Bridge, p.1
Bridge, page 1
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2023 by Lauren Beukes
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ISBN 978-0-316-26787-8
E3-20230712-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
BRIDGE: Portrait of a Kidnapping: April 2006
BRIDGE: So Barve RN
DOM: Bad Life Choices
BRIDGE: Not the Real-Real: June 2, 2006
BRIDGE: No Undo
BUDGIE: The Moment You’ve Been Waiting For
DOM: Shower Scene
BRIDGE: Refresh
AMBER: Group Work
BRIDGE: Great Pretenders
DOM: Chain Mail
BRIDGE: Due Process
AMBER: Unhappy Camper
DOM: Occam’s Razor Burn
BRIDGE: The Experiment Must Continue
BRIDGE: Adrift
Jo’s Diary
DOM: Good Hosts
AMBER: Death Ripples
BRIDGE: No Place Like
Jo’s Diary
DOM: Big Bird
BRIDGE: Falling Off a Horse
AMBER: Infestation
DOM: Science Is Hot
AMBER: Jackpot
Jo’s Diary
AMBER: Guile and Conspiracy
BRIDGE: Again, Again, Again
BRIDGE: A Million Little Pieces
CADEN: Your Own Personal Star Maker
Jo’s Diary
BRIDGE: Murder Wall
BRIDGE: Reborn Reborn
DOM: Demon Slaying
DOM: Cesspools
BRIDGE: Colors from Outer Space
DOM: Online Friends, No Benefits
BRIDGE: Dark Water
DOM: Amberlynn and the Hellshriek Box
Jo’s Diary
BRIDGE: Bummerland
BUDGIE: The Caged Bird Screams
AMBERLYNN: The Reluctant
BRIDGE: Frying Pans
AMBER: Shadow Life
DOM: Sonar Radiation
BRIDGE: Getaway Girl
AMBER: Ding-Dong-Ditch the Witch
DOM: There’s Been a Shooting
BRIDGE: The Sign at the End of the World
BUDGIE: Emergency Exit
BRIDGE: Where We Find Ourselves
DOM: Desperate Measures
AMBER: Missing in Action
BRIDGE: Truth and Reconciliation Commission
DOM: Echoing
BRIDGE: The Choices We Make
AMBER: Disconnect
BRIDGE: Ruby Slippers
AMBER: Roadkill
BRIDGE: Rest and Restitution
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Lauren Beukes
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
BRIDGE
Portrait of a Kidnapping
April 2006
On the long stretches of highway, her mom lets her sit up front next to her, although Bridge has to slouch down when they pass a police car, because they are being a little bit naughty and seven-year-olds are supposed to sit in the back. The road is a dark ribbon through the trees, like in the story about the little girl escaping from the witch Baba Yaga and her chicken-footed house.
You don’t have to think like that, Mom says. There’s no one chasing us. But her eyes flick to the mirror again and again, and when she has to pull over at the gas station to take her pills so she doesn’t get fits, she sits waiting in the car, watching the parking lot, before she goes inside, and Bridge can’t stay behind because I need you to pick the best doughnuts.
“Isn’t this nice, the two of us getting away? Surprise vacation!”
“I miss Bear,” Bridge says. “And also Daddy.” Her dad is a very busy guy. And motels don’t allow galumphing Labradors. But it doesn’t feel like a vacation. It’s not very fun. And she thinks maybe this is her fault because of what happened at her mom’s lab, which isn’t really her lab, but the professor lets her come there to do her studies and sneak Bridge in. It’s boring there. She is not allowed to climb the high wooden shelves or roll down the corridors on one of the wheelie chairs or play with the plush toy of a brown worm with a knot tied in its tail that sits on top of the filing cabinet, and I’m not sure how your dad would feel about you playing with Ebola. Bridge does know. He would not approve.
Mostly, she sits at Mom’s desk reading comic books or doing her puzzle, which has five hundred pieces, but she lost four of them, so there is a hole in the unicorn’s butt like a tiger took a bite out of it. But one day she did something bad while Mom was busy talking to the other brain scientists. So much talking! She didn’t mean to. The rats were so cute and she just wanted to let them out so she could play with them, and she didn’t even really manage to open the door to any of their cages, which aren’t really cages but kind of glass nests.
Mom got in so much trouble with her boss and with Daddy.
She shouldn’t have been there unsupervised, her dad said, talking through his teeth, and What were you thinking and This is why—and he caught her looking and pulled Mom into their bedroom by the elbow and slammed the door and their voices were soft and spitty like cobras and then suddenly loud and high like yappy dogs, and Bridge could hear the words What do you expect me to do and I can’t live like this and Ungrateful is what you are, I didn’t even want—and Bridge just turned up the TV because it was her fault they were fighting because of the rats. So maybe it’s also her fault they need some girl time now, her and Mom.
