Her mother paced back and forth, so every few seconds she flicked into view, passing through the sliver that the Brat could see of the bedroom.
“This has nothing to do with yesterday. I told you I didn’t lose it at the beach. I didn’t. It was next to the sink this morning, right beside my earrings. If they don’t have it at the front desk, then one of the maids took it. That’s what they do, the way they supplement their incomes. They help themselves to whatever the summer people leave around.”
The Brat’s father was silent for a while, and then he said, “Jesus. What an ugly fuckin’ person you are inside. And I had a kid with you.”
The Brat flinched. A prickling heat rose to the backs of her eyes, but she did not cry. Her teeth automatically went to her lip, sinking deep into it, producing a sharp twinge of pain that kept the tears at bay.
Her mother showed no such restraint and began to weep. She wandered into sight again, one hand pressed over her face, her shoulders hitching. The Brat didn’t want to be seen and retreated down the hallway.
She continued past her room, along the corridor, and out the front door. The thought of remaining indoors was suddenly intolerable. The air in the house was stale. The air conditioner had been off for a week. All the plants were dead and smelled it.
She didn’t know where she was going until she got there, although from the moment she heard her father dish out his worst—What an ugly fuckin’ person you are inside—her destination was inevitable. She let herself through the side door of the garage and got her Raleigh.
Her Raleigh Tuff Burner had been her birthday gift in May and was also, quite simply, her favorite birthday gift of all time . . . then and forever. Even at thirty, if her own son asked her the nicest thing she had ever been given, she would think immediately of the Day-Glo blue Raleigh Tuff Burner with banana yellow rims and fat tires. It was her favorite thing she owned, better than her Magic 8 Ball, her KISS Colorforms set, even her ColecoVision.
She had spotted it in the window of Pro Wheelz downtown, three weeks before her birthday, when she was out with her father, and gave a big ooh at the sight. Her father, amused, walked her inside and talked the dealer into letting her ride it around the showroom. The salesman had strongly encouraged her to look at other bikes, felt that the Tuff Burner was too big for her, even with the seat dropped to its lowest position. She didn’t know what the guy was talking about. It was like witchcraft; she could’ve been riding a broom, slicing effortlessly through Halloween darkness, a thousand feet off the ground. Her father had pretended to agree with the shopkeeper, though, and told Vic she could have something like it when she was older.
Three weeks later it was in the driveway, with a big silver bow stuck on the handlebars. “You’re older now, ain’tcha?” her father said, and winked.
She slipped into the garage, where the Tuff Burner leaned against the wall to the left of her father’s bike—not a bicycle but a black 1979 Harley-Davidson shovelhead, what he still rode to work in the summer. Her father was a blaster, had a job on a road crew shearing apart ledge with high explosives, ANFO mostly, sometimes straight TNT. He had told Vic once that it took a clever man to figure out a way to make a profit off his bad habits. When she asked him what he meant, he said most guys who liked to set off bombs wound up in pieces or doing time. In his case it earned him sixty grand a year and was good for even more if he ever managed to frag himself; he had a hell of an insurance package. His pinkie alone was worth twenty thou if he blew it off. His motorcycle had an airbrushed painting of a comically sexy blonde in an American-flag bikini straddling a bomb, against a backdrop of flame. Vic’s father was badass. Other dads built things. Hers blew shit up and rode away on a Harley, smoking the cigarette he used to light the fuse. Top that.
The Brat had permission to ride her Raleigh on the trails in the Pittman Street Woods, the unofficial name of a thirty-acre strip of scrub pine and birch that lay just beyond their backyard. She was allowed to go as far as the Merrimack River and the covered bridge before she had to turn back.
The woods continued on the other side of that covered bridge—also known as the Shorter Way Bridge—but Vic had been forbidden to cross it. The Shorter Way was seventy years old, three hundred feet long, and beginning to sag in the middle. Its walls sloped downriver, and it looked like it would collapse in a strong wind. A chain-link fence barred entrance, although kids had peeled the steel wire up at one corner and gone in there to smoke bud and make out. The tin sign on the fence said DECLARED UNSAFE BY ORDER OF HAVERHILL PD. It was a place for delinquents, derelicts, and the deranged.
