The Forever Bridge

by T. Greenwood

  Ruby nods and they climb in, let the man lower the thick metal bar across their laps. The whole mechanism lurches and they begin their ascent.

  Gloria doesn’t look like anybody’s mom. She’s what her dad calls a throwback. A hippie. Today, she’s wearing a T-shirt that says In Science We Trust with one of those Darwin fishes on it. The pink streaks in her hair have faded; now it’s just back to regular sandy blond. She wears it in two low pigtails like a little girl. Earlier she was wearing big black sunglasses that made her look like a bug, but now that the sun has gone down, she’s put them away in her giant purse.

  When Ruby was little, she used to think that Gloria was like Mary Poppins. That same exact purse has always held exactly whatever it was that she and Izzy needed: Goldfish crackers or Fruit Roll-Ups, drawing pads and Magic Markers, beads to make necklaces, baby aspirin for headaches or Dramamine when one of them got carsick. An extra pair of tights if it got cold, and once a metal spoon that Izzy used to eat yogurt on a class field trip. She looks at the bag sitting next to Gloria in the Ferris wheel cart and wonders what she keeps in there now, if she could pull out something and make everything all right.

  As they rise up, Ruby peers down at the midway below. It is twilight, and the sky is a strange, electric blue. Franklin Mountain is just a silhouette against that incredible sky. And below, below, becoming farther and farther away, are all the lights and rides and noises and smells of the fair.

  “I’m sorry about Izzy,” Gloria says as the Ferris wheel stops to let on some more people.

  Ruby looks down at her hands, at her nails that she has bitten down to the quick.

  “I don’t know why she’s being so terrible. But she is being terrible and it’s not your fault.”

  Ruby nods.

  “Are you really moving?” Gloria asks quietly.

  Ruby feels her mouth twitch. “Actually, my mom doesn’t know about North Carolina,” she says. “I just overheard my dad and Bunk talking. It might not even happen. I’m not even supposed to know.”

  Gloria smiles and reaches across the seat and touches her hand. Ruby can see her skin is freckled with dried clay. She can almost smell it, and she remembers loving that smell when she was younger. When she and Izzy curled up together and Gloria read them books or they watched movies projected on a sheet Gloria hung on the back of their house, she would breathe that earthy scent, and it made her feel calm.

  Ruby looks down at the sparkling midway below them, life bustling and humming without her. She is far away from everything, alone up here, suspended by nothing but physics, by some engineer’s dream. In a week, all of this that holds her up will be gone. Just a recollection.

  “You must miss Jess,” Gloria says. “I miss him.”

  Ruby nods but she can’t look at her. She squeezes her eyes shut and sees Jess’s face, his bright eyes and red cheeks. She pulls Jess’s baseball cap down over her eyes so Gloria won’t see that she’s crying. And she knows there isn’t a single thing in Gloria’s bag that can help her now.

  At eight o’clock, they make their way back to the parking lot to Grover’s car. Izzy and Marcy spent all of their money playing a dart game until they won matching plastic sunglasses. They are neon green. It is dark out, but they wear them anyway. They look like a weird set of twins in their matching outfits.

  The ride home is quiet. Gloria tunes into the public radio station and they are talking about the storm. It’s expected to hit the coast of North Carolina tonight. They interview residents in the Outer Banks who have evacuated.

  “Isn’t that where you said your uncle lives?” Izzy asks. It’s the first time she’s spoken directly to Ruby for hours.

  “Yeah,” Ruby says. “I’m sure they’re fine though. My dad would have called.”

  When they get to the turn for Ruby’s mom’s driveway, she says, “You can just drop me off here.”

  “Don’t be silly, Ruby. It’s dark. I don’t want you walking in the dark.” Gloria maneuvers the big yellow car between the two giant oaks that serve as a gateway.

  Ruby feels her heart start to thump in her chest. Izzy and Marcy are quiet now in the backseat, sharing a pair of headphones, listening to Marcy’s iPod. She hopes they won’t notice. She hopes they will ignore the house just like they’ve managed to ignore her all day. But when Gloria pulls up in front of the house, the floodlights come on, almost blinding them. Gloria’s hand flies to her mouth, and Ruby feels like her heart might explode.

