The Forever Bridge

by T. Greenwood

  Ruby nods. She is so hungry.

  The nurse lets her shower and then dresses Ruby in clean hospital pajamas that have teddy bears all over them as though she is just a little girl. And while normally this would make her feel really awkward, it feels nice to be taken care of.

  “We’re going to have you spend the night with us,” the nurse says, as if this is a slumber party instead of the hospital. The nurse takes her temperature one more time and then says, “You’ve had quite an adventure. Try to get some rest.”

  Gloria comes back an hour later, clutching a chocolate pudding in one hand. Her eyes are red, swollen.

  “Are you crying?” Ruby asks.

  “Just sad about Grover,” she says.

  “Is he going to die?” Ruby asks.

  “Someday,” she says, smiling sadly. “But hopefully some other day.”

  She knows that Gloria does not believe in God, that Izzy’s family is agnostic. That means unsure, is how Gloria explained it. Because no matter what anybody says, nobody knows for sure. She remembers that Gloria’s uncertainty made her feel strange. When she was little, she thought that grown-ups knew almost everything. They knew the definitions of words (barometer, gelatinous, persuasive). Her father and Bunk could fix almost anything that broke. They always knew what to do when there was an emergency. And they knew the answers to most of her questions: Why does the sun go down at night? Where does rain come from? Where is the tallest building in the world? The longest bridge? And if they didn’t know the answers, they knew where to find them. But God was a different story. And when she asked, it wasn’t like the questions she had about where babies came from. She knew there were some questions that made her mother blush and her father change the subject. But this was not one of those questions. This question made her mother’s face go white. It made the color slip away from her face, disappearing like an Etch A Sketch drawing after you shake it.

  “Where is Jess now?” she had asked that night, Jess’s cup of cocoa still sitting there on the counter, and her mother had shaken her head. She didn’t know. She couldn’t find the answer to this in the big dusty World Book on the shelf; she couldn’t Google it. Her father also had no answers. He mumbled something about heaven, but you could tell he was unconvinced and it was just something to say so that she would stop asking questions.

  It was then that Ruby realized that grown-ups don’t know everything. They can’t answer every question, and they can’t fix everything that’s broken. That there are some questions that don’t have answers. And there are some broken things that can never be fixed.

  Before the accident, she’d never felt afraid. Not really. She’d never felt anything but safe. She’d been stupid, but she’d trusted the world to stay the same. But then, in an instant, Jess was gone and nobody in the world could tell her where he went. Her parents couldn’t bear to look at each other anymore, and her mother was afraid of everything. It was as though Ruby had been walking on a high wire all this time, and never looked down. But now here she was, suspended on the most dangerous of bridges, with nothing below her to catch her if she fell.

  “You try to get some sleep, sweetie,” Gloria says. “I’ll check back in on you in a little bit.”

  Ruby can hear her mother murmuring softly to the doctor on the other side of the curtain. It makes her think of the nights after Jess had fallen asleep, and she would listen to her parents talking on the other side of the wall. It always made her feel peaceful, to listen to the soft sound of their conversation as she fell asleep at night. But now she needs more than her mother’s voice. She needs to see her, to touch her.

  “Mama?” she says softly.

  “Yeah, baby?”

  “I’m scared about Daddy,” she says.

  “Here, let me,” the nurse says and parts the curtain between them.

  Ruby slips off her bed and stands up, goes to her mother’s bed and lies her head down on her mother’s pale lap. “He’s going to be okay,” her mother says, and Ruby lets herself believe, if only for now, that her mother has this answer.

  It is nearly impossible to differentiate this night from those other nights. While the world spins on and on, reckless and unpredictable and ever-changing, the hospital is like a strange and untouched island. An antiseptic bubble of both time and space. This night could be any night. It could be the night of the accident when the nurses had to restrain her to keep her from tearing out her own hair. From running down the long bright corridors. It could also be the night last spring when she came back. When she realized that everything she thought was true was a lie. That the earth is not round at all, but rather that it has edges, and that she was standing on one, peering into the darkness below. That night, they’d restrained her too, though they didn’t need to. She had given up then, her mind failing her, her body failing her as well.

