Bridge of Sighs

is back on, though not until next summer, and of course we won’t be driving there. By then we’ll know if Kayla is ours and also have the documents required to leave the country.
    Those two have made a running joke out of my reluctance to leave home, and naturally I play along. When the time comes for us to go somewhere, Kayla takes me by the hand and drags me to the front door, where I grab hold of the frame, and she grunts until she finally gets me outside and strapped into the van, and away we go to wherever they’ve planned. When we get there I pretend not to like it, and Kayla patiently explains why I should. Finally I give in and say I’m glad to have come, though I like home, too, and Kayla agrees that where we live is a good place. It’s a good game, partly, I suppose, because it’s rooted in truth. Anyway, the idea is that I’m gradually being made a traveler; and so far, so good. I’m an old dog with a new trick. I am, I realize, the same man I’ve always been: Lucy Lynch. But this child, this late gift, has worked a remarkable transformation, taking me out of myself for longer periods than I’ve ever known.
    “Mr. Mock,” I say, “your fence has fallen into disrepair.” No one has gone near it in at least a decade, and the old, flaking lacquer has been replaced by red rust, a fact that would’ve given Sarah’s father great pleasure. Actually, of late he’s been much on my mind. I still remember his vitriolic lectures about our revered ancestor, starting with the delight he took in reminding us that he was a slaveholder who sold arms and liquor to the local Mohawks, whipping them into a bloodthirsty frenzy before loosing them on German and Dutch neighbors as far away as Albany. Tory to the bone, he fled to Canada on the eve of the Revolution, fully intending to return once the insurrection was quelled. Sarah’s father believed that on occasion Sir Thomas himself partook of his savages’ pagan rites, running naked through the woods with his body painted as garishly as any Mohawk’s. His fellow settlers had no idea who it was that buried the tomahawk in their skulls with such force and relish. There was no evidence he played a role in the Cayoga Massacre, but Mr. Berg believed he had, so that when the stream ran red that first time, he became, in a sense, its first polluter. We moderns simply esteemed his wealth, poor pathetic creatures that we are. Gathered at the fence designed to keep us out, we stared with longing at his vast shell of a house, imagining the grand parties to which our own ancestors never would have been invited.
    Which always reminds me of the day my father took me here after yet another tour of the Borough. How odd we must’ve looked, sitting in a milk truck at this very gate, as if intending to make a delivery to a house that hadn’t been inhabited in over a century. “I don’t know what he done to be so rich,” I remember him saying, “but people must’ve liked him.” As he saw it, that’s where wealth came from—people liking you more than they did the next fellow. I’ve always thought the greatest difference between Sarah’s father and my own wasn’t that one was highly educated, the other not at all. No, their most cherished beliefs were based not in knowledge or its lack, but in temperament. It was my father’s habit to give people more credit than they had coming, whereas Sarah’s gave them less. I don’t think either tendency necessarily makes a man a fool, but both our fathers were anxious that the world conform to their belief. Each was happy when it did, unhappy when it didn’t, and neither seemed able to accommodate any contrary evidence, which I know from my own experience can be unhealthy in the extreme. Odd, how I grew up thinking my parents were opposites, my father the optimist, my mother the cynic. In reality, she occupied the middle ground between his willfully blind faith in the basic goodness of his fellow man and Mr. Berg’s equally blinkered and needy belief in its corruption.
    I’m about to start looking for Kayla when she calls “Lou-Lou!” and I see her coming down the fence at a dead run. Need I say how much it pleases me that she uses the pet name Sarah once gave my father?
    A moment later she’s hanging off me, her spindly arms locked around the back of my neck. “You’re getting heavier every day,” I say when she finally lets go.
    “And
faster,
” she says, as if I’ve altogether ignored the most important