The Last Bridge (22 page)

We were dancing again. At least that’s what it felt like, his body pressed against mine as my hands reached for his shoulders to steady myself. He smelled so good.

“Alex,” he whispered.

The elephants of the past were sleeping, but they would be awake soon and I would return to my job as keeper of the herd. Not yet, though. For a moment I was that girl in the apartment above the garage, the one who wanted him beyond anything I had let myself desire.

“I missed,” I said, as I looked down, afraid of the power of my own words. He lifted my head and kissed me as we stood away from the broken glass.

“Cat!” Alex called from upstairs. Addison and I jumped apart. His shoes crunched on the shards of plate as I slammed my elbow against the counter and howled. We both laughed. “Cat!”

“Maybe now you understand why I don’t date that much,” he said.

“Yes?” I answered, following the sound to the stairs.

“Come see my room,” he said.

I looked to Addison for approval. “That’s big. He doesn’t even let me in it.”

I went upstairs and followed him down the hallway to his door. “It’s a little messy.” He let me in.

Pieces of paper were taped to every square inch of the room. There were sketches on them, comic-style, with frames and action and dialogue. Something was familiar about the drawings, the
characters. I felt my heart beating rapidly, my pulse throbbing in my throat.

This is not possible
.

“Dad gave me this book last year when he was cleaning out the garage. He said it belonged to a friend.” He held up the black sketchbook I had left behind in my backpack. The red one he had given me was thrown across the ravine but this one had been saved. He handed it to me. My hands started to shake.

“I started to read it. I loved it so much I figured I’d draw some adventures of my own. These are my adventures of Kitty Kat.” I looked at the drawings on the walls. He had captured the essence of Kitty Kat, but had added something different, a strength in her eyes that mine did not have, and the definition of line was sleeker, more skilled. He was drawing my story, making it up as he went. I felt the room spinning and needed to sit down.

“When you told me your name was Cat, I wondered if it was you.”

I cleared off some space on his bed and sat down with the book. My drawings. I hadn’t seen them for so long. His drawings, so vibrant and alive, I never imagined.

“It is me,” I said, stroking the book. I didn’t know where to look; my desire to see his work was as strong as the one to see mine.

I heard a phone ring and Addison walk to get it. I wanted to stay in the room filled with our drawings forever. I wanted to read his version of my life. I wanted to be the woman in his drawings.

Addison opened the door.

“It’s Wendy. She needs to speak with you. Your father woke up.”

I
RAN AS FAST
as I could. Through Alex’s bedroom, down the hall, where I slipped on a rug, and then bolted down the stairs, out the door, across the lawn, and over the divot I put in the grass. I tripped on the curb but caught myself and hit my stride in the middle of the street. I was running again, this time with no car or money or purse. The air was cold, black, and razor sharp. Every breath felt like I was inhaling shards of glass. I prayed for the stamina to get me somewhere.

I ran from the sound of Wendy’s voice saying the words “Dad woke up. He wants to see you.” I ran from Alex’s drawings, so close to mine and yet filled with more soul, more life, more of everything. I ran from Wilton and the papers in my purse and the deed and Andrew Reilly with that hunger to connect.

I ran because that is what I do. In all the years, the bus and train stations, the seedy hotels where I holed up for days drinking and lying on dirty sheets staring at water stains on ceilings, at all the crappy jobs where I served drinks, fending off the pawing hands of desperate drunks while gulping down their free cocktails, knowing full well that you can never get something for nothing—all those years, I knew I was running. I knew I wasn’t living a life but avoiding one.

The ground beneath me was hard and every step I took shot a splinter of pain through my bad ankle. Ahead of me was nothing
but blacktop leading to another street and another road I had to travel.

The hardest part of leaving isn’t the looking back; it isn’t the loss you feel for a place or people; it’s the fear that what you intended to leave isn’t ever going to go, and that what you really want, you’re never going to get.

