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

by Jim Nelson

  “Hanna could’ve been a horticulturalist,” Piper continued. “I bet she could have earned a Ph.D. Made a real difference in this world.” Piper paused. “That scares you, doesn’t it?”

  “Absolutely not,” Hanna said.

  “She was as smart as any girl her age, bridge or otherwise,” Piper said. “Maybe even smarter.”

  “Why are you so interested in my bridge mother?” Hanna asked.

  “She’s the perfect example,” Piper said.

  “Example for what? For your cause?” Hanna shook her head. “Did Ruby tell you Hanna decided against Blanchard’s Procedure? You’re so eager to make her the hero.”

  “Hanna possessed all the skills she would need to survive in the world after the procedure,” Piper said. “She could get a job, sign a lease, even do her taxes. That’s why so many bridges are caught after running away. They fail to blend in. They were robbed of an education and are dependent on others.”

  “That’s why you were holding up a picture of my bridge mother at the Warming Hut?” Hanna said. “Because she could do her own taxes?”

  “Hanna is what happens when society convinces the powerless into abandoning their own self-interests,” Piper said. “When a girl with so much potential commits suicide—”

  “Hanna did not commit suicide,” Hanna said.

  Piper leaned forward, her mouth at Hanna’s shoulder. “Your bridge mother chose death over life,” she said.

  “She chose my life,” Hanna said.

  “A soldier falling on a grenade,” Piper said. “It’s still suicide.”

  Hanna started to protest, her pulse rising, and caught herself. Cynthia watched and heard everything from the passenger’s seat, a camera recording everything. Hanna would not blow her top before Cynthia, especially after witnessing Cynthia mature so much in the past weeks.

  “Have you told Cynthia the story of Hagar?” Piper asked Hanna.

  “I know about Hagar,” Cynthia said. “We learned about her in school.”

  “‘School,’” Piper sniffed. “As though that finishing school back there is going to tell you the truth about anything.”

  “I heard your little speech about Hagar in the Warming Hut,” Hanna said.

  “Hagar is why we call our meetings Shur Spring,” Piper said. “The spring on the road to Shur is where Hagar learned the truth of her life. All the lies she’d been fed since she was a child, the cold spring water washed them away.” She paused. “Are you sure you don’t mind your bridge daughter hearing what I have to say?”

  “My daughters can read and write,” Hanna said. “Both received an education.”

  “And what a great gift you’ve bestowed.”

  “I listen to my daughters,” Hanna said. “They have a voice in my household.”

  “Is that so?” Piper said to Cynthia.

  Cynthia nodded after a moment’s hesitation. “My mother listens to me.”

  “I trust my daughters.” Hanna peered at Piper via the rearview mirror. “You say whatever you want. I trust them to weigh anything you have to say.”

  “Sure,” Piper said. “And when I’m gone, you’ll tell them I’m wrong and how evil I am.”

  “Do you really think what you have to say is so perfectly true that no one is allowed to suggest otherwise?” Hanna asked. “Your audience is thirteen-year-old girls. Most of them have been brought up in sheltered lives.” The bridge room at Iris Way—the musty smell, the cramped, cold air—flashed in Hanna’s mind. “Can you stand up to the scrutiny of an adult?”

  Piper said nothing. Hanna returned to concentrating on driving. Piper again rummaged through her army surplus bag. She produced an orange prescription bottle with a white safety cap. She shook out two mauve tablets. She swallowed them with water from a clear-blue plastic bottle.

  “Your gefyridol?” Hanna said. Piper didn’t answer.

  “What’s that for?” Cynthia asked.

  “The child in her is still alive,” Hanna said. “She can’t live without it.”

  “Sym-bee-o-sis,” Cynthia pronounced.

  “The gefyridol keeps the child alive, and the child keeps her alive,” Hanna said.

  “What of it?” Piper said.

  “Just explaining your condition to my daughter,” Hanna said. “It doesn’t sound like you ever did.”

  From the backseat came the sound of more rummaging through the bag, then paper and foil tearing. Piper broke off squares of chocolate from a bar. She offered one to Cynthia and another to Hanna.

  “I hid nothing,” Piper said.

