“I see,” says Ms. Doberskiff. “That must be”—she is about to say very difficult, but she knows she can’t use the same words for Jackson’s real dying mother as she did for Margaret’s probably fake dying grandmother—“incredibly painful.”
Jackson shrugs. “They keep saying she can’t feel anything.”
Toby nods. He has been told the same thing about his father. That it was fast. Mercifully fast.
There’s a hierarchy of sorts in Bridges. Dead or dying parents are at the top, then brothers and sisters, then grandparents, then pets. But it’s hard to say whether slow death trumps sudden. Like, is Jackson higher up than Toby because his mother is dying slowly, in the living room, day after day? Toby’s father hit a roadside bomb somewhere in Afghanistan, out of the blue, and Toby didn’t see it or hear it or anything. Does that count for less? Or is it worse for Toby because he didn’t get to say goodbye?
These are the questions we’d like to ask Ms. Doberskiff, or whoever. At least, these are the questions I would ask. I would like to know where I stand on the spectrum of sadness. I would like someone to tell me exactly who has it worse than me, or better.
But Ms. Doberskiff would never let us talk about that. It’s too raw, too difficult. She must protect us from our own tragic events, convince us that we are still ourselves, despite what has happened.
“Bethany?” Ms. Doberskiff keeps just the right volume to her voice, soft but clear, so as not to startle us. She would make an excellent wild-animal trainer, if this whole shaping-young-minds gig doesn’t work out. “Do you have anything you want to share with the group?”
Bethany has her notebook open in front of her, pen in hand, and has been drawing spirals, swirling loops across the page. She speaks without looking at us. “Not really,” she says. “My dog is still dead. Frank still doesn’t care that he killed him.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Ms. Doberskiff assures her. “Maybe your stepfather just doesn’t know what to say. Sometimes it’s hard for us to articulate what we’re feeling.”
“How about I’m sorry I ran over your dog?” Jackson suggests. Ms. Doberskiff glares at him, then corrects herself. Bethany’s pen continues swooping. The sound of it, the soft rushing hum, wants to put me to sleep. But I don’t think Principal Hunter will give me credit for attending the meeting if I lose consciousness.
Try to focus on something else, I tell myself.
The room where we have our Bridges meetings looks out over the athletic fields at the back of the school. As I wait for my inquiry from Ms. Doberskiff, my eyes trace the white lines painted on the fields, following their angles through the grass and dust over and over again. I like their regularity, how solid they appear from here, even though I know that, close up, they are patchy and wavering and even slightly crooked in spots. I know that they are like the lines painted on every road and every highway—deceptively reliable, incapable of actually keeping us in our places.
The door opens one more time, and Chase walks in.
This is not good, I think. The last thing I want is for Chase to hear my story like this, in a room where all the air has been replaced with sadness and self-pity. But Ms. Doberskiff’s reaction is very different.
“Welcome!” she gasps. “Please, take a seat. You’re just in time!”
“Unless you wanted something to eat,” Bethany mutters.
Chase crosses the room and pulls up a chair between Bethany and Margaret, so he’s one seat away from me. I look intently at his right shoe. I will look no higher.
“I’m Chase,” he says.
“And why are you here?” Ms. Doberskiff asks gently.
“Because while I believe in honesty, I have not been completely honest with…certain people.” His bravado is wavering. Bridges has that effect on people.
Margaret snorts.
Chase’s shoes turn toward me. “I should have said something when we first met at the coffee shop, or at the séance—”
“The what?” Ms. Doberskiff says.
“—but I chickened out both times, and then when I saw how well you handled that dead chipmunk in your locker—”
Ms. Doberskiff holds up a hand, though it is clear Chase is not finished. I think we are all relieved. “Do I need to…alert someone?” she asks me. “Like the health department? Or the police? Is this a stalking situation?”
“The chipmunk wasn’t from me,” Chase starts, but Ms. Doberskiff’s hand remains firmly raised.