She had been in there, of course (no comment on which category she belonged to), never mind her father’s threats, or the UNSAFE sign. She had dared herself to slip under the fence and walk ten steps, and the Brat had never been able to back down on a dare, even one she made to herself. Especially on the dares she made to herself.
It was five degrees cooler in there, and there were gaps between the floorboards that looked down a hundred feet, toward the wind-roughened water. Holes in the black tar-paper roof let in dust-filled shafts of golden light. Bats peeped shrilly in the dark.
It had made Vic’s breath quicken, to walk out into the long, shadowed tunnel that bridged not just a river but death itself. She was eight, and she believed she was faster than anything, even a bridge collapse. But she believed it a little less when she was actually taking baby steps across the old, worn, creaky planks. She had made not just ten steps but twenty. At the first loud pop, though, she rabbited, scrambled back and out under the chain-link fence, feeling as if she were half choking on her own heart.
Now she pointed her bike across the backyard and in another moment was rattling downhill, over root and rock, into the forest. She plunged away from her house and straight into one of her patented make-believe Knight Rider stories.
She was in the Knight 2000, and they were riding, soaring effortlessly along beneath the trees as the summer day deepened into lemony twilight. They were on a mission to retrieve a microchip, containing the secret location of every single one of America’s missile silos. It was hidden in her mother’s bracelet; the chip was a part of the gemstone butterfly, cleverly disguised as a diamond. Mercenaries had it and planned to auction the information to the highest bidder: Iran, the Russians, maybe Canada. Vic and Michael Knight were approaching their hideout by a back road. Michael wanted Vic to promise him she wouldn’t take unnecessary chances, wouldn’t be a stupid kid, and she scoffed at him and rolled her eyes, but they both understood, owing to the exigencies of the plot, that at some point she would have to act like a stupid kid, endangering both of their lives and forcing them to take desperate maneuvers to escape the bad guys.
Only this narrative wasn’t entirely satisfying. For starters, she clearly wasn’t in a car. She was on a bike, thumping over roots, pedaling fast, fast enough to keep off the mosquitoes. Also, she couldn’t relax and let herself daydream the way she usually could. She kept thinking, Jesus. What an ugly fuckin’ person you are inside. She had a sudden, stomach-twisting thought that when she got home, her father would be gone. The Brat lowered her head and pedaled faster, the only way to leave such a terrible idea behind.
She was on the bike, was her next thought—not the Tuff Burner but her father’s Harley. Her arms were around him, and she was wearing the helmet he had bought for her, the black full-head helmet that made her feel like she was half dressed in a space suit. They were heading back to Lake Winnipesaukee, to get her mother’s bracelet; they were going to surprise her with it. Her mother would shout when she saw it in her father’s hand, and her father would laugh, and hook an arm around Linda McQueen’s waist, and kiss her cheek, and they wouldn’t be mad at each other anymore.
The Brat glided through flickering sunlight, beneath the overhanging boughs. She was close enough to 495 to hear it: the grinding roar of an eighteen-wheeler downshifting, the hum of the cars, and yes, even the rumbling blast of a motorcycle making its way south.
<
br /> When she shut her eyes, she was on the highway herself, making good time, enjoying the feeling of weightlessness as the bike tilted into the curves. She did not note that in her mind she was alone on the bike now, a bigger girl, old enough to twist the throttle herself.
She’d shut the both of them up. She’d get the bracelet and come back and throw it on the bed between her parents and walk out without a word. Leave them staring at each other in embarrassment. But mostly she was imagining the bike, the headlong rush into the miles, as the last of the day’s light fled the sky.
She slipped from fir-scented gloom and out onto the wide dirt road that ran up to the bridge. The Shortaway, locals called it, all one word.
