Bridge of Sighs

don’t know. I just…need to be alone, to sort things out. Some time to yourself might do you good, too.”
    “It won’t,” I assure her. “Without you—”
    “I’m not going to lie to you, Lou. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m not even sure I know how to be alone. Or who I’d be if we weren’t together. Maybe I’ll find out. But I want you to understand that I’m not angry. I know how hard you’ve tried. It was wrong of you to do what you did. But you’re not the only one who’s ever done a shameful thing.”
    I wait until she continues.
    “Part of what you said before was true,” she says finally. “I did love him.”
    Of course. We both did.
    “Or maybe just something about him. His…”
    Courage.
    She clears her throat. “He sent me a postcard when I was at Cooper Union. It didn’t say much except that he was in Toronto and all right. He joked about how he’d signed up for an art class and joined a workshop, and I’d better watch out because he planned to catch up to me. I wanted to show you the card, but I knew it would hurt your feelings because he’d written to me, not both of us. I didn’t write him back at first, not until Lou-Lou got sick, and then again when we got married. I could tell him things I couldn’t say to you, partly because he wasn’t here, but also because you take everything to heart so.”
    Oh Lou, why must you be so…
    “I wrote him again after your father died and you…I panicked, I guess, because of how unhappy you were. And I wrote him when I lost the baby, when I was the unhappy one. That was the last letter. After that, I stopped.”
    “Why?”
    “It started to feel like…cheating. He wrote me at a post office box, and I told myself they were just letters, but having that kind of secret didn’t feel right. And by then Bobby was married himself, and it wasn’t really fair to anybody, so I told him I wouldn’t be writing anymore. I said I loved you and I loved our lives, which was true, but mostly it just seemed like it was time to stop. And then Owen came along and we got busy and there wasn’t any need.”
    “Then why start again? Why now?”
    My eyes have adjusted to the dark. There’s just enough light in the room for me to make out her smile, the same sweet smile that’s been such a blessing all these years. “Because it was finally safe. Can’t you see that? Maybe it was all of us getting older. I don’t know, but at some point I realized the danger was past and Bobby was just an old friend. And after so many years, that’s also how Bobby would think of me. But it had something to do with my cancer, too. After the operation I wanted to talk to someone who only knew me from before, as I used to be. The person I really wanted to talk to was my mother, but she was gone, and then for some reason I thought of Bobby, remembering how we used to talk.”
    About things she couldn’t say to me.
    She takes my hand. “It’s sweet that you think of me as a woman another man would want, but—”
    “Sarah,” I say, my voice barely audible even to me.
    “Try not to think of what I’m telling you as a love story, Lou. You and I are the love story, not Bobby and me.”
    “You’ll never come back,” I say, surprising myself by the force of my conviction.
    Perhaps because she knows me so well, and knows that she’ll never convince me on this point, at least not tonight, she doesn’t try. “There’s one other thing I need to tell you. I want you to understand that writing those letters to Bobby all those years ago isn’t the only dishonest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve been reading your story, Lou. All this week. I shouldn’t have done that without asking you, but I was so frightened. I was scared of something even worse than what happened today.”
    That I would cross the Bridge of Sighs. That I wouldn’t turn back. She doesn’t have to spell this out. “Not much of it’s true, I suppose. I started out trying to stick to the facts, but I kept getting lost.”
    “The way you felt about Lou-Lou was true. The way you feel about Ikey’s. And I liked what you wrote about me. But will you explain one thing? Why did you say it was some other girl, the one you describe on the stairs at the Y? The one who looked so frightened at being left behind? It
was
me, you know.”
    “No, that was—” I start to tell her who, because there’s no doubt in my mind, but I stop. For some reason I’m having trouble picturing that girl as