The Other Side of the Bridge (45 page)

EPILOGUE

I
t was five in the morning when the phone on the bedside table rang. When he answered it and heard her voice, for a moment he was back at the farm, watching the car roar backward, the cloud of dust fly up. But then she said, “I’m sorry to call you at this hour, Ian, but it’s Arthur,” and he was back in the present again.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. He switched on the light and swung his legs out of bed, feeling shaky and slightly nauseous from the vividness of the memory. It was like malaria, he thought. Like a virus that lingers in the body and returns to haunt you.

“Who is it?” his wife said, her voice muffled by bedclothes.

“Arthur Dunn.” He reached out and rested his hand on her hip, rocked her gently. “Go back to sleep.”

She rolled over and looked at him, her eyes screwed up against the light, but then she nodded, and turned over, and drew the covers up around her. She did her fair share of night visits.

He drove to the farm with the windows down to clear his head. Dawn was just breaking, a pale slit of light dissecting the darkness. When he turned in to the farmyard he saw that the lights were on in the kitchen and in the bedroom upstairs.

Laura was waiting for him at the kitchen door. She was wearing a dressing gown and her hair was loose—she must have got up in a hurry, alarmed and frightened—and silhouetted against the light she could have been a girl again, younger than he had ever known her. As she opened the door for him she said anxiously, “I’m not sure I should have called you, Ian. He seems better. I think he’s asleep.”

“Don’t worry,” Ian said. “I’d rather you called.”

Six months previously, just before his fifty-ninth birthday, Arthur had had a heart attack, and then a month later, another one. He refused to go into the hospital so there was very little Ian could do for him, but he visited him every day, twice a day in the past few weeks, to ensure that he was comfortable. Whenever he had time he sat with him. Mostly in silence of course, Arthur being Arthur, though occasionally Ian would pass on some bit of local gossip or ask how things were going on the farm. March was running the farm now; he and his wife had built a house a couple of hundred yards down the road. They had just had their first child, a son, delivered by Ian’s wife.

He went upstairs on his own. Arthur was asleep—Laura had been right about that—but his breathing was noticeably worse than it had been the previous day. Ian stood looking down at him, his fingers on the faint, irregular pulse, feeling the heavy ache of loss. His own father had died two years ago and the weight of that was still with him.

Laura was at the foot of the stairs when he came down. She asked how Arthur was and then said, not quite looking at him, “I wondered if you would have time for a cup of tea, Ian? I know you must want to get back….”

“Of course,” he said. She must know that the end was very near for Arthur, and he supposed she had questions.

And that was so, at first: when she had poured the tea she sat down opposite him at the table he had once known so well and asked all the painful and inevitable questions that attend the ending of life: how long did Arthur have left, would he suffer at the end, was there any way of easing his passing. Questions that Ian had been asked so many times, in the course of his professional life, that giving the answers should have become easier. But it was never easy, and particularly not today. Laura was struggling with tears, and Ian was not far off himself.

When she had run out of questions they both sat for a minute or two, and then Laura said, “You have been a good friend to him, Ian.”

He looked at her uncertainly. In the years since Carter’s death they had never spoken of what had happened. In fact they had scarcely spoken at all. Where do you start, when something like that lies between you? What words, what topics of conversation, do you use? After the funeral he had written to her, apologizing for what he had done—for his criminally stupid action in telling Arthur what he had seen, an action that over the years had caused him a thousand sleepless nights. He’d been desperate to know how much she blamed him. She had not replied, and somehow, over time, his need to know had become a need not to know; given the choice now, he would have avoided the subject forever. But it seemed he no longer had the choice.

“I’ve always admired him,” he said. If they were going to talk about it, he would be as honest as he could.

She nodded. “Yes. I know.”

“And you,” Ian said. “I admired you very much.”

“Not always,” she said, looking at him. Despite her directness, she looked very fragile in the early morning light. Bruised, almost, as if her emotions lay just beneath the surface of her skin.

He hesitated. “No. Not always. But I was just a kid, Laura. I thought in black and white, back then.”

Black and white. For a long time after Carter’s death it had been more like black and red, the colors of rage and loathing—of her and of himself. Rage, loathing, and overwhelming guilt. He had left for Toronto at the end of that summer and had spent the first two years of his medical degree in a haze of exhaustion and despair. During the day he was able to distract himself with his studies, but at night, Carter would come to him. Ian would see him sitting at the dining table, questioning Jake about the car, his eyes alight, his whole body animated with interest and enthusiasm. Or he would see him at the moment the car hit him. Or on the ground, staring sightless at the sky.

In the darkness of those nights, it seemed to Ian that he was guilty not just of an act of jealous rage, but of murder. Sleep became a place to avoid at all costs, and at the end of his second year at medical school he had a nervous breakdown. Even with his father’s help, the climb back to health took a long time, and it was more than a year before he was well enough to return to Toronto and continue his degree.

During all the years of his training he was sure that he would never return to Struan, but in the end it pulled him back. His wife, Helen, whom he’d met during his third year in Toronto, was a city girl, but her family had a summer cottage on Lake Nipissing and she loved the North. She was a general practitioner too—until his father’s death there were three Dr. Christophersons in the town.

There being three doctors meant, of course, that there was no need for him to see the Dunns professionally, so apart from meeting briefly at church or in the town Ian was able to avoid them, and to avoid what lay between them. And so it went on, and time passed, and although the ghost had not been laid, it tormented him less often.

And then, six months ago, at eight o’clock on a bright Monday morning, Laura phoned the doctors’ office to say that Arthur was lying on the ground and couldn’t breathe, and it was Ian she asked for. He didn’t know why—perhaps it was Arthur’s wish—but whatever the reason, he was grateful to her now, because it had forced him, finally, to reestablish his relationship with Arthur, and gave him the opportunity in some small way to make amends.

