Bridge of Sighs

and says, “Me.” She’s proud, and also challenging any rival interpretation. It’s she and no one else who’s about to enter our lives. Anyone who sees this differently need speak up now or forever hold his peace. No one does. A quiet group, we’ve come together in the present to recall the past and share a vision of the future.
    “Dear God,” my mother finally says, mock-disgusted, because of course tears are rolling down my cheeks and I’m sniffling audibly.
             
     
    A N HOUR LATER I have Ikey’s to myself. Owen has left to meet Brindy and the couples’ therapist they’ve been seeing once a week for the last few months in the hopes of ironing out their differences before giving in to the impending divorce. Why my son would submit to this particular counseling is beyond me. Brindy has freely admitted to the affair she’s been having with the West End man and shown no inclination to give him up. According to Owen, the woman who’s counseling them seems more concerned with his reluctance to show anger or even resentment than with Brindy’s behavior, as if to suggest that Owen has driven her to whatever she’s done. “Do you understand how hurtful your silences can be?” she asked at their last session. “Do you understand that stubborn silence can be a form of aggression? That you dehumanize Brindy by refusing to enter into the discourse, to articulate what you want from her? That your silences are a serious obstacle to true reconciliation? Brindy hasn’t given up on your marriage, Owen, but your silences tell her that you have. There’s another man in Brindy’s life now, Owen. Do you realize you haven’t even told her you want her to break it off with him? Do you realize how hurtful such coldness can be? If you
want
Brindy to be faithful to you and your marriage, you have to verbalize your feelings.”
    I study my son, or rather the man in Sarah’s new drawing, and something about it conveys his genetic ambivalence. No doubt this marriage counselor reminds Owen of every well-intentioned teacher who ever tried to draw him out. His strategy was always to wait them out, and I doubt very much that it’s changed. Eventually, all those teachers gave up and went away, and I’m sure he thinks this counselor will, too. In their last session it was Brindy, not Owen, who snapped under her relentless questioning. “
Look
at him,” she told the therapist. “He’s not going to talk. Can’t you
see
that?”
    I can’t help wondering if the space Sarah’s left next to our son may one day be occupied by the therapist herself, because after that last brutal meeting, she’d asked Owen to remain behind, and surprised him by taking his hand and apologizing for being so rough on him. She was just doing her job, she said, trying, for his sake as much as Brindy’s, to achieve a breakthrough, to get him to at least acknowledge what he wanted. Surely he must want
some
thing, she added, giving his hand a squeeze. “I’d figured her for a lesbian,” he told us sadly, later that evening. “But I guess not.”
    What I suppose I like most about my wife’s new drawing is that its purpose, across the decades, is the same as her earlier drawing. She drew us—her and me—together in that one, which was how I’d known we were. Now she’s telling me that we’re still together, that she’s returned for good. I’m no longer on probation and probably never was. She has restated her vows, in a sense. In my darkest hour I imagined myself lost in Sarah’s Bridge of Sighs, and now she’s given me a work of art I can truly live in. This is no Ghost Ikey’s, no parallel world. It
is
our lives.
    “Are you okay with it?” Sarah asked before driving Kayla home and starting on our dinner. “I thought about putting your dad in. I mean, I feel his spirit in the store every day. It would’ve been the whitest of lies.”
    “No,” I told her. “You did exactly right. And putting Kayla where Bobby was…” But I promptly stopped, unable to continue.
    “That felt right, too,” she said, raising her index finger to touch Bobby in the old drawing, a gesture that would’ve troubled me before but doesn’t now, and not, I hope, because he’s gone. When the phone rang that morning two months ago, I’d expected it would be Sarah, telling me her train had been delayed, or that she and Kayla had decided to stay in the city another day. Instead it was a reporter from the principal Albany newspaper