“Wow, you’re young!” she said. Jovial. Maybe it would rub off on him. She bubbled with desire to get to know him better, to unravel whatever it was he had tightly wound around his heart. She cared for Bridge. No matter what, he had something to live for. Estranged or not, he had a family in Clementine. He seemed interesting and intelligent. She tried her best to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
“I feel old,” he said.
“I feel old sometimes, too.”
“Why did you stop me?” he asked. His eyes, hauntingly sad. It was almost as if a shadow fell across them. Supplicating. Like an oil painting of Christ wearing His crown of thorns.
“I care about you. I don’t want you to die. I’m…so glad you didn’t jump.”
He took the lid off his coffee cup, blew across it. Drank and put it down before looking at her.
“Well, you were making so much fucking noise I couldn’t hear myself think,” he said.
He’d caught Tallie so off guard she was blushing as she laughed, covering her face. Voilà! She knew making suicide harder for people who were considering it was sometimes the difference between life and death. She’d read about the suicide rate plummeting in Great Britain after something as simple as swapping the coal gas stoves for natural gas, because too often, suicide came down to a matter of convenience. She was pleased that making so much fucking noise had made a difference. She thought back to her well-intentioned but slapdash therapy session and sloppy rescue techniques, almost choking on her coffee.
“Careful. You’re going to spill everything,” he said. She felt the table steadied and peeked out from between her fingers at him, drinking his coffee again like he hadn’t said a word.
“I’m not apologizing for stopping you,” Tallie said, once she finished laughing.
“I’m not asking you to.”
“Good.”
“What are you going to do now?” he asked after a moment. He leaned over like a sigh, let his weight press against the wall beside them. Suicide casual. He was a stranger, a strange man. Everything about him was oddly both new and familiar when held up to the other men in her life. Bridge had small ears like her dad and her college beau, Nico. Bridge, Nico, and Joel all had nice hands. Bridge looked the most like a storybook lumberjack from a deep forest who’d taken a wrong turn, ended up in the big city. And the rich, golden timbre of his voice reminded her of her brother’s.
“What are we going to do?” she asked. The little boat of nervousness was gone, gone, gone. Bon voyage. She couldn’t see it if she squinted.
They were en route to her place. He’d been quiet so far in the car, only replying to the questions she asked.
“So you have a house or an apartment?”
“I used to. Not anymore, really,” he said.
“You don’t have anywhere to stay?”
“I didn’t say that. I just don’t have a house or an apartment.”
“You have a car?”
“I don’t have a car here. Not in town,” he said.
“How do you get around?”
“I get around all right,” he said. He looked over at her with the backpack in his lap. He kept his hand on top of it. Tallie’s fear scuttled back when she glanced at that backpack. That’s where his torture devices could be—the ropes, the gun, the knives. “Knives Out.” Creepy song to be floating across the coffee shop. Tallie kept hearing the chorus in her head.
It was full dark and still raining, although not as much as before. Halloween was on Saturday. What was she doing? Locked in her car, this stranger in her passenger seat, driving him to her house? This was a perfect horror film she had created, and when they got to her place he’d take whatever it was out of that backpack, murder her, and put her somewhere no one would ever find her. Her parents and brother would be on TV begging for her return. Years from now her brother would write a book about it. It’d be a best seller, get optioned for a movie. One of those kids from one of those teen vampire shows would play Bridge. He’d win an Oscar. Her brother would become a highly sought-after screenwriter and leave his family, start dating one of the young girls from the same teen vampire show.
And all that should’ve kept her from taking Bridge to her house, but none of it did. She never did things like this, and she was leaning into that chaotic energy, eager to see what was waiting for her on the other side. The wide mouth of the world was opening up! Something was happening, something beyond her control. She’d been given the keys to the lion’s cage, and she was inside, petting it. Staring into its pale amber eyes.
BRIDGE
(Driving through the rain. Her car is clean, the radio off. There is light traffic, and Tallie looks both ways even when she has the green light.)
“Let’s see…do you have any hobbies?” she asked him.
“This feels like small talk.”
“You’re right. Okay, big talk…after my divorce, I was so sad I didn’t know what to do. My world was smashed, and it felt like I was blurred out, too. Couldn’t see straight.”
“And now you feel better?”
“Most of the time, yes.”
(A fire engine’s siren screeches the quiet red. Tallie pulls over to let it pass. Her hand is flat on the stick shift. She double-checks the rearview mirror, leaning closer to the churning hurricane in her passenger seat.)
TALLIE
When Tallie’s house was built, the Fox Commons neighborhood was brand-new. A mixed-use community unlike anything else in Louisville. Most residents swapped their expensive cars for golf carts when they got home from work and used them to motor their children to the school playground or the walking trails at sunset, the fountain in the square, the amphitheater overlooking the fishing lake. There was a public pool, several tennis courts, two salons, and a building solely devoted to doctors’ offices—dermatologists, neurologists, allergists, pediatricians, internal medicine, plastic surgery. Residents had their choice of fine dining with plenty of outside seating, including Tallie’s favorite trattoria, Thai noodles, sushi, pizza, and an American bistro with the best burgers in town. There was also a pastel sweet shop where the gelato was made with local milk and an Irish pub lit up with enough lime-green bulbs to turn everyone into Elphaba from Wicked upon entering. Plans for two hotels—one leviathan, one boutique—had been drawn up. The grand-opening ribbon for six neat beige rows of condominiums had recently been cut with a pair of comically large scissors. Lionel was an investor, and he and his wife, Zora, had attended the ceremony, then stopped by Tallie’s for small-batch bourbon and homemade Kentucky jam cake afterward.
The steps leading to Tallie’s white-brick front porch were fringed with pumpkins—some orange, a few blued like skim milk. A fluffy wreath of orange-red-yellow-brown leaves hung on the wide yellow front door. On one wicker porch chair, there was a polka-dotted canvas pillow with the word HOCUS printed on it. On the other, POCUS. The welcome mat read HELLO in loopy black cursive on the stiff hay-colored brush.
“Um, I could make dinner. Are you hungry?” she asked him after they’d gotten inside.