Bridge of Sighs

heady mix of pleasure, surprise and affection. Was this what Karen’s mother had meant when she said my father hadn’t known what hit him? Was what my mother had done this simple? Had she just taken my father by the hand, led him across a room and placed him before something she wanted him to look at? Had the frailty and warmth of her hand opened something in my father’s heart that he hadn’t known was there?
    Sarah’s entry was a pen-and-ink drawing of a boy who looked to be six or seven years old, and you could see why it got three bold checks in the upper-right-hand corner. True, it looked like there might be something wrong with the proportion of the boy’s features. One eye seemed slightly larger than the other, and they appeared not equidistant from his nose. But they were alive, those eyes. She wasn’t drawing how the boy’s eyes looked. It was like they were real, that he was using them to see with. They made you wonder what he was looking at. You could tell right away that it was located just off the edge of the drawing and also that it worried him. And you could tell where the light was coming from. Sarah’s name appeared in the lower-right-hand corner, printed impossibly small, as if whatever confidence she’d had went into the drawing itself, with none left over for a signature.
    “My little brother,” she said. “He died of leukemia. I draw him all the time. We’ve got lots of photos, so I draw those. When I try to draw him from memory, it never looks like him.”
    “I’m an only child,” I told her, feeling inadequate for having nothing to say about the dead boy.
    “Me, too,” she said. “Now, I mean. It’s just my dad and me.”
    “What about your—”
    “They’re separated. After Rudy died, she didn’t want to live here anymore. I live with her summers. My dad teaches at the high school.”
    “Mr. Berg,” I said, making the connection. Even in junior high, we’d all heard about Mr. Berg. Everybody tried to stay out of his English classes. “I hear he’s strict,” I said, hoping to imply that this was why kids didn’t like him, not that he had bad breath or body odor. I waited, expecting Sarah Berg to confirm or deny her father’s strictness, since she was in a position to know. When she didn’t, I noticed that her drawing of her little brother had taken second prize, not first. Nan Beverly’s watercolor of a spaniel puppy had won first, but I noted an odd thing about the three checks in her margin. Two were identical, in black ink, whereas the third looked different, in blue ink, as if someone had added it after the fact. Had Sarah noticed this? Though I decided not to ask, that third check mark reminded me of Karen Cirillo’s unshakable conviction that our teachers had everything worked out in advance, the Borough kids catching all the breaks. Looking Sarah Berg over more closely, I was surprised to discover she was pretty, something I hadn’t noticed before. Also, that she had eyes like the boy in the drawing, one slightly larger and lower than the other. After leading me across the room, she’d dropped my hand, but I could still feel the warmth of hers and wished there was someplace else for her to lead me.
    “You should’ve gotten first,” I told her. “Yours is a lot better.” I said this last quietly, even though we were alone in the room. It was the sort of statement that, if overheard, could lead to a fight in the school yard.
    “Nan’s is good, too,” she said, and I could tell she liked having a reason to say her name, as if that might make them friends. Which made me like Sarah Berg even more.
    I was still holding my drawing of Ikey’s, and this gave me an idea. “Maybe
you
could draw Ikey’s someday,” I suggested, immediately feeling foolish. Why would she want to draw that? “You could show me which parts should be white.” Dumber and dumber.
    But she smiled, as if the only thing holding her back was just such an invitation, and when our eyes met I half expected Sarah’s to shift to some point off in the middle distance, like Karen Cirillo’s always did. But they didn’t. They stayed right on mine.
    Which must mean, I concluded, that I was still there.
             
     
    T HE VERY NEXT DAY Sarah Berg appeared with her sketch pad. I’d been working in the back room, and when I came out, there she was, sitting Indian style on the terrace across the street. “You’ll never guess what that girl’s doing,” my father said,