Bridge of Sighs

I could smell her breath and body. “He’s mean,” she confided, then lowered the lid of the trunk, surprising me almost as much as she had when she opened it.
    “Where’s my purse?”
    “The hell should I know?” I could hear the man pulling on his pants and zipping his fly.
    A moan now. “It fell,” she blubbered.
    “Fell where?”
    “Down there.”
    Down between the ties was what she meant.
    “Get it for me?”
    “That’s hilarious,” the man said.
    “I hate you,” she said. “I hate you worse than my husband.”
    “Getting laid doesn’t improve your disposition much, does it.”
    The voices were receding now. After a pause I heard the woman say, “There was too a little boy in that trunk.” And then I didn’t hear anything more.
             
     
    I HAVE SCANT MEMORY of the journey home. My vague conviction that I now lived in some kind of dream was borne out by the nightscape. The Cayoga, which had run clear that afternoon, was scarlet now, which meant the night shift at the tannery upstream had introduced a new dye batch. The moon, nearly full, had risen, and it made the churning water look like blood, and twice, despite my care, I lost my footing on the rocks and splashed into the stream. I’d imagined we’d come a very long way—maybe a mile—from the footbridge, but in no time there were lights high up on both sides of the embankment, and rounding a bend, I identified the largest of the dark, looming shapes as the back of our own apartment house, clifflike, with my own lighted bedroom window impossibly high up its black summit. Many a night, awakened by the wind or the branches of the tall elms scratching the back wall of the building, I’d gotten out of bed and gone to that same window and peered down into the moonlit ravine, idly wondering what it would be like to be out in that ghostly landscape instead of safe inside.
    When I caught sight of the footbridge, I immediately recognized the dark figure standing motionless upon it as my father. I was trying to find my voice to call out to him when he was gone again, the moon having slipped behind a cloud. Had I just imagined him there? Unsure now, I didn’t call to him, but continued along the stream until I arrived at where he was staring sightlessly at the water running beneath the bridge, and I think he must have heard my step before he saw me. “Is that you, Louie?” he said, as if he didn’t trust the evidence of his own senses, and then I was in his arms, breathing him in. Feeling his big body quake with sobs, I began to cry again myself. How long we stood like that, shaking in each other’s arms, I don’t know, but his big embrace forced my detached dream-reality to retreat and allowed the necessary space for the old, normal world to return.
    Berman Court was full of police cars and our neighbors were all out on their porches when my father and I emerged from the trees behind our building. My mother was talking to a policeman, and he first noticed our approach. “I found him, Tessa,” my father called, his voice sounding strangely formal. “Our Louie’s safe and sound. He’s right here with me.”
    The horror on my mother’s face when she looked up, though, caused me for a brief moment to imagine, as you sometimes do in a nightmare, that my mother didn’t love me, that she had not wanted me to be found. It only lasted a second, of course—that look of horrified revulsion at the sight of me, a boy dyed vividly red. To her I must’ve been the embodiment of the fears that had grown worse and worse since my failure to return home from school that afternoon. But then her rationality returned, and she came toward us, her eyes streaming, as our neighbors began to clap and cheer on their sloping porches, glad to have been wrong, because of course they, too, had concluded I would never again be seen alive.
    Even now, over fifty years later, I feel profoundly the miraculousness of these events, though explanation renders them mundane. In that trunk I experienced the first of the “spells” that have ever since haunted my life. The symptoms are familiar now—the sleepy exhaustion, the sense of detachment from reality, the feeling of having been “away,” the odd, unaccountable, overwhelming sense of well-being that accompanies me on my return—but at the time all that was new. I had awakened not with a sense of having been victimized but ironically of having been given an invaluable gift. In captivity I had