Bridge of Sighs

Lou-Lou, but he’s the one that’s confused, not us.” Owen chuckles and shoots me a glance. Kayla’s enthusiasm seldom allows for niceties of transition. We’ve been trying to get her to slow down by asking, “What belongs between those two sentences?” and offering various suggestions: “because,” “nevertheless,” “still,” “also.”
    On the other side of the wall I hear the whirring vibration of my mother’s mechanical chair. That she, too, is to be present for the unveiling testifies to how historic an event this has become. I have to admit I’m puzzled, because Sarah usually refuses any hint of fanfare about her work, which means that this has to be more about us than the object itself. Kayla, who’s already seen what lies under the drape, has been excited about showing me all day long and apparently feels she’s waited long enough. She hops up onto a stool and is about to do the unveiling herself until Owen says, “Hold on, sugar,” and loops his arm around her waist and gently lowers her back to the floor, her long legs churning in the air. “We’re supposed to wait for Mom and Grandma Tessa.”
    But Kayla doesn’t want to wait, and she hops right back up on the stool, determined to uncover what’s hidden from view right this second. Again Owen prevents her, and this time her eyes flash with anger that’s real and bright as he sets her back down. We don’t see this often, though when Kayla’s overexcited or unexpectedly thwarted she can lose control. “Let me
go,
” she says to Owen, who’s now standing between her and the stool, and she tries again to dart around him.
    “Hey,” he says, his expression serious now. “Who’s bigger, you or me?”
    And for a moment it seems as if Kayla will push or strike him, anything it takes to remove this obstacle to her will. Since she’s decided what she wants to do before Sarah and my mother appear, nothing will make her happy but doing so, and time is running out. We hear the mechanical chair come to rest, and Kayla turns to me, her face a mask of rage. “
Tell
him!” she says.
    “Kayla,” I say, and we stand in just this attitude until the bell rings over the front door, and this releases the spell. Kayla’s fury vanishes without a trace as my mother and Sarah step inside. I meet Sarah’s eye, and she takes in at a glance that we’ve just experienced what she and I refer to as a Kayla moment.
    The girl wasn’t with us very long before we realized the dark recesses in her personality contained the glowing embers of some past experience, embers that under the right conditions could ignite into a conflagration, only to disappear again so completely that you’re not exactly sure what you just witnessed. At first these flare-ups seemed to happen when she hadn’t gotten her way, but that explanation doesn’t square with all the other times when her will is thwarted without consequence. Rather, the infrequent episodes seem to occur when for some reason Kayla decides she isn’t loved, or that someone else is loved more.
    Whatever the cause, they have alarmed us sufficiently to discuss them with a social worker from Albany who specializes in children, and she alarmed us further by asking just how determined we were to proceed with Kayla’s legal adoption. “You don’t know what this child has suffered,” she said. “And you may never know the extent of the damage done.” Sarah doubts that Kayla has been sexually or otherwise physically abused, though there’s no doubt that the love she craved desperately has been withheld, until now. “People get broken,” the social worker concluded. “Sometimes they can be repaired, sometimes not. You might do everything right and this could still end badly.”
    “How will it end if no one does anything?” Sarah asked. She wasn’t trying to be confrontational or to deny anything the woman had said, but I’d heard that determination in her voice before and knew what it meant. The social worker herself seemed to suspect, because she then turned to me. “What do you think, Mr. Lynch? Because I can tell you this much for a certainty. You and your wife had better be on the same page.”
    What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His