“It’s fine,” I assure her. “I’m fine.” And I am pleasantly surprised to find that it’s true. The knot that my stomach tied itself into when Chase walked in has vanished. Whether or not it was his intention, he distracted me with his confession, drowned out the noise in my head with something else. Something interesting.
But he doesn’t get to finish because Margaret starts to choke on the powdered sugar from her donut hole, and Ms. Doberskiff leaps to her rescue and then adjourns the meeting in order to take her to the nurse.
Mel is right outside the door when we’re done, waiting to retrieve me. She cocks her head and raises one eyebrow when she sees Chase coming out behind me. “New member of the Sadness Club?” she inquires.
“I came for the snacks,” he tells her.
I spin around, startling him. “What were you going to say?”
“Uh—I…” He glances at Mel, who is only too happy to chime in.
“You need to have a problem to be here. That’s how it works. So?” She puts her arm around me. It feels like a chain.
“I’d rather not talk about it in the hallway,” he says, with surprising composure. “Can you—would you come by sometime? To my house? To hang out?”
Mel guffaws and bumps her hip into mine, knocking me off balance. “Like we haven’t heard that one before.” Then she begins to steer me down the hallway, pulling me like a stiff puppet.
“I admire your moxie,” she calls back to Chase. “But we’ve got carnival work to do.”
Much of what Mel says is coded, so carnival work could refer to just about anything. This time, though, she means what she says. The school carnival is in four days and Mel is in charge of set design. She normally rejects school activities, but this time her love of power tools and ordering people around overruled her disdain for sanctioned events.
“Come with me,” she says to me. “I’ll let you drill holes in things. You’ll feel better.”
“You’re probably right,” I concede, “but I’ll take a rain check. I’m working today.” This may or may not be true. I haven’t gotten a straight answer from Cranky Andy about whether I still have a job now that Martha’s working so many hours. But it’s as good an excuse as any.
Mel holds me for another few seconds, then releases me. I can feel her imprint on my body as I walk away. She lets me take five or six steps before she calls, “Are you okay?”
I don’t turn around, just raise my hand and wave it a little. She doesn’t need more than that. Doesn’t want more than that. It’s our arrangement.
Five more steps and then I call back, “What’s the opposite of happiness?”
“Plastic,” she shouts.
I walk home, trying not to think about what Chase said at Bridges. Trying to figure out whether his invitation meant anything more. Before, I would have laughed it off, or taken the bait, but either way I would have felt every part of it. The elation, the anticipation. The disappointment, the damage. Feelings used to be like the vinegar in my baking-soda-volcano gut. They came along and made a mess and died down again and left me with the memory of that brief, gorgeous thrill. Buzzing. Waiting for the next time.
But we’re in the after now. Now I can’t think of the last time anything felt like anything. I am accustomed to being broken, lurching along like an old machine. The rituals stir something up, sometimes, but it’s more like a dull and distant itch than any actual emotion.
Everything I see as I walk is far away, too. My house comes into sight and seems to be just a painting of itself
, flat, impossible to enter. My reflection in the hallway mirror is missing some dimension that would make it look real—I stare into my own eyes, seeing myself there, shrunken and receding.
All I feel is mild fascination. Am I protecting myself? Can I choose to stop, force my way out of limbo and back into the world? The back-to-normal quest—I still believe in it, but it seems impossible sometimes.
We had a globe when I was little, the kind with topographical bumps and ridges, and my brother and I spent a lot of time tracing them with our fingertips and trying to match them to parts of our faces. Occasionally our fingers would collide and we would become territorial, arguing over who had feeling rights to which mountain ranges. The bridge of his nose was more defined than mine, so he claimed the Andes and I got stuck with the Catskills. But they were solid, real. There was no questioning them.
Now I trace my scars from the accident the same way, small white lines that crisscross my arms. I reach down to the one on my hand that I touch when I’m nervous. A different kind of ritual, not for remembering as much as…wondering. About what really happened, because my memories are so fragmented, like the shards of a mirror that don’t make a whole mirror when they’re glued back together.
