The Last Bridge (12 page)

Addison was sitting at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee. His hair was rumpled from sleeping and he was wearing the clothes from the night before. His jeans had been pulled on in a rush, as the last two buttons of his fly were open. His feet were bare and bony. He jumped up when I came out.

“Better?”

I nodded. He came and led me to the bed.

“This is the plan. I’ll see what’s going on. If everything is okay I’ll let you sleep and go do some chores. If it isn’t okay, like your dad’s looking for you or something, I’ll find a way to warn you.”

“I need clothes.”

He nodded. “I’ll get some.”

While he was talking he gently pushed me down on the bed and pulled the covers around me. I rolled over, with my back to him as he sat on the edge of the bed.

“About last night…” he started.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, beginning to drift off.

I don’t know how long I had been sleeping when I felt a hand on my cheek. I jumped to the farthest corner of the bed.

“I didn’t mean to scare you.” Addison was holding a pile of clothes. “Everyone left for Rucker’s Ravine to walk the plank and they won’t be back tonight.” He shrugged, not fully understanding what that meant.

“It’s a place we go to … a game. It’s hard to describe,” I said. Addison sat next to me on the bed and put his hand on my leg as he listened. I was embarrassed by the way he was studying me. He subtly glanced down at my chest and then back up to my face. I looked down and saw that the shirt had come unbuttoned and one of my breasts was pushing its way out. I wanted to button it, but I didn’t want him to know I had noticed or cared. I pulled the covers up around me and pretended I was cold.

“Did anyone—?” I said, avoiding his gaze.

“I told them you were okay.”

“What about Dad … did he ask about me?”

“No,” he said. “He didn’t mention you at all. He was in a good mood. Couldn’t wait to get everyone together to go.”

“He didn’t say anything?”

“Why do you care?”

“Tell me.”

“He said he would have his time with you at the ravine later.”

A shiver rushed down my spine. The kind that Mom said meant a goose walked on your grave.

“So it’s just us …”

“He didn’t ask where I was?”

Addison moved through the apartment picking up things, hanging up a towel, sidestepping himself from my question.

“Addison …”

He came out of the bathroom and leaned against the doorway of the bedroom. “He said, and this is quoting him directly, he didn’t care if you ever came back. Are you happy now?”

“Why are you getting so mad?”

“’Cause I don’t know what you do that makes—”

“You think I’m doing something?”

“Well, it always seems like you’re on his shit list. At least since I’ve been here. He doesn’t seem to bother Wendy or Jared.”

“So it’s me … I’m causing it?”

“I didn’t say that …. I just want to know what’s with you two.”

“Nothing is with us, you asshole.” I jumped out of bed and peeled his sweats off as I reached for the jeans he brought and pulled them on. I was so angry I forgot I wasn’t wearing any underwear. I scooped up the rest of my clothes and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to the house. I don’t want to be with you.”

“Hey …” He grabbed my wrists.

“Don’t touch me …. I may be his property but I’m not yours.”

Addison let go of me and I walked out into the afternoon light toward home.

I made a bologna and cheese sandwich and poured myself a glass of lemonade and sat on the swing on the front porch. My mother hadn’t left a note this time. I didn’t expect anyone to be back until lunchtime tomorrow. Walking the plank was always an overnight adventure.

“Are you going to ignore me all day?” Addison stood at the bottom of the porch stairs an hour or so later.

“I’m not ignoring you.”

He climbed the stairs and walked tentatively over to the railing closest to the swing and looked out over the front yard toward the road.

“Want to go for a swim?”

“I can’t swim,” I replied.

“I could teach you,” he said, not looking away from the road.

“I don’t need you to teach me anything,” I said, between the creaking of the swing.

“You’re a hard one, Alex.”

“Well, life is hard,” I replied.

We stayed like that for a while. A million opposing thoughts passed through my mind; I wanted him to stay so I could tell him what happened as much as I wanted him to go.

A warm breeze brushed against my neck. Addison closed his eyes and leaned his head back.

“My father left,” he said, fixing his eyes back on the yard. “My mother didn’t want us telling anyone. He left about a year ago. Just walked out. Business was bad, he’d lost almost everything, except the house. Ran off with my girlfriend. One day I left for school, I was trying college again, came home and there was a note from her, we were sort of living together. She said she had gone away with someone. Took us a while to put the pieces together.”

“How do you know? It could have been a coincidence.”

“That’s what I thought, until we got a letter that said they were together, not to go looking for them, you know, the usual.”

“Did you love her?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.

“I’m not sure I know what that is, but I liked her. She was kind—”

“Of mean,” I interrupted.

He turned back to the yard. I continued to rock myself and waited for him to speak again.

“Anyway, I quit school and got a job as a carpenter. I moved in with my mom to help with expenses. I felt obligated. I was planning on staying. And then, I found out she was pregnant and they wanted the house.”

“Pregnant, who, your father and his girlfriend?”

“Yeah …” he said, lowering his head.

“Oh, God. Why did they want the house? Wasn’t it your mother’s?”

“No, it was both of theirs, but my mother just gave up when he came back. She couldn’t bear to fight him so she said they could move in.”

“Where’d your mother go?”

“She lives in the basement. They rigged up an apartment for her.”

I leaned forward. “She lives in the same house with them? Is she crazy?”

“Where is she going to go, Alex? She’s never had a job. She doesn’t have a high school diploma and she still depends on my father for everything. Where the hell was she going to go?” he said, yelling at me.

“I don’t know,” I yelled back.

We sat still for a few moments.

