NOS4A2(21)
Their last assignment that year was “life drawing,” and they were asked to work from a photograph that was special to them. Vic’s father had room over the desk in his study for a painting, and Vic very much wanted him to be able to look up and see his mother—in color.
The painting was done now, had come home the day before, on the last day of school, after Vic emptied out her locker. And if this final watercolor wasn’t as good as Covered Bridge, Vic still thought she had caught something of the woman in the photograph: the hint of bony hips beneath the dress, a quality of weariness and distraction in her smile. Her father had gazed at it for a long time, looking both pleased and a little sad. When Vic asked what he thought, he only said, “You smile just like her, Brat. I never noticed.”
The painting had come home—but the photo hadn’t. Vic didn’t know she didn’t have it until her mother started asking about it on Friday afternoon. First Vic thought it was in her backpack, then in her bedroom. By Friday night, however, she had come to the stomach-churning realization that she didn’t have it and didn’t have any idea when she had last seen it. By Saturday morning—the first glorious day of summer vacation—Vic’s mother had come to the same conclusion, had decided that the snap was gone forever, and in a state bordering on hysteria had said that the photograph was a lot more important than any shitty junior high painting. And then Vic was on the move, had to get away, get out, afraid if she stood still she would become a little hysterical herself: an emotion she couldn’t bear to feel.
Her chest hurt, as if she had been biking for hours, not minutes, and her breath was strangled, as if she were fighting her way uphill, not gliding along level ground. But when she saw the bridge, she felt something like peace. No. Better than peace: She felt her whole conscious mind disengaging, decoupling from the rest of her, leaving only the body and the bike to do their work. It had always been this way. She had crossed the bridge almost a dozen times in five years, and always it was less like an experience, more like a sensation. It was not a thing she did, it was a thing she felt: a dreamy awareness of gliding, a distant sense of static roaring. It was not unlike the feel of sinking into a doze, easing herself into the envelope of sleep.
And even as her tires began to bump across the wooden planks, she was already mentally writing the true story of how she found the photograph. She had shown the picture to her friend Willa on the last day of school. They got talking about other things, and then Vic had to run to make her bus. She was gone by the time Willa realized she still had the photograph, so her friend simply held on to it to give it back later. When Vic arrived home from her bike ride, she would have the photo in hand and a story to tell, and her father would hug her and say he was never worried about it, and her mother would look like she wanted to spit. Vic could not have said which reaction she was looking forward to more.
Only it was different this time. This time when she came back, there was one person she couldn’t convince, when she told her true-but-not-really story about where the photo had been. That person was Vic herself.
Vic came out the other end of the tunnel and sailed into the wide, dark hallway on the second floor of the Cooperative School. At not quite nine in the morning on the first day of summer vacation, it was a dim, echoing space, so empty it was a little frightening. She touched the brake, and the bike whined shrilly to a stop.
She had to look back. She couldn’t help it. No one could’ve resisted looking back.
The Shorter Way Bridge came right through the brick wall, extending ten feet into the hall, as wide as the great corridor itself. Was part of it outside as well, hanging over the parking lot? Vic didn’t think so, but without breaking into one of the classrooms, she couldn’t look out a window and check. Ivy smothered the entrance of the bridge, hung in limp green sheaves.
The sight of the Shorter Way made her mildly ill, and for a moment the school hallway around her bulged, like a drop of water fattening on a twig. She felt faint, knew if she didn’t get moving she might start to think, and thinking would be bad news. It was one thing to fantasize trips across a long-gone covered bridge when she was eight or nine and another when she was thirteen. At nine it was a daydream. At thirteen it was a delusion.
She had known she was coming here (it had said so in green paint, on the other end of the bridge) but had imagined she would come out on the first floor, close to Mr. Ellis’s art room. Instead she had been dumped on the second, a dozen feet from her locker. She’d been talking to friends when she emptied it the day before. There had been a lot of distraction and noise—shouts, laughter, kids running by—but still she’d looked her locker over thoroughly before shutting the door for a last time and was sure, quite sure, she had emptied it. Still: The bridge had brought her here, and the bridge was never wrong.
There is no bridge, she thought. Willa had the photograph. She was planning to give it back to me as soon as she saw me.
Vic leaned her bike against the lockers, opened the door to her own, and looked in at the beige walls and the rusted floor. Nothing. She patted the shelf, a half a foot above her head. Nothing there either.
Her insides were bunching up with worry. She wanted to have it already, wanted to be out of here, so she could start forgetting about the bridge as soon as possible. But if it wasn’t in the locker, then she didn’t know where to look next. She started to shut the door—then paused, raised herself up on tiptoes, and ran her hand over the top shelf again. Even then she almost missed it. Somehow one corner of the photograph had snagged on the back of the shelf, so it was standing up and pressed flat to the rear wall. She had to reach all the way back to touch it, had to reach to the very limit of how far she could stretch her arm to catch hold of it.