The Bridge (7 page)

“Intense?”

“Yes.”

She relaxes slightly and I take her hand. “For me, too. I just…it just…”

“Did you get freaked out?”

I take a deep breath and let it out. “Yeah. I did. I’m sorry. You deserve much better than…”

“Oh shut the fuck up, Henry.”

I laugh abruptly. “What?”

“I said shut up. Don’t be stupid. It’s not about what anybody deserves. This is just you. And me. And the situation is what it is.”

I gaze at her for a moment, at her dark, dark eyes. Then I lay my hand against the opening of her robe. “Can I see it?”

She stills and doesn’t seem to know what to do. “Why?”

“Because I want to. If you’ll let me.”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Might as well. Seeing as…” She gestures to my lap and we both chuckle a little, and then she pulls her robe aside.

It’s much less angry than I would have thought, having imagined, for some reason, a dark red vertical Frankenstein scar. Instead, it’s horizontal, slightly slanted toward her armpit, and pink. Her entire left breast has been removed, leaving behind a perfectly flat chest on one side.

I slip the bathrobe over her shoulder and meet her eyes. “Can I touch you there?”

She hesitates, and then nods. Slowly, I press my palm over the scar. The heat of her body radiates into my hand. Her chest rises and falls. It hitches, and I can feel her shake herself to get control of that. Then she lays her hand over mine.

I want to put it back for her. To undo it. To say whatever it is that will make it all okay again. But I know better than most how impossible that is. Once you’ve reached a certain tipping point of knowledge about how cruel the world can be, you can’t turn time backwards and un-know it. The truth becomes part of you. It changes you. It leaves scars both actual and hidden.

Meanwhile, the world keeps spinning. The people around you go on acting like everything is normal when you know it isn’t. You know that lightning strikes and it doesn’t care who it chooses. You can’t avoid it by being good, or being careful. It strikes and if you’re the one in the way, it’s you. It can happen at any time, and not only are you supposed to just sit there and take it, you’re supposed to go on acting like the world is somehow okay still. And it isn’t. It never will be, for you, again.

The best I can do for her right now is to be honest about that. The bad things that happen to us are awful enough, but it’s the lies people tell about them that truly mess with our heads. That everything will be okay? That we’ll get over it? Fuck that.

“I can’t think of anything that sucks more than this, Christa.”

She makes a little hiccupping, sobbing laugh. “Genocide?”

“Maybe that.”

“If they’d cut off my head instead?”

“That would have been bad, yes.”

“Right?” She swipes a hand over the tears on her cheek. “Although all this might have been easier, without a head.”

“All that pesky
thinking
. Gone.”

She covers herself again with the robe, but keeps hold of my hand.

“Can I see the other one?” I ask and she goes still.

“Why?”

I shrug. “Why not?”

“It has a lump in it.”

“I know. I still want to see it. But first you have to get off my legs. They’re falling asleep.”

‘What? Oh. Sorry.” She climbs off my lap and sits beside me. “Do you still want to go swimming?”

“Not right now. Maybe later.”

“Okay.” Her head leans against my shoulder, and I can smell her hair. It’s drying now—frizzing a little and tickling the bare skin of my arm. “Do you want to get in bed with me? We don’t have to…you know. But maybe you could hold me?”

I squeeze her hand and stand, and we go to the bedroom and lie down side by side between the cool, clean sheets.

After a moment, she pulls her robe aside. She doesn’t look at me, but she lets me see it—her one breast so pale and pretty against the white bedding.

“My breasts were always really sensitive. It was a big part of sex for me, touching them. Having them touched. Now there’s just this one, and if I had to have another surgery—”

“I’m sorry, Christa. It’s…I’m just sorry. I wish—”

“I know.” She sighs, long and slow. “What can you do.”

“Why don’t you touch yourself, now? While you…while you can.”

“Touch my breast?”

“Yes.”

“With you watching?”

The question makes me hard again. Or rather, harder. Because her skin, her hair, her voice—they’ve brought me back from that place of panic. I didn’t want to disturb her with it, but now, seeing her naked, vulnerable—I think it might help her, to feel this. To remember what it’s like. Maybe it will help me, too.

“Yes, with me watching.”

Her dark eyes look into mine, and then she lifts a hand to her breast.

I don’t know how to describe what it’s like, watching her stroke her fingers over her nipple. The way her back arches into it, the sound she makes. A tear slips from between her closed eyelids, and I kiss it away. I kiss her mouth. Her lips taste sweet and hot, and when her tongue slips into my mouth, my hand takes the place of hers. Her nipple is silky, tight. I lower my head and lick her there, and then suck, and when her legs fall open I slide my hand between them.

So much life is in her, in Christa. So much heat and life. I dip my fingers inside her wetness and stroke it up over her clit, and she whimpers. I want so intensely to make her come, I will do anything. Anything.

“Henry.” She pulls my face to hers and kisses me, and presses into my hand. Her hips lift off the bed, and she’s so slippery. So swollen. “Faster.”

