Bridge of Sighs

and their three sons were waiting for her on the platform back in Fulton. “Welcome home, D.C.,” he told her. “You have a nice trip?” In the station parking lot he tossed her suitcase into the metal dumpster.
    Though she became more sophisticated with each subsequent attempt, Noonan’s father also got better at anticipating her flight. Everything was against her. For one thing, she always bolted when she was pregnant. Of course she was pregnant most of the time, but still. If she’d fled as soon as she
got
pregnant, she’d have been in better shape and also less easily identifiable to her pursuers. Yet it was always in the seventh month that her despair peaked, when it occurred to her that she couldn’t bear to continue here. By the age of ten, Noonan himself could see it all coming as clearly as his father, and as the time approached he kept an eye out for another new suitcase.
    Her husband couldn’t watch her every minute of the day, not while holding down his job, so his strategy was to keep her poor, thus making flight more difficult. He gave her only as much money as she needed for the week’s groceries and warned nearby markets not to allow her to set up charge accounts without his approval. No matter how little he gave her, though, she somehow managed to squirrel away bus or train fare. Returning from work each day, her husband took careful inventory to make sure none of their possessions was missing, and he also alerted the owners of Thomaston’s two pawnshops that she soon might appear, hoping to unload their valuables.
    The deck was stacked against her, but the run she made when he was in sixth grade had nearly succeeded. Someone—Noonan suspected Mrs. Lynch—had given her a ride to Albany, where she’d purchased a train ticket to New York, but then, instead of getting on, she’d taken a taxi to the bus terminal and boarded a Greyhound for Montreal, trusting that her husband’s reach wasn’t international in scope. At the border, probably because she looked terrified without apparent cause, she’d been taken off the bus and questioned, and her answers were, of necessity, vague. She had no idea where she’d be staying. How long would she remain in Canada? Until her husband located her and brought her home. How much money did she plan to spend? She had fifty dollars in her purse, and unless she was mistaken, she’d have to spend all of it. Evasive answers led to further questions, which led to suspicions that she could read in their faces. These men clearly knew her husband, and they had no intention of letting her into Canada. She sat in the tiny room where they questioned her, staring out the window at the bus, the other passengers fidgeting in their seats and blaming her for their delay. For how long? She glanced up above the door at the round clock, which was there and then wasn’t there, and then nothing was there.
    When she awoke on a cot with an IV in her arm, she was told not to worry. Her baby would be fine. Everything would be fine. They’d gone through her purse and found a library card, then called information in Thomaston and gotten her phone number. Her husband was on his way.
    Noonan had known he was going to catch it. It had taken his old man no time at all to find out about the train ticket she’d bought for New York, so he was surprised to get the phone call from a hospital on the Canadian border. Where had she gotten money for both a train and a bus ticket? When he hung up, he studied his son suspiciously, and Noonan made the mistake of looking away guiltily.
    When they returned, his father was no sooner in the door than he fixed Noonan with that same stare, just to let him know that the ten hours it had taken to fetch his mother home hadn’t interrupted his focus a bit. “Welcome home, D.C.,” he said. His mother stood in the doorway, one hand beneath her enormous belly, looking down. Noonan heard her murmur what he thought might have been “Please.”
    “What’s that, D.C.?” his father said. “You have something to say to your family?”
    “Please,” she said, audibly this time, though just barely. She was peering out from behind her husband at Noonan, who knew she was beseeching both of them with that single syllable, begging her son not to further antagonize his father, begging her husband not to punish his son for what she’d done.
    His father came over to where he stood shaking with fear. “Well,” he said, “you’ve had time to think about