My parents don’t offer to discuss it, and my doctors talked to them, not to me. So all I know is what I remember from before the accident happened, and what I was able to gather from the newspaper before terrible things happened to other people and replaced our story in print.
It was May twenty-fifth. Three weeks left of school. We had both been working on papers, but we couldn’t concentrate anymore, so we went to the Sip’N’Dip for ice cream. We took my mother’s car, the station wagon we called the Green Goblin. He drove there, but I wanted to drive us home. I had just turned sixteen, and had practiced in the simulator. I had my permit but my parents hadn’t taken me out for many driving lessons yet because they were too busy. My brother was only a year older than me, not old enough to teach me, but he still had ice cream in his cone and I was finished with mine, so I begged. I begged until he gave in. And I didn’t care that it made him nervous, didn’t listen to his objections.
So I was driving. For real, for the first time. And I was doing fine.
He was instructing me between mouthfuls of ice cream. “Light on the brakes, good, check your mirrors.” He turned the radio on and found a song we both liked. And it was good. Better than that. It was great.
But it had rained a lot that morning, and for two days before that.
I got us almost all the way home. The last thing I remember was my brother cheering me on, the sound of his teeth biting into his ice cream cone, the crunch merging perfectly with the sound of our tires splashing through puddles on the road.
And then I drove straight into a huge one, deeper than it looked, and the tires hit the water and seized up.
We hydroplaned off the side of the road and into a tree.
The car hooked left at the last second. The impact was almost entirely on the passenger side. Where my brother was sitting. Where I would have been sitting if he had just finished his ice cream—the vanilla fudge dip cone he always, always ordered—at the Sip’N’Dip instead of slowly eating the rest in the car. If I hadn’t begged so much. If he hadn’t given in. If we had followed the rules.
I was lucky, they said.
But whatever part of me made it out of that car, whatever shell-self I have become now, is nothing like the girl who was driving. And the red circle around October fifteenth screams at me every day, reminding me that if I can’t find my way out of this limbo soon, I may lose my chance to make my own choices. I will be counseled, medicated, moved away. My parents may be in their own orbits for now but I am all they have left, and Dad is poised and ready to move somewhere else and start over. Which would mean leaving my brother’s room behind, leaving the spaces he used to inhabit, leaving our only connection to where he used to be. Losing him all over again.
Hence, my mission: to prove that I can be who I was before. Or at least that I can convincingly act like it.
I text Cranky Andy to ask about my schedule, and he replies almost immediately:
martha has us covered for now. will let you know
I search myself for a reaction to this. I can’t tell how I feel. So I tell myself that I am relieved, and maybe a bit offended. Put some anger in the mix. Make a recipe for what a normal reaction would be. I’m debating about what to write back when a message pops up from a number I don’t recognize:
sorry about the ambush. if you change your mind: 844 linden place
His address jumps out like the numbers in the yearbook index, numbers on a calendar, a code.
How did he find me? My own voice whispers in my head.
I tell myself that it doesn’t matter. I am standing at the edge. I cannot afford to go backward.
—
I haven’t taken my bike out in a long time. It’s been waiting for me in the garage, a dusty companion with endless patience. I brush it off with my bare hands, then wipe my hands on my jeans, leaving brown trails that look like ineffective camouflage. My helmet watches me accusingly from its hook on the wall, knowing that I want to leave it behind. It’s too tight, and it has a purple cat on it. Humiliating. But I put it on. I will do that much for my mother.
Curse her for making me protect her this way.
Riding the bike, at least, is easy. The burning in my thighs is welcome, familiar, and I push harder and harder to keep it going, to get to a speed where sheer momentum keeps me upright and moving. It’s different from riding in a car. I’m in control. The roads are blessedly dry. And I know exactly where I’m going.
