Bridge of Clay

by Markus Zusak

  “Boring as bloody bat shit!” they’d crow, and it was safe, a routine.

  A metronome.

  * * *

  —

  And finally then, the morning I’m looking for, and she must have known she was close—and she came for him at three o’clock:

  She carried the drip through the door of our bedroom, and first they sat on the couch.

  Her smile was hoisted up by then.

  Her face was in decay.

  She said, “Clay, it’s time now, okay?” and she told him the edits of everything. He was only thirteen years old, he was still too young, but she said the time had come. She told him moments way back to Pepper Street, and secrets of sex and paintings. She said, “You should ask your father to draw one day.” Again, she lifted, and dropped. “Just ignore the look on his face.”

  * * *

  —

  After a while she said she was hot, though.

  “Can we go outside to the porch?”

  It was raining, and the rain was glowing—so fine it shone through the streetlights—and they sat with their legs out straightened. They leaned against the wall. She gathered him slowly toward her.

  She traded her life for the stories:

  From Europe to the city to Featherton.

  A girl named Abbey Hanley.

  A book by the name of The Quarryman.

  She’d taken it when she left him.

  She said, “Your father once buried a typewriter, you know that?” In perfect, near-death detail. Adelle and her starchy collar—she’d called it the ol’ TW—and there was a time when they’d both traveled back there, to an old-backyard-of-a-town, and they buried the old great Remington—and it was a life, she said, it was everything. “It’s who we really are.”

  * * *

  —

  By the end, the rain was even softer.

  Her drip had nearly fallen.

  The fourth Dunbar boy was stunned.

  For how does a just-thirteen-year-old sit by and gather this up? And all of it falling at once?

  But of course he’d understood.

  He was sleepy, and also awake.

  They were each like bones in pajamas that morning, and he was the only one of us—the one who loved their stories, and loved them with all his heart. It was him she fully trusted. It was him she’d imagined would go one day, and dig up the old TW. How cruel those twists of fate.

  I wonder when first he knew:

  He’d give those directions to me.

  * * *

  —

  First light was still half an hour away, and sometimes good fortune is real—for the wind began to change. It came shadowing sideways through to them, and held them like that on the porch. It came down and wrapped around them, and “Hey,” she said, “hey, Clay”—and Clay leaned slightly closer, to her blond and brittle face. Her eyes were sunken closed by then. “Now you tell the stories to me.”

  And the boy, he could have fallen then, and bawled so hard in her lap. But all he did was ask her. “Where do I even start?”

  “Wherever,” she swallowed, “you want,” and Clay stalled, then helped it through him.

  “Once,” he said, “there was a woman, and she came with a lot of names.”

  She smiled but kept her eyes closed.

  She smiled and slowly corrected him.

  “No—” she said, and her voice was the voice of dying.

  “Like this—” and the voice of surviving.

  A momentous effort to stay with him.

  There was refusal to open her eyes again, but she turned her head to speak: “Once, in the tide of Dunbar past, there was a many-named woman,” and it came a great distance from next to him, and Clay now called toward it; he had something to add of his own.

  “And what a woman she was.”

  In three more weeks, she was gone.

  Soon there was nothing else left:

  They finished but were never finished—for they knew there was something to come.

  As far as building the bridge went, though, construction and cleanup were over; they watched it from every angle. In the evening it seemed to shine longer, as if charged by the heat of the day. It was lit, then faded, then gone.

  The first one across was Achilles.

  He looked ready to bray, but didn’t.

  Lucky for us no pacts had been made with bad or corrupting spirits; he walked gingerly first, examining it, but by the middle he’d taken ownership:

  Backyards, suburban kitchens.

  Fields and handmade bridges.

  They were all the same to Achilles.

  * * *

  —

  For a while they didn’t know what to do with themselves.

  “I guess you should go back to school.”

  But that time had surely passed. Since the death of Carey Novac, Clay had lost the will to count. Now he was just a builder, without a single certificate. The proof was all in the hands.

  * * *

  —

  By the time a month had gone by, Clay came back to the city, but not before Michael showed him.

  They were in the kitchen, with the oven—and this was no ordinary boy. People didn’t build bridges this quickly, and certainly not of such magnitude. Boys didn’t ask to build arches; but then, boys didn’t do so many things—and Michael thought of the morning that flooded them, in the last of the waters to come.

  “I’m going home to work with Matthew,” said Clay, and Michael said, “Come with me.”

  * * *

  —

  First they went under the bridge, and his hand on the curve of the archway. They drank coffee in the coolness of morning. Achilles was standing above them.

