The Last Bridge Page 20

Still I kept looking, hoping something remained. Although I had not sketched anything beyond a doodle since that night, I continued to experience my life in frames. I drew in my head, mapping out story lines and adventures. Drinking occupied my hands now. I couldn’t do both.

  Drinking. God, I wanted to be alone in a bed with a remote in one hand and a bottle in the other, holed up for the duration of the cold weather.

  “Cat!” I heard a voice coming from the bridge. “Help!”

  I turned toward the sound, wondering if I had imagined it. “Help!” It was clear and loud and very real. It sounded like a child. I started running.

  Alex was halfway across the bridge, gripping the rope with both hands and struggling to stay still. His bike was turned over near the entrance on the other side as if he had jumped off and run across the bridge. He had been the shadow in the garage. He had followed me.

  “I can’t move,” he yelled. His face was pale and open, as if he were frozen in place.

  “Are you stuck?”

  He shook his head.

  “Hurt?”

  “I’m going to fall. Oh, God, I’m going to fall.”

  My knees started shaking as I moved as close as I could to the bridge. I wiped my hands on my jeans and reached out to him. “No, you’re not. Look at me.”

  He looked down.

  “Alex, look at me.” I was pointing at my eyes. He focused on me. I nodded. “Good. Now think about taking a step toward me.”

  “I can’t. Oh, God, Dad is going to kill me.” He turned toward his bike as if Addison were standing there.

  “Alex, me.” He looked back.

  “You have to come for me. I’m scared.”

  The bridge swayed. Alex screamed. My legs buckled as if I were the one on the bridge struggling to stay still, as if I were Alex and he were me or we were the same. I did not feel my feet, only my pulse beating in my throat, as I leaped to the first plank and made my way toward him.

  “Stay still,” I said. “I’m coming.”

  He was whimpering but holding steady with his eyes locked on mine as I worked my way toward him inch by inch. The bridge was rocking wildly. The ropes were creaking as they grew taut from our weight. I looked down.

  “Me!” Alex said.

  Our eyes connected as I moved more swiftly. When I reached him, he let go of the ropes and wrapped his arms around my waist. I felt the bridge give way, or was I imagining it? I gripped the ropes and tried to maneuver myself into a more steady position. “Thank you,” he said into my belly, his head resting between my breasts.

  “Don’t thank me yet; we have to get back.”

  I talked him across. When his foot almost slipped through a plank, I told him to put his feet on top of mine and I walked us to solid ground.

  “Okay. We’re good now,” I said, trying to pry him off. He wouldn’t let go. He hugged me tightly and cried. I could feel him breathing against me. He smelled like oranges and talcum powder. I stroked his hair and said, “Shhh,” like Addison had done for me the night before.

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

  I thought about saying I wasn’t going anywhere, but that was a lie and there had been too many of those. I pushed him away from me and wiped the tears off his cheeks with my shirtsleeve.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. That was a bad idea.”

  “I followed you.”

  “I figured.”

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. For a while.”

  I picked up his bike and pushed it to my car as we walked. I opened the back door, and with his help we got it in the backseat. We got in and I started the car and put the heat on high. We sat together, watching the bridge twist in the wind. I turned the heat down. Alex and I were both sitting with our palms open and resting on our knees with our index fingers curled slightly.

  “I’m your mother,” I said finally.

  He nodded.

  “Something bad happened to me here. That’s why I left.”

  “Was it me?” he asked.

  I finally knew the answer.

  “No,” I said, as I began to cry. “It had nothing to do with you.”

  He reached for my hand. I looked down and rubbed my thumb against his coffee-colored birthmark.

  “I miss Diana,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  IT WAS THE AFTERNOON of my son’s eleventh birthday. I was leaning against the Grover Cleveland statue and waiting for school to let out. It was one of those luscious spring days when the sun’s light makes everything appear crisper, more focused.

  I had been sober for one year, twelve days, and eighteen hours. The waistband on my jeans was cutting a ridge in my once flat, and now rounder, stomach. Without alcohol I needed something, so food comforted me. Double Stuf Oreos took the edge off. I carried a dozen or so around with me in a ziplock bag in my purse next to a copy of my mother’s note—her message in a bottle cast from an island of regret.

  He isn’t who you think he is ….

  My palms were sweaty, and I had that odd, new feeling of not quite fitting in my own skin. One of the downsides to being sober is you get to feel uncomfortable most of the time.

  I’d been gone for ten years.

  I knew I would leave Wilton and Alex again. What I didn’t know is if I would ever come back. Addison was right; if I was to go I needed to get gone, and if I were to stay? I wasn’t sure how to do that.

  Alex and I sat in the car for hours that day at Rucker’s Ravine and talked about his life. He told me he missed me, even though he never knew me. “Does that sound stupid?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  We went to breakfast at the Omega diner and discovered our mutual love for onion rings and chocolate milkshakes. I began to feel woefully incapable of sustaining a presence in his life. I wanted to drink more than I wanted to be with him.

  I called Addison from the pay phone by the restroom and asked him to come get us. I didn’t tell him he was only taking Alex until he got there.

