The Forever Bridge

by T. Greenwood

  Now, she peers out of the sleeping bag, which is too hot, the smell of her own body unbearable. The morning air smells clean, green; her nostrils flare with relief. She peers through the shaggy leaves of the tree, feeling like a child hiding under a table, peeking out from under the tablecloth. She can see a man in a uniform climbing a telephone pole. It’s just a telephone man. An ordinary man. A man in a gray-green uniform with a job to do. A man who fixes things. The simplicity of this vision hits her hard. Like a whack on the back to someone with something lodged in his throat. The simple image of this man dislodges a blockage, and she can suddenly breathe again.

  None of the men she knows are like this. None of them honest, purposeful, hardworking men. It’s no wonder she’s been so directionless. She has been surrounded by aimlessness, by purposelessness, her whole life. Her grandfather was the only decent man she ever knew, but he’s long gone. Even Mica, who she wanted to believe could one day be this kind of man, an ordinary man, turned out to be as substantial and trustworthy as dust. The things she found attractive about him at first became the things she most despised. His tenderness became weakness. His affection toward others became betrayal. His easiness was really just apathy. Because while he seemed to care about everything (everyone), he really didn’t care about anything at all. And this, more than that black hair, that dirty black coil on that clean white soap, was why she left.

  She is afraid to move, to make a sound. She wishes her sleeping bag were green instead of red. She is hardly camouflaged here in the woods. She is like a crimson blood spot among all this green. But the man on the pole is so intent on his job, he does not notice her. She imagines herself an apple fallen to the ground. She is only a maple leaf, a wild strawberry, a poppy. She dreams herself a chameleon, blending into her surroundings, becoming one with her environment. Blending in.

  It’s been a long time since she’s been this intimate with nature. When she left Vermont, she went as far away as she could, arriving in LA where she met a couple of girls who were driving to Portland. And on the way north from California, they slept inside coves and under piers, awakening each morning to the sound of the surf and the squealing squawk of gulls. She camped among the redwoods, slept in the back of pickup trucks, in backseats, in vans. When she first arrived in Portland, she lived with another girl in Woodstock Park for three weeks before she met Mica. Though in Portland, even in the park, it seemed like there were always others like her around. A community of wanderers. But now that she is back here where she started, there is no longer the illusion of friendship, or companionship. Even her mother is gone, and she is alone. Well, almost alone.

  The baby kicks her hard just under her breastbone and she gasps at the pain. The man on the pole turns his head, as though looking for the source of the sound. She holds still, presses her hand against her stomach to still the baby. To still her own heart as it clangs and bangs inside her chest. She remains motionless, a statue, a tree, afraid to move even an inch. And soon he goes back to work, but she knows she needs to keep moving. She can’t stay here, not in the naked light of morning. She needs to keep moving or to find proper shelter. A good place to hide until she can figure out where, exactly, to find him. How to go about this.

  And so as soon as his truck pulls away, she scurries out of her sleeping bag, rolls everything back into her pack, and then takes off up the river’s edge, thinking she will bathe here later. Tonight when the sun goes down again. She imagines the water taking the debris of the last week, the detritus of a lifetime disappearing downstream.

  She has blisters on her feet from her sneakers, and so she slips them off and shoves them in the side pockets of her backpack. She doesn’t have any socks, so her feet are bare. Tanned and dirty. The silver toe ring she lifted from a bikini shop in Venice Beach sparkles in the sun. Her heels are callused, conditioned to the elements: hot sand, burning pavement. She feels primitive without her shoes on, free. Her flesh barely registers the pine needles and branches, the twigs and stones and pinecones underneath her. She could belong to a different time, she thinks as she claws her way through the thick foliage. To a time before shoes, a time before clothes.