As she approached the bridge, she saw that the chain-link fence was down. The wire mesh had been wrenched off the posts and was lying in the dirt. The entrance—just barely wide enough to admit a single car—was framed in tangles of ivy, waving gently in the rush of air coming up from the river below. Within was a rectangular tunnel, extending to a square of unbelievable brightness, as if the far end opened onto a valley of golden wheat, or maybe just gold.
She slowed—for a moment. She was in a cycling trance, had ridden deep into her own head, and when she decided to keep going, right over the fence and into the darkness, she did not question the choice overmuch. To stop now would be a failure of courage she could not permit. Besides. She had faith in speed. If boards began to snap beneath her, she would just keep going, getting off the rotten wood before it could give way. If there was someone in there—some derelict who wanted to put his hands on a little girl—she would be past him before he could move.
The thought of old wood shattering, or a bum grabbing for her, filled her chest with lovely terror and instead of giving her pause caused her to stand up and work the pedals even harder. She thought, too, with a certain calm satisfaction, that if the bridge did crash into the river, ten stories below, and she was smashed in the rubble, it would be her parents’ fault for fighting and driving her out of the house, and that would teach them. They would miss her terribly, would be sick with grief and guilt, and it was exactly what they had coming, the both of them.
The chain-links rattled and banged beneath her tires. She plunged into a subterranean darkness that reeked of bats and rot.
As she entered, she saw something written on the wall, to her left, in green spray paint. She did not slow to read it but thought it said TERRY’S, which was funny because they had eaten at a place called Terry’s for lunch, Terry’s Primo Subs in Hampton, which was back in New Hampshire, on the sea. It was their usual place to stop on their way home from Lake Winnipesaukee, located about halfway between Haverhill and The Lake.
Sound was different inside the covered bridge. She heard the river, a hundred feet below, but it sounded less like rushing water, more like a blast of white noise, of static on the radio. She did not look down, was afraid to see the river between the occasional gaps in the boards beneath. She did not even look from side to side but kept her gaze fixed on the far end of the bridge.
She passed through stammering rays of white light. When she crossed through one of those wafer-thin sheets of brightness, she felt it in her left eye, a kind of distant throb. The floor had an unpleasant sense of give. She had just a single thought now, two words long, almost there, almost there, keeping time with the churning of her feet.
The square of brightness at the far end of the bridge expanded and intensified. As she approached, she was conscious of an almost brutal heat emanating from the exit. She inexplicably smelled suntan lotion and onion rings. It did not cross her mind to wonder why there was no gate here at the other end of the bridge either.
Vic McQueen, a.k.a. the Brat, drew a deep gulp of air and rode out of the Shorter Way, into the sunlight, tires thumpety-thumping off the wood and onto blacktop. The hiss and roar of white noise ended abruptly, as if she really had been listening to static on the radio and someone had just poked the power switch.
She glided another dozen feet before she saw where she was. Her heart grabbed in her chest before her hands could grab for the brakes. She came to a stop so hard, with such force, that the back tire whipped around, skidding across asphalt, flinging dirt.
She had emerged behind a one-story building, in a paved alley. A Dumpster and a collection of trash cans stood against the brick wall to her left. One end of the alley was closed off by a high plank fence. There was a road on the other side of that fence. Vic could hear traffic rolling by, heard a snatch of a song trailing from one of the cars: Abra-abra-cadabra . . . I wanna reach out and grab ya . . .
Vic knew, on first glance, that she was in the wrong place. She had been down to the Shorter Way many times, looked across the high banks of the Merrimack to the other side often enough to know what lay over there: a timbered hill, green and cool and quiet. No road, no shop, no alley. She turned her head and very nearly screamed.
The Shorter Way Bridge filled the mouth of the alley behind her. It was rammed right into it, between the one-story building of brick and a five-story-high building of whitewashed concrete and glass.
The bridge no longer crossed a river but was stuffed into a space that could barely contain it. Vic shivered violently at the sight of it. When she looked into the darkness, she could distantly see the emerald-tinted shadows of the Pittman Street Woods on the other end.
Vic climbed off her bike. Her legs shook in nervous bursts. She walked her Raleigh over to the Dumpster and leaned it against the side. She found she lacked the courage to think too directly about the Shorter Way.
