The Bridge (8 page)

When I wake in the morning, the bed is empty. I have no idea what time it is, but a faint scent of coffee draws me downstairs.

On the table is a carafe, warm to the touch, with a clean mug beside it. And a note with a phone number at the bottom.

Dear Henry,

I hope you slept well. That sounds very domestic, doesn’t it? As though this were our ten thousandth night together and I’ve just run down to the corner bakery to pick up some pastries.

In another life, maybe, that could have been us. If we’d met earlier? But no, that wouldn’t have worked either.

I watched you sleeping this morning. Hopefully you know how sweet you look like that, with your cowlick all sticking up and your hand curled under your cheek. Like a child, almost. Thank you for letting me see that. As painful as it is inside your heart, there is beauty there. In you. I saw it, and loved it, and loved you. I wasn’t expecting such a gift, yesterday of all days, but it works like that, I guess. You get blindsided by tragedy and joy alike.

I’m going home now to call some friends. You were right that they at least deserve a chance. Tomorrow I’ll go back to the doctor. And the pro bono acupuncturist. And the fucking nutritionist. The works, I promise. Maybe if I survive this I’ll go back to school and become a social worker or something, who knows?

You, I think, will be going to the bridge, and I want to tell you for the record that I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to, Henry. I can’t stay here and watch you go. I can’t handle a goodbye. But if you decide not to, if you change your mind, call me. I’ll be here, at least long enough to put up a fight.

Love,

Christa

Her clothes, such as they were, are gone. Her towel is neatly hung in the bathroom. It’s as though she were never here. As though a bomb went off and blew her away.

And I just let it happen.

Outside on the street, it’s still quiet. In other parts of the city, you might see churchgoers filing down the sidewalk on a Sunday morning, but here, everyone’s still sleeping.

I walk the few blocks to Chelsea Market and pick up another coffee and a hunk of Irish soda bread from the bakery. Two days ago I didn’t have much of a taste for food, but I woke up this morning starving. Christa and I skipped dinner, I realize.

Christa and I. How quickly that became a phrase in my mind. And so offhand, the way you would describe your girlfriend. What exactly were we playing at yesterday? It was absurd to think it meant anything.

Yet even as I say that, I know I’m betraying myself. It did mean something. It meant exactly the kind of gnawing hunger I’ve been fighting like hell to avoid these past ten years. Ever since the hospital, where I vowed to keep myself on an even keel. No excesses. Daily exercise, regular diet, a careful regimen of pills and supplements to balance my mood. Work and then home, and that’s it. Whenever anyone got too close, I cut myself off. Because I can’t be trusted, and that is more clear now than ever. I spent one day with Christa and all I want is to climb into bed with her and never get out.

I think of her sister, drunk at her bedside in the hospital. At least she was there. Would I have found the same courage if it were my brother who was sick? Or would I have turned away, as I did to Christa last night when she asked if I would help her through the treatments?

The fact is, she was right to leave me this morning. I would only have made love to her again, and held her, and then left. Because I can’t take this. You wouldn’t think it, but even more painful than fucking depression is the tender, awful openness of hope.

I’m going back to the bridge tomorrow. I’ve done what I set out to do. I’ve saved her, at least for now. I won’t inflict myself on her now that she’s decided again to live. She has enough on her plate without lugging a depressive behind her the way she’s lugged her family.

Last night, as we lay in bed, she asked me, “What do you think happens when we die?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. It just…ends.”

“That doesn’t scare you?”

I turned to face her. Her cheeks were pink, her lips abraded from my day’s growth of beard. “I won’t know the difference at that point. So it won’t matter. Does it scare you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why—”

“I don’t know. I guess I just…panicked. I didn’t think I could do it again.”

“And now?”

“Do you think God would forgive us?” she asks, ignoring my question. “For wanting to die?”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“Not really. If he exists, he certainly hasn’t helped me any.”

“You don’t think so?” She touched my face, traced the line of my jaw. “We did both show up at that tower at the same time.”

