by Nora Decter
“Well then, be a good girl and let us drive you. Come on.” He takes my arm, and when he does, the quiet one loosens his grip on me, and before either of them can tighten I explode out into the street, running straight across all four lanes, no thought to traffic. I hear them swearing behind me and hear the car doors slam, but then I’m down a side street, then a back lane, and I run for as long as I can and then keep going till I’m home.
I find my keys, put them in the door. Slam it shut behind me. All the lights are on, but no one’s home. Howl is asleep on the kitchen floor, and I curl up next to her, bury my face in her fur. I would like the room to stop spinning, but it won’t. Not even when I close my eyes or when I ask it nicely to please stop. Not even then.
TWENTY-NINE
Questions in the morning. Bad ones. Like, why does my mouth taste like puke, and what am I doing on the living-room couch, and why is Maggie sitting by the window in her bathrobe, watching me?
“You’re up.”
“What the fuck,” I say, rubbing what feels like sand deeper into my eyes, “is going on?” And then I remember for the hundred thousandth time that I’m the original asshole. It’s totally me.
The weight of remembering pins me down to the couch, but I need to get away from her, from everything, so I find a way to throw off the blanket that’s covering me and sit up. Which on second thought is maybe not such a good idea. “Oh god.”
“Here,” she says. “Take these.” She hands me Advil and a glass of water. “You’ll be feeling pretty rough today.”
I swallow the pills and catch a whiff of something that smells like hobo. It’s me. “How did I get here?”
“You passed out on the kitchen floor. Louie carried you to the couch.”
This is too humiliating to imagine, so I don’t. The drapes are open, and delicate tendrils of light reach into the room, dance across the coffee table and the floor and stab deeply into each of my eyeballs. “What time is it?”
“A bit after two,” she says. “I thought you needed to sleep it off.”
“Shit,” I say, standing up.
“Sit down, Jolene. We need to talk.”
I climb the stairs in an entire catalog of pain, leaning forward and bracing myself with my hands like a Neanderthal or a toddler or maybe just a drunk. I’m beyond wounded pride at this point, but I’d still rather not face-plant in front of Maggie, and I’m none too steady on my feet right now.
Maggie follows me to my bedroom, so I grab a towel and leave again, shutting the bathroom door behind me.
In the mirror a strange girl with gray skin and matted hair stares out. I avert my eyes from hers and drop my clothes on the floor, turn the taps, let the water run until it’s hot and step into the shower. Water scalds the skin at the top of my head and streams down my body, but I don’t adjust the temperature. The pounding of my skull makes it hard to distinguish one pain from the other. So much the better.
The room is thick with steam when I’m done, but I’m still careful to avoid the mirror. I also avoid thinking about what I’ll say to Groves. I’m more than late. I may as well not even show. I push it away. I push everything away. Basically, I’m tiptoeing around in the corners of my mind.
In keeping with this avoidance theme, rather than go into my room again I start putting on the clothes I wore last night, but it’s no use—they’ll have to be burned.
Even in the state I’m in, I know it’d qualify as a warning sign to show up to see my English teacher covered in my own puke. Wrapping myself in the towel, I scoop up my dirty clothes and hurry down the hall to get it over with.
Maggie is sitting on my bed, next to the guitar case. “How’re you feeling?”
“Fine.” Bristling with annoyance or something masquerading as it, I pull open my dresser drawer and put on underwear and then a pair of jeans. If you’ve ever wondered if it’s possible to put on underwear angrily, well, it sure is.
“Ivy’s been calling for you all day. Last night too. Late. She was really worried. Something about a bridge.”
I keep my back to her as I find a T-shirt and put it on too.
“Your school called too.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And Benny.”
“Good for him.”
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“Nope.”
“What about the guitar? You wanna tell me about that?”
My hair is wet and in my face, and I am very, very close to crying, but the one thing I want right now more than anything in the goddamn universe is not to start crying in front of Maggie, so I brush my hair angrily, straighten my shirt angrily and walk out of the room.
“Where are you going, Jo?” She sounds so tired, it stops me in the hall. But it’s too late. I’ve got to go.
Groves’s car is still in the parking lot. I’m too chicken to go in and look for her, so I wait around outside, not feeling the cold. After about half an hour a group of students comes out. I can tell they’re drama students by the way their voices project across the parking lot. Groves walks out after them, fumbling for her keys and pulling her scarf up over her mouth. I have to call out a few times before she hears. When she does, her face is hard.
“This is bad, Jolene.”
“I know,” I say, and then I start crying. I start crying like I’ve been saving up all my tears for years, and maybe I have.
“Hey,” she says. “Shit, come here.” She unlocks her car and shoves me inside. It’s flood season on my face. And I don’t care. I’ve moved to a place beyond pride. For a few moments Groves just watches me soak through the tissues she retrieves from her purse. But then some of the drama kids pass by and stare, and she waves, starts the car and pulls out of the parking lot.
“Are you kidnapping me?”
“Not yet. We’ll see where the evening takes us.”
“Where are we going then?”
“I’m getting you out of here. Or do you want to be a spectacle?”
This prompts another surge of tears. “But I already am!”