  She only walks for about ten minutes before she sees the structure, and she can barely believe her luck. It looks like some sort of shack, a hunting cabin, she thinks. It is falling down, nobody’s house. Abandoned. There is one window, but it is broken: a hole at the center of the glass from which an intricate pattern of spidery cracks emanates. The roof is caved in on one side, and the foliage has grown around it, camouflaging it. It is perfect. But it’s on the other side of the river, which has, somehow, gotten wider here. It doesn’t look deep, but the water is moving fast. One wrong step and she could get swept away, or at least dragged across the rocks. Her center of balance has shifted with the baby. She used to be agile, strong. Now she feels clumsy, uncertain in her own skin. But what choice does she have? And so she tentatively tests the first flat stone she can find. The water is freezing cold, and the rock is slippery, but her toes are strong and she has to trust her calluses. She grabs a low-hanging branch to steady herself and she holds on tightly as she makes her way to the next stone and the next. The shock of the water is somehow both violent and assuring. She is alive. She is awake. She is making progress across this body of water. By the time she reaches the opposite bank, she is trembling with adrenaline, and her chest swells with a sense of accomplishment. She looks around, as though waiting for approval from the trees. As though someone should applaud her efforts. But she is met only with the silent stare of a thousand invisible eyes. All creatures besides herself hiding in the dark green shadows.

  She runs, the backpack slamming against her back. The tendons beneath the swell of her stomach stretching, aching. She knows this baby isn’t going to wait much longer; she can only hope she’ll wait long enough. She wonders for a moment about that midwife the waitress mentioned, and her throat swells. She hasn’t seen a doctor since she slunk into the Planned Parenthood this winter and had her fears confirmed. And she has refused to do the math, to count backwards to figure out how close she is. But the baby reminds her, whispers and nudges. Soon, it says. Soon. The door to the shack is hanging from one hinge, but it is unlocked. It is open. It is hers. And it is home. For now.

  The very first bridges in history were the ones made by nature: something as simple as a fallen tree across a ravine making it possible to cross from one place to another. And the earliest man-made bridges were simple: just limbs lashed together, stones. They served a basic purpose: to get from a familiar place to the unknown.

  But while the earliest bridges were built simply out of necessity—to get safely from one place to the next—function was not enough. The Romans wanted not only utility but endurance. The oldest bridge that is still in existence, and still in use, is the Arkadiko Bridge in Greece. It was built in 1300 BC, an arch bridge built to traverse a stream, made using limestones, Cyclopean masonry. This bridge was made for chariots. Ruby dreams of going there someday, of traveling along the same stone steps as the Ancient Grecian people. As the gods even.

  The Alcántara Bridge, built over the Tagus River in Spain, an arch bridge also made of stone, was inscribed: Pontem perpetui mansurum in saecula (I have built a bridge which will last forever). She has studied this bridge that has survived not only the elements but war. This everlasting bridge. She has sketched the arches in her notebook.

  This is the kind of bridge Ruby wants to make. Not necessarily one made of stone or even of this design, but the kind of bridge that survives, that is immune to natural disasters and to destruction by people. She wants a bridge that won’t crumble. That will last.

  She doesn’t need Izzy. She can do this on her own. But there are just a couple of weeks left until school starts. She needs to get the designs from Izzy. She needs to finish them and finalize her plans. The bridge they’ll make at school will be miniature, just a model. But what if she could actually build a real bridge? To really test the design before
the contest? The mere thought of it, the possibility of it, makes her not feel so bad about Izzy. About Marcy Davidson. And so, after the phone company guy comes and fixes the phone, she decides to take a walk down by the river. That’s one thing she hasn’t thought about, something they don’t really take into account in the contest either. A bridge relies upon what it bridges. Upon the land that will support it.

  “I’m going for a walk,” Ruby says. Her mother is sitting at the table with a dead bird laid on newspaper in front of her. The smell of alcohol is strong. It turns Ruby’s stomach.

  “What about the fence?” her mother says.

  “I’m doing research for a school project. It’s required.”

  “But school hasn’t even started yet.”

