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“It is,” she said.

Pete said, “Nah. Costume jewelry. Those things look like diamonds? Zirconia. And see inside the band, where it’s goin’ silver? Gold don’t come off. What’s good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.” His brow wrinkled in an expression of unexpected sympathy. “You okay? You don’t look so hot.”

“I’m all right,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of sun.” Which seemed a very grown-up thing to say.

She wasn’t all right, though. She felt dizzy, and her legs were trembling steadily. She wanted to be outside, away from the mingled perfume of Petesweat and onion rings and bubbling deep fat. She wanted this dream over with.

“Are you sure I can’t get you something cold to drink?” Pete asked.

“Thanks, but I had a milkshake when I was in for lunch.”

“If you had a milkshake, you didn’t get it here,” Pete said. “McDonald’s, maybe. What we got is frappes.”

“I have to go,” she said, turning and starting back toward the door. She was aware of sunburned Pete watching her with real concern and was grateful to him for his empathy. She thought that in spite of his stink and brusque manner he was a good man, the kind of man who would worry about a sick-looking little girl, out on her own along Hampton Beach. But she didn’t dare say anything else to him. The ill sweat was damp on her temples and upper lip, and it took a great deal of concentration to clamp down on the tremors in her legs. Her left eye thudded again. A bit less gently this time. Her conviction that she was only imagining this visit to Terry’s, that she was tramping through a particularly forceful dream, was hard to hold on to, like trying to keep a grip on a slick frog.

Vic stepped back outside and walked swiftly along the hot concrete, past the parked and leaning motorcycles. She opened the door in the tall plank fence and stepped into the alley behind Terry’s Primo Subs.

The bridge hadn’t moved. Its exterior walls were crammed right up against the buildings on either side. It hurt to look at it dead-on. It hurt in her left eye.

A cook or a dishwasher—someone who worked in the kitchen—stood in the alley by the Dumpster. He wore an apron streaked with grease and blood. Anyone who had a good look at that apron would probably skip getting lunch at Terry’s. He was a little man with a bristly face and veined, tattooed forearms, and he stared at the bridge with an expression located somewhere between outrage and fright.

“What the motherf*ck?” the guy said. He cast a confused look at Vic. “Do you see that, kid? I mean . . . what the motherf*ck is that?”

“My bridge. Don’t worry. I’ll take it with me,” Vic said. She was herself unclear what she meant by this.

She gripped her bike by the handlebars, turned it around, and pushed it toward the bridge. She ran alongside it two steps and then threw her leg over.

The front tire bumped up onto the boards, and she plunged into hissing darkness.

The sound, that idiot roar of static, rose as the Raleigh carried her out across the bridge. On the way across, she had believed she was hearing the river below, but that wasn’t it. There were long cracks in the walls, and for the first time she looked at them as they flashed by. Through them she saw a flickering white brilliance, as if the world’s largest TV set were just on the other side of the wall and it was stuck on a channel that wasn’t broadcasting. A storm blew against the lopsided and decrepit bridge, a blizzard of light. She could feel the bridge buckling just slightly, as the downpour dashed itself against the walls.

She shut her eyes, didn’t want to see any more, stood up on the pedals and rode for the other side. She tried her prayerlike chant once more—almost there, almost there—but was too winded and sick to maintain any one thought for long. There was only her breath and the roaring, raging static, that endless waterfall of sound, rising in volume, building to a maddening intensity and then building some more until she wanted to cry out for it to stop, the word coming to her lips, stop, stop it, her lungs gathering air to shout, and that was when the bike thudded back down in





Haverhill, Massachusetts


THE SOUND CUT OUT, WITH A SOFT ELECTRICAL POP. SHE FELT THAT pop in her head, in her left temple, a small but sharply felt explosion.

She knew even before she opened her eyes that she was home—or not home, but in her woods at least. She knew they were her woods by the smell of pines and the quality of the air, a scrubbed, cool, clean sensation that she associated with the Merrimack River. She could hear the river, distantly, a gentle, soothing rush of sound that was really in no way like static.

She opened her eyes, lifted her head, shook her hair out of her face. The late-day sunlight blinked through the leaves above her in irregular flashes. She slowed, squeezed the brakes, and put one foot down.

Vic turned her head for a last look back across the bridge at Hampton Beach. She wondered if she could still see the fry cook in his dirty apron.

Only she couldn’t see him because the Shorter Way Bridge was gone. There was a guardrail, where the entrance to the bridge belonged. Beyond that the ground fell away in a steep and weedy slope that ended at the deep blue channel of the river.

Three chipped concrete pylons, bracket-shaped at the top, poked out of the tossing, agitated water. That was all that was left of the Shorter Way.

Vic didn’t understand. She had just ridden across the bridge, had smelled the old, rotting, sun-baked wood and the rank hint of bat piss, had heard the boards knocking under her tires.