“You said that before. It’s freaking the hell out of me.”
“You look just like me.”
“I noticed. That’s freaking me silly too.”
Jamie said, “Somebody named me after you, and I don’t think it was Grandma and Grandpa.”
He had finished with her face and was watching her intently. “Grandma and Grandpa who?”
“Bridger. Cletus Uru Bridger. Resurrection Lily Bridger.”
“My parents,” he murmured.
“I know. They raised me. Are you my father?”
He took her hand and said very softly, “Jamie, can we table that for just a little while? Till you’re feeling better?”
“I’m fine.” She lifted the ice off her nose and sat up to face him, wobbling only a little. “Please. I’ve got to know.”
“I wish I was. You are one gutsy kid.” But he sat there holding her hand and wearily shaking his head.
“You—you’re not?”
“No.”
But—this couldn’t be happening. “You have to be,” Jamie insisted. Nothing made any sense otherwise. “Could—is it even a little bit possible? Maybe you didn’t know—”
“Jamie,” he interrupted gently, “there is no possible way I can be your father.”
“But—”
“Look at me. Read my lips.” The warmth of his hand and the sadness of his smile took the sting out of this. “Jamie, I—assuming you know where babies come from—it can’t be me. I have never had sex with a woman. No woman. Ever.”
It was such a bizarre, extreme day that this did not embarrass her. But it did surprise her, because he was very good-looking. She sat there staring at him with her mouth open. “You—you’re a virgin?”
Looking back at her, his eyes winced. His face went pink. He looked down at the carpet.
Then his friend, David, the big blond man, walked over and put a hand protectively on his shoulder, looking levelly at Jamie.
“Oh,” she whispered, getting it. “Oh.”
Bridger nodded.
“They—he—threw you out because—”
He looked up at her again. “Because I’m gay. Yes.”
It made sense; it was just what Grandpa would do—but nothing made sense. “Great,” Jamie whispered, and then she heard herself shouting it. “Oh, just great!” She was on her feet, shouting. “Just wonderful! My grandpa eats stewed chicken and dies and my grandma is sitting on her big butt in a closet and I’m failing school, I never have time to do art anymore, the checkbook is totally screwed up and I come all the way to New York and forget to tip the cabdriver and now you’re gay! Where’s my father, where’s my mother? Who are they?” Her head ached, her face hurt, her throat hurt from shouting, everything hurt. She started to sob. “I want—somebody.”
“Jamie. Shhhh.” Bridge stood up and put his arms around her, and she was hanging onto him and sobbing on his shoulder, and he was patting her back, soothing her shoulders. “Easy, Jamie. Easy.” He felt big, strong, solid, warm, his hands warm on her back, his face warm against her head. “We’ll work on it,” he told her. “We’ll figure it out, I promise you. We’ll find out who you are.”
Chapter
9
“Could you have a brother or sister you don’t know about?” Jamie asked Bridger. “Could that be where I came from?”
“Not likely.” But Bridge spread his hands. “A few hours ago I would have said no way, not in a thousand years, but now I’m not sure of anything.” Jamie had been telling him her story, and he looked stunned, dazed by the implications. “They withheld important information from you. Maybe they withheld important information from me.”
From where she sat at Bridge and David’s dining table, Jamie could see her reflection in their mirrored wall, and the sight of herself made her wince. Swollen mouth, bruised cheek, black eye—she looked awful. Yet she felt fine in a what-a-day sort of way. Her belly was full of David’s good veal tetrazzini. She had phoned Kate to tell her she was okay. She was going to bunk on the sofa for the night, and Bridge was going back to Dexter with her in the morning. She had gotten silly trying to explain to Kate that Bridge was not her father after all, but he was still Grandma’s son, and he wanted to see her. Which he did, very much. He did not seem to believe how nuts Grandma was. My whole life is nuts, Jamie thought. Surreal. So surreal, she no longer felt very teary. Mostly she felt interested in how strange things were.
“Maybe I’m really some sort of cousin or something.” David came in from rinsing plates and said, “This is starting to sound like a logic problem, and I have often wondered whether logic can be applied to Bridger.”
