The Last Bridge (19 page)

“I don’t feel well,” I said.

“Lean back.” She sandwiched my shoulder with her hands and helped me lie down. She brushed my hair out of my face. I started to cry again.

“I’m going to give you an internal exam, if that’s okay.” She said that after she felt my abdomen. “You say you’re tired?”

“Yes.”

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.”

“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.”

“Y
OU 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.”