What Can't Be Undone

by dee Hobsbawn-Smith

  “She said, ‘Where’s Joe? Where’s your dad?’ But, Peter, it was how she said it.”

  I had a sharp memory of the despair I’d seen in Sal’s face as she fed apple slices to Joe against that backdrop of trembling canvas. I grabbed Fiona’s hand and we ran, our feet slipping on the wet boardwalk.

  I heard Tag barking hysterically as we approached the beach.

  We rounded the curve past the highwater logs. A small stick lay beside a squiggle of lines drawn through a shallow runnel of water. Clouds banked above the distant coastline.

  Even without my glasses I could see the child’s golden hair glinting in the flat light. I slowed, tugged Fiona to a stop.

  “He’s okay, he’s all right,” I bent forward, gasping. Fiona pulled her hand free and ran, red hair flying.

  “Joey!”

  My feet and lungs were lead, but I ran after her all the same, cursing my age, cursing the heavy sand, cursing her father. Norm stood immobile, staring across the strait, cigarette in his mouth. Tag was racing back and forth along the lacy edge of the waves, a scant five feet from Norm, to where Joe sat, legs crossed like a tiny Buddha, the swirling water sucking sand and stones from beneath him.

  The Bridge

  AT FOUR AM, BREATHLESS ROLLS OVER and stares at the blue numbers on the clock. She can feel sweat beading on her upper lip. At five, she pulls on a skirt, tank top, sandals. Cigarettes and lighter, cash and key, cotton sweater over her arm. The hall floor creaks as she tiptoes to the lobby.

  “Which way to the Brooklyn Bridge?”

  The night clerk’s smile is as wan as the walls. “A good half hour south on foot, ma’am. You aren’t walkin’ alone, surely?”

  Breathless almost smiles. “I’ve seen things. It’s like wearing armour, you know? A map, please.”

  The map materializes. “It’s got the subways on the other side. See? And maybe I can lock your necklace in the hotel safe?”

  “Gotcha. I’ll keep it out of sight.” She wraps her sweater sleeves around her throat, covering the necklace, steps into the morning.

  A postcard pinned to the wall above the coffee urn in her favourite diner at home in Calgary had brought her to New York City. She’d stared at that postcard over breakfast for years. Men in hard hats and undershirts, building the mile-long Brooklyn Bridge over the East River in 1883, leaning casually on the cables. All those strands spoke volumes, braided steel wires that held the bridge together, tied it to the earth, stronger than they appeared, complicated beyond unstringing or understanding. The men who had woven the bridge into being were long dead, but Breathless had wanted to see their world — boots swinging over the bridge deck as they unpacked metal lunch buckets, at ease, unconcerned by the river, its currents, the city’s unseen risks. As if life was no more demanding or perilous than a simple walk across a bridge. As if all anyone needed was a single silver strand to hold them safe and guide them home.

  Home’s a myth. Just the act of living takes all of her breath and attention. In her teens, Breathless would reluctantly pull herself from the shelter of a novel, arrive late for class, for supper, for visits with friends, her breath huffing, her face pink with the effort of being present. Her mother, a hardcore boozer, single all her life, dead forty years, had nicknamed her only daughter Breathless, abandoning the name she’d given her at birth. Breathless has always been grateful for that anonymity.

  The streetlights are still flickering. Breathless scans the map, gets her bearings and heads to Stuyvesant Square, hoping for parkland, a fountain. But the park is tiny, stitched with paving stones and benches, a pair of magnolia trees. In front, a plain red building, the plaque announcing the Quaker meeting hall. Beside it, a Gothic heap of stone, complete with lions at the gates — the Episcopalians. Newspaper sheets crumpled on a bench ruffle in the breeze, a couple huddled beneath the folds, pillowed by corrugated cardboard. She tugs her sweater free, drops it on the forms huddled on the bench, doesn’t look back when she hears a muttered “Thanks.”

  The breeze whispers across her bare neck, across the necklace, a lacework of silver filigree around a square-cut amethyst that reminds her of early-spring flowers. It’s all Breathless has from her lover, Simon, a university prof, with a graceful neck and throat like a Canada goose, grey-haired, a fine down of silver hair on his chest. He’d whistled Sonny Rollins riffs in bed, scattered books and coffee rings around the hotel rooms they frequented, and left her abruptly, before the crocuses bloomed.

