Bridge of Sighs

Gabriel Mock into the middle seat. Then she and I lift her bike into the newly created space and close the door. But once I’m behind the wheel and she’s belted into the seat next to me, she remembers something so exciting she almost triggers the air bags. “I found the cave!” she practically shouts.
    My heart flutters even more frantically than it did when I pulled up and saw her bike leaning up against the fence and no Kayla. “Did you go in?” I finally ask.
    She stares at me wide eyed.
“No way!”
she says, shuddering at the mere thought, which makes me happy, knowing that her brashness has limits.
    Also, I take heart in the knowledge that we’re not so different, she and I. Because I remember vividly the day I found the cave entrance myself. I’d been searching for it all that summer, and I felt hugely disappointed that it was just a hole in the side of the hill, small enough to be hidden by a bush, nothing like the caves you saw in movies, with openings large enough for a warrior to ride into on a great steed. I also recall standing there in despair, having found what I’d been searching for for so long yet was now afraid to explore. I got down on my hands and knees to squint into the dark opening, trying to see inside, but it was like staring straight down into a pool of black water, and I caught a whiff of something rancid inside. And it occurred to me that whatever made that stink might be just inside, staring back out at me. Next summer, I remember telling myself. Next summer I’d be bigger and braver. I’d bring a flashlight. I’d do it. I would. Of course I never did.
    All of which reminds me of my unfinished story. I’ve done no more work on it since the afternoon I made it halfway across Sarah’s Bridge of Sighs painting, but I still think about it, especially when, like now, something from those early years occurs to me that I haven’t included. Still, the urge to put it all down, to have my complete record, has mostly dissipated, and this I credit to Kayla, who’s made the present more urgent than the past. Indeed the present, most days, is all I can handle, all I have need of.
             
     
    B EFORE GOING to Ikey’s we drop Gabriel off at Berman Court. En route he tells Kayla how slow witted I was as a child, how I’d insisted that if you climbed
up
a ladder to the moon, you’d still be looking
up
at the earth when you got there. Naturally, Kayla took my side, making the same argument I’d made so many years ago that
up
was determined by gravity, not direction, but Gabriel was still having none of it, though he winked at me in the mirror to indicate how much fun he was having with all this.
    “This is where you used to live when you were a boy,” Kayla says after I’ve helped Gabriel step out of the van and up the walk to the apartment house, and she’s pointing up to where our apartment was, as well as the one where Bobby and his family lived.
    “Maybe you’ll be our family historian,” I joke, putting the van in gear and heading for Ikey’s.
    Kayla, though, takes this possibility seriously. “Maybe,” she says. In case she isn’t a painter or an Olympic sprinter or any of the myriad possibilities we’ve discussed of late. Then, once we pull up in front, “Sarah’s here,” she says excitedly. “Mama, I mean,” she quickly corrects herself.
    Referring to Sarah as Mama isn’t something we’ve particularly encouraged, since her real mother’s still alive and it’s possible, if unlikely, she’ll one day enter the picture again. But Kayla has a mind of her own and announced shortly after arriving in Thomaston that Sarah would henceforth be “Mama,” and she has been, except when things happen unexpectedly or just too fast for Kayla to handle.
    Owen’s at the register, chatting with a couple of the guys from the Elite Coffee Club, which still gathers at Ikey’s in the morning, the sons and even grandsons of the original gang, most of them. This morning I mentioned there’d be an unveiling of a new work of art in the afternoon, and they all promised to be here, and a couple of them actually remembered. Sarah’s new piece, draped, has been hung just to the right of her old drawing of Ikey’s, a place of honor in the store.
    “Kayla,” my son says when she skips around the counter to give him a kiss and a hug. “What’s shakin’, sugar?”
    “I found the cave!” she tells him. “Mr. Mock says I don’t know up from down and neither does