by Jim Nelson
“He’s not dead,” Piper said. “I’m not a killer.”
“You can’t be serious,” Hanna said.
Piper pulled on the rear door latch. Discovering it locked, she rapped a row of knuckles on the window.
“Can you give me my backpack,” Piper called through the window.
“No!” Ruby called out from the far side of the car.
Hanna disabled the car’s parent lock so the rear door could be opened. With some struggling and squirming, and over Ruby’s protests, Cynthia managed to unwedge the mountaineer’s backpack and slide it across her lap. Piper hooked her arms through its loops and snapped its assortment of buckles. With a heave-ho, she shook it into place. She looked just as she did when Hanna first encountered her at the fruit stand, except now she had her baseball pullover tied about her waist, its floppy sleeves dangling to her knees.
Hanna shut the rear door, muting Ruby’s crying. “I want to know what you said to my bridge daughter. At the fruit stand.”
“I told her the good news,” Piper said. “I told her soon all of Hagar’s sisters would quit wandering.”
“She’s not a Hagar’s sister,” Hanna said. “And she’s not wandering.”
“We’re all wandering,” Piper said, backing away. She backed all the way to the edge of the pump islands, near the propane tank shaped like a giant white pill. “Every bridge wanders,” she called out, “but soon we won’t have to.”
Hanna watched her retreat into the nighttime toward the highway. Hanna half-expected the girl to disappear into the shadows, but she never quite did, always in the light of a streetlamp or the neon OPEN sign of a convenience store down the street.
Hanna could not calm down Ruby. Cynthia said nothing, but from her hot glances and pout, Hanna knew she’d angered her as well. An end to a wearing and tedious day, Hanna surrendered and let them fume and cry. The pneumatic cord on the ground made a cheery ding when the car crossed it, the same as when they arrived.
They passed Piper trudging up the shoulder of the ramp, a streak of green camouflage and psychedelic pastels lit up by the headlamps. In a moment, she was behind them. Hanna did not look in the rearview, relieved to be past the girl. Ruby never stopped crying.
Eleven
They travelled two miles on the unlit, unmarked Old Jachsen Road, the highway well behind them. Unlike the county roads along the edge of wine country, the road here gently curved between rolling hills and elderly redwood and pine trees. Each piece of property was marked with barbed wire running along the roadway. Hanna knew this road better than the roads around the house she lived in now. Although ten at night and foot heavy on the gas, she knew exactly when to slow, and she knew which dirt turnout to pull onto, a dirt turnout no different from the dozen they’d passed since leaving Highway 101.
The barbed wire demarcating this property was interrupted by a cheap swinging gate across a dirt road leading into the property. Leaving the engine running, Hanna stepped out of the car with a flashlight and swung the gate open. She pulled the Audi through and shut the gate behind them. It had no lock, and as far as her memory served, it never did.
A pair of wheel juts cut into the earth led through the woods. The mist in the air left a film of condensation across the windshield. Hanna learned to drive a stick on this track of gravel and dirt. Driving it now revived memories sewn into her fingers and toes. She knew exactly how to navigate this road. She didn’t touch the accelerator, allowing the Audi’s automatic transmission pull the car forward, as though magnetically drawn into the foggy night toward some unseen lodestone.
An wide arroyo cut a jag across the property. The only crossing was a plank bridge with arched brick foundations on both banks. The arroyo was dry this time of year, but so deep no vehicle could’ve forded it without four-wheel drive. The planks made a hollow clun-clun-clun as the wheels crossed the loose, misaligned planks. Then the Audi was back on solid ground, tires tracking the juts carved in the dirt.
The farmhouse appeared among the redwoods and pines and Monterey cypress, a single-story building of right angles and oddly matched building materials. Some of the outside walls were stucco, others brick, and yet others wood slats. Fluorescent-green moss drooped from the eaves of its cantilevered roof. A colorful flower patch ran along the front of the house. The headlights illuminated a white chicken coop on the far side of the yard, its windows shuttered and door locked to keep out the wild things that preyed on flightless fowl. A small red barn stood beside it, although it housed no animals, only the painting studio and darkroom in which Hanna’s grandmother long ago crafted her creations. Hanna’s mother used it for storage.