My hands clenched into fists as I tried to keep up the pace I had established as I tore out of Addison’s house. I did not want to see my father—did not want to touch, know, or feel him. Which would be worse—if he was sorry or if he wasn’t? And what is sorry anyway? What does remorse get you?

“He’s not going to make it,” Wendy had said on the phone. “This could be your last chance to say good-bye.”

“Alex!”

Behind me was the sound of other footsteps and voices calling my name. I turned as I ran and saw Addison and Alex coming after me. Addison was ahead, closing in as he moved from darkness to light. His stride was sure and seemed more practiced than mine. Alex lingered behind, waving. His call was weaker, but I heard it. “Cat,” he cried, “come back.”

I kept going.

“Stay there!”

I turned. Addison was motioning for Alex to stay put as he held his hand out for me to stop. My body responded before my brain could process what was happening. I felt myself winding down, and although I was still moving, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

Addison caught up to me and grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me to a stop. I bent over and put my hands on my knees and struggled to get my breath back. He did the same as he balled the piece of my shirt into his fist and panted.

“Goddamn you,” he huffed.

I tried to pry his hand loose but it wouldn’t budge. I was so winded it wouldn’t have surprised me if I started coughing blood.

“Let me go,” I begged.

“Dad, are you okay?” Alex called. “Cat?”

“Go back to the house,” Addison shouted. “We’re fine.”

Alex lingered in the street with his hands on his hips, hopping from foot to foot in worry.

“You should go back with him,” I said.

Addison looked up and held his ribs. “You need to stop running.”

“You don’t know what I need,” I said, as I wiped my mouth.

He tugged on my shirt in frustration, pulling me closer. I tried again to push his hand away but his grip was too strong, so I shoved him, hoping he would fall, and he did, taking me with him. We fell together like two fugitives handcuffed together. He did not loosen his hold on me.

“Let me go!” I shouted as we struggled to get up. “You want me to say I’m sorry? I’m sorry. You want me to jump into his life and be his mother? I can’t do that. It’s too late. You think I can stop running? How am I going to do that? Everywhere I look I remember that night. Every day for the last ten years I think of those hands reaching into me, taking parts of me he had no right to take. He destroyed me.”

Addison let go and I fell over, not realizing that his grip was all that had been holding me up.

“No, you did that.”

“Does it make you feel better to think I did this to myself?” I stood up and steadied myself against the rush of dizziness that came over me.

“This isn’t about what makes me feel better,” Addison said.

“Really? Was it easier for you to swoop down and save the day when Diana died, knowing I would always be more irresponsible than you? It must be great to have me to measure yourself against. As long as I’m the big fuckup, you can be the hero.”

“This is how you do it, isn’t it? This is how you justify your choices? Everyone else is to blame for your misery.”

“So you’re the model of responsibility? Please. You took advantage
of my and Diana’s feelings for you and then you left. You’re no different than my father. You were a destroyer too. So you came back. So you did the right thing. You were the one who made the mess. It was yours to clean up. I was the one who was messed with. There’s a difference.”

“So you’re a victim and that excuses you? Look at you, you’re a drunk. You have no life, no friends, no connection to anything, including your son. Your father didn’t do that, you did. You’re a destroyer too, Alex. You have a son you neglected. Maybe you’re more like your father than you know.”

I looked up into the winter sky, so dark and bleak. February, the worst month of the year, short days, unbearable chill followed by enough warmth to make you think spring might come, though it’s still so far away. I hated my life the most in the winter.

Addison was right. There was no defense. If my father had told me he had been beaten every day as a child, it still wouldn’t excuse what he did to me. Even my mother’s loneliness could not undo the pain of her choices. And rape did not excuse abandoning that baby.

It did not.

I looked away and began to cry.

Addison pulled me to him and wrapped his arms around me. I fell into his chest and smelled the orange musk of his body. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and hold on for life. I wanted it to be over, however it ended.

I pulled away.

Addison released me like he was pushing a boat away from a dock. I fell back on my heels and tried to find my footing.

