Bridget, Thursday, May 7, 2015
The mill had ceased production in 2005 and now it stood, forgotten, its exterior failing it in innumerable ways. The brick crumbling and the mortar giving way. The windows were soaped and broken, some fully punched out, some jagged and peaked. A large chemical tank stood rusting, the pipes skewed, uneven, their connections ripped and battered from winters in the mountains. Along the far side, overflowing into the parking lot, was a pile of blackened and rotting pallets, the weeds growing between the cracks, winding around the wood.
Even the air felt dusty in her lungs.
The sky had turned gray, the air warm and rumbling with the soft hint of a distant thunderstorm, and Bridget rolled down her car window. She could hear the dam behind the mill, a loud constant that drowned out birds, insects, other people, leaving behind only a whooshing silence. The parking lot was deserted, which wasn’t unusual, but Bridget sat in her car with the windows down, simply listening. If she closed her eyes, she could be anywhere: a beach, a spectacular waterfall in Hawaii (not that she’d ever been), the bank of the Flint River in Georgia, her feet ankle deep in gray-black clay mud. If she closed her eyes, she could be seventeen again, lying down in that muck, her hair tangled in the leaves and the rocks and the mud, her mouth and tongue seeking a boy’s. What was his name? Ricky Tomlin. Sweet Ricky Tomlin, a boy himself, but with a man’s wants, and those hands—God he knew what he was doing. Bridget could practically feel the mud, cold and chalky on her mouth.
If she closed her eyes, she could remember being seventeen. Eighteen. In love.
Everything now was so different: social media, the Internet, texting. It all sharpened people’s edges, made them the opposite of social. Turned them feral.
Bridget got out of the car, shutting the door carefully behind her. She made her way across the parking lot, her sandaled feet crunching on stones and hardened dirt, the dust kicking up when she walked. Today, thankfully, she’d worn jeans to school, and although it was close to five o’clock, the looming summer meant longer days, and the air felt thick, almost viscous. She could taste it.
It was easy to remember being eighteen, that was the thing. It was harder to remember being in love as an adult. Easier to remember Holden the way she’d met him under the blazing southern sun, his Yankee white skin blistering with the heat of it. On the patio of a Mexican chain restaurant, where the waiters slapped a straw sombrero on each of their heads and sang “Happy Birthday” in unison to the two of them, a table apart. He’d bought her a margarita; it had been her twenty-second birthday, his twenty-seventh, but it was their birthday, and this above all seemed to mean something hugely profound. Only a few years removed from Aunt Nadine’s mysticism, she’d felt so certain that she and Holden had been fated to be together from the moment she saw him.
Remembering the early days of summer love and long nights in wet grass under black skies kissing and kissing and kissing with nowhere to be and no one to answer to. That was easier than remembering later, when love felt like something wet and slick in her hand. When they would fight until 2 a.m. until one of them fell asleep midstonewall, when they didn’t even have “real” things to fight about yet. After that she’d felt the early doubts sneak in, that maybe fate isn’t what held a marriage together. That sharing the same birthday didn’t mean they were destined for each other, that it didn’t mean anything at all.
Maybe a month before he was diagnosed, she’d found something. A single broken acrylic fingernail in his car, painted red and sheared angrily from the base. He’d been at a conference the week before and lost in his own head since he’d been back. She prodded him but he blamed it on feeling sick—intermittently nauseous and tired—until he’d snapped back at her. She kept that broken fingernail in the fleece of her bathrobe pocket, waiting for the right time to bring it up, and she’d find herself rubbing the nail between her thumb and forefinger like it was the silk edge of a security blanket for weeks. The right time never seemed to happen.
Then she found something else, a business card in his pocket from a radiology group from somewhere in New York. But that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was the writing on the back, a woman’s handwriting, and all it said was Watercress, 6:30. Which again by itself could have been anything. But the fingernail and the business card together made her skin crawl. The handwriting was loopy but neat and almost fanciful. She kept that, too, and a week later finally looked it up. It was a bar near the medical conference but not one on the charge cards or the bank statement. She supposed he could have not gone to Watercress at 6:30, and that would have been the simplest explanation, but her sixth sense tingled anyway.
