* * *
Something like a voice croaked behind her. She didn’t want to turn and look because she thought it might be a recently evacuated spirit. Maybe Kurtz still fighting his crazy stupid fight from beyond. But she could never help but to look and was only a little relieved to see Gil there because he was bound to be the most broken person in a town full of them and she didn’t know if she had it in her to hold him together. But he was one of her only real friends left and she needed him even if he was just barely there.
She patted the ground next to her. “Come. Sit.”
He smiled a little as he plopped down next to her. As best as she could make out, he said, “I think that’s what I just told the dog.”
Dog? Oh. “You have Ivy then?”
He nodded and gestured back to his store.
“What happened to your voice?”
He looked around the lake…at how the bridge stood shining and new while all the trees on either end of it were broken and charred and the ground black from the blast. It didn’t make any kind of sense except if you believed Kurtz after all or believed even a little part of Gil’s town history.
“It was just too much to take and it all came out at once.”
And she understood that even though it was barely there. When Jenny came to tell her that Ben died, she had rushed back to Gil’s store, but he was gone and she expected that he would be gone for a good long time. For as long as she had known him, when something really traumatic happened, he would vanish without so much as a goodbye. Then she would start getting his post cards. Wherever he would land until he moved on, he would send her a card that simply said, “I’m alive and here. Love you.” She kept his cards in a little album at home, but never looked at it. She was like that with so many things in her life. She would collect things, organize them, put them away neatly and then not think about them. She somehow believed that someone, someday perhaps in the far future when people were collecting things from the past to figure out what things were like, would come across her neatly cataloged life and write a book about her that people would read and know this time in history through her preserved collections. She believed that it was her ticket to immortality because she believed if they recreated her life in the future in that way, they might be interested enough in her to find some way to reconstruct her through DNA in her collection or maybe even use a time machine to come back and get her right before she died and bring her to the future where they could make her young again and then she could live forever there. So what she did was important because that could happen and she wasn’t going to risk not doing everything she could for that future. But she also wanted to live her whole life now as well. That was important because she loved the people here now and she was needed now, especially after what had happened. Gil wouldn’t leave this time. He would simply fade away and that would be worse because there would be no post cards and he wouldn’t really be alive.
She took his hand and looked at him with her most severe, but caring and loving look, which she had practiced in the mirror so she knew it was what she thought it was and not to be mistaken for some other strange look…people thought they were giving looks that meant one thing and they actually meant something else and then they were confused when they were misunderstood.
“I thought I was going to have to go home and wait for another post card for my collection. But then there you were with the dog and I wish you weren’t there and I wish you weren’t here. I think you’d be better off out in the world right now. This is not a good place and you don’t belong here. Please take Ivy and go, Gil. Go somewhere beautiful and peaceful…like New Zealand.”
Gil laughed silently but his face showed so much pain and she started crying because he had lost hope.
“I can’t leave, Shelley. If I went to New Zealand, it would be swallowed up into the Pacific, but somehow I’d float and float and float and end up back here. Why go out in the world and cause all that misery and pain when I can stay here where people are used to it?”
“It’s not your damned fault, you asshole! Yes, you are as cursed as this fucking bridge! But you didn’t ask for it and you didn’t make it. How can it be your fault if it was just something you were born with? Are you supposed to go hide in a cave or kill yourself to save the rest of us from you? Would that make you noble somehow? Oh, sure. We’d all, and at this point I just mean me and Jenny because there’s no one else to talk to around here about this crap, we’d go on and on about what a decent guy you always were and how hard you had it and how your bad luck fucked everything up. And we’d miss you because most of the time when nothing bad was happening around you, you’re an amazing person and an amazing friend and…and…and… I have all these post cards that say that you’re alive and you love me and no one else ever tells me anything like that because I’m just this fucking girl at a counter.”
