The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  In his turtle-ish hand he holds a pair of faded jeans. No underwear, but this is not a store. This is not her room. This is not the day before. When she lets the folded jeans fall open, the smell of mildew plumes, but it’s just the scent of towels that have been folded still wet. How she’d hated that smell back when she was stupid! When she could throw a sour towel back into the dirty clothes basket unused.

  Thisbe studies a grayish rag balled up and dry in the tiny stall shower. Fossilized there. She picks it up and holds it to the showerhead, creaks the handle. Only a trickle of water spills out.

  “What are you doing, Julia?” the man asks.

  “Wathing.”

  “The shower doesn’t work right.”

  She can see that. But there’s a little water, a shard of old soap. She uses it and puts on the old jeans. It’s not good but it’s better.

  When she leaves the bathroom, he holds the duct tape and strips of cloth. The knife is right beside him on the table.

  He says he’s sorry to tape her wrists again, but he isn’t sorry. The tears she meant not to cry are oozing out of her eyes again. “It will all come back,” he says, “and then we’ll be together again, like we used to be,” and she stiffens with the fear that the man used to have sex with Julia. Only when she’s lying once again in the aft cabin behind the locked door does she permit herself to move her hands against each other to see if the tape can be stretched this time.

  In the silence she hears water. Lapping, flowing, lapping. The water might be moving around the boat or the boat might be moving through the water. If they’re sailing, how far have they gone? How many miles a day, and for how many days? An engine starts, then sputters, starts again, and holds. All she can see through the porthole is sky, and the sky is blue-green, a trick of the glass or the time of day, she can’t tell, so she rubs her wrists together slowly, the way you might rub the edge of a bandage that has been glued to your skin for too long, the way she used to rub the stickers on the spines of library books that said, in red letters, 14-Day Book, knowing that eventually the edge of the sticker would dry up and curl away because she couldn’t let it alone.

  Jerome dropped his tennis bag by the front door, where it basically blocked the whole entrance to the kitchen, as his mother had many times pointed out, and took Maddy out on her leash. The sun on his skin was perfect, dry but not hot, weather his mother said he should learn to appreciate because his dad was emphasizing small liberal arts colleges now, especially DePauw. Friendly coach, full scholarship, midwestern values, his dad’s relatives within range for dinner, especially Thanksgiving, because it would be too far to come home, and never mind that it was Division III, which just meant, according to his dad, that Jerome could play every match and win some. Jerome knew the truth was he hadn’t panned out. At ten he had seemed headed for the highest high-holy teams, the kind his dad hadn’t been able to play on, but the better Jerome got and the higher he climbed in the rankings, the more kids he faced who practiced like he practiced and played like he played, who had also been competing, since six or eight or ten, for the highest high-holy teams, and who maybe had something he didn’t.

  The text that came through as Maddy sniffed a telephone pole said, Jerome?

  He didn’t want to answer it or even show that he was there. He let Maddy go to the end of the extending cord and then tugged her back. He typed, Who’s this?

  Thisbes sister Ted.

  He allowed part of himself, a small part, to hope that Thisbe’s sister, who thought he was a beast, was texting him secret information about Thisbe, who regretted her association with Clay and was in love with Jerome, spent her nights crying about it, actually, and Ted wanted Jerome to know that.

  Hi, he said.

  But it wasn’t like that. It never was. All Ted said was, Have you seen Thisbe today or last night?

  No, he said. Of course Thisbe wasn’t crying in her room over the stupid choice she’d made. Who wanted Jerome, anyway? Probably not even DePauw. He thought about adding, Did you check with the stoners because they’d probably know. He didn’t, though. He walked up the steps with Maddy and left the door open so she could sit on the threshold, half in, half out, while he made a sandwich that he ate in four bites because he didn’t want to taste it.

  What the crazy man is doing she has no idea. They are definitely anchored somewhere. It can’t be the open sea because she’d be seasick, wouldn’t she? Or is the sea calm right now? She should tell him she gets seasick. She might barf again while she’s locked in the cupboard and die.

