by Meg Haston
He’s lying.
“From—” I start.
“Huh?”
“Protect her from what?”
“Just . . . emotionally,” he says vaguely. “You know.”
But I don’t. I don’t because he won’t tell me. I let him guide me through the crowd. I tell myself, I know this boy. I know him deep. He’s not lying about wanting to protect his mother. I’ve watched him carry her through this. He’s calmed her; he’s stood between the cops and her; he’s spoken for her. And all to protect her. From what?
“You cold?” Wil rubs my shoulders.
“I’m fine.”
“Bridge?”
“Huh?”
“I asked what you were doing after this. I have something I want to show you,” he says.
“Sure. Okay.” I catch a flash of Leigh’s dreads, the tips dyed purple. “Hold my place for a sec?” I push through a swaying circle of stoned beach rats and grab her embroidered sleeve. “Hey. Hey.”
Her face hardens when she turns around. “Oh. Hey.”
“What’s—” I try to decode her. “What’s wrong?”
“You cannot be serious, Bridge.” She drags her fingers through her hair. “You’re like—I don’t know. Unbelievable.” She whips her head around, like Is anyone seeing this?
“Leigh. Just tell me.”
“That’s just it, Bridge,” she says. “I shouldn’t have to tell you. I shouldn’t have to say that you missed the unveiling of my art project Saturday morning.”
My stomach bottoms out. I can’t breathe.
“Oh, shit. Leigh.” I told her I’d be there. I’d promised.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you that it’s not friendship when you drift in and out at your goddamned convenience.” She crosses her arms over her chest.
“Leigh,” I say again. Like if she would just give me a second, I could explain! Everything would make sense! Only we both know that I won’t be able to fill that silence.
“What, Bridge?” she snaps. “It’s just . . . I’m here. And unlike Wil, I’ve been here the whole time. All of high school. I’m not his understudy, you know? I’m not.”
“Leigh,” I say again. “You’re not an understudy. You’re not—”
One of the beach rats yells, “Ooooooh, tell her,” and I whip around to tell him off. By the time I turn around again, Leigh and her purple hair are gone, and Señora Thompson is steering me toward the H section, where I belong.
When rehearsal is over, I find Wil’s truck in the parking lot. I lean against the tailgate and the metal burns through my T-shirt and bra strap. I’m the sick kind of tired. I don’t know whether to accuse Wil of hiding something from me or fall into his arms. The kid part of me wants to slide into the cab and hide there. Burrow into the ripped cloth seats because it’s safe. Or at least I used to feel that way, wedged between my best friend and the father I didn’t get to have, as though, for a few minutes after school every day, we were a family. But that wasn’t real, because Wilson wasn’t real. He’s made my memories fiction, wiped them out with his fist.
“Sorry.” Wil comes up behind me. “Señora pulled me aside asked how I was doing and then she started crying, so I couldn’t really—”
I crumple under his hand.
“Bridge?” He turns me and pulls me into him, and that’s a mistake because now I’m sobbing into his T-shirt, and I have no right.
“I screwed up,” I bleat into his chest. “With Minna and Leigh—I really screwed up.”
“Here.” He holds me steady with one hand and unlocks the truck with the other. He helps me inside and then jogs around the back. I catch his reflection in the rearview: a flash of a young Wilson.
“Okay. Tell me,” Wil says when he’s next to me again.
I shake my head. “I don’t—you have too much going on.”
“Not for you,” he says. “Not ever for you. Got it?”
My face crumples like I’m going to cry again, but there’s nothing there.
“Got it?” he says again, and I nod.
“Still.” I rub the stiffness from my face. On the other side of the window, a circle of girls is hugging and wiping single diamond tears from one another’s perfect cheeks. This is what high school should have been. “I don’t really want to talk about it. Later.”
“Yeah. Sure. You just—let me know.”
“Thanks.” I sniff.
