The Other Side of the Bridge

by Mary Lawson

Ian undid the mooring line and stepped delicately, barefoot, down into the canoe. It shivered slightly under his weight but it took him only a second or two to get the balance of it. The floorboards were warm and mellow under his feet.

  “Thanks, by the way,” he said, looking up at his father. Dr. Christopherson nodded. It was still early morning, not yet eight o’clock, but already the sun was strong. It beat down on them—his father on the dock, himself in the boat. A little band of ripples sprang up out of nowhere and patted the sides of the canoe.

  He paddled down the shore, listening to the slippering of the water under the hull, wondering about his father’s motives in giving him such a present. It must have cost a lot of money, for a start, and they weren’t rich. His father was useless—Ian’s mother’s word, and he hated to agree, but it was true—at extracting payment from his patients. “In due course,” he’d say uncomfortably. “When you feel able.” The whole business of money embarrassed him.

  But leaving the cost aside, a canoe was a strange gift, when you thought about it, for someone who would be leaving home in a little over a year’s time. Hardly something you could stuff in your suitcase and take with you. He wondered if that could possibly be intentional. No, that was stretching things, not intentional. But unconsciously, could his father have sought to give him something that he would love but would have to come back to Struan to use? Could he be trying to plant in Ian’s mind a seed of longing for the North that would grow in him while he was away and finally draw him home? His father took it for granted—Ian knew this—that he would go to college, would in fact have pushed him if he’d been unwilling to go. But he also knew his father wanted him to come back. He had never said so, but he didn’t need to. Ian knew it in his bones. Deep down, his father hoped that he would go into medicine and join him in the practice. If you confronted him with this, he would look astonished and deny it. He would say that it went without saying that Ian must choose what he wanted to do with his life. But it also went without saying that he hoped Ian would choose medicine, and Struan.

  It would have been bad enough, to disappoint him, to leave home with no intention of returning for anything but the odd holiday, if everything had been normal. But in the circumstances? Leaving his father alone, knowing how low he could get? It scared Ian sometimes—the depth of his father’s depression. He had always thought of his father as invulnerable, thought he had the answer to everything. That was the impression he gave, not just to his patients but to Ian as well. He looked rock solid. Unshakable. But it wasn’t so.

  Mostly he seemed to be all right while he was working. He kept his regular office hours with Margie Bannister, his nurse, and did his rounds and listened to his patients and their woes, just as he always had. And he was generally fine in the mornings; at breakfast they both sat in the kitchen and read the paper. They were both early risers, so even on school days breakfast was a fairly leisurely affair.

  It was in the evenings that he went downhill. He fought against it; Ian could see that. He tried—in fact, the trying was the most painful thing to watch. Supper times, when he was going through a bad patch, were an endurance test, made worse by the fact that his father seemed to think they should eat “properly,” sitting at the big polished table in the dining room as they had done when Ian’s mother was there. Ian disliked the room. It still reeked of his mother’s presence. It and the living room were full of her little touches: the lacy runner on the sideboard, the cut-glass vases (which had never held flowers because there was nothing but weeds, his mother maintained, within four hundred miles of Struan), the low table lamps on each of the side tables. (“Don’t they look charming?” he remembered her saying when the lamps first arrived. “You see the way they cast little pools of light? It’s so simple. So elegant. Don’t you think?” She had moved one of the lamps fractionally to the right. It was one of the few times he remembered her looking happy, which made the memory all the more painful.)

  She didn’t buy the lamps in Struan, of course. You could get oil lamps at the hardware store to guard against the possibility (in fact, the certainty) of power-cuts during winter storms, but they were functional. Struan hadn’t caught up with the idea of a “charming” home yet. Struan had never heard the word decor. Eaton’s catalog (“the other Bible,” Ian’s father called it, because in many of the homes he visited it was the only other reading material in the house) hadn’t heard of it either, but at least they had proper lamps, and with a little bit of imagination—Ian’s mother said wistfully—you could create the sort of look that turned a house into a home.