He picked up a stick and drew a little box in the dirt. In the box, he wrote, “I’m alive and here. Love you.” Then he gave her a hug and walked over to the bridge. He didn’t walk on it. For as long as she knew him, he never walked on it. He would look in it and through it, looking to see where it was supposed to go. But he could never bring himself to walk through it because he said he was afraid that he might not make it out the other side…that he would find where it was meant to go and that could not be a good place. She tried to imagine all the things Gil would tell her about like she tried to imagine Kurtz’s world.
But Kurtz was not alive and he was not here. All that time when she and Gil would laugh at what Kurtz was up to and admire his little bridges and all the effort he put into his world, they never really thought anything could happen to him. It didn’t really seem possible. She always thought that if someone suffered as much as he had, he would be done with it and could move on beyond it. But Kurtz never really moved on from it. He was always kind of suffering from that attack and they all just played along. What she didn’t get was what he was doing here with Tod Logan and John Patrick. It didn’t make any sense. As far as she knew, Kurtz had a restraining order against Tod and every time she had seen Tod in town, he had always been so meek, not like before he attacked Kurtz when he had been a lunatic. She really tried very hard not to talk about him or to him or think about him at all because he would always be the one who broke Kurtz and she would never forgive him for it. Now she thought he must have been the one who killed her friend, but at least he had blown himself up for good measure. There was some kind of justice in that, but she wasn’t sure what because Kurtz never really hurt anyone at all and his fantasy was harmless because he had never done anything to the bridge either, not that anything could apparently be done to the bridge being that there had been explosions on either side of it and they apparently missed the whole damned thing and it didn’t make any sense unless you believed what Gil said and then it made even less sense and then maybe the explosions had been on the bridge like it really seemed which was the only way this made any sense at all. But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because Kurtz died here and Tod and John, too.
John made no sense at all. Everyone thought he was away at Colby College up in Maine studying English Literature. Shelley never saw John without a book of some kind in his hands and he wasn’t like the other kids reading stuff just because the teachers made them or reading some popular thing that everyone else was because if you didn’t read that popular book or series of books and tell everyone how amazing they were or even if you liked them - because popular books are sometimes popular for a reason - you would trash them to your friends to show how cool and above all that you were but you read them just so you could speak with authority about how awful they were. But John didn’t read like that. He just read all the time and read everything. She never saw him with the same book and she knew he wasn’t trying to show off or anything. So when he went off to Colby to study books, she kind of laughed because as far as she was concerned, all he ever did was study books and why did he need some college professor to
help him do what he always did so well anyway. But she supposed people went off to college not just to learn things they already knew, but to talk to other people who loved the kinds of things they loved as much as they did and share their love. John had a lot of love to share. Sheriff Tom said he talked to him just a few days ago and he was loving life up there and thought he’d stay the summer instead of coming home. A few people had seen him around town yesterday in that stinky old green Chevy Caprice he bought at a police auction up in Burlington and bragged about paying only 200 dollars for and no one doubted for a second, but he never stopped in to talk to anyone like he should have and then they found his car up off the road and found his body blown out into the woods.
They found Kurtz on the other side along with what was left of Tod and she had seen all that because she had been up with Jenny where Ben had died when they heard the explosion just after Gil came back with Ivy almost dead from the fire that killed Denise and Stephanie and Roger and she maybe wondered if she had some of Gil’s bad luck because she had just seen Denise and Stephanie right before they died and if it had just been one or the other than it might have been coincidence but it was the both of them and sure they lived right across the street from one another and so the fact that both of them came in at the same time was an even bigger coincidence to the point that with everything else that happened that day it didn’t seem possible that it was a coincidence which meant that she was somehow responsible in some small way for what happened because if she just insisted that Denise spend the night with her then Roger wouldn’t have been there. No one knew what he was doing there but he would have only been in the house of Denise was there. And if she was with Denise, he wouldn’t have been there and he could have called someone when Stephanie collapsed and she knew she wasn’t really responsible but that didn’t change how she felt and maybe that was how Gil was feeling right now. Shelley stared at Gil and wondered how he made it through days like these.