“Here. I want to show you something.” Wil leans over my lap and pulls a wrinkled yellow legal pad from beneath the seat. He flips to a page with a rectangle drawn on it. Inside the rectangle are our names.
BRIDGE & WIL
There’s an etching of a canoe beneath the words.
“It’s kind of a graduation present,” he says. All of a sudden, he looks shy. We’re kids who don’t know each other yet, but want to. We are the old versions of ourselves.
“It’s, ah . . . what it is?” I ask. My insides flutter.
“It’s a brick! For downtown. I ordered it this morning. Should be installed in a couple of weeks.” He looks proud, and he should. This is the sweetest thing. We have a brick. Wil and I will stay here together forever. We will be cemented into this place, no matter what. The faucet in me twists again.
“Wil. It’s so . . . It’s really . . . Thank you.” I lean across the seat and wrap my arms around his neck. I inhale him. I don’t know how I could have doubted him. He loves me. He would never lie to me. I know it, but it’s more than that. I can feel it.
“Yeah? You like it?”
“I love it, Wil.” I lean into him. Press my ear against his chest. Touching him quiets the buzzing doubts in the back of my mind.
BRIDGE
Summer, Senior Year
I wake up the next morning in my bed, my ear pressed against Wil’s bare chest. But the steady chant I’ve heard before is absent. I hold my breath.
Silence.
“Wil?” I sit up in bed.
His skin is the color of almost night. He is rigid, stiff lips and dripping curls sealed tightly to his forehead. He smells like the ocean. His skin is transparent, showing his insides. Beneath his skin is a pulsing, living thing. Oil-black grief, curled around his heart. Blocking his throat. Pulsing in his fingertips.
“Wil?” Sour sick rises in the back of my throat. “Wil?”
His eyes snap open.
“Help. It’s killing me,” he says.
A never-ending scream rises up in me. I scream until there is nothing left inside me.
“Bridge!” Mom’s face looms over me, dull at first, then sharper. “Bridget!” She pulls me into her lap and holds me so tight, I can’t move. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”
“Mom?” Micah hovers in the doorway, wide-eyed.
“It’s okay, honey. Bridge just had a bad dream. Give us a second?”
Micah looks relieved to shut the door.
I shudder against her. She’s solid and warm. “Mom,” I moan.
“I’m here, sweetie. You’re safe.” She rocks me slowly. I wish I could stay here, curled against her, forever.
“Want to talk about it?” She brushes damp hair from my forehead.
I shake my head violently. “I can’t. I just . . . I don’t want to think about it anymore, okay? Please.”
Mom kisses the top of my head. “I’m always here, you know. Always.”
“I know,” I whisper into her collarbone. I want to stay here with her forever. Slowly, she is becoming one of the only people I have left.
I shower under an ice-cold faucet and throw on the first pair of jeans and T-shirt I find on the floor. My hair is still dripping down my back when I jump into the truck and speed out of the driveway, headed for the Mini Mart. I buy two giant coffees and start out again, all the while thinking of anything, everything other than a cold, dead Wil.
My gas light flickers on, then off again as I pull onto Leigh’s block. Her parents built the pretty stucco house when she was four. It’s the kind of house that whispers A beautif
ul family lives here. The kind of house that belongs on the cover of a decorating magazine, if readers could overlook the ugly-ass VW van parked in the driveway. The house has a widow’s walk, which has always been my favorite part. Stand up there and you can see the Intracoastal snaking to the end of the world, and the ocean beyond that.
I park my truck on the street and walk up the bricked drive, past the flower beds that are wet and throbbing with color. I can see through the front windows to the water on the other side. I knock. Louder, more insistent, with every passing second.
Finally, Leigh’s mother appears on the stoop. She’s wearing a plush bathrobe with matching slippers, and just the right amount of makeup to make her look awake but soft. The coffee she’s holding smells like hazelnut.
Leigh’s mom gives me a look like Good morning, sweetheart, and then she holds up her index finger and disappears inside. Leigh . . . your . . . underprivileged friend is here, I imagine.
