Bridge of Sighs

replied.
    To Noonan, his friend’s obsession with the recent past made no sense. After all, he’d just completed three reasonably happy, well-adjusted years in Thomaston High. Why would anybody, much less Lucy Lynch, feel nostalgic for junior high, with all its skewed symmetries? There he’d been a miserable loner, whereas now he had Sarah, and the two seemed happy together. Why pine for Karen Cirillo?
Because,
he could hear Mrs. Lynch saying,
people don’t change.
             
     
    A T THE M ARCONI HOUSE, everything had changed. His father was rarely there, even in the evenings. He claimed to be working longer hours at the post office and traveling around the region as a consultant to support his growing family, but Noonan was sure he was spending most nights with the woman on Division Street. Which was fine. His mother, strangely blissful now, a new infant at her breast, seemed content that peace and quiet should reign. His little brothers, most of whom weren’t so little anymore, had the look of pale, exhausted victims of the blitz, climbing up out of underground bunkers at the all-clear signal, blinking at the light and wondering if the bombing would resume. With Noonan working long hours and hanging out at Ikey Lubin’s, he himself was seldom there either. Occasionally, late at night or early in the morning, he’d run into his father at the refrigerator, and then there’d be a wary, wordless little dance of courtesy. Amazingly, his mother seemed to conclude that her husband and eldest son were in the process of reconciling, putting their long, virulent animosity aside. Only once did she regard Noonan curiously and ask if he’d said something to his father back when she was in the hospital. Noonan, seeing no reason to trouble her, had lied.
    It was the middle of July before he noticed the tiny pill she took with her orange juice first thing every morning and again before going to bed at night. Nor was he quick to connect that pill with the fact that this baby—alone among Marconi infants in this respect—never seemed to fuss, instead smiling blissfully at the world as if it had no father and no need of one.
             
     
    W HEN S ARAH RETURNED to Thomaston at the end of the summer, Noonan barely recognized her. Suddenly she was no longer a girl, but rather a young woman. Lucy had invited him to come along to meet her at the station—he couldn’t help wondering why—and waiting in the parking lot, he saw the hug she gave Lucy when she got off the train. Did it differ from the one she gave him a couple minutes later? He didn’t think so.
    “How come you never wrote me?” she demanded on the drive home. They were sitting three across in the Lynch station wagon, and she elbowed him in the ribs, hard, when she asked.
    “You never wrote
me,
” he pointed out.
    “Untrue,” she said. “I addressed every one of my letters to Ikey Lubin’s, which includes you. Everybody else wrote back. Even Dec sent me a dirty postcard. First you show up four years late, then you don’t write. Are you going to be a crappy friend?”
    “I guess we’ll see.”
    “I hear you bought a motorcycle.”
    “Not exactly. Dec’s letting me use his.”
    “So who do I ask for a ride, him or you?”
    “Ask your boyfriend.”
    Now she elbowed Lucy, just as hard. “Can Bobby give me a ride on Dec’s motorcycle?”
    Say no, Noonan thought.
    “Sure,” said his friend. “Why not?”
    Noonan could have told him. Should have.

    W AS IT POSSIBLE to miss somebody you’d met only once, someone you didn’t really know? Probably not, but that was what it had felt like having Sarah back—like he’d been missing her all summer without knowing it. He lay awake that night, remembering the hug she’d given him there in the parking lot. Never having received such an unself-conscious embrace from a girl his own age, he didn’t know what to make of it. By seventeen, most girls were physically aware, and they angled their bodies accordingly. Sarah had hugged him like an older sister would, unafraid that he might misinterpret it. Did that mean she had no more interest in him than a sister would? She was Lucy’s girlfriend, after all. Still, Noonan couldn’t quite decide whether her embrace suggested confidence or a complete lack thereof. Was she unable to imagine a boy like him being attracted to a girl like her, or was she placing her trust in
him,
in his virtue, as Lucy’s friend? A mistake, if the latter.
    To