Bridge of Sighs (88 page)

“Are you okay with it?” Sarah asked before driving Kayla home and starting on our dinner. “I thought about putting your dad in. I mean, I feel his spirit in the store every day. It would’ve been the whitest of lies.”

“No,” I told her. “You did exactly right. And putting Kayla where Bobby was…” But I promptly stopped, unable to continue.

“That felt right, too,” she said, raising her index finger to touch Bobby in the old drawing, a gesture that would’ve troubled me before but doesn’t now, and not, I hope, because he’s gone. When the phone rang that morning two months ago, I’d expected it would be Sarah, telling me her train had been delayed, or that she and Kayla had decided to stay in the city another day. Instead it was a reporter from the principal Albany newspaper wanting my reaction to the unexpected death of Robert Noonan, the painter and former Thomaston resident who’d died of an aneurysm in New York. She’d called our local paper, where someone remembered that Bobby and I were friends once upon a time and that I could most reliably be reached at Ikey Lubin’s market. Bobby had died, the reporter filled me in, during a dinner celebrating his triumphant new show. He’d simply slumped forward in his chair and was gone.

I, too, reach up to touch his figure on Sarah’s old drawing. Asked what he’d been like as a boy, I told the reporter how we’d surfed my father’s milk truck, that Bobby had been fearless and liked to shut his eyes going into the curves, that he wanted what was coming down the road to be a surprise, even if it meant he got hurt. That story must have struck a chord, because it was picked up in several other obituaries, including the one in
Time.
“Do you think that’s what artists have to do if they want to be great?” the reporter asked me, and I told her I didn’t know about that, only that Bobby had been brave, that I’d admired his courage and still did. Then she asked if I knew why he’d left Thomaston. Was it because he’d nearly killed his father in an altercation, as she’d heard, or had he left the country to avoid the draft? Was it true he’d gotten a girl pregnant and maybe ran away to avoid marrying her? I quickly made an excuse, telling her the store had gotten busy and I had to hang up. Was there anyone else in Thomaston she could talk to? Anyone who’d known Mr. Noonan well? No, I told her. No one.

Bobby. Hearing that he’d died brought home to me that I’d spent most of my life saying goodbye to him: first when his family moved from Berman Court, and then again a few years later when the Marconis moved from the East End to the Borough. All of this I recounted in my story, and were I to continue it, I suppose I’d have to describe the day Bobby left Thomaston for good, how his mother, looking pale and frightened, had appeared unexpectedly at Ikey’s. My father and I were alone in the store, but it was my mother, her old confidante, that Mrs. Marconi had come to see, and my father agreed, like he always did, that if anybody could help, it would be my mother. “They don’t have to sit outside,” he told her. All of Bobby’s brothers were crammed into the family sedan that was parked outside, the oldest at the wheel. “They can come in and have a soda. I wouldn’t charge ’em or nothin’.”

So in they all trooped and selected their free sodas from the cooler, while I went across the street to fetch my mother. When we returned, she shooed the boys back outside, then led Mrs. Marconi to the table by the coffeepot, where they sat down. My father looked as if he hoped we might be sent away as well. It had been a rough spring: Sarah’s mother dying, her father’s disgrace, the persistent rumor that Nan Beverly hadn’t returned to graduate with the rest of us because she was pregnant and now what had happened between Bobby and his father. All of it had sorely tested my father’s optimism, his deep conviction that things would work out all right in the end. “It’s like everything’s gone crazy,” I heard him say to my mother the night before, his voice once more coming up through the heat register. He didn’t want to hear any more bad news now, and you had only to look at Mrs. Marconi to know that was all she had.

“The doctor says I could die,” we heard her whisper to my mother, who was holding both of her hands in her own, and I remembered the time I’d come home from school and seen them like this in the Marconi kitchen. “What should I do?”

And my mother said, “I’ll go with you.”

“He’ll be so angry.”

Hearing this, I looked at my father, and he at me. Clearly, the reality of Mrs. Marconi’s circumstance hadn’t fully registered. Her husband was in critical condition in the hospital, being fed through a tube, but out of long, sad habit it was still his wrath she feared most, even when her pregnancy might kill her.

“It’ll all be over,” my mother assured her. “He’ll have to accept it.”

Frightened though she was for herself, there was something else that scared Mrs. Marconi even more. “They’re blaming Bobby,” she said, as if this were the height of unfairness. “What if they arrest him?”

Actually, that morning we’d heard the police were just waiting for a judge to issue the warrant. “We’ll take care of Bobby,” my mother told her.

“How?”

“Lou will see to it,” she said, and Mrs. Marconi looked first at my father and then me as if trying to decide which one of us my mother was referring to, or whether either of us could perform such a miracle. “You go home,” my mother told her. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

My father’s line. Their roles had reversed. I glanced over at him and saw him thinking the same thing, and he seemed dubious, even though doubting was her job and not his.

Once Mrs. Marconi and her brood drove away, my mother went over to the till and took out the money we always kept under the drawer and held it out to me, but I had money of my own saved up and didn’t want Ikey’s. When I hesitated, she said, “I’ll do this if you can’t.”

“No, he’s my friend,” I told her. I’d only hesitated because I wasn’t sure Bobby wanted me or anybody else to help him. When I heard what had happened, I’d gone over to his place and knocked on the door. There’d been no answer, but I had the feeling he was inside and didn’t want to talk to me. That door was never locked, so I could’ve gone right in, but in fact I didn’t really want to talk to him either, mostly because I didn’t know what to say. “Besides, Sarah can come along.”

“No,” my mother replied, sternly. “Just you.”

