BRIDGE

The Piscataqua River Bridge rises and arches like an enormous heron, its wings wide in flight.

In the morning Pilot and I follow our unplowed street to the river path, then slog through the snow to our stretch of beach beneath the bridge. I barely see its shape in the morning dark, even now that I’m standing beside it. But I know the wings of the bridge curve out to the sky. Suddenly Pilot bays a high, chilling animal alarm. Nobody hangs out here. Especially in cold so fierce a body could crack. But I see a person in the snowy dawn, balanced on one of the rusted I-beams of a pier that was once here, maybe destroyed by the fast-running river. At low water the narrow beams reach long, first over rocks and then the river. Who’d want to be so near thirty-five-degree water screaming by?

His feet are wide. A him?

Pilot races in a wide arc around him. “Pilot,” I call softly. She is black and invisible in this light, except for her feet, which are white. I can’t find her feet running. Then a strip of pink light shows between the river and the sky. She’s there. A black cartoon nearly grown puppy with a licorice tail. The person turns, a figure etched in the new light, unaware of me.

I make out camouflage baggy pants. Boots. A muddy-colored cap pulled low.

Soldier things. The soldier shifts his feet on the beam like it’s a tightrope. I drop to the sand and hold out my arms. Pilot’s bony frame slams in. I fix on the marks on the soldier’s clothes and the cap that covers his eyes. His shoulders sag. He holds something in his right hand, his far hand from me. The sun’s pink tinge creeps through the mist and out of the water. The sun!

My beach is not long, just the rocky shore you can walk at low tide between the bridge to the east and woods of white birch and oaks to the west. I’m not twenty feet from him. I call “Hey” toward the pier. He doesn’t say “Hey” back.

Everything’s different this morning. It’s a school day. And I’m here, and there’s a soldier in the silver light. After what my father said last night.

Pilot escapes my reach again. She gives out a ridiculously deep bark for the baby she is, all eleven months of her, a gangly puppy with pancake-sized feet.

The soldier moves.

“She’s friendly,” I say.

Pilot calls up a gravelly howl from deep inside her. The soldier finally turns his head toward us. The soldier’s right hand seems to tremble and drum against his leg. Pilot’s body shakes with concentration on his every move. The pink light streaks over the sky. The soldier’s head bends at a funny angle, and for some reason I think of the Tin Man.

“I’m not going to hurt her,” the soldier says. “The dog.” He scatters his words into the cold air. I glance at him directly. I see more of his face in the new light.

Pilot sprawls flat, from muzzle to tail, watching him. “You’re on her beach,” I say.

A low sound comes out of the soldier. It isn’t worried like Pilot’s. It’s flat.

Pilot lets out a yip that cuts through the cold. “Excuse me,” I say, “do you have any treats? She’s food motivated. That’s what they said at the shelter. If you had a treat, she might stop howling.”

Looking at the soldier, I don’t think he’s much older than Jamie, next door, who turned nineteen in December. He wears a thick watchband with a face as wide as his wrist. An American flag is stitched on his shoulder, only it’s in black and white. His lips are small, straight lines, except for a part that’s bloody and swollen. I want to tell him, Stay away from the Page. People get shot in that bar.

Was he a soldier in Afghanistan? With Mr. Murray we are studying the country the way it was before we were at war.

The soldier gets the word treat. Finally he pats his chest pockets. His hip pockets. He even has pockets on his sleeves. Above the flag are stripes like arrows.

If he answers I don’t know. The roar of traffic from the bridge sucks up any words.

Finally the soldier comes up with a packet of airline peanuts from one of his millions of pockets. “She like peanuts?” I think he says. He doesn’t focus on either of us.

“Her name’s Pilot,” I say. “Call her.”

The birches moan when the trees lean into each other, and then the wind suddenly stops. The soldier lets out a long, quivery whistle. It’s as if he heard a command—call her—and obeys.

Pilot lifts her sleek self, walks straight to him. She scarfs up every peanut he holds out in his hand, then licks the scent from his open palm.

My eyes are drawn to a glint of light, something in his other hand. I take a step nearer. But the soldier does some kind of trick, pulling something from another pocket. I freeze. I see what he drops into a place beneath his coat. What had glinted in the sunlight shining through falling snow was a gun.

The warnings my mother would try to scare me with flash in my mind. Danger is everywhere. Trust no one. The spirits will get you. They want to take you to live with them. Watch out for spirits on your path. They lie in wait. For you, Sophea.