Leigh appears on the stoop a few seconds later, in boxers and a purple T-shirt that matches the tips of her hair.
“Hey,” I say.
She squints into the sun.
“I’m, ah . . . here.” I hold out her coffee. At first I think she’s not going to take it, but she does, because she’s Leigh and she believes in caffeine even more than she believes in grudges.
She takes a sip. “You pick terrible coffee. What is this, pineapple?” She sticks out her tongue.
“Hawaiian flavor, I think.” I take another step toward her. “What you said yesterday. You were right.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve let everything in my life take a backseat to Wil. Including you. And that really sucks, and I’m sorry. And also I’ve screwed up a lot of things lately, so it’s not just you, if you were wondering.” My voice wobbles.
“You know my mom thinks you’re high,” she informs me. “Or, as she likes to put it, ‘taking the pot.’”
I try a small smile, and she smiles back.
“We can get real coffee at Nina’s,” she says. “You probably shouldn’t come inside while I change, though. Unless you want a lecture on the dangers of the pot.” She gives me a real smile, like Forgiven, and disappears inside for a few minutes. When she reappears, she’s wearing cutoffs that are short enough to show the pockets from the inside and a T-shirt that she’s clearly spray-painted in.
“Nice shorts,” I say.
“Yeah, well. My best friend’s a bad influence.” She elbows me. “On account of taking the pot.”
Iz takes us to Nina’s, and we slide into our usual booth by the window. Leonard gives us a wave and goes back to the television on the counter.
“Just coffee, thanks, Leonard,” Leigh yells.
“So . . .” I tug a napkin from the dispenser and start tearing it into ribbons. “What’s new . . . with you? How did the unveiling go?”
She rolls her eyes. “Stop being weird. We can talk about you. Or Wil or whatever you want.”
My face gets hot. “Sorry.”
She shrugs. We are not us yet.
I don’t know where to start. I want her to know about my dream without my having to speak it. Leigh would say that the dream is my subconscious, trying to send me a message. Only there are so many messages blinking on and off in my brain—Wil is lying; Wil would never lie to me; trust no one; he’s hiding something, for sure—that I don’t know which to hold on to.
“Hello?” Leigh waves a plastic-coated menu in my face.
“Okay. Minna’s pissed,” I say carefully.
“Minna’s always pissed.”
“No. I mean, like, for real.” I tell her about Minna’s history, about the letter I sent to Virginia. “Maybe her daughter called and they had a fight or something,” I decide. “So she’s mad about that.”
Leigh’s whole face squints at me. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. I’m guessing it didn’t go well.”
“Maybe it went well and maybe it didn’t. But that’s not the point. You know that, right?” Leigh says.
Leonard comes over with coffee, and I pretend like we have to stop talking while I stir in cream and sugar.
“Tell me you know that.” Leigh’s eyes narrow. “Tell me you understand that this was absolutely inappropriate and an inexcusable invasion of privacy.”
“Leigh. The woman hasn’t spoken to her daughter in thirty years! It isn’t fair!”
“Oh, but you know what is fair? Stealing her personal property and sending it without her permission. Changing her life without asking first.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I protest. The coffee is too hot, too sweet, but I chug it anyway.
“It was exactly like that. Here. Put your coffee down.” She reaches for my hands and squeezes them. “Look at me. For real.”
I look everywhere else, until there is nowhere else to look. Her eyes are a near black today, burning coals.
“Thing is, Minna is an adult. She’s been running her own life since the Stone Age.”
“Well.” I blink.
“And deciding when, or if, to speak to her daughter is one hundred percent her business. It’s so far from being your business that if you were standing in your business, you’d need a telescope.”
“Okay. I get it.” I pull away and stare out the window.
“So far from being your business that you’d have to take three flights, a train, and a ferry to get even close.”
“Okay.” I rub my temples. “I’m an asshole.”
“That is appropriate.”
