Bridge of Sighs

on the trestle that night I’d woken up in the trunk, and that my mother had been there with him. Once Sarah was convinced of this, she’d understand everything my mother was up to now—renovating the flat over Ikey’s, namely preparing to sell the store, so that later, once my father was out of the picture…
    I might have said all this, but didn’t. What stopped me was the look of revulsion on Sarah’s face and the fact that I could feel the same obscene knowledge spreading across my features that I’d witnessed that day on Karen’s mother’s. So I just held my tongue and looked away, out the window, where the ridiculous birds continued diving at the now-black canal, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, flying in precise formation, low over the water, turning the already darkening sky black with their wings. Then they banked all at once and disappeared from sight, as if a living room blind had been yanked open, each blade too thin to register on the eye, until they banked back and the sky was again black with them. Everywhere, nowhere. Everything, nothing. No in between.
    I didn’t look at Sarah until I heard her say my name with more tenderness than I deserved. “Lou,” she said, “are you saying your mother
wants
Lou-Lou to die?”
    Hearing her give voice to that thought instantly made me see the lunacy of it. I started to say
No, of course not,
but wasn’t that precisely what I’d been saying? And wasn’t what I’d almost said even more insane? What evidence did I have that the man on the trestle that night had been my uncle, beyond that they shared a handful of common sayings? That so-and-so was a good egg. That people in hell wanted ice water. But evidence, of course, was not the issue. After all, I was positive that the woman who’d opened the trunk and peered inside at me was
not
my mother. I’d seen her. Why did something I knew to be false continue to haunt me with the terrible power of truth? Did I
want
it to be true? What possible benefit could derive from such a bitter, cruel falsehood?
    I must have sat there stunned and mute for a long time, Sarah regarding me with that same tender, confused expression, and I think that if I could’ve spoken then it would have been to do what I’d suspected my mother of doing: I’d have warned Sarah against me, against the life I was offering her; that her affection for me, and for the rest of us Lynches, was a trap; that this was her chance to escape and tomorrow she should leave Thomaston and never look back. But when I finally spoke, I said, weakly, “It’s just…,” and then I had to pause again, because suddenly I was aware that the restaurant was blurry around the edges, that it had been since we entered. Sarah herself was out of focus, with a halo encircling her dark curls. A spell, I thought. I’m having a spell. But this realization was less important than my need to explain, so I tried again. “It’s just…I don’t want her to sell Ikey’s.” I concentrated as hard as I could, wanting to get it right, to be as precise as I could. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want my mother to sell Ikey’s; I didn’t want her to be
right
about Ikey’s, to be right about
anything.
I wanted desperately for her to be wrong about every single thing she’d ever argued with my father, wrong about our family, our town, our country. I wanted her to be wrong about
me.
But it was more than any of that. “I don’t want my father to die,” I said.
    At which my Sarah, our Sarah, smiled. “Lou-Lou’s going to be fine,” she said, and she seemed so certain that in my vagueness and confusion I accepted her authority and felt something ponderous lift off of me. “He is?” I said.
    Sarah said, “Lou, listen to me. Your mother isn’t planning to sell the store. If anything has to be sold, she’ll sell the
house.
She knows how much you love Ikey’s, that it would kill you to lose it. Maybe she doesn’t love Ikey’s like you and Lou-Lou, but she loves that
you
love it. It’s true she doesn’t want to lose your house, but she knows it wouldn’t kill her if that’s what happens. Do you understand? She’s not getting her way. You’re getting yours. She wants you to have Ikey’s, if that’s what you want.” She paused then to let all this sink in. “She wants
us
to have Ikey’s, if that’s what
we
want.”
    Then she reached across the table and took my hand, and at her touch the spell’s aura was gone, the edges of everything sharp and