A Narrow Bridge

by J. J. Gesher

  Jacob sat on a low stool. He had not changed clothes since the funeral—his jacket was torn at the lapel as a physical representation of his grief. He was disheveled, his beard uncombed, with dark circles under his bewildered eyes. As the relatives and friends came in, they approached him to shake hands or offer a hug, but Jacob could not respond. When he was out of earshot, they whispered among themselves.

  “I came to show respect, but frankly I’m terrified to leave my own house. I’m afraid of everything.”

  “And who isn’t?” murmured another voice. “I won’t let my kids ride the bus.”

  A group of men picked up the conversation. “In Israel, things explode all the time—not only buses but cafés and markets—and everybody goes about their business.”

  “This is Brooklyn, not Tel Aviv,” said Rabbi Weiss. He was in his fifties, tall and thin. His salt-and-pepper beard reached past his neck.

  “They want to make you afraid. That’s the whole point.”

  “It will pass. I never thought we’d go back to normal after 9/11, but we did.”

  “What good does that do Jacob?” That voice belonged to David.

  David and Jacob had been friends since they were boys. They had always been such an odd pair—where Jacob was tall and good-looking, David was doughy and plain. The families’ friendship had even extended to the next generation, with Yossi and Jonathan, David’s youngest, in the same class at the yeshiva. Hava could tell by his solemn face that David felt the loss of Julia and the children acutely. How would he explain Yossi’s death to his own child? How could he promise to keep the midnight monsters at bay if Jacob hadn’t protected his own son? Jacob’s tragedy rendered them all vulnerable.

  David continued speaking quietly, afraid that Jacob would hear him. “He just sits. Doesn’t talk. Doesn’t move. I don’t know what to do.”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” said Rabbi Weiss. “Stay near him. I don’t want him to do anything foolish.”

  Many people talked to Jacob, but he appeared not to follow the conversations, as if he couldn’t make sense of the words. When a few of his students arrived, he looked at them without any sign of recognition. He was simply blank, stunned to his core, so deeply submerged in loss and grief that the outside world no longer existed.

  Hava was aware that Julia’s parents, Barbara and Steve, were huddling in a corner. Propriety dictated that she stand with them, but each time she approached she could hear Barbara reliving the moment she found out about her daughter’s death to whomever was offering condolences. Then Steve would counter by launching into a story about Julia’s resourcefulness. Each time, the same nonsensical story with no deviation, as if they were working from a memorized script.

  “After college, Julia lived with friends in a fifth-floor walkup in the East Village,” Steve would say. “Barbara thought the apartment was a hellhole, but the girls were delighted to be on their own and playing house.” At this point, Barbara would smile, and he’d continue, “The tiny living room was barely wide enough to accommodate the faded orange corduroy loveseat they’d rescued from Goodwill. The plates and kitchen supplies were leftovers from recently departed grandparents, and their stemware was a mismatched assortment of drinking glasses and old jelly jars.”

  Hava had no patience left. She wanted to scream. “Tell them something else about your daughter. What of her essence, her soul?”

  The relentless headache was making her unkind. Naomi, Jacob’s very pregnant sister, offered her mother a plate of food. Hava declined. She could feel the bile rising in her throat. She nodded toward Jacob.

  “See if your brother will eat something.”

  Naomi, dutiful, maneuvered through the crowded apartment toward her brother, squeezing her belly between a dozen or so of the guests.

  She passed by Rabbi Weiss. “Excuse me, Rabbi. Jacob needs to eat something.”

  “Let me have that,” the Rabbi said, taking the plate from her hands.

  Rabbi Weiss approached Jacob and handed him the food. Jacob put the plate down on the floor and looked away.

  The rabbi leaned in. “I know what you’re thinking. You want to know why this happened. I have no answers. But tragic events—like this—belong to a higher divine order that we cannot comprehend.”

  Weiss placed his hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “As you mourn, you need to remember that to God, there are no arbitrary happenings.”

  He offered his hand to help Jacob stand. “Come, Ya’akov, it is time to pray.”