“David is a data analyst on Wall Street.” Bridge smiled and reached for pen and paper. “Let’s see if he can analyze this situation.” He wrote down:
POSSIBILITIES LIST
Jamie is child of unknown brother or sister.
Jamie is some sort of cousin or something.
“Good grief,” Jamie whispered, watching. “Your handwriting is just like mine.”
“So we’re time-warp twins, so what else is new?”
Jamie said, “Maybe a mad scientist stole body cells from you and kept them for fourteen years and did a sex change on them and made them into me.”
“I am not going to write that down,” Bridger complained.
“Or maybe we’re both aliens.”
Bridger rolled his eyes, but David laughed so heartily he stamped his feet. “I like it! It fits.”
“This is not one of your sci-fi novels,” Bridger grumbled. “Don’t get him started, Jamie.”
Jamie said, “Okay, how’s this one. You had sex with a woman and you don’t remember. Like, you got drunk.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Okay, you’ve got amnesia.”
Bridger sighed and pushed the list away. “This isn’t working.”
“Maybe I’m adopted,” Jamie said. “Maybe I’m no relation to you at all.” Damn, her voice was going ragged. “Maybe I’m never going to have a family.”
“Now you listen.” Bridge leaned forward and took her by the shoulders, looking straight into her eyes. “No matter what we find out, you’re precious to me, understand? Good grief, we both have the same name, we look alike, we were raised by the same neurotic people. That’s more connected than most families ever get.”
Jamie gazed back at him and felt herself smiling but could not speak.
“I am so pissed that nobody told me about you when I went back.” Bridger let go of her to clench his fists. “Those damn tight-ass neighbors, I could fry them in oil. Them and that snotty lawyer. They’d guessed about me, or heard about me, I could see it in their eyes, and they wouldn’t tell me anything. Polite pricks.”
“That was the same feeling I got,” Jamie said, trying to straighten out her loopy smile. At least her voice was behaving now. “They weren’t telling me things.”
“Yeah, well, screw them all. We’re going to find out the truth. And I think what we’re going to find out is that we’re related somehow, Jamie.” Bridge leaned back, and his smile was just as wide and loopy as hers. “I’d like that. I want family too.”
“If we can find Grandma’s sister Amaryllis,” Jamie said. “I bet she can tell us something.”
“Aunt Mary!” Bridge stopped smiling and sat up straight. “That’s right, her real name was Amaryllis. Amaryllis Duncan. I would have tried to get in touch with her years ago, but I couldn’t remember where she was from.”
“Someplace around Chicago, the Wolgemuths said. But they didn’t tell me her last name.”
“Duncan, I’m sure it was Duncan. Aunt Mary and Uncle Don Duncan.” Bridge got up and paced around the room, he was so excited, but he did not go near the phone. “We’ll track her down, Jamie, but—but not right now. Can you wait one more day?” He turned to her, appealing. “I want to see Ma first.”
“Sure.”
“I know she’s in bad shape, but I’m a never-say-die dreamer, okay? Dee
p down she knows where she got you from, and I’m still hoping she’ll tell us herself.”
David stood watching from across the room as Bridger gave Jamie another ibuprofen and asked her if she had brushed her teeth and brought blankets to the sofa for her. The tough guy actually tucked her in. Sure, Bridge was a nurse, and a good one, but from what David could see, the way Bridge felt about Jamie was even more than the way a good nurse cared about somebody who had been hurt.
“G’night,” Bridge told Jamie softly. “Holler if you need anything, all right?”
She did not answer. Already asleep, or nearly asleep. Worn out. What a day for her.
What a day.
Bridge padded across the carpet to David and touched him on the shoulder. The two of them walked softly to their room.
“You okay, buddy?” Bridge asked, keeping his voice down.
David told an untruth. “I’m fine.”
“Well, I’m not. I’m flabbergasted.” Bridger sat on the edge of the bed, his eyes round. “I get up this morning, just another day in the life, Saturday off, I have lunch, do a little shopping, I’m walking home and there’s a commotion and zap, kazowie, things are never going to be the same. Where the hell did she come from? Who is she? Did you ever hear of anything so weird?”
