The Last Bridge Read online

  She placed my feet in the stirrups, using extra care with my bad leg. Although the cast was off, I was still compensating for the weight of it. I was shocked at how sore it was—I assumed when the bone healed I would be able to walk normally again. Not true. I would be hobbling on crutches for a while longer.

  “Scoot down a little,” she said. “That’s good.”

  The air felt cold between my legs. Even though it wasn’t raining in the examining room, it felt that way to me.

  “Nausea?” she asked, as if she were offering me a mint. She had slipped on a glove, and as I nodded, she inserted her fingers inside me. It is one thing to be touched, another to be invaded.

  I screamed and kicked her hard with my good leg.

  She fell back against the guest chair, which kept her from falling. She picked up her stethoscope, which had flown off her neck, and adjusted her lab coat before walking back toward me.

  “Let’s talk about what happened,” she said, “while I take some blood.”

  Diana took me out to dinner and the movies to celebrate getting my cast taken off. The doctor said I would be back on my feet within a couple of weeks.

  “I could use some help getting ready for this show I’m doing on the South Side,” she said, as I sipped a chocolate milkshake and tried to remember how much I liked them. “I have some grant money. I could pay you.”

  “You’ve done enough,” I said. “I can help.”

  We sat in silence for a while, neither of us wanting to bring up the news that was hanging over us. Dr. Worthy said the blood tests would confirm what she was almost certain of.

  We had to walk slowly back to the car, as I was struggling with my leg.

  “You don’t have to have it,” Diana said.

  For a moment I wondered what she was talking about—the thing growing inside me hardly felt like an “it,” let alone a person.

  “I don’t want to think about it,” I said.

  “Whatever you decide, I’ll help you.”

  “I think it would be better if I—” I began to say.

  “No, it wouldn’t. Let’s keep walking; it’s a beautiful night and the exercise will do you good. We’ll take it slow.”

  NINETEEN

  “I WANTED TO TELL YOU that first day at the morgue.” He spoke in a tone so measured it felt rehearsed. Andrew’s eyelashes were long and curly. My mother’s were so long she couldn’t wear sunglasses. I wondered how he managed.

  I waved the waitress over. “Two bourbons, straight up.”

  The waitress came with the drinks and cleared off the shots I had emptied. “Pay her,” I said to Andrew. He obediently took out his wallet and gave her a twenty. The longer I looked, the more I was able to conjure my mother. Even his hair was the same color, and there was a wave that seemed familiar, but her hair was straight.

  “How old are you?” I said.

  “Thirty-four.”

  Four years older than Jared. He laid his palms flat on the table as if he were going to shove off.

  “What do you want? There’s no money,” I said.

  “I want to know who she was. What she was like … what you were like …”

  “Hold up. Slow down,” I said, trying to temper his enthusiasm.

  “Don’t you want to know more about me? About your mother?” he said innocently.

  I didn’t want to know, not really. I had tapped out my capacity for understanding my mother a long time ago. So she had a kid and gave it away. There’s no crime in that. What did it change?

  He brushed his bangs off his face, revealing a small patch of freckles at the top of his forehead. I had a memory of connecting the dots of Addison’s freckles as we lay in bed together.

  Freckles and wavy hair don’t make two strangers brothers.

  I swigged the first of the two bourbons and lost the feeling in my knees. Outside, the sun slowly drifted behind a dark wall of clouds. From the window by the door, I saw my car and the highway that would lead me out of town.

  The second bourbon dropped like a heavy stone in the pit of my stomach. I should go while I could, while the truth was blurred by my drunkenness. I could add this to the pile of fuzzy-edged memories I was collecting. I could try to do to Andrew’s story what I had failed at with my own. I could forget it.

  Numbness traveled up my thighs and through my waist. Even if I wanted to I would not be able to run, not without help.

  Addison; Jared Sr.; Jared; Mom; Andrew. This wasn’t a family tree; it was a twisted vine choking at the roots.

  “How did you find her?” I asked.

  Andrew’s body slackened from its usual upright countenance. He looked toward the door as if the memory of his abandonment was an uninvited guest he didn’t want to come in. He took a deep breath. “I thought about it since I was fourteen. After my adoptive parents died, I bounced through a bunch of foster homes and got really … lost.” He hung his head. “At first I didn’t want to know; I just wanted to be happy. School helped, and when that wasn’t enough, drugs did. But all the while, I thought about her. What she was like.” His tone changed whenever he spoke of her, like he was talking about an angel.

  “She never looked for you?” Andrew’s hands balled into fists and retreated under the table.

  He shook his head. “It’s hard to believe a woman who gives up a child could forget like that.”

  “Giving up is not forgetting.”

  He smiled. “That’s what she said.”

  It was my turn to pull away. Tears welled in my eyes.

  “After I finished college I jumped from state job to state job trying to locate my birth records. I wasn’t sure what I would do with the information once I got it, but looking gave me purpose. I got a break a couple of years ago. A private detective I hired obtained the adoption records.”

  “You hired a private detective?”

