Bridge of Sighs

it. Where do you suppose your mother got all that money, Robert?”
    “I saved it,” his mother said.
    “The hell you did, D.C.,” he told her. Not once since the moment they entered had he taken his eyes off Noonan. “A train ticket you didn’t even use? A bus ticket to Montreal?”
    “I put a little aside every week,” she said. “I did…I promise.”
    “When I call the bank tomorrow,” he said to Noonan, “and ask how much is in your savings account, what are they going to tell me?”
    Noonan’s eyes met his mother’s then and saw how pointless it was to lie. He’d emptied the account containing five months’ worth of paper route money last week, the same day he discovered another strange suitcase in the back of the hall closet, right where his mother always hid them. It had been
his
idea to buy the train ticket but not use it. Let his father look south while she was heading north. He remembered the look on her face as he explained how to do it, at once frightened and proud of his gift for deception and strategy. One day he’d be a match for his father. Before long he’d be a man, ready for whatever the world threw at him.
    But not
this
day. Today he was still a boy, and he was quaking violently now, waiting, as he had been for ten hours, for what would happen next. He wasn’t stupid. He knew the thing to say was
I’m sorry.
For his own good as well as his mother’s.
I’m sorry.
Say he didn’t know what she wanted the money for. She’d back him up, no matter what he said. Though his father wouldn’t believe either of them, that’s what he wanted to hear, and once he did then things would gradually get better.
I’m sorry
was the right thing to say, the only thing, really. Instead he heard himself say, the words nearly lost in his sobs, “
You’re
why she runs away. If you were nice to her, she wouldn’t want to. It’s
you
she hates.”
    As he said this, his father stood over him flexing his big fists, the birthmark along his hairline dark purple now with rage. Scared as he was, Noonan remembered thinking, almost with relief, All right then. This was the day the terrible blow would finally come. By now his brothers had begun to cry, and his mother was pleading urgently on his behalf, imploring her husband not to strike him, telling him he was just a boy, that he hadn’t had any idea what she wanted the money for, that he didn’t mean what he’d just said. And besides, it wasn’t true. She didn’t hate him and didn’t want to leave her family, not really. It was just that sometimes she got so tired and confused that she was afraid she’d just start screaming in front of the children. “He’ll apologize,” she said. “Bobby will apologize right now. You will, won’t you, sweetie?” She’d come over to where he stood and gotten down on her knees. She’d taken his hand and was kissing it, wetting it with her tears. How ugly she was, he remembered thinking, her face contorted with need and fear. “Tell him you didn’t mean what you said, okay? Do that for Mommy?”
    Noonan hadn’t yet learned that his father would not strike him. That understanding would come to him years later at the academy, a blinding, utterly transformative revelation. For all his threats to thrash the boy within an inch of his life, he’d never once struck him or, now that he thought about it, his mother. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that adults could be like school-yard bullies? Sure, his father was a holy terror when it came to inanimate objects. Earlier that year he’d taken a Pyrex dish containing a casserole his mother had scorched and scraped the food directly into the trash, refusing to let anyone taste it. Then, to make his point—that the dish itself was ruined—he smashed it on the edge of the counter, in the process slicing open the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger, and a look of horrible satisfaction had come over his features as the bright blood pumped into the sink. “See?” he kept saying, showing the wound first to his mother, then to Noonan. “See?”
Sure, the blood’s mine,
he seemed to be saying,
but next time it could be yours. Next time, if you aren’t careful, it
will
be yours.
For years Noonan had watched his father kick trash cans, rupture suitcases, throw bottles across the room so they smashed on impact, their contents oozing down the wall.
    But what his father had always wanted him to fear was the day he’d lose control, when the blood would really