NOS4A2 A Novel

THE LIBRARIAN

1991





Haverhill, Massachusetts


HER MOTHER HAD SAID, DON’T YOU WALK OUT THAT DOOR, BUT VIC wasn’t walking, she was running, fighting tears the whole way. Before she got outside, she heard her father say to Linda, Oh, lay off, she feels bad enough, which made it worse, not better. Vic caught her bike by the handlebars and ran with it, and at the far edge of the backyard she threw her leg over and plunged down into the cool, sweet-smelling shade of the Pittman Street Woods.

Vic did not think about where she was going. Her body just knew, guiding the Raleigh down the steep pitch of the hill and hitting the dirt track at the bottom at nearly thirty miles an hour.

She went to the river. The river was there. So was the bridge.

This time the thing that had been lost was a photograph, a creased black-and-white snap of a chubby boy in a ten-gallon hat, holding hands with a young woman in a polka-dot dress. The woman was using her free hand to pin the dress down against her thighs; the wind was blowing, trying to lift the hem. That same breeze had tossed a few strands of pale hair across her cocky, wry, almost-pretty features. The boy pointed a toy pistol into the camera. This puffy, blank-eyed little gunslinger was Christopher McQueen, age seven. The woman was his mother, and at the time the photograph was taken she was already dying of the ovarian cancer that would end her life at the ripe age of thirty-three. The picture was the only thing he had left of her, and when Vic asked if she could take it to school to use for an art project, Linda had been against it. Chris McQueen, though, overruled his wife. Chris had said, Hey. I want Vic to draw her. Closest they’ll ever come to spending time together. Just bring it back, Brat. I don’t ever want to forget what she looked like.

At thirteen Vic was the star of her seventh-grade art class with Mr. Ellis. He had selected her watercolor, Covered Bridge, for the annual school show at Town Hall—where it was the only seventh-grade work included among a selection of eighth-grade paintings that varied from bad to worse. (Bad: innumerable pictures of misshapen fruit in warped bowls. Worse: a portrait of a leaping unicorn with a rainbow erupting from its ass, as if in a Technicolor burst of flatulence.) When the Haverhill Gazette ran a story about the show, guess which picture they chose to run alongside the article? Not the unicorn. After Covered Bridge came home, Vic’s father shelled out for a birch frame and hung it on the wall where Vic’s Knight Rider poster had once been displayed. Vic had gotten rid of the Hoff years ago. The Hoff was a loser, and Trans Ams were oil-leaking shitboxes. She didn’t miss him.

Their last assignment that year was “life drawing,” and they were asked to work from a photograph that was special to them. Vic’s father had room over the desk in his study for a painting, and Vic very much wanted him to be able to look up and see his mother—in color.

The painting was done now, had come home the day before, on the last day of school, after Vic emptied out her locker. And if this final watercolor wasn’t as good as Covered Bridge, Vic still thought she had caught something of the woman in the photograph: the hint of bony hips beneath the dress, a quality of weariness and distraction in her smile. Her father had gazed at it for a long time, looking both pleased and a little sad. When Vic asked what he thought, he only said, “You smile just like her, Brat. I never noticed.”

The painting had come home—but the photo hadn’t. Vic didn’t know she didn’t have it until her mother started asking about it on Friday afternoon. First Vic thought it was in her backpack, then in her bedroom. By Friday night, however, she had come to the stomach-churning realization that she didn’t have it and didn’t have any idea when she had last seen it. By Saturday morning—the first glorious day of summer vacation—Vic’s mother had come to the same conclusion, had decided that the snap was gone forever, and in a state bordering on hysteria had said that the photograph was a lot more important than any shitty junior high painting. And then Vic was on the move, had to get away, get out, afraid if she stood still she would become a little hysterical herself: an emotion she couldn’t bear to feel.

Her chest hurt, as if she had been biking for hours, not minutes, and her breath was strangled, as if she were fighting her way uphill, not gliding along level ground. But when she saw the bridge, she felt something like peace. No. Better than peace: She felt her whole conscious mind disengaging, decoupling from the rest of her, leaving only the body and the bike to do their work. It had always been this way. She had crossed the bridge almost a dozen times in five years, and always it was less like an experience, more like a sensation. It was not a thing she did, it was a thing she felt: a dreamy awareness of gliding, a distant sense of static roaring. It was not unlike the feel of sinking into a doze, easing herself into the envelope of sleep.

And even as her tires began to bump across the wooden planks, she was already mentally writing the true story of how she found the photograph. She had shown the picture to her friend Willa on the last day of school. They got talking about other things, and then Vic had to run to make her bus. She was gone by the time Willa realized she still had the photograph, so her friend simply held on to it to give it back later. When Vic arrived home from her bike ride, she would have the photo in hand and a story to tell, and her father would hug her and say he was never worried about it, and her mother would look like she wanted to spit. Vic could not have said which reaction she was looking forward to more.

Only it was different this time. This time when she came back, there was one person she couldn’t convince, when she told her true-but-not-really story about where the photo had been. That person was Vic herself.

