Read an Excerpt
Ten years to the day after my sister’s disappearance, my father kills himself. It’s a sleepy Friday night like any other when he drives his car through the rotting barn wall of the most beautiful bridge in town and plunges himself into the shallow waters below. The same shallow waters where divers in seal suits panned for Angie’s remains when all of our better leads ran cold. He doesn’t vanish like she did. He isn’t swept away with the current. His car isn’t even fully submerged. He lands in the rocks, bumper sticking out from the water like a bad joke.
Mom and I stand at the edge of the road in police overcoats, watching as state authorities dredge the car from the riverbank with their big tow trucks. The local cops tape off the entrance to the bridge, which looks like it was hit with a wrecking ball. The sheriff they sent up from Portland tells us there are only nine covered bridges left in the state. Eight now, if they can’t restore this one. It’s the first thing he says. Only after Mom apologizes, only after she assures him that her husband must have been trying to veer off the road sooner, must have been trying to miss the bridge entirely and cut across the steep patch of nothing between the start of the bridge and the end of the guardrail, only after she insists that he must have simply been going too fast, turned a second late, wound up on the bridge—only then does the sheriff volunteer that my dad was killed on impact. He didn’t drown. Small mercies.
My mom thanks the sheriff, and his face softens when he hears her lovely, musical brogue. She turns it up for the occasion, leaning into each lilting syllable.
Mark loved that bridge, she says.
The man pats her shoulder.
I think: I wish it ever stopped raining long enough for me to light this fucking bridge on fire. I wish I could throw a match and engulf the ancient lumber in flames, but I know that it would only self-extinguish in a leftover pile of muddy snow.
For years later, at night, all I will be able to think about is the butt-end of the car sticking up like that and the feeling that, if he wanted to, he could have unbuckled his seatbelt, opened his door, and walked out. From this day forward, Angie will appear in my dreams soaking wet, lips blue. My dad won’t appear in my dreams very much, and I’ll miss him.
Mom closes her eyes and tugs nervously at the streak of white in her auburn hair. She insists on identifying his body alone, and I let her. For now, I am glad, but I will be angry later when I can’t be sure if the bloated, bruised, waterlogged version in my head is more or less grotesque than the real thing. I will grow jealous of her for getting to see him, for the visual proof that convinces even the most stubborn parts of her brain that he is dead.
It will all come later. Things take time.
Before I get a chance to email my boss and ask for Monday sub coverage, he emails me and copies the entire faculty.
Teddy,
We heard. We are all SO sorry for your loss. Take some time to be with your mother. Hank and Wendy have volunteered to cover your classes in the interim. Please let me know when the wake will be held. The school would love to send a spray to Brown’s, and I’m sure members of the community would attend.
Deepest sympathies,
Rick
Principal, Upper School
Other faculty members jump on the thread. Lots of caps lock. Many sad faces.
Teddy, hon! I saw the news. SO SORRY! xoxo Bea
Ted, more bad news for your poor family?! Hang in there, babe. —Wendy
Theodora, I know we don’t know each other very well, but I want you to know that my uncle committed suicide. My prayers are with you and your mother. Let me know if I can help in any way.
Love, Fred (from upstairs)
I send one email to the group before I mute notifications:
My entire St. Aug’s family, I so appreciate your well wishes, and I can’t thank you enough for stepping up to cover my classes. However, we will not be having any public services, and I plan to return to work on Tuesday. I thank you in advance for your discretion with the students over the next
few weeks.
Best, Teddy
Before Angie disappeared, she was very focused on the things she didn’t have: a boyfriend, a car, a beach body, good hair, good skin, a tongue piercing, a full sleeve tattoo, a reliable pot dealer, a chance at a half-decent college, a date for senior prom, a sense of direction. I would sit at the end of her bed and paint her toenails a shade of green or red dark enough to look black, and she would list them off.
When she was gone, it felt like we were drowning in her things: Angie’s CD collection, Angie’s ripped jeans, ripped sweaters, ripped everything. Angie’s sketchbooks, Angie’s textbooks, Angie’s yearbooks, signed with inside jokes that Mom tried to crack like spy code.
I inherited none of it. I couldn’t wear her clothes or her earrings or her perfume. I tried once, with the perfume—a saccharine vanilla scent that I had scored rightfully, as a hand-me-down from herself—and it made Mom so upset that she wouldn’t speak to me until I showered.
The only thing I got was Angie’s dog, an Irish wolfhound—only a puppy then, all legs and wiry, slate-gray fur—that year’s birthday present from my dad, purchased without Mom’s knowledge, a month before Angie went missing. For Angie to take with her when she moved out and started her classes at the community college. A security system.
Wolf was small then. Now he is large and blind. Ten is old for an Irish wolfhound.
“Come on, Wolf,” I say, hauling his gaunt frame into the trunk of my car for another doctor’s appointment, only hours after the bridge. “Help me help you, buddy.”
“Does he need more pillows?” Mom asks.
I look at Wolfie. He lies on his side, long limbs extended toward the back of the car. He is surrounded by pillows.
“Come on,” I say. “The rest are boxed up.”