So Bridget did the worst thing she could have done and instead of asking him about it, she pulled out Aunt Nadine’s tarot and gave herself a reading. When she dealt the lovers card and the chariot reversed, she put the cards away and squared her shoulders and prepared to confront Holden the minute he came home.
Except he came home and sat her down and told her he’d been diagnosed with stage III pancreatic cancer—the worst kind of cancer there was—but that he was going to beat it. She tucked the fingernail and Watercress 6:30 into the silky bag along with Aunt Nadine’s deck, then placed it in the bottom of her underwear drawer. Their life became chemo and radiation and surgery, something called a Whipple procedure, and diet modification. She learned new words like bilirubin, cachexia, protease. She forgot (almost) entirely about Watercress 6:30. Almost.
Sometimes she wondered if the worst part wasn’t that he died, but rather that he died before she knew if he’d stopped loving her.
She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered into the mill through a broken window, searching for remnants of Lucia. Why had she come? What would she say if she found her? She didn’t know.
But she did know that Nate was in trouble, more so than before, if that were even possible. It was no accident that it was Detective Harper who took her statement and then followed her out the door. Back at Tripp’s, she’d all but run to her car, wanting to avoid any run-in with Nate, but also because Tripp was getting to her. Something had shifted, ever so slightly, and she wasn’t sure how to put it all back the way it was. She needed to be away from him and Nate and this whole thing, except she was pulled here, to the mill, just to check she kept telling herself. A quick look around and then she’d leave.
She saw the flash of white on the other side, the window to her left, but it was opaque, heavy and gray, and she couldn’t get a better look. She moved down the line, the brick crumbling beneath her palm, and looked through the bottom panel, splintered in like it had been hit with a baseball or a stick. She knew the boys threw stones at the windows, accumulating points for a good loud break. The white flashed again, soft and downy, and Bridget’s heart skipped. She heard the distant pattering of feet so she called out, “Lucia!” with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
The window at the far end was punched all the way in, the wooden lattices splintered at the edges and wide enough for an adult to climb through. Bridget was tentative with her footing, and the jagged glass scratched along her shirt, nearly cutting through to her skin, but she made it in, only a two-foot drop to the floor.
Inside, she called out again, the building blocking out the sounds from the dam, her voice tinny and hollow bouncing against the cement. The room was darker than she’d thought, the sun having long been hidden behind twilight clouds, and she squinted trying to make out anything. From another room, or maybe the one she was in, she heard a rustling, and she spun one way then the other, convinced already that she’d made a mistake in being here. She followed the rustling, trying to steady her breath, which seemed to be coming in quick bursts, and called, “Lucia!” again, just to make sure. There was no reply.
Bridget navigated around the stainless steel beams positioned every ten feet or so in the enormous concrete room. The floor was littered with cardboard tubing, various diameters, and if she wasn’t careful, she’d roll right over one and break a leg.
The next room was filled with stainless steel machinery. Large steel tanks were sunk into the concrete floor, the steel of their caps rusted and thin. Piping, four feet in diameter, connected one tank to the other, a remnant of a mechanical assembly line ending in the pulp room. Bridget ran her flashlight beam into one of the ragged openings, wondering what lay beneath the ground. What lived in those caverns—animals? People?
She shuddered. Behind a beam flashed that white again, quiet and quick. Bridget followed it, whispered “Lucia,” the rustling of a soft step guiding her deeper into the mill. The air thickened and she turned the corner, expecting to see the girl, crouching, terrified.
The thing flew at her before she knew what it was, shrieking and wild. Bridget screamed and covered her face.
Someone grabbed her from behind, pulling her down.
“Jesus Christ, Bridget. I can’t keep following you all over hell and creation. You’re going to get yourself killed.” Tripp’s hands were on her biceps, his fingers digging into her flesh.
The white thing, the thing that flew at her, toddled away. A goose. Not Lucia. She’d been tracking a goose.
“A snow goose in May?” Bridget asked.
“A loner, maybe.” Tripp shrugged, his breath at her ear. “Lost?” The goose bleated in the corner, like them, looking for a way out. They’d come in here in the daylight, ventured in far too deep, and now the exit seemed impossibly far away and cloaked in darkness.
