The Other Side of the Bridge

by Mary Lawson

  If she’d been trying to get away she would have looked relieved when he walked in, not horrified—so Ian reasoned, if he reasoned at all. Jake had his back to him and Ian didn’t wait to see his reaction. He turned around and walked out.

  He went directly back to the field where he’d left Arthur. He did not debate what he should do, the rights and wrongs, the possible consequences. He was filled with an intent so furious, so ungovernable, that it left no room for thought. When he reached the field he walked straight across it, straight through the tall uncut grain, trampling it, sweeping it aside with his hands. Arthur brought the horses to a stop when he saw him coming and then came to meet him, looking puzzled. When he was still a few feet away Ian said flatly, “You’d better go back to the house.”

  “Somethin’ the matter?” Arthur said.

  “Yes. Your wife and Jake.”

  For a second or two Arthur stared at him and then Ian saw understanding hit him. It was as if it hit him literally: Arthur almost staggered. Then he pushed past Ian and started walking, fast, back to the house.

  Ian followed him. He left the horses standing in the middle of the field. He followed Arthur, still not thinking, still focused solely on the image in his brain: Laura and Jake. He felt breathless with a kind of excitement, a violent excitement, made up in equal parts of rage and retribution. He was almost dizzy with it.

  He saw Arthur reach the steps to the kitchen and fling open the screen door and go inside. He knew that something was going to happen, that there were going to be consequences. He was glad. There should be consequences, the worse the better. When he entered the kitchen Arthur was just disappearing up the stairs. Laura was standing at the foot of the stairs, her hand on the banister, looking up. Jake must be up there, packing, probably. Packing in a hurry, thinking that he would get away. Ian heard Arthur’s footsteps crossing the landing, and then Jake’s voice, light, falsely cheerful. There was a scuffling sound, and Jake said, almost laughing, “Hey Art! Hey! Calm down! What’s the matter?”

  Laura looked at Ian and he saw she was shaking. She said in a whisper, “Ian, what have you done?”

  Ian stared at her, his mouth open, speechless with disgust. When he could find words he said, “What have. done? What have. done? What have you done?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. But oh, Ian…”

  Upstairs Jake was talking fast, still sounding amused, but then there was more scuffling, crossing the landing, and they heard him say, “Jesus, Art! Jesus! Take it easy!” And then he came hurtling down the stairs, Arthur right behind him. At the foot of the stairs Jake fell and before he could get to his feet Arthur reached down and grabbed him and hauled him upright. Jake tried to brush him off, he said, “Okay! Okay!” still trying to make light of it, trying to sound amused. He looked across at Ian and gave an embarrassed laugh as if in apology for the unseemly behavior of his brother, but Ian saw that he was scared, which was good. Laura looked terrified; she’d backed away from the stairs and was standing in the middle of the room with her hands pressed against her face, and that was good too.

  It wasn’t until he saw Arthur’s face that Ian began to feel uneasy. Arthur hadn’t said a word but there was something in his eyes that Ian hadn’t seen before in anyone, far less in Arthur. It was the look of someone who had reached the limit, the end of the line—as if he were teetering right on the edge of a cliff within himself, and if he went over, there would be no telling what came next. He propelled Jake across the kitchen toward the door and when they were still a few feet away he gave Jake a shove, and Jake cannoned into the screen door so hard that it slammed open, right back against the outside wall, and he flew out into the yard. Laura gave a cry and ran to the door and Ian came after her. They saw Jake scramble to get up and Arthur reach down and grab him by the back of his shirt and stand him on his feet and start propelling him toward his car. Jake was saying, “Okay, Art. Okay. It’s okay,” but his voice was breathless, there was no pretense of amusement anymore. Laura ran after them. Ian followed hesitantly, apprehensive now, but not yet scared, or not yet admitting that he was scared. He approved of what was happening: it was more serious, more violent than he had expected, but that was okay.

  Arthur and Jake had almost reached the car and Arthur, pushing Jake toward it, spoke for the first time. He didn’t shout and his back was to Ian but there was such force behind the words that Ian heard him clearly. He said, “Go. Go now.”

  Maybe Jake was emboldened by the fact that Arthur had spoken; maybe he thought he could reason with him now, that they could have a civilized discussion, which he, of course, would win. Arthur had let go of him, expecting him to get into the car and go, now, this minute, but Jake turned to face him, his back to the car, and smiled and said soothingly, as if to an overexcited child, “Okay. Okay, Art. I’ll go. I’ll go right now, but my stuff is still up in the bedroom; just let me get my things, okay?”

  He shouldn’t have done that. He should have got into the car and gone. Instead he gave a little laugh as if it had all been just a joke between them and now it was okay, it was over, it was fine.

  He said, “You’re kind of overreacting, brother.”

  Was it the laugh that did it, or the patronizing tone? Arthur reached out and took hold of the front of Jake’s shirt with both hands and lifted him into the air, right up into the air, and then slammed him against the car, slammed him so hard the car rocked with it. “Go now,” he said.