  Daily prayers were conducted in the home of the bereaved family so they wouldn’t have to go out in public during shiva. The guests naturally segregated themselves, the women moving toward the kitchen, the men on the other side of the room. Even outside the synagogue setting, Orthodox Jews pray separately. Julia’s parents reluctantly followed orders, splitting up because they were too worn down by their grief to object. Barbara stood on Hava’s left and Naomi on her right. Without prompting, Barbara and Hava reached for each other’s hand.

  The men prayed, their eyes closed, their bodies bobbing and swaying, as they mumbled the ancient words of Hebrew text. Julia’s father opened a prayer book and tried to follow along. Hava noticed his unease. Most likely, Steve hadn’t held a prayer book since his own bar mitzvah.

  Jacob could not go through the motions of prayer. The rabbi’s words echoed in his mind. Even in his dazed state, he was deeply offended by the rabbi’s reasoning: God had sanctioned his family’s death? His beautiful wife, his innocent children—all part of some “divine plan”?

  He couldn’t concentrate. The last time his family sat shiva was when his father died. Jacob had been absent. Now he was confused. Was he mourning his wife and children? His father? All of them?

  His strongest memories of his father were the contentious Friday-night discussions. After Shabbat dinner, his father would propose a topic for the week. Usually the discussion was based on that particular week’s chapter from the Old Testament. Every Friday-night meal ended the same way. His father would settle in with a cup of tea and begin the weekly debate on an ethical dilemma. Using his finger as a flesh-and-bone exclamation point, he’d stab at the air and offer his opinion. Jacob would have loved engaging in philosophical gymnastics, but his father was a bully. If you didn’t agree with his way of thinking, then you were wrong. Not different, not insightful—wrong.

  One week, the discussion was about the mehitza, the wall that divided the men’s and women’s sections in the synagogue. The partition, present in Orthodox synagogues for centuries, had been constructed so that women would not distract the men from prayer. In some synagogues, women were relegated to a balcony; in others, they sat behind a wall at the back of the sanctuary. In Jacob’s synagogue, a five-foot latticed wall divided the room. The younger women had requested that it be lowered by eight inches so that they could participate more in the service. They knew that the mehitza kept them isolated, gossiping, and chasing children, when they wished for spiritual equality. Jacob thought lowering the partition was a reasonable request

  His father balked. Any modification was heretical. “Unacceptable! Feminist nonsense! The outside world will change, but our laws protect us. God ordained it this way.”

  Jacob argued, “Women have equal rights in the rest of the Western world. If we don’t modernize our traditions, we’ll alienate women.”

  Again, his father scoffed. “Soon these women will be asking to study the Torah with men. We cannot bend to the cultural winds of the day. Impossible!”

  Jacob kept his cool. “We’re strong enough to pray together without compromising our core values. We must allow women to participate…”

  “Nonsense!” his father bellowed.

  Jacob tried another tactic. “How are we different from fundamentalist Muslims who keep their women in burkas? They don’t allow women to pray with the men at the mosque.”

  Aaron Fisher slammed his hand on the table. “Enough! How dare you compare us to Arabs! Your views are idiotic and
destructive.”

  Jacob gestured to his mother and sister. “Why don’t you ask them how they feel? They’re not invisible.”

  When Jacob saw his mother and sister exchange looks, he knew that they’d chosen not to rock the boat.

  “Jewish men and women have prayed separately for more than three thousand years. I don’t see why we need to change now,” Aaron declared.

  The women got up to clear the table. They knew where the discussion was going. Aaron would berate Jacob until he either backed off or quieted down. The warmth of the Shabbat table would plunge to icy hostility as father and son locked horns.

  His mother had opposed his father in many ways, but years after his death, when she spoke of him, he was the perfect man, the most loving of husbands, the most gentle of fathers.

  Suddenly Jacob couldn’t breath. The reality of shiva was extracting the life from him. He stood and went to the bathroom. Although David followed discreetly, Jacob ignored him and closed the door.