  Addison wasn’t surprised. He acted as if he had known all along that this was how it would go. Instead of feeling relieved, I was disappointed. Perhaps I had hoped he would fight for me to stay. Alex wasn’t as accommodating, and insisted on understanding why I had to go.

  “I’m not a good person,” I said, as he turned away to hide his tears.

  “How can you say that? You’re my mother,” he said. I didn’t understand that in his mind, if I was not a good person, then neither was he. It wouldn’t have mattered to explain that I was sure he had more of Addison in him than me and more of me than my father.

  “That’s not what she means,” Addison said. “She means she doesn’t feel good. She needs to get better.”

  Alex looked at me as if I had a big tumor coming out of my head that he hadn’t noticed before.

  “I haven’t been myself for a long time,” I said, as I brushed my hand through Alex’s flannel-soft hair. It would have been easy to love a boy with hair that smooth.

  In the end, Addison and Alex let me go. Alex made me promise to come back as soon as I felt better. “There are worse things than leaving,” Addison said, as he walked me to the car. I wondered what he meant. The only thing worse than leaving is coming back?

  Alex stood rigidly by Addison’s truck like a good soldier and watched me leave for the second time in his short life.

  I drove through the night and found myself in Pittsburgh just as the sun was coming up. I found my way to Diana’s old house and fell asleep in my car. A neighbor told me where she was buried and made me a hot cup of coffee to go.

  I told Diana everything that day. I started standing up, and as I got deeper into the story, I sat on her grave and leaned against her headstone and talked until I was hoarse. I found words to describe what had happened that night. Words I had never spoken to a living soul. Words I could only say to the woman who had mothered my child a
nd who tried to mother me. I needed her to know there was a reason I did what I did.

  I got halfway back to the car before I realized I had not said the one thing I needed to say. I went back and kneeled next to her headstone and got close to the earth and whispered, “Thank you.” Maybe it was the wind, or the way the branch of the oak tree that stood guard beside her grave gave way, or maybe it was the ground beneath me releasing the cold, but I felt a shift, a slow turning.

  I checked into the Viking Motel out by the airport with a case of bourbon and a phone number for Domino’s Pizza. I stripped down to a T-shirt and panties and crawled into bed with the remote and a bottle. This was how I treated myself. It was my reward.

  My purse was filled with my mother’s papers. There was more to know. Questions that needed answers; children who needed to know their parents—Andrew, Alex, and possibly all of us. There was nothing to run from anymore except who I became, and that was nothing.

  I lost count of days and bottles. I drifted in and out of a boozy haze, with my dreams and the TV blending into a hyperreality. I rolled over onto the remote and let the world click by. I didn’t want to be alone, but I didn’t care what kept me company.

  I woke up in a small bed in Mercy Hospital with a pudgy-faced nun holding my hand and smiling as if I were the baby Jesus.

  “You came back to us,” she said.

  My throat was sore from having my stomach pumped. I had been asleep for three days. I had no memory of leaving the motel or of anything else.

  “Do you know who you are?” she said, as she brought a cup of water to my lips. The sun beamed through the window, bathing her in a halo of amber light. I was in a white nightgown, lying on crisp linen sheets. The air smelled sweet, like blueberry muffins baking in a kitchen down the hall. Everything felt focused, sharp, and unreal. I was too alive to not be dead.

  “Do you know who you are?” the nun asked again, after I sipped cool water.

  My thoughts scrambled in search of the best way to answer. I am alone. I am Alex Rucker. I am a drunk. I am a daughter who was raped by her father. I am a sister. I am a half sister. I am my mother’s daughter. I am a woman. My mind scrolled the list, trying to find the one that defined me the most. The nun lifted me by the shoulders and put a pillow under my back so I could sit up. She waited patiently.

  I began to cry. She took my hand.

  “I am a mother,” I said.

  Sister Anna helped me find a red gilded sketchbook just like the one Addison got for me so many years ago. I bought two.

  I started drawing again as I went through rehab. I became as dependent on the pen as I had been on booze. I drew the adventures of Kitty Kat from memory and picked up her story where I thought it had ended in a soggy pit on the bad side of Rucker’s Ravine. I got her away from the Hand and into a whole new set of adventures with a nemesis called Jack D.

  During the day I rested, went to meetings, and stayed with Sister Anna in her small house behind railroad tracks that led nowhere. I ate what she cooked and got back my taste for food. At night, I sat on the cot in her attic, where I slept and filled the book with the images in my head, and slowly drew myself back to life.

  Anna insisted I stay with her until I knew where I was going. I told her I might never know; she said I was closer than I thought. I wrote Addison a letter to let him know I was okay and to thank him for being the father of my son. The days of doubting were coming to an end for me.

  We went to visit Diana again when I made ninety days without a drink. I told Anna what happened as we planted white petunias in front of Diana’s headstone. Anna listened with ease and lack of judgment. When I was done, she put her small garden shovel down and embraced me. “You poor child,” she whispered. “You needed a mother’s love.”

  What I heard was, “Your poor child needs a mother’s love.”

  When I told her that later in the car she laughed. “That’s God’s way,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes and asked her if we could stop for pizza. There’s only so much healing and God shit I could take in a day.

