Bridget, Wednesday, March 25, 2015
The comforting thing about high schoolers was they never changed. Every day they were as self-absorbed as the day before, their phones perpetually inches from their faces, fingers flying over the screens, sending Snapchats and text messages and tweets. Drama over boyfriends and best friends and boyfriends-slash-best friends. Bridget kept her ear to the ground: she knew who were BFFs and baes and whose mom was popping pills and whose dad was sleeping with the biology teacher who wore the short skirts.
Even when Bridget had bad days, really, really bad days, when she missed Holden with every breath in her body, when her very cells seemed to vibrate with missing him, with the way his flat, wide thumb used to slide up her arm with a smooth, gentle pressure. It was the little gestures that popped into her mind and stole the air from her lungs in the middle of class, in the middle of a sentence half the time. She swore the kids thought she’d lost her ever-loving mind. Maybe she had. But even then, on those days when she could barely string two sentences together and they all looked at her, mouths agape like catfish, they never let her down. They concerned themselves with her for about one hot minute before they kept on keeping on with their oh-so-gripping soap opera lives.
It was too cold for March. Sneaking up on spring break and still hovering around the thirties and forties. Her Georgia blood wasn’t used to this nonsense, and she wondered for about the billionth time why she didn’t go back, now that Holden wasn’t keeping her here anymore. Maybe because it still felt like he was here, only nine months later. Hardly any time at all, and she could still sense him in the bare, crackling trees in the front yard, their leaves scattered and killing what was left of his precious lawn. She could, what? Feel his aura? Oh, if her mother could hear her thoughts. Ain’t got the good sense God gave a rock, that’s what she’d say.
“Earth to Bridge.” Nate Winters stood in the door to her empty classroom, only three minutes after the bell, but long enough into her prep period to catch her sitting, hands folded in her lap, staring at the far wall of chipped and peeling cinder block.
She gave him a big smile, shaking her head to clear it. “I’m here. I was . . . thinking.”
Nate crossed the room in two easy lopes, turned a chair backward, and sat. “You? Nah.” He rolled his eyes and she swatted at him.
They used to joke about that, Bridget’s hamster-wheeled brain, the thing that never stopped. Even when she was drinking, she’d stand up suddenly, her whiskey and Coke sloshing over the edge onto Alecia’s new carpet (and you could tell she had a small heart attack about it), and proclaim to have an idea. This was back when they thought they could do things. Nate and Bridget were teachers. Holden was a doctor. Alecia was in public relations. They were a dream team for some not-yet-established charity that helped children and bought them shoes or taught them to read or gave impoverished girls tampons. They had potential, dammit.
Bridget straightened the papers on her desk, just for something to do, her mind slipping dangerously on the thin ice of the past, the way it sometimes did. Some days she never really found her footing. But Nate made it more bearable. He touched her arm.
“How’s Alecia?” She brushed her hair back off her shoulders, sat up straighter, and gave Nate another bright smile. “Gabe?”
“Oh, you know. Ups and downs.” He shrugged, and Bridget wondered how many of the downs Nate really got to see up close.
“Give them my love.”
He nodded and pulled out a folded index card. “I stopped by because I wanted your advice on this.” He pushed it across the desk at her.
The ravens came in sets of three
One for each sword, drawn down, unfreed
Fearless
Until nightfall when he’d cower
Washed with the blood of a thousand kings
Bridget read it twice, three times. It made very little sense; it wasn’t even symmetrical, poetically speaking. The rhythm was wrong. But something about it crawled around in her brain, skittering across her unfocused thoughts.
“Who wrote this?” She flipped it over, not expecting a name.
“I’m not sure, but I found it on the floor, near my desk after last period.” He leaned back, pulling on the chair back. Nate was a fidgeter, not much different from the long-legged boys in her classes, their knees bopping, cracking their knuckles. “It weirded me out. You don’t think it’s weird?”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m a creative writing teacher. You should see the shit I read. They’re kids. Some of them truly think that what they’re going through on any given day is the worst pain they’ll ever have in their lives.”
Nate gave her a sad smile. “Aw, Bridge.”
“No. You don’t get to feel sorry for me. That’s not your job.” She waved her hand at him. She studied the card again. Something in the last line, the thousand-kings part, jumped out at her. She snapped her fingers and flipped through the journals on her desk.
She’d made them keep a handwritten journal. Some days it was classwork, some days it was homework, but it couldn’t be typed. In her view, journals were meant to be taken to bed, scrawled in while tucked under the blankets, a private enclave of thoughts.
