The Forever Bridge

by T. Greenwood

  She thinks she must be close to the turn to her mother’s. Despite the darkness, her body somehow remembers the curve of the road, the configuration of trees. And so she is confused when suddenly she is blinded by two bright lights. She shields her eyes, struggles to make sense of it. But then logic clicks in, like puzzle pieces snapping into place. The car pulls up next to her, and the window rolls down. It’s Grover’s station wagon, and Gloria is inside.

  “Ruby! Jesus, I could barely see you out here,” she says. “Get in!”

  Inside, the car is warm and dry. There’s a Joni Mitchell CD in the stereo. It’s pretty much the only music Gloria ever listens to. It drives Izzy crazy, but Ruby likes it. There’s something soft and peaceful about that kind of music. Like a lullaby.

  She doesn’t realize she’s crying until Gloria reaches into her glove box and pulls out a tissue.

  “The house is gone,” Ruby says. And saying it out loud feels strange. Like it wasn’t true until she said it.

  “What?” Gloria asks, her eyes wide.

  “The river. There was a flood. It’s gone.”

  “Where’s your mom?” Gloria asks gently, but Ruby can tell she is horrified. Terrified.

  Ruby is crying so hard now, she can hardly get the story out. But somehow, Gloria is able to decipher enough from her blubbering, and she drives past the turn to her mother’s house and heads back out onto the main road.

  “Where are we going?” Ruby asks. “We can’t leave them.”

  “I know,” she says. “We’ll go around, over the other bridge. I think it’s the Monroes’ farm across the river from your mom’s place. It’s probably their sugar shack. Don’t worry. And here . . . take my phone. As soon as we get reception, call 911 again.”

  Ruby stares out the window at the rain. She feels like she is inside the whale now. Swallowed up.

  “Ruby?” Gloria says, and she looks at her. She is gripping the steering wheel with both hands. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”

  The midwife is gone for only a few minutes, but in those moments alone with the baby, Nessa tries not to imagine what will happen if she doesn’t come back. If she has left her here. She presses the baby against her, and tries only to focus on the heartbeat she feels underneath the barrel cage of bone. Like a bird inside, beating its small wings. But then, just as her own heart begins to pound with fear, the woman returns.

  She stands in the doorway of the shack. “Tell me what happened,” she says.

  “His name is Declan O’Dell,” Nessa says. “He was driving. His headlights didn’t work right. It was an accident, but I couldn’t make him stop. He wouldn’t listen.”

  The woman stands there, but she doesn’t say a word, and for a moment Nessa worries that somehow, she has stolen the woman’s voice. Perhaps she has taken her ability to form words; maybe breaking her own silence has muted someone else. But then, as the woman lifts the baby from Nessa’s chest, her words come to her as soft as rain.

  “My son died that night.”

  Nessa’s chest feels bare, exposed. Her heart feels hollow in the baby’s absence.

  “He was seven years old.” This sounds like an accusation, like a plea.

  Nessa struggles, searching for something to say that will make any of this okay. That might comfort or appease her. That might undo the damage she has done. She scours her vocabulary for the phrase or sentiment that might act as a balm to this old wound. But words are simply syllables, abstract constructions. Meaningless in their own right. Any words she might offer her on their own could not change history. They could not give her her son back. And so, for now, she says nothing.

  And the woman studies her, though it doesn’t seem like she is waiting for anything. It’s as though she too realizes the inanity of words. The pointlessness.

  “I think the baby may have an infection,” the woman says. “We need to get her to a hospital. Ruby’s gone to call an ambulance. But it may be awhile.”

  Nessa watches the woman who is holding the baby in her arms. But it isn’t fear that she feels. This woman, whose life was shattered that night at the bridge. This woman who should despise her. Instead, Nessa trusts her. She trusts her in a way she has not trusted a single person in her life.

  “We need to keep her hydrated. Let’s try to get her to latch on again, okay?”

  Nessa nods. She will do whatever this woman says.

  She brings the baby back to her and positions her under Nessa’s breast.

  “Here, if you flatten your breast out like a pancake and tickle the roof of her mouth with your nipple, she’ll latch on. Your milk hasn’t come in yet, but the colostrum is good for her. And it will keep her hydrated.”

  The baby cries. And her chest rattles with each exhalation.

  Nessa peers down into the small face of the baby, at the dark eyelashes and dark hair. She doesn’t look like anyone she knows. Mica is her father, but what does this even mean anymore? Instead, she thinks, she is a child of the road. A gypsy child conjured from pavement and neon and cornfields. Conceived of stars rushing across the sky, of cold grass and endless rivers. She belongs to no man. She is Nessa’s alone.

  The baby wails again, and so Nessa does exactly as Ruby’s mother says, squeezing her breast and thrusting it gently into the baby’s mouth. It feels both utterly strange and somehow exactly the right thing to do.

  “Here,” the woman says, and turns the baby so that she is facing Nessa, pressed directly into her chest. “Like this.”

  And then the baby is latching on. And for a moment, just one quiet moment, she feels like everything is going to be okay.