  The tick tick of machines, the hush hush of slippered feet across the linoleum. The antiseptic stink; the smell of sickness disguised. Like cologne slapped onto a sweaty man. Like air freshener in a house where an animal has died.

  The other nights she had wanted to be left alone. She had wanted to simply close her eyes and slip inside herself, into the safe dark pit at the center of her chest. She’d wanted only to not speak, to not hear, to not smell or see or feel. But now, with Ruby curled next to her in this bed, their bodies pressed together and balancing delicately on the narrow expanse of mattress, she wants only to go home.

  But home is gone. Home is a splintered fractured building carried away by the river. Home is nothing but a cement hole in the ground. Home is a memory.

  This thought is stunning. Like trying to ponder infinity. To grasp ahold of the insides of a black hole. To imagine the depths of the ocean or how long ago a star died.

  Gloria comes into the room again, and she has a sad smile on her face.

  “Did you reach him?” Sylvie asks, afraid of Gloria’s answer.

  She shakes her head. “Not yet.”

  Robert. Robert is somewhere out there in the storm. And she knows now that there are no safe places: roads collapse, bridges crumble, even houses get swept away.

  “I’m sure he just isn’t getting reception in this weather, or maybe his battery died,” Gloria says unconvincingly, sitting down in a plastic molded chair next to the bed. She absently picks up the blue plastic pitcher the nurse left with ice water earlier.

  Sylvie nods and strokes Ruby’s hair. Ruby is curled up in the bed next to Sylvie, half-asleep.

  “How is the baby?” Sylvie asks.

  “They’ve taken her to the NICU, but she’s a tough little one.”

  “And the girl?”

  “She’s okay too. Sleeping, I think.”

  It is so hard to think past this moment. Normally, her mind would be reeling, like gears click, click, clicking, anticipating the next moment and the next, creating a chain of endless possibilities. What will she tell Robert about the girl? How will they find the man who was driving the car? What will happen to the baby? But suddenly, the gears grind to a halt.

  She smells something familiar. Something so lovely and impossible, she is completely overwhelmed by it.

  She leans down and breathes the scent of Ruby’s hair. Closes her eyes and is completely transported. It’s only shampoo. But in that scent is an entire world she has forgotten. For a brisk and beautiful moment, she is nothing, not a thing, only this child’s mother. She is kneeling on the cold tile floor next to the bathtub, rubbing the soap into her hair in quiet lazy circles. She is sitting on the couch, the blue glow of the TV in front of her as she combs out the tangles. (She is careful to hold her hair at the scalp as she tugs through the knots so as not to hurt her.) Here she is running one tine of the comb down the center of her scalp to make a part, twisting the hairbands Ruby loves with the colored plastic balls at the end to make two ponytails. Here she is crying as she cuts those first dark curls, catching them on a towel spread across Ruby’s lap. Here she is when Ruby has fallen asleep at night, pressing her
face into her hair to smell the sweet child smell of her, the innocent scent of her. It smells like neither winter nor summer; this soapy smell is seasonless. Timeless.

  Her throat feels thick with this simple remembrance.

  There is the muffled sound of a phone. It is ringing inside Gloria’s giant purse. She fishes around inside, her face lost in concentration.

  Finally, she pulls it from her purse and clicks it on. “Hello?” she says.

  “Robert?”

  Silence.

  “Oh, Bunk, thank God. Where are you?”

  AFTER THE STORM

  It is Nessa’s eighteenth birthday today. This is what she thinks when she wakes up to the bright and unfamiliar light of the sun, to the growingly familiar sound of her baby fussing. Wren, her little songbird. She sits up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and looks around the room. Gloria had asked her what her favorite color was, and she’d said purple. And so now, the walls are a soft silvery shade of purple, and the curtains and bed are white. It is like the room she dreamed when she was little. The room she imagined even as they moved from one apartment to the next to the next.

