by Meg Haston
“No. Wil.” I cross my arms over my chest, reminding me to keep the space between us. “Your dad was so much more than those things. Your dad was this—”
“Stop it, Bridge. Stop.” He covers his face with his hands.
“Okay. Okay. I’m sorry.” Emotion rises up in my throat, fills my eyes, bobs beneath the surface of my skin.
He clears his throat, hard. “I found something. Thought you might want it.”
I blink and he’s small, like the grief is shrinking his cells right in front of me.
“What?” I ask softly.
“This, ah—this.” He tears open his backpack and pulls out a cap. It’s worn and dirty and I haven’t seen it in years, since Wilson tugged it over my head to shield me from the sun.
“Mama P’s Seafood Shanty,” I murmur.
He Frisbees the hat in my direction. I catch it.
“Man. My skin gets itchy just looking at this thing.” I pull it on and it smells like Wilson and Christmas-tree air freshener. “I don’t know if this is a weird thing to offer, but if you need help with the packing . . .”
The words hang in the air. He looks past me. “You want to take a walk? I haven’t seen the water all day.”
“Yeah.”
There’s a careful amount of space between us as we head the few blocks to the water. We don’t know how to be this version of us. When the water appears, Wil asks about Micah and Mom. He doesn’t know to ask about Minna, which feels strange. I tell him almost everything about home, about how Mom’s studying for her real estate exam so she doesn’t have to work the front desk at the resort anymore, and about how for me, the most exciting part of her career change will be being able to buy shampoo in a regular-sized bottle like a normal human being. I tell him about how Micah’s been staying out too late, not doing his homework. I tell him I’m worried.
“He’ll get it together,” Wil says, his eyes on the ocean. “Besides, college isn’t for everybody.”
“I know.” When we get to the sandy part of the street, we step out of our flip-flops at the same time and scoop them up.
“I’m not going.” He squints into the sun. The pinks and oranges make him look like an oil painting of himself. “I want to stick around here. I want to work on boats. I kind of think it’s in my DNA.”
“Probably,” I say, relieved. At least one thing hasn’t changed.
He stops. “You ever wonder about that kind of thing? Like, how much of you is new and how much of you is just passed down and you were always going to be that way, no matter what?”
I almost elbow him and say, “Deeeep,” but when I look into his eyes, I realize he means it seriously.
I shrug. “I wonder about my dad sometimes.”
Occasionally at night, in the minutes before I fall asleep, I think about which parts of me came from my father. Maybe he kept Mom organized, too: made the grocery runs and told her when it was time to go to bed. Maybe he got tired of being the adult. But I doubt it. Responsible isn’t Mom’s type. It’s more likely that he’s the part of me that said screw it last year after Wil and I broke up, the part that sank into beer and boys.
“It seems kind of fucked up, doesn’t it? If we’re born a certain way and that’s just how we’re wired—”
“Yeah, but we have our choices. And those are ours, not our parents’,” I say.
He’s quiet for a while, and I wonder if the wind swept my words away. But then he says, “Maybe,” and that’s the end of it.
The beach is crowded for a late-April afternoon. A chocolate lab bounds toward us, tongue flapping, until a tennis ball catches its eye and it doubles back toward the jagged foamy waterline. There are kids building sand castles and screeching at one another in a language that only kids at the beach understand. The water is pink beneath the sun, and people are swimming in fire.
We drop to the sand. I draw hieroglyphics between us and try to think of things to say, things that are right and won’t make this worse than it already is.
“You can help,” he says quietly. “With the packing. If you want. I fucking hate having to do it by myself.”
“Yeah.” I pretend to rub sand from my eyes. “Okay. I will. Anything I can do, Wil.” My pinky finger is only inches away from his. There are one hundred grains of sand between us, maybe. I am acutely aware of this.
One of the little kids screams, “Nooo! Doon’t!” Suddenly, Wil’s whole body tenses and he jerks toward the sound. Like a magnet, my hand goes to his back. He shrugs me off and cups his face with his hands.
