The Last Bridge Read online

  “I don’t trust him,” I said. “He winks.”

  “So do I,” she said. “Exactly …”

  “Addison is going to stay with us awhile,” Dad announced one night at dinner. “As far as I’m concerned, he’s part of this family and will be treated as such.”

  Addison moved his duffel into the apartment above the garage that had been empty since my mom’s parents had died a few years back. He worked hard to form bonds with everyone in the family. He was a good influence on Dad. He helped him with the equipment repairs, trailed him on errands, and showed more interest in learning about farm life than any of us ever had. He was kind to my mother and often helped her with the dishes or household chores when he wasn’t working with Dad. He complimented her on her cooking, took an interest in her quilting, and loved to play guitar and sing with her after dinner. He was an avid sports fan and played catch with Jared in the yard on the weekends or would go to the school and shoot hoops with him. On Sundays he sat in the living room with Jared and my father and watched all of the games. He gave Jared advice on women (which I was beginning to suspect Addison knew a lot about), and loved to hear Jared and his friends talk about the girls at school. As for Wendy, Addison treated her in a brotherly fashion. He spent hours teaching her how to play guitar and helped her understand the basics of music composition. Addison was good at many things. He was a first-rate carpenter, and had a beautiful singing voice and athletic ability. I couldn’t imagine what someone with all that talent was doing living above our garage.

  Addison worked so hard to cultivate relationships with everyone that it felt as if he were auditioning to be part of our family. As if this were a family worth getting into.

  I stuck to my promise that I had no intention of getting involved with someone who could distract me from my goal of getting out. And so, while the others circled around Addison for attention, I went about my business doing homework, pursuing my driver’s license, and drawing.

  “You spend a lot of time with your head in that book.” Addison stood in the doorway of my room watching me draw one afternoon.

  “So?”

  “What are you drawing?”

  He settled his shoulder against the doorjamb with the confidence of a man who knew the value of waiting.

  “It’s none of your business,” I said. “Move along.”

  He laughed. “You don’t like me, do you?”

  “I would have to care about you not to like you.”

  The truth was, he fascinated me. When it was safe, I would watch him work in the garden from my window and wonder what twist of events had led him to our door. Everything about him reminded me that there was something beyond the farm and family. His manner, the stories he told, the things he knew, made me feel hopeful. I didn’t want to be with him as much as I wanted to be him.

  In the evenings, when the weather was warm, I walked around the farm and talked to myself about all of my “big plans” as I watched the sun go down. Those evenings were my favorite part of the day as I was free to imagine all of the wonderful and exciting things I would experience away from Wilton. I never shared my plans with anyone, which wasn’t hard considering no one asked me what I wanted to do with my life. If they had, I would have lied and said I didn’t know.

  Sometimes I wanted to tell Jared that I was going to leave too, just so he knew he wasn’t going to be the only one, but he was obsessed with his plans for college and graduation and didn’t seem interested in the ideas of his younger sister. The only things that mattered to Jared were sports and comic books. He loved football and baseball and came alive when a ball was in his hands. Even at night in his room, I’d walk by and he’d be tossing a football or baseball up and down and acting out a great catch or save. He was never embarrassed to find me watching him; in fact, he performed all the better with an audience.

  “I’m not sure anyone could ever love you as much as you love yourself,” I said to him one afternoon after catching him flexing his muscles in the mirror. He had come out of the shower and was wrapped in a towel.

  “You’d be surprised how much the chicks dig me,” he said. He flexed again. “Check out these pecs—ever seen anything like them?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I could kick anybody’s ass with these fists,” he said, boxing in front of the mirror. “Name the guy and I’ll take care of him for you, Cat.” As he jabbed harder his towel fell off. He grabbed it before I could see anything, but not before his face flushed as red as Mom’s heirloom tomatoes.

  Jared couldn’t interest me in sports, but we bonded over comics. He followed most of the Marvel superheroes and taught me their stories, the comic book structures, and the production schedules of the serials. On Saturdays he would often let me ride my bike with him to Goldstein’s Drugs and Sundries to pick up the new releases. A new release usually meant Jared would share the old one with me, and so although I was always a month behind, I was as drawn to the stories as I was to sharing something special with my big brother.

  In the last couple of years, as he focused more on college, his love of comic books waned while mine grew. Jared had an extensive collection that he lent me freely. With no one to share the stories with, I studied the books more closely and secretly began drawing and writing my own comic, called “Kat’s Eye.” It was the story of a girl named Kitty Kat who was banished from her hometown of “Niceville” (I saw that town on a map of Florida once) by her nemesis, “the Hand.” The stories were about Kitty Kat’s attempts to fight the Hand (and his fellow evildoers, “the Monster” and “the Hard Heart”) and get back to Niceville.

  It was stupid.

  My sketches were rigid and the stories were lame, but I loved doing it. I hid the drawings from everyone, even Jared, as I was sure he would laugh.

  When Jared wasn’t at sports practice or studying, he was pacifying my mother. It seemed the worse my father got, the more she depended on Jared. At times she treated him like he was her surrogate husband: cooking special meals for him, leaving presents under his pillow, and massaging him after his games. I was embarrassed at the attention she showered on him, and avoided them whenever they were together. I could tell it made Jared uncomfortable, but he put up with it. He said he was all Mom had.