  Ian, scared now all right, seriously scared, saw the color drain from Jake’s face from the force of it. Laura cried out and ran toward them and grabbed Arthur’s arm, but it was clear that Arthur didn’t even know she was there; he lifted Jake and slammed him against the car again. “Go now,” he said again. And lifted him once more. “Go now.”

  It was the thud of Jake’s body against the metal of the car that was so terrifying. Running toward them, appalled, Ian saw that the force of the blows would kill him. Maybe that wasn’t Arthur’s intention, maybe he just wanted Jake to go—wanted it so badly that there were no words to describe it and so in the absence of words he was urging Jake on his way. Maybe that was all he thought he was doing, but he was going to kill him nonetheless.

  Ian reached them and grabbed Arthur’s arm, yelling at him to stop, but Arthur pushed him away. Ian staggered, regained his balance and flung himself at Arthur again, wrapped his arms around his neck this time, and heaved backward. Arthur lost his balance and toppled over and they both ended up on the ground. But in falling Arthur did let go of Jake, and Ian, fighting to keep his arms locked around his neck, managed to yell, “Get into the car!”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a figure running toward them. Carter, still too far away to help but coming fast. He saw Laura help Jake into the car and slam the door behind him, but he couldn’t hold Arthur any longer and as the engine roared into life Arthur broke free.

  From where he lay on the ground, what happened next seemed to Ian to take so long that at any stage he should have been able to reach out and stop it. Jake, finally inside the car, his face stiff with shock; Arthur, scrambling to his feet and lunging for the car, one hand stretched out to grab the handle; Carter, racing toward them; Laura, reaching for Arthur, trying to block his path—and then the car, lurching as Jake slammed it into reverse, taking off from a standing start and roaring backward in a great plume of dust and gravel, traveling so fast that Carter had no chance whatsoever: his face, as it hit him, frozen in astonishment, his body pitching forward, head hitting the rear window with such force that his legs were flung up and over, straight up and over, so that his body somersaulted right over the top of the car, and then, slowly and finally, down. And after that: stillness. Silence.

  Strange, the way the mind works. The way it protects itself from things it cannot face. Grief, for instance. Or regret. Guilt. It finds something else, anything, to draw between it and what cannot be looked at.

  What troubled Ian most, in the days following the accident, was that he coul
dn’t remember whether or not Carter had been with the rest of them earlier that afternoon when they’d gone out to look at the eagle. He would call up the scene in his memory again and again, trying to recall where they’d all stood, where within the little cluster of them Carter might have been. The others he could see quite clearly. He himself had stood directly behind March, because the little boy was craning his head back so far he was in danger of falling over backward. Laura was to his left, with Julie beside her. Jake was a few feet behind them. Arthur was beside the water trough. But he could never quite see Carter.

  He worried about it constantly. He wanted to be able to see him, there with the rest of his family, head tipped back, looking up in awe at the magnificent bird.

  EPILOGUE

  It was five in the morning when the phone on the bedside table rang. When he answered it and heard her voice, for a moment he was back at the farm, watching the car roar backward, the cloud of dust fly up. But then she said, “I’m sorry to call you at this hour, Ian, but it’s Arthur,” and he was back in the present again.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. He switched on the light and swung his legs out of bed, feeling shaky and slightly nauseous from the vividness of the memory. It was like malaria, he thought. Like a virus that lingers in the body and returns to haunt you.

  “Who is it?” his wife said, her voice muffled by bedclothes.

  “Arthur Dunn.” He reached out and rested his hand on her hip, rocked her gently. “Go back to sleep.”

  She rolled over and looked at him, her eyes screwed up against the light, but then she nodded, and turned over, and drew the covers up around her. She did her fair share of night visits.

  He drove to the farm with the windows down to clear his head. Dawn was just breaking, a pale slit of light dissecting the darkness. When he turned in to the farmyard he saw that the lights were on in the kitchen and in the bedroom upstairs.

  Laura was waiting for him at the kitchen door. She was wearing a dressing gown and her hair was loose—she must have got up in a hurry, alarmed and frightened—and silhouetted against the light she could have been a girl again, younger than he had ever known her. As she opened the door for him she said anxiously, “I’m not sure I should have called you, Ian. He seems better. I think he’s asleep.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ian said. “I’d rather you called.”

  Six months previously, just before his fifty-ninth birthday, Arthur had had a heart attack, and then a month later, another one. He refused to go into the hospital so there was very little Ian could do for him, but he visited him every day, twice a day in the past few weeks, to ensure that he was comfortable. Whenever he had time he sat with him. Mostly in silence of course, Arthur being Arthur, though occasionally Ian would pass on some bit of local gossip or ask how things were going on the farm. March was running the farm now; he and his wife had built a house a couple of hundred yards down the road. They had just had their first child, a son, delivered by Ian’s wife.

  He went upstairs on his own. Arthur was asleep—Laura had been right about that—but his breathing was noticeably worse than it had been the previous day. Ian stood looking down at him, his fingers on the faint, irregular pulse, feeling the heavy ache of loss. His own father had died two years ago and the weight of that was still with him.

  Laura was at the foot of the stairs when he came down. She asked how Arthur was and then said, not quite looking at him, “I wondered if you would have time for a cup of tea, Ian? I know you must want to get back….”

