by Deb Caletti
He stares that other bridge down. He needs to know he can look right at it and take it. Some days, he can take it. A girl on a bike calls, “On your right,” and the walkway gets too crowded for him plus all the dogs, so he turns back.
He and the dogs are a well-oiled machine. If Amy or Lee or any of the interns tries to walk more than two dogs at once, it’s a shit show, let alone in a place like this. But the five of them, hell, they’re like ballroom dancers. They’re a flock of birds flying in a V, with him as their leader. They’re a . . . Wait. What? His heart almost stops.
At the small park at the foot of the bridge he sees that truck again. He’d know it anywhere. He recognizes those silvery bald patches, and the big, sturdy hood that looks like a friendly face with surprised eyes. It’s that girl. The one who was dumped by J.T. Jones.
What happens next—he doesn’t have words for it. He’s taken up, as if struck by a spell. A Fear Spell, likely, where an invisible cone of terror causes a living creature to panic, unless it succeeds in making a save. He’s terrified, all right. Panic has its hairy hands out. He has no reason to suspect what he does, none at all, no one even jumps from this bridge, but she is looking up at it, right at where he’s been standing, and he is sure, sure, he knows what she is thinking. The asshole dumped her, all right, and now look.
He starts to run. He flies around the corner of the stair rail and down the steps. She is heading toward him, heading up. The dogs feel his fear and energy and start to bark as they run beside him. They are a team of speeding superheroes. They need to stop her. His insides insist.
“No!” he yells. “Please, no!”
He’ll be so glad later, so glad, that with the roar of engines and clatter of steel, you can’t hear a damn thing down there.
Chapter Five
Suzanne Bellarose cries. Actually, literally cries, with one percussion hit of a sob. “How can I stay with him when he’s always taking off?” She blows her nose into a paper towel that has seen better days and tosses it (ick) onto the kitchen table. There’s a bunch of bills on there, too, and another unopened box from Amazon. She gets at least one a day. Mads is always at their house when the mailman comes. The packages pile up; the smiles on the sides of the boxes stack up against each other.
“It’s good you’re meeting Denise for lunch,” Mads says. She’s playing counselor. She’s gotten good at that. If you’ve gotten good at playing counselor, you probably need one yourself.
“Denise doesn’t understand. Denise has perfect Ben. And perfect Sophia. Do you know Sophia is walking already? She’s not even ten months. God.”
Mads wants to cup her hands over Ivy’s ears. She wishes for the millionth time that she could take Ivy away from here. The baby sits in her high chair, a handful of Cheerios spread out on the tray. One plump hand hovers over them, but she’s lost interest. Her blue eyes are wide, fixed on her mother’s face. There’s a single crease of worry between her brows, and her little rosebud mouth is half open, suspended between squall-or-not.
“Oh, look, Suzanne. It’s almost twelve thirty.”
“Great. Just great. Now I’m going to be late. Denise is always on time, of course.” Suzanne shoves her chair back, stomps up the stairs to the master bathroom. “Do you know how long I waited to find the right man?” she shouts. Mads hears a bathroom drawer slide open and slam shut again. “I could have married Zach Shelton. I could have had Terrance King. Carl doesn’t even realize.” Her voice tilts. It’s the sound of a chin lifted for a quick application of mascara.
Mads can’t wait for her to leave. Honestly, she can’t stand that woman. Mads is there every day for Ivy and Ivy only. She feels a duty. Duty is complicated.
Ivy tosses a few Cheerios from her tray and then looks down as if she can’t imagine how they got there. Another handful flies to the floor. She checks Mads for her reaction.
“Good trick, buttercup,” Mads says. She smiles at Ivy. She smiles tons to make up for all the upset Ivy’s seen. Mads is pretty sure every human being has a tally sheet on their spirit, so she does what she can.
“Gah,” Ivy says.
“Couldn’t agree more. Want to get out of that thing?”
Mads unsnaps the tray of Ivy’s high chair, and then unfastens the belt. She lifts the baby up. This makes Mads’s arms truly happy. Ivy smells of smushed, ripe fruit, and Mads has to stop herself from biting Ivy’s fat cheeks. She walks into the living room with Ivy riding her hip. Claire and Thomas helped set her up with this job, and out the front window, she sees their house. Olivia Watson is next door to them, and next-next door is Ned Chaplin, who lives alone with cats. Mads stands by the wall of photos, wishing Suzanne would hurry up and leave. Until she does, Mads has to be Perfect Babysitter, which feels like wearing tight pants. Ivy reaches out a hand and a framed wedding shot tips crooked on its nail.
