AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She walked up and down the streets in the blazing afternoon sun, trying to retrace her steps. Again the world seemed to have stopped and started anew. First there was the world that had Tibby and the Septembers in it, a fundamental center to her life and a source of deepest comfort. In a single moment that world had ended and a new one had started without them. A sadder world had started with just Eric and a mattress on the floor, but she’d left that behind too.
And so had opened the world in which she was itinerant, filthy, and pregnant but had a bike. And apparently now even that world had come to an end.
She stumbled upon her broken lock lying on the sidewalk a dozen yards from Planned Parenthood. So that was what happened to her bike.
She didn’t even stop for it. She kept walking. She pointed her body west and just kept going. She wondered if she could join one of the lower orders, like shrimp or termites, which were not burdened with consciousness.
By the following afternoon, her pack was too heavy and the sun felt too hot. Even the lower orders felt pain. Bridget stuck out her thumb. With her hair blowing around behind her, even messy as it was, she knew it wouldn’t take long to get a ride. She let the first two cars that slowed go by. The third had a man and a woman in it. She got in the backseat.
“Where are you headed?” the driver asked. He was in his late forties, probably, with a neatly trimmed goatee and a Hawaiian shirt.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
“Sonoma.”
“That sounds fine.”
The wife turned around. She had frizzy light brown hair and a look of motherly concern. “Where do you live?”
Even with the mind of a termite, Bridget knew not to set off the alarms of kind, concerned people who were giving her a lift. “San Francisco,” she said.
“Do you want us to drop you there?” the woman asked.
“No thanks. I’m on vacation,” Bridget said.
“So are we,” the man said. “I’m Tom and this is my wife, Cheryl.”
“Sunny,” she said. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for the ride.”
Bridget parted ways with Tom and Cheryl at a gas station off Route 80, a bit south of Sonoma. She walked in the direction of the setting sun. By the time it dunked into the ocean, she’d made it all the way to Petaluma. She sat on a bench outside a bank and wondered about Eric’s cousin Anna and her wedding. It was the day after tomorrow, she thought. Or would have been the day after tomorrow. Anna belonged to the old world, along with Bridget’s bike and her empty uterus and her sanity. She wondered if Anna was even getting married anymore.
Bridget bought a slice of pizza on her way out of town and walked westward in the dark. Cars zoomed by and she figured one of them might kill her.
Over the next blur of days she slept in state parks, ate at diners and from vending machines, and slowly made her way as far west as she could, and that was the Pacific Ocean at Point Reyes. Her arms were dark red from sunburn, and her hair was dirty and matted, but she couldn’t feel anything anymore. She’d descended down through shrimp and termites to an even lower order, a thing without a central nervous system. Maybe a germ, an amoeba, blue-green algae.
She’d gotten to the ocean, but she couldn’t stop walking, so she turned south. She spent her days sleeping and walking from Inverness to Dogtown to Bolinas to Stinson Beach. You could go a long way in this direction. You could go all the way down to Mexico. She pictured herself walking through Half Moon Bay, Big Sur, San Luis Obispo, Redondo Beach, Ensenada, all the way out to Cabo at the tip of Baja, and even though she couldn’t feel anything she started to cry. It was an involuntary thing her body did, like the sweat that rolled down her back. She cried for a mile or so, and then she stopped and sat down.
At Stinson Beach she threw her pack on the sand. She realized she did feel something after all, but it wasn’t sad. It was angry. She was pissed. The more she thought about it, the angrier she felt. She was furious at the stupid bed. She was furious at Eric for getting it and thinking she would like it.
She was furious at her uterus. She was in no position to be dealing with anything, not even herself. Didn’t it know that? This captain was letting her ship go down, she didn’t care who was on board.
She was furious at her bike for getting stolen. She was furious at the lock for failing. She was furious at her dad for getting rid of her old bike without even asking her. She was furious at him for getting rid of all their stuff, even her mom’s shoes, when he sold their house and moved into an apartment.
She thought of her mom’s shoes and how they’d been keeping them for so many years. They were a size and a half too small for Bridget, and she probably wouldn’t have worn them anyway, but you couldn’t just throw them away.