  A splashing sound. Scraping. Through the porthole she sees nothing but sky. The same blue-green color. It’s impossible to tell what time it is, or to feel that time will pass.

  She lies on her side, knees bent, and thinks. A yellow taxi pulled over in front of her, she remembers that. Yellow with black letters that said Eritrea on the trunk. The driver was a black man with bony shoulders who told her to get in. The taxi driver is or is not a part of what is happening now? She got into the taxi, and the backseat had no padding, so you felt the round springs. “My phone died,” she said to him, by way of explanation. The thought came to her, too late, that she was in a taxi without her purse. Like a dream of being at school in your underwear. She asked the man from Eritrea with the long, slender hands to pull over right at the end of the bridge, in Tidelands Park, and she told him she was sorry, so sorry, that she had no purse. She promised to send him the money. He said no. He said it was nothing. She said please give me your address and I’ll send you money. He wrote it down on a piece of paper he tore from a book. Did he have something to do with Julia? He stayed in the taxi and she walked toward the bay, across the wide lawns of Tidelands Park. The boots were bugging her, slowing her down, so she stopped and took them off. Where was she going? Home. She was planning to walk home under the bridge.

  But when she turned the corner at the golf course, where the bike path ran straight like a gray ribbon, a man came out from the bushes. “Julia,” he said. The bristly beard, the tanned skin like the neck of a tortoise, the blue spot on his lip. He wore a beanie and a stained sweatshirt, the look of scary imploring.

  “I’m not Julia,” she said, and kept walking, but the man followed her, his feet scraping gravel on the asphalt path.

  “Julia,” he said again. “Forgive me.”

  If only she’d had money, she could have paid the man from Eritrea to drive her home. She walked faster, but the man followed.

  “I saw them all, Julia,” he said. “The seven signs.”

  She started to run with her boots clutched hard against her chest, awkward running, sharp stones underfoot. She heard him ask forgiveness one more time before she felt the pain in her arm, a violent shuddering that spread and stiffened in all her bones at once, and before she fell like a dropped puppet, the trees on the golf course grew whiter, taller, almost human with their muscled arms reaching upward in the empty air.

  On the night of what Clay called his Spring Fiestathon, Clay’s older sister, Renee, was supposed to be in charge, which was a laugh. “Be good,” she said before she left. There were already fifty or sixty people there.

  Even when the house was full of kids drinking out of red cups and making out, you could sit and stare at the water flowing past like a river. That’s what Jerome usually did: sat in one of the ultramodern chairs with immaculate white upholstery (they somehow never got stained or grimy like the chairs on the balconies of the Deckerling Arms) with a rum and Coke that he dumped out in the bathroom sink when the ice melted so he could refill. This way he never felt more than a slight buzz, which he would have gotten anyway from sitting on that lawn by the bay as it turned cobalt, then lilac, then flickered in the dark like a black-and-white movie.

  It wasn’t like he spent a lot of time with Clay at the parties now. The parties were places for Clay to circulate, sexually speaking. The girls he’d had in the past still came to the fiestathons—Clay couldn’t really stop them, because once the word got around, all
the juniors and any underclassmen who thought they could enter unchallenged would show up—but Clay wouldn’t talk to conquered facilones (which even Jerome with his mediocre Spanish knew meant “the easy ones”), no matter what they wore or said or did. The girls never seemed to learn from each other. Didn’t they think the same thing could happen to them? Was it just Clay’s looks, or was it the house?

  Until Clay had started fishing for Thisbe Locke, not one girl had ever been hard to catch. Thisbe was smarter than the girls Clay usually liked, for one thing. She took multiple AP classes, which is why Jerome knew her. She didn’t go to parties. She didn’t (though he sort of wished she would) post pictures of herself in a bikini so her girlfriends would write, you r so gorgeous girl!!! She was beautiful, in Jerome’s opinion, with a narrow, intelligent face. Her lips were naturally dark and full, like lips in a painting, and her eyes were the exact shade of brown as his Doberman Maddy’s eyes, which would have been a weird comparison except that no one looked at you the way that dog did: the steady, confused, worried response to being stared at. If you looked into Maddy’s eyes, she looked back with a sweet, unnerving doubt that always made him say, “Relax, Maddy, you’re the predator here.” Maddy didn’t seem to know her own power, and neither did Thisbe.