The interior of the house was dark. Hanna cut the headlamps, only using the dim yellow of the running lights to illuminate her way across the yard the three buildings surrounded. Cynthia had awoken on the bridge, coming to with a murmured “Are we there?” Ruby, tuckered out from her outburst over Piper’s departure, remained asleep until Hanna set the brake and cut the engine.
Hanna could no longer carry Ruby. She woke her and held her hand to the front door. Cynthia, bleary-eyed, followed her up the path. The front door was unlocked, and on quiet feet, she took the girls to their bedroom. The beds were made and turned down, layers of thick wool blankets in preparation for the cold night ahead. Hanna tucked in Ruby while Cynthia, yawning, undressed. In her underwear, Cynthia went to the bathroom across the hall, hawked a ball of phlegm into the toilet, relieved her bladder, and returned to the bedroom, eyes at half-mast.
“Look at you,” Hanna whispered. She put her hand to Cynthia’s midsection and pressed her palm to the bulge there, as taut as a basketball. “You are developing so fast.”
Cynthia stood, hands on hips and arms akimbo, and studied herself. “Not much longer, is it?”
“Maybe four weeks now,” Hanna said. “How do you feel?”
Cynthia shook her head. “That girl we picked up,” she said. “She’s a bridge daughter too.”
What did Piper tell them? “No, she’s not.”
“It felt like she was.” Cynthia yawned once more, and it seemed to awaken her. “I’m hungry.”
Leaving Ruby in her slumber, Hanna led Cynthia to the kitchen.
This was a farmhouse, not a tract home, and it had been constructed over the decades room-by-room. The sitting room was first, followed by the kitchen, the pantry, and the bedrooms and baths. Each room different, a duck-billed platypus of a house. Like the exterior, the rooms used unique materials, redwood planks, plasterboard, whatever was available at the time. Growing up, it seemed perfectly normal to Hanna, but as an adult, she realized her grandmother had built crazy quilt of a house for her family that ceased to grow with her death.
The nonperishable groceries in the car could wait until morning to be unpacked. The one bag of meat and produce she removed from the trunk and transferred to the refrigerator. Hanna rummaged in the walk-in pantry, a telephone booth of redwood shelving and drawers and a handmade revolving spice rack built from parts of a wrought-iron weather vane. Hanna searched for a quick snack for them both. With an unopened bag of potato chips and a box of dill-flavored crackers in hand, Hanna tugged the pantry’s overhead bulb off and stepped out to the kitchen.
“Let me fix you something,” Hanna’s mother said. She stood at the stove in a tattered purple kimono. “You two sit down.”
“Mom.” Hanna set down the snacks and hugged her mother for a good while. “You look good,” Hanna whispered.
Dian returned the hug without a word. When they separated, Dian turned to Cynthia. “You look sleepy.”
“I’m good now, ma’am,” the bridge said.
She returned to Hanna. “I don’t like you drinking and driving.”
“It was just a glass of wine,” Hanna said.
Dian pointed to a worn red pot on the stove. “I made a seafood stew. I thought you’d all be here by six. I should have known better.”
Hanna thought of making another excuse about traffic, then cau
ght herself. Pretexts and pretenses worked in the city and in Berkeley, where people used white lies as a social grease. Dian, Hanna’s mother, had no time and little patience for them.
Dian led Cynthia through a tour of the kitchen, pointing out the food she’d prepared for dinner and where she’d stored it when they failed to show on time. She reminded Cynthia where to find the plates and utensils, although nothing had changed since the last time they’d been to the farmhouse. “And put away that junk food,” Dian said to Cynthia, followed by a hacking cough into a wadded-up handkerchief she carried.
“Yes, ma’am.” Cynthia returned the chips and crackers to the pantry.
