Bridge of Sighs

  Then Jesus provided again. The next-door apartment went vacant, and the very first night there was a fire. The complex’s owner had let his insurance lapse and was unwilling to spend what it would cost to clean and repair the damage. Sarah found that fire suspiciously convenient but didn’t say so to Miss Rosa, who explained that since the place was just sitting there and she was by then something of a local celebrity, the owner succumbed to public pressure and allowed her to expand her operation, rent-free—in the hopes that this act of generosity might prevent another fire? Sarah wondered. The nearest food pantry was miles away, but Miss Rosa persuaded the staff there to make twice-a-week deliveries of whatever they were thinking about throwing away. Soon the second apartment, too, was crammed from top to bottom.

  “My life one gift after another,” Miss Rosa said. “Every time I turn aroun’, there’s Jesus with somethin’ new, somethin’ I didn’t even know I needed till He give it to me. Say to myself, What my gonna do with this? But finally I figure out everythin’s a gift. That tumor was the first. Takin’ it away was the second. You a gift your own self. To me and this child.” This was a week or so after Sarah started giving Kayla lessons. “Doan be givin’ me that hairy eyeball like you doan believe, ’cause I know better. You too nice a lady to go through life a heathen. Maybe you doan believe now, but you will ’fore you die. You jist got to ’just your thinkin’, then you see everythin’ clear.”

  Food, clothing, small appliances, pots and pans. It all turned up in apartments 108 and 110. “Throw it away? Don’t. Miss Rosa know what to do with it.” She had half a dozen elderly women helping her a couple hours a day each, along with several ancient-looking black men who lugged things and were good at mending toys. The few young men who lived at the Arms were useless at anything other than drug dealing. You seldom saw them before late afternoon, scratching their skinny asses and wondering why there wasn’t anything to eat. An odd group, they at once feared Miss Rosa and held her in high esteem, and out of respect, they never conducted their business on the premises. When she gave them a piece of her mind, which she did regularly, they stood and took it, though when she was done they sometimes asked if she’d been born a crazy old woman or grew into it. “Seventy-three-years’-worth-of-smart is what I am,” Sarah heard her tell them once. “You all gon be dead ’fore you’re thirty, so you tell me who’s crazy.”

  The woman had an amazing memory. Nothing came in that didn’t immediately get cataloged in her brain somewhere, somehow, though items often didn’t light for long. She’d hold a pair of toddler’s sneakers up and say, “I know juss where you-all’s goin’, doan think I don’t. I got me a system,” she told Sarah. “Problem is, doan nobody but me know how it works. I juss pray I doan never die or get no Altzeimers, ’cause it’ll take ten people smarter’n me to do what I do. That’s why Jesus ain’t took me yet, I ’spect. Made myself…what’s the word?”

  “Indispensable?” Sarah suggested.

  “Thass it.”

  Do people ever bring you things you wish they’d keep? Sarah asked her one day.

  “Not often,” Miss Rosa said. “Sometimes.”

  Kayla was sitting on the wall with the second sketch pad Sarah had bought her that week. Miss Rosa looked at her and nodded.

  WARMER. That’s how Sarah continued to feel each morning when she went across the street. Which was why, at the end of the first week, she again gave the horrible woman in the Sundry Gardens office her credit card. “Another whole week?” she said, clearly suspicious. Her grandson again was stretched out, motionless, on the sofa in the next room. Did he ever get up? “You mind my asking what you do over there every day?” she added while waiting for Sarah’s card to be approved.

  “Not at all,” Sarah told her. “Do you mind my not telling?”

  The woman shrugged, but she clearly had something else on her mind. “That girl?”

  Kayla had accompanied her into Sundry Gardens the day before. Sarah had made them a simple lunch of sandwiches and canned soup before setting off on their afternoon drive. Two days ago they’d gone all the way out to Montauk, where Kayla had filled half a new sketchbook with drawings of the lighthouse. Afterward they’d eaten an early supper of mussels and clams and fried calamari, none of which the girl had ever tasted before. Her real appetite was for information about Sarah herself, especially her Long Island summers with her mother, so they drove through the old neighborhoods and Sarah told her about the families she used to babysit for. To Kayla, these now-shabby houses looked palatial, much as they had to Sarah at that age. She listened to the stories of who lived where as if she expected to be quizzed on them later, though Sarah quickly learned that she was the one who’d be quizzed. Kayla would go anywhere Sarah wanted to take her, but she preferred going back to places and having her repeat the stories she’d told earlier. If Sarah added a new detail, she’d frown and say, “You never said that before.” She was equally intolerant of gaps and omissions. “The little sister had golden hair,” she’d interrupt peevishly. “That’s what you said before.”

  “I’m going to have to start calling you Sponge, the way you soak everything up,” Sarah said.

  But Kayla’s eyes narrowed in hurt and anger, her body suddenly rigid. “I don’t like it when people call me names.”

  “I’m not calling you a name, Kayla,” Sarah replied. “I’m paying you a compliment. You have a good memory.”

  The girl seemed to accept that but was quiet for the rest of the day, leaving Sarah to puzzle it through. Though she was bright for her age, she was also, Sarah suspected, emotionally stunted, closer to nine or ten than her actual twelve.