Vic came out the other end of the tunnel and sailed into the wide, dark hallway on the second floor of the Cooperative School. At not quite nine in the morning on the first day of summer vacation, it was a dim, echoing space, so empty it was a little frightening. She touched the brake, and the bike whined shrilly to a stop.

She had to look back. She couldn’t help it. No one could’ve resisted looking back.

The Shorter Way Bridge came right through the brick wall, extending ten feet into the hall, as wide as the great corridor itself. Was part of it outside as well, hanging over the parking lot? Vic didn’t think so, but without breaking into one of the classrooms, she couldn’t look out a window and check. Ivy smothered the entrance of the bridge, hung in limp green sheaves.

The sight of the Shorter Way made her mildly ill, and for a moment the school hallway around her bulged, like a drop of water fattening on a twig. She felt faint, knew if she didn’t get moving she might start to think, and thinking would be bad news. It was one thing to fantasize trips across a long-gone covered bridge when she was eight or nine and another when she was thirteen. At nine it was a daydream. At thirteen it was a delusion.

She had known she was coming here (it had said so in green paint, on the other end of the bridge) but had imagined she would come out on the first floor, close to Mr. Ellis’s art room. Instead she had been dumped on the second, a dozen feet from her locker. She’d been talking to friends when she emptied it the day before. There had been a lot of distraction and noise—shouts, laughter, kids running by—but still she’d looked her locker over thoroughly before shutting the door for a last time and was sure, quite sure, she had emptied it. Still: The bridge had brought her here, and the bridge was never wrong.

There is no bridge, she thought. Willa had the photograph. She was planning to give it back to me as soon as she saw me.

Vic leaned her bike against the lockers, opened the door to her own, and looked in at the beige walls and the rusted floor. Nothing. She patted the shelf, a half a foot above her head. Nothing there either.

Her insides were bunching up with worry. She wanted to have it already, wanted to be out of here, so she could start forgetting about the bridge as soon as possible. But if it wasn’t in the locker, then she didn’t know where to look next. She started to shut the door—then paused, raised herself up on tiptoes, and ran her hand over the top shelf again. Even then she almost missed it. Somehow one corner of the photograph had snagged on the back of the shelf, so it was standing up and pressed flat to the rear wall. She had to reach all the way back to touch it, had to reach to the very limit of how far she could stretch her arm to catch hold of it.

She pried at it with her fingernails, wiggling it this way and that, and it came loose. She dropped down onto her heels, flushing with pleasure.

“Yes!” she said, and clanged the locker door shut.

The janitor stood halfway up the hall. Mr. Eugley. He stood with his mop plunged into his big yellow rolling bucket, staring along the length of the corridor at Vic, and Vic’s bike, and the Shorter Way Bridge.

Mr. Eugley was old and hunched and, with his gold-rimmed glasses and bow ties, looked more like a teacher than many of the teachers did. He worked as a crossing guard, too, and on the day before Easter vacation he had little bags of jelly beans for every kid who walked past him. Rumor was that Mr. Eugley had taken the job to be around children, because his kids had died in a house fire years and years ago. Sadly, this rumor was true, and it omitted the fact that Mr. Eugley had started the fire himself while passed out drunk with a cigarette burning in one hand. He had Jesus instead of children now and a favorite AA meeting instead of a bar. He had gotten religion and sobriety both while in jail.

Vic looked at him. He looked back, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish’s. His legs trembled violently.

“You’re the McQueen girl,” he said in a strong Down East accent that obliterated r’s: Yah the McQueen gill. His breathing was strained, and he had a hand on his throat. “What’s that in the wall? By Jesus, am I goin’ crazy? That looks like the Shortaway Bridge, what I haven’t seen in years.” He coughed, once and then again. It was a wet, strange, choked sound, and there was something terrifying about it. It was the sound of a man in gathering physical distress.

How old was he? Vic thought, Ninety. She was off by almost twenty years, but seventy-one was still old enough for a heart attack.

“It’s all right,” Vic said. “Don’t—” she began, but then didn’t know how to continue. Don’t what? Don’t start screaming? Don’t die?

“Oh, dear,” he said. “Oh, dear.” Only he said it de-ah. Two syllables. His right hand shook furiously as he raised it to cover his eyes. His lips began to move. “Deah, deah me. ‘The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.’”

“Mr. Eugley—” Vic tried again.

“Go away!” he shrieked. “Just go away and take your bridge with you! This isn’t happening! You aren’t here!”

He kept his hand over his eyes. His lips began to move again. Vic couldn’t hear him but could see from the way he shaped the words what he was saying. “‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.’”

Vic turned her bike around. She put a foot over. She began to work the pedals. Her own legs felt none too steady, but in a moment she thudded up onto the bridge, into the hissing darkness and the smell of bats.

She looked back once, halfway across. Mr. Eugley was still there, head ducked in prayer, hand over his eyes, other hand clutching the mop to his side.

Vic rode on, photo in one sweaty palm, out of the bridge and into the drifting, lively shadows of the Pittman Street Woods. She knew, even before she looked back over her shoulder—knew just from the musical chuckle of the river below and the graceful sweep of the wind in the pines—that the Shorter Way was gone.

She pedaled on, into the first day of summer, her pulse knocking strangely. A bone-deep ache of foreboding rode all the way back with her.