“Sorry,” he mutters into his palms. The hairs on the back of his neck are damp. “Sorry.”
“We can talk about it, you know,” I say softly. “Maybe it would make you feel better to—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Before I can tell him that it’s okay, of course it’s okay, that I’m sorry, he whips off his T-shirt and jogs toward the water. The closer he gets, the faster he runs. He leaps over the soft waves that lick the sand, and then he dives beneath the surface, his toes the last part of him to disappear.
He stays under long enough that I know what’s happening. He’d do this as a kid: get really upset, and go out for a swim to calm down, and when he came back, his eyes would be bloodshot and his face would be puffy. It’s from the salt water, he’d say before I could ask.
Fix it, Brooklyn.
I dig my toes in the sand, anchoring myself here. I’ll wait for him to surface. I’ll stay here for as long as I have to, until we find our way back. Until I fix us. I promised.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
FOR years, I knew Wil the way I knew my own name; the knowledge was automatic. Involuntary, even. I didn’t have to think about his most embarrassing moment of the first day of middle school (Spanish. Picking the name Manuel for his Spanish name, only saying it like Manuel, uhh . . . and being called Manuela by the teacher and the students for the rest of the year). I never asked stupid questions like what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday (pie, always) and where he wanted to live when he grew up (here, always). Because it was instinctual, the way I knew him.
“He feels like a stranger now,” I tell Minna later that night. I’m curled up on the settee, pretending to skim my physics textbook, but the words swim in front of me on the page. “I hate it.”
“You don’t understand him,” Minna says. “Of course you don’t. Has anyone ever come into your home in the middle of the night? Killed your family?”
I stare at the text again. “Obviously not, Minna.”
She shrugs. “How should I know? Families keep secrets.”
“I’d have mentioned that kind of thing.” I don’t know much about Minna’s family before she moved to Florida. I know that Long Ago, she lived in California and was married and had a daughter she named Virginia because that was a state she’d always wanted to visit. And then she wasn’t married anymore, and she’s never seen Virginia the state. Virginia the person, she hasn’t seen in twenty-seven years.
Minna writes and addresses a letter to Virginia every night. Sometimes I bring homework and we sit together on the settee with the news on low. In the background: bombs, floods, open-mouthed, long-faced grief. Minna says that the world has always been like this. She says that people will try to fool you with the phrases like back in my day or people never used to, and they are lies. People always used to. It’s just that the world didn’t have as many ways of finding out what humans were capable of. It makes me feel a little better every time she says it. Not that the world has always been a spinning ball of assholes, exactly. Just that things aren’t getting any worse.
I go back to my homework. I read and reread a line about gravity and my mind keeps clicking back to Wil. Trying to make sense of what happened on the beach today, what set him off. Remembering the look on his face brings cold beads of sweat to the surface of my skin.
At the commercial break, Minna flicks her pen at my head and says: “Say it.”
I duck.
The pen narrowly misses my temple. “Minna! What the—”
“Whatever you’ve been wanting to say since you got here, say it. Sitting here listening to you sigh every two seconds isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.”
“I’m not sighing. I’m breathing.” I stare at my textbook while she stares at me. On the television, a studio audience whispers, “Wheel! Of! Fortune!” My eyes are on the book. Minna’s eyes are on me. I will not win this.
“I miss Wil. I want the old Wil back. I want us back.” I whip the pen back at her. “There. You’re welcome.”
Minna mutes the television, and then she turns it off. She looks at me. She has this dangerous, beautiful face that can unravel me. One look from her, and everything I’ve been holding on to since the beginning of time could spill out.
“We talked this afternoon, for the first time in”—I close my eyes—“forever.”
“How did it feel?”
“Awkward.” I scratch at the velvet couch with my index finger. “But at least he’s talking to me again. Or did today, anyway.”
“So what’s the problem?” Minna asks pointedly.
