At night, the pale green bridge is illuminated. Lights flicker across blue water. It’s a tied-arch bridge, rising high above Lake Michigan. The horizontal forces of the arch are held in tension by a chord that connects both ends of the arch. The bridge spans the harbor, connecting the city to the port. In heavy fog, it’s like driving through nothingness. In winter, you can drive in a frozen sky, drifting over icy water.
I had to drive across the bridge when my son went to live with his father. He was fifteen. Days and nights on the road.
__________
My son’s father called it The Bridge to Nowhere.
“Why do you always call it that?” I asked early on.
“It took a long time to finish,” he explained. “For several years, there were no freeways to connect the bridge at either end. It was a bridge to nowhere.” He laughed at his own story, but I didn’t fully understand the joke.
He turned up the radio to a song about a road to nowhere. I traveled to a faraway city in my mind, a place I wished I was.
I stared ahead. He held the wheel with his right hand. The left hand extended a Camel straight cigarette out of the window. Ashes fluttered into the car.
__________
I fell for him when I was seventeen. I met him shortly after I moved to the US with my father, following the tragic and unexpected deaths of my mother and brother.
I was a new arrival from the UK. Green, slanted, far-set eyes. Long red hair. I rolled my own cigarettes with Golden Virginia tobacco and the green Rizla rolling papers from home.
He always packed both ends of a soft cigarette pack into the palm of his hand. Tap. Tap. Tap. I had never seen such a thing. Then he shook out a single cigarette and tapped it onto a hard surface, to prevent any loose tobacco from spilling out. With his head tilted to one side, he lit the cigarette. Deep inhale. Smoke wafted into the air. An olive-green, felt fedora hat cast a shadow over his deeply lined face. I didn’t know it then, but the lines were drawn from bitterness and anger. They arrived before their time. He was twenty-seven.
__________
We split up before my son’s second birthday. I was nineteen. I had arrived at the relationship too young to know any better. I carried my unresolved grief and trust issues from a childhood fraught with addiction and neglect. A weight enough to drown a person.
To the relationship, he contributed violence and rage, fueled by an unrelenting need to exert control and dominance over me. When things got violent, I had to break away.
My son and I grew up alongside each other. We were a family of two.
I loved everything about being his mother: making green eggs and ham, going on star walks, reading bedtime stories, picking out his clothes: tiny striped dungarees over a tiny white sweatshirt.
__________
Lake Michigan is known as an inland sea, due to its turbulence and strong winds, storms that generate high waves and rough waters. Mariners tell of superstitions, shipwrecks, and sinkings.
When my son was fifteen, I had to drive across the bridge to pick him up from his father’s house. Giant gusts of wind pulled my car. Great swells of air from the depths of Lake Michigan threatened to pull me under. I was deathly afraid of heights.
I held the wheel tightly with both hands.
I was driving my old Toyota Tercel, with a faded red matte finish, purchased for $1000. I’d saved the money for it waiting tables. I remember working at a restaurant and saving my employee meal to take home and give to my son: a California wrap with waffle fries.
‘Landslide’ by Fleetwood Mac accompanied me on my journey. An aching, truthful moment, the words themselves an undertow: I’ve built my life around you.
The song always makes me cry, dredging up the deaths of my mother and brother, as well as my father and sister who died shortly after I left the UK. The lyrics captured how completely lost I felt. I was inside a landslide, losing everyone around me.
As he got older, my son and I went through a lot of conflict. I responded with stress, fear, and worry. They were my constant companions. He chose to live with his father. I felt a sharp pain inside my body, as if I’d been cut with a dull knife.
I held the wheel tighter, tears running down my face, drying my eyes when I pulled up to pick up my son. The front door of his father’s house opened and my son came out, always a flash of brilliant colour, the brightest of my day. Through the window, I caught a glimpse of the life he was leaving behind: his father’s wife, three beautiful daughters with blonde hair.
On the way back over the bridge, I drove in the lane closest to the guard rail, as that was the safer place to be. It was counter-intuitive, but the sweeping gusts of wind from the lake below would skim over the vehicle closest to the guard rail.
On some nights, I’d have to drive him back to his father’s house, as that was where he wanted to sleep. I tried to prioritize harmony over everything, even though I was never that great on the harmony front.
“If that’s what you want. We’ll leave soon, ok.”
I’d slip into the kitchen to hide my emotions, fight back tears, take a deep breath, grab the car keys.
