Chapter 5 The Letters Cross

And the letters kept coming, and the bridge kept being built, and the autumn moved over Merrow like a slow tide, turning the willows yellow and the water cold and the evenings long, and Wren and Miles learned each other the way the river learned its banks, by the daily pressure of the water, by the small repeated fact of the other being there, on the other side, at the same hour, under the same moon. They learned each other's silences before they learned each other's names, and the silences were the planks, and the names were the posts, and the bridge was being built out of the only material that can truly hold, which is the patient repeated choice of one person to be there for another. And on the tenth night, after they had written the letters that stopped circling, Wren and Miles did not cross the bridge, and the not crossing was its own kind of promise, the promise that the letters would keep coming, that the bridge would keep being built, that the river would keep carrying what it was given. They stood at their own ends in the dark and felt the planks warm under their feet and the water moving under the deck and the thread running from chest to chest across the river, and they understood that they had begun something that would not end when the letters ended, that the bridge was alive and they were feeding it, and that when it was full, when it had carried enough letters and enough names and enough late-night looking, it would be ready, and they would be ready, and the crossing would be the crossing of a bridge that had been waiting its whole life to be crossed. The letters began to cross the river like small migratory birds, one a night at first, then two, then a whole flock of them, and the bridge at the bend below Cold Spring, which had been a ruin for longer than anyone alive could remember, became the only real post office in the town of Merrow. Wren wrote to the west bank about her father, about the way he filled the silence with the radio and the way the silence filled the house when the radio was off. Miles wrote to the east bank about his father too, about the mill and the torch and the plan, the three generations of men in his family all holding the same orange fire. Wren wrote about Hazel leaving for college and the particular emptiness of a best friend's chair. Miles wrote about the boys at the mill and the way they laughed and the way he had never once felt like one of them. They wrote about the river. They wrote about the bridge. They wrote about everything except the two things they were both circling, which were their names and the night they would finally cross. The bridge itself began to change under the traffic of the letters. Planks that had been half-rotten for years started to feel firmer under their feet, not because anyone had repaired them but because they were being used again, the way a path reappears when it is walked. The water under the deck seemed clearer, the reeds on both banks straighter. Wren noticed it on the fifth night, when she stepped onto the east end of the bridge and felt the wood hold her weight the way a good bridge should hold it, without the small sagging apology she had come to expect. She knelt and looked at the planks and could not find what had changed, and she understood, kneeling on the bridge in the dark, that the bridge was being built by the letters, that every letter that crossed it made it one plank stronger, that a bridge is made of crossings, not wood, and that the wood was only the proof. Miles noticed it the same night from the west bank, the same way, and he knelt on the planks at his end and ran his hand along the grain and felt the wood warm under his fingers in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the night. He did not tell anyone. He did not tell his father, who had begun to ask, with the particular heaviness of a man who has planned his son's life, what he was doing every night, and who was not satisfied with the answers. He did not tell the boys at the mill, who had begun to notice his absence and to joke about it in the way boys joke about things they do not understand. He kept the bridge to himself the way Wren kept it to herself, the way both of them kept the letters, and he wrote to the east bank that night about the warmth of the planks and the strangeness of a bridge that grew stronger the more it was crossed, and Wren wrote back that she had felt it too, and that she had decided the bridge was alive, and that they were feeding it, and that she did not know what it would do when it was full. They wrote the letters on the tenth night the way they had written the first nine, and the tenth letter was different, because the tenth letter was the one in which they stopped circling. Wren wrote: I think about you all day. I think about you when I am supposed to be thinking about other things. I do not know your name and I do not want to know it, because I am afraid that knowing your name will make you real in the way everything else in this town is real, and I want you to stay real in the way the bridge is real, the way the river is real, the way the letters are real. Miles wrote: I know what you mean. I have been afraid of the same thing. But I have also been afraid that if I never know your name, I will spend the rest of my life looking for you in a town full of names, and I will never find you because I will not know which name is yours. They placed the letters the same night, each under the last dry plank on their own bank, and they did not meet in the middle, and they went home along their own banks, and the bridge, half-sunk in the shallows at the bend below Cold Spring, held its breath the way the river holds its breath in the hour before the rain.