Minna writes and addresses a letter to Virginia every night. Sometimes I bring homework and we sit together on the settee with the news on low. In the background: bombs, floods, open-mouthed, long-faced grief. Minna says that the world has always been like this. She says that people will try to fool you with the phrases like back in my day or people never used to, and they are lies. People always used to. It’s just that the world didn’t have as many ways of finding out what humans were capable of. It makes me feel a little better every time she says it. Not that the world has always been a spinning ball of assholes, exactly. Just that things aren’t getting any worse.
I go back to my homework. I read and reread a line about gravity and my mind keeps clicking back to Wil. Trying to make sense of what happened on the beach today, what set him off. Remembering the look on his face brings cold beads of sweat to the surface of my skin.
At the commercial break, Minna flicks her pen at my head and says: “Say it.”
I duck. The pen narrowly misses my temple. “Minna! What the—”
“Whatever you’ve been wanting to say since you got here, say it. Sitting here listening to you sigh every two seconds isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.”
“I’m not sighing. I’m breathing.” I stare at my textbook while she stares at me. On the television, a studio audience whispers, “Wheel! Of! Fortune!” My eyes are on the book. Minna’s eyes are on me. I will not win this.
“I miss Wil. I want the old Wil back. I want us back.” I whip the pen back at her. “There. You’re welcome.”
Minna mutes the television, and then she turns it off. She looks at me. She has this dangerous, beautiful face that can unravel me. One look from her, and everything I’ve been holding on to since the beginning of time could spill out.
“We talked this afternoon, for the first time in”—I close my eyes—“forever.”
“How did it feel?”
“Awkward.” I scratch at the velvet couch with my index finger. “But at least he’s talking to me again. Or did today, anyway.”
“So what’s the problem?” Minna asks pointedly.
“There is no problem.”
“You said it yourself. Things are awkward.”
“I meant that things are different. What time is it?” I check the clock on Minna’s microwave. :14. She’s paused the timer after making tea. “I should get home to Micah.”
“Different how, Bridget?” Minna has never called me Bridge. “A bridge is a structure spanning and providing passage over a body of water. Bridget is a girl’s name,” she told me on our first day.
“Different.” My skin feels hot and damp against the velvet. “Different because we’ve spent so much time apart. Different because Wil just isn’t the same.”
She raises a silvery eyebrow. “Never will be.”
“I know, Minna. But I don’t have to like it.”
She reaches for my hand. Hers is mapped in delicate veins, blues, and greens. “Remember what I said about tragedy. Sometimes it pushes people further apart. Sometimes it draws them together. It always intensifies what’s there already. It magnifies the good and the bad and the absolutely unspeakable. And you two have a lot of good between you.”
“Had.”
“So little faith.” She sips her tea and wrinkles her nose. “Cold.”
“Here.” I take the cup. “I’ll warm it.”
“That’s my mother’s good china. Keep it out of the microwave.”
I escape to the kitchen, gripping the teacup with sweaty hands. Minna’s voice reverberates inside me. It magnifies the good and the bad and the absolutely unspeakable. There is so much good between Wil and me. He was there for me on my birthday for so many years in a row, made it bearable even though I’ve always hated my birthday. When we got older, he would plan a million things on the day, back to back, from early-morning waffles at Nina’s while it was still dark out to evening beach campouts as the moon rose. I never had to tell him that I dreaded that day because it was the one day of the year that my father should think to call. He never had to tell me what I already knew: that my father never would. There are literally years of good, miles of good between us.
But there is a single night of the bad: my choice on the dock that night. Wil’s anger.
There is the unspeakable: Wilson’s murder.
And with the weight of those things on our shoulders, in our hearts, I don’t know if all the years of good are enough to buoy us.
I catch myself having a silent conversation with Wil on the drive home, and as I unlock the front door and toss my keys on the couch in the dark living room. My lips move, forming the wishes I have for us: Please forgive me for real; we need each other now more than ever; I can’t take this away but I can be there; I will be; I promise. I wonder if he can hear me. I wonder if it’s possible for us to have that kind of connection.
It’s one thing to miss Wil. It’s another to talk to him like he’s here. But even after my lips have stopped moving, there’s a sound. It’s too far away, too soft for me to grasp. Coming from upstairs. But it’s there, and it shouldn’t be. Adrenaline floods every inch of me. I try to remember the pencil lines on the wanted poster I’ve seen on the news. I wonder if Wilson heard the same soft sounds before. I slide my house key between two of my fingers and the spare key to Leigh’s between another two and I make a fist.
I listen so hard my ears might bleed. The sound is muffled. Low, urgent. A moan, like someone’s hurt. It’s not Mom. It’s not Micah. Something in me clicks and I sprint up the stairs, stopping long enough to decide that the sound is coming from Micah’s room. I throw my shoulder into the door.
“Micah?”
A girl screams, but the girl isn’t me at first. By the time Emilie Simpson dismounts my brother and claws her shirt off the floor, all three of us are screaming. I stop screaming long enough to notice my favorite candle, the expensive one Leigh bought me from Anthropologie last Christmas, flaming on Micah’s bedside. Hell no.
“Bridge! Get the hell out!” Micah’s voice cracks, and his face is all red and splotchy and hormonal, and I look away to avoid the rest of him but I want to scream That! That voice crack is exactly why a kid your age shouldn’t be screwing Emilie Simpson! but my brain is throbbing with our humiliation. I trip on Micah’s backpack on the way out, which pisses me off more than I ever thought possible.
“Get out!” I yell at the closed door. I take the stairs two at a time and throw myself through the front door. Outside, I pace the front walk, from the door to the mailbox and back again. I wish I could rinse my brain free of the last three minutes.
If Wil were here, he’d know how to talk to Micah. He’d know what boy words to use to get through Micah’s thick skull. But Wil isn’t here. Mom isn’t here. It’s just me, bracing beneath the weight of my family and my many mistakes. And I’m worried I won’t be able to carry this weight forever.
BRIDGE
Spring, Senior Year