Bridget struggled to calm her racing heart. “I really thought I’d find her here,” she said lamely.
“She might be here, but we won’t find her tonight.”
“What do we do with the goose?” He hadn’t let her go, and for a second, Bridget let herself lean back into him. His skin smelled mossy, a waxy, soapy smell.
“We have to leave it, if we stay here any longer, it’ll get dark and we’ll be stuck. Don’t worry, he got in, he’ll get out. He’s weeks away from his flock, though.” Tripp said into her hair. “The guy is pissed; listen to him. We couldn’t get near him if we wanted.”
Bridget didn’t move and was suddenly tired enough to lie down, right in the dark, in the dust and the steel and the warmth of Tripp’s arms and take a nap. He stepped back, putting space between them.
“Come on, Bridge, it’s about to get full-blown dark out. We’ll be in deep shit then.” He took her hand and pulled her gently from the steel machines, rusted stuck in time, to the open room they’d come from. Bridget took one last look in the lost goose’s direction, its cry growing more distant as they navigated the mill debris, away from it. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for it, wandering among the man-made landscape, with the natural sounds of the dam and other birds close enough to hear and unable to find his way out.
• • •
In the parking lot, Tripp turned to her at her car. “Dinner?”
“What?” She’d been thinking of Lucia, and if she was honest, about Nate. Where he was right now, where Lucia was right now, if they were together. If they were together together. She hadn’t realized how firmly the doubts had taken hold, but now they were there, solid as though they’d always been there, and she found if she was honest, she no longer truly believed in him.
“I said dinner? The 543?” Tripp repeated as Bridget started to shake her head no. “You have to eat no matter what, right?”
Bridget felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, and without looking at the display, declined the call. Petra had already called three times that day alone.
She followed his truck in her car for the three miles into town. She thought maybe she should call Nate, tell him she was meeting Tripp. In another life, he’d have gotten a kick out of this. Back when Holden was alive, and she and Nate and Alecia and Bridget were a foursome, they’d have parties at Nate and Alecia’s.
Sometimes he’d come to Nate’s without a date and flirt with Bridget and Alecia, vying for their attention, the men oblivious or just not caring or even teasing them all. Holden would say here comes your boyfriend and laugh, and Bridget would redden. Or she remembered one of his girlfriends, Aubrey with the perm, who worked nights at the Quarry Bar, who sat incongruously at the living room card table next to Alecia. Alecia with her Seven jeans and her straight blond hair. Aubrey went out to smoke a cigarette and Alecia had hissed across the table, Jesus, Tripp, are you slumming for women now? And Bridget had elbowed her, because honestly, the girl-on-girl trash talk irritated the living shit out of her. Didn’t they get enough bullshit from men and now they had to give it to each other? Tripp would say, Aw, A, you’re such a bitch sometimes. Bridget had laughed, because that, at least, was true. Tripp would put his arm around Bridget, his big hand squeezing her shoulder, and say, listen, my two favorite women are already taken. Holden would roll his eyes and later say, I don’t know how anyone can stand that guy. Bridget would defend him, he’s just kidding around, lighten up. But lightening up wasn’t in Holden’s repertoire and he only tolerated Tripp because Nate loved the guy. Their card nights had always seemed like postcollege shenanigans, where the rules of normal society didn’t exactly apply and they could all be as ridiculous as they wanted with few consequences.
But now the weird part was, Bridget was available and Holden was dead, and none of them had partied like that in what seemed like years. Since Gabe was diagnosed, at least. Three years felt like a lifetime. Sometimes she asked Nate how Tripp was; he even once told her that Tripp was engaged—maybe to the woman in the picture on his desk. At the time, she’d been oddly sad about it.
And now, Tripp was here. She remembered the way his fingers clutched her arm as she leaned into him at the mill, gentle and firm. It made her wonder what his hands would feel like on her bare skin and then chastise herself for the thought. But truthfully, the idea had been there for a very long time, if only in a boozy afterthought way. If she was truly honest about it, she’d always used to put on a little bit more makeup, her shirt a little lower cut, her hair a bit more curled on the nights she thought Tripp might come.