A bold print of white and yellow water lilies ran down Dian’s sheer purple kimono. The kimono was ragged at the hems, showing its age. A brown-and-gold knit wool muffler was loosely knotted about her neck, the ends stuffed into her kimono. Her hair was short—Hanna wished she’d grow it out a little—and her thin salmon-colored lips were paler than usual.
Hanna thought she looked good for a woman her age living alone. She wished her mother would sell the farm and move into town. At least find a woman her age to move in with her, a widow or a divorcee, someone to keep her company. Dian refused to consider any change to her living arrangement.
While Cynthia warmed up dinner on the stove, Dian and Hanna caught up on career and family. Hanna’s mother openly asked about Barry’s new wife, although they’d been married for years now. She hacked into a tissue while they talked.
“Catch a cold?”
“It’s the air,” Dian said. She pushed away Hanna’s hand, who was reaching to feel for a fever. “I get it this time of year.” She waved the handkerchief toward the window. “The fog comes in and everything gets drippy and wet.”
Cynthia served them dinner. She brought bowls of the aromatic seafood stew, a plate of crisped sourdough slices, pats of butter on a coffee saucer, and short tinted glasses of instant lemonade over ice. The stew was not spicy but pungent with saffron and herbs. Hanna didn’t realize how famished she was until the steaming bowl was set before her. She and Cynthia ate in near-silence while Dian watched on, having already taken her dinner.
“Did Ruby bring Ruby Ann?” Dian asked.
“It’s Ruby Jo now,” Hanna said.
“She’s quite the nurturer,” Dian said. She coughed again, wet and phlegmy this time. She excused herself to use the restroom and returned with a fresh tissue.
After eating, Dian told Cynthia she was excused. Dian would do the dishes so they could get some sleep.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Cynthia said. She hugged Hanna goodnight and retreated to the bedroom.
Hanna and Dian stared at each other for a protracted, silent moment. Hanna knew what was coming.
“Don’t say it,” she said to her mother.
“You can’t get attached to them,” Dian said. “You always think you’re ready for the finality, but you never are. You’re only making it difficult for yourself later.”
“You talk like you had a dozen kids,” Hanna said with a slight laugh.
“You buy their affection today, you pay for it when they’re gone.”
“Have you ever seen a bridge look like her?” Hanna said, nodding toward the door Cynthia had disappeared through moments before. “The doctor said he’s never seen a bridge exhibit the baby’s gender so strongly.”
“Your father’s bridge mother was mannish too,” Dian said. “That’s where Cynthia gets it.”
Dian raised herself from the table with some effort and went to the sink.
“Mom, let me do that.”
Dian started the hot water and squeezed a string of dish soap into the sink. Soon clouds of steam were rising around her, particularly thick due to the chill in the house. She stopped the tap and the quiet returned. They were over a mile from the road. Hanna cherished the pure silence she’d grown up with, easily dismissed and forgotten when you’re young and in love and escaping the countryside to carve out a new life in the city. When she brought Vaughn back to the farm with her, now betrothed, the silence was replaced with Vaughn’s braggadocio and constant demands for attention.
“She’s not wearing pants anymore,” Dian said, meaning Cynthia.
“She’s so big, she can’t,” Hanna said. “She wants to, though. I know you don’t approve.”
“I never said that,” Dian said while scrubbing. Her back was to Hanna. “Your bridge mother wore pants.”
Hanna had never heard this detail. “You let her?”
“Until the last few months,” Dian said. “She liked to be outside in the dirt with her flowers.”
This Hanna had heard from her parents. Both mentioned Hanna’s love of flowers, her near-encyclopedic knowledge of varieties and her knack for creating arrangements. This tidbit of her bridge mother’s history was about the sum of what she’d learned from her parents. Dian had never encouraged Hanna—this Hanna, the one alive today—to take up floristry or even an interest in the flower garden growing outside the front door of the farmhouse. Hanna might even say her mother had discouraged her from taking an interest in flowers.
“I invited some people to a baby shower on Wednesday,” her mother said.
“Oh, Mom, I don’t want anything overblown.”
