Bridge of Sighs

frightened or desperate, in part because she wasn’t alone. She had Lou, whose affection and devotion never wavered, and she had Owen, and she had, well, her life. Maybe her sexual currency in her fifties was less than it had been in her thirties and forties, but sex had been her mother’s only currency, or so she’d believed, which amounted to the same thing. Which was why she’d felt less like a woman that last summer, a feeling that Sarah had escaped.
    Until now, perhaps. Had her mastectomy finally fulfilled her mother’s prophecy, or some irony-rich version of it, at the very moment she’d congratulated herself that they didn’t share an emotional destiny? All Sarah knew for sure was that she’d come out from under the anesthesia with a profound sense that her mother had been with her through the whole thing. Not there in the operating theater, or out in the waiting room with Lou and Owen, but
with her
in her drug-induced dreams, riffing the entire time, though Sarah couldn’t remember a single word she’d said. In recovery, her first conscious thought had been of her mother’s mutilated body lying for hours in the blood-soaked snow. Later, when she could examine what had been done to her, she recalled again the warning that she’d eventually become the woman holding that cigarette with the long, lifeless ash. Had she sold her mother short? Sarah wondered. Had she been wiser than Sarah gave her credit for? What if she hadn’t been talking about menopause at all, but rather life’s ability to demonstrate just how alone you really are?
    In the months following the operation, her mother continued to haunt Sarah’s dreams. Which made a kind of sense, she supposed. Her mother had been so badly disfigured by the accident that her casket had been closed, and some subconscious part of Sarah had probably clung to the hope that it was another woman inside. Living with her father when the terrible news came, she’d never felt that she could properly grieve. To give herself over to the devastation of that loss would have shown him the truth, that she’d loved her mother more, this at a time when his own troubles were fast closing in and he was teetering dangerously on the brink. Had her own recent scare given her long-delayed permission to imagine this woman’s loneliness and, finally, to grieve her loss?
    Possibly. Except that somehow it seemed less like grieving than…what? Sarah couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it was more like a conversation between them had been left unfinished, as if one or the other had started to say something important and then been interrupted. But what? Several conversations had been left dangling. Was it possible to be in love with two boys at the same time? Should she worry that one of them always played it safe and the other was both reckless and careless? Was it more important to love or be loved? Was Sarah’s great gift—as her mother saw it—incompatible with love? Was that why she’d said, “I’m so, so sorry”? Sarah had tried asking these and many other questions but to little or no avail, her mother invariably retreating further into self-doubt. Then there were all the other conversations they’d have had if her mother hadn’t died. Would she think she’d betrayed her gift by marrying Lou and be angry because she’d squandered what she herself would have valued most of all? Sarah just needed one more hour in her company, maybe in one of those small, narrow New York restaurants they’d gone to—except for that final summer—for an oh-so-late supper after the show before Sarah returned home.
    One hour: her last conscious thought before the rhythm of the rails lulled her to sleep.
    When she awoke, it was with the odd, dreamy sense that her wish had been granted, that the train, whose destination was Penn Station, would make an exception and take her to Grand Central, as it had when she was a girl, where her mother would be waiting at the information kiosk beneath the gold clock. Even more bizarre, her mother would still be forty-six. Damned awkward, that part, being older than your own mother. But otherwise it was a sweet fantasy, and Sarah dreamily indulged it. Maybe they’d
both
move to New Mexico and live in the desert together. By the time the train pulled into the city this lovely vision, instead of diminishing, had become even more powerful, so intense, in fact, that Sarah was actually surprised to realize it was Penn Station, not Grand