The alley stank of fried food going bad in the sun. She wanted fresh air. She walked past a screen door looking into a noisy, steamy kitchen and to the high wooden fence. She unlatched the door in the side and let herself out onto a narrow strip of sidewalk that she knew well. She had stood on it only hours ago.
When she looked to the left, she saw a long stretch of beach and the ocean beyond, the green cresting waves glistening with a painful brightness in the sun. Boys in swim trunks tossed a Frisbee, leaping to make show-off catches and then falling in the dunes. Cars rolled along the oceanfront boulevard, bumper to bumper. She walked around the corner on unsteady legs and looked at the walk-up window of
Terry’s Primo Subs
Hampton Beach, New Hampshire
VIC WALKED PAST A ROW OF MOTORCYCLES LEANING OUT FRONT, chrome burning in the afternoon sun. There was a line of girls at the order window, girls in bikini tops and short-shorts, laughing bright laughter. How Vic hated the sound of them, which was like hearing glass shatter. She went in. A brass bell dinged on the door.
The windows were open, and half a dozen desktop fans were running behind the counter, blowing air out toward the tables, and still it was too hot inside. Long spools of flypaper hung from the ceiling and wavered in the breeze. The Brat didn’t like looking at that flypaper, at the insects that had been caught on it, to struggle and die while people shoved hamburgers into their mouths directly below. She had not noticed the flypaper when she’d eaten lunch here earlier in the day, with her parents.
She felt woozy, as if she’d been running around on a full stomach in the August heat. A big man in a white undershirt stood behind the cash register. His shoulders were hairy and crimson with sunburn, and there was a line of zinc painted on his nose. A white plastic tag on his shirt said PETE. He had been here all afternoon. Two hours before, Vic had stood next to her father while Chris McQueen paid him for their burger baskets and their milkshakes. The two men had talked about the Red Sox, who were on a good run. 1986 was looking like the year they might finally break the curse. Clemens was mowing them down. The kid had the Cy Young locked up, with more than a month left to play.
Vic turned toward him, if not for any reason than because she recognized him. But then she just stood there, in front of him, blinking, no idea what to say. A fan hummed at Pete’s back and caught the humid, human smell of him, wafted it into the Brat’s face. No, she was definitely not feel
ing too good.
She was ready to cry, gripped with an unfamiliar sensation of helplessness. She was here, in New Hampshire, where she didn’t belong. The Shorter Way Bridge was stuck in the alley out back, and somehow this was her fault. Her parents were fighting and had no idea how far away she had got from them. All this needed to be said and more. She needed to call home. She needed to call the police. Someone had to go look at the bridge in the alley. Her thoughts were a sickening turmoil. The inside of her head was a bad place, a dark tunnel full of distracting noise and whirling bats.
But the big man saved her the trouble of figuring out where to start. His eyebrows knitted together at the sight of her. “There you are. I was wondering if I was going to see you again. You came back for it, huh?”
Vic stared at him blankly. “Came back?”
“For the bracelet. One with the butterfly on it.”
He poked a key, and the register drawer popped open with a clashing chime. Her mother’s bracelet was in the back.
When Vic saw it, another weak tremor passed through her legs and she let out an unsteady sigh. For the first time since exiting the Shorter Way and finding herself impossibly in Hampton Beach, she felt something like understanding.
She had gone looking for her mother’s bracelet in her imagination, and somehow she had found it. She had never gone out on her bike at all. Probably her parents had never really fought. There was only one way to explain a bridge crammed into an alley. She had gotten home, sunburned and exhausted, with a bellyful of milkshake, had passed out on her bed and now was dreaming. With that in mind, she supposed the best thing she could do was get her mother’s bracelet and go back across the bridge, at which point she would presumably wake up.
There was another dull throb of pain behind her left eye. A headache was rooting itself there. A bad one. She couldn’t remember ever carrying a headache into a dream before.
“Thank you,” said the Brat as Pete handed the bracelet across the counter to her. “My mom was really worried about it. It’s worth a lot.”