Chase only lives a couple of miles away from me, but those miles contain a universe of their own. Each house is larger than the next, newer, with a manicured lawn and stone driveway, and even the asphalt beneath my wheels seems smoother.
He is surprised to see me when I ring the bell. I have been thinking about what to say on the way over, but I’m so stunned by the size of his house and the scale of everything around it that I am struck silent as a doll.
“Martha gave me your number,” he offers.
“Ah,” I say. “She’s awfully helpful.” She must really want Cranky Andy all to herself. I decide that she can have him.
“Come in,” Chase says, and then quickly adds, “If you want to.”
“Well, I didn’t ride all this way to stand on the porch.” It sounds harsher than I meant it to, so I throw a smile on it. I step into the house and at the same time he takes a step back to let me through. It’s like choreography. But much more awkward.
“You, um…Can I take that for you?” He points at my head and I realize that I am still wearing my helmet. The rush of blood to my face feels good, dizzying and fast. Act normal, I tell myself. And then, as a consolation, You can leave whenever you want to. But first I want to see what this mysterious show-and-tell is all about.
I hand him the helmet. “What’s on the agenda?”
“I have, um…” He runs his fingers through his hair, and I grant myself a moment to enjoy his discomfort. It’s a nice change from my own.
“I have something to show you. Upstairs,” he says, but I hesitate and he sees it and says, “Actually, wait here. I’ll go get it.” He sets my helmet on an empty hall table and springs up the staircase.
I look around and listen to the rhythm of his footsteps on the marble floor. Photographs cling to the walls, fighting gravity in identical black frames. A mountainous landscape, a portrait of Chase’s parents on their wedding day, a smiling baby swathed in blankets. I assume it’s Chase, although the baby’s eyes are lighter than his are now.
He comes back, carrying a thick black binder.
I follow him into the living room, full of oversized couches and chairs. I wonder how many people live here, if there’s some secret tribe of brothers and sisters that Chase hasn’t mentioned yet. We haven’t talked about our families.
He sets the binder down on t
he enormous coffee table and flips the front cover open. “Here,” he tells me.
I lower myself carefully and the page comes into focus. It’s a newspaper article, cut out and pasted onto beige paper. The headline says HOUSE FIRE CLAIMS LIVES OF SIX. Without speaking, Chase slowly turns the page and reveals another clipping: FATHER OF THREE KILLS FAMILY, SELF. And then another: HUMAN REMAINS FOUND ON ABANDONED FARM.
“What…” I don’t even know what question to ask, don’t even know what it is that I’m feeling. Horror. Fascination. It’s like his own version of The Lives of the Saints, but with regular people. Real ones.
“It’s a memorial,” he says quietly. “The stories of people who will never have a biography written about them.”
He flips all the way to the back. “This was the first one.”
It’s an obituary.
ELEANOR AND AVERY ABBOTT. A photograph of a woman and a baby. The same baby as in the photograph in the hallway.
“My father’s first wife and son,” Chase says.
I look at the dates. They died years ago, before Chase and I were born.
“I didn’t know about them for a long time, not until I was ten or eleven. He never talks about them. He would never tell me what happened. So I went online and I found them myself.”
I run my finger across the baby’s face. “He’s really cute,” I say lamely. My voice sounds far away, like I’m talking into a tunnel.
“He’d be out of college by now. He’d have a job somewhere. He’d have a past. And I’d have…” An older brother. He doesn’t say it. Doesn’t need to.
It’s absurd that we’re missing the same thing. But not the same thing. He never knew this boy. It’s not the same. But he’s still talking and I want to act normal, so I listen. I make myself focus and listen.
“And it made me think about other people who died, people I never knew—but that I could find out about, with these.”
“Like little biographies,” I say.
Remembering. It seems like such a simple thing, an involuntary process, like breathing. And then we complicate it, mess it up, force it into dark corners and rip it back out. We punish ourselves. We pay.
Some of the Parts Page 5