The Last Bridge Read online

  “Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  I went back to the swing and pushed myself. The chains creaked as he studied me. His eyes took in every outward feature: my hair, eyes, hands, lips. Maybe if he looked long enough he could see right through to the heart of me. And in seeing that dark core, would he understand or would he run away?

  He got off the rail and sat next to me and took my hand and wove our fingers together. We sat like that for a while, moving forward and then backward, together.

  ELEVEN

  ALL THAT REMAINED of the porch swing were the grooves in the floorboards worn down from years of pushing off and landing.

  Andrew found me leaning against the rail, the same spot that Addison had occupied so many years ago. My smoking had banished me from the house. Wendy said she didn’t need to be exposed to anything that could keep her from getting pregnant. One look at Willard and his dull, expressionless face and you had to wonder if he fell into that category.

  “Aren’t you cold?” he said, hugging himself. He was wearing a starched pink oxford shirt, khaki pants with creases sharp enough to cut paper, and black Gucci loafers. He reminded me of the city college professors who came to the club for lap dances after a hard day of teaching and making passes at students. They were lousy tippers and pretended to be concerned that a smart girl like me hustled drinks in that shithole for a living. I preferred the sweat- and beer-stained convention center carpenters who told me they liked my tits as they shoved a fifty in my cleavage.

  Andrew motioned for a cigarette and a light.

  “I quit,” he said, as he took a drag.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  A lone pair of headlights passed along the country road. We faced forward and said nothing. Andrew shifted his weight back and forth in an effort to keep warm.

  “I can’t believe you’re not cold,” he said finally.

  “I’m freezing,” I said.

  “But you’re perfectly still. You’re not even shaking.”

  I dropped the butt and ground it out with my foot.

  “I guess I’ve been cold so long I stopped trying to warm up.”

  He nodded. I started for the door.

  “I miss her,” he said to my back.

  The sound of his voice made me turn. For an instant I thought I heard Jared.

  “Who were you to her?”

  “We went to the same church. We were acquaintances.”

  “Not friends?”

  “No, well. Yes, I suppose it grew into that. We had things in common.”

  “What? A misguided belief in God?”

  “No, other things.”

  “Are you always this vague?”

  “I was her sponsor,” he said finally, throwing his hands up in defeat.

  “Of what?”

  “AA.”

  “My mother didn’t drink. She was too busy. She worked from sunup to sundown; she was quiet and reserved. She was …” I shook my head and started for the house. Andrew grabbed my arm.

  “Drunk most of the time. For many years.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I never saw the woman take a drink in her life.”

  “She snuck it; she took lots of little sips throughout the day. She covered it up by saying she had stomach problems.”

  “She did. She carried a blue Mylanta bottle around with her all day ….”

  Andrew mimed my mother nipping at her Mylanta bottle. A cold shiver bolted through me as I fell back against the railing.

  “I need a drink,” I said.

  “You want to go inside?” Andrew asked as the sound of laughter and music came from the living room.

  “I’d ask you to join me but I guess that would be tacky.”

  “I don’t have a problem with alcohol. Heroin was my downfall.”

  “Well, well, well, how did a junkie end up the coroner of Wilton County?”

  “Let’s just say this is the last bridge. I’ve burned all the others. I have nowhere else to go.”

  “Yeah, join the club,” I said as we walked into the living room and found Wendy and Jared on the couch looking at a photo album.

  “Cat, come here, look at this picture of the three of us with Georgie.” Wendy waved me over. Georgie was our horse. He had a lame back leg that rendered him useless for anything except being a pet. The Igbys gave him to us when they realized he’d never amount to much. Wendy, Jared, and I adored him. They were looking at a black-and-white photo Mom took of the three of us sitting on Georgie, wearing our cowboy hats.

  “Did you know Mom was a drunk?” I said. Jared and Wendy looked at each other and then at me.

  “Yeah,” they both said, as if everyone in the world knew but me.

  “The Mylanta bottle,” Jared said. Wendy nodded her head.

  I sat in Dad’s La-Z-Boy. “How come we never talked about it? Why didn’t I know?”

  “You knew,” Jared said. “You did, come on.”

  I swallowed hard, wishing for the burn of some bourbon to replace the wave of shock that was coming over me. This wasn’t the first time I had the sensation of being a stranger participating in my own life, but it was one of the worst.

  “The finger thing,” Jared said. That had been our code for Dad’s punishment for Mom trying to leave. It was too awful to call it “the night Dad dragged us to the barn and chopped Mom’s finger off,” so we called it the finger thing.

  “She started drinking after that,” Wendy said. The album was balanced in her lap as her open palm rested on that picture of the three of us and Georgie. That night of the finger thing, Jared said he wished Georgie could run like the wind and carry us away. But Georgie stood in the barn like the rest of us and watched my father hack away another piece of my mother.

  I felt sick. I put my head between my legs to keep from throwing up.

  “Willard!” Wendy yelled into the kitchen. “Bring Cat a drink.”

  “Bourbon,” she added, as I looked at her through my legs. She shrugged with the resignation of a death row warden bringing an inmate his last meal.

