Bridge of Sighs

staring at a strange shape—a cloaked man?—at the far end of the room. It took him a while to recognize the triangle at its apex as the point of Sarah’s easel, and for some reason this reminded him of his cathedral dream. He’d thought of it off and on in the intervening months, even considered asking Three Mock if he knew of anybody on the Hill who had a dream book. But that would just give him a number, something he could play, and what he wanted was the dream’s meaning. Tonight, oddly enough, he thought maybe he knew it. If he’d had to sum up in a single word what the cathedral had felt like, it was “home.”
    Earlier, shoveling snow with Lucy, he’d felt like Ikey Lubin’s might be home, but he now understood that had been merely a yearning. The Lynch store was no more his home than Nell’s was his father’s. Ikey’s was just a place he’d become invested in. A small, good thing, yes, but not
his
small, good thing. He was welcome there, true, but always as a visitor. In her drawing Sarah had been right to locate him outside, about to enter. Realizing this, Noonan felt, for perhaps the first time, the terrible combination of loss—of something he wasn’t sure he could afford to lose—and fear that there might be nothing to replace it. After all, what did it mean if your only true home was a place that didn’t even exist outside your own head? Wasn’t that just an indication that you didn’t belong anywhere?
    What he wanted, desperately, was to dream the cathedral again, because this time he’d be ready. The first time he’d wanted to share its wonders. Now he’d know better than to lose his focus. If he had the dream again, he’d know it was meant for him alone, that some things couldn’t be shared. The magic and beauty of the cathedral, if that’s what it was, could only be revealed to one person at a time, with no distractions. The presence of anyone else, even a loved one, maybe especially a loved one, made it vanish. It was what you got, he now understood, in lieu of a loved one.
    As he lay awake staring at the dark, indistinct shape of Sarah’s easel, Noonan could not know that he was looking at his future, his destiny, or that he’d spend his adult life in front of easels, his brush often guided mysteriously by a series of what he would come to think of as “paint dreams.” All of that was too far away. He did, however, sense a more immediate future, dark shapes moving in the middle distance between his sleeping bag and the easel at the other end of the room. He could sense them gathering force, and he found that by squeezing his throbbing wrist he could make them almost visible in the darkness. The months to come—between the blizzard and graduation—would give these dark shapes substance in the physical world, driving events that would surprise everyone but Noonan. Despite what Nan told Lucy, she and her mother would not return to Thomaston from Atlanta. Her parents would arrange for her to finish her course work and take her exams in absentia. Her diploma would be sent to her through the mail. Lucy, predictably, would take this hardest. “How come she doesn’t even write, is what I’d like to know,” he’d say at least once a week, adding, “To you, especially,” hoping Noonan might explain. “Mind your own business, Lou,” his mother would tell him. “You, too,” she’d warn her husband when he opened his mouth to say it didn’t make no sense to him either.
    Nor, of course, was Noonan surprised when Sarah’s father was arrested in May for possession of controlled substances. He’d seen that coming back in the fall. The charges were ultimately dropped, though not until Mr. Berg agreed to resign his position. A similar accusation, it was learned, is why he’d left his teaching job in New York and come to Thomaston in the first place. When no substitute could be found so late in the semester, he was told he could finish out the term, but then the story broke in the newspaper, and he never returned to class after that. Everyone in honors was awarded an A. Poor Sarah, Noonan thought, grateful she had Lucy and his family for comfort. “We’ll take care of her,” Tessa had promised when her mother died, and they did.
    Of course what shocked people most was what happened between Noonan and his father, but to him, those events, even more than the others, had the feel of a too-familiar story whose plot was set in motion long ago and whose resolution, barring