  His legs wouldn’t hold him. He leaned against the bathroom door. Julia was dead. Julia was dead and the children never existed. All of them were figments of his imagination. Even he was a fabrication. Nothing was real. It couldn’t be.

  The bathroom had two doors: one to the hallway and one to the bedroom. Driven by some unseen force, Jacob quietly exited to the bedroom. From the bedroom window, he looked at the city below. Jacob opened the window. All those hovering people in the living room suffocated him. They meant well, but he couldn’t stand the chattering and was nauseated by the smell of all the food. He gulped the air from the open window, but it wasn’t enough. Taking only some cash and leaving his wallet and phone behind, he stepped through the window onto the external fire escape. There were only four flights to the street, where he could breathe.

  With a mix of remorse and reprieve, Jacob noticed that the early evening air felt good on his skin. Inside, a grieving house was stultifying. He told himself that all he wanted was a moment alone, but the brutal truth surfaced immediately. Jacob needed to get high. It had been years since he’d gotten clean, but that didn’t matter now. Obliteration was the surest way out of pain.

  Inside the apartment, David rapped softly on the bathroom door, “Jacob, you all right?”

  When there was no response, he knocked more insistently.

  “Ya’akov?”

  He jiggled the doorknob. The bathroom door was unlocked, and he cautiously entered; Jacob was nowhere in sight. He went into the bedroom—maybe Jacob was resting. But the room stood empty, the window fully open, and Jacob’s cellphone and wallet lay on the dresser. David looked out the fire escape to the street below. No one was there.

  David returned to the living room as the prayer service broke up. He approached Rabbi Weiss and whispered in his ear. They pulled Hava aside.

  “Gone?” she said with an edge of hysteria in her voice, “Where could he go?”

  “Maybe he went for a walk. He’ll be back,” the rabbi said reassuringly, sensing Hava’s fragility.

  Her brave face collapsed.

  Naomi came to her side. “Don’t worry, Mommy. Jacob needed to be by himself for a while. He probably went to get some fresh air. He’ll come back soon.”

  David prayed she was right.

  Within minutes Jacob found himself at the crosswalk where he’d last seen Trench McGinnis. Although he’d tried to mind his own business that day, he’d seen when Trench disappeared into the apartment building next to the cleaners. Maybe he lived there. Maybe he could score off him.

  The front door opened to a tiny vestibule with a buzzer security system.

  There it was—McGinnis—in a hand scratched add-on next to 309. He pressed the buzzer and waited. No answer. Trench wasn’t home, and the possibility of throwing away years of sobriety held its breath. He pressed the buzzer again, this time for an insistent ten seconds. The building’s front door swung open as a young woman, laden with groceries, made her way into the vestibule and juggled bags to get her keys.

  “Oh don’t bother,” she said in a heavy Brooklyn accent. “That intercom doesn’t work. I’ll let you in. Bang on the apartment door.” She turned her key in the lock and Jacob held the door for her, grateful for access.

  Each step of the three flights, Jacob silently repeated turn around. But he never did. Getting wasted felt inevitable. He stood in front of apartment 309 and knocked on the door. He could tell that someone was appraising him through the peephole.

  Within seconds, the door whooshed open. “Holy shit motherfucker.” Trench bear-hugged him in a cloud of yesterday’s garlic and stale cigarettes.

  Jacob stood rigidly, his arms at his side.

  “How the hell have you been?”

  After a strained silence, Jacob replied with a staccato, robotic summary: “Clean, wife, three kids. They all died in that bus explosion the other day.”

  Trench started to laugh. “Man, you always had a weird sense of humor.”

  His laugh dangled in the air half-formed. Trench watched Jacob rub his sweaty palms on his pants. He was telling the truth.

  “Jesus…I’m so sorry, dude. Come on in. Get out of the fuckin’ hallway.”

  Jacob stayed rooted. Trench gently guided him inside the apartment and closed the door.

  Jacob’s lower lip twitched before he spoke. “It’s bad, Trench, I need to get high. Can you help me?”

  Jacob wasn’t sure what he expected Trench to do—fill a bowl, whip out a needle, pop open a cap of oxy, but whatever form it took, he wanted the relief.