  “Of course,” he said. She must know that the end was very near for Arthur, and he supposed she had questions.

  And that was so, at first: when she had poured the tea she sat down opposite him at the table he had once known so well and asked all the painful and inevitable questions that attend the ending of life: how long did Arthur have left, would he suffer at the end, was there any way of easing his passing. Questions that Ian had been asked so many times, in the course of his professional life, that giving the answers should have become easier. But it was never easy, and particularly not today. Laura was struggling with tears, and Ian was not far off himself.

  When she had run out of questions they both sat for a minute or two, and then Laura said, “You have been a good friend to him, Ian.”

  He looked at her uncertainly. In the years since Carter’s death they had never spoken of what had happened. In fact they had scarcely spoken at all. Where do you start, when something like that lies between you? What words, what topics of conversation, do you use? After the funeral he had written to her, apologizing for what he had done—for his criminally stupid action in telling Arthur what he had seen, an action that over the years had caused him a thousand sleepless nights. He’d been desperate to know how much she blamed him. She had not replied, and somehow, over time, his need to know had become a need not to know; given the choice now, he would have avoided the subject forever. But it seemed he no longer had the choice.

  “I’ve always admired him,” he said. If they were going to talk about it, he would be as honest as he could.

  She nodded. “Yes. I know.”

  “And you,” Ian said. “I admired you very much.”

  “Not always,” she said, looking at him. Despite her directness, she looked very fragile in the early morning light. Bruised, almost, as if her emotions lay just beneath the surface of her skin.

  He hesitated. “No. Not always. But I was just a kid, Laura. I thought in black and white, back then.”

  Black and white. For a long time after Carter’s death it had been more like black and red, the colors of rage and loathing—of her and of himself. Rage, loathing, and overwhelming guilt. He had left for Toronto at the end of that summer and had spent the first two years of his medical degree in a haze of exhaustion and despair. During the day he was able to distract himself with his studies, but at night, Carter would come to him. Ian would see him sitting at the dining table, questioning Jake about the car, his eyes alight, his whole body animated with interest and enthusiasm. Or he would see him at the moment the car hit him. Or on the ground, staring sightless at the sky.

  In the darkness of those nights, it seemed to Ian that he was guilty not just of an act of jealous rage, but of murder. Sleep became a place to avoid at all costs, and at the end of his second year at medical school he had a nervous breakdown. Even with his father’s help, the climb back to health took a long time, and it was more than a year before he was well enough to return to Toronto and continue his degree.

  During all the years of his training he was sure that he would never return to Struan, but in the end it pulled him back. His wife, Helen, whom he’d met during his third year in Toronto, was a city girl, but her family had a summer cottage on Lake Nipissing and she loved the North. She was a general practitioner too—until his father’s death there were three Dr. Christophersons in the town.

  There being three doctors meant, of course, that there was no need for him to see the Dunns professionally, so apart from meeting briefly at church or in the town Ian was able to avoid them, and to avoid what lay between them. And so it went on, and time passed, and although the ghost had not been laid, it tormented him less often.

  And then, six months ago, at eight o’clock on a bright Monday morning, Laura phoned the doctors’ office to say that Arthur was lying on the ground and couldn’t breathe, and it was Ian she asked for. He didn’t know why—perhaps it was Arthur’s wish—but whatever the reason, he was grateful to her now, because it had forced him, finally, to reestablish his relationship with Arthur, and gave him the opportunity in some small way to make amends.

  Still, though, when he looked at Laura, what he saw was the events of that day, and he knew that for her it was the same. They could not get around it. If he stayed to chat with Arthur she would bring tea up to them, but she never stayed herself. Before he left, Ian would step into the kitchen to tell her how Arthur was doing, and then he would go. That was the extent of their communi
cation, up until now.

  Laura was looking away, across the kitchen, focusing on nothing; he studied her, looked at her properly for the first time in many years. She was still beautiful, in his opinion, but her face was thin and lined, and her hair had faded to an uncertain gray. Perhaps she had never been quite as beautiful as he imagined. He had laid his absurd image of womanhood upon her and required her to live up to it, and when she failed—when she failed, how devastating his retribution had been.

  She turned and looked at him, and he was afraid she had felt his gaze and guessed his thoughts, but she said, “There is something I want to say, Ian.”

  He nodded, and braced himself for what might come.

  She said, “I want you to know, now, while Arthur is still here, that I love him. And that I loved him then.”

  He was startled. It was not what he had expected her to say. He had expected her to tell him how much she still held him to blame.

  She went on, her voice unsteady but determined. “You said yourself that you thought in black and white back then. Young people do. So probably you would have assumed that I didn’t love him. That I couldn’t have.”

  He remembered Jake’s hand, lifting her chin. Her hands on his chest. Yes, he had assumed she did not love Arthur.

  “After the funeral,” she said, “when Jake was finally leaving, Arthur asked me if I wanted to go with him. I said no. He said, was I sure.” Her face suddenly flushed. “That question, Ian! That question! Was I sure! Next to Carter’s death, that question has been the hardest thing I’ve had to live with. The fact that he had to ask it.”