Bridge of Sighs

little boy!” I’m sure I needn’t state here, though I do, emphatically, that this woman was
not
my mother. Though backlit, she had been large and pale and fleshy and blond, and their voices had nothing in common. Why, then, when my uncle appeared, did a tiny door open in my brain and allow so bizarre a notion to enter? And why, in view of conclusive evidence to the contrary, was it so difficult to dispel?
    “What’s the matter, Bub?” my uncle wanted to know. For some reason he wasn’t standing in the doorway anymore but next to my mother, both of them staring at me curiously. I guess I must have been staring at them, too, or perhaps at nothing at all. Realizing that I’d just suffered one of my spells, I tried to say something, but as was so often the case when I “awakened,” my disorientation was too profound, and I couldn’t find the right words. Sometimes, if I tried to speak too soon, unable to form the right combination of sounds to make familiar words, I’d spout gibberish. Less severe episodes would leave me in possession of the right words but no sense of how to arrange them in the right order, which was almost as frightening. Usually I was able to gauge the severity of a spell by studying the people who’d witnessed it, and I was pretty sure this one hadn’t lasted very long because Uncle Dec was standing just a few feet away from where he’d been before and my mother’s posture suggested she’d only this moment become aware that something was wrong. She squatted in front of me and took my hand, saying, “Lou? Are you back?”
    I nodded, unwilling to trust language just yet, not with Uncle Dec there. He’d never witnessed one of my spells, and he now regarded me suspiciously, as you might if someone pronounced dead at the scene of an accident suddenly sat up and started looking around.
    “You’re cold,” my mother said, rubbing my hands together in her own. “You want to go downstairs and see Dad?”
    This was what I always wanted after a spell, so she wasn’t surprised when I nodded again. As usual I was exhausted and thirsty, as if I’d been walking along a dusty road for days, so tired I wasn’t sure I could make it down the stairs, but I didn’t want to be carried or even helped, especially by Uncle Dec. “This is pretty weird, Bub,” he remarked as we descended. “You know that, don’t you.”
    “He’ll be all right,” my mother assured him. “He hasn’t had one of these in a while.”
    In the air outside I could feel the vagueness begin to dissipate, though I still felt stupid and uncertain. My father knew what had happened as soon as we entered the store. “You have a spell, Louie?” he said, more an acknowledgment than a question. I closed my eyes, allowing the sound of his voice to soothe it all away. Not much remained now but the tingling in my fingertips and toes, that and the thirst. He got me settled on the stool next to the register. “You want a soda?”
    “Me,” I said, the word “yes” not yet where I needed it to be.
    “Shouldn’t—” Uncle Dec began. I knew how he would’ve finished, too. Shouldn’t I see the doctor?
    “No, he just needs to sit quiet a minute, don’t you, Louie?”
    I was determined to say “yes” and tried hard to do so, but again all that came out was “me.”
    “Me, right,” Uncle Dec repeated, rolling his eyes.
    Unwilling to speak again, I focused on my father’s white shirt as he went over to the cooler, returning with a bottle of grape soda. I drank half of it down in one huge gulp, then closed my eyes and concentrated on the big, gentle hand my father had placed on my shoulder. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that it was over. My uncle was just my uncle, not the man outside the trunk, and my mother was just my mother. And I was myself again: Louis Charles Lynch.

CROSSING THE LINE
     
    T HAT’S PITIFUL, really. He shouldn’t even be on the street,” Sarah says when I tell her about our encounter with Buddy Nurt. I wouldn’t even have mentioned it except she’s already observed that I seem out of sorts, and I’d rather have her blame Buddy than my mother, whom she’ll now question about it, though I wish she wouldn’t. Saturday is Sarah’s day to look in on her, to gauge what she’ll need for the week. She’ll pick up the few things we don’t stock at Ikey’s, plus whatever she needs from the drugstore and Kmart, a bigger list than usual tomorrow because by next Friday we’ll be on a plane