  “I got nothin’ that’ll help you.”

  Jacob stared at him, and then begged. “Please.”

  “I’ve been clean for four years. Besides, with everything that happened, you don’t want to do that.”

  Jacob could feel vitriol surge from the bottom of his feet. Trench owed him a fix. If Trench hadn’t saved him, he wouldn’t have gone to rehab, wouldn’t have returned to his community, wouldn’t have met Julia or fathered his children. If Trench hadn’t made that phone call, Jacob wouldn’t be alive. He wouldn’t be condemned to this agonizing reality.

  Trench crossed the room to his small kitchen and opened up the mini-refrigerator. “I got a ginger ale, and I can make you a turkey sandwich.”

  “Fuck you, Trench. Fuck you.” Jacob spit out through tightly pulled lips. He walked out the door. If Trench wasn’t going to help him, he knew where he could get what he needed.

  Trench’s voice faded in the background. “Jake, bro, you don’t want to do this.”

  CHAPTER 7

  After school that day, Rosie sipped a restorative cup of tea and ruminated about her day. Hansom, the boy from McDonald’s, the one with the terrible acne, was in her last class. She made a point of approaching him during discussions, but he didn’t engage. When she greeted him by name during lunch or passing period, he pretended not to see her. His body language told her that he was anxious, maybe even depressed. She made a mental note to talk to Kala.

  She gazed out her kitchen window at the street and the church beyond. The houses looked worn and poorly kept: weedy yards, junked cars, cracked driveways. Rosie felt self-doubt rising in her chest. Is this why she left Birmingham? Only Mo’s house and the church across the street still had green lawns.

  A few children a little older than Langston were outside tossing a football. Another was riding his bike up and down the block. They’d now been in Brent for months, and Langston had yet to find friends in the neighborhood.

  “Why don’t you go across the street and play? Those boys are about your age,” Rosie suggested.

  Langston glanced out the window and sized up the prospects. He shrugged off her advice. “I don’t want to.”

  Rosie didn’t give up. “You walk over there and stick out your hand and say, ‘My name is Langston, what’s yours?’ You remember how to shake hands the way we practiced? Firm grip, look people in the eye, and say your name.”

  “Kids don’t shake hands, Mom. And the big kid on th
e bike looks mean.”

  Uncle Mo came over to see what Langston was talking about. “He’s not mean. That’s Tyler. He’s got a cat named Bouncer, a fat old thing who used to come over here all the time—uninvited, I might add.”

  Langston lit up.

  “When Bouncer spies me on the porch, he strolls over, kinda sideways and a little zigzag, like he’s tryin’ to pretend that he’s not on his way. Then when he gets here he wraps himself around my legs until I scratch him behind the ear—has to be his left ear. That cat has me trained, I tell you.” Mo winked at Rosie.

  Rosie heard herself sigh in relief.

  “Why don’t we go sit on the porch and see what happens?” he continued. Langston was out the door before Mo could take one step.

  Rosie could hear Mo’s booming voice as he followed the boy outside, “Hey there, Tyler. I want you to meet my nephew. Is your cat around?”

  Uncle Mo was a better father than Langston’s own father could ever be, Rosie reflected sadly. She hadn’t imagined her life going so wrong when she married Robert. He had been a pre-law student and president of Alpha Phi Alpha at Morehouse College. Robert was the magnetic center of a cluster of cool guys. He was a natural leader with a mischievous sense of humor and a generous wallet.

  Rosie spent her undergraduate years at Spelman, a historically Black women’s college. She was quiet, content with a few close girlfriends and her books. Rosie was the one classmates turned to for lecture notes. Her color-coordinated loose-leaf binder, perfectly organized and totally complete, had proved many a friend’s savior during finals.

  All the girls in her sorority had a crush on Robert. So when he began lavishing attention on Rosie, she was flattered and willing. For the first time in her life she knew what it felt like to be attracted to someone. She couldn’t wait to be alone with Robert. She took pleasure in their drawn out, nothing-to-do-today lovemaking.