“That’s just coincidence, Christa.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Are you worried someone else wouldn’t forgive you? Friends, or your sister?”

She sighed and turned onto her back. “Yeah. Aren’t you?”

“Yes. If I were my brother, I wouldn’t forgive me either. I just have to hope he understands.”

“Understands what?”

But I hadn’t been able to answer that question. I just lay there, staring up into the darkness, and after a while we both fell asleep.

The gray staircase to the High Line is a block away from Chelsea Market, so I climb up. I almost wish we had come here together instead of the hotel pool, but I can’t regret that, selfishly. Swimming with Christa, watching her glide through the water with wet hair streaming behind her, feeling her slippery legs tangling with mine—I would have stayed in those moments forever, if I could have.

But you can’t, can you? Those moments of joy are fleeting. They leave you reeling, and they always, always leave.

I walk down the High Line path toward 14th Street. Back towards the hotel. Although the street is quiet, up here the tourists are already flocking, taking pictures of the last flowers of the season planted along the old tracks. In front of me, a family ambles along, necks craned back to see the buildings rising above. To my right a middle-aged couple sits on a bench eating bagels. A young man wearing a navy backpack brushes past on my left. He doesn’t excuse himself, and I don’t bother to berate him. It’s not my business anymore to interfere in anyone else’s life.

At the end of the park, a small glass enclosure seals off the High Line from the open space beyond it. I want to sit there with my breakfast, just for a moment, before I head down the nearby staircase and go back home to start planning. It’s maybe four blocks away. If I hurry I can head off the tourists and have a few moments in peace.

The boy who bumped into me is crouched down by the side of the path, rummaging in his backpack. Once I pass him, I’m alone. The lush green of elephant grass and bamboo insulates this area against the buzz and hum of the city.

I wish Christa hadn’t left. I wish I’d had a chance to say goodbye. To kiss her again. To thank her. To apologize. I push my hand into my pocket, just to feel the note she left. The paper she touched. I’d never seen her handwriting until this morning. It’s angular and messy and when I open the folds to look at it again a huge fist opens up in my chest, and just like that I’m crying. Like a child. Walking these old tracks toward the hotel where I spent my last day with her.

I scrub both hands over my face and as I pull them away, I see someone sitting on the bench overlooking Gansevoort Street. A woman in a black sweater, with dark curly hair.

I should have known.

Christa.

She is destined to be exactly where I wish she weren’t. Exactly where I didn’t know I needed her to be.

When I sit beside her she doesn’t look at me. Her profile against the skyline is rigid, controlled, and so fucking beautiful I want to cry all over again. But I’m afraid of scaring her off, and selfishly, selfishly, I can’t let her go.

“I saw you coming,” she says, to the tops of the buildings in front of us. “I wondered if you would.”

“What are you doing here?” I have to clench my own hand to keep from taking hers.

“I told you last night. I like the High Line.” She jiggles her knee, restless, and her leg makes a tapping sound on the pavement. “Don’t you have somewhere to be? The Brooklyn Bridge isn’t going to jump off itself, you know.”

“Funny.”

“No, actually.” She sighs deeply and rises. “It’s not.”

I join her at the railing. Below us, traffic is starting to pick up. Families with strollers push their way down the street in search of breakfast, and the cool morning air carries a trace of frying bacon. It’s such an ordinary tableau—so hopeful in its total banality. People all around us breathe in and out, take one step and then another, are born and live and die. And here I am beside a woman I think I could love and I can’t say a word. I can’t tell her. I can’t reach for her. I can’t save her. I can’t brave it.

I’m trying to find a way even to say goodbye when I hear a sound I don’t understand.

What’s confusing about it is that I not only hear it, I feel it. I taste it, too. It’s a sound with three dimensions and
weight
, and it crashes down on us so utterly and so immediately there’s no time to react.

Christa is down on the ground, her arms over her head. There’s a burning smell in the air. People on the street are looking up, shielding their eyes. I see them through the glass barricade.

Smoke rises from a section of the High Line perhaps three blocks north of us. There’s no sound from that direction that I can see—just a terrible, eerie stillness. Between us and them is a staircase.