Their handwriting was atrocious and they whined incessantly about the assignment. Most of them wrote about what they did, which was boring as all get-out, even documenting what they’d eaten for breakfast. The girls often confessed their weight, a long-held secret, bursting out of them like jelly from a doughnut. They turned them in on Fridays, and Bridget might check to see that they were complete, but didn’t grade what they wrote. Sometimes she gave them topics in class, sometimes it was open-ended.
She grabbed the black leather one; she knew which one it was by heart. Lucia Hamm wrote about death and dying—a lot of them did. But most of them glossed over it, or mused about what it was like to die, what happened or how it would happen to them. Some of them were scared. But Lucia Hamm seemed to fly toward the subject, undeterred by her teacher losing her husband almost a year before to cancer. Lucia tackled pain and death clinically, a biology lab dissection. As if Bridget’s hurt could be pulled apart like little frog’s legs, pinned back to the wax, sliced clean down the middle, and simply exorcised. Bridget had seen it before, a death fascination; that’s not what bothered her. It was almost mundane to be Goth. But Lucia got under her skin.
She flipped through until she found the page. A drawing, three blackbirds along the top, feathered over a wire, three swords pierced through a beating heart. No kings. Huh. She flipped it around to show Nate. He studied it.
“Gotta be, right?”
“I’ve given up trying to figure her out.” She shrugged. “She sees birds.”
Nate cocked his head, moved his hand in a circle, like go on.
She sighed, the idea exhausting her. “She finds dead birds, she says. She’s written about it. She says they come to her and she knows bad things will happen.”
Lucia, on the fringe, but exotically, unsettlingly beautiful. Crazy white hair, black-rimmed eyes and bloodred lips. She’d been held back in kindergarten, something about emotional and social readiness, so she was a full year older than the other seniors. She had a way of speaking, clipped and certain, her gaze level and steady, like she was humoring you. Bridget always looked away first, couldn’t take the directness. Every conversation felt like a confrontation.
She handed the card back to Nate.
“I think there’s something going on. Lately her grades have been tanking. She comes in, looks like shit. No makeup. Haven’t you noticed?” He tapped the card against his knuckles and twisted his mouth. “She’s got that godawful brother, you know?” Bridget vaguely knew. Her brother, Lenny, a dropout, and her father, Jimmy, had skipped town.
Bridget eyed the journal, suddenly ashamed. She hadn’t really been paying attention. This was her job, not just the teaching, but to observe them. In that way, Nate took it more seriously than she did.
Nate had anonymous social media accounts. He never posted anything, just scrolled through the newsfeeds. He followed his students and they followed back, not knowing who he was. So stupid, Bridget thought. Didn’t they know the creeps who were out there? But Nate knew who was fighting whom, where to be, when to be there, who was getting bullied, who was doing the bullying. It made him a better teacher, he defended. He’d never abuse it, she knew that, but still. She told him she didn’t want to know anything. Leave her out of it. She wondered if Alecia knew that when she lay in bed next to her husband at night, he scrolled through his phone, spying on the lives of his students like they were his own personal miniseries. It was a moral gray area, she admitted, but Nate did it for the all the right reasons. In the drama that played out at school each day, the stage was set online the night before.
“I just don’t have it in me. Not this year. Other years, I’ve been with you. Fighting for them. Against the administration, against their parents, against themselves half the time. Not this year. I’m barely hanging in.” She opened Lucia’s journal, fanned through the pages, and realized for the first time how many of the entries were drawings. Half of them, at least. She’d have to talk to her about that. This wasn’t art class.
Then, a glimmer of recognition as she turned the book one way, then the other. She’d known once what it all meant, although her skills felt rusty. Aunt Nadine had taught her how to do a reading when she was barely ten, perched on her lap while a cigarette snaked down to the butt. But that was a long time ago.
The last reading she did nearly ended her marriage.
She pushed the book across the desk and pointed.
“Nate. They’re tarot cards.”
• • •
Bridget had a cat. A petite gray-and-white stray that she adopted a month after Holden died, an ill-advised decision. She named her Sunny, after the prostitute in Catcher in the Rye. It was her own simple, obtuse memorial to her husband, but also she loved irony. The cat was both gray and grumpy. So, Sunny she was, or more likely, she wasn’t. No one ever got the joke, but then again, most people didn’t get Bridget’s jokes, with the exception of Holden.
Lord, how she missed him.
It had been less than a year since his death. Two years since his diagnosis, and ten since they married. Bridget liked to imagine her life in timeline form, and sometimes, if she’d had enough to drink and it was late enough at night, she envisioned it hovering there above her head. A single line with dots, like a subway map, green up to the fall of 2012, red and bloody for that year between 2012 and 2013, and muddy-water brown thereafter with a blinking red You Are Here somewhere along the interminable brown. She couldn’t see anything past today.