  In Ian’s opinion they should have thrown everything out the day she left, cleared the house of the ornaments and knickknacks, the candlesticks and picture frames, but they hadn’t, and all of them were still sitting there, covered with dust (dusting wasn’t Mrs. Tuttle’s forte), waiting to ambush your memory. Why couldn’t they eat in the kitchen, which had always been Mrs. Tuttle’s domain? Why couldn’t they sit in there in the evenings as well as the mornings?

  Though the truth was that he knew why. He knew that his father felt the need to maintain a semblance of “normal” family life. So he said nothing, and they sat in the dining room, night after night. Mrs. Tuttle prepared their supper (on Fridays she made things that they could heat up on the weekend) and set the table before she left, and they ate there, formally, and made polite conversation, even when there was nothing to say.

  “Loaded with fat,” his father would announce, his voice strained with the effort of lightness, helping himself to a piece of Mrs. Tuttle’s fried chicken. “Grease coagulating in your gut, arteries clogging up. We’ll both be dead within the year.”

  “Worth it, though,” Ian would say, going along with it, playing his part.

  His father would nod in agreement. “Oh yes. A fine way to go.”

  Or they’d discuss their days.

  “Joyce Ingrams was in again today.”

  “Yeah, I saw her sitting there. She should have a chair with her name on it. What was the matter this time?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Can’t you just say, ‘You’re imagining it. Go home’?”

  His father shook his head. “She needs the reassurance. Hypochondria is a disease, in a way.”

  Like depression? Ian thought. If so, he did feel sorry for her.

  “Maybe what she needs is to actually get sick,” he said. It seemed to help his father if you could get him involved in conversation, as if his brain were less vulnerable when it was concentrating. But it was hard work getting him there, like winding up an old gramophone that was forever running down. “Then she’d know the difference. Has she ever had anything really wrong with her?”

  “Not that I can recall. Had the flu a few years back. A mild dose, no danger.”

  “She’ll be really pleased when she dies,” Ian said. “She can have ‘I told you so’ carved on her tombstone.”

  His father smiled. It was a small triumph to make him smile. Laughter, in the evenings, was beyond him.

  Ian thought the bad patches were a little further apart than they had been at first, but there were still times when it almost seemed as if gravity doubled its pull on his father. The skin of his face sagged; his big frame seemed weighed down. He looked exhausted. Was he ever going to get over it? And if he didn’t, how could Ian leave him? The thought of it swamped him with guilt, and the guilt made him angry. You shouldn’t have to feel guilty about living your own life. You shouldn’t have to be responsible for your parents’ happiness. It wasn’t fair.

  The day was warming up and the morning mist was lifting slowly off the surface of the water. He slid through it, the canoe making no more sound than the mist. It was a beautiful craft, and here he was, gliding along in it, stewing about something that was still more than a year away. He was fed up with himself, with the way he worried about everything—he drove himself crazy. He should be enjoying the canoe. It was a great birthday present and the odds were that his father had bought it f
or him simply because he knew he would love it. Just that, no more, no less.

  In the wake of the mist a light breeze was stirring and the clean acid smell of the trees drifted across the water. He dipped into Blake’s Bay but there was no sign of Pete, so he carried on to Hopeless Inlet and found him anchored in the marshy bit, where the pike liked to hide, hunched over his fishing line like an old troll.

  “Well, well. A white man in a canoe,” Pete said as he came up. “Whaddaya know.”

  “Not bad, is it?” Ian said.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Pete said, stretching out one leg, then folding it up again and stretching the other. The thwarts in the Queen Mary were very low, and Pete’s legs were very long, so his knees were always jackknifed up around his ears. The knees of his jeans had given up the struggle long ago and were split straight across from seam to seam. “When you guys have evolved a bit more, like in a billion years or so, you’ll discover the outboard motor and you’ll never look back.”

  Ian grinned. But lately there seemed to be an edge to Pete’s jokes, and sometimes it made him uneasy.

  “It’s a nice canoe, though,” he said, trying again. “You have to admit.”

