Hagar's Mother (The Bridge Daughter Cycle Book 2)

by Jim Nelson

  Shur Spring might not even be tonight, Hanna thought. But it would be soon. Piper could manage mixing with the public, but Ruby, pregnant and five weeks to her finality? No chance. Piper risked exposing herself in so many ways escorting a bridge daughter around.

  Hanna parked the car, cut the ignition, and brought up on her smartphone a map of the area. Piper could take a half-dozen different routes from the farmhouse to the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, but after that, there was no alternative. She had no choice but to cross the span. That meant passing through the toll gate with a thirteen-year-old bridge daughter on the back of her motorcycle. Certainly, Hanna thought, that would catch someone’s attention.

  As with Cynthia earlier, an image of Ruby on the back of the motorcycle flashed through Hanna’s mind. She imagined Ruby wearing only her bridge daughter dress, no helmet, no protective jacket. It outraged her, this smug girl on whatever crusade she was on, risking the life of Ruby and her unborn child.

  Hanna’s father called twice while she drove into the city. Hanna imagined Cynthia explaining the day’s events to him. He must know by now Ruby was gone. No, abducted.

  He would want to call the police. She debated calling the police too. She’d nurtured a tiny fantasy on the car ride from Marin, a pipe dream of spotting Ruby at Crissy Field, grabbing her by the wrist, and dragging her back to the farmhouse. Sitting in the car watching the bay waters spray up against the tidal wall, she knew nothing would be so simple.

  Hanna searched for the San Francisco police non-emergency number on her phone. After a single ring, a computerized voice explained calls would be answered in the order received. While waiting, the hunger she’d ignored so far began gnawing at her. More than that, she wanted a glass of wine badly. To distract her, to calm her. Sunday nights were spa nights, having her feet cleaned by Ruby while sipping a cold Chardonnay. Such domestic comforts seemed an alien, distant world now.

  “San Francisco police non-emergency line,” came the man’s voice. He sounded bored. “Your name and the number you’re calling from?”

  “I’d like to remain anonymous,” Hanna said carefully. “Can I do that?”

  “What’s the nature of your call?”

  “I was just crossing the Golden Gate,” she said, improvising. “I spotted two girls on a motorcycle.”

  “Which direction were they traveling?”

  “Into the city,” she said. “I was in the lane next to them.” She thought it would give her story credibility. “The one on the back was really young.”

  “How old?”

  “I believe she was pregnant.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I believe she was a bridge daughter,” Hanna said. “And she didn’t have a helmet.”

  A register of urgency entered his voice. “What time did this occur?”

  Surely Piper and Ruby entered the city an hour earlier, or even before. She checked the dashboard clock and did the math. “Around three,” she said. Maybe it sounded funny to wait so long in reporting it. “Or three thirty.”

  “Can you describe the driver?” Now he spoke as though writing while talking. “Is it possible she was the bridge’s mother?”

  “No,” Hanna said. “She was too young.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “She looked sixteen or seventeen.” Hanna rapidly described Piper: hair, clothes, height, weight.

  “And the girl on the back? The bridge?”

  Hanna offered a description as well. With each detail, she felt increasingly guilty and complicit.

  “I’m going to transfer you to Bridge Protective Services—”

  “I need to go.”

  “Ma’am,” he said, “it would be helpful if you could speak with the workers there.”

  “Please, I’ve said enough.” Fumbling with the phone, she disconnected the call.

  They have my phone number, she thought. With one call to her cell service provider, they would have her name, her address, even her credit history if they so desired. The officer asked for her phone number at the beginning of the call. She knew they could find her if they were determined.

  This was Hanna’s gambit, getting the San Francisco police searching for her bridge daughter. If it brought Ruby back into her arms, safe and healthy, that was all that mattered.

  —

  Hanna drove through the Presidio until she chanced on Lombard Street, a four-lane corridor of motels and fast food servicing the steady stream of traffic heading to and from the Golden Gate Bridge. She passed restaurants on four city blocks until she spotted one that fit the bill, a soup-and-salad chain. She ordered a bowl of tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich and a tall Coca-Cola, the latter to replenish her plummeting blood sugar levels. When the food arrived at the table, she felt about to faint.

