The Last Bridge (4 page)

I bent over, hooking my foot into the toe of the panty hose. My fingers couldn’t pull with authority. I was overwhelmed with the image of my own death. The thought sent me toppling onto the bed. Who would come to bury me? What would my note say? “He was everything I thought he was.”

“Coming?” Jared yelled from the bottom of the stairs.

“In a minute,” I answered, giving my panty hose a final tug.

I slipped on the matching black pumps and went to my mother’s jewelry drawer in her dresser for earrings and a purse. I found the beaded bag she bought on her honeymoon in Atlantic City and stuffed my cigarettes, a lighter, and an airplane-size bottle of bourbon into its tiny opening. I would need a liquor store at some point, but that would get me through the service at least.

I sat on Mom’s pink satin bench rifling through the stacks of brittle cardboard boxes filled with costume jewelry and found the rhinestone earrings I had given her before I left. She had admired them every time we passed Jacob’s Jewelry in town, so I bought them with my babysitting money and left them on her pillow with a note that said, “From your secret admirer.” She never said anything. I wondered if she knew who gave them to her. Now they sat in a Jacob’s box that said “Jacob’s Jewelry, Jewels Fit for a Queen!” and were wrapped in the original tissue paper and never worn.

At the bottom of the box there was an old receipt from Abe’s Dairy folded in half. It was yellowed and crisp. On the front was an order for two gallons of whole milk, a large cottage cheese, and a quart of buttermilk with a notation that said “Weekly—Saturdays
are preferable.” I almost threw it out until I saw a neatly written scribble on the back:

The word
name
was underlined five or six times. The blue script was hers, delicate and lovely. I looked up to see if anyone was watching me and caught my reflection the way you do when you walk down a crowded street and think you recognize the stranger in the store window. You look closer and realize it’s you.

I folded the paper and returned it. I put on the earrings and stood up. With my black and rhinestones, I looked like I was attending a memorial service for a cabaret diva instead of a funeral in Bumfuck, Nowhere.

“Cat, can I pull this off?” Wendy was standing in the doorway wearing a sleeveless black knit dress that was a size too small. Her stockings were true black, as were her gloves, which coiled up her arms like fashionable garden snakes. She wore a pillbox hat that cast dark netting over her face. She looked like the widow of a mafioso.

“You look fine,” I lied. I headed for the kitchen.

She shuffled behind me, hovering as I stumbled on the stairs, not used to walking in heels.

“Are you sure I look okay? As the youngest, I thought I should look, well, you know …” She struggled for the right adjective.

“Sadder?” I said sarcastically.

“Yes!” she answered. She held my shoulder as we came down the stairs.

I turned around and looked at her. “You look blacker.”

“I guess that will have to do.”

Jared and Willard sat together drinking big mugs of coffee in their black suits. Willard looked old enough to be a father taking his grown-up children to mass. God, I wanted a drink. I felt my purse for the shape of the bottle and felt calmer.

Jared and I had stayed up the night before setting up the living room and bringing down the folding chairs from the attic. The deli platters were in the fridge, the beer was on ice, and we had cleared an entire table just for the Bundt cakes. As long as we were talking about the service, we were okay.

After deciding whose car we would take, we left for the church. Our Lady of Grace was anything but graceful. Looking at the façade, you had to wonder where all those dollars in the collection basket went—certainly not to capital improvements. The parking lot was almost as large as a football field—a callback to the days when going to mass was more than a birth/death thing, and as much a part of life as marriage and Saturday night sex. My mother’s faith was old-fashioned. She believed the church took care of you, and in return, she took care of it. She had tea and potlucks with her fellow parishioners and never told anyone about the monster living in her house.

The parking lot was filling quickly with mourners. I was not surprised. My mother was well loved, and even though my father tried to keep her to himself, she had managed at one time or another to bestow her kindness on almost everyone.

It was a brittle day. The branches on the trees creaked like the bones on a skeleton waving in the wind. Nothing green would come this way until April. I would be long gone by then.

Jared and Wendy blessed themselves with holy water as we entered the chapel. I passed them and ended up walking down the aisle alone, like a bride who has been jilted and doesn’t know it yet.