  “It’s nice,” Pete said. “But I’d like to see you land a pike in it. Man overboard.” At that precise moment his hook was grabbed by something so big that Pete was flung to the side of the Queen Mary. The jigger flew out of his hands and he came within half an inch of going overboard himself.

  “Holy shit!” he said when he’d recovered himself. “What was that?”

  Ian was laughing too hard to answer. Pete took an oar from the bottom of his boat, paddled the Queen Mary up beside the canoe, reached out, and before Ian could stop him gave the side of the canoe a little push, and over it went.

  The water was so cold Ian’s heart almost stopped. He came to the surface gasping with the shock of it, and there was Pete, looking down at him and grinning like a cat.

  “You’ve christened it,” Pete said. “It’s good luck to dunk your canoe first time out. You’re gonna be a lucky man.” And he was right, because Ian heaved himself out of the water, made a wild grab at Pete’s arm, and by sheerest luck managed to catch it, flung himself backward, and Pete ended up in the water too. It was just like old times.

  At church, Ian and his father sat in their usual pew. It was a full house. The summer-like weather had cheered everyone up and made them more willing to sit through a sermon in return for the pleasure of gathering around the church steps afterward and getting caught up on the gossip. The women were wearing summer dresses and hats with fake flowers. Everybody looked brighter and more alive than they had a month ago, when there was still snow on the ground. Even the children seemed less fractious than usual. Reverend Thomas was the only one out of step. His sermon was on the theme of pain—on accepting that life was full of it, on enduring it cheerfully, on welcoming the closeness to God that suffering could bring. Ian, who was wider awake than usual because of his early-morning dip, heard his father suppress a snort. He’d seen more of pain than Reverend Thomas had.

  Arthur and Laura Dunn and the children sat three rows ahead, as they always did. Ian fixed his eyes on Laura, as he’d been doing now for what felt like his whole life. If Cathy had been there he might have felt guilty, but her family went to the Baptist church at the other end of town. Ian was secretly glad; it left him free to concentrate on Laura. He still felt the usual confusion of emotions when he was in her presence. It was like a drink of cool water in the desert and being eaten alive by army ants, both at the same time.

  After church, while Arthur headed back to his truck so that he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, she came up to speak to him.

  “Happy birthday,” she said. Carter had followed his father, but Julie and March came with their mother. Julie smiled shyly up at Ian. She was shy with him again because she had seen so little of him during the winter. March, the baby, who wasn’t a baby anymore, stopped digging a trench in the sand around his mother’s feet with the toe of his shoe and looked up at Ian curiously. Laura said to them, “Aren’t you going to wish Ian a happy birthday?”

  “Happy birthday,” Julie said.

  “Thank you,” said Ian.

  March said, “I gotta truck.”

  “Do you?” Ian said. “Where is it?”

  “At home,” Laura said. “Or he’d have been running up and down the aisle with it.”

  “What color is it?” Ian asked March. He must be almost three by now. In the past two years he seemed to have improved considerably. So had Julie. Ian didn’t mind either of them now.

  “Blue,” March said uncertainly, looking up at his mother for confirmation. She nodded.

  “Like your dad’s,” Ian said, and March looked over to where his father’s truck was parked under a tree. He shook his head.

  “It’s smaller,” he said regretfully.

  “Maybe it will grow,” Ian said, and March frowned at him under his thatch of fair hair.

  “Ian’s teasing you,” said Laura. She touched the side of March’s cheek with the back of her hand, making Ian ache with longing.

  He watched her make her way slowly back to the truck, Julie and March trailing along behind her like small dinghies behind the mother ship. Carter and Arthur were standing by the truck. Carter was asking his father something; Arthur shook his head and Carter turned away, his shoulders hunched. Typical Carter posture.