  Tearing off a bite of the sandwich, she realized why she’d ordered this particular plate, one she’d normally overlook in search of healthier fare. Before she left the farm in search of Cynthia, Ruby had been preparing soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Her lunch must have lodged in Hanna’s mind and suggested a similar meal at the restaurant.

  As the meal began to soothe her jitters, she took stock of the restaurant she now found herself in. Hard florescent lights allowing no shadows. Bright orange menus and similarly gaudy salt-and-pepper shakers. Canned New Wave music played from the overhead speakers. Deep plush booths and tables with laminated tops with faux wood grain. The waitress touched the tabletop twice, once when she took the order and once when the meal arrived. She would touch the table a third time when she checked in with Hanna halfway through her meal.

  In a prior job, Hanna designed web graphics for a gourmet ice cream chain. She knew every detail here was engineered to maximize a certain kind of experience dictated by the marketing research group. Nothing was left to chance in these restaurants, not even the placement of fake leafy plants by the greeter’s stand or the color of the laminate flooring.

  She’d selected this restaurant for its supposed emphasis on healthy options, but she’d surrendered to her body’s base instincts the moment she picked up the menu. The tomato soup was over-salted and most likely contained too much sugar, or worse, high-fructose corn syrup. And the sandwich, oily on the plate and browned with butter. The cheese grease made her smack her lips. Signs in the windows advertised a healthy choice menu, but the menu photos enticed her to load her body with the empty calories of fat and dough. She could stop—she’d not finished all her food—but Hanna surrendered again and bit into the second browned oily triangle.

  A special little girl, her mother had told her. Bright and generous and giving.

  Hanna could not recall her mother speaking so lavishly about anyone, most of all Hanna herself. It stung her. She’d been raised by her taciturn and demanding mother and knew nothing other than it. She thought it the norm until she left the farm and witnessed the way other parents praised their children. Overpraised them, Hanna thought. No need to raise delusional, overconfident children who then grow up to become self-absorbed, overconfident adults. Another agreement she’d made with herself as she planned to raise two new citizens of the world.

  After another glance about the restaurant’s engineered interior, Hanna grimaced and made a derogatory remark to herself about American mediocrity. She saw the waitress approaching and made a wisecrack to herself about Stepford wives in the workplace.

  The waitress came by to touch the tabletop and check on the meal. Without missing a beat, Hanna brightened and smiled and told her, “Everything’s fine, thank you.”

  How did I become this way? she asked herself once the waitress moved away. How did I come to be a person to sneer at someone for serving me the grilled cheese sandwich I’d requested?

  She inspected the remainder of her sandwich, examining its bread and congealing cheese and the crevices and the oily sheen. This meal had come to mean something more than the meal itself.

  No—she’d elevated it to more than the meal itself. By imbuing ev
ery moment with broad political ramifications, she’d removed herself from every moment. She’d not ordered this sandwich. A team of corporate strategists had forced this sandwich upon her. How did she come to think this way? Why not just eat the sandwich?

  Ruby made two sandwiches at the farmhouse. Ruby thought Cynthia was in the yard with the chickens. She said as much, but she was only making lunch for two people, Hanna and herself. Ruby knew Cynthia was gone.

  With her forehead in her hands, a worse realization struck Hanna. What if Ruby knew Piper was coming back for her? What if Ruby was in on the ruse from the get-go? What if the sandwiches were for Hanna and Cynthia, Ruby’s token of affection before running away?

  Hanna forced herself to finish the rest of her meal. She had a long night ahead of her and she had to think of Ruby first. No, she thought, the child within Ruby. That’s the priority here.

  She stirred the cooling bright-red soup with the tip of the remaining sandwich. She told herself she was a complete fool. This was all her fault. She was, by any measure, a horrible person and a horrible, horrible mother.

