Bridge of Sighs

free cigarettes or free anything. This, I intuited, was the price of being Lou and not Lucy, which meant the cigarettes
would
be free, just this once.
    “Let’s go,” Jerzy said, then hooked his index finger into the waistband of Karen’s slacks and gave it a gentle tug. When the material stretched, I could see that his finger was between her bare skin and her underpants—a gesture made even more staggering by the fact that she didn’t seem to object. Sex, I thought, just that one word. That slender finger slipped down between her bare skin and panties meant sex. And during all of this she never once took her eyes off me.
    “See you around, neighbor,” she said, though I only half heard. Jerzy had pivoted, letting go of her waistband—the snap was audible—and was heading for the door. Karen followed, saying, over her shoulder. “Thanks for the cigs, Lou. You’re a prince.”
    The front of Ikey Lubin’s was all glass, and from behind the register I had a clear view of our house. At the precise instant Jerzy put his hand on the knob and pulled the door toward him, our front door opened and my father emerged, as if the two events were connected by a single cause, and I had the eerie sense that until the moment Jerzy opened the door, my father had been trapped inside our house, unable to come out onto the porch. Was it my imagination, or was there some urgency to his step as he came across the intersection?
    “Who was that?” he wanted to know, shutting the door behind him.
    “Who?” I said, lamely.
    “Them two that just left,” he said, glancing at the cigarette rack where the single packs were kept. For an instant I wondered if he’d counted them before leaving for dinner and now was counting them again. But a second later he was looking only at me.
    “A couple kids from school,” I said, meeting his gaze before looking down. If I told him their names, would he recognize Jerzy Quinn’s? Had my father ever learned the names of the boys who’d locked me in that trunk so long ago? And what would he do if he made the connection across the intervening years?
    He seemed about to say something else, but just then, on the other side of the wall, we heard the sound of feet pounding up the stairs to the apartment above. “They’re back,” I said, meaning the brothers, but I knew it wasn’t them. No pickup trucks had pulled up outside, and though the noise of tramping feet was loud, it wasn’t nearly as loud as they’d been all afternoon, big, heavy men pushing and shoving one another into the walls, pounding the uncarpeted stairs with their boot heels. Suddenly I understood what Karen had meant by calling me neighbor.
    That night my mother regarded me suspiciously when I announced my intention to go to bed early, wanting to know if maybe I was coming down with something or felt one of my spells coming on. What I wanted was to be alone in the dark. For hours I lay awake, thinking it all through. Karen Cirillo and I would be neighbors. I would likely see Jerzy Quinn every day. If she became my friend, did it follow that he would? The idea was almost too thrilling to contemplate. Of course it troubled me that I’d betrayed my father by giving away a pack of cigarettes. In doing so, was I not hastening my family toward financial ruin? Mostly, though, I lay there thinking of how casually Jerzy had slipped his finger into Karen’s waistband, and I tried to imagine myself doing something equally brazen and confident.
    I don’t know what time it was when I finally fell asleep, but I remember no longer minding so much that Bobby had moved away. If he and his family still lived above the Spinnarkle sisters, then I’d have to share Karen and Jerzy. And they now represented to me the embodiment of the mystery I’d come to feel was at the heart of everything, a mystery as deep and profound as why my parents loved each other, as why some people had to pay the footbridge toll while others did not, as why a woman like Mrs. Marconi felt the need to run away from her own family, all as inexplicable as the mystery of my own suddenly fluid identity. If I played my cards right, I could be Lou Lynch, like my father, not a boy with a girl’s name. Wasn’t that what Karen had implied when she introduced me as Lou? I considered again the possibility that my destiny wasn’t etched in stone. The door to the future was suddenly wide open, and the light pouring through it, there in the darkness of my room, was