by Owen Thomas
“Only the cab of the truck was actually on the bridge. The back end had smashed through the old timbers so that the bed of the truck dangled twenty-five feet above the sloping bank of the river. The crumpled hood was wedged beneath a cross beam, holding the truck like a vice. I stepped over a chrome hubcap. Bits of wet glass crunched beneath my feet.
“The passenger side of the truck seemed strangely untouched and the entirety of the front windshield was fully intact, deflecting sheets of water down onto the edge of the bridge. I ducked under the beam that held the truck in place and advanced several more steps along that outer skirting of the bridge until I could see inside the cab of the truck, praying to a God in which I have never believed.
“Julia was in the driver’s seat, her hands holding the wheel. Her hair was wet and matted and lay plastered against her face and shoulders. Glass glinted in her lap and along on the tops of her arms. A bridge timber bisected the cab, entering the driver’s window at a forty-five degree angle and ramming down into the floor beneath the passenger’s seat. A long corner of that beam had sheared and separated into a jagged wooden lance that pierced the left side of Julia’s neck and reemerged on the right, just beneath her ear. I felt its tip lodge squarely in the center of my heart.
“I was overcome with horror. I screamed her name and yanked open the passenger door. Some part of me must have been conscious enough of the edge of the bridge to mind where I placed my foot, but I have no memory of such concern. All I can remember is a confluence of rage and guilt and terror and love, like four powerful rivers coming together in my broken heart at the same time. I bent into the cab of the truck, my hand on the outside of the door and said her name. She was perfectly motionless. I shouted her name once more, and then again.
“And she blinked. Her eyes rolled toward me, as if disconnected from the rest of her and independently sentient. All I could do was repeat her name. Julia. Julia. Julia. Until the word became a sob. Her lips moved and I choked back my own breath so that I could hear her over the rain and the river below. At first there was no sound from her at all. She was like a fish washed up on a beach. Then there was a breath, fighting to be a word. I leaned in, bracing myself against the steering wheel, my hand on her hand.
“It was her eyes, the whites shot through with blood, that did most of the speaking. They apologized for not being enough. They forgave me. They loved me for who I was. Then her breath shaped a few spectral words. ‘Wanted to surprise you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
“There was more. I’m sure of it. She had blinked and swallowed and started again. There was certainly more in her. But I was not to hear it. The timber pinning the truck to the bridge chose that moment to give way. I heard the sound and felt the sensation of movement as part of the same sickening visceral realization.
“In my panic I gripped the steering wheel, clutching at her hand. In that instinctive act, I became one with my father’s old truck, which slipped off the bridge into open space, freefalling for what seemed like minutes, and then impacting its back end on a granite bolder jutting out the riverbank. I was facing the river as we fell. I could see the watery earth looming up through the back window as we dropped. I have seen it a million times since then in my dreams.
“It was that river bolder that drove a piece of metal window trim into my face and up my jaw line, leaving me this reminder that I can feel but have chosen not to see every time I look into a mirror. But I can’t curse the bolder for my disfigurement. That was my own doing. I did that all by myself. And, in any event, it was the bolder that kept me alive. I cannot say it saved me, because I am not saved. I will never be saved. But it kept me alive. It pinned the battered truck to the bank and kept it from rolling down into the water where I would have surely drowned.”
“Angus…”
“Stop. Just… stop.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So when the downward motion stopped in … in, my God, an earsplitting crush of metal … there we sat, almost horizontal, wedged between granite and earth, with the river gushing only half way up the tires. I imagine that from some angles – to the owls in the trees above us – it must have looked like the truck was riding on top of the water.
“Not that I spent much time appreciating that irony or anything more than the excruciating pain in my face which I had to hold together with both my hands. There was a great deal of blood and I knew I had to stop the flow as best I could. I righted myself in the seat and stripped off my shirt. I ripped the sleeve off the body and tied it around my face, along my jaw line, knotting it behind my neck as tight as I could. Then I did the same with the other sleeve. Then I used my hands to apply pressure on top of that.
“True to form, it was only after I had tended sufficiently to my own needs that I thought of Julia.
“It is not possible, Matilda, for life to be still. Not truly still. Up on the bridge I had been terrified at how utterly still she seemed. So still that even as I screamed her name I feared her dead. But down below, held above the water by a granite boulder, I was struck at how animated she had actually been up there. Circulation. Respiration. Cognition. Eyelids. Lips. The little muscles in her forehead. The whisper of a voice. The heart, that great ennobled muscle, beating away.
“But there is no stillness like death. It is a qualitatively different thing for which life has no equivalent. Not sleep. Not even deep coma.
“I wept her name. I held my severed face in my hands, laid my forehead against the bridge beam whose errant splinter had killed my wife and I sobbed for all I was worth, pain rivaling pain, rivaling pain. The rain fell even harder, beating furiously against the badly cracked but still intact windshield as if trying to do what Julia’s backward collision with a bridge and a twenty-five foot freefall into a granite catcher’s mitt had not done.
“Somehow, through all of that, her voice found me. At first it was like a note on the wind. The cry of some passing bird. But when I sharpened my attention I could discern a human pitch. And then my name.