“Aarl,” she says.
“A metaphor, huh?” Mads says.
“Dah.”
“I can see that. Look, there’s your dad. And there’s your mom. And Kitty. See Kitty?” Mads points now.
“Kee.”
“Exactly.”
Suzanne rushes down the stairs, heels clicking, handbag bouncing. “Come here, sweetheart! Come to Mommy.”
She swoops Ivy out of Mads’s arms. “Mommy will only be gone a little while. I will miss you so, so much! You be a good girl for Madison? Your mommy loves you so, so much!” Suzanne buries her face in Ivy’s neck as if she’s a soldier going off to war. Then she hands the baby back to Mads. Ivy starts to wail.
“It’s okay, sweetheart! Mommy will be right back! You’ll be fine! Oh, God, I hate it when she does that. I can’t stand to leave!”
“Bye, Suzanne,” Mads says. Ivy’s face is red from screaming and Mads is losing a few years of her good hearing.
“You call me if you need anything. If she doesn’t stop, I want to know.”
“We’re fine.”
“Bye, sweet girl. Mommy loves you, you know that, right?” Suzanne turns her back and shakes her head as if it’s all more than she can bear. She rushes out. Mads hears the car door slam.
The exhausting part of babysitting isn’t the baby. Any baby sitter knows this. Probably every teacher, too. Ivy sobs as if her days have ended.
“Come on, chickadee.”
Mads opens the sliding glass door to the backyard, takes the deck steps down to the lawn. “These are roses,” she says. “Beautiful, right? Yellow. Yel-low. Prickly, though. You have to be careful. All thorny things in general.” Mads uses her calm voice, but she is sick of people, and she’s crushingly sad, and full of love for Ivy. Mads’s flip-flops are off now, and there she is, stepping across the grass barefoot with a baby on her hip, totally unaware that the Big Guy Upstairs (or fate, or beautiful circumstance, or who-what-ever) is moving the pieces around for her, too.
“Another rose. Pink.” She says pink as if it were the most cheerful word there is, and, yeah, it’s probably in the top ten. “This one? Don’t know what it’s called, to be honest. Look at those big, fat flowers, though.” They’re cheerleader pom-poms, or the ball of fireworks that drips down like tears. Mads pats one, just a few hours before her life is about to change again.
“Your mom ought to water these.” The squall has turned to a hiccuping sob. “Okay, fine,” Mads says. “I’ll water them.”
With Ivy balanced on her hip, Mads squeak-squeaks the faucet on, and they stand together, watching the hose trickle. Ivy leans down to grab the water, and Mads sprinkles some on her hands and toes. “Funny girl, funny toes. All right, miss. You want to get down, huh? Now that the crisis is over, you’re ready to roll?”
Mads turns off the water, sets Ivy down on a blanket in the shade of the willow. Ivy takes off, crawling fast as a little bullet. Mads grabs her before she can eat a rock or something, sets her down so she can speed away again. This is a great game for only a little while, because Ivy’s ready for her nap. Abandonment is exhausting. So is being an object and not a person.
There’s a night-light in Ivy’s room in the shape of a moon, and there is wallpaper with bunnies, and a mobile of fleecy lambs. Ivy’s real life is crashing dishes and a silent dad who stomps off, and a mom who clutches her like a security blanket. It makes a person furious.
Ivy falls asleep fast. The house is quiet.
Back home, when Mads babysat, she’d snoop around the houses, trying to locate the secret everyone seems to have. She found a sex book in the Rowells’ dresser drawer, and bottles of Valium in the Chens’ medicine cabinet. With Suzanne and Carl, though, she has no desire to snoop. She wishes she could take away some of the things she knows, not add more.
Now, here’s what Mads intends to do: read the chapter “Contracts, the Fine Print,” study for Otto Hermann’s quiz. Here’s what she does do: opens her laptop. Looks at stuff. It’s all preamble. The things you do to cover the things you’re going to do. Even your own self needs a little fake-out before sliding into personal destruction.