  “Why did you come back here?” the woman asks. “What do you want?”

  Nessa looks up into this woman’s face, which is open as a flower. She thinks about George, about the soft kiss on her forehead. She thinks about Ruby offering her that warm Tootsie Roll from her pocket, about all the beautiful bridges.

  “I just wanted to come home,” she says.

  Sylvie should feel rage. She should want revenge. She should want explanations. But strangely, she feels none of this. For the last two years, she has been trying to come up with some sort of logic for what happened that night. She has studied the trajectories. Analyzed every factor. She has lived her life backwards, trying to figure out every turn of events that must have transpired in order for those two cars to meet on the bridge at that precise moment. She has considered all of the little things she could have done, the simple delays that would have prevented this. But considering this, she has worked herself into a frenzy. If it truly is this simple, then maybe there have been countless other accidents that have somehow been avoided, disasters averted. And the possibility of this has overwhelmed her. How do you live your life when every single decision you make could precipitate such tragic consequences? How do you live, when death is only waiting for you to slip up?

  Closing herself inside that house seemed to be the only answer. If her world was confined to this small space, to those four walls, to those quiet rituals, then she would be safe. But now she knows that there is no such thing as safety. Here is the evidence. This storm that carried her house away. Her house, her home, is gone. It was swept away as casually as someone rubbing a smudge of chocolate from a child’s face. And if she had been inside the house, she would be gone as well. This thought nearly overwhelms her.

  Because somehow, this girl, this strange girl with the ratty hair and blue eyes, this odd Madonna is the one who saved her. She studies her, the way she would study a painting. Looking for meaning in the quiet brushstrokes of her hair, in the textured patterns of her flesh. She examines the angles of her shoulders, the quiet slope of her back and the swell of her breast as she feeds her baby. There are no answers here. Only more and more questions.

  How do you not believe in fate? How do you ever think that you are the one in control? How could she have been so foolish as to think that she had any authority over her future? How could she have been so brazen as to think that
this had anything at all to do with her?

  And so instead of rage, she is suddenly filled with a sense of thankfulness. Her chest inflates with a sense of kinship she hasn’t felt before. This girl is not to blame. No one really is to blame. Even the man, Declan she says, is culpable only of cowardice.

  Because the world sometimes conspires against us even as we embrace it. And sometimes the world embraces us, even as we forsake it. Maybe this is God, she thinks. This quiet, easy truth. And religion, the acceptance of it.

  Nessa hears something outside the shack, and for a moment she worries that the river has risen again, that it has somehow gone over the high banks and that it will sweep the sugar shack, and them inside of it, away. She tries to imagine that journey, the one she might take on this river. She wonders where it would carry her this time.

  But then there is light filling the room. And there is Ruby and another woman.

  Sylvie rushes to Ruby and embraces her. She looks like she might swallow her up in her arms. And Ruby clings to her, as though she is trying not to drown.

  The other woman moves quickly. “Stay here. I’m going to go meet the ambulance. I’ll bring them here. It will just be a few minutes. Is everybody okay?”

  Nessa nods. And together, Ruby and her mother nod.

  And then there are the men in uniforms. It feels official. It feels like something on TV. They know what they are doing and move with certainty and purpose.

  “We need to take the baby from you,” one man says, and despite the width of his shoulders and the seriousness of his face, his voice is gentle. When she shakes her head and clings to the baby, he says softly, “We’ll give her back. I promise.”

  And so they take the baby, who is screaming again, and it feels as though Nessa’s heart is being torn from her as they carry her outside. They have brought a stretcher. They help her lie down on its hard white sheets, and then they fasten her. It feels strange to be tethered to a board like this. It makes her think of a papoose, as if she is the infant.

  Outside, the rain is still coming down hard and sharp. It feels like splinters on her face. The journey from the shack to the dirt road feels endless. She can still hear the baby crying, and so she says, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” hoping that her voice will somehow reach her.

  The men walk like soldiers through the woods, and she stares up into that unforgiving sky. Nessa lets the rain fill her eyes, wet her face. It feels like a baptism. Like a blessing.

  The lights are bright once they are out of the woods. There is a car parked cockeyed in the field, and the ambulance is parked next to it.

  She feels a strange and overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Of familiarity.

  It’s a yellow station wagon. The same yellow station wagon that picked her up after she leapt from the car that night. It’s George’s car.

  It doesn’t make any sense, yet it doesn’t matter. She’s found exactly what she was looking for the whole time. And as the doors close behind her in the ambulance, and she sees the paramedic strapping a tiny little oxygen mask over her baby’s face, she knows that everything is going to be okay.

  Inside the warm, dry ambulance, she closes her eyes, and the silver clasp closes shut. She is safe.

  Ruby and her mother climb into the back of the station wagon and Gloria gets in the driver’s side.

  “There are blankets in the way back,” Gloria says into the rearview mirror.

  Before she fastens her seat belt, Ruby gets on her knees and peers into the cluttered back of the station wagon. She finds two blankets and pulls them into the backseat. She hands one to her mother and then wraps one around herself. Her entire body is shaking with cold and something else.