  “That’s different from telling the complete truth,” Hanna said.

  “I told Ruby she could never raise the baby inside her,” Piper said. “She was obsessed with the idea.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Hanna said. Late in pons anno, bridge daughters often grew emotionally attached to the child they carried.

  “How many of those wish child baby dolls did you buy her?” Piper said. “To placate her and give her false hope? Make her think she could some day raise a baby of her own? Don’t you think you might have fed the fiction to her?”

  “I’ve always been perfectly truthful with my bridge daughters,” Hanna said.

  “That’s different from telling the complete truth,” Piper said.

  Hanna felt the blood rise within her. It was a cheap shot, and so it stung that much more.

  “Don’t lecture me on the truth,” Piper said. “Mothers are in no position.”

  —

  For girls like Cynthia and Ruby, Hagar was as familiar a story as Eve and the serpent. Usually it was told to bridges with the more sensational and graphic parts elided. God punished her for running to the desert was the standard way Hagar’s story was related to bridge daughters. For Hagar’s trespass, God cursed all bridge daughters henceforth with the wage of death.

  “Women are punished for being women,” Piper said.

  Hanna said nothing. She could not, and would not, argue with that.

  “Hagar was a slave,” Piper said.

  “She was Sarah’s bridge daughter,” Cynthia said.

  “No,” Piper said. “Sarah was barren. Hagar was given to Abraham in trade, like a calf.”

  Cynthia looked to her mother for protest. Hanna nodded once, eyes on the road ahead. “That’s how I understand the story,” she told Cynthia. She’d read up on Hagar on Wikipedia, as well as looked up Piper’s manifesto online. The last time she faced Piper, Hanna felt overwhelmed by Piper’s barrage of supposed insights into the workings of the world. This time, Hanna was prepared.

  “Hagar carried Abraham’s water,” Piper said. “That’s why Hagar’s urn is our symbol. Hagar knitted the clothes on Abraham’s back. She cooked his food. She fed and bathed him. And she carried his son. Hagar was a slave, but her inherent value went no further than the son within her.”

  Hanna began to protest and stopped. Once again, she found she could not argue.

  Piper said to Cynthia, “Have you seen a statue of Buddha?”

  “Maybe,” Cynthia said. “I think so.”

  “They tell us Buddha was a prince,” Piper said. “But every statue of Buddha, he has a girl’s face and breasts.”

  Although Hanna was raised in an areligious household, it was not unusual to visit a neighbor’s home in the hills of Marin and discover a small shrine to Buddha in a kitchen corner or in the garden. The adherents in Marin were not religious in any other way, never proselytizing, never reading Buddhist books, never quoting Siddhartha. Still, she picked up bits and pieces of the religion over the years, enough to conclude Buddhism was the official secular religion of Northern California.

  “She means the yin and the yang,” Hanna explained to Cynthia. “The Buddha is one with the universe. He possesses the essence of both the male and the female. That’s why he sometimes appears with female features.”

  “Buddha was a bridge daughter,” Piper said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Hanna said.

  “Loo
k at your bridge daughter next to you,” Piper said.

  Cynthia’s silhouette was well-defined against the passenger-side window. Her Adam’s apple bobbed below her father’s prominent jaw.

  Piper said, “Women like Cynthia could lead nations, if given a chance.” Piper stroked Cynthia’s hair. “Strong women.”

  Cynthia jerked away. “I said don’t touch me.”

  She spoke it with a blaze in her eyes, as though she’d warned Piper of it before. How far did Piper go to coerce Cynthia out of the farmhouse? Hanna could imagine just about anything at that moment.

  “The spring on the road to Shur,” Piper said. “That’s where Hagar learned the truth of her situation.”

  “What ‘truth?’” Hanna said. She expected Piper to produce some legend, some bit of malarkey passed around among bridge daughters to comfort each other.

  “That no one would choose this road,” Piper said. “That’s the truth she learned at the spring on the road to Shur.”

  Piper leaned forward again. Without touching Cynthia, she spoke into her ear. “Where did you come from?” she asked. “Where are you going?”

  “I came from Berkeley,” Cynthia said.

  “No,” Piper said with a soothing and even voice. “Tell me where you come from.”