  For her fiftieth birthday, they’d spent the afternoon at a riverside restaurant. He’d given her the necklace, clipping it around her throat where the stone pressed, cool against her skin, and then he’d retreated. “So long, sport,” he’d said, as if it was the wind-up game of baseball season. “You’re great, just great. It’s been … well, I won’t be seeing you again. Sorry.”

  Breathless had the impulse to throw the necklace at him as he left, but it had seemed pointless. Instead, she’d ordered coffee and madeleines, then walked home along Memorial Drive, the chain heavy on her neck. As she had crossed the footbridge over the river, she’d thought again about tossing the necklace away, but it already felt familiar, like the ache, a beacon to loss, buried beneath the stone.

  Next day in the diner, her breakfast had sat untouched and her coffee cooled as she’d stared at the bridge in the postcard. At work, she’d gone online and spent her tips on a plane ticket.

  As Breathless ambles down Fourteenth Street, at the corner of Second Avenue a woman surfaces from a brimming dumpster emblazoned with “Property of NYC,” clutching a stained chenille bathrobe, her hinge of a voice scraping against the dumpster’s metal walls. “What you starin’ at?”

  Breathless shrugs, keeps walking. How could she help? At Third, a street sweeper grinds past, its brushes scrubbing the pavement. In its wake of silence, a cop car rolls alongside her, window down. A hard brush-cut emerges. “You workin’? Move along.”

  She folds her arms. Raises her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, sorry, ma’am. This isn’t the best neighbourhood. Maybe you should … ” The head retreats.

  Cops. Alike in any city. Plenty of them hang around at The Eddy, the east-side Calgary hotel where Breathless tends bar and keeps a small apartment on the second floor, home since Gran died. Her room is clean but sparse — a red Japanese paper lantern, narrow bed covered with Gran’s patchwork quilt, a few clothes hanging in the closet. In the bathroom, a tawny orchid flowers for months at a time, something delicate but foreign about its stamens and intricate petals, evoking tropical nights, the waning moon. Exile.

  Approaching Union Square, a pretzel vendor sets up for business in the lea of the market. Breathless imagines a horse harnessed to the cart, its nobbled head nodding, the huckster’s thin shout cracking the early light. “Mustard. Salt. Hot pretzels. Get yer hots here.”

  The pretzel, still warm, is chewy, salty and dense inside, akin to Gran’s bread. Her memory of Gran is fading, like the rug in her bedroom. Gran raised her after Breathless’ mother had died. She hadn’t been one for wasting anything — not fabric, not words, and her spare shows of affection had extended to plaiting rugs from scraps for Breathless’ floor. Eating takeout noodles alone in her room after work, the knotty texture of the rug under her bare feet was a reassurance. She still felt. Something still stirred, might yet flare.

  Horns blare through the morning air. Pickups and vans are backed up to the sidewalks lining Union Square, apron-wrapped men unloading flats of bread, links of sausages, tubs of cut flowers, onto tables and stalls.

  “What’s all this?” she asks one of the men when he looks up.

  “It’s Saturday, right? Farmers’ market.”

  “How much for the flowers?”

  “We ain’t open for an hour yet. Here. Just take ’em.” He grabs a bunch of tulips, jams them toward her.

  “That’s so kind! Which way to the subway station?”

  “Yeah, no worries.” He waves at a sign across the square. The tu
lips’ orange tips bulge beyond their paper jacket. She tucks them under her arm and crosses the park for the subway, the bridge her final destination.

  At the top of the stairs into the subway, a girl shoves past. She’s maybe fifteen but her face is leathery with scars. A stride past, she swivels.

  “You spare a few bucks? I haven’t eaten in days.”

  Breathless assesses her short skirt and thin camisole, burn holes in the tights pulled across narrow thighs, holds out the tulips, and a ten. “Go get a juice and a bagel, girlfriend.”

  The girl ignores the flowers, grabs the bill. “I ain’t your girlfriend, bitch.” Her ankles wobble above her high heels as she retreats.

