The Other Side of the Bridge (43 page)

Ian’s line had sunk down into the water. The hook would be down on the bottom, wrapping itself in bits of weed and waterlogged driftwood. He didn’t care. He put down the rod, let it drape over the side of the boat. “When did you decide this?” he said.

“A while ago.”

“How long is a while? A month? A year? Ten years?”

“Why does it matter?”

“I’m just curious.”

Though he wasn’t curious, he was angry, and getting angrier as it sank in. Angry, and somehow betrayed. He knew Pete was smart, maybe smarter than any of them, though mostly he kept it hidden. Smart in ways both broad and deep. He thought for himself, questioned things, took nobody’s word for anything. And though Ian had never been able to imagine exactly what Pete might end up doing, he had always been sure that it would be something impressive. He would show them all; Ian had been certain of that.

Pete shrugged. “I guess quite a few months.”

Something big grabbed Pete’s line, then spat it out again; Ian thought he saw a long dark shape drifting away. “Shit,” Pete said.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ian asked. That was almost as upsetting as the decision itself. Neither of them was given to talking about personal things, but this was different; there was no reason why they couldn’t have talked about this. And they should have. They definitely should have.

“I guess ’cause I knew we’d end up having this conversation,” Pete said. “I was putting off the evil day.” There was, at least, a note of apology in his voice.

“I don’t get it,” Ian said. “Why did you take the exams?”

“My grandfather wanted me to.”

“Doesn’t he want you to go to college?”

“Yeah, but he understands.”

“Well I don’t,” Ian said. “I do not understand.”

A pair of Canada geese flew low over the water and skidded to a landing twenty yards away, feet turned up like water skis, then settled, shuffling their feathers.

Pete said, “I can’t leave this place, man.”

Ian looked out across the lake to the rocky shore and the woods behind. The rain had stopped and the surface of the lake gleamed like pewter. He said, “Okay. Sure. It’s going to be hard to leave, I know that. But it will all still be here. It isn’t going anywhere. You can come
back
to it, if you want to. But you can do other stuff
first
. I don’t see why you can’t do other stuff first. I think you’re making a mistake. A big mistake.”

Pete hauled in his line. He dropped the jig in the bottom of the boat and sat, his elbows on his knees, looking down into the water. After a while he said, “I don’t know how else to put it, man, except to say that everything I care about is here. Everything that matters to me is right…here.”

“But that’s because it’s all you know!” Ian said. “Jesus, Pete! You don’t even know what else is out there!”

“No,” Pete said. “But I know what’s important to me. And I know I don’t have to go anywhere else to find it.”

They sat in silence. It passed through Ian’s mind that it was the first time he had ever seen Pete sitting in the boat but not fishing. He supposed it showed how seriously Pete was taking the conversation, but that did not mollify him. He was too frustrated, too disappointed, to be mollified by anything.

He said bitterly, “People are going to think you’re scared to try. You know that, don’t you? They’ll think you’re scared you can’t make it out there.”

Pete turned his head and looked at him. He said mildly, “You care too much what people think, man. That’s your biggest problem. You think I’m making a mistake? At least I’m not doing something I don’t want to do just to prove a point.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ian said, hot with anger now.

“You know what it means.” Pete picked up the jig and dropped it over the side again.

“No, I don’t.”

“You’re dumber than I thought, then,” Pete said, still mild as milk. “Go work it out.”

He dreamed of his mother again, the second time in a week. They were sitting in the living room, just the two of them, and she was looking through an Eaton’s catalog and suddenly she looked up, her eyes wide, and said, “Listen!”

He listened, but there was nothing to hear but the faint dry rustle of the wind in the trees. He said, “I can’t hear anything.”

She said, “That’s right. That’s because there’s nothing to hear. Nothing! That’s what I can’t stand about this place. I can’t stand the nothingness!”

He said, “I’m here, Mum. It isn’t nothingness if I’m here, is it?”

She smiled at him and for a moment he almost thought she was going to say no, you’re right, of course you’re right. But instead she said, “Go work it out.”

On Tuesday morning he had his appointment with Mr. Hardy at nine o’clock, so he was late getting to the farm. Jake and Carter were in the farmyard when he arrived. They were standing beside Jake’s car; the hood was up and Carter was headfirst inside the engine. Jake was looking as he always did when he was dealing with Carter—half bored, half amused. He liked the fact that Carter was so impressed with the car, though; you could see that. As for Carter, he was a different kid nowadays. It was as if he had been waiting his whole life for someone to talk to about cars. Or maybe just someone to talk to, period.