  Willard, donned in my mother’s KISS THE COOK apron, came in with a jelly glass half-filled with amber relief. I would have preferred the bottle, but I took what I could get. As I drank, Willard patted the back of my hair lightly, like a father touches his child when she wakes up from a bad dream. Andrew sat on the couch next to Wendy.

  “Andrew’s a junkie,” I said, before I felt the medicine sear through me.

  “Was a junkie, Alex, was,” Andrew said.

  “Once a junkie always a junkie,” I said, licking my lips to get the last drop.

  “Why do you have to be so mean?” Jared asked.

  “The truth hurts,” I said. “So I guess you both knew that Mom was hanging out with a coroner junkie.”

  “No,” Wendy said, “Andrew told us today.”

  “I want to know why she stopped drinking; that’s the part that has me stumped. I’d say she found Jesus, but Christ, she had Jesus all along and look what He did for her. And please don’t tell me she and Dad walked the twelve steps together because then I’ll really have to puke.” I was feeling stronger now; the bourbon sent away the dark spirits that haunted me. I went to the kitchen for a refill.

  Willard was finishing the dishes and putting away the food from the enormous feast he had prepared. Although food was not my thing, I had to admit he had a gift. He filled both the apron and the room with the same frenetic energy my mother had. He was built like her too: slim and small-boned, with fast, efficient hands. I would have thought Wendy would have gone for a linebacker, a lumberjack, someone more brooding, like my father, but she went for delicate, reserved.

  “She’s got you wrapped around her finger,” I said loud enough so he could hear. I filled my glass twice before returning to the living room. Willard wiped the tablecloth with a rag, lots of Fantastik, and elbow grease. Those poor roosters couldn’t catch a break.

  “I love her,” he said, without looking up.

 
“Well, if that’s love, count me out,” I said, tripping as I licked the bourbon that spilled on my hand.

  “Looks like it has,” he said.

  “The meetings are in the church basement. Everyone loved her cakes.”

  “So why didn’t you say something at the morgue that first day?” I leaned against the doorway.

  “I didn’t think it was appropriate. I told Wendy and Jared after the service. You missed all that.”

  “So you were close with her? Did she tell you she was going to kill herself?”

  “Cat”—Jared stood up and came toward me—“enough.”

  “No. You don’t have a suicide note addressed to you hanging over your head.”

  Andrew shrugged his shoulders. “The last time I saw her she said something about the deed. She said it was in the safety deposit box at Farmers Union Bank and you would know where the key was.” Andrew was pointing to me.

  “How would she know?” Wendy said.

  “Yeah?” I said, in a rare moment of agreement with Wendy.

  “She said, ‘Cat will remember. She remembers everything.’”

  TWELVE

  I OPENED MY EYES and discovered I was alone on the swing. Addison’s hand was replaced with a note that said he was at the store and would be back to cook dinner.

  I felt a throbbing in the base of my neck where my father’s hands had left his mark on another part of me. The territories of my body were being seized by him at an increasingly violent and rapid pace. My body would never be my own; that much was certain. If being a woman meant you had to be possessed by a man, then I would at least have a say in who would have me first.

  I took another shower and shaved my arms and legs. I used my mother’s hand lotion on my feet and elbows and blew my hair dry, taking the time to curl it under in a smooth, soft line that edged my face. I brushed and flossed my teeth, plucked my eyebrows, and put on blush and a little lipstick. I chose a flowered sundress from Wendy’s side of the closet that made me look as pretty as I could be. I was playing at being a girl, imagining what it was like to be someone’s treasure.

  I went to my mother’s jewelry drawer to find her pearls. Although they were fake, she said they were “good imitations” and valued them as such. Mom kept them in a special place that she claimed only she and I knew about. She wanted me to know where just in case something happened to her. “What’s in this pouch is for you,” she said.

  I figured I would borrow them for a few hours and get them back before Mom returned. The pearls made me feel grown up and ready to seize the future. The pouch was in the back of the drawer hidden in a worn brown paper lunch bag. I pulled the drawstring loose and turned it upside down to empty the contents. The pearls came sliding out along with an odd-shaped key. I put the pearls around my neck and tossed the key in my palm, wondering what it could possibly fit. It wasn’t for a door or a car or any of the locked storage bins we kept in the barn.

  I heard Addison’s truck in the driveway and put the key back.

  “Coming,” I said when I heard him calling for me. I went to the window and watched him lifting paper grocery bags from the back cab. He followed the sound of my voice and smiled as I stood in the same spot my father had when he watched us a few nights before.

  Addison was making a salad when I opened the door and came into the small kitchen. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his feet were bare with one foot balancing on his calf like a flamingo.

  “We’re having steak and salad—it’s pretty much all I can cook.”

  “Can I help?”

  Addison put the knife down and turned toward the bag on the table. “Grab the potatoes and wrap them in foil. We’ll stick them on the grill with the steaks.”

  I went to the table and felt embarrassed by my expectation that all the primping I had done had made a difference. I might as well have been standing there in a flannel shirt and jeans. I fought the urge to run.