  Girls like her hang out down the hall in The Eddy. Breathless is cautious there, coming and going, dodging needles and empty syringes, stepping around the girls clustered in the stairwell. When she’d arrived in Calgary at nineteen, she’d found a similar room in a similar hotel, and had offered several similar girls a cot and bite to eat, but her jewellry and clothes had disappeared with them. She’s learned to nod and say hi, looks past their bruises, and as casually as she can, she gives them juice boxes, peanuts from the bar. Their stagnant faces remind her of her mother, her breath and body heavy with gin, snoring on the couch while Breathless scrambled together her school lunch.

  The subway station’s stairwell needs a good paint job and the floors need a mop. Breathless buys a token and feeds the turnstile, wanders through the cavernous halls and corridors until she finds a map threaded with colours. The platform for number six downtown is nearly empty. Breathless leans on a cement pillar, studying the wall tiles, their chipped enamel fading. Thirty years of looking away from girls who could’ve been her, tending bar and dating a string of men, listening to minor plans and lies. Whenever Breathless would look in the mirror back home, she’d wonder why she hadn’t succumbed to dope or booze. What does she have to show for surviving? Back home, The Eddy’s regulars lean on the counter, certain of her ear. “Breathless, listen. This guy at work, he tells me one day … ”

  Tom, the acerbic manager, would inevitably flip his ponytail, snort and ask, “You got a candy-ass heart? See yourself as some shrink, gonna save the world?” He doesn’t have the patience to wait for the stories that leak onto the bar, but he sees the tip jar fill each evening during her shift.

  “I’m here anyways, Tom,” Breathless always shrugs. “I might as well listen.” There isn’t much she hasn’t heard. Sometimes she feels numb, although the stories keep her from fretting about aging alone, and although her cheeks are still firm and high, her breasts too, some mornings, lying on her bed, her bones ache, and she’s not looking thirty anymore, her hair slipping from mahogany to mouse.

  “Maybe your next big thing is to set up some charity house for them girls, hmm?” Tom heckled the day before she flew to New York. “Become a Mother Teresa.”

  Breathless laughs at the thought.

  When the train chuffs to a halt, Breathless steps through the doors and takes a window seat. She averts her eyes when a clutch of young men in tight black jeans and jackets scramble through the door, the sweet stink of stale alcohol wafting from their clothing. One lags behind, appraising Breathless. He jerks his chin at her.

  “How ’bout it?”

  “In your dreams.” She settles by a window, her hand rubbing the smooth stone at her throat. The door hisses shut and the young man sways up the aisle into the seat behind her. He’s older than he seemed, scarred and bruised, dull eyes. For a minute, she watches his reflection in the window, tries to breathe smoothly, looking for an escape route. But she still jumps when his hand grabs her hair at the nape of her neck, turns her face inexorably towards his.

  “C’mon. You want it.” He wraps his forearm around her throat.

  The ripcord panic line is out of reach above her head. His friends cluster at the far end of the car, watching as he forces her to her feet. She retreats, step by step, until her back is against the central door, the man crowding her, his breath bitter, leaning in, his thighs hard. Breathless tries to jam her knee upward into his crotch, an elbow pinned to her ribs.

  His hand tightens around her throat. Breathless thinks of Gran, her muscular forearms, as the car slows to a stop. The door behind her opens and frees her arm. She whips the tulips up, a hard backhanded arc that lands her knuckles on the point of his nose and the flowers in his eyes.

  “Bitch!” He jerks back, then sneezes.

  Breathless almost forgets to move, then pulls free, stumbles through the doorway, smashed flowers tumbling through the gap to the tracks. She looks back, catches sight of him, regains her balance and runs across the empty platform, up the stairs, no second chances, no echoing footsteps.

  Above ground, the sun shimmers behind the mist, damp air a welcome touch on her skin. Breathless eases her pace, arms wrapped around her heaving ribcage, shuddering as she approaches the curved crosswalk to the bridge. Even on an early weekend morning, the car deck below is busy. Along the elevated walkway, the wooden slats under her feet are dull, but the cables above her head twang like bluegrass chords.

  At the sound of footsteps chasing up behind her, Breathless convulsively hunches, ducking. Two women in jogging gear, wired, feet moving in unison. They nod, a kind of salute. When they pass Breathless, she studies their square-held backs, her shoulders loosening in their hinges.