  “Hey, Clay,” said Michael, quietly. “It’s still not finished, is it?”

  The boy by the stone said, “No.”

  He could tell by the way he’d answered, that when it happened he’d leave us for good—and not because he wanted to, but he had to, and that was all.

  * * *

  —

  Next was something long coming, since Penelope, the porch and the stories:

  You should ask your father to draw one day.

  They were small by the bridge, in the riverbed.

  “Come on,” said Michael, “here.”

  He took him out back to the shed, and Clay saw now why he’d stopped him—when he’d gone for the torturous shovel that day, when he’d driven him out to Featherton—for there, on a homemade easel, and leaning slightly away, was a sketch of a boy in a kitchen, who was holding toward us something.

  The palm was open but curling.

  If you looked hard you could tell what it was:

  The shards of a broken peg.

  It was in this kitchen I’m sitting in.

  Just one of our in-the-beginnings.

  * * *

  —

  “You know,” said Clay, “she told me to. She told me to ask you to show me.” He swallowed; he thought, and rehearsed:

  It’s good, Dad, it’s really good.

  But Michael had beaten him to it.

  “I know,” he said, “I should have painted her.”

  He hadn’t, but now he had him.

  He would draw the boy.

  He would paint the boy.

  He would do it through all the years.

  But before that beginning was this:

  In the last weeks, for the most part, it was barely her shell that stayed with us. The rest of her, out of our reach. It was suffering, the nurse and her visiting; we caught ourselves reading her thoughts. Or were they thoughts long written in us:

  How the hell does she still have a pulse?

  There was a time when death had loitered here, or swung from up on the po
wer lines. Or hung, slung-armed, round the fridge.

  It was always here to take from us.

  But now, so much to give.

  * * *

  —

  There were quiet talks, there had to be.

  We sat kitchen-side with our dad.

  He said there were still a few days.

  The doctor explained that yesterday, and also the morning before that.

  Those days-before were endless.

  We should have already had a stopwatch back then, and chalk to write the bets with; but Penny would just keep living. No one would win the winnings.

  We all looked down at the table.

  Did we ever have matching shakers?

  * * *

  —

  And yes, I wonder about our father, and what it was like—to send us each morning on our way—for it was one of her dying wishes, that we all get up and leave. We all go out and live.

  Each morning we kissed her cheek.

  She’d kept it seemingly only for this.

  “Go, sweet boy—get out there.”

  That wasn’t Penelope’s voice.

  * * *

  —

  It also wasn’t her face—that turning thing that cried.

  That yellow pair of eyes.

  She would never see us grow up.

  Just cry and silently cry.

  She’d never see my brothers finish high school, and other absurdist milestones; she’d never see us struggling and suffering, the first time we put on a tie. She wouldn’t be here to quiz first girlfriends. Had this girl ever heard of Chopin? Did she know of the great Achilles? All these silly things, all laden with beautiful meaning. She had strength now only to fictionalize, to make up our lives before us:

  We were blank and empty iliads.

  We were odysseys there for the taking.

  She’d float in and out on the images.

  * * *

  —

  And I know now what was happening:

  She’d beg him for help every morning.

  The worst was each moment we left.

  “Six months,” she’d say. “Michael—Michael. Six months. I’ve been dying a hundred years. Help me, please help me.”

  Also, it was rare now—it hadn’t happened for weeks—that Rory, Henry, and Clay would skip school and come home to visit. Or at least we were fools to believe it—because one of them often did come back, but was good at remaining unseen. He’d leave at varying time slots, and watch from an edge of window frame—until once he could no longer see her. He’d left school as soon as he’d got there.

  Back home he walked the lawn.

  He moved to their bedroom window.

  The bed was unmade and empty.

  * * *

  —

  Without thinking he took a step backwards.

  He felt the blood and the hurry—

  Something was wrong.

  Something’s wrong.

  He knew he had to go in there; he should walk straight into the house, and when he did, he was hit by the light; it came right through the hallway. It belted him in the eyes.

  But still he carried on walking—out the open back door.

  On the porch, he stopped when he saw them.

  From the left he could hear the car—a single but tuneless note—and he knew in his heart the truth of it: that car wasn’t leaving the garage.

  He saw his father standing, in the blinding light of the yard, and the woman was in his arms: the woman of long-lost piano, who was dying but couldn’t die, or worse, living but couldn’t live. She lay in his arms like an archway, and our father had dropped to his knees.

  “I can’t do it,” said Michael Dunbar, and he laid her down gently to the ground. He looked at the garage side door, then spoke to the woman beneath him, his palms on her chest and a forearm. “I’ve tried so Goddamn hard, Penny, but I can’t, I just can’t.”

