The Forever Bridge by T. Greenwood Page A

each morning on her way to school. She barely recognizes the girl in the window now. Tattered, filthy clothes, dreadlocks. Swollen face and feet and a belly as large as a small moon. It stuns her. Who has she become? She peers closer, as if she can find an answer to this, but instead her reflection disappears, and she is not staring at herself anymore but at an old woman sitting under a hair dryer, her lips pursed in disdain at what she sees outside the window.
    Startled, she steps away from the glass.
    Her stomach rumbles with hunger.
    Nessa studies the mailboxes along the wall by the door, searches for her mother’s name, but the label on her mother’s box has fallen off, leaving only its sticky ghost behind. And so she opens the door and climbs up the narrow stairs to the second floor. Her legs remember the depth of each tread, the steepness of each rise. The scent of cigarette smoke and the salon chemicals fill her with an odd nostalgia. Her heart beats hard in her chest, but the baby is motionless.
    The hallway is longer than the one in her memory. Darker. She walks to the end.
    And then she is at the door. Her mother’s door. She presses her forehead against the wood and takes a deep breath. Her stomach contracts; it nearly takes her breath away. Her entire abdomen tightens like a fist.
    She tries to imagine her mother’s face when she opens the door, the look of relief and surprise. It’s been two years since Nessa slipped away, two fugitive years. Of course, she’s thought of her mother often. Dreamed herself inside these walls, tried to imagine her mother’s worry, her fears. She used to think that her disappearance might actually help turn things around for her mother. That maybe it would be the one thing that would, finally, make her get clean. On the darkest days in Portland, when she was hungry and alone, she even imagined that she was somehow doing this for her mother. As though her running away was some sort of sacrifice instead of the most selfish thing in the world.
    But now, as she curls her fist to knock, she thinks about the day she and her mother returned to Quimby, when her mother told her to stay in the car when she walked up the long path to Nessa’s grandfather’s house. How she had watched her mother open the screen door, and how a stranger had stood in the doorway shaking his head. Her mother must have known that this was a fool’s errand.
    Nessa holds her breath, but hope is slipping away.
    The door cracks open, and an elderly woman in a housedress peeks out at her.
    “I got my own church,” she says. “And I ain’t buying nothing.”
    And Nessa is only surprised by how little this surprises her. She must have known all along that her mother was long gone.

I t’s Sunday so Ruby doesn’t have swimming lessons. Thank God. She promised her dad she’d call the phone company, but she doubts she’ll be able to get through to anyone on a Sunday. She figures she’d better call anyway so that when he checks in with her later she can at least say she tried.
    She goes to her mother’s bedroom door and knocks. “Mom?”
    “Yeah, honey?” she says from inside the room. Her voice is too bright.
    “I’m going to go into town to call the phone company. I might go to Izzy’s house too. If that’s okay. Do you need anything ?”
    Silence.
    “Mom?” she says, feeling a flutter in her throat. Ruby hears her slippered feet, and then her mom opens the door. There are shadows under her eyes.
    “There’s a storm coming,” she says.
    Ruby is confused. The sky is bright blue. It’s already warming up outside. It looks like a beautiful day.
    “I mean, when you talk to your dad. You should tell him to listen to the news. I worry about him and Bunk driving in bad weather.”
    “Okay,” she says and shrugs. “Do you want anything from in town?”
    Her mother shakes her head, and for one moment Ruby gets the strange sensation that she is the child. Ruby is nearly as tall as she is now. Her