  Nineteen

  Not a soul on Crissy Field, not a vehicle passing by, Hanna couldn’t help but admire the quiet somber beauty of the Golden Gate at night. Pinpoints of light dotted the hulking bridge’s outline and revealed its curving cable lines and twin towers. It stood as a great buckle lashing the Marin headlands to San Francisco. Brooding and massive, its presence comforted her.

  She carried a small flashlight in her back jeans pocket, not using it now but ready to if the moment arose. Her zip-up was tight on her and closed to her throat, dark blue like her jeans. She hoped her outfit provided some camouflage against the gray moonlight. She’d purchased a random cap at a Lombard Street gift shop, “Fisherman’s Wharf” in embroidered cursive lettering over the bill. She wore it low across her eyes, her hair back in a ponytail and looped through the hole above the adjuster. She trod the sandy paths of Crissy Field with caution, sensitive to every noise around her.

  After an hour, she checked the time on her phone. Half past ten and nothing to show for it but a runny nose and lips chapped from the unabating ocean wind. Hanna spotted a park bench up ahead. She hurried her steps, plopped down on one end, and hugged herself to get warm. Her teeth clattered.

  How long was she willing to stay out here? An hour more? Two? She could imagine the Hagar’s sisters holding a meeting at the dead of midnight. They could just as well hold it before dawn. She would not last all night in this cold. She’d not thought to bring even the simplest of necessities for staying warm, such as a Thermos of coffee or a pair of gloves. Hanna felt utterly unprepared, an amateur outmaneuvered by a sixteen-year-old girl with a motorcycle.

  After all, why even meet? It would be far less dangerous for these girls to communicate anonymously over the Internet, as they appeared to be doing already. What was the purpose of meeting in person and risking capture?

  Every couple of years, the twenty-four news channels lit up with a high-profile trial of a bridge daughter facing charges after undergoing a bi-graft. In each case, her parents were sitting behind the prosecutor, mother weeping, father on the verge of tears but maintaining the facade men feel so necessary to maintain. No one sided with a bridge, save for the state-provided attorney charged to defend the undefendable.

  After twenty minutes on the park bench, shivering and unable to get warm, she stood, surveyed the dark beach one final time, and started off for the Presidio, defeated. She told herself she’d run the car heater to get warm, nap for an hour or two, then return to search for any sign of Shur Spring.

  A glimmer of light made her do a double-take. A faint pale-yellow light came from a building at the far end of the field. The excited surge of hope cleared the chill from her body. She approached the building on quick feet. The coarse packed sand shushed and crunched with each step.

  The glimmering came from the Warming Hut, nothing so crude as the name suggested. The hut was a good-sized A-frame with a full-service cafe offering organic sandwiches and connoisseur coffee in compostable cups. Adirondack chairs with wool lap blankets circled indoor fire pits. No fires burned now, no lunch was being served. The flickering yellow light came from the lower corner of a side window. Otherwise, the hut seemed utterly empty. All exterior lights were off. The outdoor chairs and tables were chained to the propane heat towers the coffee-drinkers huddled about during business hours. Hanna’s first impulse was to cup her face to the glass doors and peer inside. She knew better, and circled around the hut for another way in.

  As she passed windows, she heard whispered voices inside, a great number of them. At the rear of the building, she located a service entrance. The porthole window on it was dark. Then, taking a second look, she realized the porthole was windowless. With her eyes adjusted to the moonlight, she found the circular fixture atop an outdoor lockable freezer. The brass trim had been unscrewed and the entire piece, glass and all, removed. Anyone could then reach through the door and unlock it from the inside, even a sixteen-year-old girl. Hanna tried the service door handle. It opened.

  She navigated the kitchen work surfaces and professional gas stoves to the swinging doors opposite. From the light shining down their middle, she knew she could go no farther without revealing her presence.

  She was also trapped. If someone came through the service door, she had no exit and few places to hide. If anyone in the dining area decided to leave the way they came, they would discover Hanna as well.