  Between my father and Wendy and my mother and Jared, there were moments in my life when the bonds between them seemed so strong that I wondered if I had a place anywhere. But there were nights when I was feeling particularly good that being alienated from them didn’t matter. I would sneak out after dinner, go to my favorite tree stump in the woods, and pull out the large sketchbook I kept hidden in a hole next to the gnarly root I rested my foot on. This was the third book I had filled. Each page was covered with my hand-drawn frames and carefully lettered exposition. I sketched my ideas on small pieces of paper: sometimes I laid out the whole frame, other times I wrote an idea for a story or character, and quite often I worked on sketches, always trying to perfect my technique. Once I felt ready, I would draw the whole story into my big black sketchbook.

  After I finished a book, I would take the snippets of paper and put them in a ziplock bag. I kept the whole bundle of my work in a watertight case I had purchased with birthday money. When the weather got cold, I moved everything to a special spot I had in the barn.

  My current book was about half-filled but it was already bursting from all the scraps I stuffed into it.

  Some nights I imagined I was a famous cartoonist who was being interviewed on The Late Show. I had only seen David Letterman a couple of times, mostly from the kitchen when my mother sent me down to wake my father after he passed out in front of the TV. I hated to do it, as I was never sure what kind of mood he’d be in, so I stood in the doorway and got lost in the glow of late-night television.

  Addison followed me out to the woods one night after he arrived. Dad was passed out drunk and everyone else was asleep or settled into bed. I don’t know how long he was there or what he heard. I only know that I was standing up and
reading aloud from a story I wrote about Kat’s adventures fighting the evil Hand. As I read on about the Hand’s attempt to steal the treasure Kat carried in a secret compartment on her belt, I felt a hand around my waist and was lifted into the air. My stories went flying everywhere.

  “Gotcha!” he shouted.

  Without thinking, I elbowed him with a force that sent him tumbling into the pricker bush, and before I realized who it was, I kicked him in the ass several times.

  Addison rolled over and sat on his knees. I caught my breath. “What the fuck is your problem?” I shouted as tears sprang from my eyes. I couldn’t tell which upset me more, getting caught or being ambushed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as he stood up and pulled the prickers from his pants.

  I wiped my nose with the back of my sleeve. He handed me a bandanna from his back pocket. I slapped it away as I turned and gathered all the loose sheets of paper I could see in the glow of the moonlight.

  “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “I’m not crying—I’m mad.” I searched the ground for more scraps.

  “Listen,” he said, walking toward me.

  “Don’t!” I put my hand up to stop him. I picked up a Tastee Freez napkin with the name Freidkan Walker written on it. He served me a root beer float. I thought his name was funny so I wrote it down.

  I left Addison pulling prickers from his pants. I had no choice but to take my box with me. I couldn’t leave it under the stump for him to discover. I rushed through the woods toward the house, feeling the sting of tears streaming down my cheeks. Brittle branches snapped beneath my feet as I propelled myself forward. I had been caught feeling free. Now I would have to find somewhere new to hide. I was running out of places.

  The next morning I left for school without seeing him. On the bus I made a list of all of the ways I would avoid Addison. I hid the box in the barn but took Book III with me in the hope that I could assess whether I had lost any ideas. It felt as full as I had remembered. To be sure, though, I was going back that night with a flashlight.

  By the time I got to school I felt good about my plan. If I stuck to it, I could avoid Addison and get back to the woods to recover anything that had been lost.

  I remembered too late that Nell had left early for a doctor’s appointment and I tried to catch the last bus home. As the doors closed without me, I saw Addison leaning against the statue of Grover Cleveland, holding a large shopping bag. He was wearing red cowboy boots and loose jeans that hung off his waist and a T-shirt that said STINKY’S BAR AND GRILL. THE ONLY THING THAT STINKS AT STINKY’S IS NOT HAVING YOU HERE. His rust-colored hair was damp and combed off his face. He looked as if he had just showered.

  The bus pulled away.

  “Shit.”

  “I have the truck,” Addison said, coming so close I could smell the orange scent of his shampoo. “Let me give you a—”

  I put my hand up to silence him and began the long walk home. He went away.

  After a few moments, I felt the rumbling of his engine as he followed slowly behind me in his truck. He pulled up beside me and coasted as he held a shopping bag out the window.

  “Here,” he said, shaking the bag.

  I looked at the package. It was lilac and covered with white polka dots and looked fancy, like the kind you buy at Hallmark for a special gift.

  “Don’t make me drive into a ditch again,” he said, as he swerved off the road a little.

  The bag flew out of his hand and into the air. Before I knew what I was doing, I ran to catch it. There was tissue paper inside that matched the lilac and white of the bag.

  Addison stopped the truck and hung his head out the window. “Open it!”

  I looked at him and then back at that beautiful bag and the wrapping. It was lovely enough to be a gift on its own.

  “Please.”

