The Last Bridge (2 page)

The end of the hall was punctuated by two silver metal doors. We stopped together as Andrew stepped forward and pushed a button that opened them. He led Hal and me into a small puce room filled with empty metal tables. “Your mother’s over here,” he said. I followed the movement of his arm as it arched toward her table as if he were a maître d’ uniting me with my dinner partner.

For a moment, hearing someone say, “Your mother’s over here,” I thought she was waiting for me in a chair, with her purse resting on her lap.

“Hey, Mom,” I would say, and smile the smile I saved for her and my school picture.

“Miss Rucker, over here,” the coroner whispered to me, guiding me gently by the elbow.

She was in a bag.

As I looked at the zippered closure I thought about how much she would approve of the container. Instead of “Ashes to ashes,” the preacher should say “Ziplock to ziplock.”

“As soon as you can identify her, let us know,” the coroner whispered as he unzipped the bag and pulled down the sides. “Your impulse is to look at her face, but try not to. It’s in bad shape.”

In bad shape? The woman put a shotgun in her mouth and express-mailed her brains to heaven. I think her face is in worse shape than bad. Christ, he made it sound like all she needed was a little powder and lipstick.

I didn’t have to look at her face to know it was my mother. I didn’t even have to look any farther than her left hand that was dangling off the metal table. I nodded and turned away.

“That’s her,” I said.

“How do you know?” the coroner asked.

“The wedding band,” Hal answered, looking at me for confirmation.

“The tip of her ring finger,” I said.

Both men looked closely. “Ah,” they said in unison as they noticed my mother’s finger was missing the first joint and nail bed.

“Was that a birth defect?” Hal said.

“No … marriage,” I replied, searching my bag for a cigarette. “My mother tried to leave my father once. He found her, brought her home, and cut the tip of her finger off. He told her if she ever tried to leave again, he would cut her hand off. Needless to say, she never left after that. Anybody have a light?”

I
T WAS LUNCHTIME
when I got back to the farm. The sky was overcast, making it feel later than it was. I pulled my car into the garage and closed the swinging door that had alerted Ruth Igby to my mother’s end. I came into the kitchen through the mudroom.

I was rarely alone in our house. My mother was always there, cooking, scrubbing, dusting, or doing laundry. It was hard to know where she ended and the house began. To me the two were inseparable; her smell filled the house, or was it that the smell of the house filled her? I could never tell. Both smelled like oranges and cloves and, during the holidays, pine needles and cinnamon. When she hugged me, her dresses smelled like my sheets and when I slept my sheets smelled like her.

Out of habit I headed for the refrigerator and opened it. As a child I checked the contents of the refrigerator to make sure that life would go on. If there was milk there was hope. An empty refrigerator meant my mother had given up. Food was the barometer by which I measured her commitment to staying. Although she only tried to leave once, I worried she would do it again. I was more afraid of what her leaving would do to me than to her.

The refrigerator was well stocked. On the top shelf was a jug of homemade lemonade and a stack of bologna and cheese sandwiches, my favorite lunch. She knew I would come.

I went to the sink and threw up.

I sat at the table with a damp towel in one hand and the note in the ziplock bag in the other. Before I opened it, I brought the towel to my face and took in the scent of the lavender water she used in the laundry.

I woke up a few hours later with my face stuck to the bag and a banging in my head that felt like a frying pan smacking against my temple. The kitchen was dark, except for the eerie orange glow from the light I forgot to turn off in the garage. All Ruth Igby needed was to find another Rucker facedown on the kitchen table. I got up slowly, working out the kinks in my neck and shoulders from sleeping hunched over. I turned on the light and filled the kettle with water and found my way up to the bathroom. The house had not changed. The floorboards on the third and fifth stair still creaked under the pressure of my feet, and even though I was the only one there, I locked the bathroom door behind me.

The white subway tile on the walls was the same, as was the black-and-white octagonal floor. The porcelain of the basin had been scrubbed way past polish, and although it was clean, there were small nicks showing the black cast iron underneath. The claw-foot tub, with its deep wide bottom and shower curtain that wrapped around like a hoop skirt, was the only welcoming sight. As a child I soaked for hours with the curtain pulled tight and my head immersed halfway into the water. I would stare at the ceiling, soothed by the slow-drip faucet, and imagine how my life would be away from the farm. I never heard my sister screaming or my brother calling, or the pounding of my father’s fists on the door. I only heard the sound of the water and of my own heart beating in anticipation of places far away.