“There is no problem.”
“You said it yourself. Things are awkward.”
“I meant that things are different. What time is it?” I check the clock on Minna’s microwave. :14. She’s paused the timer after making tea. “I should get home to Micah.”
“Different how, Bridget?” Minna has never called me Bridge. “A bridge is a structure spanning and providing passage over a body of water. Bridget is a girl’s name,” she told me on our first day.
“Different.” My skin feels hot and damp against the velvet. “Different because we’ve spent so much time apart. Different because Wil just isn’t the same.”
She raises a silvery eyebrow. “Never will be.”
“I know, Minna. But I don’t have to like it.”
She reaches for my hand. Hers is mapped in delicate veins, blues, and greens. “Remember what I said about tragedy. Sometimes it pushes people further apart. Sometimes it draws them together. It always intensifies what’s there already. It magnifies the good and the bad and the absolutely unspeakable. And you two have a lot of good between you.”
“Had.”
“So little faith.” She sips her tea and wrinkles her nose. “Cold.”
“Here.” I take the cup. “I’ll warm it.”
“That’s my mother’s good china. Keep it out of the microwave.”
I escape to the kitchen, gripping the teacup with sweaty hands. Minna’s voice reverberates inside me. It magnifies the good and the bad and the absolutely unspeakable. There is so much good between Wil and me. He was there for me on my birthday for so many years in a row, made it bearable even though I’ve always hated my birthday. When we got older, he would plan a million things on the day, back to back, from early-morning waffles at Nina’s while it was still dark out to evening beach campouts as the moon rose. I never had to tell him that I dreaded that day because it was the one day of the year that my father should think to call. He never had to tell me what I already knew: that my father never would. There are literally years of good, miles of good between us.
But there is a single night of the bad: my choice on the dock that night. Wil’s anger.
There is the unspeakable: Wilson’s murder.
And with the weight of those things on our shoulders, in our hearts, I don’t know if all the years of good are enough to buoy us.
I catch myself having a silent conversation with Wil on the drive home, and as I unlock the front door and toss my keys on the couch in the dark living room. My lips move, forming the wishes I have for us: Please forgive me for real; we need each other now more than ever; I can’t take this away but I can be there; I will be; I promise. I wonder if he can hear me. I wonder if it’s possible for us to have that kind of connection.
It’s one thing to miss Wil. It’s another to talk to him like he’s here. But even after my lips have stopped moving, there’s a sound. It’s too far away, too soft for me to grasp. Coming from upstairs. But it’s there, and it shouldn’t be. Adrenaline floods every inch of me. I try to remember the pencil lines on the wanted poster I’ve seen on the news. I wonder if Wilson heard the same soft sounds before. I slide my house key between two of my fingers and the spare key to Leigh’s between another two and I make a fist.
I listen so hard my ears might bleed. The sound is muffled. Low, urgent. A moan, like someone’s hurt. It’s not Mom. It’s not Micah. Something in me clicks and I sprint up the stairs, stopping long enough to decide that the sound is coming from Micah’s room. I throw my shoulder into the door.
“Micah?”
A girl screams, but the girl isn’t me at first. By the time Emilie Simpson dismounts my brother and claws her shirt off the floor, all three of us are screaming. I stop screaming long enough to notice my favorite candle, the expensive one Leigh bought me from Anthropologie last Christmas, flaming on Micah’s bedside. Hell no.
“Bridge! Get the hell out!” Micah’s voice cracks, and his face is all red and splotchy and hormonal, and I look away to avoid the rest of him but I want to scream That! That voice crack is exactly why a kid your age shouldn’t be screwing Emilie Simpson! but my brain is throbbing with our humiliation. I trip on Micah’s backpack on the way out, which pisses me off more than I ever thought possible.
“Get out!” I yell at the closed door. I take the stairs two at a time and throw myself through the front door. Outside, I pace the front walk, from the door to the mailbox and back again. I wish I could rinse my brain free of the last three minutes.
