AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I cut past Soldier Field. When I reach it, I travel through a long, shadowy underpass beneath Lake Shore Drive, bringing me closer to the bridge. The entire commute takes about an hour so that, by the time I step out from beneath the underpass and see the bridge just ahead, my teeth are chattering and I’m so cold that, despite a pair of leather gloves, I can barely feel my hands.
The bridge. It’s not much to look at. You almost don’t see it until it’s there. There’s nothing pretty about it, nothing fresh and modern like the light blue sinuous curves of the pedestrian bridge at 43rd Street. This bridge is wooden and austere; it’s a necessity only, indispensable but old and ugly, providing lakefront access to residents who live here.
I feel a surge of emotions wash over me seeing the bridge. I regret coming all of a sudden; this was wrong. I could still turn back and I consider it for a split second, but then I don’t, not when I’m this close. I don’t usually do this kind of thing. I don’t let patients dominate my days off and I don’t get wrapped up in their stories. I don’t let them affect me in any personal way, though it takes effort not to. I have to be careful.
The bridge slopes gently upward. It’s not a hard climb, but still my breathing is heavy. I hold fast to the corroded railings and climb the ramp to the top to where the bridge spans six railroad tracks. Once there, I tent a hand to my eyes to block out the sun.
At the center of the bridge, a single bouquet marks the spot where Caitlin went over the edge. I walk to it and squat down beside the flowers, which are wrapped in cellophane and half-dead. Their petals wilt, losing color, turning pale. I wonder who left them.
I glance over my shoulder to be certain I’m still alone, and I am, as far as I know.
A semitruck soars by just then, blaring its horn at something, and I jump. I turn toward the rush of road noise. I see cars in the distance, traffic easily moving in excess of forty-five miles per hour on Lake Shore Drive. I think about what Natalia from work said, that if what happened had happened on a different bridge—one that went over the street and not the train tracks—she’d be dead and not fighting for her life in our ICU. Natalia was right. If it had happened on Lake Shore Drive, things would be different. Traffic isn’t always heavy on Lake Shore Drive, but it is constant. There would have been no way for a driver to anticipate something like that and no time for them to react to a falling body.
I stand up. I step past the flowers to get closer to the edge of the bridge. I lean down, looking over the railing to the tracks beneath, feeling suddenly light-headed from the height. It’s disorienting and overpowering, a sheer drop. I can’t even begin to estimate the distance to the earth. I find myself thinking again about what happened when Caitlin landed, wondering if it would have hurt when she hit the ground or if she would have been unconscious by then. I thought the same thing about my sister Bethany for years. I wondered if she would have been dead before impact or if she died sometime after. I wondered if it hurt.
I think about the person who found Caitlin. I’ve heard it was a lineman, someone who was already here inspecting the tracks and came across her body. I think about this lineman a lot, and about what he saw, the condition of her body.
All of a sudden, I’m not alone.
I jerk, hearing the hollow screams of kids passing through the Lake Shore Drive underpass, going the opposite direction and away from me. I look, but the voices are disembodied. I can’t see them. They’re just kids—I can tell from the sound of them—being silly, playing around, listening to the echo of their own voices in the underpass, which should bring some humor to the situation, but instead, the sound of their piercing screams undoes me.
The ground beneath me suddenly seems to move, and I jerk my eyes back, grabbing hold of the railing as a train appears, bearing down on the tracks beneath me. I grip the bridge’s ledge even tighter to keep my balance, having to tear my eyes away from the train as it passes by below.
I’ve never been any good with heights, but this is something different, something even worse because of what happened here.
I risk a glance back down. One thought comes to mind when I see it from this angle: She should have died.
There’s movement in my peripheral vision just then, immediate and unanticipated. My head swings to the right, to the ramp that leads up to the bridge, where a man appears, stopping at the top of the ramp to take stock of me. My stomach tightens and I feel caught, taking in his thick, warm-looking brown parka, his bare head, the brown hair that stands upright in the wind. I think the thing that worries me most is how he lingers at the end of the bridge, hanging patiently back, watching me. It crosses my mind to leave, to go the other way so I don’t have to walk past him. But that would make things worse.