I am not afraid. I don’t know any Khmer Rouge or the Pol Pot time my grandmother talked about. I am not Cambodian. I am American. I am not afraid. I have no past. I have no ancestors. I have no mother. I make myself from scratch every day.

“Found this hanging from the fence.” The soldier gestures to the cyclone fence that divides the woods from the riverbank. My eyes leave his face and glance at what he holds. My ring. The black slit in the tiger’s eye stone gleams. He holds it out to me. I am aware of the ring, the rock, the soldier, the sun, the moon sucking the river back into the sea.

“That’s mine.” I find myself shouting at him, as if he’ll pull the ring back and pocket it, too.

He tosses it, and it lands in the crevice of the rock at my feet. On my knees, I scoop it into my hands clumsy with thick mittens.

He’s watching me. “Are you real?” he asks.

Somehow, this is confusing. I wrap my arms around myself. “I don’t know.”

But all of a sudden, I’m aware of being a physical person. I’m aware of the ribbing of my undershirt hugging my wrists. I’m aware of my hair I wound in my fist that falls to the nape of my neck under my stocking cap. I feel the cold air as I breathe into my chest. We squint our eyes in the shard of sunlight and take each other in.

“What’s your name?” I say. Did he forget the gun inside his coat?

“Luke. Lucas.”

I see the shadow of his beard. I step back.

“I’m Sofie.” I jerk Pilot, who wants to run. Then I let her go and she flies, her floppy ears thrown back like Superman capes. I wonder what color his eyes are. Maybe, like the river, they change with the angle of light. I love the feel of my ring back with me in my fist. It feels solid. I feel solid. But I can’t keep it.

I open my mitten with my ring. “My father gave me this,” I say. “I’m giving it back to you. It’s for good luck, wherever you’re going. It’s a tiger’s eye.”

I come closer, balance the ring on the steel bar. But this time I stay and study the American flag high up on his sleeve and try to make out the patch beneath it. Something Army National Guard. New Hampshire. I see a patch shaped like a shield, with many stars. Nine. Beneath that, bright colored bars. Striped and starred. Why did he pin on all these badges to stand under a roaring bridge?

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Sixteen,” I say, not thinking, since I’m almost seventeen. “Seventeen,” I say, but the roar of six lanes of cars overhead flattens it.

The soldier lifts his glasses and turns his eyes on me. They are yellow-green exhausted eyes that are both terrifying and beckoning. I feel like I’m wearing nothing but the cotton undershirt and he can see every bone up my rib cage. “You need a night’s sleep,” I say, and again I feel the fear in my legs and also fascination with his eyes. He looks at me with eyes that make me remember lines my father used to tell me from a Scottish nursery rhyme. It begins, One for sorrow. I’m stalled on the first line.

I say, “I have to go.”

He pulls back toward the river.

But he tosses something quite light toward me, and I catch it. It jangles on a silver chain that slides between my mittens. What is this? In exchange for the ring? I wrap it in my hand.

“Sofie Grear!” I hear from the trees. My dog stops tearing across the strip of beach where, at the horizon, the splotch of pink shows through the snow clouds. She listens, too. “Sofie.” Short. Abrupt. It’s my father. He sees the soldier on the steel beam. I hold what the soldier tossed out of sight. Overhead, the sky has become smoke.

“Sofie, come away from there.” I hear tension in my father’s voice. My father with the calmness of the sea.

“I’m not a lost dog,” I call.

Without looking, I feel the soldier—Luke—straighten.

My father drops down through the scrub brush to the rocky beach so quickly, it’s as if he thought the current of the river had sucked me into her snake body. High above, angles and lines of the bridge disappear in the fog and the snow.

“Sofie,” he calls again.

“I’m here.”

“What are you, crazy?” I am still near the beam. For one second my father looks like he is going to come hard on the soldier, and I think of the silly joke we have, “You can always come home. No matter what.” I could always come home. What is there in the world to keep me from my father?

But the soldier and I are here in the snow. It’s hard to place my father here.

It’s Luke who jumps from the pier to the rocky beach. He speaks softly, and my father answers in such a way that I realize they know each other. Luke looks at my father, his face at an angle. He is deferential. He holds out his hand. He wants to shake my father’s hand. My father extends his hand a short way to be done with the business of greeting, but Luke takes his hand in both of his. Then he leaps across the rocks and disappears into the snow.

I slide the silver chain into my pocket.