She glances away from the road to me. “So? You gonna talk?”
I press my palms over my eyes and try to stem the flow, but it doesn’t work that way. I don’t know where they’re coming from. I hiccup, and it hurts. “I made an ass of myself all over town.”
“How’s that?”
I can hear the hint of a smile in her voice. I uncover my eyes. We’re pulling into the driveway of a house a few blocks away from school.
“Come on,” she says.
“Do you live here?”
“Sort of.” She unbuckles her seat belt and opens the door.
“That’s ambiguous.”
“Good word,” she says, leaning into the backseat to gather her bags. “You should have used it in that paper that was due last week.”
“Why are we here?”
“Because,” she says, “I’m going to make you some fucking tea.”
Language like this from a teacher, even one like her, shocks me into calm. I get out and follow her inside.
The house is very seventies suburban. Busy textiles, orangey walls and fake wood paneling. In the kitchen she puts the kettle on, and I take a seat at the island.
“You really live here?”
“Well, I did. Growing up. I moved home last year to take care of my mom. She had a stroke.”
“That’s nice.”
“Not really.”
“Where is she?” I ask, looking around.
“Out. She goes to bingo with her girlfriends most afternoons.”
“Sounds like my mom.”
Groves takes mugs out of the cupboard, drops tea bags into them and gets the milk from the fridge. “I’m giving you Earl Grey,” she says. “It’s my feeling you need a bit of caffeine. You look like shit.”
“I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.”
“With honey,” she says, taking it out of the cupboard. “Sweet things are soothing.”
The kettle boils, and
she pours steaming water into each mug, then sets one in front of me. “So,” she says. “Talk.”
And then we wait.
Eventually I shake my head. “I thought I could do it, but I can’t.”
“You can do it. You just have to try.”
“No, you don’t get it. I thought I could have things other people have. But I can’t.”
“What kind of things?”
“I dunno.” I shrug. “Friends? Fun? A future?”
“What happened?”
I shake my head.
“Talk, Jolene. I can’t help otherwise.”
She’s wrong. It’s not easy. It’s not the kind of thing you say out loud. But for once I’m more afraid of what will happen if I don’t talk about it, so I try. “We were going to this party. We were walking there. I thought it would be okay, that we’d take the footbridge, but they wanted to walk across the train bridge to save time because they were cold—these people don’t dress for the weather—and I didn’t want to, but I did anyway because I didn’t want them to know.”
“Know what?”
“That I was scared.”
She scoffs. “There’s nothing wrong with being scared, especially of doing something stupid like that.”
“It’s not like that. It’s not the kind of fear normal people have. I have reasons to be afraid.”
“Why?”
This is the closest I’ve ever come to it, and I stop and wait for alarms to start wailing, for the walls and the ceiling to cave in, for the floor to open up and swallow me down, but I’m still here. So is the ceiling, and so are the walls. Nothing’s moved. The words barely made a ripple in the room. So I try another and another.
THIRTY
I used to be hungry all the time, ravenous, single-mindedly starving. I swam once before school and then again after, and I was never very good at packing food to take with me—neither was Maggie—so by the time I got home at night I’d be insane with hunger.
That’s why I didn’t notice anything strange when the carpool dropped me off that day. I went straight for the fridge, took a swig of 2 percent and rooted around for leftovers.
Then someone called out from the living room. Said, “Jolene, can you come in here?” I didn’t recognize the voice, but I went. Char and Cory were there. That was normal. But Jim sitting on the couch next to Maggie—that was not. Someone else told me to sit down, and from the way they spoke it was clear they’d planned it, but it was a shit plan because it wasn’t possible to feel like anything that happened next was really happening. No one had ever said to me, Sit down—we need to tell you something before, and I hadn’t even seen Maggie and Jim in the same room for years. It was like a TV show crossover episode where your favorite stoner dad and your favorite catastrophe mom join together in a story line so outrageously orchestrated it ruins both shows for you forever. Because when I was safely seated they told me there’d been an accident and Matt was dead, except that couldn’t be, because Matt didn’t do things like die. He would never do something like that. It was completely out of character. They should have delivered it in some different way, a way that would have made it possible for me to do anything other than sink away from them into myself. They should have told me in a way that made it real. They should have had Matt deliver the news himself. He would have done it better. He could do anything. Almost.
Here are some things that I know.
I know it was raining. (I checked the weather records for that night, among other things.) Not a hard rain; it was that fine, misty rain that doesn’t fall but sort of surrounds you, the kind umbrellas are powerless against.
I know he’d climbed that bridge before, with the friends he made staying at the hostel, friends he told me about when he called from the pay phone by the harbor, the same harbor that the bridge crosses. He would have been able to see it while he slid quarters into the slot and dialed home. That would have been the view.
I know that the bridge, a huge steel structure, is capable of splitting in half and rising up into the air to let ships pass between its gates, and I know that when it’s flat and at rest cars travel across it, joining downtown Victoria to the neighborhoods on the far side of the water.