“My parents worked out an agreement that my mother could live off the rent on my grandma’s house if I fixed it up and found a tenant.

“Why don’t you sell the house so your mom can live on her own?”

“My mother thinks if they sell it, my father will leave with the money.”

“So why did you want your father to come?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I wanted him to see the work I did on his mother’s house and be proud of me, I guess.”

“Bad idea.”

He laughed. “Frightfully bad idea.”

“So where are you going after the house is rented?”

“I don’t know. My mother thinks my father is going to come around eventually.”

“He’s not,” I said as Addison turned toward me. “He’s not going to come to his senses any more than my dad is.”

“This isn’t the same thing. Your dad isn’t like my dad,” Addison responded. “At least your dad stayed with the family. At least he takes care of you guys. He loves you.”

I jumped off of the swing. “Do you really want a father so much that you would delude yourself into thinking that my father
is actually better than yours? Have you seen anything since you got here?”

“Okay, so he drinks a little. I can see that, but—”

“Addison, he does more than drink a little.”

He shook his head, refusing to hear what I was trying to tell him. “When I was five my father burned the bottoms of my feet with his cigarette because I complained that my church shoes gave me blisters. He said that would take away the pain of the blisters. When I was seven, he threw my mother down a flight of stairs and broke her arm. When I was ten, he smashed a plate over Jared’s head and wouldn’t take him to the hospital for stitches. Jared has a scar this thick on his head that no hair will grow on. Ask him, he’ll show it to you. The first and only time my mother tried to leave him, he cut the tip of her finger off with an ax and made us watch ….” Addison tried to pull away from the words but I grabbed his hands and wouldn’t let go. The more he resisted the louder I spoke. “You want to hear about what happened in the bathroom?” But I couldn’t say it. I swallowed it down.

“Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

I went back to the swing and pushed myself. The chains creaked as he studied me. His eyes took in every outward feature: my hair, eyes, hands, lips. Maybe if he looked long enough he could see right through to the heart of me. And in seeing that dark core, would he understand or would he run away?

He got off the rail and sat next to me and took my hand and wove our fingers together. We sat like that for a while, moving forward and then backward, together.

A
LL THAT REMAINED
of the porch swing were the grooves in the floorboards worn down from years of pushing off and landing.

Andrew found me leaning against the rail, the same spot that Addison had occupied so many years ago. My smoking had banished me from the house. Wendy said she didn’t need to be exposed to anything that could keep her from getting pregnant. One look at Willard and his dull, expressionless face and you had to wonder if he fell into that category.

“Aren’t you cold?” he said, hugging himself. He was wearing a starched pink oxford shirt, khaki pants with creases sharp enough to cut paper, and black Gucci loafers. He reminded me of the city college professors who came to the club for lap dances after a hard day of teaching and making passes at students. They were lousy tippers and pretended to be concerned that a smart girl like me hustled drinks in that shithole for a living. I preferred the sweat- and beer-stained convention center carpenters who told me they liked my tits as they shoved a fifty in my cleavage.

Andrew motioned for a cigarette and a light.

“I quit,” he said, as he took a drag.

“Yeah, me too.”

A lone pair of headlights passed along the country road. We
faced forward and said nothing. Andrew shifted his weight back and forth in an effort to keep warm.

“I can’t believe you’re not cold,” he said finally.

“I’m freezing,” I said.

“But you’re perfectly still. You’re not even shaking.”

I dropped the butt and ground it out with my foot.

“I guess I’ve been cold so long I stopped trying to warm up.”

He nodded. I started for the door.

“I miss her,” he said to my back.

The sound of his voice made me turn. For an instant I thought I heard Jared.

“Who were you to her?”

“We went to the same church. We were acquaintances.”

“Not friends?”

“No, well. Yes, I suppose it grew into that. We had things in common.”

“What? A misguided belief in God?”

“No, other things.”

“Are you always this vague?”

“I was her sponsor,” he said finally, throwing his hands up in defeat.

“Of what?”

“AA.”

“My mother didn’t drink. She was too busy. She worked from sunup to sundown; she was quiet and reserved. She was …” I shook my head and started for the house. Andrew grabbed my arm.

“Drunk most of the time. For many years.”

“That’s ridiculous. I never saw the woman take a drink in her life.”

“She snuck it; she took lots of little sips throughout the day. She covered it up by saying she had stomach problems.”

“She did. She carried a blue Mylanta bottle around with her all day ….”

Andrew mimed my mother nipping at her Mylanta bottle. A cold shiver bolted through me as I fell back against the railing.

“I need a drink,” I said.

“You want to go inside?” Andrew asked as the sound of laughter and music came from the living room.

“I’d ask you to join me but I guess that would be tacky.”

“I don’t have a problem with alcohol. Heroin was my downfall.”

“Well, well, well, how did a junkie end up the coroner of Wilton County?”

“Let’s just say this is the last bridge. I’ve burned all the others. I have nowhere else to go.”

“Yeah, join the club,” I said as we walked into the living room and found Wendy and Jared on the couch looking at a photo album.

“Cat, come here, look at this picture of the three of us with Georgie.” Wendy waved me over. Georgie was our horse. He had a lame back leg that rendered him useless for anything except being a pet. The Igbys gave him to us when they realized he’d never amount to much. Wendy, Jared, and I adored him. They were looking at a black-and-white photo Mom took of the three of us sitting on Georgie, wearing our cowboy hats.

“Did you know Mom was a drunk?” I said. Jared and Wendy looked at each other and then at me.

“Yeah,” they both said, as if everyone in the world knew but me.