David had an idea he knew who Jamie was, but he just shook his head, sitting on the thick charcoal-gray carpet to listen to Bridge babbling. The only other time he had ever heard Bridge talk this much was one night when there had been a particularly ugly death in the emergency room where Bridge worked. There was nothing ugly about Jamie, but still—Bridge was in shock.
“I gotta pack.” Bridge stood up and went to his dresser, rooting through its drawers in a useless way. “Better take a suitcase, I guess. Gotta call my supervisor in the morning.”
“Here.” David got up and gently pushed Bridge back to his seat on the bed. “I’ll do it.” He started to organize a toiletries bag for Bridge.
“I might have to stay a few days,” Bridger said.
David nodded, keeping his eyes on what he was doing. He had known Bridger for only a few months, but badly wanted to know him forever. He was frightened. He wanted to say, Please don’t go. He wanted to say, Please come back soon. Please come back. Don’t let them take you away from me.
He said nothing, because he loved Bridger, and loving Bridger meant letting Bridger do what he had to do. Time would tell whether Bridger loved him.
“It’s so strange,” Bridge was saying. “Every time I look at her, it’s like déjà vu, you know? Like looking back on my own childhood. I mean, I know Jamie is Jamie, she’s herself, not me, and I know I’m going to learn to appreciate her that way, but for right now—comforting her is like comforting myself, consoling her is like consoling myself. I feel about fourteen years old, but it’s like—I’m finally going to be able to heal the inner child in me, you know?” A moment’s silence, then Bridger made a face. “God, I sound like a TV psychologist.”
“Not really,” David said. “You sound more like a person telling the goddamn truth.”
The six-hour bus ride back to Dexter went fast for Jamie, because she and Bridge talked almost the whole way. They talked about Grandma’s strawberry pies. They talked about Grandpa’s waffle-potato-noodle-stuffing-stewed chicken dinners. They talked about the house in Silver Valley, and the front room where Jamie had slept, which had been Bridger’s room also. They talked about Bridger locked out and crying in a toolshed. They talked about New York City. They talked about Jamie’s art. They talked about TV shows they liked, movies, books they had both read. They told each other stupid jokes, and laughed so loud that people looked at them. They found that in many deep ways, and small ones too, they understood each other. By the time they got to the outskirts of Dexter, Jamie felt as if she had always known Bridger.
“Almost there,” she told him. Then she noticed his face had lost its color. “You okay?” she asked him, thinking maybe he was going to be sick. Bus fumes always made her sick, except today.
“Scared,” Bridger said.
“Hey,” she told him tough-kid-style, “the old man is dead. And even if he wasn’t, you’re a fighter now. You could whip his butt.”
“I know.” He managed a tense smile. “That’s why I learned to box, so nobody could ever throw me out in the cold again. But funny thing.” He lost his smile. “It doesn’t help.”
“What doesn’t help?”
“Being able to wallop people. It just doesn’t cut it. It—it’s not what I really want.”
Jamie knew what he wanted, and knew he was not likely to get it, and could not think what to say.
“I’m scared of—of seeing Ma.”
There really was nothing to say.
“Jamie.” He turned to her, his face tight. “What do you think, really, about me—my being gay? Truth. Does it bother you?”
Maybe it would later, when she had time to think; maybe it would bother her some. But at that moment it honest to God did not. Jamie said, “Bridge, my life is so screwy right now that having a gay virgin for a father seems normal.”
His jaw dropped, and then he leaned back in his seat and banged his head against the window glass and laughed. He laughed all the way to the bus depot.
It was a long walk from there to the house, and the walking seemed to relax him. He looked around Dexter with interest. “Hideous town,” he said with a sort of awe. By the time he and Jamie got to the mailbox with CLETUS U. BRIDGER stenciled on it, Bridge looked ready.
Jamie, however, had seen the sign that had appeared in Kate’s front yard, and felt far from ready to deal with anything.
Kate met the two of them at the front door and hugged Jamie hard. “I kept putting off telling you,” she said.
“Later,” Jamie told her.
“What happened to your face? Somebody hit you. You didn’t tell me somebody hit you!”