Now he sat across the booth from her at The 543 giving her a grin she’d thrilled at only a few years ago, and the jolt under her skin went up her arms and straight up into her hair, then dissipated, instantly, like static.
She wasn’t that same person. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn lipstick. Her clothes hung on her—she’d been curvy at one point, but a sporadic diet of frozen dinners and red wine for dinner had run the curves right off her body. Now she had no hips, no waist, just a straight blob from her neck to her knees, and had Aunt Nadine seen her now, she would say girl you gotta stand up twice to cast a shadow. The jacket Bridget wore had been Holden’s spring jacket—a tan canvas, utterly unfashionable with no shape whatsoever. She was a widow now, still having sex dreams about a man who died a year (nearly a year, must call Petra!) before, and being content with orgasming in her sleep and calling it a good night.
Dating was a laughable proposition. Then again he hadn’t asked.
She ran a hand through the ends of her hair.
They both ordered coffee. Tripp suggested pancakes and Bridget went along with it because food didn’t have much taste and she truly didn’t care. The waitress took away their menus and the pregnant silence was followed by them both speaking at once.
“So, do you think—” Bridget started.
“What do you want—” Tripp said.
They laughed. Tripp motioned for Bridget to talk first.
“I was going to ask you, do you think Lucia and Nate are together?” She shook out a sugar packet and tore the top.
“I don’t know. I called Nate just before I saw you at the mill—”
“Did you follow me?” She interrupted him without thinking.
“I did,” Tripp conceded, stirring his coffee. “I had a hunch you wouldn’t go home. You left my house in such a rush. Tell me, why are you so intent on figuring this all out? It doesn’t seem like you believe Nate. You don’t believe Lucia, do you?”
Bridget considered this. It was a perfectly fair question, and one she’d been asking herself the entire drive to the mill earlier. Again, because today seemed like a particularly good day for honesty, she had to admit maybe it was the curiosity of the whole affair that pulled at her. I mean, what else did she have? Besides Petra and the perfect maple tree, which seemed pretty stupid now. For God’s sake, let Petra find the tree.
“I think I believe Nate. I do. He’s not a cheater. I’ve known him for years.”
“Does a cheater have a type?” Tripp asked slowly, unfolding and refolding his napkin.
“Oh, I don’t know. I think so.” But then Bridget flashed on Holden, on Watercress 6:30, on that broken red acrylic fingernail, each so seemingly innocent. Holden—stiff, conservative, predictable Holden drinking one (and only one) bourbon and water on the rocks at the bar after his medical conference—had taken a red-fingernailed radiologist to his bed. He didn’t seem the type, either. He’d voted for Bush. “Maybe not,” she conceded.
“Alecia cheated on Nate, did you know that?”
Bridget looked up then, stunned. “No. When?”
“Years ago, before they were married maybe? Someone kissed her at a work thing. This is how life happens, though. There’s no type for anything. People are just doing their thing, being people, right?”
“Maybe. But with a student?” Bridget tried to figure out if he was defending Nate. It was one thing to explore a kiss at a work function when you had a boyfriend, but it was quite another to hunker down with a student when you had a wife and a disabled son at home who depended on you.
“I don’t think so.” He moved in his seat, tucking his hands under his legs and leaning forward. “Lucia being missing? This changes things, I think. They’ll gun for him. Harper already had a closed case on the guy for institutional assault. I don’t know if it would have stuck. He was talking to the DA. But he wanted Nate, for sure.”
“Should you be telling me this?” Bridget practically whispered, looking around. The closest occupied table was ten feet away, but still.
“Probably not. I’m basically just a traffic cop; there’s no crime in this town. There’s drugs, but even those have a larger regional task force. It’s no secret I can’t stand Harper. He goes after what he thinks the truth is, be damned with what he finds out along the way. I want to be a detective, but not his way.”
“Something was going on at school,” Bridget admitted slowly. She thought about the witch comments, the burning note. She thought about Lucia’s creative writing journal, sitting on her desk, the bizarrely cryptic entries she’d initially attributed to her brother. Wrist to floor, his hand like an ape.
She thought about how disengaged she’d been as a teacher in the past year, the past few months. How life seemed to be happening around her, and if she had to picture it, she felt like an observer. A patron in the monkey house. She realized that maybe all of this was related, that maybe Nate was collateral damage.
