Free The Bridge by Rebecca Rogers Maher

you can do to just survive it?”
    He keeps his gaze locked into mine, searching for something. I wish I knew what he was looking for.
    “Is that how you feel, Christa?”
    I give his arm a little squeeze, and then pull away. “You know what I feel?”
    “What?”
    “I feel like eating all the ice cream in the world.”
    He half-smiles, in a way that’s at once so fragile and so intensely herculean, it hurts to see. “Sounds good to me.”

5:00PM, Christa
    The nice thing about knowing you’re going to die is that you can eat all the hot fudge you want and not worry about whether your ass is going to need its own zip code. I figure the creatures at the bottom of the East River have seen worse, so I order a double and wait outside on the steps for Henry.
    The eastern tower of the Brooklyn Bridge looms high above the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory and its neighbor, the swanky River Café. Both sustained heavy damage after the last hurricane hit New York and were closed for a long while. I try to picture the river rising and surging up over the wooden pier, slamming against the stairs where I now sit. I could have just come out here then and been swept away by the storm. But I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know I was sick again yet. I was holding on to the hope that things were turning around and might in the end be okay.
    But it’s like that, isn’t it? You get a short reprieve and you think, oh, there are moments of peace, moments of happiness. A tree changes colors and its leaves fall down over you like butterflies and you feel for that one instant that the world is a good place, that it’s worth sticking around for.
    But then a wave of awfulness sweeps up over you, out of nowhere, in places you thought would never be touched, and you’re covered in filth, and you have to shut down. You have to.
    Henry comes out of the ice cream shop with a coffee sundae and a handful of napkins, and we head over to Pier One to sit in the grass. A water taxi lumbers up to the dock and dispenses a dozen or so travelers. Along the railing, people photograph each other with the bridges and skyline behind them. Two little boys run back and forth beside us, chasing their dad as he tries to get a kite up into the air.
    “Dad! Dad. Dad. Dad. Over here. Over here.”
    “Look out, Dada! The tree! The tree!”
    Their father unfurls the string, lifting the kite into the wind and then calmly adding another spool. The string is soon so long, the kite flies hundreds of feet in the air. Over the Watchtower building. Over the traffic on the BQE. Almost as high as the east tower on the bridge.
    “Why did you choose the Manhattan side of the bridge, Henry? When you like the Brooklyn side better?”
    “I wanted to land in the water.”
    I nod and spoon some fudge into my mouth. I’d forgotten how salty it is. With a start, I realize that I might have never tasted this again, if things had gone as planned this morning.
    “I scoped out the Brooklyn side, too,” I say. “But who wants to fall on a bunch of construction trucks?”
    “Nobody.” Henry turns his spoon around and licks the convex back. “That’s not romantic at all.”
    “Is that what you were after?” I ask. “Romance?”
    He shrugs. “I’m not above it.”
    “No. I suppose not. Me, I just wanted to feel that feeling for minute. Of being free, you know what I mean? I know it only lasts a second, but I wanted to see what it’s like to fly.”
    “Why not try skydiving?”
    I snort. “Good one.”
    “I’m serious though, Christa.” He puts his empty sundae cup down the grass. “You’re not like me. There’s nothing wrong with you, chemically. You’ve had a lot of bad breaks and some shitty people in your life, but you could survive this cancer. You could go on to find some good people. To have a nice life. Why would you throw that all away?”
    “You obviously haven’t seen a mastectomy scar.”
    “Really? That’s what this is about? Because you lost your