T
HE PLAN WAS
for me to take Bobby to Lake George, not Albany. There he could catch a bus to Montreal. Under the circumstances, I imagined it would be a somber journey, and I couldn’t guess what we’d talk about. Would he tell me he was glad he’d done it, that his father had it coming? Or would he break down and say it was a terrible, awful thing? Would he do what until now he’d steadfastly refused to and admit how badly he was hurting? But I think I knew better than that, that he’d be the same Bobby of his surfing days, just as I was the same Lucy Lynch, as was demonstrated when I again knocked on his door above the Rexall, my eyes already brimming. Though I hadn’t told him I was coming, he seemed to be expecting me. He’d gathered his things into one small quadrant of that cavernous space, and his clothes were crammed into a duffel. When I told him what we’d be doing, he just nodded, and I knew we wouldn’t talk at all about what had happened.

The drive to Lake George normally wouldn’t have taken much more than an hour, but I took a wrong turn and got lost, then found the right road again before getting lost twice more. By then we were laughing like a couple of fools, Bobby saying I had to be the worst driver of a getaway car in the history of crime. I offered to let him take the wheel, forgetting his right hand was in a cast, and that got us laughing even harder. At the bus station he didn’t want to take the money I’d withdrawn from the bank, but we both knew he had to, and finally he did. He told me to tell Dec he was sorry about the Indian, sorry he’d made such a mess of things in general, and I didn’t tell him he hadn’t because we both knew better.

“Remember the footbridge?” I said, mostly for something to say. “How I never had to pay when I was with you?”

“I never should’ve let them do that,” he said, and I knew he meant the trunk.

His admission made me uncomfortable, as if I was the one who owed him an apology, not vice versa. “Will you write?” I asked, and I think maybe a little of the old, juvenile pleading crept back into my voice, like when his family moved to the Borough and I made him promise to call with his new phone number. “When you get where you’re going? Sarah will want to write you back. We both will.”

He nodded. “You should address the letter to Robert Noonan.”

My incomprehension must’ve been written all over my face. “Why?”

“Because that’s my name now. I filled out the paperwork on my eighteenth birthday, but it became official just a couple days ago.”

I could only repeat, “Why?”

He shrugged. “To piss him off. Seems like overkill now, I admit.”

I saw that he’d registered the word “overkill” and, if his father didn’t recover, its possible literal application.

I suppose I looked as horrified as I felt because he said, “Hey, it’s okay.” But how could that be true? How could it be okay to do something so horrible, so irrevocable? In its own way this was more shocking than the beating. When Bobby shouldered his duffel, I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask, “Aren’t you afraid?” And I’m not sure what I meant—afraid of going out into the wide world without a destination, or of going anywhere in his now-fatherless condition. To me, they amounted to much the same thing.

“What of?” he said, sounding genuinely curious, as if I had a better view than he of the road ahead and had glimpsed a dangerous curve coming, one it would be my duty to call. Instead, I just told him to take care of himself, and he told me to take care of Sarah, that I was lucky to have her, and I said I knew I was, and part of me knew right then I’d never see him again.

Sarah believes that if Bobby hadn’t died in New York when he did, we’d have seen him shortly thereafter. I would like to believe this. I would. I wish Ikey’s little bell could’ve jingled his reentry into our lives once more. I can see him plain as day in my mind’s eye, in his surfer’s stance, though we wouldn’t need that to recognize who it was. Yes, it would have been grand to see him one more time.

Except that would’ve necessitated yet another goodbye, and there have already been too many. How many times, after all, does the same person get to break your heart?

W
HEN
O
WEN RETURNS
from his session with Brindy and the counselor, I suggest we close the store early so he can join us for dinner, but he says no, thanks anyway, Pop. It’ll be slow tonight, and closing up at the regular time will do him good, he says. Though he’s glad he’s here and not at our West End market, which stays open until the gin mills close and people who can’t afford to lose start lining up to buy their Lotto tickets.

Owen is looking around the store, taking it all in, as I often do when I have the place to myself, and he ends up studying his mother’s two drawings—Ikey’s then and now. “This was a good idea Grandpa had,” he says.

“It was your grandmother who figured out how to make it work,” I feel compelled to remind him. But otherwise I agree. I do. Sometime in the not-too-distant future I’ll again raise the issue of selling the West End store, even though Owen’s right. It generates twice the income of Ikey’s, because of all those desperate people paying taxes on their ignorance, as my mother puts it. That market was one of the top five Lotto convenience stores in the state again last year, a fact that would have shamed my father and does shame me, though we’re doing nothing illegal and enjoy the full backing of the state of New York.

“I wish I’d known him,” Owen says, looking at my father in the first drawing.

“You would’ve liked him,” I say. “Just about everybody did.”

Owen surprises me then by coming around the counter and giving me a hug.

“Whenever I needed him,” I say, “he was right there.”

“You’ve been right there, too,” he says. “But now? This minute? You should go home. Even your good side’s starting to droop.”

“Okay, I will,” I tell him. It’s been a long day. A long, good day, with another coming tomorrow. “I’ll open in the morning, though. Sleep in if you feel like it.”

That’s how we leave it. I’ll open in the morning. It’s my favorite time of the day, before I unlock the store and let the world in. In that earliest hour Ikey’s is crowded with benevolent ghosts. For the rest of the week and all of the next I’ll open Ikey’s and enjoy every minute of it. The following week we’re taking Kayla to Boston, and I’m sure Sarah has planned some other short trips that I don’t know about yet. And in the summer, Italy. This time we’ll go. We will leave this small, good world behind us with the comfort of knowing it’ll be here when we return. But. We will go.