  Thisbe’s legs were long and she didn’t have a narrow waist or wide hips; she just went straight up. He’d see her walk in and sit down and he’d forget to notice what they were talking about in English because his whole mind was now occupied by the nearness of her. One time on his way to a tennis lesson, he saw her walking down the sidewalk in pink rubber boots and shorts and a tank top. Rain boots, even though the rain had stopped so long ago that Jerome was positive the courts were dry. “Hi, Thisbe,” he said, turning around so he could see the way the tank top was tight on her breasts. “Hi, Jerome,” she said, which was the first time she uttered his name.

  The worst, most soul-corroding part was that Clay never would have noticed her if Jerome hadn’t pointed to Thisbe (crossing the quad in a white skirt, arms folded, hair in a ponytail) and said, “Her,” when Clay said, “Come on, Jeronimo, who would you pick? First choice, I mean, not who could you get.”

  Thisbe walked, Jerome pointed.

  “Frisbee?”

  Jerome had forgotten that people used to call her that, and Clay sounded incredulous.

  “Forget it,” Jerome said. He didn’t want to hear why she was inferior to girls Clay picked up.

  “Awesome taste, bro. You should do it,” Clay said. “Make a move.”

  “Nah.”

  “Come on, Hairr-oh-nee-mo. I thought you said you liked her.”

  “Forget I said anything.” He liked her but he didn’t want to talk to Clay about it.

  “You’re a junior, bro! You never get any, and it’s disturbing. I’ve seen how you work on the courts—you like to be the dark horse. Maybe that’s your problem.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “You have to be four down before you try to win.”

  “That’s not true,” Jerome said, though for a second it flattered him that Clay knew his game so well. Clay had seen more of Jerome’s matches than anyone except Jerome’s dad, and he always knew the score, which was more than you could say for the other four people in the stands, usually the mothers of freshmen. Ask Clay after a match if that kid had hooked you in the second game of the first set, and he’d know.

  The winter went on, bright blue and cold in the morning, balmy all afternoon, rain falling seldom, though it was the season for it. Jerome went on going to class and hitting with Rolf and not doing anything about Thisbe until he got the flu and missed two days of English. He thought about texting her, Did you get the notes in Shao’s class? but he didn’t have her number. That Friday night he was doing homework because he had a tournament in Palm Springs, and Clay was lying on his bed, telling Jerome to get done already because Clay wanted to get MTO, and it took Jerome a second to remember that MTO wasn’t a drug or a sex thing but Mexican takeout. Suddenly Clay said, “Look who’s posting helpful homework hints on a Friday night! She’s your total soul mate, man.”

  Clay held out his phone to show Jerome the name beside a tiny picture of what looked like a painting of squiggly vases: Thisbe Locke.

  “What the hell is that?” Jerome asked.

  “She says it’s the painting in the poem.”

  They stared at the picture together. Vases, bowls, a strange blue blob. This was going to be one horrible essay assignment.

  “Dude,” Clay said. “I’m getting a headache because you’re taking so long! Do you have any Motrin?”

  Jerome shouldn’t have left his computer behind, since he was logged on to Facebook, but the Motrin was in his mother’s bathroom, and then he had to wash a glass because his mom hadn’t done the dishes in a while, and then he went to the trouble to get fresh ice cubes out of a tray because one time Clay had said, “Why does your ice taste so weird, man?” and Jerome didn’t say it was because the Mooreheads probably had springwater piped from Switzerland to their giant freezer’s ice-cube maker. Jerome’s extra effort allowed Clay to have a pretty long chat with Thisbe on Jerome’s computer.

  When Jerome came back with the bottle of pills and the ice water, Clay was looking very amused.

  “What?” Jerome said.