  “Jesus,” Gloria says, but Ruby is already out of the car, running toward the house.

  Illuminated in the headlights, the floodlight, lit up like something at the midway, are two giant sheets of plywood. Both of them are spray painted in neon orange paint: KEEP OUT! NO TRESPASSING! STAY AWAY!

  Nessa’s toes throb. They are swollen, filled with blood and turning a deep bluish purple. They look deformed, monstrous. And the pain pulses like a drum with every heartbeat.

  When the sun came up earlier that morning, she was able to release the trap. It was a lot simpler than it seemed last night as she was dragging the damn thing with her across the river. If she’d had more than the sliver of moon to see by, she could have done it sooner and she probably wouldn’t be in this predicament right now. She’s pretty sure at least three of her toes are broken. The pain is incredible. She can’t even walk. It is incessant, insistent.

  And the baby seems to know that her body’s efforts and energies have now all shifted to her right foot. She is not the rolling, jabbing entity she was just yesterday. She is still. Demanding nothing. Nessa feels like a failure. That she is distracted from the work of carrying this baby. Even her own body has neglected it. She wonders if this is her true legacy from her mother.

  The sun has gone down again, but now she cannot leave. She can barely even walk. But she needs to eat. The baby needs her to eat. She found an old PowerBar in a forgotten pocket of her backpack, and it felt like a miracle. But that was three hours ago, and she is starving again. She crawled around outside the shack earlier and found some more crab apples, a couple of blackberries that were still green. They did nothing to assuage her hunger. She worries she will die out here.

  She knows that soon she will have no choice but to take her chances and go knock on someone’s door, to depend, once again, on the benevolence of strangers. She will have to scratch out her pleas on a piece of paper, look at their alarmed faces when they realize she doesn’t speak. She will have to endure the sidelong glances as they offer her food or water or a place to sleep. She knows, though, that her silence makes her suspect. It always has. It is nearly impossible for people to believe that someone is unwilling or incapable of voicing their concerns, their wants, their needs. What they don’t know is that her voice has failed her. Words, she can trust, but her own assertions, requests, denials, and pleas have almost always gone unheard. And so when she refuses to speak, when she proves incapable of explaining herself, they will not trust her. They might even call the police. And if they call the police, she could get in trouble. Her mother could get in trouble. She’s seventeen years old, not allowed to be on her own in the world yet. Never mind the stolen money. Never mind the baby. Never mind all that she knows but has not spoken.

  Words. She rifles through her bag, looking for the notebook where she stores them. These tiny little gems, hidden away from the world. Her words, the ones captured in her unwilling throat. The words are tiny, scribbled in her nearly illegible writing. Page after page of this. If you look at it from far away, it looks like the scribbles of a child. Near the back of the notebook, she finds a blank sheet of paper and tears it out.

  The ink in her pen has dried up, and her pencil is just a stub. But it is enough. She writes carefully. I AM HUNGRY. PLEASE HELP.

  Sylvie heard Gloria’s car pull up, saw the headlights through the window, but still, Ruby’s violent entrance startles her. Ruby unlocks the door and storms into the kitchen, her face red. Sylvie nearly drops the hermit thrush she’s working on at the table.<
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  “Why did you do that?” Ruby cries, and Sylvie feels her entire body clenching like a fist.

  She knows she’s talking about the signs. And she was going to wait until after Ruby got home. But it started getting dark, and she was terrified that whoever was out there last night would be back. She couldn’t wait any longer. It’s not her fault. She’s just trying to keep them safe.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “You heard them last night though, didn’t you?”

  “It was an animal!” Ruby screams. “It got caught in the trap Daddy set for the raccoon. It was just an animal!”

  Sylvie feels her face grow hot. How can she explain to Ruby the way every nerve of her body feels danger coming? How can she articulate this terror to a child? How can she make sense of the illogical, the nonsensical? The insane?