They find a youth hostel near Bourbon Street, which smells gross on Sunday morning, like wet garbage and sick. Jo does card tricks for the backpackers from South Africa and New Zealand and Ireland and tells them how she used to live here, in New Orleans, but not in the tourist part, when she was their age, or younger, actually, fourteen when she ran away from home—and for the first time, Bridge thinks: Oh, is that what we’re doing?
They drive all around the city, past old-fashioned houses and under twists of highway near the stadium, past the cemetery with white marble tombs like a Lego city for ghosts. They visit a broken house with graffiti and holes in the floor and Mom says this was her home when she was a runaway, but Bridge doesn’t want to go inside because it’s creepy and there are spiky thistles everywhere and what if the roof falls down?
They stop at restaurants and bookstores, Mom always asking around for people she used to know. Once a man followed them back to the car. Hey, pretty lady, I can help with that, maybe you can help me, know what I’m saying and Mom snarled, Fuck off, and that only made him mad, so they had to run and jump into the car, and he came after them and slapped the back windshield as they drove off.
Her mom says they’re trying to find a rabbit, but they find a witch instead, with curly hair and tattoos of stars and not scary like Baba Yaga. Her name is Mina and she knows her mom from back in the day, and Bridge is impressed at how she is grubby and glamorous at the same time in a short black dress and big army boots with the laces undone so she might trip at any moment.
She lives up a flight of rickety metal stairs in an old warehouse, and as she climbs, Bridge has to hold the railing really tight and not look down at the gaps where the sky shines through. Everything is in one room, the rumpled and crumpled bed and the kitchen, full of plants and glass bottles and things you might find washed up on the beach, old bones, and antlers and bits of coral, still pinky red, with skinny twisted fingers. There are string lights hanging from the ceiling and the skeleton of a huge bird with its wings spread wide and some of the feathers still attached, kinda ratty, but still determined to fly. She has dreams about that dead bird afterward, but she has a lot of weird dreams that year.
Mina and her mom talk and talk and talk and cry and Bridge gets bored and embarrassed. Then she must have dozed off on the couch, because it is evening and Mina is unlocking one of the display c
Mina keeps saying the rabbit is dead and, maybe that’s what it is, all wrapped in cloth—a dead baby bunny—also Mina doesn’t want to give the mummy to her mom, but her mom keeps saying she needs it. More than anything. Please.
And Mina says, I hope you know what you’re doing.
And her mom says, I don’t have a choice.
BRIDGE
So Barve RN
This is not where Bridge is supposed to be. Story of her life. But here especially, standing on the threshold of her dead mother’s home—this most haunted of houses. Reality is not real, her mom used to say. Your perception is a lie your mind tells you. It’s only that Jo’s brain told her grander and more dangerous lies than most people’s—that the world was more than it was—and for a time after they got back from being on the run, Bridge believed it too.
“It’s not your fault,” her therapist, Monica, told her repeatedly. She was a little kid, seven years old; her mom had a brain tumor that made her delusional, and she brought Bridge into her dreamworld for a little while. She was better afterward, didn’t mention it for years and years, but then she got sick again, and it all came rushing back. The absurd, desperate fantasy. And now she is dead.
This is a raw physical fact; incontrovertible.
This is real, like the cold metal of the key in her hand on this quiet street in Mount Scott–Arleta, the cicadas ratcheting in the trees, and the Grand Am’s engine clicking accompaniment. Dom drove it here all the way from Austin to help her, and it broke down only once. Or so they claim.
Dom is wearing a blue jumpsuit and puffy Day-Glo sneakers—“Manual labor, but make it fashion,” they quipped when they picked her up this morning from that hateful anonymous apartment two blocks over from the OHSU Hospital in Marquam Hill.
By contrast, Bridge is wearing leggings and a black T-shirt. Grief, but make it entropy. It’s been her uniform for the past few days, since her mom took a sharp, sudden downturn and she flew here, too late. Jo was in no state to even recognize her. You’re not my daughter. Chemo-induced dementia, the doctor said, or the tumor pressing on her brain. Again. Jo was fifty-one years old, but the cancer had been trying to kill her for almost forty years. Once, twice, third time’s the charm. Joke the pain away, she thinks.
Dom has brought supplies: cardboard boxes, folders, labels, stickers, packing tape, groceries, a bottle of tequila—all the essentials needed to deal with your dead mother’s estate. And doesn’t that word estate imply a mansion in the countryside with secret passages for the servants and hidden treasures in the attic rather than this modest boho cottage, cycling distance to Everard University? Sure, her mom had sent her a cryptic e-mail about “frozen assets,” adding that she’d provide further instructions when they next saw each other, but in the hospital she was too out of it to talk, and her lawyer didn’t know anything about it. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a secret inheritance: gold bullion, a lost Dora Maar portrait, or, ya know, answers, closure? All the things left unsaid.