  Hanna, half-focused on the road ahead, said, “She answered you.”

  “What’s behind you, Cynthia?” Piper said. “What did you leave behind?”

  Cynthia looked down to her egg-shaped midsection. Her dress was bunched beneath her breasts, which had begun to swell from the hormonal changes. It was a vestigial side-effect for bridge daughters, as the breasts would not produce milk, nor would she live to nurse the child within her.

  Cynthia massaged her belly with both hands and considered her answer to Piper’s question. “I left nothing behind,” she said with a deep baritone. “I’m carrying all that I am.”

  Hanna’s heart vibrated.

  “And where are you going?” Piper said, not relenting.

  “To find my sister,” Cynthia said. “To heal my family.” She turned to Piper. “A family you helped break.”

  Piper studied Cynthia for a moment. She retracted to the backseat. In the rearview, Hanna could see Piper was not quite so upright now, no longer the sultan on the divan.

  The headlamps caught a speed limit sign approaching. Hanna slowed to stay a tick under the reduced limit. A freeway intersection marker appeared on a road sign informing drivers of gas and hotel services ahead.

  “Do I keep going?” Hanna asked.

  “I’ll tell you when to leave the freeway,” Piper said.

  “It doesn’t seem like you’re paying attention,” Hanna said.

  “I’m watching the road.”

  Piper brooded in the backseat. She broke off squares of chocolate herself, nibbling each furtively and with a faraway look in her eyes. She tore away more of the foil and bright yellow wrapper and dropped the scraps to the floor. Her insolence annoyed the hell out of Hanna, but she said nothing of it.

  “You talk like you know a lot about Hagar,” Hanna said.

  “Cynthia’s not the only bridge who can read,” Piper said.

  Hanna wondered what Internet web site peddled the theories Piper spouted. She’d obviously practiced her rhetoric. Hanna could see bridge daughter message boards taking simple legends and speculative history and whipping them into the frothy ideology Piper offered as enlightenment.

  “Tell me about Hagar’s mother,” Hanna said.

  “You mean Sarah?”

  “No, Hagar’s mother. Tell me what you know about her.”

  Piper sighed. “I told you. Hagar was sold into slavery. Men couldn’t bother to record her mother. Women are erased.”

  Hanna would not normally argue with that. “Men recorded Hagar,” Hanna said.

  “As a warning,” Piper said. “To scare bridge daughters.”

  “And to scare mothers too,” Hanna said. “Mothers are scared by Hagar’s story.”

  Piper had returned to her cross-legged position in the backseat. She held the chocolate bar in the hole created by her folded legs.

  “You don’t know one thing about Hagar’s mother,” Hanna said.

  “Neither do you,” Piper said. It was feeble.

  “I know exactly how Hagar’s mother feels right now,” Hanna said. “Her bridge daughter taken away from her. I’m sure she was told it was for good reason. Someone told her to set aside her emotions and think of the greater good. Hagar’s mother could feel the loss, just like I feel Ruby missing.” Hanna pressed her hand into the center of her chest, up and under one breast. “You scooped a hole out of me. There is no connection stronger than my connection with Ruby and Cynthia. That’s what I share with Hagar’s mother. And all mothers.”

  Piper made a dismissive noise from the backseat.

  “If you had your way, there would be no more bridge daughters,” Hanna said.

  “Your wrong,” Piper said. “We’re the perfection of humanity.”

  “Humanity would cease if every bridge daughter had a Blanchard’s,” Hanna said.

  “I believe in possibilities,” Piper said.

  Hanna waited for more. Piper sat in the backseat with a satisfied smile. Hanna guessed she’d plumbed the limits of Piper’s beliefs. What lay beyond those murky depths seemed inconsequential to Piper. Apparently she felt the question of humanity’s survival would have to be answered when the problem was faced.

  “How do I know you’re not leading me to Ruby’s grave?” Hanna said.

  “Quit being so dramatic,” Piper said.

  “I saw your performance in the Warming Hut,” Hanna said. “Making all those girls recite stories about other bridge mothers. Nothing is so simple with you. Everything you do is to make some great point.”