  From the east, out of the shadows hanging over Brooklyn, a man in a tattered beige trench coat leads a little dog. The man moves with a lurching reel, as if he’s been too many years in dry dock. The dog, an apricot poodle, shambles to a halt at her shin, and cocks its hind leg.

  “Hey! Get on!” The man yanks the leash. The dog reluctantly lowers its leg and disappears up the sidewalk, the man staggering along in its wake.

  Breathless paces to where wires and cables coalesce. In the postcard, this spot is the heart of the bridge, where workmen rubbed elbows, their rough community palpable. In the exact centre, a sax player stands alone. His music hangs, smoky as the light. Breathless stops, leans on the rail, waits for her heart to settle, watching his long fingers on the stops, listening as he riffs. He cocks an eyebrow and nods at her without lifting his mouth from the reed.

  “‘Giant Steps’?” Her voice is a whisper.

  The player nods again, lips pursing around the reed. He’s grey-haired, weathered, with the angular body of a basketball player, clad in t-shirt and chinos, his torso bending with the music he blows. His fingers slide from metal to metal as if the instrument is skin and soul.

  When the music stops, she drops a folded bill into the open instrument case lying at his feet.

  “No need,” he says. “I play for my own pleasure.”

  Pleasure seems a long way away. Breathless turns to the view on the Manhattan side, to the Chrysler Building’s majestic indifference. Tears slide down her cheeks. So many losses. Youth, lovers, opportunity, Gran, her ruined mother, hope, all the unwinding threads of her life. The tulips on the subway tracks. Then she looks up at the bridge’s silver wires, spinning their own web above the city, its tugboats, stevedores and smugglers, their stowed secret cargo, broken, beautiful and tragic. Incomprehensible irony.

  The music follows Breathless as she walks back into Manhattan. To the first open coffee vendor, next to its furled umbrella, sipping, pondering the scars on the jazz blower’s naked forearms, what he has seen, how he continues to play.

  She lifts her half-full mug in acknowledgment, tells the barista, “Another, a double to go, extra hot,” then strides back up the bridge, balancing both cups in a cardboard tray. He’s still there, Rollins rolling from his horn as if the big man himself still straddled the bridge. Breathless sets the extra cup beside the musician’s feet, nods to him, walks to the rail. Halfway through “St. Thomas” the sax player bends, drinks, missing barely a beat as he straightens. Notes slide from the horn, channeling Coltrane, Rollins, Parker. Breathless follows the melody into the beautiful depths, thinking about the centuries
of differences between men and women, their desolations and separate longings.

  She reaches behind her neck to unclip the silver chain holding her amethyst. Coffee cup in one hand, her elbow balanced on the bridge’s cable, her necklace lies across her palm, fingertips fretting where stone and silver meet. All Breathless is conscious of, all she can absorb, is that its strands will tarnish and the amethyst will loosen in its setting. Letting go might be easier.

  Finally he stops playing. Removes the strap and the reed, lays the saxophone in its bed. He tenderly wipes the metal clean, then he strides toward her, his head gently bobbing, eyes blinking behind round glasses. An arm’s length away, he stops.

  Breathless freezes.

  His hands open at waist height, palms up. Her breath whistles as he plucks the necklace from her hand, opens it. Without touching her, his arms encircle her. Deft fingers attach the clasp at the nape of her neck. “Just don’t quit,” he murmurs, rough as unrehearsed music. “You hear?” Calloused fingertips brush across the amethyst in the hollow at the base of her throat. He swings back to his sax in its case. Picks it up and begins to play.

  Breathless, feeling oddly blessed, lights a smoke, leans on the spun wire railing, her fingers on the silver chain. Downriver, she can make out the Statue of Liberty. Light undulates along the river’s milky skin. She can sense the sky, the city’s vast inhale as real as her own skin’s rise and fall above her ribs. Chin on her forearms, she feels New York surrounding her. Above her shoulder, the long-gone workmen are still a presence, tangible in the wires they strung. She can hear them now, her ear softened by the big man’s playing. As her cigarette burns down to the filter, she smiles ruefully, her boss’ offhand comment echoing. Maybe she is a do-gooder after all. Considers the cost of a few rooms next to hers in The Eddy, a shelter, a safe landing for those homeless girls. The stub of her cigarette flicks free and she watches the firefly tumble and spark of its descent, like sparks from a welder, until it disappears into the river.