Read The Bridge for Free Online Page B

one. “I got married here.”
    The boats rocks, and I grip the railing to keep from rolling backward. “You’re married?”
    “No.” She rubs a hand over her face and looks out at the water. “Not anymore. He left, when I got sick.”
    I want to say I can’t imagine anyone could be so cruel, but that would be a lie. I can imagine it all too well.
    “His name was Sam, and he never really wanted to get married in the first place.” She shrugs. “We’d been together five years, though. I wanted security. A family. I talked him into it.”
    “Did you have friends with you? For the…ceremony?”
    “No. We did it during a regular commuter run. Middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. Then we went out for pizza.” She gives a brief, bitter laugh. “But at least I had a ring!”
    “Where is he now?”
    “I don’t know. Boston, I think? A few months after the wedding, I found a lump in my breast. Sam stuck around for a little while. I mean, he wasn’t a total jerk. He tried. And at least I was covered under his insurance then, thank God.” The wind whips at her hair, and she drags it away from her face and tucks it behind her ear. In a matter of seconds it slides free again. “But it was more than he felt like taking on. All those doctor appointments, and once they said I needed a mastectomy, forget it. After the surgery, he couldn’t even look at me.”
    “Is this the first time you’ve been back on the ferry?”
    She smiles, and turns her face into the wind. “Yeah. I guess I just thought…I don’t know. I wanted to remember how I felt that day. So full of hope.”
    “Christa—”
    “But being back here, you know what I realize?” She faces me, and her forced smile dies away. “There is no hope. You can have little moments of pleasure or joy, but they fade, don’t they? Reality comes back, and happy endings don’t happen. Not to people like me, anyway.”
    “People like you?” I want to take her hand or something, but it doesn’t seem appropriate. I barely know her. Standing here beside her in this strange time-out-of-time, though, I feel like I do. Maybe it’s because we’re away from land. Floating, we belong to no place and no person, and so, for just these few minutes, we can feel like we might belong to each other. Or at least pretend to. “Do you know Spalding Gray?”
    She wrinkles her forehead. “Swimming to Cambodia?”
    “Yeah, that’s him. He killed himself, here. Jumped off the Staten Island Ferry. They found his body on the Brooklyn shore two months later.”
    “God, I remember that.”
    “He talked about this. How relentless life is.”
    She is silent for a moment before she speaks again. “So why do you want to jump? Why are you where he was?”
    Why not answer? We’re here in this no-man’s land and no one else will hear me. Maybe it will help her. To feel like she’s reaching me, like she’s saving me.
    “You know what it is? I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s just…pain. Everywhere. In my body, my heart, my brain. Just this throbbing, awful pain. I go to work in the morning only because I have to. I act like everything’s fine because I have to.”
    “And you get away with that?” Her hip is braced against the metal side of the ship. I think how flimsy it is, that barrier between her and open space, between her and the long fall to the water.
    “Why shouldn’t I? This isn’t anyone else’s problem. After that first stint in the hospital, everybody walked on eggshells around me, for months. Years.” I cross my arms around myself, trying in vain to keep out the cold wind. “‘Don’t do anything to set Henry off.’ You know what I mean? ‘He’s fragile.’ Can you imagine? I doubt any of them could endure what I deal with in my head every single day. It’s not weakness that makes me want to end it. It’s exhaustion. It’s a normal reaction to being dragged behind a truck, mentally, day after day. But even so, I don’t need to blow apart