  “They think you’re crazy!” Ruby hisses.

  Sylvie shakes her head, feels tears coming to her eyes.

  “Normal people don’t live like this!” Ruby’s hair has come loose from her ponytail, and tears are running down her face.

  “I’m just trying to keep you safe. Can’t you understand that? After everything that happened, Ruby. You were there when your brother . . .” She stops. She can’t say the words or else she will be there again. She will be inside the car as it slips into the water, watching from inside as the river presses against the glass, as she sinks and the others are thrown. As those lights fade away in the distance and she is swallowed by the darkness.

  “It’s too late!” Ruby says. “Don’t you get it? Jess is dead. And Daddy is going to take me away too. You’re going to have nobody, Mom. And it’s your fault!”

  Sylvie covers her ears with her hands, shakes her head. She can’t listen. The words sting, striking her somewhere in the heart and then shattering like buckshot, piercing every bit of her. And then Ruby is running out the back door, kicking at the fence they built, kicking and kicking as Sylvie stands, powerless, and watches. One of the boards yields and then Ruby is scrambling over it, running toward the river, disappearing into the dark, dark woods.

  Sylvie knows she should go after her, but when she gets to the broken fence, she can’t move. She is paralyzed, a dog with an electric collar. This fence is fallible, but the invisible one she has erected is strong.

  “Ruby!” she cries out, but her voice is powerless as well.

  Ruby runs and runs, even though she knows her mother won’t come after her. This is something she can be certain of. She leaps across the river, her ankle twisting as she lands, but she recovers quickly, shaking the pain away. She doesn’t look back. She doesn’t know where she’s going, but she knows she can’t go home. She wishes she’d gone out the front door and gotten her bike instead. Then she could have ridden back into town, gone to Izzy’s house. But she imagines knocking on Miss Piggy’s door, Izzy and Marcy answering the door in matching pajamas, and she knows she has nowhere to go anymore. The realization of this is almost more than she can stand.

  She feels herself starting to cry, but it’s not just the leaky eyes she gets sometimes when she feels sad, but rather the kind of crying that starts in your stomach, that rises up into your shoulders and shakes you. The kind of crying you can’t control. She runs, even as her whole body is trembling, as though she could run away from the crying itself. As though it’s something she can escape.

  It is so dark out here in the woods, the moon completely covered in clouds now, she could be running into another night. She could be slipping backwards through time. As though this darkness is a portal. A giant black hole into which she has fallen. Alice’s rabbit hole. She runs headlong into the past. Fearless, but not aimless. And then it begins to sprinkle and she is rewinding, she is doing the impossible. She is pulled, somehow, back through the last two years, through the dark abyss into this night. Into these woods. By the edge of this river.

  Here is the sound of the river, of wood creaking, moaning. The sounds of water filling her ears. Here is the scent of pine, the smell of rain, the crush and crumble of leaves. The crack and hiss of an engine. Here are the colors red and blue, like carnival lights reflecting off everything. Here is the taste of mud in her mouth, blood in her mouth. The sound of her father keening, her mother moaning, and Jess’s silence.

  Silence. She has stopped crying. It feels as though she has hit a wall, the bottom of the rabbit hole? Regardless, it is as though her body is simply incapable of feeling even another ounce of sorrow. Her tears spent. Her eyes impoverished.

  It is quiet, but she doesn’t feel like she is alone.

  She has traveled upstream so far she can’t see her mother’s house anymore. Her legs are shaking with the effort. She can feel the scratches on her bare legs from the branches and brush. She can feel blood trickling down one calf. The rain is light, cooling her skin, which feels feverish. Hot to the touch. She climbs up the embankment and looks around, suddenly scared of all the creatures that live in these woods. She is the trespasser here. The vandal.

  As the rain starts to come down a little harder, she moves toward a dark, thick grove of trees, hoping to find shelter. Her ankle reminds her of the earlier stumble, and she turns it again as though working out a kink. She pushes through the thick foliage, the overgrowth of trees, and suddenly, her eyes, accustomed to the darkness now, make out a crumbling hunting cabin, or a sugar shack? How has she never found this building before? She has walked through these woods a thousand times. She feels disoriented. How far has she gone?