After another drive across the bridge, I’d drop him off at his father’s house. The flash of colour went back inside the house. The only colour of my day.
I made the day’s fourth trip back over the lake. I counted the number of crossings with bitterness and internal conflict. I blinked away tears that made it hard to see straight. Lake Michigan faded to black, this time on my right. Twinkling lights lit up the harbor, shimmering across the water.
Was my life stuck in a loop of eternal recurrence? A thought experiment? I felt a sense of derealization, as if I wasn’t even really there. Did I even exist?
I thought about drifting out of my lane as I tried to manage intrusive thoughts.
I drove home to a place that didn’t even feel like home because my son didn’t live there anymore. It was an empty house. My son’s room was untouched, the bed still made. I’d sob upon entering, pointlessly drawing the curtains against the night sky.
I’d been afraid of changing. I’d built my life around him.
My son felt like my only constant: a brilliant northern star. I felt guilty because I knew that parents are supposed to be the orbital and governing center of their children’s universe.
__________
My son had been living with his father for a few weeks. I let the days go by.
One night the phone rang.
“He has not come home tonight. And I don’t know where he is.” His father’s voice was low and staccato, weary and fatigued. The grim sermon-like tone reflected the fact that he didn’t want to be speaking to me at all.
I flew into a rage.
My mind went to black. I screamed into the phone. A surge of pure hatred twisted in my stomach.
Unlike some fathers who go out for a pack of smokes and never return, my son’s father took the path of episodic abandonment, always getting up to walk out and leave when things became difficult or inconvenient.
“I just don’t have time for either of you,” his voice flat and monotone, “I have my own life.”
I never understood how love could so fully drain out of a person. I wondered if it was ever there in the first place. Why was he so mean?
He’d have the cigarette prepared, tamped down and compact, ready to light up and smoke at the moment when he stepped across the threshold and out of fatherhood.
I reserved one word for him. Bastard.
That night, I paced for hours across the old wooden floors of my house. I smoked cigarettes. I drank to numb my fears. I thought I was going to lose my mind.
I jumped when the phone rang, terrified to answer.
“It’s me. I am safe.” It was my son. “I know you’re worrying about me and I wanted you to know that I am ok.”
He quickly explained that he was calling from a friend’s house. He had the measured voice of a diplomatic hostage. Then the line went dead. I placed the phone carefully down on the receiver, so as not to trip time backwards to the moment before I knew he was ok.
An incoherent mother’s howl. It sounded as if it was coming from outside my body.
My heart took two beats.
I fell away from the present moment of engulfing pain, to when my son was small, when I read picture books to him each night, sitting up in bed.
“Trip! Trap! Trip! Trap! went the bridge.”
“Who’s that tripping over my bridge? roared the troll.”
I remember the way my son giggled the more I exaggerated the troll’s voice.
“Oh it’s only I, the tiniest Billy Goat Gruff,” I said with the smallest voice I could muster.
My son smiled and snuggled up closer to me, as if he was one of the goats who had to cross the bridge.
We lived in a small 1913 apartment. Pots of geraniums in the north-facing windows, forever in full bloom against the rippled lead glass. Pink and red toppling brilliant flowers against bright green leaves. Petals fell on the wooden floor.
We had two yellow and green songbirds in a cage.
When we were living there, my father died suddenly on the way to work. I was twenty-one, my son was three. I raised him in my grief, inside turbulence and pain.
I escaped my grief inside the world of the story books we read each night. A wonderland for two.
We lived with the goats in the lyrical colors, yellow and pale blue, of a Norwegian spring, a faraway hill in imagined safety. All was in perfect harmony. I held my grief at bay.
__________
After the phone call, my son came home in two days.
The bright colors were restored into the house, the way sunlight fills leaves with an even deeper green.
That night, I peeked into his bedroom to check he was still there, a habit that set in when he was a baby. He was sleeping peacefully in his bed under the window. I could see an arc of protective light above him. I felt a lightness in my own heart, yellow and pale blue.
I slept like a child, finding solace within the realm of somewhere, in the place I had built around him.
–
Sarah Harley is originally from the UK. She works at Milwaukee High School of the Arts where she supports her refugee students in telling their own stories. Sarah holds a BA in Comparative Literature and French, as well as an MA in Foreign Language and Literature. Her essays have appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Idle Ink, Glassworks Magazine, Press Pause Press, and elsewhere. You can find her online here: https://www.sarahharley888.com
© 2024, Sarah Harley
Halfway Down the Stairs 