Bridge of Sighs

to issue the warrant. “We’ll take care of Bobby,” my mother told her.
    “How?”
    “Lou will see to it,” she said, and Mrs. Marconi looked first at my father and then me as if trying to decide which one of us my mother was referring to, or whether either of us could perform such a miracle. “You go home,” my mother told her. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
    My father’s line. Their roles had reversed. I glanced over at him and saw him thinking the same thing, and he seemed dubious, even though doubting was her job and not his.
    Once Mrs. Marconi and her brood drove away, my mother went over to the till and took out the money we always kept under the drawer and held it out to me, but I had money of my own saved up and didn’t want Ikey’s. When I hesitated, she said, “I’ll do this if you can’t.”
    “No, he’s my friend,” I told her. I’d only hesitated because I wasn’t sure Bobby wanted me or anybody else to help him. When I heard what had happened, I’d gone over to his place and knocked on the door. There’d been no answer, but I had the feeling he was inside and didn’t want to talk to me. That door was never locked, so I could’ve gone right in, but in fact I didn’t really want to talk to him either, mostly because I didn’t know what to say. “Besides, Sarah can come along.”
    “No,” my mother replied, sternly. “Just you.”

    T HE PLAN WAS for me to take Bobby to Lake George, not Albany. There he could catch a bus to Montreal. Under the circumstances, I imagined it would be a somber journey, and I couldn’t guess what we’d talk about. Would he tell me he was glad he’d done it, that his father had it coming? Or would he break down and say it was a terrible, awful thing? Would he do what until now he’d steadfastly refused to and admit how badly he was hurting? But I think I knew better than that, that he’d be the same Bobby of his surfing days, just as I was the same Lucy Lynch, as was demonstrated when I again knocked on his door above the Rexall, my eyes already brimming. Though I hadn’t told him I was coming, he seemed to be expecting me. He’d gathered his things into one small quadrant of that cavernous space, and his clothes were crammed into a duffel. When I told him what we’d be doing, he just nodded, and I knew we wouldn’t talk at all about what had happened.
    The drive to Lake George normally wouldn’t have taken much more than an hour, but I took a wrong turn and got lost, then found the right road again before getting lost twice more. By then we were laughing like a couple of fools, Bobby saying I had to be the worst driver of a getaway car in the history of crime. I offered to let him take the wheel, forgetting his right hand was in a cast, and that got us laughing even harder. At the bus station he didn’t want to take the money I’d withdrawn from the bank, but we both knew he had to, and finally he did. He told me to tell Dec he was sorry about the Indian, sorry he’d made such a mess of things in general, and I didn’t tell him he hadn’t because we both knew better.
    “Remember the footbridge?” I said, mostly for something to say. “How I never had to pay when I was with you?”
    “I never should’ve let them do that,” he said, and I knew he meant the trunk.
    His admission made me uncomfortable, as if I was the one who owed him an apology, not vice versa. “Will you write?” I asked, and I think maybe a little of the old, juvenile pleading crept back into my voice, like when his family moved to the Borough and I made him promise to call with his new phone number. “When you get where you’re going? Sarah will want to write you back. We both will.”
    He nodded. “You should address the letter to Robert Noonan.”
    My incomprehension must’ve been written all over my face. “Why?”
    “Because that’s my name now. I filled out the paperwork on my eighteenth birthday, but it became official just a couple days ago.”
    I could only repeat, “Why?”
    He shrugged. “To piss him off. Seems like overkill now, I admit.”
    I saw that he’d registered the word “overkill” and, if his father didn’t recover, its possible literal application.
    I suppose I looked as horrified as I felt because he said, “Hey, it’s okay.” But how could that be true? How could it be okay to do something so horrible, so irrevocable? In its own way this was more shocking than the beating. When Bobby shouldered his duffel, I