Bridge of Sighs

she said, her now-standard inquiry. “You have to tell me. I can’t help if you keep secrets from me.”
    But of course I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know I needed help and didn’t
have
a secret, unless it was secret from myself as well. I had only my mother’s word, and Sister Bernadette’s, that something was wrong. Our family doctor believed I was still terrified, but I don’t remember being afraid during the weeks and months that followed my abduction. If anything, the odd serenity I’d awoken with in the trunk, together with the sense of power I’d achieved by making my tormentors disappear, is what had persisted in the aftermath.
    It’s true, however, that I was seldom really happy except in my father’s company, perhaps because he alone gave no indication that anything was amiss. His was the diagnosis—judging me safe and sound—that I clung to.
             
     
    M Y MOTHER SAID nothing to my grandparents about what had happened. Shortly after our move to Berman Court, they’d sold their house and relocated downstate, ostensibly to be closer to my grandmother’s sister, who was ill, though there was surely more to their decision than that. By ignoring their advice and moving into town, my mother had sided with my father, just as she’d done in marrying him, and their moving away was intended to convey that she was now on her own. My grandparents didn’t dislike my father, but neither had they ever made an effort to conceal their opinion that my mother had married beneath her station. There remains to this day in upstate New York a deep prejudice against anything rural, and in our valley the word “farmer” is used to explain everything from uncouthness to congenital idiocy. That my father had grown up on a farm, without city water, indoor toilets or electricity, and that his parents lost that farm to back taxes, ending their lives in the county home, made him, in their view, an unsuitable husband for the daughter of a white-collar worker.
    That said, they’d welcomed him—and, of course, me—into their home, all of us living “in each other’s laps” until we moved to Thomaston. Part of the reason my mother hadn’t immediately told her parents about my ordeal was that she hoped to forestall their I-told-you-so’s, spoken and unspoken. Moreover, my subsequent spells and abstractions had convinced her that we needed to move again, out of the West End this time, something we could not accomplish without their help. She had no choice but to swallow her pride.
    This was our unstated purpose in boarding the train (back then there was daily passenger service downstate) to go see them. My father didn’t accompany us, the official explanation being that he couldn’t get time off from the dairy, but I think my mother had decided her prospects would be better if he remained behind. I wanted to stay in Thomaston, but my mother insisted I come along because there was no one to look after me when my father was at work. Besides, she needed me as a visual aid. Her task, after all, was delicate. She had to confess about what was going on with me, but in the same breath assure them there was nothing to worry about. Though in the end I’d be fine, right now my doctor was convinced a change would do me good. It wasn’t that Thomaston’s West End was dangerous, as my grandparents had argued, but rather that Berman Court reminded me—how could it not?—of what had happened, whereas in a new neighborhood I’d feel safe. A fresh setting would reinforce what I was being told, that nothing like that would ever happen to me again. I myself didn’t subscribe to this logic because, as I said, I wasn’t afraid, but I knew my mother did. Her certainty on this point made me wonder if it was possible for someone to be afraid and not know it. My mother had, more than once in my young life, suggested that she knew me better than I knew myself, so I supposed it was possible.
    My grandparents met us at the train station, and I could tell right away that my mother had explained some of this on the phone, because my grandmother immediately pulled me to her and began to cry. My grandfather just seemed angry and shook his head at my mother, who didn’t take it lying down. “It’s not fair to blame me for this, and you know it,” she told him, even before saying hello.
    But if I seemed different to my grandparents, so did they to me. In the time since I’d seen them, they’d grown old. My grandfather