I know the bridge is painted a blue that the skies don’t get out there. I know this because Matt told me so during one of those few phone calls that came in the weeks he was gone but not for good. He said Victoria had plant life bursting from every nook and cranny. He said even the junkies and bums who slept on the grass by the harbor had a million-dollar view. And he said the skies out there were either clouded over or a phony Disneyland blue and that on clear nights the sky went a color he’d never seen anywhere but the coast—black saturated by a vibrant blue. He said it must be the ocean reflecting or something.
But this bridge, the Johnson Street Bridge, it’s painted a prairie blue, the pure blue of an uncluttered sky. That seemed important to me when I saw it. I’ve looked at pictures of all the places he talked about on the Internet. It’s another use of technology I’m not sure I approve of.
On the bridge there’s a pedestrian path that’s separated from the road by a metal partition. At a spot just a little ways out on this path the steel supports of the bridge conceal a ladder, and if you plant your bum on the partition and swing your legs over, you can access this ladder and climb up to a catwalk about twenty feet above the road. Walk along the slick metal surface of this catwalk to the center of the bridge, and you’ll find another ladder. Climb it. At the top you pull yourself up onto a final catwalk, except this one is narrow, like a gangplank, with a metal railing on either side.
You are now high above the water and the road, and you hold on to the railing and walk out to the edge, where the catwalk ends. It’s not quite the middle of the night but nearly, and lazy patches of fog drift down from the clouds to lap gently at the edges of buildings. You sit down and let your legs dangle. Maybe you brought a beer along with you, and you drink it and you feel good, magic maybe, like you left your hometown on a whim and went as far west as you could go before you hit the ocean, and you stopped there to rest a while and found something that was all new and only yours. And maybe you go away in your head to think about things. Things you’ve done and things you haven’t done. Things you might do next. Maybe you just feel empty in a Zen sort of way. Or maybe you’re feeling badass, and when the beer is done you let the can drop, and you listen for the splash and maybe there isn’t one.
There are so many possibilities. I imagine them. It’s a big pastime of mine.
But this next part is the part I don’t know at all, can’t piece together with common sense or research on the Internet. I can’t track it down with a few phone calls, and I can’t ask an expert. They don’t have those.
The cops spoke to the people he knew out there, and to us, but in the end they could only call it an accident. But that’s not what it was. That’s too trivial a word for what it was. It was and remains a mystery. And it’s so hard to accept a mystery. Show me someone who doesn’t love answers. Give me one person. I’d love to meet them. Maybe they could teach me a thing or two.
So anyway, you’re on this bridge. And you sit there and do whatever, and when you’re done you stand up, out there on the catwalk, past where the railing ends, and maybe the height gets to you or your feet fail you, and you fall.
Falling is easy.
And what happens after the fall is beside the point.
It’s something else that haunts me.
I know how long the moment after your feet leave the ground lasts. How it stretches out and breathes. That’s what I hate to think. That’s the awful thought that comes to me when I’m alone at night trying to sleep, when I’m walking down the street with my head full of music only I can hear, when I’m sitting in class playing blind, deaf and dumb. It comes upon me regularly, the thought. I don’t want it to, and I really wish it wouldn’t, but it comes. What it must have felt like in that moment after his feet left the bridge and moved out to so
mewhere else. How long it lasted. How much he must have wanted to go back.
I know how it feels to me, and it’s the worst feeling I’ve ever felt. Wanting to go back. And I do. I want to go back and back and back again. Back before yesterday and the day before yesterday and the year before that. Back before traffic interrupted time. Before cavemen had clothes. Before we took liberties, tripped fancies and lived these lives of endless leisure. Back to before I knew what it was to beg of gods we were never brought up to believe in.
That’s what I want. That’s all.
THIRTY-ONE
I leave Groves’s house and let my feet go. Past parking garages and boarded-up buildings and discount retail stores. I walk past the university and the library and the big old beauty of the Hudson’s Bay building with its windows full of featureless mannequins in jaunty spring fashions. By the hockey arena, where people dressed in coordinated colors are milling about before the game. I walk by broken bottles and cigarette butts and puddles of frozen vomit that may well be my own. I walk by kids pushing grocery carts down the street to get their kicks and by a woman wearing three jackets who tells me that her face is melting and by a girl with a baby bundled into a stroller, waiting for a bus to come by with room to let them climb on board. I walk in circles and straight lines, and I walk in triangles and hexagons.
I don’t think about anything, but then the sun goes down and stays down, and I get cold, though it takes a while for me to notice in my condition. And it wakes me up. Snaps my mind back. Reminds me of the letter. And I want to know what it says. I need to.
At home I go straight to the basement, before anyone or anything can stop me. At the bottom of the stairs I stop, and my hand goes to my heart in surprise.
“Hey, sweets,” Maggie says. She’s sitting on Matt’s bed, blanket wrapped around her, and she smiles at me through her tears. She stands up, and I start to turn around, run away, but I’m so tired that suddenly I’m sinking, to the floor, to my knees, and she’s right there. She helps me up and sits me down and tucks the blanket around me. “Jesus, Jo. Your lips are blue,” she says, and I guess I wasn’t done crying after all, because I start to blubber all over again. But Maggie doesn’t seem to mind that I’m snotting all over her shirt. She just holds me, and I let her.