The Last Bridge (26 page)

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.

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 wished 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.

I stayed with Jared in his bachelor apartment in Columbus for a few days on my way to Wilton. I showed him the letters and we talked a little about the past. He told me he had kept in touch with Wendy and Andrew and Addison. He was in the process of getting a divorce; he said losing Mom and Dad had made his marriage seem pointless. “Ever feel like you’re running and you’re not sure if it’s away from or toward something?”

I nodded. “The thing is, there is always something to get away
from. If you keep looking back you can’t see what you might be heading toward.”

“Something good?” he said, as if I knew.

“I don’t know. I think we get to decide that for ourselves,” I said.

Wendy moved back to the farm with Willard to live with Andrew as they prepared for their daughter to arrive. Andrew had convinced them to adopt and to come back to Wilton. Andrew had gone to California to meet his father, and while he did not get a fairy tale reunion, Jared Watkins acknowledged Andrew as his son. Jared showed Andrew a letter my mother had sent to him the day she killed herself, asking Jared to turn the farm over to her children. Jared respected her wishes and turned the farm over to us. My mother’s death had righted a good deal of wrongs after all. Andrew had found his father at last, and although on some level I’m sure he was a disappointment, at least he knew where he came from.

The school bell rang and the doors burst open with screaming middle schoolers. I shifted the shopping bag with his birthday present to my other hand as I scanned the crowd for my son. I thought about the years I spent wondering if I would be able to pick him out of a crowd, if I would know him easily. The better question would have been, would he have known me?

His backpack appeared taller than he was as I saw him bounding out the door with a dark-haired girl. She was trying to ignore him, but, like his father, he was hard to resist. She smiled before she pushed him away. He laughed.

I waved and he saw me. I was afraid he might run in the other direction or flip me the bird or turn away, but he was not me. He came toward me instead and smiled shyly.

“Dad said you were coming back,” he said. “Are you better?”

“I’m getting there. Happy birthday,” I said, handing him the bag.

“You remembered? How did you know?”

“I was there when you were born,” I said.

“Oh, yeah.” We laughed. “Can I open it?”

“Wait for Dad. He’s coming.” Addison had been waiting by his car at my request. We had agreed I would do this on my own.

“Dad’s here too?” he said, as if he could not imagine a universe where such things could happen.

I pointed behind him as Addison rushed up and snatched him in his arms. “Happy birthday. You like your present?”

“Dad!” Alex hit him in embarrassment. “You promised you wouldn’t say anything.”

“Say what?” I asked.

“Alex asked for you for his birthday.”

I felt a rush of something flood my chest. This was the old sign that it was time for a drink, but I had learned a new trick in rehab that I was still practicing. I learned how to breathe. I took a deep one as I felt my chest open up to a strange emotion I suspected was close to joy.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t have preferred a new mitt?” I said, joking.

He laughed. “Well, I do need one.”

Addison looked at me and smiled and I felt that flood again. This time when I breathed, I felt the urge to touch him. I held back; there were still mountains to climb before I got there.

Alex opened the present and loved the book and set of pens.

“Your dad gave me a book exactly like this when we first met.”

“This is cool.”

“I started it for you,” I said. “Open it.”

On the first two pages I had sketched out the story of his birth and included drawings of Addison and Diana. I put in as much detail as I could.

As we walked to the car he looked at the captions and laughed at the exaggerated way I had Addison’s eyes popping out of his head when he came out. “Dad, see how funny you look,” he said.

“That’s pretty accurate. I was freaked out,” Addison said, ruffling Alex’s hair.

“Were you?” Alex said to me.

“For about ten years,” I said.

“But you’re not anymore, right?”

“I’m working on it, kid,” I said, and without thinking, I put my arms around him and hugged him. He fit perfectly in my arms.