  She mentioned the incident to Miss Rosa the next morning.

  “Been lied to her whole life,” she said. “Her mama tell her she’s goin’ to the store for cigarettes, be back in a hour, then she gone for two days. Child doan believe what you or nobody else tell her. Always checkin’ your story out, lookin’ for lies. Got to hear it over an’ over.”

  “You’re saying she won’t ever trust me?”

  “I’m sayin’ there ain’t no bottom to that child’s need.”

  “Kayla,” Sarah told her landlady now. “Her name is Kayla.”

  “She doesn’t belong on this side of the street any more than you belong on the other side.”

  “This is America,” Sarah told her.

  “Exactly,” she said, handing back her American Express card. “That’s what I’m saying. Look around. Tell me what you see.”

  “I see an unpleasant woman,” Sarah said, sliding the card back into her billfold. Much to her surprise, the woman’s eyes promptly filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was uncalled for.”

  The woman waved off the apology and lit a cigarette, waiting until Sarah was at the door to say, “So what possessed your mother to marry Harold?”

  Sarah noted that he was “Harold” rather than “my father.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I saw your dad around all the time, but I didn’t know they were…anyway, he told me I’d like him better once I got to know him. I never got the chance, though.”

  “Me either,” his daughter said. “Not that it was any big loss. He was just a drunk.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said, and again made to leave.

  “I’ve got a lawyer,” the woman said. “Just so you know.”

  “I don’t understand. Why—”

  “This place belonged to my mother alone, and now it’s mine. You think any part of it’ll ever be yours, think again.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said again. “But I don’t know your name.”

  “The hell you don’t.”

  “It’s true. I don’t.”

  “Pamela,” she said, and her hands were shaking so hard she could barely hold on to the cigarette. “Pam. And I hope you don’t think I’m a complete goddamn idiot.”

  “Pamela,” Sarah said slowly. “I’m not interested in Sundry Gardens. That’s not why I’m here. I don’t know how to make you beli
eve me, but it’s the truth. It’s good you’ve got a lawyer, but you don’t need one for me.”

  This seemed to calm the other woman a little, though she didn’t answer immediately. “It’s possible, just possible, that I might believe you, if you’d tell me why you are here.”

  “I wish I could,” Sarah said, which was true enough. In fact, she considered telling her a plausible lie that was at least close to the truth. That she’d struck up an improbable friendship with a twelve-year-old black girl who’d managed to get under her skin, probably because she brought to mind a skinny, luckless black boy who’d once taken a terrible beating as a result of sitting next to her in a movie theater. Except she doubted this story would seem plausible to Pamela.

  The truth? Well, that was simply out of the question. The truth was both beyond ludicrous and too frightening, a half-overheard scrap of conversation between two of Miss Rosa’s grandma volunteers, the gist of which was that not everyone living in the Arms was black or Hispanic. The woman living in the apartment with the blue door was a shut-in who’d been here since before Miss Rosa had moved in, and during the past year she’d left the apartment only twice, both times in an ambulance. She was hooked up to an oxygen tank twenty-four hours a day and was a good ninety-five years old.

  And this woman was white.

  “YOU BESS GET HOME to your man soon,” Miss Rosa said one afternoon. They were sitting on the courtyard wall—“resting their bones a spell,” as she liked to put it—Kayla was down at the far end and out of earshot, drawing Miss Rosa, her first attempt at a human figure. “I turn out pretty it means you gotta take more lessons, girl. Means you still got a lot to learn.” Sarah was writing a postcard to her husband. She’d purchased half a dozen cards at the drugstore the day before, had written him two this morning over breakfast and two more over lunch, when she’d taken Kayla to a sandwich shop in town. In between she’d given Pamela her credit card for another week, reassuring her again that she had no designs on Sundry Gardens. She’d almost told her to charge for the whole next month, but hadn’t wanted to freak her out.

  Miss Rosa, whose spirits were usually unsinkable, was grumpy today, as if she knew about the transaction across the street and was no happier about it than Pamela. Though she was fond of Sarah, over the last two weeks she’d gone from puzzled by her continued presence to concerned, from mystified to annoyed.

  Dear Lou, Sarah wrote. She already knew she wasn’t going to send any of the earlier postcards, which had managed to hit all the wrong notes. She’d tried being chatty, totally unlike herself; informative, without providing any actual information, like a White House press release; optimistic, without any apparent grounds; and honest, this being the briefest, since there was so little to say that wasn’t a lie. She knew her husband wanted to know only one thing: when was she coming home? And that she couldn’t tell him. I want you to know that I’m well, that I love you, that I’m not angry with you, and that I won’t stay away a moment longer than I need to. A poor offering, she knew, almost not worth the stamp. She’d made the last three statements before she left, and each raised its own obvious question. If she loved him, then what was she doing here? As for angry, as Owen said, who wouldn’t be? And how much longer did she need to stay away, having been gone two weeks already? The first few days the urge to call home had been desperate, yet now it had all but disappeared. If this was progress, then toward what? And the first statement was no better: I’m well. Was she? Apparently Miss Rosa didn’t think so.