  “I spent my money on searching and heroin. I wasn’t doing very well. I burned most of my professional bridges and was close to getting fired. Once I knew she was in Wilton, I used one of my last connections to get the appointment as coroner. We met at church, that part was true.”

  “You told her right away?”

  He shook his head. “Once I saw her, I lost the desire to confront her. What was I going to say?”

  “Tell her the truth. Make her see you.”

  He laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I didn’t have a chance to do anything. Once she saw me, she knew. She came to me.”

  “And everything was fine after that?”

  “No, she drank. I used. It was great at the beginning, but after a few months the novelty wore off and I felt so angry. She didn’t understand. She had a hard time seeing herself as a person who made choices.”

  Life just happened to my mother; it washed over her like waves reaching for the shore. She loved a man who impregnated her but left, so she let my dad decide what her next move would be. She lived in suspended animation, waiting for something better. Killing herself was the only real choice she ever made.

  “Did she ever say anything about me?”

  “She knew you had a son.”

  I felt my stomach lunge. Here it comes. I gripped the edge of the table.

  “Addison would bring him over and say hello whenever we sat in the park.”

  “Addison?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did he introduce him? Did he say, ‘This is your grandma’?”

  Andrew shook his head. “Addison told Alex your mother was an old friend.”

  “And what did he say about the kid’s mother?”

  “He told us she was dead.”

  “Dead, huh?” My leg twitched as if driven by an internal motor. There were thousands of potential follow-up questions, plenty of details to discover, but where would it lead me? She knew, maybe everyone did. So what? We sat in silence and drank some more.

  “She said she had to think of a way to get you back. She couldn’t let you make the same mistake
,” Andrew said after a bit.

  “Which mistake was that?”

  “I think she meant leaving your son.”

  Outside, the sky opened up and pelted rain so thick I couldn’t see beyond the door. I smoked my last cigarette and felt the weight of the booze bearing down on me.

  “I should leave.” He took a final drink of his beer.

  It was time to go.

  Andrew helped me to my car and offered again to follow me home. “I’m not going home,” I told him, but I didn’t say where I was going. The cold rain on my face woke me up a little and I felt surprisingly capable of finding my way to the highway and heading out of town. I would pull over as soon as I got to the first rest stop and sleep it off. When I woke up with a puffy face and a mouth as dry as a good martini I would be ready to press on and put some more miles between me and the past. I rolled the window down and called out to him as he was walking away, “Did she ever tell you who your father is?”

  He shook his head and turned back. “Not really, except she said he wasn’t your father. I figured it out. Especially when she wanted me to go to California with her. And there was Addison and the way she always asked about his dad whenever we ran into him. I was waiting for her to tell me, though. I wanted to hear it from her. And now I won’t have that chance.”

  I turned on the ignition. “God, to think she had a chance with someone else and blew it.”

  “The man who was my father left her. Your father saved her.”

  “Is that what she said?”

  He nodded. “Your father was awful, but being alone is worse, don’t you think?”

  “Worse than having your finger cut off?”

  “No, not that, but putting up with the meanness was better than being alone. I was so lonely growing up.”

  “You can be lonelier with someone else than by yourself. That kind of love, that life she made, destroyed everything. Being alone never hurt anybody.”

  TWENTY

  “YOU ALWAYS HAVE a choice, sweetie. If you want to have this baby, have it, but it’s also okay to have an abortion.” She whispered and finger-quoted the word and laughed. “God, I hate it that the word is considered so dirty. Pro-lifers—those are the folks who say abortion is murder, you’re killing a child, blah, blah, blah.” She sipped her coffee, which had grown cold, during one of the many mornings we sat together on her wicker glider on the front porch and felt summer winding down and the crispness of fall creeping in. She wore a long, flowing, faded paisley cotton caftan that she pulled over her knees and legs as she swigged coffee and rocked back and forth. She smelled like cinnamon in the morning, from the incense she burned in her room to help her sleep. Her hair was wild and peppered with gray, but it was soft and smooth when it brushed against my shoulders as we talked.

  Some days I thought just being with her would be enough.

  “Being pro-choice doesn’t mean you’re not pro-life—it just means you get to choose whose life is most important to you.” She touched my stomach and smiled. “This one inside you will consume you. There are rewards, huge ones I would imagine, but there is also loss; you lose yourself.”

  “Do you have kids?”

  “Oh God, no, I was way too focused on myself to have children. I had an abortion once. Now that I’m older, I think I’m finally ready, but that’s the thing about life, kiddo …. Sometimes you’re ready at the exact moment it’s too late.”

  I knew that day on the porch I would not have an abortion. The hard bubble that floated inside me was no more a baby than I was a mother, so it wasn’t my fear of killing something that made me not do it. To be honest, I wasn’t spending too much time in my body anymore. The part of me that had thoughts and occasionally feelings about it was not the same part that tried to zip up jeans that were getting too tight or fit into bras that were getting too small.

  If there was a body I lived in, I guess it was Diana’s, as hers seemed more resilient, more lovely than mine could ever be, and so in an odd way, it was Diana who was carrying the baby, not me.