  “I’m taking you both to the hospital,” Gloria says.

  Ruby feels something stop in her chest, like a plug getting sucked back into a drain. She looks at her mother, afraid of what she will see. The last time her mother went to the hospital, they had swaddled her like a baby, made her arms useless. She had felt embarrassed for her mother, guilty with her own inability to help her. But now her mother just nods and looks out the window as they make their way through the high grass of the field and back onto the dirt road.

  The wind is strong, but inside the car, they are safe.

  Gloria follows the ambulance, which announces itself with high-pitched wails and glaring red lights. Everything inside the station wagon is imbued with red. She looks at her mother, and thinks she could just be blushing. The color of her cheeks that of shame.

  “Who is she?” Gloria asks, finally, as they get onto the road and are driving fast down the main road toward town. “That girl?”

  She looks in the rearview mirror again and catches Ruby’s eye.

  Ruby shakes her head. She doesn’t know. Despite everything they’ve been through together over the last week, despite the fact that she has fed her and cared for her and tried to keep her safe, she has no idea who she is. And she thinks that perhaps she is the same mystery to her own mother. Her mother, who has been absent for nearly the last two years of her life, who has let her slip away like so much sand through careless fingers.

  “She knows what happened to Jess,” Ruby’s mother says suddenly, and Ruby turns to her.

  “What?” Ruby says, and Gloria turns her head as though whatever she is seeing in the rearview mirror is not enough.

  “She was there,” she says. “At the bridge.”

  There are haunted bridges all over the world. Ruby has studied them with the same sort of morbid curiosity she used to have for ghost stories. Her dad told the best ones. Ones he and his brothers used to tell around the campfire when they were kids.

  The Golden Gate Bridge is the most famous one, haunted by suicides mostly but also by the SS Tennessee, which wrecked and sank near the bridge in the 1850s. People still claim that they can hear the screams, the voices of the dying through the thick San Francisco fog at night. In 1891, a train derailed in the middle of the night while crossing the Bostian Bridge in North Carolina. Thirty people were killed. Visitors to the bridge claim that at 3 A.M. on the anniversary of the accident each year, it is as though it is happening all over again. There is the sound of the cars crashing into the ravine below, the screams of the passengers inside. But the story that has always fascinated Ruby the most is that of Emily’s Bridge, which is right here in Vermont. Ruby has never been there, but her father said that he has. Nobody can seem to get the story straight though. One version is that this woman, Emily, was supposed to meet her lover at the bridge to elope, but that when he never arrived, she hung herself from the rafters. The other version is that Emily was left at the altar by her lover and, in a rage, she took off in a horse-drawn wagon in which she plummeted to her death at the bridge. People go to the bridge to try to catch a glimpse of Emily’s ghost. Some people claim they hear the sounds of a girl screaming, of horses, hear a loud banging sound, and feel a woman’s gentle touch on their skin. It bothers Ruby that nobody knows what really happened to Emily.

  Ruby doesn’t know much about ghosts, but she knows that they’re supposed to be the people who died with unfinished business. She wonders about Jess, about what sort of things might not be settled for him.

  The night of the accident, when she and her mother returned to the house, there was a cup of cocoa sitting on the counter, a little bit of the cocoa powder spilled next to it. Jess used to hate the tiny marshmallows that came in those packets, so he’d pick them out before stirring the powder into the hot milk. She remembers her mother staring at the mug, holding it in her hands. She couldn’t wash it or even move it from the counter top for weeks. Every single day it was a reminder that Jess had stood here, plucking marshmallows out of his cocoa, not knowing that in a few hours he would be gone.

  Ghosts usually haunt the places where they died. They return looking for some sort of closure, some way to pass through to the afterlife. In every culture in the world there are ghosts. On every continent and in every country. She thinks about Nessa. And how
she has haunted their lives as well. For months after the accident, her mother insisted that there was another car at the bridge that night. But her father couldn’t remember anything about the accident except for the moment when the steering wheel crushed his legs. Her mother pleaded with her father, with Gloria, with her to believe that there was someone else there. Someone who saw what happened, who didn’t stop. Bunk promised he would find the car, but how do you begin to search for the invisible? How do you find a ghost?

  But Nessa is not a ghost. She is real, and she is here.

  “How are you feeling?” Gloria asks, peeking into the hospital room where Ruby and her mother lie in separate beds. Her mother has, somehow, fallen asleep. Gloria pulls the thin curtain between them across, separating them. “The doctor says you’re going to be okay,” Gloria says to Ruby. “You look like you’ve taken a mud bath.”

  Ruby remembers only then that her entire body was caked in mud, like she is one of those bog people she learned about at school, their bodies preserved in a cast made of peat. The bog people were ghosts in their own way, she thinks.

  “Listen, I’m going to try to reach your dad again,” Gloria says, squeezing her hand. “I’ll also check on Nessa and the baby, and Grover too.”

  She had almost forgotten that Grover is also somewhere in this hospital.

  “Can I pick you up something from the cafeteria on my way back?” Gloria asks. “Jell-O? Some chocolate pudding?”