If Wil were here, he’d know how to talk to Micah. He’d know what boy words to use to get through Micah’s thick skull. But Wil isn’t here. Mom isn’t here. It’s just me, bracing beneath the weight of my family and my many mistakes. And I’m worried I won’t be able to carry this weight forever.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year
I remember the exact moment when I realized that I loved Wil Hines. We were in the eighth grade. Even then, I knew school wasn’t important to him the way it was to me. School was something he did out of routine, like brushing his teeth. So when I volunteered to be his partner for a science project, not because he made good grades in science but because I had recently come to understand that his hair was a whole new color under the splintered light of the workshop, I knew. We spent long hours working on the project at his dad’s worktable and I tried not to touch Wil’s hair while he read out loud about the moon, about how its gravitational pull was so strong that it controlled the tides.
It freaked me out, knowing that something so mysterious and far away could control us. I told Wil that’s why I didn’t want to believe in God, exactly. He said something stupid, like how he’d been thinking of taking up surfing, and I thought, Oh my God, I accidentally love you. I didn’t tell him I liked him out loud for several months after that. I wanted Wil to say it to me first. He almost did.
For a few nights in a row now, the idea of sleep drifts out my open bedroom window while I watch that same moon tug shadows across the floor and over my bed. And I can’t stop any of them: Micah and Emilie, Wilson’s death, the new strangeness between Wil and me. I can try to catch them, but they’ll just bleed between my fingers. I’m powerless to stop them.
When the Friday moon turns into the Saturday sun, I stand outside Wil’s front door and stare through the familiar decorative glass in an unfamiliar pattern. I thought the gold curlicues were shaped like flowers, but these look more like clouds. I feel sick when I remember: The old door shattered the night Wilson died. This is a new door, a door that shouldn’t be here.
I balance a cardboard tray of coffees and a box from Anastasia’s in one hand, and I trace the design with another. The glass is cold despite the warm morning, and a sour taste rises in the back of my throat. Wilson fought for his last breath here. His eyes dulled here. His heart stopped here.
I suck in a surprised
breath when Henney’s fragmented face appears on the other side of the glass. She opens the door just a crack. She’s tucked into a cotton-candy robe that overwhelms her frame. Her dark, salt-streaked hair is wild around her face.
“Bridget?”
“Mrs. Hines! You scared me.” Then I remember. I’m the one on her stoop. She’s the one who will never feel safe in this house again.
Henney opens the door a little wider. The muscles around her mouth twitch, as if she’s attempting a smile. “If I’d have known you were coming, I would have changed.”
“Oh. It’s no big deal. Believe me, when you’ve seen my mom in the morning—” I force a laugh. “Um, Wil didn’t tell you I was coming?” A few drops of coffee slide down one of the cups and I bite my hand. I lean in a little to hug Henney. I haven’t seen her up close since the funeral. She stays perfectly still, and I’m left swaying back and forth in her doorway, an odd dance.
She shakes her head. “No. But—please.” She opens the door a little wider. Not wide enough for me to move past her.
I hold up the bag. “I brought coffee. And cream and sugar. I don’t know how you drink it.”
“Isn’t that sweet?” Henney mouth-smiles at me. That’s the way I described it to my mother when I met Henney for the first time. Henney had chaperoned our fourth-grade trip to the aquarium, and by then I’d spent almost every afternoon for weeks in the shop with Wil. I expected her whole face to warm when she saw me. But she just mouth-smiled, her irises dim, the skin around her eyes smooth. She said, Nice to finally meet you, honey, and that was it.
“I just wanted to say that the service was really beautiful,” I blurt, instantly making her eyes wet and red.
“You know, a lot of people have said so. Thanks. Thank you.” She swallows and pulls the door open the rest of the way, guiding me into the tiled hallway. It’s gray inside, and there are boxes stacked in the hallway. The air in here is old and sad.