“I craned my neck over the beam, physically maneuvering my head with both hands pushing against my bleeding face, so that I could see out the window to the bridge above.
“Iris was standing in the hole in the side of the bridge left by the truck; a wet smear of yellow against the black sky. I saw her shout again, cupping her hands. I stuck my arm out of the passenger window and waved. I saw her arms drop. It was a reaction that I like to think was motivated by some genuine relief on her part that was I was actually alive.
“Then she made a sweeping gesture with both arms that I understood.
“‘Away. Away. I’m going away.’
“It was the only sensible thing to do, of course. There was no way for her to get down to me without risking her own life and no way that I could get out of the truck with a riverbank pushing against the door. Even if I could climb out of the car, over Julia and out the driver’s window, there was no way to avoid falling into the river. The only practical course of action was for her to take my car across the bridge and follow the road until she picked up the signs to New Philadelphia. There she could find a telephone and call for help.
“It was the only practical thing to do. Iris was nothing if not practical.
“Of course, I did not interpret her gesture in the way it was intended.
“‘Away. Away. I’m going away.’
“It was a verdict. It was my sentence. I could not see her icy blue eyes, but I could feel them, cutting through the rain, through the glass, through the wood, through my very flesh and burrowing into my shredded heart. I am going away and leaving you with what you have done.
“Because I loved her, I released her. Something I had never done for Julia. I waved my arm again and watched the wet yellow smear move quickly along the bridge. In a moment, I saw the Fairlane drive slowly past, traversing the sky. It paused at the hole in the bridge, taillights flaring like distant suns, then accelerated away. Black space quickly swallowed the car, leaving only the shrink
ing red lights. I reached my arm over the beam and pressed my palm against the windshield, framing the lights like I could hold them. And then they too were gone. And I was alone. Truly alone.”
I inched along the couch toward Angus. He was staring at a spot on the table, not blinking. His eyes were hollow and dry. There were no tears left for this story, which he must have relived a million times and, I suspected, never told another soul. Over the years, the crying had long since given way to writing. The tears had become words.
But I cried for him. I could not help it and I did not try to hide it from him. I put my hand on his knee and squeezed it gently. He blinked and looked up at me. I sniffed and tried to smile. He patted my hand.
“I was unconscious when help arrived. They told me I was hypothermic and close to bleeding out. They said I was lucky. Of course, the papers got it all wrong. They described a car accident in which Mr. and Mrs. Angus Mann, driving back from their cottage on Leesville Lake, skidded through a bridge railing and fell into the Tuscarawas River. She was killed and her husband, Angus Mann, a local writer of some repute, was lucky to have survived the ordeal. That, surely, is the version you stumbled upon.”
“Yes,” I nodded. After an uncomfortable silence, I asked, “What of Iris?”
Angus smiled ruefully.
“Iris was true to her word. True to her integrity. Her judgment. I never spoke to her or saw her again. She left my car at the airport. One of my nurses told me that a woman had called several times inquiring into my condition. I like to think it was her. I allow myself the luxury of that delusion from time to time, conveniently ignoring that a woman reporter told me that she had made several calls to the hospital hoping for an interview.”
“It could have been her, Angus,” I said with as much hope as I could work into my voice. “It really could have been.”
Angus nodded.
“Maybe. Doesn’t matter. She’s gone. Vanished from Knopf. From New York. I’ve looked. In all of my enduring hubris, I have actually searched for her. Friends say she moved to Paris. She’s gone. Maybe dead by now. And in their ignorance, the newspapers whitewashed her right out of the story. Never followed up on who had notified the state police. I did nothing to correct the story that became the official version. Tragic accident ends happy marriage. I just let it go.”
“Why?”
“To keep her out of it. Least I could do was to preserve the fiction. That’s what I do best. I’m a fiction writer. I live with fiction. I breathe it. I dress in it every morning. I exist as a fiction of my own imagination. We all are. We’re all lies and wishes, Matilda. Look at you,” he said with a hint of disgust. “Movie star. World by the tail. Oh yeah? You’re a fucking walking wound. You think I don’t see that? You think I don’t know a life bent on self-destruction when I see it.”
“You don’t know…”
“Yes. I do know. We have a secret language. A secret look. We’re like vampires spotting each other in a crowded room. You may look like Julia, and you may think like Iris, but for all the world, Matilda, you live like me. You remind me, of me. We pick obsessively at our own unhappiness like scabs. Why? Because healing is the last thing we want. Happiness is the last thing we want. We protect that wound like a child. We guard it with our lives. Why? Because it is us. Without that unhealed wound, that unresolved anger, that relentless not-forgiven guilt, who are we? We have no idea. We live to fester. We fester to live. We live to accuse and to be accused. To judge and to be judged. We will not forgive others and we will not be forgiven. Because we will not tolerate it. Because that’s the state that defines us. Not forgiven. We are the not forgiven. And we walk the earth looking for opportunities to prove that nothing has changed.