  “That’s how you change the world,” Piper said. “If I told you the number of bridges who died each year from botched Blanchard’s operations, it would mean nothing to you. You don’t change the world with statistics and body counts. You make people feel.”

  Piper unwound her legs. She peered through the windshield and pointed to the right side of the road.

  “Take this exit,” she said. “Stay on the right. Head straight through the intersection.”

  Hanna followed the instructions. The two-lane road was not as well-lit as the freeway. Soon the coarse stone walls of wineries lined each side of the road. They passed rows of trussed grapevines with untended rosebushes at each end. White dots of distant headlamps glowed in Hanna’s rearview. The Audi sped headlong into darkness.

  “When I think of Ruby,” Hanna said, “I think of a beautiful little girl. Ruby is Please and Thank you and May I? My little girl respects people and she earns their respect.”

  A warm flush grew up Hanna’s neck. Her throat constricted.

  “When Ruby has her first crush and needs a shoulder to cry on, I’ll be there for her,” Hanna continued. “And when she falls in love, I’ll sit with her and share everything. She can follow any path she wants. She can confide to me all her deepest feelings. I will always be there to support her.”

  From the darkness, Piper said softly, “This is what you want for Ruby?”

  “I’ve wanted this for thirteen years,” Hanna said. “And what I hope so very, very much is Ruby meets the right man. A man who sees within her all her beauties and dignities, and forgives her for her faults and short-sightedness. They bond and produce a loving family.” Hanna reached across to hold Cynthia’s hand. “I want Ruby to provide the support and love my husband and I failed to supply.”

  “You didn’t fail us,” Cynthia said softly.

  “Yes I did,” Hanna said. “I could have done so much better for you both.”

  “Wait,” Piper said. “You really want all that? For Ruby?”

  “Of course,” Hanna said.

  Piper fell back in her seat. “I don’t believe this.”

  The flush blossomed within Hanna. At that moment, she felt com
plete.

  “I completely misjudged you,” Piper said. “Have you told Ruby any of this?”

  “When she’s born, I will,” Hanna said. “I’ll tell it to her every night as I’m rocking her to sleep.”

  Piper gasped. She whispered something Hanna could not hear.

  Cynthia wiped the wetness from her cheeks. She unbuckled and, one hand on her belly, lowered herself across the front seat. She nestled her head in Hanna’s lap. She kept one hand on the boy within her and the other on Hanna’s leg.

  Hanna drove steadily, eyes on the road ahead, while stroking Cynthia’s face. She could not wait to put her arms around Ruby, as well as the Ruby within her.

  Twenty-eight

  Piper directed Hanna to slow the car. A turnout appeared in the headlamps. A dirt road led into trees and the darkness.

  Hanna slowed. A pair of wood posts as thick as railroad ties flanked the entrance to the dirt road. She noticed three pale-cream figures painted on the side of one post, the Hagar’s urn sandwiched between a crescent moon and a diagonal cross-hatch. Someone had hidden Hagar’s mark in a ranching brand.

  Loose dirt and pebbles crunched beneath the Audi’s tires. Unlike the farm in Marin, the dirt road did not travel miles off the highway. It made a quick French curve through tall dry grass to a diminutive house of stained shingles. A stubby brick chimney nudged upwards from the roof. The stairs up to the front door were composed of river rock and roughly-poured concrete. When Hanna cut the car’s headlamps, the only illumination was the light of the waning moon and a single streetlamp on the two-lane road a hundred yards away. The house was dark. Not even a porch light burned. The astringent odor of pine was strong here.

  “Where are we?” Hanna said as she stepped from the car.

  “Calistoga,” Piper said.

  Calistoga in name only. They might be within city limits, but the mineral spring baths and wine tasting rooms lay miles away. Hanna’s father treated them to a Calistoga trip once a year—a friend of a friend managed a spa and cut him a deal on the room rate. The past two trips, Cynthia balked at the girly treatments and pampering. She soaked in a tub with Grandpa, watching golf on the sports channel. Ruby and Hanna exercised all the perks, the rosewater soaks and mud packs and a mani-pedi in the tea garden. Ruby’s spa nights at home originated from a trip to Calistoga.