I don’t know you.
She didn’t get to say goodbye, not properly, not in those circumstances, with Jo turned to face the curtain, her scrawny shoulders hitching, flinching away from Bridge when she tried to touch her, tried to tell her she loved her. The uncrossable gap between them stretching wider.
I want to go home.
Bridge thought she only had to wait it out, that it would run its course like Jo’s epileptic seizures, and her mother would emerge on the other side, and they could talk. But she didn’t. And now all that’s left of Jo is cremains in a plastic bag inside a wooden box shoved in a cheap wheelie suitcase.
Dom is mucking about, holding a blue plastic label printer like a gun and sweeping it across the neat houses of Portland, with their neat lawns and their neat curtains and neat lives inside, acting as if they are in an over-the-top action movie with assassins ready to descend instead of in another chapter of Bridget Kittinger-Harris’s so-far-pretty-pointless existence.
“Coast is clear,” they announce and Bridge manages a smile. Trying for okay.
“How about it,” Dom prompts again. “You ready to do… the thing?”
“Fuck no.” Bridge sighs. The dread is like someone stuck a feeding tube in her throat and poured concrete down it, and now it is sitting thick and heavy behind her rib cage. “Are you sure we can’t just burn it all down?”
“Hmm.” Dom is fiddling with the label maker, jabbing at the buttons. “Well, you’d be the first suspect. And the landlord would be pissed.”
“The landlord could file an insurance claim,” she protests.
“Bridge, my love, we are going into that house and we are doing the thing if it kills us.”
“It might, though,” she pleads. The label gun makes a grinding chirp as it prints something out.
“Here.” Dom peels off the new label and sticks it on Bridge’s shirt upside down, so she can read it.
SO BARVE RN
“Barve?”
“Flying fingers, bonus typos.” Dom shrugs.
“Yeah, well, that solves everything.”
“Like magic. Language has power. Feel the courage.”
“All right, all right.” Smiling despite herself and the cat’s cradle of emotion, all the tangled anguish and despair, along with the rage. She is goddamn furious with Jo for leaving her, for being right about the brain cancer, for not calling her sooner. And furious with herself. The guilt that she didn’t come sooner, when Jo told her, three weeks ago. And in general, that she didn’t visit more, call more, pick up on her mom’s erratic behavior: her new squirrelly evasiveness, the trip to Argentina, the dramatic breakup with Stasia, losing her job. But Bridge had been caught up in her own life, her own problems, now minor and stupid in comparison. She’d thought she would have more time. Her mother wasn’t supposed to die.
She slides the key into the scuffed lock, turns it with a click, and pushes the door open, drawing a jangle of protest from the squared-off antique Chinese bell hanging above it that is supposed to summon blessings or whatever. Dom steps in behind her and taps the doorframe twice, murmuring something in Spanish—a Puerto Rican benediction for the dead.
“That’s really kind,” she says, trying to mean it. She’s not ready for this: Acknowledging the dead. Making a peace offering. Death is pretty fucking real, it turns out. A whole set of realities, all uniquely awful. And now the infuriating bureaucracy that comes after. Sadmin, Dom calls it.
Her dad has already offered to pay for an agency to deal with Jo’s junk, once Bridge has gone through it, and for the memorial service, when she’s ready, and for more therapy. But he can’t be there in person. Unfortunately. Solving everything with money. Solving nothing. She hasn’t told him she dropped out of the business-degree program he’s paying for and is now working full-time at Wyvern Books.
Does she even want a memorial? It would have to be in Cincinnati, for her very elderly grandparents, and maybe her uncle would show, and the cousins she hasn’t spoken to in years. But Jo’s students? Her colleagues? There are scores of heartfelt posts on Jo’s Lifebook wall, regrets and blandishments that all run together. Bridge stopped reading them, mechanically clicking Like, Like, Like, so she didn’t have to respond to these strangers who thought they knew Jo but who saw only one version of her. Would anyone come to mourn her life in person? Jo had nuked all her bridges once she got her diagnosis.
Standing in the entry hall, half blocked by the antique desk with its drawer hanging slack-jawed, Bridge tries to shift gears, to be barve. She puts on her best poncey British decorating-show-host voice and gestures grandly around the shabby interior, at the mismatched picture frames, the bookshelf running the length of the hall. “As you can see, what we have here is a classic take on absent-minded adjunct-professor chic.” Always playing the clown. Distract, deflect.
Dom takes in the details, deadpans: “I was expecting more beakers.”
“Beakers is chemistry.” She moves to help them haul in their bags. There’s the reassuring clink of the tequila bottle—because no one should have to do this sober. “Neuroscience is all about electron microscopes and patch clamps and oscillatory… majigs. Actual technical terms. And that would all be at her lab at the university.”
