Sky Bridge

by Laura Pritchett

  “Shawny told me something once. That killing yourself didn’t have anything to do with reasons. It had to do with something extra, beyond. She was going to fight this thing for as long as she could. It wasn’t you, and it wasn’t the baby.”

  Maybe he knows this. But I want to say it anyway, just in case it helps him to let go. I glance over and he’s clenching his jaw, tight, fighting back tears.

  To help him out, I start talking again. “Derek left,” I finally say. “I asked him, ‘Derek, do you remember that night I told you Tess was pregnant?’ and he did, of course. What I remembered was the sky, because it was so cold that day and everything seemed so bright and frozen, even the air. The branches were frozen with frost and you could see all the crystals. Way back then, I thought the baby was going to be a boy. He said he didn’t remember the sky at all, he just remembered thinking that I wouldn’t do it. Not really. And so I said, see, for both of us, it’s true: Things never turn out like you think they will.”

  Miguel nods. He’s found his voice and he’s got the tears back where he wants them. He says, “I never figured I’d be a single father. Or that then I’d be a father of two. I suppose Alejandra here never figured she’d be living in Colorado.”

  “Kay never figured she’d be helping a group of ilegales—she’s busy finding them all jobs, now. Baxter never figured he’d be putting his land into a—what do you call it?—conservation easement. I never figured I’d be in Ed Monger’s garage, centrifuging honeycomb.”

  “No sabemos lo que está a la vuelta de la esquina,” Miguel says.

  “You got that right.” But I’m thinking: It’s more than that, too. I keep seeing how everybody’s pushing ahead, looking for a place with enough space for our dreams. The illegals. Tess. Derek. Me. Moving forward, trying to cross those invisible boundaries so we can find the place where we’re the most free, and the most full.

  I glance at Miguel, and his brown, steady eyes are considering something far away. Someday, I decide, I’m going to tell him how much I see inside him, that I think he’s a higher-up class of person. I don’t know what he’s going to do with that piece of information, or if it will matter to him, and I don’t even really care. I just want him to know. What I say now is, “So, are you gonna invite me over to your house in Lamar sometimes?”

  “Ay, mi amiga.” He tilts his head toward Alejandra, who looks at me and smiles. “We will. Our kids are going to grow up together. Y nosotros también.”

  I feel so alive that I can’t help but laugh. We will. We’ll show ourselves to each other. We’ll become friends. We’ll become human to each other. We’ll love however we can.

  Kay walks in the kitchen door and pauses, then looks back outside and pauses. I’ve got all the old furniture moved outside so that I can paint the walls, and it looks like a crazy mess, stuff piled everywhere. She scowls at me and my two new chairs, which are the only furniture in the room. They’re light pine, and they were on clearance at K-Mart because they got scratched, but still they’re simple and pretty. “Good god,” she says. “You’ve got no sense.”

  She leans sideways to look into the living room at the walls I have painted, and if she asked I’d say that I picked a color called sage because both the color and the name are beautiful. She doesn’t know it yet, but there’s new tan carpeting on its way, which Baxter sprung for in honor of his new helping hand, and a peach-colored couch I picked up second hand.

  I’m braced, ready for whatever nasty thing comes out of her mouth, but all she says is, “Brought you the mail.” She hands me a large envelope. “Thought you might be interested in this.”

  I don’t have to open it to know what is inside. It’s the start of a long process, one that will involve lots of paperwork with Tess’s signature, and mine, and all the pages of type explaining what those signatures mean.

  There’s also a letter from Tess addressed to Amber, just like she promised. That letter is also filled with words about those signatures. The envelope is pretty thick, so I guess she had a lot of explaining to do. Sometimes it takes a while to say goodbye in the right kind of way.

  I’ll put these letters in Amber’s box, along with the letter I put there yesterday—the one from Harold and Dottie. What they wanted more than anything, they said, was for Amber to feel loved. They said they didn’t want to fight over custody, and that, after all, a baby needed a mother, and no arrangement they could figure out would take the place of that. Plus Simon had prayed and had decided that his future shouldn’t include a baby after all. But didn’t I agree that a baby needed a set of grandparents? They’d like to be involved with her somehow and—forget the court system—could they have her visit now and then? How about one day a week? Because that way they’d feel a part of Amber’s life and I could get a break. And Amber could grow up knowing the other side of her family, because they imagined that having one half missing created a gap that would be hard to fill, to which I could only agree. Which is all nice, although I’m not dumb enough to think it’s going to be heaven, because they also threw in a “God bless you both” at the end, and an invitation to join their church, which was, as they put it, quite a soul-saving station. I figure I’ll just take that one as it comes.

  In that box of Amber’s are also an arrowhead and a chip. Someday I might tell her what they mean, or maybe I won’t, because it seems like one of a mother’s jobs is to protect a kid from the hurt of this world. Maybe it would be better if she held them in her palm one day and wondered, and smiled at the possibilities, and I’d let her believe in them.

  Kay opens the refrigerator and scans it, and then starts to make herself a cheese sandwich. “Whaddya have here to drink?”

  “I hear you and Baxter are getting married.”

  That makes her turn from the fridge, and she looks at me, surprised.