The church was warm and had the faint smell of fireplace ash mixed with lemon furniture polish. High behind me “Amazing Grace” boomed from a bulbous organ that was made for a better place.

The front pews were full of families and couples while stragglers and loners punctuated the back rows. As I made my way to the altar, I felt the eyes of the town watching me, hoping to see if they could find something in my manner that might reveal what had happened to me.

“She took off. No one ever heard from her again.”

“Poor Maureen, all alone with that man.”

As we passed Ruth Igby, I looked at her and she turned quickly away, as did most of the women when I attempted to make eye contact. I reached back and took Jared’s arm, needing something to steady myself even if it was him. “You okay?” he whispered in my ear, brushing my hair off my forehead.

I nodded, feeling worse for needing him.

No one from the family spoke. We agreed my mother would have wanted the priest to handle everything. The service was long and filled with lots of standing, sitting, kneeling, hymns, bowed heads, and moments for reflection. As a little girl I would sing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” quietly to myself whenever we had to recite a prayer or sing. My mother would squeeze my shoulder and shake her head in disapproval. I didn’t care; I thought God would appreciate hearing something a little different.

We piled out of the church and stood at the entrance and thanked everyone for coming and invited them back to the house. I slipped away and found the ladies’ room and my airplane-size bottle of courage in the basement. I needed more to drink but was too far from a liquor store. I thought about stealing wine from the rectory but thought better of it.

The wait at the grave site was unendurable. My mother had planned every detail, down to the coffin, the hymns at the service, and where she would be buried. She had left that information with our parish priest, who had made most of the arrangements as a personal favor to her. Rather than helping her with her funeral, I wondered why he didn’t consider keeping her from killing herself.

Mom was buried in Calvary Cemetery next to her parents on the top of the windiest hill in the windiest section of town. There was an empty space next to her reserved for my father. No plots had been purchased for the kiddies—we’d be as alone in death as we were in life.

“The views are great here, aren’t they?” Father O’Malley said
to Jared and me when he took us to meet with the cemetery administrator yesterday. “Your mother will be happy here.”

“I’m so glad,” I lied. I was dying to ask him if Mom was really going to go to heaven: I thought suicide was a sin. I’m guessing my mother took care of that already. She probably dropped a few extra singles in the basket, made two stews for potluck night, and, of course, had a last confession.

Most of the mourners followed us to the grave site. The air was so cold and dry, it felt as if it were slashing my face as it tore up and over the mound that was to be my mother’s final resting place. The priest recited a few prayers and some crap in Latin and asked us if we wanted to say anything. None of us did. Wendy cried as Willard held her and chewed on a toothpick. Jared stood as still as a soldier on guard duty. I felt an intense pressure on the balls of my feet from wearing high heels in the mud. My legs felt chapped and exposed. My body had cooperated: legs were standing, head was focused, and my heart remained hidden. My buzz was wearing off.

I counted twelve Bundt cakes. This was part of Wilton tradition: a Bundt cake for a death, a blanket for a birth, a casserole for a heart attack. The cakes were stacking up on the card table; there were three lemon with yellow drip icing, four chocolate with coconut centers, two cinnamon swirl with coffee-cake-crunch topping, and three chocolate mousse, which were made from my mother’s favorite recipe. She invented the chocolate mousse Bundt cake after her thirtieth or fortieth funeral. She decided there had to be a different kind a woman could bring to a wake, so she came up with her own. It never occurred to her that she could have brought something else, like a ham or a salad; she knew that Bundt was the tradition and she worked within her limits. Her chocolate mousse cake became so popular that we suspected some people looked forward to the next death just so they could have a piece. Today no one touched any of them, not even the mousse ones.

I tried to be polite to our guests. Many offered their condolences
and all of them knew better than to wish my father a speedy recovery. Although the circumstances surrounding my departure remained a mystery, it was no secret that it might have had something to do with my father, and out of respect, no one mentioned his name all evening. It was clear from the way people checked out the place that it had been a while since my parents had company. Although the house looked the same to me, I was aware that everything had aged, but it still gave me the feeling of stepping back in time.