The shrill of the kettle whistling jolted me. I ran to the kitchen, turned off the burner, and searched for a tea bag. I hit the jackpot when I found a vodka bottle behind the coffee in the pantry. My mother had probably hidden it from my father during one of his bad spells. I filled my mother’s rose china cup and forgot about the
tea, grabbed a bologna and cheese from the fridge, and sat next to my mother’s note.

The letter was facedown and written on a small sheet of lilac stationery that looked as if it had been torn in half. I flipped it over and took a swig of vodka and felt a warm surge of relief flow to the tips of my fingers.

Through the plastic I recognized the careful script resulting from my mother’s Catholic school education. Whenever I marveled at it, she laughed and said, “Anyone can write nicely if they have the time.” Judging from the penmanship, this was a note my mother had taken her whole life to write.

My hands shook as I slid the note out of the bag and held it to the light, not sure of what I hoped to find—a hidden message or a hologram of her smiling as if to say, “Gotcha!”

He isn’t who you think he is …
.

I counted the words including the hugs and kisses. Ten, minus the date—one for every year I had been gone.

I worked the note into the bag and tried to press the seal together but could not make it stick. Every time I thought I was on track, I let go and saw the bag creeping open. My fingers became slick and less steady with every attempt to get it back in.

But there was no getting back.

I pushed myself from the table, tasting the acid backwash of vodka as I rushed the stairs. Halfway up I stopped, feeling the pull of the bag on the table, imagining it opening and closing, breathing in the air from the kitchen.

I crept back downstairs and hovered over the table as if I were checking on a sleeping baby. I wiped my palms against my back
pockets and reached over and sealed the bag in one swift motion, then grabbed the bottle off the counter and cut the light.

I finished off the vodka as I waited for sleep. After tossing in my bed for hours, I tried every other bed in the house until I fell asleep in the tub several hours later.

“Are you going to stay like this forever?” White light punctuated the cool baritone of Jared’s voice as I struggled to keep my eyes open.

“Turn it off.” I pulled myself up from the semifetal position I had been dreaming in as the room faded back to the blue-gray of morning. “How long—?” I started to speak, but winced at the pain that shot through every miserable muscle in my body.

“Just got here,” he said as he leaned in and wrapped his massive arms around me and lifted me out of the tub in one swift motion.

“Christ, Cat… you’re skin and bones.” He hugged me hard, pressing my ribs against his. My cheek brushed the soft cotton of his pressed shirt as I took in his familiar smell of baby powder and sweat. In spite of everything, my body remembered his.

I pushed away. Jared stepped back and raised his hands in surrender. I caught my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror and saw what he had seen: dark puffy circles under bloodshot eyes, unwashed hair waving in clumps away from my face, and pale cheeks with hollow indents where dimples used to be. It was hard to believe there weren’t two corpses my brother had come to bury.

“You alone?” I asked, as I rinsed my mouth with icy water.

“Yeah,” he said. “You?”

I nodded. I wiped my mouth with a hand towel cross-stitched with a snowman and then looked over at him. Jared had morphed from a sweatsuited linebacker into a Wall Street banker with starched khakis and a long-sleeved navy polo shirt neatly tucked in and pressed. His chestnut hair was cut short and hugged the sleek curve of his neck. The bow of his front teeth was gone, replaced by flat porcelain white caps. His new smile revealed the
teeth he used to hide. His milk chocolate eyes were all that remained unchanged.

It had been seven years since the night in the motel when he walked away. The rain pounded around him as he pulled a Penn State windbreaker over his head and climbed into his fiancée’s Jag. I watched from the doorway of the room I had been holed up in for three days feeling the ricochet of the raindrops crackle against my face and neck. Jared had tracked me down and had almost convinced me he cared until he explained why he came. I threw him out and made a solemn vow to drink until I forgot. I was still trying.

“Coffee?” he asked, as I followed him to the kitchen.

I didn’t want coffee.

Downstairs, a pot was brewing and a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts was on the table next to the note he had taken out of the bag.

The room felt small with Jared, me, and the elephant of our shared history wedged between us. Drinking quieted the elephant.