  Ruby rolls her eyes even though there is no way in the world her mother would know about the bridge project or about Izzy or about anything that has her stomach in knots.

  “It’s a contest,” Ruby says. “We had the whole summer to work on it. But Izzy was supposed to help, and now I’m doing it by myself.”

  “Oh,” her mother says, and Ruby waits. For something. She doesn’t even know what it is she wants. She doesn’t really want to talk about Izzy, but she’s mad at her mom for not knowing something is wrong. For not asking. She doesn’t want to tell her about the way it made her feel to see Izzy and Marcy leaning into each other at the pool, the way her heart ached when she noticed that the friendship bracelet was gone. Her mother doesn’t know there was a friendship bracelet to begin with. She doesn’t know the secret language that she and Izzy made up (the one like pig latin but with “izzyuby” instead of “ay” at the ends of words). She doesn’t know that when she spends the night at Izzy’s house, they like to sleep head to toe in Izzy’s big bed. She doesn’t know how much she loves the smell of the detergent that Gloria uses, that she falls asleep with Izzy’s ankles pressed against her cheeks, smelling that smell in Izzy’s extra pillow. She doesn’t know about the times she and Izzy have dreamed themselves grown up, living next door to each other with their families. That they’ve got a name for the company they’ll start together. That they have shared dreams the way other girls share hairbrushes and candy. And so she doesn’t know how it feels like somebody tore her heart out. That she feels like she’s missing something so big it left a sinkhole where it once was. She doesn’t know that she feels, suddenly, like half a girl.

  “Okay, then,” her mom says, looking up from the dead bird.

  Ruby could say something now. She could go to her, to sit in her mother’s lap, let her stroke her hair. She can see in her mother’s eyes that this is what she wants of her, but she has forgotten how to give it.

  And so she does nothing.

  And her mother looks down at the bird again. “Don’t be gone long.”

  Ruby glances up at the clock on the wall. But the battery died a long time ago, and so it is always 7:21 in the kitchen. Always either dawn or dusk.

  “And lock the door behind you?”

  Ruby checks to make sure she has her key, and then she locks her mom inside. As she walks across the backyard, she wonders when the last time was that anybody mowed the grass. Something about this makes her angry. She thinks about Izzy’s lawn again, about the tulips and irises that pop up in the spring, the yard littered not with trash and debris but daisies and black-eyed Susans. She starts to kick a beer can that has washed up onto the yard from the river like seashells on a beach and then instead, she stops, mid-kick, and picks it up. She tries to crush the can in her fist the way she’s seen both her dad and Bunk do, but she’s not strong enough. It just dents in on one side a little bit. And so she chucks it back onto the ground and takes off.

  The river isn’t wide enough here to make a bridge necessary. With a good run, she can leap across it. The water’s pretty shallow here too, though if she’s not running fast enough she might land in the marshy edge and get her feet wet. There’s not much on the other side: just woods. Beyond that there’s a farm and a cemetery. Sometimes Izzy and she used to go there and play. It’s the old cemetery where everyone’s been dead for a hundred years or more. The gravestones are crumbly. You can’t even read the names on some of the stones because they’re covered with moss. Jess is buried in the town cemetery by the high school in the new part where the stones are so shiny you can see your reflection in them. She’s only been there once, for the burial. She spent the whole time staring at her shoes so she wouldn’t have to look at that tiny white casket.

  The river divides the people who live out here in the boonies from the rest of the town. They’re almost like an island, she thinks, which is actually kind of nice. A bridge would change that though. The kind of bridge she plans to make anyway.

  The idea behind a bridge is getting somebody safely from one place to another. But she wants her bridge to be more than that. The best bridges aren’t just about function but about beauty too. Over forty million people either visit or cross the Golden Gate Bridge every single year. Of course, most of them are the people who are driving to and from work; those are the people who drive across without even thinking twice about it. But then there are those who go all the way to San Francisco just to see the Golden Gate Bridge, just to drive or walk across the 4,200 feet of the San Francisco Bay.

