Right away was an understatement. Nora flew to the car and backed out of the driveway so quickly that had something been in her path, well, good luck to that something. She was a warrior. She was a woman and she was a mother. Hear her roar.
Her baby, her Cecily. On the Golden Gate Bridge.
The sergeant had put her on the phone but all Nora had heard was crying, then four words.
Mommy, Cecily said. Mommy, come get me.
Easy peasy lemon squeezie Cecily. Cecily, falling at the feis. Cecily, working so hard on her landmark project. Cecily, the joy draining from her beautiful brown eyes. And Nora hadn’t really noticed. She’d been so wrapped up in Angela, and Maya, and Harvard, and her own idiotic troubles with the Watkins home and the Marin dwarf flax, that she hadn’t noticed. She thought she was on top of things but all along she wasn’t—all along she was watching, was worrying about, the wrong daughter.
And this was her penance.
Genie, I take back everything I’ve ever wished for in my whole life. That crap about putting the kids in mason jars? Forget I ever said that. The wish about wishing I’d never even heard of Harvard? Stupid. Stupid! I didn’t mean it, of course. All the way back to the chocolate appliances, the perms, the one time I wished (privately) that Marianne wouldn’t get invited to Lisa Reardon’s party along with me so I wouldn’t have to watch over her. There is only one wish now, there’s only ever been one wish that matters. Make Cecily okay. Genie? Are you hearing me? God? Are you out there?
To get to the security office she had to cross the bridge, just as the sergeant had told her. When traffic halted her progress for a minute she could see, on the east side, knots of pedestrians, a couple of runners. Hey! Nora wanted to call to all of them. Hey, guess what? I’ve been worrying about the wrong child!
Cecily and Pinkie were spending more time together than ever before this fall. Nora had attributed this to Cecily’s quitting Irish dance but really it was more: they were plotting something, they were plotting this.
Whatever this was.
Wrong child, wrong child. Nora had been worrying about the wrong child.
It was confusing, pulling off so close to the end of the bridge, and then squeezing into the small parking area that Sergeant Campbell had described. Nora had to ask a bridge patrol officer examining his bicycle where to go, and he answered her nonchalantly, like this was a regular day, a regular situation. Up a few steps, bridge traffic whooshing by just behind her. Another officer at the window of the security office, a voice that didn’t feel like hers asking where to go. Then down a corridor. And there was Cecily, sitting on a plastic chair and holding a cup of water. And Pinkie. And Cathy Moynihan.
Sergeant Stephen Campbell wore a tan uniform with a holster. No hat. Nora realized that on the drive over she had been picturing a hat. Wrong child, wrong child, I’ve been worrying about the wrong child. Probably he had one somewhere, he just wasn’t wearing it at the moment. There was a gold star above his front left pocket, and a blue patch on his right arm that made Nora think of the Girl Scout patches her mother spent many a painstaking hour stitching to Nora’s uniforms. Now they were all iron-on. Irrelevant fact. The sergeant’s tan pants had a blue and gold stripe running down the side. He was clean-cut, with hair going gray, about Nora’s age, although he could have been a bit younger or a bit older. Strong, square hands, deep wrinkles around his eyes, the kind common in avid skiers and hikers—people who summered and wintered near Tahoe. I’ve been worrying about the wrong child.
It was unthinkable, all of it.
That Cecily had gotten herself to the Golden Gate, and that Pinkie had too. (“Took the bus,” they said later, almost casually, as though they were talking about an after-school activity, like glee club or lacrosse. “Then the 10 and then the Muni.”)
It was unthinkable that the school had never called to inquire after their absences.
“They called themselves in sick,” said Cathy Moynihan, who somehow, unfairly, had gotten herself there before Nora. Cathy Moynihan looked as ill as Nora felt; her hair was unstyled and partially damp, as though she’d stepped right out of the shower and into the security office. She wore no makeup. Nora noted in a pocket of her mind reserved for incongruous, unimportant thoughts that she had never seen Cathy Moynihan without makeup.
All of it was unthinkable: Cecily and Pinkie standing on the Golden Gate—two ten-year-olds, by themselves—until Sergeant Stephen Campbell happened by on his regular bridge patrol, saw something amiss, and pulled over.
“Wait a second,” said Nora. She still didn’t understand. She hadn’t let go of Cecily since she’d arrived. She was kneeling in front of her, holding on now to the sleeve of her turquoise fleece, as though she might take flight without warning. “You were going to jump? They were going to jump off the bridge?”
“No! No, Mom, no.” Cecily looked horrified. “We were helping.”
“Helping what?” Cathy’s voice was carved straight out of ice.
“Whoever needed it,” said Pinkie. Her face was dead white; her freckles looked almost black against her skin. Her hand holding her water cup was shaking; some of the water sloshed over the edge and onto her jeans. “We learned about all those people who help people who want to jump. And we thought we could help. We thought we could save someone. And then we’d be…and then we’d be heroes.”
