Bridge of Sighs

part. “Watch!” And then she dashes off, sprinting a good fifty yards to the nearest large oak, her arms churning, and then back again, out of breath now, resting her forehead on my breastbone. Most days she wants me to see how much faster she’s gotten than the day before, as if I had a stopwatch and had measured the various distances in advance.
    “Girl makes me tired just watchin’,” Gabriel says.
    “You and me both, Mr. Mock,” I agree, gathering her in. When she finishes hugging me, she goes over and gives Gabriel another, which I can tell makes his day. The first time she told him he stank, but since then he’s passed hygienic muster, so I’m not the only one who’s been transformed by Kayla’s arrival in our midst. For nearly a decade Gabriel’s merely been going through the motions, living more meaningfully in memory’s twilight than reality’s noonday sun.
    “I think I might be an Olympic track star,” she tells us with a sigh, adding this possibility to the long, long list we’ve been cataloging. Energy restored, she begins to skip. “I’m really good at a lot of things, huh?”
    “Better not let your grandma Tessa hear you bragging,” I warn her.
    At the mention of my mother, her face clouds over. “How come she doesn’t like me?”
    “She likes you fine,” I assure her, just like I do every day. In this respect Kayla could be a direct descendant of my father. She just can’t understand why anybody wouldn’t like her, an opinion that could derive only perverse obstinacy. In truth, I don’t know why my mother hasn’t warmed to her. I doubt it has anything to do with Kayla herself, only in what Sarah and I are attempting: to adopt her and to finish the job of raising her in Thomaston, an experiment doomed, in her view, to failure. “You haven’t seen enough heartbreak?” she said when I first explained this. She was referring to Gabriel Mock, of course, and his son, and to every other black kid she’d known growing up, most of whom still live on the Hill. She seems to think our purpose is a social experiment akin to Mr. Berg’s, though nothing could be further from the truth.
    “If it makes you feel any better,” I tell Kayla, “I was never sure she liked me either.”
    But she misses most of my attempted reassurance because she’s gotten hold of my left hand and is straightening out my fingers, which curl up again as soon as she lets go.
    “What do you think?” I ask. “Better today?”
    “Definitely,” she says, though what we have here is another subjective measurement, like her sprint to the oak.
    “I think so, too,” I say, winking at Gabriel. “What do you think, Mr. Mock?”
    “Never mind them fingers,” he advises her. “Fix that crooked grin. Makes him look even more like his daddy and he looks enough like him already.”
    She comes up on tiptoe, puts an index finger to the corner of my mouth and pushes up, so my smile isn’t lopsided anymore. The slightly cramped fingers on my left hand and my asymmetrical smile are the only effects remaining from my stroke last month. At the end of the day my left foot will sometimes drag a little, but otherwise I’m back to normal and I feel better than I have in a long while. The cholesterol medication seems to be doing the trick, and Kayla has made it her personal mission to make sure I don’t cheat on my new diet. People don’t seem to realize that for me, the stroke was a gift, a demonstrable physiological event that actually left some evidence in its wake. For the first time a CAT scan did reveal damage. Not severe or irreparable, of course, and I’m grateful for that, but proof something had happened, something that could be documented. Instead of my not being
right,
something was
wrong
with me, a tiny semantic difference to anyone except me. Ironically, on the basis of this sole event, it’s now been decided that I’ve probably been suffering from ministrokes all along. TIAs, they’re called, common enough, if rare among children. The other possible explanation for my spells is even more esoteric, something called organic brain syndrome, which so far as I can tell is a grab bag of symptoms that remain unexplained by any other diagnosis. The most honest of the numerous specialists I’ve consulted just shrugged and admitted, “There’s so much we don’t know.”
    The rear seats of our van fold down into the floor with minimal effort, a job Kayla loves to perform, so I let her do it while I help