The Bridge and the River
Chapter One
It was July, the sun was aimed for the Western hemisphere and someone, somewhere, was picking up a lucky penny. A woman in Argentina may have been giving birth to twins. A man in Rockies may have been reaching the end of a two hour hike up a mountain. A family of pygmies in Guatemala may have been gliding down a river in a canoe. But Mary Shackles, frankly, did not care where any of these people were. She had never been to any of these places, nor did she care to. What she cared about was where her brother, at this moment, was. And he was nowhere near Argentina, and doing nothing close to climbing around mountains.
She certainly did not care where she was, either. There were many places Mary Shackles wasn’t right now. She wasn’t in an airport in Lima, Peru. She wasn’t scooping sand from a beach. She wasn’t on her way to class. She was lying on her back under her brother’s bed, surrounded by twenty six black canisters which her brother had sent to her over the past eighteen months, and instructed to place beneath his bed. Mary had thought nothing of it. She had assumed it was one of the weird collections he was always starting. She had her eyes closed, blind to the heavy floral patterns spotting the underside of the mattress, and was concentrating on not touching any of the containers with her body. These canisters could probably tell more stories about her brother this past year and a half than she could. Maybe one of them could tell of how he had spent a week sleeping under the stars on a beach in Brazil. Maybe another could tell of the friends he made touring the Cook Islands. Or of how he’d broken his arm cave diving in Hawaii. He had probably laughed through the whole thing. Mary wouldn’t know, though.
Where was it she’d last heard from him? Had it been Rome? Or Amsterdam? Either way, he wasn’t here now. It was just Mary, lying under his bed, staring at the wooden bed slats two inches from her nose. They didn’t move. And neither did she.
She didn’t even move when the door creaked open and her mother’s voice rang through the room.
“Mary? You in here? I need you to come downstairs now,” said her voice, slightly nervous, dangerously quiet.
“Mom, please, I’m on my Island of Tranquility right now,” she lied. Another thing Mary wasn’t doing was utilizing the coping technique that one of her mother’s audiobooks had taught her.
Her mother’s voice grew a little harder. “Please come down, your Aunt Helen wants to talk to you.”
“Well please tell Aunt Helen that I’m still on my Island of Tranquility and to come back later.”
“Mary, she lives across the country.”
“We’ll make a day of it,” Mary answered.
“It’s not every day your Aunt Helen visits.”
“It’s also not a fucking family reunion, mom.”
But her mother had pleaded in the frightening quiet voice again, the one with the slight waver that made Mary’s teeth clench, and so she grudgingly extricated herself from beneath the bed, and followed her mother down the stairs into the living room. Mary watched her mother’s back as she followed behind her. A thread curled out from the seam on her mother’s black cardigan, which hung limply from her narrow shoulders, shoulders that sloped down towards wiry arms and hands which had taken up the habit of constantly wringing themselves. That little loose thread hanging from the seam, as though it had given up all hope of escape from its stitching, that was the most pathetic thread in the world.
When they reached the living room, they had to weave through mingling relatives Mary vaguely recognized, before a small raisin of a woman jangled up to them and immediately grasped Mary’s hands in hers, oozing platitudes about how it’s a shame, such a handsome boy, it wasn’t his time, what will you do now?
Mary stood there, staring at her aunt’s papery fingers clamped onto her wrists, staring at her translucent skin stretched over ropes of veins which tangled up her hands and disappeared into her sleeves. She looked past these hands onto the tiles on the floor below. Mary knew every mustard-stained inch of these tiles. Every shape in the pattern, every spider web crack. She looked at the squares crowding up against the triangles. Then she looked up at the back door.
“Mary?” her aunt persisted, “I said what will you do now?”
“I’m going to walk out that door,” Mary said, not taking her eyes off that doorknob.
“What dear?”
Mary freed her hands from Aunt Helen’s grip, took the eleven steps down the hall, and flung open the door.
“Mary!” Her mother called out, “Your cousin Jeffrey came all the way from the west coast to be here, the least you could do is –“
But the rest of her mother’s sentence didn’t really matter, because Mary was halfway through the neighbour’s backyard before the door closed.