  She moves toward the door of the shack, when suddenly there is the sound of rustling inside the cabin. She backs up, afraid.

  “Hello?” she says softly.

  Nothing. The rain starts to come down a little harder.

  “Hello?” she says again, louder this time, feeling her voice rising up from her stomach. Like the choir teacher at school always says, from the diaphragm. And Ruby is overwhelmed by fear. “Is anybody in there?” she asks again.

  Again, there is the sound of floors creaking, of someone moving around.

  She pushes tentatively against the broken door. She knows she should just turn around, run back to her mother’s house. She shouldn’t be here. She thinks about the gun in her mother’s drawer, wonders if whoever is inside here has a drawer as well. A gun inside. But her common sense, her logic, also seems to be lagging behind, still trying to catch up with her, and so she pushes the door open and steps inside.

  At first she doesn’t see anything except for the weak glow of a candle in the middle of the floor. But then she sees the girl. And she recognizes her instantly. It’s the girl she saw in town on Sunday, the one who disappeared down the alley.

  The girl is backed into the corner now, like a frightened animal. Her blond hair is knotted, dreadlocks braided around her head like a crown; she looks like an illustrated girl. Like a fairytale girl. But she is pregnant, her belly enormous. She sits like a child though, her legs splayed out in front of her. When Ruby’s eyes adjust to this new light, she can see the piece of paper she is holding up. It says, I AM HUNGRY. PLEASE HELP. And scratched at the bottom, it says, PLEASE DON’T HURT ME.

  Nessa presses her back hard into the corner of the shack, as though she can disappear into the walls. She holds the sign she has made out in front of her like a shield. When the voice outside ceases, the only thing she hears is her own pulse beating in her ears. She cranks her jaw to try to open her mouth, but it does nothing.

  When the door to the shack opens, she is ready for whatever the following moments hold for her. She has learned to accept her fate. To acknowledge her powerlessness. To embrace it even. She knows suddenly that living like this, on the run, has prepared her for this moment. Its inevitability has finally come to fruition.

  She holds the sign out in front of her, and looks up at the figure in the doorway.

  But even in the weak glow of the candle, she can see it is only a child. Just a girl. She looks as though she’s only about ten or eleven years old. She has long dark hair pulled into a
messy ponytail. Big eyes and tiny features. Nessa suddenly feels the fear, the wild thumping rattling fear, begin to melt. It is candle wax, dripping hot down her throat and into her stomach.

  “Who are you?” the little girl asks, not moving any closer. “What are you doing here?”

  And here is the question, the one with all the words. (All those unspoken words, like beads collected in a jar. A million glass beads, each one a moment from her life until now, but jumbled inside her. She lost the ability a long time ago to string the words together. The last time she tried, the string that held them together snapped, and the beads, the words, slipped off the string, tumbled back into chaos. And she was left with this.)

  Nessa shakes her head.

  “Here,” the girl says, slowly coming closer and then sitting down on the floor across from Nessa. Indian style, as though they are only sitting by a campfire. As though they are Girl Scouts. “I have some candy.”

  She reaches into her pocket and pulls out three Tootsie Rolls, which she holds out to Nessa as though she is some sort of wild animal. Nessa reaches for them tentatively and then squeezes them in her hand. They are warm. She unwraps one of the candies and puts it in her mouth. She doesn’t chew but rather lets the sweetness fill her mouth, which floods with saliva. It is somehow both satisfying and completely unfulfilling. Her body responds to this small bit of nourishment by reasserting its hunger. The baby kicks hard as the burst of sugar reaches it. And then her stomach growls, hungrily, angrily. Demanding more. She wonders about starvation, if because of the baby the length of time before she begins to starve is half. Or is it exponential? She imagines it like a math problem. She considers cells multiplying, while strangely her body divides.

  “You can’t talk?” the girl asks.

  Nessa shakes her head.

  “Can you hear?” the girl asks.