Bridget, Thursday, May 7, 2015
The mill had ceased production in 2005 and now it stood, forgotten, its exterior failing it in innumerable ways. The brick crumbling and the mortar giving way. The windows were soaped and broken, some fully punched out, some jagged and peaked. A large chemical tank stood rusting, the pipes skewed, uneven, their connections ripped and battered from winters in the mountains. Along the far side, overflowing into the parking lot, was a pile of blackened and rotting pallets, the weeds growing between the cracks, winding around the wood.
Even the air felt dusty in her lungs.
The sky had turned gray, the air warm and rumbling with the soft hint of a distant thunderstorm, and Bridget rolled down her car window. She could hear the dam behind the mill, a loud constant that drowned out birds, insects, other people, leaving behind only a whooshing silence. The parking lot was deserted, which wasn’t unusual, but Bridget sat in her car with the windows down, simply listening. If she closed her eyes, she could be anywhere: a beach, a spectacular waterfall in Hawaii (not that she’d ever been), the bank of the Flint River in Georgia, her feet ankle deep in gray-black clay mud. If she closed her eyes, she could be seventeen again, lying down in that muck, her hair tangled in the leaves and the rocks and the mud, her mouth and tongue seeking a boy’s. What was his name? Ricky Tomlin. Sweet Ricky Tomlin, a boy himself, but with a man’s wants, and those hands—God he knew what he was doing. Bridget could practically feel the mud, cold and chalky on her mouth.
If she closed her eyes, she could remember being seventeen. Eighteen. In love.
Everything now was so different: social media, the Internet, texting. It all sharpened people’s edges, made them the opposite of social. Turned them feral.
Bridget got out of the car, shutting the door carefully behind her. She made her way across the parking lot, her sandaled feet crunching on stones and hardened dirt, the dust kicking up when she walked. Today, thankfully, she’d worn jeans to school, and although it was close to five o’clock, the looming summer meant longer days, and the air felt thick, almost viscous. She could taste it.
It was easy to remember being eighteen, that was the thing. It was harder to remember being in love as an adult. Easier to remember Holden the way she’d met him under the blazing southern sun, his Yankee white skin blistering with the heat of it. On the patio of a Mexican chain restaurant, where the waiters slapped a straw sombrero on each of their heads and sang “Happy Birthday” in unison to the two of them, a table apart. He’d bought her a margarita; it had been her twenty-second birthday, his twenty-seventh, but it was their birthday, and this above all seemed to mean something hugely profound. Only a few years removed from Aunt Nadine’s mysticism, she’d felt so certain that she and Holden had been fated to be together from the moment she saw him.
Remembering the early days of summer love and long nights in wet grass under black skies kissing and kissing and kissing with nowhere to be and no one to answer to. That was easier than remembering later, when love felt like something wet and slick in her hand. When they would fight until 2 a.m. until one of them fell asleep midstonewall, when they didn’t even have “real” things to fight about yet. After that she’d felt the early doubts sneak in, that maybe fate isn’t what held a marriage together. That sharing the same birthday didn’t mean they were destined for each other, that it didn’t mean anything at all.
Maybe a month before he was diagnosed, she’d found something. A single broken acrylic fingernail in his car, painted red and sheared angrily from the base. He’d been at a conference the week before and lost in his own head since he’d been back. She prodded him but he blamed it on feeling sick—intermittently nauseous and tired—until he’d snapped back at her. She kept that broken fingernail in the fleece of her bathrobe pocket, waiting for the right time to bring it up, and she’d find herself rubbing the nail between her thumb and forefinger like it was the silk edge of a security blanket for weeks. The right time never seemed to happen.
Then she found something else, a business card in his pocket from a radiology group from somewhere in New York. But that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was the writing on the back, a woman’s handwriting, and all it said was Watercress, 6:30. Which again by itself could have been anything. But the fingernail and the business card together made her skin crawl. The handwriting was loopy but neat and almost fanciful. She kept that, too, and a week later finally looked it up. It was a bar near the medical conference but not one on the charge cards or the bank statement. She supposed he could have not gone to Watercress at 6:30, and that would have been the simplest explanation, but her sixth sense tingled anyway.
So Bridget did the worst thing she could have done and instead of asking him about it, she pulled out Aunt Nadine’s tarot and gave herself a reading. When she dealt the lovers card and the chariot reversed, she put the cards away and squared her shoulders and prepared to confront Holden the minute he came home.
Except he came home and sat her down and told her he’d been diagnosed with stage III pancreatic cancer—the worst kind of cancer there was—but that he was going to beat it. She tucked the fingernail and Watercress 6:30 into the silky bag along with Aunt Nadine’s deck, then placed it in the bottom of her underwear drawer. Their life became chemo and radiation and surgery, something called a Whipple procedure, and diet modification. She learned new words like bilirubin, cachexia, protease. She forgot (almost) entirely about Watercress 6:30. Almost.
Sometimes she wondered if the worst part wasn’t that he died, but rather that he died before she knew if he’d stopped loving her.
She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered into the mill through a broken window, searching for remnants of Lucia. Why had she come? What would she say if she found her? She didn’t know.