The pedestrian bridge is part of a path that leads to the Museum Campus and then all the way to Northerly Island if you follow it long enough. When the weather is nice, people walk or bike, but it’s too cold out for that now. The kids are gone from the underpass. They’ve moved on to somewhere else. I look around. The vastness, the barrenness of the space is overwhelming.
Jackson Beckett begins a slow walk along the bridge, his hands in the pockets of the parka. “What are you doing here?” he asks as he reaches me, and I feel guilty for having come. I can’t come up with an answer to save my life, because everything I can think of—how curiosity got the best of me and I had to see it for myself—sounds insensitive. “It doesn’t matter,” he says, letting me off the hook. “It’s a public bridge. Anyone can be here.”
He looks away from me, toward the skyline, the modern skyscrapers a sharp contrast to the steel rails of the rail yard. “It was brave of you to come, though, when there’s a murderer on the loose,” he says before correcting himself, “Sorry. Attempted murderer,” his tone too light, too offhand for the situation, his breath visible in the cold. He sets his bare hands on the rusty railings and leans over, looking far down over the edge of the bridge, taking it in, unfazed, unlike me, by the height. I look at his hands, holding tight to the bridge railing. He’s married, a wedding band on his ring finger, and I wonder about his wife and what she’s like, and if the Becketts have grandkids. First impressions aren’t everything, but my gut tells me there’s something about him not to like.
“Terrible what happened, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Awful,” I say, opening my mouth for the first time. I’m not usually like this. I can almost always come up with something to say, but his demeanor, his choice of words, makes it hard. “Your poor family,” I say. “You must all be completely beside yourselves.”
He lifts himself back up, quiet at first.
“Do you think she’ll make it?” he asks then, as if asking if there is snow in the forecast rather than if his sister will live.
“I... I don’t know,” I say, caught off guard by his bluntness. “There’s certainly a chance, though there’s no way to know for certain.” He stares, saying nothing, as if expecting something more. “What I sometimes tell loved ones is to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, just in case. It’s good to be prepared, I think. To consider all the possible outcomes. It’s good that you came when you did. People have a hard time forgiving themselves if something terrible happens and they don’t get a chance to say goodbye.”
He harrumphs. “Yeah well, I didn’t come for her. I came for my parents. They asked me to come and so I did. They don’t live far from here, you know?” he offers then—and I say no, that I didn’t know that—before turning to lean his back against the edge of the bridge, fighting off the cold. “They have a townhome on Indiana,” he says, pointing in the general direction, and my eyes go there, west of the bridge, further away from the lake. “You can see Soldier Field and Grant Park from their deck.”
“That must be nice,” I say, knowing that views like that don’t come cheap. If they really can see Soldier Field from their deck, then their townhome must be incredibly close. It makes me wonder if that’s the real reason Caitlin was in the area that day, if she came to see them, though, according to the Becketts, they didn’t know she had come back from California. But maybe she was nosing around or maybe she did come, but no one was home, or she got cold feet, changed her mind and left. “Is this where you grew up?”
“No,” he says, taking in the buildings in the near distance, just beyond the rail yard. “No, this neighborhood wasn’t what it is now twenty years ago. It’s changed, with loft condominiums taking over old warehouses, and luxury townhomes being built. I grew up in Hyde Park,” he says, and I nod. “It was sometime after Caitlin, Henry and I left that they sold the old house and moved here, to be closer to Dad’s work. He’d had enough of the commute. It used to take him almost an hour to go eight miles. Now, when the weather is nice, he can walk.”
I nod. City traffic is the worst. I can’t think of anything to say, and so, unthinking, I fill the void with, “My ex-husband and I had our wedding reception at Promontory Point,” which is in Hyde Park, a peninsula extending out into Lake Michigan with sweeping skyline views—wishing a breath later that I hadn’t been so quick to disclose personal details about myself.
Ben and my wedding was relatively small as weddings go, less than a hundred guests, though the space—a charming vintage building with French doors, stone verandas and breathtaking views—was everything I wanted. The pictures, now packed away in a box in the basement, were exquisite.
“Promontory Point.” He laughs under his breath. “My buddies and I used to hang out there back in high school, usually up to no good. In fact,” he says, sobering, “I was just there last weekend with a friend. It is beautiful, even in winter.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I say. I’ve never been in winter, but I imagine what it would be like to stand on the large boulders beside the lake, to take in the white of the snow against the dazzling blue of the lake and sky.
