of my hairbrush. I mixed the wolfsbane into some water in a plastic bottle small enough to fit into my coat pocket. In my locker, I rummaged for the little purse and the tips of my fingers touched something hot and slick. I pulled it gently out. I went to the mirror and tied your blue ribbon around my crown of frizz. It was time. I’d made a promise. And the story had to deliver. Narn taught me how to do that, just as she taught you.

  “And we flock in fury together,” I hummed, as off-key as your ghostly pitch was perfect. “No word of a lie.”

  Leaves had gathered along the Corso and the trash bins were overflowing. The bookshop clerk stared sadly out of the window. Bicycles rusted in their stands. Sasha, it seemed, had won. The Redress Scheme looked doomed.

  I went into Dirty Bert’s, empty except for a couple of older Mades. I ordered two beers and two shots before Marvin texted that he had a big day and would see me another time. I checked my watch. Just after eleven p.m. The readings in Sasha’s turret would begin soon. It was a special Christmas session with everyone asked to write a holiday-themed story and a big party afterward with the select few moving on to Sweeney’s. The beer at Dirty Bert’s was even more watery than usual. A text came in from Pagan. I ignored it. Another one came in.

  Where are you?

  I ignored that too.

  You’re up next.

  You missed your spot.