Free The Forever Bridge by T. Greenwood Page B

remembers hundreds of nights in this bed, as she lay reading (her eyes blurry with exhaustion) with Robert snoring next to her, waiting for the phone to ring. Expecting the shrill tremble of it, and wondering if it was life or death waiting on the other end of the line.
    It was Gloria who gave her her first books, who brought her armloads of the novels she’d kept from college. They were mostly tattered paperbacks with yellow USED stickers along the spines. The pages were riddled with illegible notes in the margins, with yellow highlighter bleeding through to the other side. But she was grateful for the diversion, grew to rely on it. She wonders what she would do now without her books. What would distract her from all the new potential catastrophes, both real and imagined?
    Tonight she tries to focus on the page, on one of the new books that Effie has delivered, but she is too tired to make sense of the words. The ink is blurry on the paper. Her days, as predictable and uneventful as they are, still manage to wear her down. Fear is a cumbersome thing. Regret even heavier. By the time she climbs into her bed at night, her limbs ache with the exhaustion of another day, though as she turns out the light and closes her eyes, her body rests but her mind races. Like a car long after the ignition has been turned off, the engine ticking, ticking. The hood still hot to the touch. Because while her days are predictable, as an ascetic’s grim routine will be, her nights are capricious. Sleep is like the river. Changeable. Sometimes it is still, harmless, and sleep is nothing but a simple shutting down. But other times it is a violent thing, which pulls her into its current. On nights like these there is nothing to do but to surrender to its sway.

N essa stands at the edge of the road and thrusts her thumb out into the night, her hand, her entire arm enclosed by the darkness. There is no moon. There are no streetlights. And there are no cars on the road to cast their beams on her. The night is swallowing her whole. Her backpack digs into her shoulders, and she wonders what she could sacrifice in order to lighten the load. What she could spare. She tries not to think about all the things she’s given up or lost on this long journey.
    After she left her mother’s apartment in town, she walked all the way to Lake Gormlaith to her grandfather’s old house. By the time she arrived, her ankles ached, and her feet and hands were tingling and swollen. His absence, unlike her mother’s, was expected. Still, the unfamiliar car in the driveway, the toys in the yard, the child in a sagging diaper staring at her through the screen door made her throat grow thick. And so she’d kept walking, stopping only when she got to the boat access area, taking off her shoes and wading into the lake. The cold water had numbed her aching feet. And she considered just walking into the water, making her whole body insensate.
    She is completely alone.
    She’s not sure where to go, now that she knows her mother is, indeed, gone. Or at least no longer living in that apartment. She hasn’t really thought beyond this. Like most runaways, she has not considered much beyond the leaving. Her thoughts, her body, have been focused on departure rather than destination. Driven only by a vague, but urgent, need to return to the place where it began, or rather where it ended.
    In her pocket, she touches the slip of paper. When she left Portland it had given her a sense of safety. But she wonders now if this too was foolish. What if it is like so many other broken promises? One made in haste, sincerity as ephemeral, as fleeting, as the night, as she herself seems to be. Still, it is all she has. She needs to find him.
    If someone would just stop to offer her a ride, she would hand them the paper, ask them to help her. But she has been walking for hours now, and no one has stopped. Not one person has even slowed down. When she was in town she had felt as though all eyes