I laugh and cry a little and ask Leonard for a refill.
“So . . .” I say.
“So . . .” Leigh says.
“Maybe I should write her a letter or something. To apologize, since she’s not talking to me.”
“That’d be a start. As long as you make it clear that this was not a misunderstanding. She didn’t take it wrong or miss the point. This was just you being the worst court-ordered gal pal Minna has ever had.”
I let my head thunk against the window.
“Onward. So what’s going on with you and Wil?” Leigh starts to build a small standing house with artificial sweetener packets. This is the thing about Leigh: She can be mad about Wil one second and ask about him the next. It’s a kind of goodness that isn’t in most people. “You guys looked kind of weird at rehearsal yesterday. Scratch that. You looked weird at rehearsal.”
“He’s, ah . . .” I want to tell her. I do. I want her to tell me that I’m ridiculous, over-involved, reading everything wrong. “I love him.”
It’s the only truth I know.
I spend the rest of the morning at home on the couch, trying a letter to Minna. But everything comes out the wrong way, the way Leigh warned me.
It’s just that my family is broken, too, and—
I know how much you love your daughter, so—
I only meant to—
“Bridge.” I snap out loud. Leigh was right. I should never have sent that letter in the first place. And believing that I was doing Minna a favor was nothing short of delusional. I crack my neck, hunch over the legal pad, and write an apology. A real apology. I ask for her forgiveness. I tell her that it’s okay if she doesn’t want to give it. It’s her choice. I mean the things that I say. When I’m finished, I press a stamp into the corner and shove it in our mailbox.
Inside, I slink onto the couch again and turn on the television. A talk show host I don’t recognize is delivering paternity test results. Cartoons. A woman in an apron is moaning over the apple crisp she just made. A local news anchor is bringing breaking news, live from Atlantic Beach. The helmet blonde from the newscast I watch with Minna. From Wil’s street, the night Wilson was killed. The house behind her is Wil’s house. I sit up.
“I’m here in front of the Hines residence with breaking news in the ongoing investigation into the death of Wilson Hines, the Atlantic Beach husband and father who was murdered in cold blood during a break-in back in early April.”
I tu
rn up the volume.
“Police have been investigating the murder as part of a string of break-ins in recent months. A second victim, twenty-four year-old Dana York, died due to complications from a separate, but police believe related, attack.”
“Get on with it, get on with it.” I turn the volume louder. Louder.
“According to reports from the Atlantic Beach Police Department, detectives in the case have, just minutes ago, arrested a suspect.”
My stomach launches into my throat.
“Police say twenty-one-year-old Timothy Pelle, seen here, has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder in the beating deaths of Wilson Hines and Dana York. Additional charges are reportedly being considered by the state attorney.”
Beating deaths. I taste sour.
“ABPD says that they apprehended Pelle in the middle of yet another burglary and police say they are confident that Pelle is responsible for both attacks. Channel Five will bring you more information on this ongoing investigation as we have it. This is—”
I kill the sound, and then the picture. And I fly to Wil’s, my heart miles ahead of the rest of me, searching for Wil’s heart.
BRIDGE
Summer, Senior Year
I park one street over from Wil’s, my front tires wedged in a random yard. I run the rest of the way, my sneakers slamming into the glittering pavement. Wil’s block is choked with fat painted news vans, each with thick silver poles and satellite dishes scraping the sky. Sweating cameramen and reporters in too-bright suits lean against the vans, fanning themselves with scripts.
I skirt the vans and pass the neighbors who are suddenly interested in Wil’s family again. There’s a cruiser in his driveway. Porter and Yancey. I sprint across the yard. I find him where I knew I’d find him, with his saws and stains and the stereo with the cord bound with a garbage tie. He’s sitting on the workshop floor. His knees are up; his head is down. He is curled into a ball, sealed up tight.
“Hey,” I breathe. I wipe the sweat from my upper lip.
“They got the guy,” he says to the floor. “Without our ID, so.”