The churn of anger got rougher. How could her mom have just left them with all those shoes, not knowing what they were supposed to do with them? Or her clothes? Or her gardenias, every one of which slowly died in a dark room? All the stuff Marly left behind—what did she think was supposed to happen to it? Did she even care? Did she think the world ended when she decided to leave it?
And Bridget was mad at Tibby. She was furious at Tibby. She kicked the sand into a shower that got into her eyes and mouth and hair. “How could you do that?” she screamed at the ocean. “I wouldn’t do that to you!”
She fell onto the sand and lay there without moving. Hours passed and she didn’t bother getting her sleeping bag. She lay on her back looking at the sky.
Hadn’t Tibby loved her at all?
If one synchronized swimmer drowns,
do all the rest
have to drown too?
—Steven Wright
Some people said the first month was the worst. Others said it was really the first three months. Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you’d recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.
As Lena walked along the river in Providence, shivering in a wool coat long overdue for retirement, she felt like she was going in the wrong direction. She grieved about as well as she did everything else, backward and badly.
The first month hadn’t been the worst. She’d been horrified, blinking and confused, like she’d been whacked in the back of the head by a shovel, but she hadn’t really believed Tibby was gone. This December morning fell somewhere after the middle of the second month, and by now she believed it. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and in that empty space, the nothing in the middle of her, had come to settle a black, drab something.
Each day that passed took her further from the time when Tibby was alive and made her incrementally more dead. Each day that passed buried deeper Lena’s old ideas about the world.
That morning she’d woken up feeling sorry for Carmen. It was a feeling she kept out, but her early-morning mind was half dreaming and vulnerable, and somehow the sympathy had gotten in. It was a flickering image of Carmen’s damned iPhone that had gotten to Lena. Every time Carmen looked at her phone there was that old picture coming to life of the four of them as toddlers peeking over the back of a sofa, looking like a miniature girl band. Carmen looked at it five hundred times a day. How could she take it?
As Lena cried for Carmen and the picture on her phone, she knew why she tried so hard all the time not to feel sorry for Carmen and Bee. Because it was the same as feeling sorry for herself, and if she allowed that, the surge of it would carry her away.
At this rate she couldn’t imagine what she would be like at six months. She would be a black shriveled ball. Blacker and more shriveled, with hopes buried too deep ever to come out. Her life wouldn’t have shifted to make room for her grief, it would simply have shriveled and surrendered.
These days she walked a lot. Often along the river without really seeing the river. Somewhere she possessed the idea that if she was moving, the saddest images couldn’t settle on her as heavily. It didn’t really work. But being still was intolerable.
Her fingers ached with red col
d as she put her key in the lock. They hurt all the time, but she lost track of them and failed to replace her lost mittens. The lesser pains like the ones in her fingers and toes vied for attention, but like fifth- and sixth-born children in a very large family, they didn’t get much of it. It was the firstborn pain and the most recently born pain you tended to think of.
There were messages on her phone. She was down to two regular check-ins, by her mother and Effie, not Carmen anymore, and their messages had grown more pitying and patronizing, if that was possible. She didn’t want to listen to the messages. She let them pile up.
In her tiny apartment she sat down at her desk, still in her coat. She crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling. She didn’t like to look at anything. On the walls were the photographs, the ones she hadn’t taken down or hidden away. There were the drawings, all from a different time, reminding her of ways she used to feel but couldn’t anymore. There was nothing she wanted to feel or taste or see or even imagine.
She jiggled the mouse of her big, lumbering desktop computer, watched it wake, and subjected herself to her own version of Carmen’s phone, her daily punishment. Bright on the big screen was one of the few pictures she hadn’t flipped over or put away: the four of them on the day they graduated from high school. There they were with those thick, oily rented gowns, holding or tossing those weird hats. Surrounding them were all their family members, their nearest and dearest. The picture represented her whole life at a moment when it had seemed biggest, most complete, most hopeful. Her arm was around Tibby, clutching her ardently and without reserve, her face so animated and free in its joy she couldn’t even recognize it as her own.