There was a lot Jamie had not yet told her. “Later. Is Grandma okay?”
“About the same.”
“Is it okay for Bridge to come in? She’s not going to come downstairs and run into him, is she?”
“Not likely. She hasn’t come downstairs all weekend.”
Bridger was already in, setting his suitcase by the door, looking around with his face very still, as if he were listening to voices nobody else could hear. When Kate said hi to him he smiled at her, but the smile left quickly. His eyes left her to scan the room.
“I remember things,” he murmured. “The green lamp. That corner shelf.” He took a few steps toward it. “That stupid china horse. I used to love that china horse.” It was a homely blue-brown thing with one hind leg broken and glued back together. “I broke it, playing with it when I wasn’t supposed to. Mama fixed it quick and didn’t tell Pa.”
“She never told me how it got broken,” Jamie said. Did Grandma remember? Why had she kept the horse? Did she ever look at it and secretly think of her lost boy?
Silence. What now? Jamie was wondering, but she set her stuff down and waited.
“God, it feels like the old man’s still in here.” Bridge hunched his shoulders, shuddering.
“He’s not,” Jamie said rather sharply. Even in midafternoon there was never enough sunshine in Dexter to drive the shadows out of the corners. She did not like this shadowy house or this room with the recliner where Grandpa had died, and she did not like what Bridge had said.
He did not look at her, but at the china horse. “Ma’s in the closet upstairs,” he said.
Both Kate and Jamie nodded, though it was not really a question.
Bridge stood with an intent look on his face. “She’s frightened,” he said mostly to himself, and he headed for the stairs.
He padded up quietly on his sneakered feet. Kate and Jamie looked at each other, then followed.
It was mostly dark up there. Shades were drawn—Grandma wanted it that way. She seemed to be afraid of the window glass, the brightness, and Bridge seemed to know it. He did not turn on
a light.
“Ma?”
She did not answer, but there was a scraping sound from the far side of the dim bedroom. Jamie could vaguely see Grandma’s feet in their old-lady oxfords as she pulled them farther into the closet. She could see Grandma’s thick legs in their support hose. The rest of Grandma was a squat shape hiding behind housedress skirts, huddled in a corner.
Bridger got down on the floor to make himself less tall. “Ma,” he said. His voice sounded unsteady, and he let it tremble; he let it go up high and quavery. “Ma, it’s dark in here. I’m scared.” He started to cross the room toward her on his knees.
“Ma. Mama. Don’t let him get me.”
There was a sound like a sob from the closet, and Grandma’s voice whispered hoarsely across the shadows, “Jamie?”
Outside the door, the girl Jamie Bridger could barely stand still and watch. She grabbed for Kate’s hand and held on.
“It’s me, Ma.” Bridge had tears in his voice.
“Jamie!” Grandma cried out the name. “Oh, Jamie, are you all right? You mustn’t come in here.”
Bridge stopped where he was, in the middle of the bedroom. “It’s cold, Ma, and it’s dark, and I’m scared.” He meant it. Even though it was a June afternoon, to Bridger it was that terrible night in January. He was remembering, and letting himself feel the pain. His voice quivered with pain. “Ma, I need you.” He sank down on the braided rug. “Ma. Mama. Please, you’ve got to come out and help me.”
Bridge hugged himself, sitting on the rug, swaying, bent over. Was he crying? In the dim light it was hard to tell, but Jamie thought so. She bit her lip and took a step toward him, but Kate held her back. “Wait,” Kate whispered.
Jamie waited. It might have been a minute, a long minute, silent except for the sound of someone sobbing—Grandma? To Jamie the time seemed like an hour.
“Mama,” Bridger begged.
“Jamie, no.” She was crying hard. “Daddy—wouldn’t—”
“Mama!”
And his mother came to him.
The housedresses swayed as if a winter wind had blown through, and their metal hangers rattled as Resurrection Lily Lutz Bridger surged up from their folds and lunged toward her son. With shaky old hands she touched his head. She toppled to her arthritic knees beside him and pulled him into her arms. Bridge clung to her, hiding his face against her shoulder.
Looking for Jamie Bridger Page 8