  There was no question in her mind, though. She peered through the plastic windows on the swinging doors, hoping to at least gain an idea of what she was eavesdropping on. This was Shur Spring, an event few outside of Hagar’s sisters ever saw or experienced.

  —

  Piper stood at the far end of the Warming Hut’s dining room. A single candle flickered on the cafe table beside her. The assemblage, all seated on the floor, spread away from her. With Hanna’s quick peek through the doors, she estimated thirty or forty girls. Two sat on chairs to one side. Hanna could tell from their silhouettes they were bridge daughters, pregnant and nearing the end of their pons anno. She could not tell if either was Ruby. It seemed plausible.

  The whispered murmuring made an audible blanket over the room. The smell of the scented candle wafted through the slit between the swinging doors, an elder smell of mahogany and oak and tobacco. Hanna expected Shur Spring to be a social gathering, a Burning Man for bridge daughters. Or more formal, with a vote taken or a hat passed around to raise money for a Hagar’s sister in need. She’d not expected to see what she witnessed in the Warming Hut, the girls fanning out on the floor from Piper standing alone.

  Each of the Hagar’s sisters held a photograph in her hands. Some held a wallet-sized photo, too small for Hanna to see in the dim light, but others held larger photos, the size of family portraits placed atop fireplace mantels or on cubicle desks. Hanna knew women who placed photographs of their children beside their computer monitor, the cheap Walgreens frame pushed up against the monitor housing so they could look into the faces of their children each second of their workday. The larger photos required two hands, but in each case, the Hagar’s sisters held their photographs before their chests as a rectangular breastplate, a rosy cross affirming their faith.

  Piper produced a photograph as well, a large grainy portrait of a girl’s face. She held it over her head with both hands. Piper rotated left and right so her audience could see and follow her lead.

  “Rachel,” Piper said. She pointed at a girl at her feet sitting cross-legged. “You next.”

  The girl spoke so softly, Hanna strained to hear.

  “Loud,” Piper said. She raised her voice. “Be bold. This is for us all. This is for all bridge daughters. This is for the sisters who came before us and those who have yet to be born.”

  “Francis,” the girl said, speaking louder. She climbed to her feet and stood beside Piper. “Francis,” she announced with the photo before her heart.

&n
bsp; Another girl rose to her feet. “Anna,” she said. She held the photo of a girl’s face aloft. “Anna.”

  The ritual continued, girls rising and presenting their photographs with a single name. Darlene, Marla, Kathleen, Cate with a C. No explanation was given, although perhaps Hanna was late.

  Lily. Veronica. Selby. Phoebe. Hanna!

  Hanna jerked her face to the plastic window, desperate to see the face of the girl who’d shouted her own name—a voice she recognized, the unmistakable voice of Ruby.

  She confirmed Ruby was one of the silhouettes seated in chairs, one of the bridge daughters taking part in the Shur Spring. Ruby now stood, her face in the candlelight solemn and defiant.

  Ruby bore a photograph of Hanna. In the candlelight, it appeared to be a photograph of Hanna as a young girl, a time when she lived alone with her mother, hated her father, and went skinny-dipping in the arroyo under the bridge. A naive Hanna, a simpler time, as they say, when days were long and lazy.

  After a moment of thought, Hanna knew it was her bridge mother, the other Hanna, the eight-by-ten taken at Susanna Glen. A girl her mother called bright and generous and intelligent, a special girl who died giving birth to Hanna. A girl so loved, Hanna’s uncle committed suicide over her death. This was the photograph Ruby held high at Shur Spring, her very name a statement of protest, a one-word manifesto.

  Hanna calculated if she rushed in right then, the girls might flee. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, they also might fight back. If Piper commanded them to protect Ruby, who knew how they’d react? Piper might even manage to whisk Ruby out of there before Hanna reached her. Once on the unlit beach outside, Piper could lead Ruby almost any direction to safety while Hanna stumbled about in the dark.

  “They can take your life,” Piper announced to the sisters. “They can take your gefyridol. They can take your liberty. Throw you in prison. Lock you up in a bridge house. Forcibly return you to your parents. Suffer their punishments.”