  The man who helped her, George Downs, who lived here before, is in a nursing home now. Gloria took her to see him, to meet him a week ago. Nessa worried he would have no memory of her, of that night. But when they came into the room, his eyes lit up, and she could see recognition flicker in his face. As if he were recalling a dream. He wasn’t able to speak, the stroke he’d suffered after he went to the hospital had stolen his words. And this shared loss made her feel even closer to him. She sat next to him for nearly an hour, not speaking, simply holding his hand. Before she left, she whispered softly, “Thank you,” something she had been waiting nearly a year to say to him.

  She can smell breakfast cooking in the other room. Gloria’s husband, Neil, makes these pancakes that look like something from a Dr. Seuss book. He has promised her Dutch babies and bacon and the vanilla coffee she has grown to depend upon.

  They found an old crib out in the garage, but the baby sleeps with her in this big bed (it is the biggest bed she has ever had). Wren lies flat on her back with her arms and legs splayed out, like a teenage boy instead of a newborn. She is nothing like babies are supposed to be. She is happy, easy, wanting nothing more than to eat and sleep.

  Nessa rolls over and peers closely at Wren’s sleeping face. She touches the soft swirls of her dark hair with the tips of her fingers. Her skin is untouched, so soft that when she strokes her cheek, it feels as though she is only touching air. She tries to imagine her own mother lying next to her eighteen years ago, wonders if she felt this same strange bliss, this delirious happiness. This overwhelming sense of peace.

  Wren stirs, and she is glad. She gets nervous when she sleeps for too long. Sometimes she wants to wake her, just to watch her eyes struggle to focus. To see the faint recollection that follows this confusion. She knows that soon she will begin to understand that Nessa is her mother, that she is the one who loves her, the one who will take care of her. The one who will keep her safe. And she will keep her safe. She will protect her. This is where the legacy from her mother disappears.

  This week will be a busy one. Wren has a doctor’s appointment. Nessa has to go to the social services office and sign up for WIC, for Medicaid, for all those things that will help them until she gets on her feet. She has also promised Sylvie that she will make a statement to the police, to tell them the true story of what happened that night. Gloria says that she also needs to tell them what Declan did to her for all those months leading up to the accident, reminding her again and again that this is not her fault. That she was only a child. It won’t be that simple, of course. The barn where he lived is empty now, abandoned. They will have to find him, and when they do, there will be charges, an arraignment, an arrest, a trial. She knows she will be asked to testify, to sit across from him, even as she speaks out against him. She only hopes that her words are powerful enough to bring Sylvie and Robert the justice they so badly need.

  She knows she also needs to find her mother, though the urgency of this has lessened now. Gloria has offered to help her, when she’s ready. It could be as simple as searching Facebook. As Google. As calling Information. Or it could be more difficult. She does worry that if she waits too long, it will be too late, that like her grandfather, her mother may have slipped away when she wasn’t looking. She doesn’t know what she will say when she finds her; she just needs to trust her voice this time. To ask the questions that remain. To say what needs to be said.

  Gloria has a friend who owns a coffee shop who has offered Nessa a part-time job, and she will finish up high school online. Neil says she can enroll in some classes at the college as soon as she is done. She is overwhelmed by their generosity. She wishes there were words for the enormous gratitude she feels. Thank you is too small. Too ordinary a phrase for this tremendous kindness. And so she offers all that she has. Hands to help wash and dry dishes, to chop vegetables, to help Gloria unload the kiln with her fragile treasures inside.

  School has started for Ruby, and so Nessa sees her most days. She comes home with Izzy and they sit at the big wooden table in the kitchen to do their homework before disappearing upstairs to do whatever it is that eleven-year-old girls do. She watches them with a strange fascination and longing. It is hard to remember herself at eleven. It seems she has always been this age, seventeen now eighteen. It seems that she never had that wild gorgeous innocence that these girls have. She has no memory of being this young. This beautifully young.