There was a tiny bit of freedom in being alone. She popped a frozen dinner into the microwave, waited the requisite two minutes, and pulled it out with two fingers, dropping it onto a paper plate. She poured white zinfandel into a red Solo cup because she hated doing dishes, and took her dinner to the living room. Holden would have died, had he been alive. He liked expensive cabernet, from certain regions in France—she had no idea which ones. He was also a particular eater and had specific, bizarre notions of what could and should not be eaten together. Steak and potatoes. Pasta and pork. Chicken and rice. Only in those two combinations. In restaurants, she’d feel endlessly irritated at his requests: whole potatoes, not mashed, no garlic, extra pepper.
Now she could eat whatever she wanted. Strange how she’d welcome back in a heartbeat all the things she used to wish away. When she talked to him, which she did sometimes, not enough to be called often, she didn’t look at his picture or up to the ceiling. She talked as though he was right there next to her.
“Tomorrow I’ll cook something, H. I promise. Maybe.”
You never make promises to the dead that you don’t intend to keep. She wasn’t religious, but Mama’s voice often floated up from the swamps of Georgia just to smack her in the head.
Sunny kneaded at her leg, bucking his head under Bridget’s chin. She ran her nails down the cat’s back, scratching just above his tail. She popped the last bite of gluey mashed potatoes into her mouth, took a deep drink of wine, and reached across the sofa cushions for the journal.
It was black; many of them were. They could pick their own, a request they’d all initially groaned at. But later they’d come in with leather-bound notebooks that reflected their personalities, handing them in shyly as if a glitter-pink cover or gilded pages revealed something otherwise unknown about their souls. They were teenagers; black and angsty was their jam. The class, creative writing, held both juniors and seniors as an elective. The seniors were edging toward college, the sweet lick of freedom bittersweet on their lips, so they weren’t as moody as the juniors who were stuck in Mt. Oanoke for another eighteen months. The seniors were coming full bloom, all the things that had seemed so confining starting to take on the rosy glow of nostalgia. High school was in their rearview mirror.
She flipped the pages. Lucia’s journal was erratic, with changing handwriting, drawings, and block letters filled in with pen. She didn’t read all the entries in anyone’s diary. The exercise was more for the idea of journaling, writing down their brainy, brilliant thoughts, just to get them on paper. She didn’t care about the content, just if they were done on time. They’d ask her, did you read mine? For all their complaining, they seemed to crave the approval.
I’m not a virgin. That’s a joke, right? No one thinks that. I’m a slut. A skank. A witch. A fetish. Never a real person. Except to you. And maybe Taylor, although she’s been flaky. Cares more about Kelsey and Riana and, depending on the day, Andrew.
I couldn’t care less about any of them. I care about you, though, so there’s that.
Bridget closed the journal. She’d never heard anyone call Lucia a whore, a slut. Most of the girls steered clear of her with her sharp, red mouth and sharper tongue. She was more likely to be the one flinging names around. The boys mostly avoided her, but some hung around a bit, too. She clung to the edge of the right crowd—Andrew Evans and Josh Tempest—Taylor clicking up behind them, double step to keep up, and Lucia hanging back. Andrew always watching her, his eyes sliding around, his mouth with that sideways smirk that the girls fell all over themselves for.
A lesson from science class: in nature, the prettiest things are poisonous.
Bridget was tired. It was only seven thirty, but she was always tired. Sleep was both an escape from the everyday weight on her chest and a possible chance to see him again. Touch his soft stubbled cheek, if only in a dream. It was worth the crushing moment in the morning when she realized none of it was real. Maybe it was worth it.
The old house brayed and whistled in the wind. She’d moved in hating this house—an inheritance from Holden’s great-aunt—everything it represented, the cold, unforgiving north, the life she’d left behind. They moved, ostensibly to fix it up, sell it. Move back south. Give it one year. If you want to leave in one year, we’ll go. I promise, back to the swamps and the bogs and the heat and the y’all. We’ll go. Then she’d gotten a job as a teacher and they stayed. They met Nate and Alecia and she made the house her own and the year came and went with hardly a whisper. That was almost eight years ago.
The house sat back from the road, the original farmhouse for the land that had since been developed. Three-acre lots with three-thousand-square-foot McMansion developments on either side. Commuter families, driving to North Jersey or New York City, coming in late in the evening but with hefty paychecks. Unlike when they’d first moved in, when the town was still reeling from the closure of the paper mill. Now they had neighborhoods with kids and bikes and winding cul-de-sacs and neighborhood barbecues. Mommy nights out and golf games and Super Bowl parties and first birthdays.
There Bridget sat, high above them all. Keeping vigilant watch over a life that wasn’t hers to have.