The Bridge by Rebecca Rogers Maher Read Free Book Online Page A

turns and blowing through a series of yellow lights.
    “You have kids?” he asks.
    I shake my head, and he blows through his teeth. “Too bad. Kids make happy. Make smile. Good for heart, no?”
    I look out the window. Henry can field this one.
    We tried, Sam and I. Or at least I tried and he went along with it. “Just don’t tell me about it,” he said. “Like, when you’re ovulating or anything. I don’t want to feel like a breeding bull or something. Just, you know, put on some lingerie and do what you’ve got to do.”
    Romantic as that was, I didn’t conceive in the few months we had before Cancer Town. It was a blessing, I guess, in retrospect.
    In the front seat the driver starts humming tunelessly. Clearly we are boring him. “You mind I play music?”
    “Go ahead,” Henry says, and I think under better circumstances he might have winked at me. If we were, in fact, two normal people on a date. And then the music comes on—an instrumental cover of “Dust in the Wind” played with a pan flute.
    I remember the first time I ever heard this song. I was a teenager and my boyfriend put it on a mix tape for me. I lay on my bed and listened to it over and over and cried because I thought it must have meant he loved me—if he could know the opulence and majesty of my adolescent sadness, and reflect it back to me that way, in a song. Even before the war zone of cancer and divorce, I was a melancholy bastard, motherless and wanting.
    It was only later that I realized people find the song silly. Melodramatic and over the top. My boyfriend took it seriously at least, at the age of sixteen, but he left me anyway for a girl who would drink beers with him in the back of his truck, who didn’t cry when they had sex.
    C’est la vie
. And so what if
la vie
totally sucks.
    I look over at Henry and he’s gazing out the window, listening. His body’s gone very tense and I wonder how it is that I’m able to discern that already, especially when tension is pretty much his natural state. But when he turns toward me, there’s a seriousness in his eyes, and that’s when I forget that I don’t know anything about him, that I’ve only known him for five hours and those hours are probably some of the worst of either of our lives. I forget all that and feel instead a sorrow so intense I don’t know how to contain it. For him, and for whatever it is that makes him so desolate he can’t find a reason to live.
    We look at each other for a long while, as the flutist on the stereo begins a long tribute to seventies-era classic rock hits, each one more absurd than the last. When the cabbie starts to sing along to “We’ve Got Tonight,” what are we supposed to do?
    We sing along, too.
----
    The Cloisters—a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—is a collection of art and architecture from Medieval Europe. I know this, and I kind of know why I’m supposed to appreciate it, but the real reason I like going is the quiet. I don’t even bother paying for museum admission. I just walk around the outside, up the staircases and through the archways of Fort Tryon Park. Henry has been here before, of course. I imagine it was part of the sort of cultural education wealthy people engage in. But I’m just guessing. We walk around for a while and look at the fall colors before settling on a patch of grass overlooking the Hudson. I lie down on the ground and Henry lies beside me.
    “So, you have a brother?” I ask him.
    “Jack. He’s in the Peace Corps.”
    “That’s exciting.”
    “He’s in Guyana. Because of Charles, maybe, our driver? They were always close. My parents hate it, but he’s not exactly the obedient kind. He’s been there for almost two years now.”
    “You must miss him.”
    “I do, yeah.” He stares straight upward. The fog has cleared, but overhead a cluster of clouds moves slowly across the sky, casting a shadow over the sun. “I’m glad for him, though. That he’s doing something that matters