“Did you see the bologna and cheese?” I asked, as he pulled the milk from the fridge without looking, just as he did every morning growing up. I was expecting him to take a swig from the carton but he didn’t.

“Creepy,” he said, shaking his head, checking the milk label. “Whole milk; you’d think she would have bumped down to low-fat at some point.”

Outside the wind whipped the screen door open and shut. Inside, the coffee bubbled in the percolator on the stove, releasing its throaty aroma.

Jared poured the coffee, holding the handle and the lid with pot holders, the way my mother did. In the light of the kitchen I saw how much like her he was, from the almond shape of his mouth to the hesitant way he pulled the cup toward him, blew, and then licked his lips before sipping gently. He even closed his eyes and tilted his head back, savoring the rush of caffeine like she did. Jared and I sat quietly, sneaking looks at each other, assessing the impact of time.

His hair was a salt-and-pepper mix of dark brown and gray. His complexion was smooth and worn, like the leather on the underside of my purse. He was handsome with my mother’s plain oval features and my father’s strong bones and hands. As a child I spent hours lying in the grass studying his face. Whenever Dad got rough Jared would take me to the flat patch of field behind the barn and make up stories from the shapes of the clouds. “My hero,” I’d exclaim when he’d slay the dragon in his cloud tales. Sometimes I’d trace shapes on his cheeks with a blade of grass. I knew the geography of his face better than I knew my own.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” he said, breaking the silence. His fingers circled the rim of his cup. “I miss you.”

I got up and poured myself a cup of coffee and looked out the window. “When is Wendy coming?”

“Cat?” he said.

“Wendy?”

“This afternoon.” I could feel his stare as he waited for me to turn around so he could give me another imploring look. I refused to turn around.

“Who called her?”

“I did.”

“You talk?”

“Sometimes.”

“Mom?”

“Sometimes.”

I nodded. So everyone kept in touch. My leaving hadn’t changed anything for them. Good to know. Jared tapped his fingers against his mug. I imagined myself running in the fields barefoot and numb.

“Why did you come?” Jared said.

“Mom left me the note.”

“So?” he said.

“She knew where I was; she gave Ruth my number.”

When I got the call, it took a while for me to place the voice. I
had been sleeping off a binge and had the cloudy half-awake sense that I was dreaming the conversation. Her words were strong:
shotgun, blood
, and
stroke
. A note addressed to me. It wasn’t until I was on the George Washington Bridge that I realized I was going back.

“I gave Ruth your number,” he said.

“I thought Mom—” I gripped the edge of the counter.

“No.”

I dropped my cup in the sink as tears filled my eyes. The idea that she knew where I was had gotten me here. I should have known better. What kind of mother lets her daughter go and never looks for her?

“I’m tired. I’m going to take a bath,” I said.

“That’s all you have to say?” he said.

I turned from the stairs and looked at Jared, who had moved to the sink and was looking at me. His expression was a replica of one my mother had mastered, with pleading eyes, open mouth, and desperate restraint. “Forgive me,” it seemed to say.

“Call me when Wendy gets here,” I said, taking the steps two at a time.

Wendy arrived as I was drying my hair. I heard a car door slam and looked out the window. She was standing by the open trunk of a car barking orders at an old bald guy as she loaded him down with suitcases and bags. “Get this. Your hands aren’t full yet. Where are you going? There’s more stuff to carry!”

“Has anyone called the hospital to see if Dad is all right?” Wendy asked as I came down the stairs. Jared sat staring into space, wincing at the piercing tone of her voice as his leg twitched a mile a minute under the table. Wendy eyed me up and down, taking me in as if I were a contestant in a beauty pageant she was judging. Wendy works with what she has and thinks everyone is obligated to make themselves as attractive as possible. I could tell by the way she pursed her lips that I was not obliging my looks. She was right.
I had lost the habit of caring for myself. Like Jared’s, my hair was filled with streaks of gray that looked like fine flecks of white paint. The shape was vaguely reminiscent of a haircut I had more than a year ago, with bangs that had grown past my nose. Even with makeup, which I didn’t bother with much, my eyes had permanent dark puffy circles under them. I was underweight by about ten pounds, which was unusual, as I tended to be fat. My clothes hung on me. Heavy drinking was my diet of choice; it shed the pounds and numbed the senses; all in all, not a bad program.