  “Laying the groundwork, man. Laying it down.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Clay showed him the speech bubbles:

  “Crackadilic?” Jerome said, practically exploding. “What the hell does that mean? Did you have to pretend to be me and talk like a total imbecile?”

  “ ‘You have a large and interesting vocabulary,’ ” Clay said, quoting one of their English teachers.

  “In which the word crackadilic does not appear.”

  Clay just laughed while Jerome started typing in a mad rush to tell Thisbe that wasn’t really him a minute ago, and she said, Sayonara, you crackadilic pranksters. That was sort of funny but it was hard to tell if she thought he was a jerk, so when Clay left by himself to get MTO for both of them and Jerome saw she still had a green light by her name, he said, Hi again.

  He could have taken a picture of himself but he always looked stupid in that camera’s little eye, like his nose was a foot wide and his eyes were closed. The poetry handout was nearby, flipped open to the poem Jerome was writing a bunch of nonsense about, something called “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” so he skimmed it for the lines he’d sort of liked when Mr. Shao had read it aloud: I am one of you and being one of you / Is being and knowing what I am and know. God, no, not that. It would sound like he wanted carnal knowledge or something.

  I am the angel of reality, he typed.

  It was like being kissed on the cheek by Señora Moorehead. Sexier, though. God, he was deprived.

  To keep things going, he said, So that’s the painting, huh? The picture you posted. He could see the vases and blobs better on the computer than he could on Clay’s phone, but it was still nothing like he’d thought the painting would be when Mr. Shao said the poet was writing about some picture he’d bought. Jerome thought a painting called “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” would at least have an angel in it, something you’d see in church over the altar, where flat-faced women held flat-faced babies under flat-winged doves. I don’t get it, he said.

  The bowl on the left is the angel, she said.

  He wanted to say something about what he liked so she wouldn’t think he was stupid, but it would take too long to do that and he wasn’t sure what he liked except for the part about being one of you and knowing what you know.

  I don’t get the poem at all, he said.

  She didn’t say anything back, and he didn’t want to go on and on about his inability to understand poems that were like a cross between the Bible and Dr. Seuss, so he changed the subject. Did you get the notes in history? I had early release today. He already had the notes from Gabe Friesen but she didn’t have to know that.
>
  A photo appeared. Her notes were a billion times more detailed than his, and her handwriting, dark and limber, could be a type font called Thisbe. Her fingertips showed at the edge of one page, the little half-moons white above her cuticles. He printed the pages even though he could see the words better on the screen, where he could (and did) zoom in and out (feeling more deprived and depraved), and said, Thanks. I owe you.

  Yes, you do, she said, and he floated on that all evening, pathetically.

  —

  For the next four school days, he looked at her empty chair in English and his empty in-box at home, slowly accepting that she thought he was too stupid for further communication, and then a message came during dinnertime, while his mother was reading the newspaper and he was reading an old Entertainment Weekly, a routine they’d developed because she was so tired of pretending to be cheerful with her dying clients that she didn’t want to talk at dinner.

  His mother was engrossed in some article about vacationing in Greece, her glasses low on her nose, her Stouffer’s lasagna half-finished and cold.

  Standing up got his mother’s attention, and she studied the look on his face (he knew he was grinning but he didn’t care) and, to his surprise, she smiled. A big, wide, happy smile. “Huh,” she said. “You never look like that when you’re making plans with Clay.”

  He just waited and held on to his phone.

  “What’s her name?”

  “May I be excused?” His lasagna was all gone and his glass was empty.

  “Sure. Tell her I said hi.”

  He sent Thisbe his clumsy picture of his crappy notes, and she wrote, Um…….

  He waited a few seconds and then said he knew they were confusing but he could get together with her in a few minutes, if she wanted, and he could explain it better in person. There was such a long pause he thought he’d been a fool. Then finally she said her stepdad wouldn’t let her meet guys at Panera or anywhere like that, to which he said that was cool, no problem. Probably she didn’t want to meet with him at all, it was just an excuse, but then she said it had to be at her house, sorry, it’s so embarrassing. Would he like to come over?