“Just a few of the neighbors,” her mother continued. “The Bergs and the Millers. Jill and Sam Taylor haven’t seen you since you were twenty. They’re looking forward to it.”
“I visited the old house last week,” Hanna said.
Dian stopped scrubbing. She turned her head. “In Concord?”
“That’s right. I even ran into Erica Grimond. Her mother is still living across the street,” although Hanna guessed she would not be there for much longer. “I took the girls to see the place. There was an open house. You should have heard all the questions they asked.”
“Questions like what?”
“About growing up there,” Hanna said. “Did we have any pets. I told them we never did.”
Her mother muttered something into the pool of sudsy water before her. She spoke up. “You did have a pet. Don’t you remember?”
“No we didn’t,” Hanna said. “I begged for a puppy, but you said—”
“You had a pet here,” her mother insisted. “A kitten. Don’t you remember?”
Hanna began to protest and stopped. Her mother was correct, she did own a kitten. Hanna discovered the poor, mewing thing in the woods behind the farmhouse.
“You called her Pint because she was pint-sized,” her mother said. “She was a runt.”
“I can’t believe I forgot,” Hanna said, astonished. The memories fell on her like raindrops. “There was a stray in the back corner of the barn. She gave birth to a litter.”
“She kept the strongest and abandoned the rest around the property,” Hanna’s mother said. “The one you found was the tiniest, sickliest kitten I’ve ever seen.”
“But Pint got healthier,” Hanna said. “There was nothing wrong with her.”
“The mother cat could only raise one,” Hanna’s mother said. “She kept the largest of the litter, a big charcoal one.”
Memories continued to drip down on Hanna now. “Pint was brown with white feet,” she said. “She was small but healthy. She could almost fit in my hands.” She shook her head, lost in thought. “The mother cat could’ve kept her and raised her. There were plenty of mice in that barn. She could have raised both of them.”
Her mother, back to Hanna, shrugged. “It’s the way things work. Cats don’t have bridge kittens, so they weed out their young. It’s Nature. It can’t be changed.”
Hanna said, “Why do you think Pint ran away?” Hanna clearly remembered waking up one morning and finding Pint beside her atop the bed covers. Hanna rubbed Pint’s fur and played jangly-keys with her. The kitten’s fur smelled of cotton and cut grass the way a newborn smells wonderfully of sour milk. That evening, Pint failed to show at her food bowl for her dinner of kibble.
More memories of
Pint surfaced effortlessly. The young Hanna cried her eyes out when she realized Pint-sized wasn’t returning home. As is so true at that age, all wounds were healed when she discovered another distraction, whatever it may have been.
“The old house got me to thinking about Hanna,” she said. “Who she was, and what she was feeling when she was carrying me. The girls have been asking me questions about her. I thought tomorrow we all could sit down and talk about her.”
Dian returned a soapy plate to the sink and set the sponge aside. She approached the table with her hands buried in a dry dishtowel. “I’ll tell you again,” she said. “Don’t get attached to those two bridges of yours.” She coughed into the generous sleeve of her ratty silk kimono.
“Mom, it’s just an idle curiosity.”
“The curse of mothers everywhere are bridge daughters,” Dian said. “They mask the joy and pure love of the infant when it’s born.”
“It’s not like that,” Hanna said. “Things are different these days.”
“You were never one to take my advice,” Dian said.
“Oh, Mom—”
“If there’s one piece of advice you take from me, it’s this. Save your love for the two children on the way. They are the only thing that matters.” And she returned to the sink to finish the dishes.
Twelve
Although electric heaters were installed in the bedrooms, they were meager deterrents to the raw, muscular chill that rose in the house during the night hours. Hanna woke in the morning with her breath smoking in the air above her. She remembered how growing up in the farmhouse felt like camping year round. Sleeping in the hard cold each night, cooking breakfast over a gas stove built when Woodrow Wilson was president, an icebox in the kitchen for dried meats and preserved vegetables. They had indoor plumbing, but the bathrooms were drafty, creaky affairs, afterthoughts in a house built from the bricks and planks of afterthoughts.