I regret it instantly, bringing up the move, but Mom doesn’t notice. She kisses Wolfie’s wet nose and shuts the trunk. Since she let her license expire a few years ago, she only leaves the house for doctor’s appointments—Wolf ’s and her own.
Mom hated Wolfie when he first arrived. She had a strict no-animals policy, and his habits of barking when the house creaked in the middle of the night and peeing on her curtains didn’t endear him to her. But Angie trained him quickly and well in a few short weeks. He learned commands and he stuck by her side day and night, sleeping on top of her head when he was small.
Sometimes, I think Wolfie understood that she wasn’t coming back before the rest of us did. The one person he would let touch him was me. He was bereft.
Only when the cops announced that they were giving up did Mom express an interest in Wolfie. She didn’t want to be his primary caregiver. She just wanted to make sure that he was well cared-for since Angie loved him, and he loved Angie, and Angie was gone.
Sometimes, it seems like part of Angie is inside of him. Or he relays messages to her. Or she can hear me when I talk to him. I know it’s only magical thinking. I can only really acknowledge that I believe this when I’m drunk. When I’m drunk, it’s very easy to mistake Wolfie’s calm presence for listening. It’s very easy to understand that if I bury my face in the side of his neck and whisper something into the space where his ear falls against the wavy fur, it will travel to Angie like a message into a tin can telephone.
USUALLY, WE TAKE THE long way to the vet, because the roads are smoother, but today we can’t because of the road closure. Because of Dad. So we take the short, potholed way, and Wolfie cries the whole time in the back as his bones and tumors bounce around. I think of the bumper sticker on the back of Dad’s car. We couldn’t see it last night in the dark, but it was there: In America, we drive on the right side of the road. In Maine we drive on what’s LEFT of the roads. Every divot fills me with more rage, until I’m clutching the wheel so hard my knuckles go white. This is your fault, I think. All your fault.
“Take it easy,” Mom says. “We don’t need another accident.”
As we’re walking into the vet’s office on Main, I spot a clear recycling bag near the door. Inside is a striped lump matted through with bits of gravel and crushed seashells—the kind they use to make rustic driveways for the beach houses.
“What the fuck is that?”
Mom bends down and reads. “It’s a cat,” she says.
“What?”
“Someone hit a cat with their car. Big one.”
I bend down: Please dispose accordingly.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I say. Wolfie is blindly sniffing at the bag. He lifts a paw to prod at it. “Wolf, get away from there.”
“Looks like a Maine coon. They probably didn’t want the turkey vultures coming,” Mom says.
“Let’s go.” I open the door and usher her in before me.
“Tourists,” she spits, despite the fact that we both know there won’t be any tourists for at least two more months.
Wolfie digs in his heels with what little strength he has and forces me to drag him over the threshold with his leash. He hates the vet.
Jen at the reception desk is reading a Nancy Drew. “Oh my goodness. Wolfie. We didn’t think you’d make your appointment today.”
“Well, we’re here,” I say.
“We didn’t want to call,” Jen continues. “We heard what happened.”
“There’s a dead cat outside,” Mom says.
“What?”
“It’s in a bag,” I say. “Hit-and-run.”
“You hit a cat?”
“Not us,” I say. “Someone else.”
“They left a note.” Mom gets close enough to see what Jen is reading. “Those books are for children.”
“I wanted to see if it was appropriate for my daughter before—”
“Mom.” I take her elbow. “Sit.”
Mom lets me guide her into one of the hard plastic chairs. “Wolfie’s having a hard time breathing,” she says, to no one in particular.
I smile at Jen, but she’s already pushing through the swinging door to retrieve the doctor. Before she disappears, I think I see a flash of something quizzical and accusatory on her face.
Dr. Miller seems equally confused by our presence. She knew my dad from some early visits, and she liked him. He was a nice man, she says. He played with all the dogs in the waiting room.
“Sounds like him,” I say.
Wolfie trembles for the full duration of his visit. We weigh him on the floor scale. All three of us dance around the metal rectangle trying to steady him without altering the reading. Seventy-nine pounds. A lot for most dogs, but not much for Wolf.
“What’s the situation?” Mom asks.
“The cancer has spread again,” the doctor says. She illuminates the X-rays, and even I can tell that Wolfie’s organs are marred with tumors. “There is nothing left to do for him.”
I expect Mom to ask for a second opinion, to insist that someone must be able to operate. Instead, she says, “Probably better that he enjoys the time he has left.”
“I agree,” the vet says, with relief. She’s used to Mom’s internet research on the effectiveness of infrared heat and B16 and doggie yoga and other things that people in Boston or New York might do, but that don’t really exist here, where dogs are still treated like animals.
“What can we do to make him comfortable?”
Dr. Miller drones on about organic food and the power of touch, as if we don’t already spend all our time and money spoiling Wolfie. It’s only after Mom has paid the exorbitant visit fee and we’re back in the car that I realize I didn’t ask how much time he had left.
“Shit,” I say. “That would have been good to know.”
Mom disagrees. “They tell you one thing, but you never really know.”
The car lurches, and Wolfie yelps. It can’t be long.