  She walks along the river’s other bank, studying the land at the edge, taking notes in her notebook. She worries a little that Izzy still has all of her designs on her computer. She can’t imagine she would steal them, but you just never know. That’s one thing she’s certain of. People do surprising things. The people you trust the most are sometimes the ones who betray you the worst. And the people you love more than anything are the ones who will break your heart.

  It’s another windy day today, which is a good thing. It reminds her that building bridges is not just about designing something that will keep your feet dry. It’s also about creating a structure that will withstand the elements. Rain, wind, snow, and ice. Vermont gets all of that and more. That’s why covered bridges are so popular here. That’s why every calendar of Vermont you ever see has one on the cover.

  Finally, she gets to a place upstream where the river is wide, where its current is strong. The wind blows hard here, whipping through her open notebook, nearly yanking the pages out. She nods, feeling something scary and wonderful. She starts taking notes, continuing to walk up the river when all of a sudden she feels a cold shock as her foot dips into the water. She steps on a flat rock that’s about an inch under water, but it’s slippery and she is starting to go down. She clings to her notebook; the last thing she needs is to drop that in the river, and her whole body tries to stay upright. Finally she lurches forward and catches a tree branch, which extends itself like a hand to hold on to, and she is able to brace herself. Her heart is pounding hard in her chest. That was close, she thinks.

  Instinctively she looks up then, as though somebody were watching her. And when she peers across the river toward the dense forest, she sees something move in the distance. She peers harder, shielding her eyes from the sun, which is blinding now. And beyond the trees, through the green of leaves, she can make out the outline of something. A cabin? An old sugarhouse maybe? It could simply be her imagination, but it looks as though there are shadows moving behind the broken window. She wishes she could cross the river here, go check it out. But she’s afraid it’s too wide, and dangerous. Her mother would be furious if she knew that she was even this close to the water’s edge.

  She closes up her notebook and starts to walk back down toward her mother’s house, looking behind her a few times to make sure nobody’s come after her with a shotgun to shoo her off their property. She thinks of her mother, the drawer.

  Even by the time she gets back to the house, she can’t shake the feeling that somebody saw her slip in the water. She gets that feeling other times too though. Like somebody’s keeping an eye on her. If she believed in God, she would say it was Jess, that maybe he was her guardian angel now. But she doesn’t be
lieve, not anymore anyway. God was something else she lost that night.

  The birds occupy Sylvie’s hands, but they cannot cease the buzzing of her mind. Not for long anyway. Despite being focused, fixated on the task (on the parting of feathers and splitting of flesh, the separation of sinews and the extrication of the innards). Despite the combined beauty and gore, her own fascination with the incredible complexity of the avian anatomy, the delicate bones serve as little more than reminders of fragility, of preciousness, of vulnerability.

  She tries not to think about Ruby out there, doing whatever it is that she is doing. If she allows her mind to wander down that forest path, she may get lost in the terrifying woods of her own imagination. It seems Sylvie is constantly building fences between reality and possibility. It is her life’s work now.

  She thinks again about a fence for the backyard. She is vulnerable out here, the backyard accessible to anyone: the unfinished room providing opportunity for anyone at all to come into the house, only a hollow-core door and a flimsy locking doorknob keeping intruders out. Before Ruby came she was able to put this out of her mind, somewhat. To erect that wall between herself and the dangers lurking beyond the trees. What would anyone want with her anyway? But somehow Ruby’s presence has made her aware of how very susceptible they are, how exposed.

  On the table, the spotted sandpiper lies splayed, its freckled chest carefully dissected. Everything that once made it alive, all those exquisite diminutive organs (heart, lung, brain) are now gathered in a ziplock baggie on the table. She will toss these entrails outside later, let the mother raccoon find them. Maybe she should throw them near one of the traps. She picks up the tweezers and goes about the painstaking venture of removing its eyes.