Bridge of Clay

Her smile was hoisted up by then.

Her face was in decay.

She said, “Clay, it’s time now, okay?” and she told him the edits of everything. He was only thirteen years old, he was still too young, but she said the time had come. She told him moments way back to Pepper Street, and secrets of sex and paintings. She said, “You should ask your father to draw one day.” Again, she lifted, and dropped. “Just ignore the look on his face.”

* * *

—

After a while she said she was hot, though.

“Can we go outside to the porch?”

It was raining, and the rain was glowing—so fine it shone through the streetlights—and they sat with their legs out straightened. They leaned against the wall. She gathered him slowly toward her.

She traded her life for the stories:

From Europe to the city to Featherton.

A girl named Abbey Hanley.

A book by the name of The Quarryman.

She’d taken it when she left him.

She said, “Your father once buried a typewriter, you know that?” In perfect, near-death detail. Adelle and her starchy collar—she’d called it the ol’ TW—and there was a time when they’d both traveled back there, to an old-backyard-of-a-town, and they buried the old great Remington—and it was a life, she said, it was everything. “It’s who we really are.”

* * *

—

By the end, the rain was even softer.

Her drip had nearly fallen.

The fourth Dunbar boy was stunned.

For how does a just-thirteen-year-old sit by and gather this up? And all of it falling at once?

But of course he’d understood.

He was sleepy, and also awake.

They were each like bones in pajamas that morning, and he was the only one of us—the one who loved their stories, and loved them with all his heart. It was him she fully trusted. It was him she’d imagined would go one day, and dig up the old TW. How cruel those twists of fate.

I wonder when first he knew:

He’d give those directions to me.

* * *

—

First light was still half an hour away, and sometimes good fortune is real—for the wind began to change. It came shadowing sideways through to them, and held them like that on the porch. It came down and wrapped around them, and “Hey,” she said, “hey, Clay”—and Clay leaned slightly closer, to her blond and brittle face. Her eyes were sunken closed by then. “Now you tell the stories to me.”

And the boy, he could have fallen then, and bawled so hard in her lap. But all he did was ask her. “Where do I even start?”

“Wherever,” she swallowed, “you want,” and Clay stalled, then helped it through him.