Andrew Reilly, County Coroner, stopped by and paid his respects. He had been at the service as well. He introduced himself to Jared and Wendy and made a point of telling them how brave I had been at the morgue.

“Cat?” Wendy snorted. “She runs from everything.”

Andrew smiled politely and looked at me. “I don’t see her running now,” he said and then excused himself. As he left the room he put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it.

I managed to get away from the crowd and found a spot in the kitchen. I opened the back door and faced the driveway as I smoked a butt and gulped Iron City beer and stared at the fat moon hanging in the winter sky.

He isn’t who you think he is …
.

Jared stood next to me and took in a few breaths of the crisp air. It was more refreshing than the moist, yeasty, moth-ball-scented atmosphere in the house.

In the living room I could hear Wendy ogling over the Smythsons’ granddaughter. “She’s so beautiful! Willard?” She wandered through the crowd looking for Willard, who was in the dining room skimming my mother’s collection of the Reader’s Digest Condensed versions of the classics.

The doorbell rang.

“Your turn,” Jared said.

“I got the last one,” I lied. He went to the door as I walked to the refrigerator and pulled out another bottle of the good beer I had
stashed and drank it like it was bottled water. I left the back door open, but latched the screen door to keep it from banging.

Since returning from the service there had been a steady flow of mourners coming through the front door. Although I was forced to do a few meet-and-greets, I managed to stay in the kitchen for most of the evening. It was the safest place, as everyone who wasn’t family (or Ruth Igby) came to the front door when they visited. The rest of us used the back door.

I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the containers of food stacked in towers on the counters. Death sure makes people hungry. It makes me thirsty. I went for another beer. I was feeling lightheaded.

There was a shuffling at the back stoop like someone was shaking snow off their shoes.

“Hello?” a man’s voice sounded through the screen door. The tone made the hair on the back of my neck bristle.

“Alex, can you get me two Cokes?” Jared yelled from the living room.

“Hello?” I shivered as I moved unsteadily toward the sound.

“Alex?” Jared’s voice was getting closer.

The screen door shook; he was trying to get in. I stepped into view. “Hello?” he said as he placed his hand to his forehead and pressed his face against the screen to get a look at who was standing before him.

The voice matched the body: smooth, tall, and copper-colored at the top. Snow swirled in a halo around the outside light as he stepped back.

“Holy shit!” Jared’s voice cracked in surprise. He had come into the kitchen in search of the Cokes and found me standing glacier-still in front of the door. There was no slow-motion revelation. There was nothing except the cold, hard drop of fear—the feeling you get when you look down from the top of the Empire State Building and suddenly know exactly what it feels like to fall a great distance.

Jared unlatched the door and pushed it open. As one foot, then the other, stepped into the kitchen, I could feel the door of my past straining to open like the screen door.

The walls of the room began to slip away, leaving nothing but the feeling of a free fall into a huge divide. I reached for the table, hoping for something to hold on to, but it was too late. I missed and fell hard on the floor. Everything went soft and dreamy. For one brief, happy moment, I thought I was dead.

I woke up next to a pile of coats on my mother’s bed. The only light in the room came from the hallway and bled through the crack in the door. It felt like midnight, but I checked the clock on the nightstand and discovered it was only nine-thirty. I could hear the rustle of company downstairs, glasses clanging together, forks scraping against plates, and loud, very loud, talking. The sounds, although distant, made me feel as if I were still lying in the kitchen, all soft and dreamy and desperate to be gone. I tried to sit up and felt my head drop back onto the pillow as if it were part of some magnetic force field. “Oh …” I grumbled.

“You’re lucky you didn’t barf,” a voice spoke from behind me as the silhouette of a man cast a shadow on the wall I was facing. I tried to pretend I was sleeping. The shadow lingered and then disappeared. I pulled myself up to my elbows and tried to focus. The falling feeling was gone, replaced by a sharp pounding under my eyes that felt as if someone were punching me in the face from inside my skull. I felt the urge to flee. I put my hands on the side of the bed and swung my legs over and slowly tried to stand.