“You want to go, go. This time make sure you get gone.” He reached into his pocket and threw my car keys in the street next to my feet and walked away.

It was cold again—this time the chill came from the inside out. My mouth opened to say the words “Come back,” but nothing came out.

I thought of those drawings, of the way Alex drew Kitty Kat,
the sureness of her jaw, the righteous look in her eye, and of how he seemed to know her better than I did. How determined she had been to stop the Hand. To win her fight.

I thought of Diana holding Alex as a baby night after night as he cried, missing something but not knowing what. Over time he forgot about what was missing and reached toward what was there, someone who stayed, someone who loved him completely.

Down the street past the silhouette of Addison, in the doorway of their house, Alex stood and watched the scene of his father chasing his mother. Whether he knew it consciously or not, he would one day know that that was what he saw. How did it end? With his father not being able to hold her, with them not being enough for her to stay?

And who would know my story? Who would tell him the truth?

There were different ways to feel pain, and not even the physical beatings or the touching could match the shame I felt for leaving Alex. Even if he was my father’s son, the very painful truth was, I was his mother.

I looked at the road ahead and at the ground I had covered since leaving, and, as always, I had not gone as far as I had thought. I picked up the keys and starting moving. This time I went back.

The door was closed when I got to the house. I knocked. My hands were shaking as I waited and hoped it was not too late. Addison opened the door, and after a moment of looking at me, he motioned for me to come in. I felt tears welling as I struggled to find the courage to speak.

“Will you come with me?”

“Let me see if I can get Mrs. Daley to watch Alex,” he said without hesitating, as if he had been waiting for ten years for me to ask him.

M
Y FATHER WAS
moved out of intensive care and into the same small room I was in ten years ago. The corridor walls were still the blue-green color of bathroom cleaner and the floors were scuffed and mopped to a finish a few years beyond a shine.

Addison walked ahead of me, reading the signs and asking for directions as I followed numbly. If there had been an empty stretcher I would have lain on it and slept until I woke up or was left for dead and rolled to the morgue.

On the drive over, the reality of what I was doing settled in. Even if I forgot, my body had a memory of its own. The shooting pain in the base of my pelvis reminded me of that.

“Are you okay?” Addison had asked in the car. My palms were open and resting in my lap as if I were waiting for a heavy load to drop from the sky.

For the first time Addison looked at me with something other than pity. My choice to see my father had garnered a small amount of respect from him. The tone of his voice was more familiar, like he was with a friend rather than a crazy woman he was talking off a ledge. Not many people treated me with regard. I was either too young or too drunk. Diana was the only one. While I dismissed it while it was happening, I recognized its absence when it was gone.

“It won’t change anything,” I said finally.

“Do you want it to?”

His skin still seemed so smooth. I imagined it would be warm to the touch if I reached across the armrest and traced the line of his jaw down to his Adam’s apple, which bobbed when he laughed. I could travel the muscles of his arm as it gripped the gearshift and place my palm over his hand and wait for him to hold it. I could change it all by reaching out.

“I’d really like a drink.”

“Yeah. I would too.”

We sat in silence until he turned into the visitors’ parking lot.

“Here we are,” he said as he put the car in park and turned off the ignition. I reached for his arm and squeezed it. He took my hand and warmed it between his palms.

“What if he’s not done with me?” I said.

“You said he destroyed you that night. You need to find out if that’s true.”

“Come on, Mr. Rucker, lift up. There, good boy.”

A bag of bones lay in the bed struggling for breath as clear tubes tethered him to oxygen tanks against the wall. A nurse hovered, trying to get a pillow under his shoulders.

I stood in the doorway and surveyed what was left of my father. He was gray, from the ashen tone of his complexion to the silver strands of his hair to the beard struggling to hang on to his crumbling face. Where was the man who pounded the life out of me in a blinding rage?

“Are you family?” the nurse asked, as she wiped his mouth with a wet cloth.