Bridge of Sighs

and I’m beggin’ you to stay. Tell me that ain’t stupid. My husband use to say to me
Rosebud, how my s’posed to get what you want when you doan know what it is? Make up you mind, woman, ’fore I lose mine tryin’ to please you.
I think sometimes he left when he did ’cause he couldn’t take it no more, tryin’ to please a woman who doan know her own mind one day to the next. Feel sorry for that man you got, ’cause it look like he’s in the same boat. Wass this?”
    She was studying the envelope Sarah had just handed her. It contained all the information she’d need if someone came looking for Kayla: their address and the phone number of the Borough house, the phone at Ikey’s, plus Owen’s name and phone number, just in case. Also a check. “That’s to help with your work here, Miss Rosa,” she explained when the old woman discovered it. “I talked it over with Lou, and he agrees.”
    “It’s too much,” she said, but the check disappeared into her apron pocket before her voice fell. “I know ’zactly what I’m gon do with it, though.”
    She looked past Sarah now, out the front door to where Kayla sat fidgeting on the wall next to the big suitcase they’d bought her the day before. She’d been sent outside while the two women said their goodbyes. “You gon take that child to church sometimes, or juss let her grow up heathen?” The question, neither completely serious nor critical, did suggest to Sarah that she was having eleventh-hour misgivings. Or, more probably, she was just feeling, as Sarah was herself, the magnitude of what they were about to do, which was nothing less than altering a human destiny. Or maybe fulfilling it.
    “She looks frightened,” Sarah admitted.
    “Course she is.”
    “We’ll take good care of her,” she said. “Not just me. My husband—”
    “I know that. Wouldn’t let her go nowhere with you otherways.”
    They now stood up, and when they did Kayla leapt to her own feet outside, shifting from one foot to the other, then back again, as if trying to determine which provided the firmer foundation.
    “I’m going to hold you to your promise to come visit,” Sarah said. “We’ll send you the money for the train.”
    “The good Lord willin’,” she said. “I juss got to find somebody to be me for a few days when I’m gone.”
    The two women hugged. “There’s no you but you, Miss Rosa.”
    “Thass true,” the other woman said, smiling. “Take two or three of my ladies to be me, and even then they gon need help.”
    They went outside into the courtyard, and Kayla began to make a strange sound that neither one of them immediately recognized as crying until her face finally came undone.
    “Stop that now,” Miss Rosa told her. “Be seein’ you in no time, and I ’spect to hear good reports ’bout how you gettin’ on. Bend down and give this ole lady a kiss. You gon be a good girl?”
    “I will,” Kayla blubbered, “I promise.”
    “I ’spect at lease one drawin’ a week. Want you to draw me this town you goin’ to and I specially want to know what this lady’s man look like, so draw me a good one there. Anything else catch your eye, you juss draw it for me. Good drawin’s a powerful thing, no mistake. Juss don’t make it so good I fall down in a faint and get me two black eyes, like some folks.” She let the girl go and turned to Sarah. “That remind me,” she said, “you ain’t looked up at that blue door even once. I guess you’re gon be okay.”
    “I think so,” Sarah said. “I hope Mrs. Feldman will be, too.” The old woman’s terrified face, partially obscured by her foggy oxygen mask and haloed by a cloud of wild white hair, had been the first thing Sarah saw when she came to on the floor of the apartment. That’s what she felt worst about. What if her passing out like that had given the old woman a heart attack? Her nose had bled copiously, and her blouse was a sticky sheet of bright red blood. How horrifying for the poor old woman. Except for the people who brought her noon meal and cleaned her apartment and replaced her oxygen tank, no one was allowed beyond the blue door. At the urging—badgering, most likely—of Miss Rosa, she made an exception for Sarah, and this was the result. A bloodstained carpet.
    “Know what I think?” Miss Rosa said. “I think the good Lord forgot about that old woman, livin’ all alone like she does and never talkin’ to Him. He’s gon remember her real soon, though,