She checks her e-mail. Sarah sent a bunch of pictures from a camping trip her friends took. They make Mads feel the same way every phone call or message from her friends does—as if that life is in the past. Even though she’s returning home eventually, that version of Mads is a sweet, gone thing, painful enough that it requires steady ignoring.
There’s a message from ColeSlaw1, too. This post-breakup reconnection is her fault. She called her old high school boyfriend, Cole, after the body in the water. She wanted to hear his familiar voice, wanted to feel like her former self for a minute and not a person who swam with a corpse. But since then, he keeps calling and texting. Why are you ignoring me? I just want to know you’re okay. I have to send a flipping e-mail? You sounded so awful. You scared me. . . . Come on, please! This is why clean breaks are best. The guilt-anger fills her. Sometimes, right or wrong, she can want just what she wants from a person and no more. She wants people close until they’re too close.
Next is an e-mail from Mads’s mom, who also calls every day, sometimes multiple times a day. This time she sends a link. It leads to a listing for an apartment near the Murray Realtors office. This is actually progress. Or maybe just a small negotiation for a larger gain, because before this, she hadn’t wanted Mads to move to a place of her own at all. Look at all the room I have! Free rent! It makes no sense to move out for the sake of moving out! Now she writes: Been on the market for eight weeks. I’ll go by and have a look. Maybe he’ll pay for this instead of college.
Of course, Mads knows who “he” is. “He” is her father, a fun, great-to-be-around guy, a hardworking, kindhearted, can’t-hurt-a-fly type person, who nonetheless swatted Mads right down to save himself. Her mother would prefer she not love him, but Mads does anyway. In secret. Even if he ditched her, she does. Even if he’s in Amsterdam, permanently ducking whatever flare his ex-wife shoots him, writing checks he’s able to write because of his whirlwind, busy-busy journalist job. He is fatherly by phone. Fatherly by long distance, something he may even have been when he lived with them. “He” gives practical advice, is disappointed that she isn’t going away to school, and will never understand that she can’t go away to school because he is in Amsterdam. A husband might ditch the joint, but a daughter never can.
None of these e-mails hold Mads’s attention, of course. It’s all picking at appetizers before the anticipated meal. Finally, she digs in. It’s like succumbing. It’s almost relief, the way it is with all obsessions. Anna Youngwolf Floyd. The eyes staring up, her cold skin—typing her name into the empty search rectangle makes Anna come alive. And now there is William Floyd, too, if that’s who that boy was. He ran like hell with that dog under his arm, drove off with him in the passenger seat, and now he is another lead, another inroad to an answer. Of course, Mads doesn’t even know what the question is, but that seems to be beside the point. Plenty of times there’s need with no clear reason at first.
She types in William Youngwolf Floyd. Types it in again, for the millionth time. She hopes some miraculous new bit of information will appear, but there’s only the same Seattle Times article. There’s a photo with it, two guys at the top of a snowy hill, a pair of flattened cardboard boxes under their arms. Roosevelt students William Youngwolf Floyd and Alex Banning take advantage of the record snowfall. She makes the picture as large as she can. It’s hard to tell if it’s even him, through the Lite-Brite speckle of pixels. His hair is shorter than on the boy she saw. He doesn’t even have a coat on! Still, his dark eyes stare right at Mads from the black-and-white snow day from two winters ago.
Where to look next? It doesn’t seem possible that with all the bits and volumes of information on the Internet there is only this. She hunts for other ideas. She clicks and pecks like a hen searching for an overlooked corn kernel. Seattle woman jumps from bridge. Son of. Seattle woman suicide. This leads her to a quiz. Are you depressed? Welcome to the Goldberg Depression Screening. Fine. She’ll take the stupid quiz. Why not? Maybe she isn’t even depressed! Maybe she’s just very, very tired. Number one. I do things slowly.
She pauses. It is a very slow pause. Not at all. Just a little. Somewhat. Moderately. Quite a lot. Very much. She answers after much time has passed.
My future seems hopeless.
Mads’s mind shoots her an image of those Murray & Murray business cards, all printed up and waiting. Do you know how many come in a single box? Hundreds. Hundreds! All in a row, smelling new and begging to be let free so they might circulate in the world. Here’s who I am and will always be, they shout. It’ll take her years to get through the ones her mom already ordered. Finished basements, empty rooms, the losses and leavings of other people—all of that will be hers as her mom leaves work early because her head hurts.
