第2章 The West Bank

He sat on the west bank a long time that night, after he had read the letter, with the mill's lights yellow across the water and the bridge a dark line in front of him, and he thought about his father and the torch and the plan, and he thought about the girl on the east bank, the one he had seen at the square a hundred times, the one who always walked with her head down as if she were reading something invisible in the pavement. He did not know her name. He had never once spoken to her. But the bridge was there, half-sunk in the shallows, and the bottle had been under the last dry plank, and the letter had said the bridge is still there, and I am still sorry, and Miles understood that the sorry was not his to make and not his to answer, and that the letter had been waiting for someone, and that he was the someone, and that whatever the letter was asking, he had already, without meaning to, started to carry. He went to the workshop the next day and stood at the torch with his uncle and let the orange sparks fly, and he thought about the bridge the whole time, and his uncle, who noticed more than he said, asked him what he was thinking about, and Miles said nothing, because the bridge and the bottle and the J were not the kind of thing you could say at a torch without burning your hands. He finished his shift and walked the long way home along the west bank, past the mill and the gravel and the old drowned willow, and he stood at the edge of the reeds where the bridge was, and he saw the light of the new bottle under the last dry plank, and his heart did the thing it had been doing all day, the small lurch of a thing being found, and he knelt in the dark and took out the new letter and read it by moonlight, and the letter was signed W, and it said I am here, and I am not sorry, and if you are still there, I would like to know. Miles had not meant to be on the bridge at all. He had meant to be on the far side of the county, at his uncle's workshop in Whitlow, learning to weld the way his father had learned to weld, the way his grandfather had learned before him, the three generations of men in his family all holding the same torch over the same orange sparks. That was the plan, and the plan was the only thing his father talked about anymore, and Miles had come home from the workshop that night, the last night of August, with the sparks still in his eyes and the smell of hot metal in his hair, and he had taken the long way home along the west bank because the long way was the quiet way, and the quiet was the only thing that made his father's voice stop. The bridge appeared out of the dusk at the bend below Cold Spring, and Miles stopped. He had lived in Merrow his whole life, on the west bank, under the shadow of the mill, and he had never seen a bridge here, never known there was anything at this bend but water and reeds and the old drowned willow where the town said a boy had drowned fifty years ago, which was why the bend had no houses and no lights and no name except the name the children whispered. The bridge was not the bridge of any story he had ever been told. It was narrow, old, half-sunk, its deck dark with water and its far end lost in the east bank's reeds, and it stood in the dusk like something that had been waiting for him. He should have kept walking. He knew he should have kept walking. His father was waiting at the mill, the house would be full of the smell of oil and the sound of the radio and the weight of the silence that sat between them like a third person. But the bridge was there, and Miles was seventeen, and the seventeen-year-old part of him that his father had been trying to weld shut for years leaned against the inside of his chest. He stepped onto the first plank. It held. The second sagged and held. He walked the bridge to where the deck went under the water, and he knelt, and he found the bottle. It was a green bottle, corked with wax, wedged under the last dry plank, and Miles knew, before he opened it, that it was for him. Not because he had any reason to think so, but because the bend was his, the way the east bank belonged to the girl he had seen at the square a hundred times without ever once speaking to her, the way the west bank was the place the town had decided belonged to the boys from the mill. He worked the cork out with his knife. The letter inside was folded small, written in ink that had gone brown, and it said, if you are reading this, the bridge is still there, and I am still sorry, and it was signed J. Miles sat on the half-sunk bridge in the falling dark and read the letter three times. He did not know whose J it was. He did not know what the sorry was for. He knew only that the water had kept it for someone, and that he had been the one to find it, and that there was a difference between a thing found by accident and a thing found on purpose, and that he would not be able to sleep tonight, and that he would come back to the bridge tomorrow, and the day after, and that whatever the letter was asking, he had already started to answer. He put the bottle back exactly where he had found it, because the bend was his and the bridge was the bend's and the letter was the water's, and he walked home through the dark along the west bank with the plan for the workshop gone out of his head like a light switched off, and the J burning in his pocket, and for the first time in months, the weight of his father's expectations did not feel like the only thing in the world that was real.