  As I grew bigger, the reality of what was inside me expanded as well. Diana was enthralled with the process and took me to every doctor’s appointment and bought lots of books on childbirth. She told me she thought I would be a good mother and to make her happy I played along. We never discussed Addison, never talked about getting in touch with my family, never really spoke of what would happen after the baby came. I could tell she had a plan for us and, in a way, that made it easy for me to make my own.

  One night, when I was about eight months along and feeling like a tenant in my own body slowly being evicted by its angry, kicking landlord, I tried to imagine what this thing would look like. Certainly there would be a deformity of some kind or maybe brain damage. Would there be a marker—some way to know who the father was?

  I thought again of that night at the ravine on the bridge and how the rain pounded down on me in a way that almost made me forget all other details. All of them except one: the monster was in me now and it was never going to be over.

  Addison was sitting on the front porch when we pulled up with a car full of groceries. Diana had gotten a commission check for photographs she sold and decided we should stock up on as much food as possible. She had insisted we stop at Atria’s for lunch so I could have one of their massive cheeseburgers before I had the baby. She was counting the days and full of excitement.

  Addison was leaning forward, resting his arms on his legs like he was waiting for an answer from a doctor who was performing some lifesaving operation on someone he loved.

  I didn’t want to get out of the car. Diana walked toward him. He stood up and smiled and put his arms out to hug her; she pushed him away and led him into the house, where they stayed for almost an hour. I dug out the Oreos, ate a row, and then threw up.

  Finally she came out and leaned into the passenger window. “He wants to stay for a while. He knows about the baby. He says he won’t leave until we figure it all out.”

  “You called him, didn’t you?” I said. I wasn’t able to look at her. All her talk about choice and freedom, and she needed a man as much as my mother did.

  “Sweetie, he’s the father.”

  I laughed. Little did she know.

  “He has a say,” she continued, but I wasn’t listening. Warm water rushed out between my legs.

  “Oh God, something bad is happening,” I said.

  Addison followed us to the hospital in his truck. I didn’t want him near me. Diana drove and muttered about breathing and concentrating and all that shit they taught us when she made us go to Lamaze. All I wanted was to rip out the thing tearing at me.

  I was in labor for twelve hours. Diana stayed with me and left periodically to give Addison updates. She fed me ice chips from a cup. “Open up,” she said during one of the more quiet times. She took a long cotton-tipped swab and wiped the inside of my mouth. I looked up at her. She shrugged.

  “I’m going to make an offering for a happy life for you all,” she said. Diana was always mixing herbs and potions. She claimed what saved her from cancer was healing, not medicine. I chalked it up to another one of her wacky beliefs.

  After six hours of holding my hand, she took a break for coffee.

  I knew he would come in. His hair was pushed off his face from handling it too much. His face was tan and clear except for the colony of freckles that danced on his forehead. He had the slow gait and forlorn expression of a man paying his last respects.

  “Don’t hate me,” he said when he reached the bed. I turned away. “I didn’t know. I called Diana to find out how you were ….”

  A contraction came and I reached for him. I felt the searing burn rising from the bottom of my pelvic bone up to the top, where the wave of pain crested into a feeling of my hips snapping in half. After a count of ten, the peak slowly subsided.

  “Let go,” I said. Addison loosened his grip.

  Addison and Diana took turns sitting with me. It felt as if they were the real par
ents and I was the surrogate they hired to birth them a healthy, happy baby. What they didn’t know was that there was a chance this child would be neither.

  When the baby came out, everyone sighed at the wonder of it all. They asked Addison if he wanted to cut the cord. He looked as freaked out as I felt. “May I?” Diana asked, and she did.

  They cleaned the little boy up and put him on my belly. I stared at the ceiling and fought the urge to look. The doctor said he had ten fingers and ten toes and was perfectly healthy.

  That’s what you think.

  When the nurse asked if I wanted to hold him longer, I said I was too tired.

  I missed him as soon as they took him away. I replayed the moments. The warm movement when they laid him on me. The way he stopped squirming when our skin made contact. The tiny creature that was swimming in my murky waters had surfaced and landed on the beach of my belly. There was that gasp for air, the gulping urge to take in life and announce his arrival. The way his small tummy moved in and out as his hands curled into half-fists, not sure if hands were for holding or hitting. And there was that faint creaking sound he made right before he screamed.

  Those were the moments I could never drink away—no matter how hard I tried.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I COULDN’T SEE PAST the illuminated beams from the headlights. Like with most things, though, I did better if I didn’t see too much. I thought of Andrew and the way he scratched his arms and the cool, even tone of his voice, never wavering or breaking, and how his eyes were still a little dead when he spoke.

  He’s still using.

  I thought of him shooting up, shooting hoops, going to school, searching for his mother, seeing me, his half sister, for the first time, and suddenly I felt incredibly sad.

  I clutched the wheel and leaned forward, pushing the car deeper into the rain.

  I turned on the radio and there was that song, the one they played at the dance about how time could stand still, that a moment could fill a lifetime. The smell of Addison filled the car and summoned the feeling I had as we danced that night that he could stop the world.