“And all the while we lie to ourselves. We act the part and play to the cheap seats and try our best to believe that it’s all real. That we are in control and that we have moved on. We arrange ourselves in the mirror. We tell ourselves the bedtime story version of our lives so that we can sleep at night and wake up feeling worthy. But something in us – call it a soul if you must – will always align with True North. It is a truth as still and as quiet as the dead. We must live with it. Reckon with it. No matter our success at self-distraction, the truth we know about ourselves is inescapable. It will pull us back to that point of reckoning and will hold us accountable. Forever.”
He looked at me intensely. Almost angrily. Like it was my turn to speak. Like he wanted something that I would not give him. I felt a brooding resentment filling the back of my throbbing head. Why was he here? Why now? Why was he in my life at all? I could not stop the story he had just told me from replaying over and over, looping through my head and my heart in all of its emotional detail. No, not replaying. Reliving. As though I had lived it all before, or some distantly resonant echo of it. In my head, Julia was driving. Not away from the cottage, but to the cottage. She was out of the truck, in the rain, stepping toward the door. Her dripping hand reaching. She was happy.
“The Lion Tree,” I said, looking at him, a terrible dark, cumulus thought billowing in my head. My chest tightened. My head began to pound and I felt sick again.
“Yes.” He nodded, closing his eyes.
“Angus…”
“Just ask. Matilda.”
“God. I can’t…”
“Just… ask.”
I sighed trying to calm my emotions. They would not be calmed. I tried to find a tactful route in. There was not a tactful route.
“Alan Miller…”
“Yes.”
“Leaves his wife… Jules.”
“Yes.”
“She … kills herself.”
He looked at me, irritated.
“She dies from an overdose,” he said. “Whether she killed herself or he killed her is ambiguous. Deliberately so. He knew she was fragile. There is that at the very least.”
“I guess then… So you don’t believe that Julia…”
Angus spoke through clenched teeth, the muscles in his jaws flexing.
“I don’t know one way or the other. She was distraught. After what she had seen. It was also a terrible night for driving an old goddamned truck will you stop beating around the bush and just ask me the fucking question Matilda! Ask! No! Tell me what you know! Tell me!”
His face was beet red with anguish and his hand clenched mine until it hurt. I began to cry. He shouted at me again.
“Tell me!”
“Julia wasn’t sick,” I sobbed back at him. And then shouted. “She was pregnant! She suspected. She drove herself to the doctor while you were out … out… She wanted to surprise you! That’s why she drove all that way in the truck through the fucking rain, you selfish, miserable son of a bitch! She loved you! She was your wife! Your wife! She would have done everything for you! She worshipped you! Sacrificed everything! She could have been anyone she wanted and she chose to be your wife! In her last breath she forgave you! You! She apologized to you! After all of that! She was too fucking … she was too fucking good for you! And… and…”
I wanted to run. I wanted to be sick again. I was crying so hard I could barely see.
“Say it!” he shouted.
“And you killed her! You killed them both! There! Are you fucking happy?!”
I snatched my hand away from his almost as if I was prepared to strike him. Angus closed his eyes and leaned forward, begging for it. Instead I buried my face in my palms and wept. Wept for Julia and Iris. For Angus. For Zel. For Blair.
For my father. For me.
When I finally opened my eyes, Angus was in front of me peering into my face. His own eyes were shimmering, streaming fresh tears.
“Thank you,” he said. He took my hand and pressed it to his cheek. He kissed my palm. “Thank you.”
He got up and sat next to me on the couch, hugging me around the shoulders and rocking gently. When I had calmed down, he stood.
“I like to think she would have looked like you,” he said. “Like her mother. Might have been a bo
y I suppose. But I imagine a girl.”
He squeezed me on the shoulder.
“How did you know?” he asked. “That she was pregnant, I mean.”
I shrugged and sniffed. “Because Jules was pregnant. That and…”
“What. Tell me.”
“You’re a fucking writer, Angus. Your life is like a work of fiction. Fiction is the only truth you know.”
“So.”
“So anytime a woman is sick in fiction, its never because she’s a little sick. She’s either going to die or she’s pregnant.”
He nodded. “Or both.”
We sat quietly for a moment, his arm around me.
“I’m going now,” he said standing, the tenderness in his voice leaching away and the old timbre returning. “Before the Devil changes his mind and cancels my ferry pass back across the Acheron. In the future try not to wash your sedatives down with booze. And watch where you step or you’ll end up killing yourself in your own home. Turn on some lights maybe. I refuse to worry about you after I leave.”
I wiped my mess of a face indelicately with the sleeve of my robe and watched him shamble down the hall toward the door. I stood, hating to see him go.
“Is that why you wanted me, Angus?” I asked. “As Ivanova? Because you wanted Iris’ judgment coming from Julia, or at least from someone who reminds you of Julia? Because you wanted Julia to condemn you rather than forgive you?”
He waited until I was done speaking before he turned. He looked almost amused.
“I didn’t plan any of this, you know. Blair hired you.”
“When you took over the script, you insisted on recasting the entire picture.”
“So.”
“So you had your chance to get rid of me. Why didn’t you?”
“Why would I?”
“Because the only thing I’ve managed to bring to this production is the seedy Hollywood tabloid element. Drugs and sex videos and blockbuster tripe and action star suicides. Scandal.”