  But now, it feels as though she’s grown into the older woman she has always been. It’s as though her body has finally caught up with her mind. She loves the soft pouch of her stomach, the swell and pull of her breasts. She loves her fat thighs, her tired back, the dark moons under her eyes. She loves this body, this woman’s body that instead of being stolen from, gives.

  It is her eighteenth birthday, and she is a woman. A mother. And, she thinks, as she looks around this sun-filled room, colored leaves pressing against the window like bits of colored glass inside a kaleidoscope, that maybe finding home is as simple, and as difficult, as finding hope.

  It is hard to remember each other. It is hard to recollect the ease and familiarity with which they used to interact. It is nearly impossible to capture the way they used to take each other for granted. The way they used to make each other feel safe.

  Robert is damaged. His body ravaged by the accident. He has lost so much, and must be reminded of the absence each time he looks at the place where his legs used to be. At the things he can no longer do. At the cruelties of a world that rarely compensates or complies with his new needs.

  “What do you want?” she asks him, wondering when the last time was that anyone asked him this. “Do you want to move to North Carolina?”

  He studies her as though he is leery of her sincerity. This distrust is something she will never get used to, but she is the one who has brought it about. She is the one to blame for his inability to believe in her.

  “No,” he says. “I thought I did.”

  And so she nods.

  Robert has always run away. This is what he does. He flees. He seeks. And she hunkers down. She stays; she closes herself up. What they need is a compromise. What they need is to meet somewhere in between. They need to find this bridge, the one that will traverse the chasm that has grown between them.

  For now, what this means is that she lives in a rented house in town while he stays three streets over at Bunk’s. Ruby passes between them, spending every other night with her. Robert comes over those nights for dinner. And they sit together around the small wooden table, big enough only for three. And after Ruby goes to bed, they talk. Sometimes, they talk about the future. About where to go from here. But most of the time, they talk about the past. The waters between, the now, are treacherous, they both know this and they are still looking for the materials to use to build this bridge. It is not something to be thrown together hapha
zardly. Bridges built in haste are never safe. This is something that Ruby has taught them both.

  One night in October when the moon outside is as bright as the sun, they sit together on the porch, looking out at the leaves that rush across the street like a river. Sylvie turns to Robert. And she wonders at how he can be both so familiar and so unknowable at the same time. How have they grown so far apart?

  “I need you,” Sylvie says, feeling her heart pulsing in her throat.

  He turns to look at her. She thinks it is the first time he has looked at her, really looked at her since Jess died. And she wonders what he sees. For a moment, she is afraid. Terrified that she has made a terrible mistake. That exposing her vulnerability like this will ruin her. That he could destroy her now.

  But his eyes are bright, reflecting the harvest moon that looms in the sky. And he takes her hand, rubs his thumb along the veins that run like rivers on her flesh. And he nods. “I’m here, Sylvie. I’m not going anywhere.”

  The night of the contest, Sylvie and Robert go together to the middle school. They park in the brightly lit parking lot and she helps him out of the car and into his chair. He doesn’t need her to push his chair, and so she walks beside him, noting the ease with which he navigates the sidewalks and walkways and ramps. They nod and smile at the other parents who have come to watch their children compete, and Sylvie focuses on each moment. On each breath. She is learning to listen to her body’s responses and to use both her breath and her logic to calm herself. It is not easy, but it helps. She has a long, long way to go. But each outing like this, each trip to the grocery store that ends well, each visit with Gloria, feels like an accomplishment.

  Ruby is here already. She’s been here all afternoon with the other competitors. She and Izzy have repaired what was broken in their friendship, but Ruby has insisted on doing this alone. Gloria and Neil and Izzy are sitting in the front row. They have saved the aisle seat for her, and there is room for Robert’s chair next to it.