  “Small town,” I say, and shrug. “I hired Ed to do the photos.”

  “Jeez, I was going to tell you myself. Word spreads faster than I thought. And who said anything about photos?”

  “I did. They’ll probably cost a lot of money.”

  She blinks at me. “Don’t be a brat. Yes, we’re getting married. I’m staying over there every night anyway. This is a little town, people talk. There’s that to consider. Plus he asked me.”

  “I didn’t ask you to explain yourself.”

  “Don’t be smart with me.”

  “I hear Baxter’s not doing so great.”

  “He’s not.”

  “I’m glad you’re marrying him.”

  “Well, this is a small town.”

  “Could it also be, that you love love love him?”

  Kay makes a face and then turns back to the fridge. “Quit sounding like a schoolgirl. You’re supposed to be grown up now. And for godsake, I don’t want any photos.” She makes her cheese sandwich, grumbling about my lack of good sense, or any sense at all, and how she’d be satisfied with even one tiny-itsy-bit glimmer of sense, and why am I sitting while she does all the work, and why’s she always got to be the one doing so much, and why aren’t I out helping them with the haying, because people have been carrying on with babies since the beginning of time, and it’s easy enough to drive a truck with a baby, and she expects to see me out there after lunch break, and am I listening to her?

  I stay where I am, seated in a patch of sunlight. I’ve got my feet propped up on the other chair and Amber’s propped up on the slant of my legs. She’s staring straight at me and smiling.

  It’s a new thing, her smile, and it’s something I’ll write in her journal later, that her first-ever smile happened the same day it looked like she was really going to be mine. I’ll tell her, Amber, this is what it looks like: It’s a smile that starts real slow, spreads gently across your face, and then ends up shy-looking, like you’re not so sure about it but think you might like to try.

  And I’ll also tell her about her eyes, how flecks of brown are crossing into all that blue. Soon they’ll change color for good, I know, but what a m
oment, this in-between stage, this bridge.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you:

  To James Pritchett, for countless kindnesses. His constant and generous encouragement made this book possible.

  To my readers, who helped guide this along: Lauren Myracle, Libby James, SueEllen Campbell. To the members of my writing group: Tracy Ekstrand, Teresa Funke, Jean Hanson, Kathy Hayes, Luana Heikes, Paul Miller, Karla Oceanak, Leslie Patterson, Laura Resau, Todd Shimoda, and Zach Zorich.

  To those who answered my questions: Bo Andrews, Jim Brinks, John Brinks, Julia Davis, Alan Dean, Andy Dean, Mary Dean-Reynoso, Cliff Richardson, Steve Silva, and most of all, my parents, James and Rose Brinks, who have been answering questions my whole life. Also, to the anonymous waitress in Indiana whose conversation started an idea.

  To teachers who made a difference: John Calderazzo, Jan Carpenter, Richard Henze, Eric Hermann, David Lindstrom, and Jane Neth Thompson. You taught me about books and writing, and then I could live better and feel more.

  To the U-Cross Foundation for time and space.

  And finally, to H. Emerson Blake, for believing in this book.

  AUTHOR BIO

  Laura Pritchett is the author of Hell’s Bottom, Colorado, winner of the 2001 Milkweed National Fiction Prize and the 2002 PEN USA Award for Fiction. She received her B.A. and M.A. in English at Colorado State University and her Ph.D. in Contemporary American Literature at Purdue University. Pritchett lives in the foothills in northern Colorado, near the small cattle ranch where she was raised.

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  MILKWEED EDITIONS

  Founded in 1979, Milkweed Editions is one of the largest independent, nonprofit, literary publishers in the United States. Milkweed publishes with the intention of making a humane impact on society, in the belief that good writing can transform the human heart and spirit. Within this mission, Milkweed publishes in four areas: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s literature for middle grade readers.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  © 2005, Text by Laura Pritchett

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415. (800) 520–6455

  eISBN : 978-1-571-31856-5

  Generous underwriting for Sky Bridge was provided by an anonymous donor.

  Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from Emilie and Henry Buchwald; the Bush Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; CarVal Investors; the Timothy and Tara Clark Family Charitable Fund; the Dougherty Family Foundation; the Ecolab Foundation; the General Mills Foundation; the Claire Giannini Fund; John and Joanne Gordon; William and Jeanne Grandy; the Jerome Foundation; Dorothy Kaplan Light and Ernest Light; Constance B. Kunin; Marshall BankFirst Corp.; Sanders and Tasha Marvin; the May Department Stores Company Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and private funders; an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art; the Navarre Corporation; Debbie Reynolds; the St. Paul Travelers Foundation; Ellen and Sheldon Sturgis; the Target Foundation; the Gertrude Sexton Thompson Charitable Trust (George R. A. Johnson, Trustee); the James R. Thorpe Foundation; the Toro Foundation; Moira and John Turner; United Parcel Service; Joanne and Phil Von Blon; Kathleen and Bill Wanner; Serene and Christopher Warren; the W. M. Foundation; and the Xcel Energy Foundation.

  p. cm.

  1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Colorado—Fiction. 3. Young women—Fiction. 4. Adopted children—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.R58S57 2005

  813’.6—DC22

  2004027334

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.