Bridge of Sighs

imagined a terrifying world, only to learn that I was safe in it after all, and that I had the power to vanish my tormentors. Having disposed of them, I had only to find my way home and into my father’s embrace.
    Though the police cars seemed staged for my dramatic return, I later learned that their presence had nothing to do with me. Rather, a fight had broken out at Murdick’s, a nearby gin mill, and one of the combatants, who lived in Berman Court, had been arrested when attempting to sneak home and avoid arrest. My mother, hearing the commotion outside and imagining I’d been found, had rushed downstairs, only to be disappointed. She’d spent most of the afternoon and evening riding around the West End in a police cruiser, looking in vain for any sign of me. And while I looked like the survivor of a bloody adventure, in reality it gradually became clear that nothing awful had happened. Walking home along the stream, I’d realized what I’d been too frightened to grasp before, that the public school boys hadn’t meant me any actual harm. After the man and woman had left and I’d finally climbed out of the trunk, the truth was obvious. What the boys had been sawing wasn’t the trunk but one of the sloping rafters, from which the saw still dangled. Its significance came to me in stages too minute to measure, and only when I awoke in my bed the next morning did I understand what really happened and why it was that the louder I’d screamed in terror, the harder they’d laughed. Later, I learned that my tormentors had gotten a scare of their own when, opening the trunk, they couldn’t arouse me from my catatonic state. Believing they’d scared me to death, they immediately fled the scene. Only after spending a sleepless night did two of the boys break down and confess what had happened. So in the end I’d been the victim of little more than a cruel prank transacted less than a quarter mile from Berman Court.
    The only truly miraculous thing that night was my father’s presence on the footbridge at two in the morning, where he’d been awaiting my return since dark and infuriating my mother, who viewed his stolid vigil as a mockery of reason. A West End boy roughly my age had disappeared the previous spring, abducted, many believed, by a stranger in a dark sedan rumored to be lurking in the neighborhood still. That I might have suffered a similar fate was now being whispered by neighbors and police alike. Why, my mother wanted to know, did my father insist on standing guard over the stream behind our house? Did he think we were living in a fairy tale and I’d just materialize there if he waited long enough?
    Strangely, that was precisely what he seemed to be doing there on the footbridge as he stared down into the red, churning water—wishing me home and rescuing me from the trunk, from that parallel life I’d begun to imagine so vividly, by the sheer force of his will. When he called “I found him, Tessa,” to my mind that pretty much summed up the situation. He’d found me. With my small hand safely locked in his big one, I
felt
found. “Our Louie’s safe and sound,” he told her, and me, and himself, thus making it true.
             
     
    I MAY HAVE BEEN safe, but for some months after my ordeal I was not, to most observers, sound. Sister Bernadette noted that I was easily diverted from her lessons, staring out the window at nothing. “He just goes off someplace,” the young nun explained. “I don’t think even he knows where.” I was equally abstracted at home. “Where were you just then?” my mother would ask, perplexed not just by my mental absence but also, at times, the expression on my face. “Can you tell me what you were thinking about?”
    I could not. My mind seemed everywhere and nowhere. One afternoon, my mother came into my bedroom and found me staring out my bedroom window, the one that overlooked the stream. By then it was late November, and with the trees bare you could just make out in the distance the very top of the structure on the railroad trestle, the scene of my ordeal. I remember thinking how odd it was I’d never noticed it before. According to my mother, I was in a trance she couldn’t coax me out of. Unnerved, she was about to call the doctor when I suddenly snapped out of it and expressed surprise at finding her there in my room. She took me by the elbows, then, and regarded me so intently that I wanted to look away. “Where were you, sweetie?”