“Even if we couldn’t be heroes, we thought we could do something,” said Cecily. “I couldn’t do anything at home, I couldn’t help Angela with anything and everybody at home is so stressed out, and I heard you and Daddy fighting the other night and I don’t know, I thought I could do something here. Like, where people’s problems are sooooo bad.”
It’s official, thought Nora. Worst mother in the world, right here. Bring me the award and I’ll frame it and hang it in the office. There are no other contenders.
“But there was nobody to save,” said Cecily. “So we stood there for a long time, and waited. And talked about what it would be like, and why people jump. All those people we saw in the movie, and how they thought everything was hopeless…” She started to cry. “And it was so scary, looking down like that. Imagining. The water is black if you look straight down. It was so scary, Mom.”
“Then I came by,” said Sergeant Campbell. “On bridge patrol. We share that with the bridge patrol officers. We all work together. And I stopped, of course. Because one of them was starting to climb over the rail.”
Nora’s stomach dropped right out of her body. “Which one?”
“Me,” said Cecily. And she began to bawl, the way she used to when she didn’t get her way as a little girl—taking deep gulps of air, hyperventilating.
“I brought them here, and called you both. You know the rest.”
Nora looked at Cathy but Cathy wasn’t meeting her eyes. Nora looked at Cecily. Nora pictured her hiking a leg over the rail of the bridge. Her mind refused to accommodate the image.
“I just wanted to see what it was like,” cried Cecily, in between sobs. “I just wanted to see what it felt like.”
“I told her not to,” said Pinkie. “I told her not to climb over. She couldn’t anyway, it’s way too high.”
“But if you had!” said Nora. “One slip, one mistake, and you would have been dead. Oh my God, Cecily. You would have been dead.” She’d been worrying about the wrong child.
“Listen to me,” said Sergeant Campbell. He stood in front of the two girls and looked down at them. Nora, who suddenly felt in the way, released her grip on Cecily’s sleeve and moved behind her. Sergeant Campbell was stern but you could see that he was ultimately kind, the way Nora knew parents should strive to be. This was a nearly impossible balance to achieve—it was the hardest part about parenting—but Sergeant Campbell made it seem as easy as slipping on a sweater. Look at Pinkie and Cecily, giving him their full attention! “Listen to me, you two. Listen very carefully. We are trained especially to help people like that. You can’t just…you can’t just be a regular person, even a regular person who’s trying to do some good, and help anyone in that situation. You just can’t. People who consider suicide are desperate, and we have to be really, really careful about what we say to them. Now I understand that you were trying to help. But you scared a lot of people. And you weren’t ready to help anyone. You understand?” The girls nodded. Pinkie’s braces glinted in the overhead light. They were mute and obedient; they were practically Girl Scouts.
Sergeant Campbell turned his attention then to Nora and Cathy.
“I got kids of my own,” he said. “I know how it is, you try to keep up with everything. You can’t always. But you got to keep trying.”
“You’re right,” whispered Nora. She wanted to hug Sergeant Campbell. She wanted to lie down in bed and have Sergeant Campbell wrap a giant soft blanket around her and tiptoe out of the room so she could sleep for sixteen hours straight.
But there was nothing to do but the best thing in the world: gather up her child and go home.
In the car Cecily fell asleep. The promised fog hadn’t materialized; the bay was as calm and clear as a sheet of glass.
Nora used the rearview mirror to look at Cecily, who slept with her head leaning against the window and her mouth hanging slightly open. The posture reminded Nora of how Cecily used to sleep as a toddler, leaning to one side in her bulletproof car seat.
Poor Cecily. Of course she wasn’t immune to the stress in the house: how could she be? No doubt Cecily looked at Angela, even at her parents, and saw the same fate coming down the pike for her. The other members of the Hawthorne family weren’t exactly making it look attractive, growing up.
With one hand she dialed Gabe’s number again, then Angela’s. Again. Neither picked up. When Gabe turned on his phone he’d see sixteen missed calls and seven voice mails from Nora. When Angela turned on hers: probably twenty, twenty-five. Nora had lost count. Where was everybody?
When Nora pulled into the driveway she started to wake Cecily. But instead she climbed in the backseat. The back of the Audi was nice, spacious and comfortable, and still clean, the way she had to keep it to drive clients around. Nora allowed a lot of things in her household, but she didn’t allow snacking in the car. She moved a piece of Cecily’s hair out of her face and Cecily stirred but didn’t open her eyes.
One day Cecily would grow up and fall in love and have her heart broken and do stupid things she’d regret and wonderful things she’d remember for the rest of her life; there’d be a time when Nora might not know where Cecily was for days or even weeks at a time or what she was doing, or with whom. She’d get a job (or not); she’d love it (or not); she might get married and have kids of her own or be a single mother or not be a mother at all. She might be a lesbian or an archaeologist (obviously, Nora knew, you could be both of those at once) and she might hurt people and ache with regret or be hurt herself and ache with sadness. She might not always be safe but for now she was, she was right here with Nora, and she was sleeping, and nothing could get to her at this moment.
But where the hell was Angela?