Still, though, when he looked at Laura, what he saw was the events of that day, and he knew that for her it was the same. They could not get around it. If he stayed to chat with Arthur she would bring tea up to them, but she never stayed herself. Before he left, Ian would step into the kitchen to tell her how Arthur was doing, and then he would go. That was the extent of their communication, up until now.

Laura was looking away, across the kitchen, focusing on nothing; he studied her, looked at her properly for the first time in many years. She was still beautiful, in his opinion, but her face was thin and lined, and her hair had faded to an uncertain gray. Perhaps she had never been quite as beautiful as he imagined. He had laid his absurd image of womanhood upon her and required her to live up to it, and when she failed—when she failed, how devastating his retribution had been.

She turned and looked at him, and he was afraid she had felt his gaze and guessed his thoughts, but she said, “There is something I want to say, Ian.”

He nodded, and braced himself for what might come.

She said, “I want you to know, now, while Arthur is still here, that I love him. And that I loved him then.”

He was startled. It was not what he had expected her to say. He had expected her to tell him how much she still held him to blame.

She went on, her voice unsteady but determined. “You said yourself that you thought in black and white back then. Young people do. So probably you would have assumed that I didn’t love him. That I couldn’t have.”

He remembered Jake’s hand, lifting her chin. Her hands on his chest. Yes, he had assumed she did not love Arthur.

“After the funeral,” she said, “when Jake was finally leaving, Arthur asked me if I wanted to go with him. I said no. He said, was I sure.” Her face suddenly flushed. “That question, Ian! That question! Was I sure! Next to Carter’s death, that question has been the hardest thing I’ve had to live with. The fact that he had to ask it.”

Ian saw the scene so clearly he might as well have been there. Arthur standing in front of her, his hands hanging empty at his sides,
desperate
to be sure of her. Preferring her to go, rather than stay and be unsure. Unable to endure the thought of any more doubt, any more deceit.

Ian nodded. He had a question too, one that he could never ask, a question that next to Carter’s death was the hardest thing he had had to live with. It was this: had she been sleeping with Jake that summer? Because if she had not, if the scene he had walked in on was all that had taken place between them, then how much greater was his guilt? He remembered Jake as he had been at the inquest, his face ashen, looking straight in front of him, meeting no one’s eyes; it was when he saw the state Jake was in that it came to him, in a sudden, shocked moment of clarity, that Carter was Jake’s son. The verdict had been accidental death, but that had been no comfort at all.

He turned his mind back to what Laura had said. “What did you say to him?”

“I told him I was sure,” Laura said, her face still flushed with the pain of remembering. “I said I wanted to stay with him. I told him that I did not love Jake; I loved him. It was true, it had been true for years. I knew what sort of man Jake was—how could I not know? And I knew Arthur was worth ten of him. I think I’d always known that.”

She lifted her hands, fingers spread, as if she were trying to hold something, or understand something. “I don’t know how to explain it, Ian. There was something about Jake…excitement, I suppose. I remember the first time he spoke to me, the feeling that he had singled me out—me, out of all the world! I thought he was the most exciting, fascinating person I’d ever met. I was very young, and of course I fell in love with him, and didn’t see how little else there was.”

She stopped for a moment, and looked at her hands. Then she looked back at Ian and said, “The incredible thing is, Ian, when he came back, all those years later, he still had it. Whatever it was. That…spark. I didn’t love him—in fact, I almost hated him by then—and I knew exactly what he was. And yet,
still,
he had it.”

Listening to her, seeing her distress, her urgent need to explain, Ian suddenly found himself thinking of his mother. He wondered if she had ever regretted what she had done. Over the years he had come to understand her a little better, but he had been unable to forgive. He feared it meant that he had an unforgiving soul.

“I wish…” Laura said, her voice unsteady again. “I wish I knew that he believed me.”

“Arthur?”

“Yes. I wish I knew for certain that he believed me, when I said that I loved him. And that he still believes me. I can’t stop thinking about it. I hope he does. I think he came to, over the years. I’ve told him so, many times. But after all that happened…. maybe he doesn’t. It worries me so much now, when he’s close to the end.”

“He does,” Ian said. Here at least was one question he knew the answer to. “He believes you.”

She gave him a strained smile. “That’s very kind of you, Ian, but you don’t need to say that. I wasn’t…you don’t need to say anything.”

“It’s true,” he said. Her smile made him feel sixteen years old again, and foolish.

There was silence. She studied his face.

“It’s true, Laura. I know, because in spite of…everything, that is not an unhappy man up there. I’ve spent enough time with him lately to know.”

She was searching his face. “Are you sure?” she said at last.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

He went up to see Arthur again before he left, suspecting that it would be the last time. He thought at first he was still asleep, but he opened his eyes as Ian came in.

“Hi,” Ian said. “How are you feeling?”

“Okay.” A trace of the old shy smile. He was a big man still, not reduced by his illness. A big, powerful man, with a heart that was on its way out. From long habit Ian touched his fingers to his pulse, felt the faint, uncertain heartbeat, weaker now than even an hour ago.

He sat down in the chair by the bed, turning it slightly so that it faced Arthur more directly, and as he did so, suddenly he saw the two of them, sitting on burlap bags at the side of a field, scalding themselves on hot tea, the horses beside them, cropping the grass. The image was astonishingly clear and strong. It made him wonder if maybe, given time, an image like that might come into his dreams, instead of, or at least alongside, the ones of Carter. So that he could look back without such pain on the time he had spent on the farm; set the peacefulness of those days against the tragedy that brought them to an end.