  There was something heavy and hard resting at the bottom. I had never gotten a gift out of the blue. We weren’t big on gifts in my family, except when Dad bought stuff for Wendy. We got practical stuff for Christmas and birthdays—new socks, underwear, or sometimes a few dollars shoved in an envelope—but never anything nice and never with special wrapping.

  I should have handed it back and kept walking.

  Instead I reached in and pulled out a square object and slid the bag’s handle over my hand. It was wrapped in tissue paper with a long curly ribbon dripping off it like spun sugar.

  I slid the ribbon off the edges and slowly tore the tissue, which revealed gilt-edged pages. The wrapping floated away, uncovering a larger version of my black sketchbook only covered in red leather with gold-embossed leaves on each corner. Inside the cover was red wavy satin, and each page was smooth, cool, and white, with the faint edge of gold. On the first blank page, Addison had written:

  Kat’s Eye

  The Amazng Adventures of Kitty Kat

  He knew.

  I wanted to die.

  “There’s more.” He pointed at the bag.

  I took a deep breath and rummaged through the bag and found a bundle of pens, just like the one I dropped when he picked me up.

  “I know you have your own book but I thought this was—”

  “Beautiful,” I said. My voice cracked. I willed my body to stay still as my insides collapsed and expanded in rushes of opposite emotion, like an umbrella opening and closing inside me.

  He smiled. “You like it?”

  I nodded. I knew I should say something. A thank-you, at least, but I was afraid. My hands shook as I held the book and the pens and felt the bag brushing against my leg. I should have given it back. As lovely as it was, it was one more thing I would have to hide. I should have said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” but I didn’t. I stood stone silent and hugged it to my chest.

  Addison put the truck in gear and threw the parking brake. He opened the passenger door and patted the seat.

  “I won’t bite. I promise.”

  I climbed in slowly, afraid I might lose my footing and fall away forever.

  “Don’t even think of giving it back,” he said. “I don’t want you to feel…”

  I looked at him.

  “Obligated,” he said, as if he were reading my mind.

  I closed my eyes and felt the smooth cover of the book in my hands.

  “Think of it as an investment in your future.”

  “My future?” I said.

  “You’re an artist.”

  I laughed. “It’s a stupid comic.”

  “Not stupid at all.” He reached across my lap, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a pile of scrap paper. “I went back to the woods this morning to make sure I got everything.” He handed it all to me. There were half-pages of panels, detailed sketches of the Hand. There was even one notebook page titled “The Secret Treasure—What Is It?”

  “You read all of these?”

  He didn’t have to answer. Of course he had—the book, the pens—he had read every word. He saw something I would have never shared with him or anyone.

  “Please …” I said, pleading for what I don’t know.

  Addison leaned toward me as if he were going to kiss me and reached his hand across my chest to grab the door handle.

  “It sticks if you don’t slam it.” He opened and closed my door as his cheek brushed my shoulder. I flinched.

  “I don’t like to be touched,” I blurted before I could censor myself.

  “That’s too bad,” he said, as he sat back in his seat. “Touching can be nice.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments. I felt that rush of shame again as I tried to stay in the moment, tried to feel the vibration of the motor rumbling under my thighs, the pull of his eyes on me, the smoothness of the sketchbook in my lap, and the sharp edges of my scraps he had rescued in the woods. I tried to stay in the moment, to not escape to someplace in my head where this was not happening and I was safe and alone.

  “I wouldn’t have read them if I had known how you felt.”

 
I hung my head, wishing I could fold into myself and slip into the glove compartment.

  “You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your sketches are …”

  I bowed my head and began to cry. Addison handed me his yellow bandanna from his back pocket. This time I took it.

  “It’s okay,” he said, as he put his hand on top of mine, which were folded in my lap. His palm was dry and warm and covered my fingers like a blanket. We sat like that until the setting sun glowed through the windshield, blinding us. Addison released the parking brake and shifted gears.

  He took the long way through town and around the duck pond. In the few weeks he had been with us, spring had announced its arrival with cool days that were slowly wearing away the memory of another harsh Ohio winter. We cracked the windows to get some of the sweet air.

  “Tell me about ‘Kat’s Eye,’” he said, as if he were asking me about the weather.

  Maybe it was the light or the sketchbook, but I felt a small shift inside me. The memory of his hand lingered, along with a general feeling of unease at being so near him. This was not fear, though I knew the discomfort of that; this was different. Instead of fighting the urge to turn away, I was resisting the desire to slide as close to him as possible.

  “Jared shared his comics with me,” I said, my voice sounding queer, like I was speaking in a different language. I had never heard myself tell this story. “Before I learned about comics, I drew picture books when I was little. My mom says she saved them.”

  “Kitty Kat—is she you?”

  “Me? No. She’s beautiful and brave.”

  “But she has your name.”

  “She spells it with a K.”

  “Anything else is just coincidence?” he said as he turned in to the Sally’s Sweet Shoppe parking lot.

  “Yup,” I said, smiling as I felt my toes wiggling, signaling a laugh was on its way.

  “You like root beer floats?”

  I nodded.

  Addison slid out of the car and glided into the shop as the welcome bell signaled another customer. He chatted with Sally and made her laugh so hard she reached over the counter and playfully slapped him.