I stroke her faster. Lightly, but faster, and she’s gripping my back, and bucking into my hand, and coming, and I swear to God it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my whole fucking life.

She gropes blindly for the bedside drawer and produces a condom. I have no idea where she got it from and I don’t care. I roll it on and push inside her, and I can’t breathe.

It’s too much, and it’s not enough, and I want more. She doesn’t let me even try to make it slow. She locks her legs around my hips and drives me deeper, and the sounds she makes…the desperate, pleading sounds…I want to let go, to unravel, and just for a moment—for a moment—to disappear. It’s so intense and relentless, I almost start to be afraid of it. I should be afraid of it; it’s terrifying. But then she digs her nails into my ass, and bites my throat, and I can’t help myself. I come inside her frantic, gasping body. As she tightens around me, and locks me in.

“Christa. Christa.”

Her name is the only word I know.

Henry’s clothes are still on and I ask him to take them off, so I can feel his skin. He smoothes back my hair, kisses my cheek, and obliges, returning a few minutes later from the bathroom smelling like artisanal soap.

“This place sure is fancy.” I lift the covers so he can slide in beside me. “I think my monetary value has increased just by being here.”

He gathers me into his arms. “Your face will be on Page Six in the morning.”

“You think?”

“I do.”

I hook my leg over his. “And will you be around to read it?”

He goes very still. I’ve blindsided him with this question, and perhaps that’s not completely fair. But we’ll have to talk about it sooner or later. As womblike as this hotel suite is, it hasn’t managed to stop time. Tomorrow we will have to decide—both of us—what we plan to do.

“Will
you
?” he counters, and I don’t know what to say. It depends? On whether you do?

That’s about the most fucked-up thing I could possibly tell him, or even think to myself. I can’t stay alive just because I’ve met a boy I like. That would be pathetic in the extreme. I’d have to kill myself just to shut that sad teenage girl up. The one inside who wants to stay in this bed with Henry, forever.

“I don’t know,” I say, and that’s the honest truth.

Henry sits up. “How can you not know? Christa, seriously. You have something that’s totally treatable, and—”

“You don’t know that.”

“Neither do you. You don’t know whether it is or it’s not, and you’re just willing to throw yourself away like a piece of trash?”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing, Henry? How is it any different?”

“When did you even get the diagnosis, anyway? How long have you known?”

“Answer my question.”

“No, you answer mine. When did you get the diagnosis?”

I turn my face away. This isn’t supposed to be about me. It’s supposed to be about him. About why he can’t…

“Christa.”

Goddamn him. “Two days ago.”

He just stares at me. Eyes wide with disbelief.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

I sit up against the pillows and cross my arms over my chest. “Why?”

“Seriously? You want to know how your situation is different from mine? Because I’ve known for years—
years
—that this is what I wanted. You’re making a decision that’s totally impulsive, out of panic. What if you felt differently in a week? Have you even told anybody?”

I hesitate for a moment, and then shake my head.

“Jesus Christ!”

I’ve never seen him so riled up. Of course, I’ve only known him for less than a day, but still. His ire is strangely fascinating to watch. It gives me a perverse thrill, to see him so incensed on my behalf.

After the first diagnosis nobody showed any anger at all. They were scared, obviously, but it was clear to me that their fear was for themselves. Sam was afraid he wouldn’t be able to handle it, and he was right, God bless him. He kept telling me it was going to be okay, but I knew it was himself he was talking to. Himself he was trying to reassure. He wanted to believe it would all go back to normal—to the time before we were married when the world was wide open and there were no responsibilities, no realities.

That became harder to do, after the surgery. I didn’t want the added complications of immediate breast reconstruction and wasn’t sure I ever would, and Sam took that personally.

“You’re just going to walk around like that?” he said. “What is it to you, like a badge of honor?”

“Maybe, yeah. Maybe it is.”

“I’ll tell you what it is, Christa. It’s you being able to claim victim status now for all eternity. You want the attention, is that it? You want people to look at you and say, ‘Oh, poor Christa?’”

“Who in the fuck would want this kind of attention, Sam?”

“You! You would! Whatever amount you get, it’s never enough. I’m not enough for you. Tanya’s not enough for you. I don’t know what the hell you want from me.”

I wanted him to come to the doctor appointments with me. I wanted him to do some reading about what breast cancer is, about other survivors. I wanted him to support my decisions. I wanted him to be able to
look
at me.

And Tanya? I wanted her love for me to be stronger than her need for a drink. I wanted her to be able to sit still for five seconds in the hospital room. I wanted to not have found our mother dead of cardiac arrest in her dingy apartment with a fucking crack pipe in her hand.

No, it was never enough, what I had. I wanted so much more than that, and would never get it.

“What if you told a friend,” Henry asks, “and she offered to go with you for the treatments? Wouldn’t that change things? You’re not even giving anybody a
chance
to help you, if they don’t even know.”

It’s then that I say something really stupid. It tumbles out of my mouth before I can prevent it.

“Why don’t
you
go with me?”

That stops him cold. He goes still and stares at me dumbly for what feels like seventeen minutes.

“Christa.”

