Bridge of Sighs

clearly as I did when I wrote about the incident. Nor can I remember her name.
    “You were a step below me on the stair. I knew who you were, but you hadn’t met me yet. I wasn’t the kind of girl boys noticed. I turned and there you were and—”
    “No,” I say again, not wanting to get confused. “No, I remember—”
    “I was with my best friend, Sally Doyle. She and I went to all the dances together. You were with that poor boy who hanged himself. David.”
    “No,” I say again. I’m literally shaking my head in the dark.
    “Lou,” Sarah says, sensing my upset. “It’s okay, Lou.”
             
     
    I SLEEP FITFULLY, waking an hour before dawn with the certain knowledge that of course Sarah’s right. It
was
her on that stair so long ago. I now see the hope and longing in that girl’s eyes and recognize them as belonging to the woman sleeping beside me, whose life I’ve intertwined with my own. Out our bedroom window the eastern sky shows a thin band of gray. I remember waking as a boy during these darkest of hours and being comforted by the clinking of milk bottles. Even though my father never handled our route, that sound told me he was out there making us proud, providing people with what they needed, dependable and sure in all weathers. He was, I believed, an important man with an important job. The sort of job you wouldn’t trust to just anybody.
    Poor David, I think. How many times have I denied him? This last is the worst. Because Sarah was right about that, too. David
had
been there, standing quietly beside me that Friday night. For moral support we always went to those dances together. His family had recently moved to Thomaston, and he was in desperate need of a friend, and so, as usual, was I. Finally I got to be the mentor and protector, much as Bobby Marconi had been for me, and I remember enjoying that new role. Living on opposite sides of the East End, David and I took turns walking each other home. One Friday after the dance, we went to David’s house, and there in the dark driveway he shocked me by kissing me full on the lips, then hurrying inside. The next day, at the theater, he seemed as embarrassed by what he’d done as I was, and neither of us referred to the previous night. But after the movie he walked me home and did it again, this time in broad daylight, right in front of my house. I remember thinking my father was across the street watching, and so I shoved David away and told him I didn’t want to be friends anymore. I can still see the look on his face.
    I might have let him into my story, explaining that kiss and what followed, the day at school when we learned poor David had hanged himself. No official announcement was made, but by midmorning everybody knew he was dead, that his father had found him dangling in the garage that morning. I might have written about how our stricken teachers had whispered in the halls, and how for the rest of the day both they and the other kids watched me closely, David’s only friend, as if they suspected something—that I’d known what he intended, maybe, or that now I’d be next. After school I rode my bike out to Whitcombe Park, gripped Gabriel Mock’s fence with white-knuckled fists and indulged my grief, sobbing loudly and with purpose, trying to drain the sorrow from my body, so that when I returned home I wouldn’t seem any more distraught than the rest of my classmates.
    Over dinner that night, I thought I did a pretty good job of pretending to suffer some lesser version of grief and loss than the one I was feeling. But my mother knew better, as she so often did, knew that I was hurting worse than I let on, because after I’d gone to bed she came into my room with tears in her eyes and told me how sorry she was, and I learned then that no matter how hard you try, you can never empty yourself of tears. “It’s a mean old world, sweetie,” she said. “It never lets up either. I wish I had better news for you, but I don’t.”
    A month after he took his life, his father came into Ikey’s. Apparently David had left a note that mentioned me. I happened to be working in the back room, but I heard my father say, “My Louie ain’t that way.” Later, after Mr. Entleman left, he came out back and found me sitting on a crate and staring at nothing. “You ain’t that way, are you, Louie?” he asked, and I assured him I wasn’t. “Boys ain’t supposed to like boys that way,” he explained patiently. I told