第3章 The Second Letter

And Wren, walking home along the east bank with the stranger's answer in the dry pocket over her heart, understood that she had found the thing she had not known she was looking for, and that the finding of it had changed the shape of the town, the shape of the river, the shape of her own seventeen years. She had thought, before the bridge, that her life was a straight line from the east bank to the iron bridge at the square to the rest of the world, and she had been wrong, because the line had a bend in it, a bend below Cold Spring where a half-sunk footbridge crossed the water, and on the other side of that bridge there was a boy whose name she did not know and whose letter she had just read, and the not knowing was the beginning of the knowing, and the beginning of the knowing was the beginning of the bridge. The answering had begun, and the beginning was a bottle and a plank and a night, and both of them knew, the way people know the shape of their own lives at seventeen, that the answering would not stop, that the bridge at the bend below Cold Spring had been waiting its whole life for someone to use it, and that they were the ones, and that the water moving under the deck would be carrying their letters from now on, one at a time, each letter a small plank in a bridge that was being built by the crossing of it, and Wren and Miles, on opposite banks, on the same night, under the same moon, began to build. The town of Merrow slept on, east bank and west bank, never the two, and the bridge at the bend below Cold Spring stood half-sunk in the shallows with its two ends in two different worlds and its middle in the water, and the water, patient and brown and full of kept things, began to carry something new. Wren came back to the bridge the next night, the first night of September, with a flashlight in her jacket and her heart doing its new nervous arithmetic in her chest. The town was asleep. The east bank was empty. The bridge at the bend below Cold Spring was silver under the moon, its planks dark with dew, and Wren stood at the east end and looked at it and felt the same small door in her chest open a fraction wider. She had thought about the letter all day. She had thought about it through the first day of senior year, through the crowded hallway and the teachers' voices and Hazel's chatter about college, and the letter had sat in her pocket the whole time, a stone she could not put down, and she had decided, walking home in the afternoon, that she would write an answer. Not because she knew who J was, or whether J would ever come back to the bridge, but because the letter had been waiting eleven years and she could not bear the idea of it waiting one day longer for an answer. She had brought paper. She had brought a pen. She had brought, in the pocket of her jacket, a small green bottle of her own, emptied and washed and dried, because it felt wrong to answer a letter that had come out of the water with anything less than a bottle to carry the answer back. She sat on the dry planks at the east end of the bridge, in the dark, with the flashlight off, and she wrote her answer by moonlight, slowly, the way you write when you are not sure the person reading it will ever read it. She wrote: I found your letter. I am seventeen, and I live on the east bank, and I have lived here my whole life, and I never knew the bridge was here until you told me. I do not know who you are. I do not know what you are sorry for. But I am here, and I am not sorry, and if you are still there, on the other side, I would like to know. She did not sign it with her name. She signed it with an initial, W, because that felt right, because the letter had been signed with an initial and an answer should be signed with an initial, because the bridge, she understood, was not the kind of place where people gave their full names to each other. She folded the paper small, put it in the bottle, corked it with wax from the candle she had brought, and she wedged it under the last dry plank, exactly where the first bottle had been. She stood on the bridge a long time after she had placed the bottle. The water moved under the deck, brown and slow, and the reeds whispered on the west bank, and Wren understood that she had just done something that mattered, something that had changed the shape of the world, though she could not have said what the new shape was. She walked home through the dark with her hands empty and her pocket lighter, and she felt, for the first time since her mother had left, that she was holding the far end of something that was holding her back. Miles came to the bridge an hour later, on the west bank side, with a flashlight he did not turn on and a green bottle in his pocket that he had spent the whole day thinking about. He found the new bottle under the last dry plank almost immediately, and he opened it with hands that were not quite steady, and he read W's letter by moonlight, and he read it twice, and then he sat on the half-sunk bridge in the dark with the letter in his hands and the water moving under his feet and the east bank's reeds dark across the water, and he understood, with the same sudden clarity Wren had felt the afternoon before, that the bridge at the bend below Cold Spring had just become the only real thing in his life, and that whoever W was, he was going to answer, and the answering was going to change everything.