“Never mind.” I yank the blankets off my lap and clumsily stumble off the bed. “I’ve had enough talking, haven’t you? Let’s go for a swim.”

I close the bathroom door behind me and lock it. The edge of the bathtub is comfortingly cold. It brings me back down from the fantasy cloud I was floating in. That post-sex mist that made me think asking Henry to be my nursemaid was a good idea. I feel again for my breast, palpating the flesh until I find the lump—familiar and totally irrefutable. It was a mistake to get naked. A padded bra and clothes make the fact of my body a lot more remote. Without them, I am too aware.

It was just a momentary vulnerability that made me ask. A reaction to the shock of feeling. I think of Henry’s hands, of his hips moving against mine. It was all so…beautiful. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what to do with a world that can be so painful and so lovely at the same time. I don’t know what to do with the fact that it keeps trying to kill me.

Yesterday, the answer seemed simple. I could take control of it somehow and end things on my own terms. But if I’d succeeded, if Henry had climbed that ladder just ten minutes later, I wouldn’t have had this day and neither would he.

Those guys helping the old lady on the bus. Leaning over the railing of the ferry with Henry. The taxi driver. The monks. Dumplings and ice cream and sleeping in the grass. Teenage girls fretting about Frodo and Gandalf. My jade hairpin. Making love to Henry. I’d have had none of that if I hadn’t waited.

He’s right that I was impulsive. I was swinging wildly in the wake of the diagnosis, just lumbering around like a bear with an arrow in its chest. I didn’t stop to
think
.

These moments do pass.

But maybe I don’t want them to. Maybe I don’t want to go through another cycle of hope either. Because frankly, this is just as bad. The ache I feel for Henry right now—the rawness of it—that’s awful, too. I don’t know where it ends or begins, and I don’t know how to fight it.

And I should fight it, because I’m not going to change his mind. I see that. I could use my cancer against him if I wanted to. I could tell him I’ll only stay alive if he helps me. But what kind of life would that be, for either of us? Holding him hostage with my sickness. It’s bad enough that I’m a hostage to it.

One of the last times I saw Tanya, she was trying to hold my hand in the hospital room. But I was sick to my stomach, and her hands were shaking—she hadn’t had a drink that day, and it was almost evening. She kept getting up and down out of her chair, and asking me what I needed, and I was so irritated, I told her to go get a gin and tonic already and stop being so fucking useless.

She stood as though I’d slapped her.

“I was just trying—”

“Don’t,” I told her. “Look at yourself. You can’t make it one day without a drink. It’s pathetic. Just…go.”

I remember the look on her face then. The shame. It’s what I’ve seen all day in Henry’s face—the shame of not being able to shoulder the pain he’s in.

I thought my own suffering was unique, or at least my strength. I bore up when others crumbled—I was proud of that. But it was only because I iced myself over in a way that Henry cannot do. That Tanya probably can’t do.

She needed a drink. He thinks he needs to die. I can’t save either of them. I can’t make them save me.

But I can love them. I can accept what love they have to give. I can take it in and hold it for as long as they’ll let me.

I shake off the robe and run the water to clean myself up. It only takes a few minutes. My last-minute swimsuit has no special padding, but what difference does it make at this point? I put it on and it sags in the place where my left breast used to be. I open the door and find Henry.

It’s become full night now, and city lights illuminate the Hudson. From the rooftop pool the shimmering river looks almost holy—a black and silver vein along the body of Manhattan. Everyone must be at the bar or in bed because the pool is deserted. Just as well. I’m not sure I could have handled a normal human conversation.

Henry can’t either, apparently. He hasn’t spoken a word since we left the suite. Only nodded at me and held the doors. He kicks off his shoes and shucks the robe as soon we enter the pool deck and immediately descends the stairs into the water. His head goes under and stays there for a long time. One minute? Two? I start getting worried, and then he breaks the surface and sucks in a gulp of air.

The water is warm, and Henry reaches out a hand to me as I climb down the ladder. As soon as I’m in, he grabs me to him, bracing himself against the side of the pool with his arm.

“Christa.”

He grips my waist so hard it almost hurts, and I know, suddenly, this is the last thing he will be able to do. He gave up a long time ago, and rationed himself for only as long as it would take to put his affairs in order. I know this without needing him to tell me. Doubtless he’s set up generous posthumous donations to favorite charitable organizations, a trust for any future nieces or nephews, investments for his brother. He’s left letters exonerating anyone who might blame themselves for his death. He’ll probably leave me a letter, too, to read when I wake up tomorrow morning, under the pillow in the bed we made love in. Wishing me a happy life. Thanking me graciously for today.

I want to punch his fucking face in, but I hug him back instead and kiss his cheek and swim with him as the moon rises over the city.

I set out to trick him into believing he was saving me, and tricked myself instead. I let him close enough to feel me, and now I know what that’s like. And I can never go back.

In the oversized bathtub later, I let him wash my hair. And when he turns to me in the bed, I take him inside my body and hold him, one last time. I give him all the oblivion he seeks, gladly. Because without him, I would be dead now.