Bridge of Clay(139)

We were odysseys there for the taking.

She’d float in and out on the images.



* * *



—

And I know now what was happening: She’d beg him for help every morning.

The worst was each moment we left.

“Six months,” she’d say. “Michael—Michael. Six months. I’ve been dying a hundred years. Help me, please help me.”

Also, it was rare now—it hadn’t happened for weeks—that Rory, Henry, and Clay would skip school and come home to visit. Or at least we were fools to believe it—because one of them often did come back, but was good at remaining unseen. He’d leave at varying time slots, and watch from an edge of window frame—until once he could no longer see her. He’d left school as soon as he’d got there.

    Back home he walked the lawn.

He moved to their bedroom window.

The bed was unmade and empty.



* * *



—

Without thinking he took a step backwards.

He felt the blood and the hurry—

Something was wrong.

Something’s wrong.

He knew he had to go in there; he should walk straight into the house, and when he did, he was hit by the light; it came right through the hallway. It belted him in the eyes.

But still he carried on walking—out the open back door.

On the porch, he stopped when he saw them.

From the left he could hear the car—a single but tuneless note—and he knew in his heart the truth of it: that car wasn’t leaving the garage.

He saw his father standing, in the blinding light of the yard, and the woman was in his arms: the woman of long-lost piano, who was dying but couldn’t die, or worse, living but couldn’t live. She lay in his arms like an archway, and our father had dropped to his knees.

“I can’t do it,” said Michael Dunbar, and he laid her down gently to the ground. He looked at the garage side door, then spoke to the woman beneath him, his palms on her chest and a forearm. “I’ve tried so Goddamn hard, Penny, but I can’t, I just can’t.”

The man kneeling, lightly shaking.

The woman in the grass was dissolving.



* * *



—

And he stood and he cried, the fourth Dunbar boy.

He remembered, for some reason, one story: He saw her back in Warsaw.

The girl in the watery wilderness.

She was sitting and playing the piano, and the statue of Stalin was with her. He was whipping her knuckles with an economic sting, every time her hands dropped, or she made another mistake. There was so much silent love in him; she was still just a pale little kid. It was twenty-seven times, for twenty-seven musical sins. And her father gave her a nickname.

    At the end of the lesson he’d said it, with the snow and its falling outside.

That was when she was eight.

When she was eighteen, he decided.

He decided to get her out.

But first he’d eventually stopped her.

He’d stopped her playing and held her hands, and they were whipped and small and warm. He clenched them, but did it softly, in the width of his obelisk fingers.

He’d stopped and eventually told her— And the boy.

Our boy.

This young but story-hardened boy of ours, he stepped forward, and believed in everything.

He stepped forward and kneeled down slowly.

Slowly, he spoke to our dad.

Michael Dunbar didn’t hear him coming, and if he was surprised he didn’t show it—he was numb on the grass, unmoving.

The boy said, “Dad—it’s okay, Dad,” and he slid his arms beneath her, and stood, and took her with him. There was no looking back, our father didn’t react, and her eyes, they didn’t seem yellow that day; they were hers and always would be. Her hair was down her back again, her hands were crisp and clean. She looked nothing like a refugee. He walked with her softly away.

“It’s okay,” he said again, this time to her, “it’s okay,” and he was sure he saw her smile, as he did what only he could, and only in his way: “Ju? wystarczy,” he whispered quietly, then carried her through the translation. “That’s enough, Mistake Maker”—and he stood with her under the clothesline, and it was then she’d closed her eyes, still breathing but ready to die. As he took her toward that note he heard, from the light to the smoke in the doorway, Clay could be totally certain; the last thing Penelope had seen in the world was a length of that wire and its color—the pegs on the clothesline, above them:

    As weightless as sparrows, and bright in the light.

For a moment they eclipsed the city.

They took on the sun, and won.





And so it was.

All of it led to the bridge:

It had finally been enough for Penelope, but for Clay it was one more beginning. From the moment he carried her away, it was life as he’d never known it. When he came back out to the clothesline, he reached up for the first of his pegs.

His father wasn’t able to look at him.

They would never be the same again.

What he’d done, and what he became at that moment, would turn so fast to regret.

He never remembered the walk back to school.