  But he wasn’t really a bad kid, Ian thought. He didn’t sass his parents or refuse to do what he was told or throw rocks through people’s windows. It was just that he always seemed so moody. Ian would see him in the school playground at lunchtime and during recess, watching while the other boys in his class kicked a football around. He wasn’t good at sports. Not team sports, anyway. The only thing he was really good at, as far as Ian knew, was running: during sports day at the end of the year he usually won every race he was entered for. He’d come flying in, face flaming with exhilaration, twenty yards ahead of the rest. Maybe speed was his thing; he was fast on a bike, too. Sometimes in the evenings Ian would see him streaking down the road, crouched over the handlebars, head down, a long low cloud of dust trailing out behind him.

  At home, though, he was one big negative. Sullen and uncommunicative. It was possible, Ian thought, that Arthur had been like that as a kid, but it seemed unlikely. His silence now was companionable, rather than morose. The same with Pete—you wouldn’t describe Pete as gabby, but his silence was thoughtful. Carter’s silence was resentful.

  Maybe he’d grow out of it. Ian found it hard to believe that Carter was only four years younger than him. He seemed such a kid.

  Strange, he thought later, how sometimes when you start thinking about a person, you seem to bring them to the foreground of your life. At eleven o’clock that night there was a hammering on the door and when Ian answered it, Sergeant Moynihan was standing on the porch, gripping a boy firmly by the arm. The boy was Carter. He was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, and his face was white and scared.

  “Took his father’s truck,” the policeman said without preamble, propelling Carter into the hall. “Went for a little spin on his own. Left the road, clipped a rock, ended up in the ditch. Lucky he didn’t hit a tree. Where’s your dad?”

  “He’s been called out,” Ian said, ushering them toward his father’s office. “He shouldn’t be too long.”

  “Stick a bandage on him or something,” said Sergeant Moynihan. “I’ll phone his parents.” He prodded Carter’s shoulder with his forefinger. “What’s your phone number?”

  Carter mumbled the number. He was holding a bloody handkerchief to his head and looked unsteady on his feet.

  The policeman headed toward the hall. Over his shoulder he said to Ian, “You’re getting lots of practice nowadays, I hear. Stitch him up yourself, why don’t you? Save your dad the trouble.”

  “No thanks,” Ian said sourly. He led Carter into his father’s office and sat him down in a chair. He sti
ll looked very white, and Ian wondered if he was going to keel over. He kept a hand on Carter’s shoulder for a minute or two until the boy seemed steadier. Then he went over to the medicine cabinet and got a pad of surgical dressing out of the drawer.

  “I’m just going to put a dressing on it,” he said. “It’ll do until my dad gets back.” He carefully removed the bloody handkerchief and applied the dressing. Carter flinched but didn’t protest.

  “Hold it there,” Ian said. “I’ll put a bandage around it to keep it in place. It’s not too bad. It’s almost stopped bleeding.”

  They could hear Sergeant Moynihan on the phone out in the hall. “I’ll find out,” they heard him say, and he came into the office. “Your mother’s worried, of course,” he said to Carter. “And they can’t come and get you, can they, because you swiped the truck.” He turned to Ian. “She wants to know how bad it is. Is he going to have to go to the hospital?”

  “Probably not,” Ian said. He was winding the bandage firmly around Carter’s head. “My dad will want to make sure he doesn’t have a concussion, though. And it will need a couple of stitches. Tell her we’ll bring him home.”

  Sergeant Moynihan nodded and went back to the phone.

  “I can walk home,” Carter said, his voice shaky.

  “I guarantee my dad will veto that.” Ian fastened the end of the bandage to the rest with a safety pin. He was dying to know what the story was.

  Sergeant Moynihan came back into the room. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to go and help his dad get the truck back on the road.” He turned to Carter. “What was it all about, then? You’re way under age, aren’t you?” He waited a minute, then prodded Carter’s shoulder. “How old are you?” Still no reply. He prodded him again. “Come on, how old?”

  “Nearly fourteen!” Carter said, coming to life all at once, angrily leaning away from the prodding finger. He didn’t seem intimidated, though. Ian was impressed in spite of himself.

  “Thirteen, in other words. Three years away from old enough. You could have killed somebody. Killed yourself. Not very smart, was it?”