  Sarah gave up on the postcard and just watched Kayla’s pen fly. The girl had filled an entire sketchbook each of the two weeks Sarah had been instructing her. Soon she was going to have to ask the girl to slow down, to think, to exercise more care, but for now, she thought, let her race.

  “Some other woman come along and snatch him up,” said Miss Rosa, still instructional herself. “Good men is hard to fine. Look round here, you doan believe me.”

  “You’re right,” Sarah admitted. For some time she’d been wondering if she might be one of those women who, late in life, came to the reluctant conclusion that men were more trouble than they were worth. Some of them even took female lovers, and while Sarah knew she’d never do that, she could sympathize. Lately, she seemed to have little use for anything male. The lazy, skinny, strutting, no-count boy-men at the Arms were the worst of a bad lot, but in truth she was tired of thinking about men and their needs, including her husband and son. And Bobby. That she wasn’t interested in seeing him again suggested just how much things had changed since they called off Italy, since the woman at Grand Central had convinced her that what she wanted was the LIRR. Why not admit it? Italy had been nothing more than an excuse to see Bobby. Lou had been right to be jealous. Her cancer, the resulting operation, had made her desperate. If she could just see Bobby once more, this boy she’d loved and who’d loved her…then what? That was the part she hadn’t worked out, but she now suspected that if she glimpsed Bobby Marconi in Robert Noonan, then maybe she could convince herself that Sarah Berg still existed in Sarah Lynch. Crazy. Worse than crazy. She could see that now, sitting here on this low concrete wall. Bobby was just another male of the species and, as such, of no particular interest. Unfortunately, she couldn’t congratulate herself for discarding this obsession when she’d pretty clearly just replaced it with an even more ridiculous one.

  “Serve you right, too,” Miss Rosa continued. “End up alone. How you gon feel then?”

  “Not having a husband isn’t the same as being alone,” Sarah pointed out for the sake of argument. “Your husband is gone, but I don’t know anybody who has a fuller life.”

  “Tell you one thing, and it ain’t two,” Miss Rosa said. “My husband shown up alive and said come with me, we leavin’, you be sittin’ here on this wall all alone and by yourself and nobody to talk to, includin’ me.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Sarah said.

  “Tell you somethin’ else. Longer you stay here, the harder it be on that child. Shouldn’t be tellin’ her all about where you live at neither. That she can visit and such.”

  This was probably true, and Sarah wished she hadn’t. In the beginning the girl had been interested only in her past life, when she was the same age. Any mention of her present life in Thomaston, her husband or grown son made her frown and change the subject. The third time this happened, Sarah asked why she didn’t want to hear about where she lived now, and she said that it was a long way away and she’d never see it anyhow, so why talk about it?

  “You could visit,” Sarah had said. “Especially later, when you’re older. It’s not the end of the earth. There’s a train that runs from here into New York and another that goes close to where I live.”

  But it was the end of the earth, as far as she was concerned, and Sarah knew it. Montauk had been far enough, and this was off the map.

  The very next day, though, she was curious about what sort of town this Thomaston was, so Sarah had told her a few things. “Three stores?” Kayla said, her eyes wide. “You own three?” Not supermarkets, Sarah explained. Little stores, corner groceries. When she said her husband’s name was Lou but that most people called him Lucy, Kayla laughed, but then her brow darkened. “He doesn’t care if they call him a name?” And so Sarah admitted she didn’t think he liked it and especially hadn’t liked it when he was a boy. “I always call him Lou,” she added, and Kayla said that’s what she’d call him, too. Then her expression clouded over again, possibly recalling her stated position that it wasn’t anywhere she’d ever visit. “That’s the apartment you lived in,” she declared, pointing to the one with the blue door and window box. “If that was your mama up there, you’d live there now, just you and her, and you wouldn’t go back to that other place.”

  “Thomaston,” Sarah said, knowing full well that Kayla hadn’t forgotten the name. She just didn’t want to say it.

  “You’d be here all the time and we’d be neighbors till I grew up and got me a man and moved away.”
r />   “But it’s not my mother who lives there.”

  “But it was.”

  “Yes,” Sarah conceded, because she could tell the girl was getting upset. “A long time ago.”

  The next day she said, “Do you think he’d like me?”

  “Who?”

  “Lou.”

  “Yes, I think he would.”

  “What if I called him Lucy?”

  “You said you’d call him Lou.”

  “But what if?”

  “I think he’d like you anyway. He’s a nice man. He likes people, and people like him.”

  That seemed to satisfy her. “Ikey Lubin’s?” she said when Sarah told her about the store. “That’s a funny name.”

  “I suppose it is,” Sarah said, though this had never occurred to her before, and right then it felt a long way away. The end of the earth.

  “That girl doan forget nothin’,” Miss Rosa told her now. “Repeat every word you say. Got to stop fillin’ her mine like you doin’.”

  “Forgive me, Miss Rosa,” Sarah said, “but don’t you do the same thing? Telling her how Jesus will make sure things work out all right?”

  “That’s different,” she said. “Jesus doan go into no specifics.”