She couldn’t articulate now how the kids all seemed to slide sideways since Lucia disappeared. How their eyes shifted away from Bridget, away from Bachman, their mouths smirking, whispering behind cupped hands.
There was a missing piece. Something that no one knew.
The waitress brought dinner. Bridget ate and thought about how she’d been turning a blind eye, out of laziness or tiredness or the sensation she was being weighted down. That anything she did was hopeless, that the students at Mt. Oanoke would go on being ruthless or chipper or doing heroin or underage drinking and nothing she did would make a difference. She was simply treading water. For a teacher, apathy was a crime; she used to believe that. Then again, like Tripp said, she was just a person trying to get through it.
“I think I’ve been stupid. Or at least willfully ignorant.” On her plate, a half serving of gluey pancakes remained. She hadn’t eaten that much at once in weeks. Months maybe. The hard knot of dough and sugar felt lodged in her esophagus, stuck.
“Well,” Tripp cleared his throat and rummaged in the plastic holder for more sugar packs. “You’ve been through a lot.” When he looked up he met her eyes, tilted his head. “Did I ever tell you how sorry I was? I was. I am.”
He didn’t. At the funeral, he gave her a quick peck, but mostly avoided her. He’d said, let me know if I can do anything. Like of all people in the world, when she was at the absolute bottom, when the world seemed black and shot through with silver sharp pain, when getting out of bed or taking a shower seemed like daunting tasks, when she just wanted to talk about Holden because all anyone else seemed to want to do was change the subject or bring her macaroni-and-cheese casseroles, she would have called Tripp? No.
“You didn’t. But I appreciate it.” She was better at accepting condolences, about smiling back instead of crying. To say Oh, thank you, yes it’s so hard, no don’t worry, I’m fine. That in the strange role of widow, people expected her to comfort them. Oh yes, I know it’s terrible, so awful. Yes, he was so young. Oh, I remember that time at community picnic, yes he was very good at softball.
“I should have said something sooner, but I never knew what. Plus, the guy didn’t like me much.”
And for once, Bridget laughed. Most people wouldn’t have dared to say it. So she smiled at him and spoke the truth, which felt a bit liberating. “No. Not so much.”
“I made too many eyes at his wife, I guess.” He took a sip of coffee but kept Bridget’s gaze until she looked away, out the window to the dimly lit parking lot. To the older couple shuffling to their car, he using a walker, she guiding him with one hand under his elbow. Bridget felt the familiar sting in the back of her throat, the burn in her eyes. “I admit I was jealous of him. Nate, too. Y’all had what I wanted. These happy marriages, a friendly foursome. I wanted that with Melinda, my ex. My daughter. We got engaged for a spell there. It didn’t last. She wasn’t the cheating type, either. And still, somehow.” He gave her a knowing smile and a slight lift of one shoulder and Bridget looked away.
She held her breath, her mind wiped white of words. Tripp played everything so close to the vest and Bridget had never pried. She knew so little about him; any personal inquiry in the past had been laughed off, treated like a joke. The intimacy felt too sudden, too urgent.
“And now?” Bridget asked, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say but knew absolutely, positively that she didn’t want this conversation to end, although she couldn’t have quite pinpointed why.
“Now?”
“Yes, now. With Melinda? Or . . .” Bridget looked around, her hands out helplessly, her face reddening. “Anyone else?”
“Nah. It’s too hard. I’m getting old.” He laughed, but silently, his mouth opened and she could see the fillings in his teeth. Silver amalgam; she didn’t even know they still did that. “Have you tried dating? It’s awful.”
“No,” she said much too quickly, her voice hitched and her hands flat against the table.
He appraised her then, his tongue moving around in his mouth, his cheek bulging with a wry sort of smile. He picked up the bill, and in a smooth motion, shifted out of the booth to pay. When he came back he held his hand out to help her up, and when she stood, they stayed, just close enough for her to feel his warmth, smell the syrupy pancake on his breath, the soapy, dewy fragrance of his shampoo. “You should, you know.”
“I should what?” she asked, flustered.
“Try dating.”