  The man kneeling, lightly shaking.

  The woman in the grass was dissolving.

  * * *

  —

  And he stood and he cried, the fourth Dunbar boy.

  He remembered, for some reason, one story:

  He saw her back in Warsaw.

  The girl in the watery wilderness.

  She was sitting and playing the piano, and the statue of Stalin was with her. He was whipping her knuckles with an economic sting, every time her hands dropped, or she made another mistake. There was so much silent love in him; she was still just a pale little kid. It was twenty-seven times, for twenty-seven musical sins. And her father gave her a nickname.

  At the end of the lesson he’d said it, with the snow and its falling outside.

  That was when she was eight.

  When she was eighteen, he decided.

  He decided to get her out.

  But first he’d eventually stopped her.

  He’d stopped her playing and held her hands, and they were whipped and small and warm. He clenched them, but did it softly, in the width of his obelisk fingers.

  He’d stopped and eventually told her—

  And the boy.

  Our boy.

  This young but story-hardened boy of ours, he stepped forward, and believed in everything.

  He stepped forward and kneeled down slowly.

  Slowly, he spoke to our dad.

  Michael Dunbar didn’t hear him coming, and if he was surprised he didn’t show it—he was numb on the grass, unmoving.

  The boy said, “Dad—it’s okay, Dad,” and he slid his arms beneath her, and stood, and took her with him. There was no looking back, our father didn’t react, and her eyes, they didn’t seem yellow that day; they were hers and always would be. Her hair was down her back again, her hands were crisp and clean. She looked nothing like a refugee. He walked with her softly away.

  “It’s okay,” he said again, this time to her, “it’s okay,” and he was sure he saw her smile, as he did what only he could, and only in his way:

  “Już wystarczy,” he whispered quietly, then carried her through the translation. “That’s enough, Mistake Maker”—and he stood with her under the clothesline, and it was then she’d closed her eyes, still breathing but ready to die. As he took her toward that note he heard, from the light to the smoke in the doorway, Clay could be totally certain; the last thing Penelope had seen in the world was a length of that wire and its color—the pegs on the clothesline, above them:

  As weightless as sparrows, and bright in the light.

  For a moment they eclipsed the city.

  They took on the sun, and won.

  And so it was.

  All of it led to the bridge:

  It had finally been enough for Penelope, but for Clay it was one more beginning. From the moment he carried her away, it was life as he’d never known it. When he came back out to the clothesline, he reached up for the first of his pegs.

  His father wasn’t able to look at him.

  They would never be the same again.

  What he’d done, and what he became at that moment, would turn so fast to regret.

  He never remembered the walk back to school.

  Just the lightweight feel of the peg.

  He was sitting down, lost in the playground, when Rory and Henry found him, and lifted him up and half carried him.

  “They’re driving us all back home,” they said. Their voices like broken birds. “It’s Penny, it’s Penny, she’s—”

  But the sentence never had an end.

  At home, the police, then the ambulance.

  The way it all swam down the street.

  It was well into afternoon by then, and our father had lied about everything; and that was always her plan. Michael would help her, then tell them he’d gone out briefl
y. It was Penny herself, so desperate—

  But the boy had come home and he’d ruined it.

  He’d come and he’d saved the day.

  We would call our father the Murderer.

  But the murderous savior was him.

  * * *

  —

  In the end there was always the bridge.

  It was built, and now for the flooding.

  The storm never comes when it should.

  In our case, it happened in winter.

  The whole state was soon underwater.

  I remember the endless weather, as the city was lashed with rain.

  It was nothing compared to the Amahnu.

  * * *

  —

  Clay was still working with me.

  He was running the streets of the racing quarter, where her bike, surprisingly, stayed; no one had got out the bolt cutters, or managed to break the code. Or maybe they just didn’t want to.

  When the news came through of the weather, the rain started coming much earlier; Clay stood in the first drops of water. He ran to the stables at Hennessey.

  He made the lock into all the right numbers, and walked the bike carefully away. He’d even brought down a small bike pump, and put air in the sunken tires. Cootamundra, The Spaniard and Matador. The courage of Kingston Town. He pumped hard with the names inside him.

  When he rode out through the racing quarter, he saw a girl on Poseidon Road. It was right up top near the northern part, near the Tri-Colors gym and the barbers. The Racing Quarter Shorter. She was blond against blackening sky.

  “Hey!” he called.

  “Some weather!” she replied, and Clay jumped off the old bike.