  When I hit a year sober, Anna loaned me the money to go back to Wilton. I had saved some money from the part-time job Anna got me at the hospital helping patients with their paperwork, but it wasn’t enough. She took me shopping for new clothes, as my old ones were too small. We also picked out paper and ribbon for the other gilded book. On my last night she taught me how to wrap a gift.

  I packed the clothes and few possessions I had collected over the year into a small duffel bag I bought at the hospital thrift store. I was wearing my mother’s pearls, as I had every day since Addison gave them back to me. Checking the dresser one last time, I found the ziplock bag of documents I had gotten from my mother’s safe-deposit box. In the frenzy, I had stopped at the deed, never looking at what was underneath. I was carrying them in my purse when I was found in the hotel. I remembered them in the hospital and Anna assured me they were in safekeeping at her house. I had thought of the documents a few times during my recovery but had not followed up. Roger, one of my recovery counselors, always said, “It’s not the answer to your problems you are looking for, it’s the courage to face them.”

  My mother’s note was on the top—I pulled it out and smelled it, trying one more time to make some part of her come alive so I could ask her myself what she meant.

  He isn’t who you think he is ….

  A year later, it could still mean so many things. Andrew, my father, Addison; but I believed then as I do now that she meant my son. She was right, he was so much more.

  I am not who I thought I was.

  I sorted through the papers; most of them were the legal documents: her Social Security card, the family’s birth certificates, and a few photos—all of them of her children, including one of Andrew as a baby. At the bottom of the pile was an unopened manila envelope addressed to me from Diana, postmarked around the time of her death.

  Anna called up to me to see if I wanted a cup of tea. My voice broke when I said yes, as I felt a rush of unexpected emotion. Another letter from the grave; what was up with these women?

  Downstairs Anna rustled around as I unclasped the envelope and broke through the seal of tape around the edge. I pulled out a set of papers with a note clipped to the top. It was her round, loopy handwriting. I remembered it from the to-do lists she used to leave me, written on her notepads that had “Diana McKenzie” printed in bold, plain letters at the top.

  Sweetie—

  Thought you might want to know this at some point.

  I figured you would get home eventually, so I sent it there.

  Consider this my offering for a happy life.

  Love you always,

  Diana

  I had a flash of memory reading the last line: Diana swabbing my mouth while I was in labor. I unclipped the note from the documents.

  At first glance I thought she was sending me Alex’s medical records. The heading on the front page confirmed what kind of record it was. Diana had done a paternity test.

  The letter from the lab confirmed that the “alleged father, Addison James Watkins, cannot be excluded” as the biological father of Alexander McKenzie Watkins. Farther down it indicated that there was a 99.99 percent probability.

  The report was dated a few weeks after Alex was born. She had swabbed Addison as well.

  A photograph dropped out between the sheets of paper. It was the one she took of me and Alex the day of his arrival. I look so young and so … I started to cry.

  The next morning, I got up before dawn to avoid saying goodbye, but Anna was waiting by the door with a packed lunch and a Bible. She held my hand as we walked to the car and I let her.

  Before I drove off she thanked me for telling her my story. “It helps,” she said. It was then I realized I had never asked her about her life. I hadn’t even cared. She must have sensed this small recognition, and before I could ask she said, “He’s in jail and the baby is in heaven.” She made the sign of the cross and wis
hed me well.

  I found Jared in an apartment complex in a small suburb of Columbus. His wife gave me the directions. “We aren’t together anymore,” she said. She didn’t seem that sad about it. The carved oak door she held open dwarfed her. When she spoke, her voice echoed in the cavernous entrance hall. She was blond and fair and thin, and had the air of someone who used to be pretty and was waiting for it to come back.

  “Tell him he’s late with the check,” she called to me as I made my way down the brick path that led away from a house that looked like the giant’s castle from Jack and the Beanstalk.

  I found Jared floating on a raft in the indoor pool that was one of the amenities of his condo complex. His eyes were closed and his hands were resting at his sides, like my mother’s were the day Andrew unzipped her bag. Jared’s body was softer, less chiseled.

  “You’re late with the check,” I said.

  He fell off his raft and went under. I laughed and handed him a towel.

  “Holy crap, Cat,” he said as he lifted himself out. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “That’s my job.”

  Jared rubbed the towel through his hair like he did as a teenager coming out of the bathroom trailing steam behind him.

  “You look different.”

  “I colored my hair,” I said, as I sat on the end of a chaise and watched him dry off. He put on a terry robe and slid on flip-flops. Jared’s eyes took an inventory of me.

  “No, it’s something else,” he said.

  “I’m fatter.”

  “Yeah, who isn’t?” He pinched an inch of flab on his belly. “What the hell are you doing here? Is someone else dead?”

  “No. I was passing through and thought I’d …”

  Before I could finish, Jared took me in his arms and hugged me so hard he lifted me off the ground.

  “I don’t care why, just that you’re here.” Jared held on long after I landed. His arms pulled me close to his chest, which was damp and smelled like chlorine mixed with ginger. His skin was cool and the color of white peaches. I fit in Jared’s arms the way Alex fit in mine, like human puzzle pieces.