The big ogre of despair starts stomping around, now that his name has been called. He’s a familiar beast, and so is the way he pulls Mads in and shoves her down and makes her feel out of options. Damn you, Goldberg Depression Screening! It is hard for me to concentrate on reading, Mads reads, and then reads again because she can’t concentrate.
Enough! She moves on. Next, there’s a confessional article by a famous person about their struggles with depression. It is always worded like this, like Harrison and Avery wrestling after they make each other mad. It seems about right. Mads’s own arms feel locked behind her back, and the ogre has his chin in the soft place between her shoulder blades. Now another confessional article by a famous person, and another. No one can get out of bed, and there are lots of people curled up on bathroom floors. This also seems about right. Every day, Mads experiences a forced unfurling, the fight to rise; the ogre has his big, rib-eye hand on her chest.
These confessions—Mads knows they’re supposed to make her feel better. They’re meant to send helpful messages like You’re not alone and Me too and It can happen to anyone. But they don’t make her feel better. Maybe she shouldn’t even admit it, but the articles only feel like despair stacked on despair (Suzanne’s smiling Amazon boxes, upside down), and she needs to hear the okay part. She needs her famous people to conquer. She needs people older than her to cope. That’s unfair, but she does.
A scratching and rustling blares from the baby monitor. It sounds like a space traveler making contact with Earth. When Mads goes into Ivy’s room, Ivy is sitting up, her cheeks rosy from sleep, her hair sweaty.
“Well, hello, sunshine,” Mads says.
Ivy lets out a string of babble that might be a highly intelligent foreign language.
“Let’s get you changed.”
And then Mads finally does it. The thing she’s thought about since the first day she started working for the Bellaroses. The thing that will maybe-just-maybe keep her from being some bathroom floor person from the Goldberg Depression Screening. She packs Ivy’s bag. It gives her a weird release, relief from what feels stuck and immovable. She puts in Ivy’s favorite toys—the stuffed frog, and the ball that makes music. She fixes a bottle for the road and gets the formula powder to make more. In go the c
ontainer of Cheerios, and diapers. She packs a change of clothes for every season. And then she grabs her keys.
• • •
Mads’s father always says that if you have your phone and a credit card, you’ve got what you need for a trip. He said this whenever they went on vacation and her mom got all anxious about forgetting stuff back home. It’s also nearly all he took with him as he left when Mads was nine. (And, yeah, one other thing, too, but she doesn’t like to think about that.) This demonstrates the hurry he was in. Mads has her phone and the Visa her dad insisted she get to build credit. Pretty sure he didn’t have kidnap baby in mind.
“Cap-a-bility,” Mads sings, a song that just comes to her. She tries to rhyme it, but oh, well. She buckles the car seat into Thomas’s truck and lifts the strap over Ivy’s head. “What do you think about that, missy?”
“Burble gah.”
“Burble gah! I’d have said the same thing myself.”
Ivy rides along next to Mads. Mads has her window rolled down a bit, and Ivy’s wispy hair waves farewell. The baby slaps the glass with her hand, two smart smacks.
“Bah,” she says.
“Good riddance.” It’s an old-fashioned expression Mads remembers from scary, hunched Grandma Mary, Mom’s mom. It’s no wonder Mom is the way she is. Still. Mom had a bad childhood, which means, so did Mads. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
She has no plan, but Thomas’s truck does. It zips through Wallingford, where Claire and Thomas and the Bellaroses live, and then it heads toward the adjacent neighborhood of Fremont.
“Look, Ivy. See the water? See the boats?”
“Pree.”
Mads smiles. Ivy’s new words have lately been falling like snowflakes. “So pretty.”
God, it feels great. It feels fantastic, to get out of there, to flee. She’s as thrilled as Harrison was on the last day of school, his papers and school supplies already part of the past by the time Claire poured the celebratory Gatorade. Joy rises up, and Mads could fly on that joy forever, but Thomas’s truck has other ideas. It pulls off into the little park just before the Fremont Bridge. The lot is right underneath it, and the cars roar overhead. Mads feels the rumble and shake of metal.