I hear the pop again in my head—the single thundering snap, and I remember the kid with the backpack. I passed right by him. I wasn’t thinking. But it’s obvious now, what he was doing. Fumbling in the bag, getting ready. I know this is what happened with a certainty that shames me. I saw it. I could have done something. But how the fuck can you understand a thing like that, until it’s already underway? How can you prevent every cruel tilt of the precarious planet you’re balancing on?

I should have been prepared. I should have protected Christa, and I didn’t, and now I have to get her down to the street where it’s safe. I haul her up from the crouch she’s in and drag her toward the steps. “Come on.” My voice is hoarse and my legs feel like they’re made of hot tar.

She digs in her heels. “No.”

“What? Christa, we have to—”

“There are people over there. We have to go see if…wait.” She pats at her pockets, looking for a cell phone neither of us has. She leans over the railing and shouts down to the gathering crowd below. “Call 911! There’s been an explosion. Call right away!”

And then she takes off toward the smoke.

It happens so quickly, I don’t have time to grab her. I call her name but she just keeps running. “Come on, Henry,” she yells over her shoulder, and what can I do? I follow her. I run toward the place where the bomb went off.

As we approach, people begin to move. Slowly at first. Standing and stumbling around, with blood on their faces. There’s a hole in the pavement where the boy with the bag had been crouching, and a white canvas sneaker, now black with blood, and a foot inside it. Another piece of him is thrown against the railing on the opposite side of the path. A torso, maybe. I think I see a scrap of T-shirt before I have to look away.

Christa approaches the middle-aged couple I saw eating bagels. They are dazed, their clothing darkened with smoke. Behind them is the family of tourists, touching each other’s faces, taking inventory. “Is everybody okay?” I ask them. “Is anyone hurt?” They shake their heads, and the youngest begins crying. I shepherd them toward the staircase I entered through, three blocks north, Christa at my heels with the couple. On the way we pass others, and they join us, walking slowly, as sirens sound below us. A cascade of police officers crests the staircase and runs to where we are. Several pass us, but two stay behind to help evacuate. “What happened? Is anyone hurt?”

I try to imagine this scene happening several hours from now, when the High Line is thick with crowds. The boy must have been planting devices; he can’t have meant them to go off so soon with so few people here. I remember his agitated face, the way he brushed against me. He was alive ten minutes ago and now he is dead, and all of us could have been, too. All of us and so many more, if the timing had been different. Dead without a chance to say all the things we should have said to each other, to do all the things we should have done.

I turn to Christa. I reach for her across the crowd. And that’s when the second bomb goes off.

In the ambulance I hear the muted voices of the paramedics. There’s a wetness on my midsection that feels both hot and cold. We hit a pothole and everything seems to cave in on itself. It’s blinding, this pain. So immense and consuming—a dark, churning current—roaring and utterly black.

I want to sink down inside it, to go limp and still like something playing dead, to pray it doesn’t see me.

I remember all the nights I spent alone in my bed, thinking, “I can’t do it. I can’t stand it. I want to die, I want to die.” And I lay there waiting for the darkness to take me, and I begged it to. I begged for it to be over.

But there’s a buzzing at the edge of my vision now, a steady shimmering vibration. If I sink too deep I won’t see it anymore, I won’t feel it. I won’t know it’s there, and I want to know it’s there. I want to.

I don’t want to go like this. I don’t want it to end like this.

“Christa,” I say, and again, “Christa.” It’s the only word I know.

I wake up again in the middle of a room full of beds. There’s a curtain partially closed around me, and I can’t sit up. When I try, my stomach lurches and the room spins.

Christa is at my right.

With a bandage on her right hand and a jagged line of stitches along her chin.

“You like this look?” she says. “I was going for a little Bride of Frankenstein.”

My voice won’t work at first. When I finally force a croak from my throat, I say, “Frankenstein’s Monster.”

She half-laughs, but it ends with a lilting sob. “I know, right? Frankenstein was the doctor. Why can’t anyone get that right?”