“So what’s the news?” Jake said when Ian got off his bike. “Hear you were called in to the school.”

“Just some paperwork,” Ian said. “Nothing important.” His mind was still on his conversation with Mr. Hardy and he didn’t feel in the mood for chitchat. Hardy had smiled his know-it-all smile when Ian told him what he’d finally decided to do, and although Ian had known that he would, it was still extremely annoying. Pete had been waiting in the hall when he came out, but Hardy had summoned him in straightaway, so there hadn’t been time to talk. Given how they’d parted last night, maybe that was a good thing.

“What’s this thing do?” asked Carter from half-inside the engine. Jake went over to have a look, so Ian was spared further questions. He went to the stable and harnessed up Robert and Edward and when he came out, leading the horses, the car was pulling out of the drive with Jake in the passenger seat and Carter behind the wheel.

Ian took the horses out to the fields. It was oats they were harvesting; Arthur cut oats early and let the grains ripen in the sheaves. It was heavy work and by noon both they and the horses were in need of a break. They unharnessed the horses and left them to graze on the long grass at the edge of the field while they went back to the farm for dinner.

Jake’s car was just driving into the farmyard as they arrived, Carter still at the wheel, his face flushed and happy. “We got her going a hundred and ten!” he said as he got out. He was aiming the comment at anyone in sight. “Boy, you should have seen us! She goes like a bomb!” Jake smiled tolerantly.

They all washed at the pump and filed into the kitchen and sat down and waited for Laura to serve them, which she did. Carter was still going on about the car, asking Jake endless questions. “So if the road was paved, how long would it take her to get from zero to sixty? And if it was downhill? Say it was paved and downhill, how long would it take?” Julie and March were bickering, as they always did at the table. Arthur was silently plowing through his dinner. Laura was trying to help her father get the food from his plate to his mouth without spilling it all down his front.

Ian wasn’t paying much attention to any of them. Random thoughts were floating in and out of his mind. He was thinking that when he reached the stage where someone had to help him to eat he’d shoot himself; and that Jake was surprisingly patient with Carter, given that he wasn’t a patient kind of guy; and that last night it had taken him almost an hour to reassure his father that he was not going into medicine only, or even partially, because he thought it would please him. He was thinking about Pete’s decision, wondering why it had felt like a betrayal, and whether he just wanted Pete to make the same choices he did; and about his own decision, wondering whether he had, in fact, made it, or whether everything was decided for you at the moment of conception and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. And he was thinking that it was since his mother’s letters had stopped that he’d started dreaming about her, and the dreams were worse than the letters because you couldn’t chuck them away unread. The sick anger left over from the last dream was still lying in the pit of his stomach. He knew it was irrational to be upset about something someone said in a dream, but the fact was, even if she had never said it, the gist of it was true: he and his father hadn’t mattered enough to her, when weighed against the “nothingness” she hated so much. Given the choice between them and some other life, she had chosen some other life.

He was thinking all those things when suddenly Julie took a break from tormenting March and said, loudly, “Mummy, you keep dropping things.”

Ian glanced at Laura. She was retrieving a serving spoon from the floor, and when she straightened up her face was flushed. He saw her look at Jake, just a quick look and then away. Ian looked at him too and saw that he was watching her. That was when he remembered what he’d seen on Friday night. He’d forgotten all about it until then.

“I know,” Laura said. “I seem to be clumsy today.”

“You must have something on your mind,” Jake said.

She gave a little laugh, not looking at him. “No,” she said. “Not really. I’m just clumsy.” She took the serving spoon over to the sink and rinsed it under the tap.

Maybe if the shadow of the dream hadn’t still been with him, Ian wouldn’t have thought anything of it. As it was, though, a whisper of suspicion drifted into his mind, just enough to make him wonder if there might be another interpretation of what he had seen. He wouldn’t put it past Jake, but Laura? No. He rejected the thought, and the normal to-and-fro of dinner time washed over him again and carried it away.

Afterward, when he looked back on the events of that afternoon, it seemed to him that there was an inevitability about them, as if fate had arranged a number of trivial little incidents—a series of them, like stepping-stones—without any one of which everything would have turned out differently. After dinner, for instance, when he and Arthur settled down in the armchairs for their post-dinner digestion time, March came in from the farmyard. That was the first stepping-stone. The children were supposed to stay out of the way while the men rested, but Laura had gone outside to bring in the laundry (so maybe
that
was the first stepping-stone) and March slipped in. He was carrying what turned out to be an old billhook that he announced he wanted to sharpen. Probably he had seen his father and Ian sharpening the scythes that morning and thought it looked like fun.