  With potatoes and foil in hand, I turned to find Addison leaning against the counter watching me.

  Our eyes met, but his did not linger there; they followed the line of my cheek, the smooth curve of my chin and the long open collar of powdered skin, and trailed down to my waist and hips and legs and finally my bare, dew-wet feet. In his review of me, I felt what he saw, the way the parts of me made a body, a living, breathing equation that had been ravaged but could also be adored. And while I had vowed to never look my father in the face when he was touching me, I could not look away from Addison as his eyes seemed to reconstruct me into someone different. I could not push away from the danger of that feeling; instead, I found myself sinking into it and liking it.

  I felt the sharp point of the foil box poke at my upper arm and the gritty skin of the potatoes in my hands. I smelled him from across the kitchen. His mouth opened slowly. His lips glistened as his chest rose and then fell. If a meteor crashed in the fields behind us, I would not have heard it. If my father arrived with a shotgun and blew a hole in my chest, I would not have felt it. All I sensed or knew was here, in the small space between his body and mine.

  I took the first step. This would be what I would remember. I had made it happen.

  He took the next ten and wrapped his arms around me so quickly I dropped the potatoes and foil to the floor and stumbled on them as he pulled me to him.

  “Ow—that hurts,” I said, as his mouth smashed into mine and our teeth clacked together.

  “Sorry.” I could feel every inch of his hands in my hair and on my head.

  My mouth opened and moved to find his. I put my arms behind me as the force of his passion pushed me back toward the table. I struggled to keep my balance, to push back so we could be on equal footing, but it was useless. I was not accustomed to having to manage so many feelings at once. His hands fluttered over my body. They moved from my breasts to my back and reached between my legs and pressed hard. I gasped.

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to do to him. All my experience with touching had been forced so I let him guide me. I let him put my hand on his crotch and felt the block of hardness inside his pants.

  There were noises too. Addison whispered my name as he pressed himself against me. I tried to suppress my own moans as I struggled to stay as close to the surface of desire as I could.

  We found our way to the bed, slipping on his discarded clothes littered around the room. I cried out as I stubbed my toe when we fell together on the bed. He examined my foot like it was a diamond he was checking for flaws and took my stubbed toe in his mouth and sucked it.

  I reached for him and begged him, for what I don’t know, but I needed it to stop and continue all at once. Addison understood; he nodded and kissed me as he reached under my dress and pulled off my white cotton underpants. My dress was half on and half off as Addison had worked the top half down and reached inside the bodice to touch my breasts.

  I pulled his shirt off him, marveling at my own boldness. Who was this girl who was courting so much pleasure? He unzipped his pants as his hands explored inside me.

  This would be the only time I was ever ready for someone.

  It hurt when he pushed himself inside me. I instinctively reached for his shoulders to push him off me but he grabbed my wrists and held them down. “Breathe,” he said. “It’s all right.”

  Tears welled in my eyes; this was not what I thought it was. It was too much. Did everyone feel this way or just me?

  He began to move against me, his hips and abdomen banging on me. Inside I felt nothing except a repeated jabbing that felt like a piston from someone else’s engine trying to work inside me.

  I felt myself moving out of my body and floating above us, feeling the good part was over as I watched Addison’s face contort and retreat from any connection to me. He was grunting now in that way that animals do when they’re fucking. I fought the urge to throw him off me and run to Canada or Mexico or someplace where there were no men and all the trouble they bring.

  He came. I finally exhaled, relieved
it was over. He collapsed on top of me. His dead weight felt like a sack of pig feed.

  After a few moments, he rolled over on his back and sighed. “Wow,” was all he said.

  I sat up and adjusted my dress.

  “What are you doing?” he said in a dreamy, exhausted voice.

  I looked up at the room. It was still the same. I didn’t know what I was doing, but as I focused on the misty gray walls of the living room, the chair draped with clothes and a few towels, his nightstand with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead open and resting on its belly with an empty beer bottle next to it, I knew what I wasn’t doing. I was never having sex again with anybody.

  Addison pulled me back down. I started to cry.

  He rolled me toward him and wiped the tears off my face with his hands. “Shhhh,” he said, “it’s okay.” His tenderness made me cry harder.

  As his words comforted me, his hand found its way back between my legs, and although I resisted, he asked me to let him as he kissed me lightly on the cheek in all the places my tears had been. The low, even sound of his voice and sureness of what he knew his hands could do were hypnotic. I relaxed into his touch and hoped he wouldn’t hurt me.

  I screamed his name a few minutes later as my body buckled and then released. When he tried to pull his hand away I held it there a little bit longer, wanting him more than I had ever expected.

  THIRTEEN

  THE KEY WAS IN the pouch when I went to look for it the morning Wendy and Jared left. The pearls were long gone.

  Outside, Wendy, Willard, and Jared packed the cars and said their good-byes. Earlier, I feigned sleep when they called for me. I didn’t see the point of a send-off. They would be back when Dad died, which I hoped would be soon.