“This Erector Set ain’t pretty, but she sure works hard.” She palmed away more tears. “Story of my life right there.”
“This bridge is important — she connects us to California. Don’t diminish her.”
She wasn’t listening. “What does that mom see right now?”
Right after she said mom, she touched her belly. A short, soft movement.
“If she looked up, which she didn’t, by the way, no one is looking up, no one sees us. But if she did, she’d think she was seeing one bridge when of course it’s two. Ours, right here, the rail bridge, looking like an oversize, elongated H,” I pressed harder on the girder we sat on, “with this huge section of track that just moves as one piece up and down, and when it goes down it connects the rails on the Oakland side to the tracks on the Alameda side.”
Another cry from below but I couldn’t see Cinderella. Strollering back into Oakland, she was blocked from my view by the north tower.
“Then there’s the bridge for cars below us. The Miller-Sweeney — my Miller-Sweeney — a workhorse drawbridge. But we all combine them since we’re neighbors, and make one span out of two, and call it the Fruitvale Bridge.”
“You’re not listening to me,” she said, and she slapped the girder. “What does she see right now?”
I tried to pitch my voice lower so she had to strain to hear. “Right now she sees what’s directly ahead of her, the traffic on Fruitvale, cars headed into Oakland, a few full of trick-or-treaters coming this way to Alameda.”
“No, that mom saw us. She saw our legs kicking back and forth. Someone saw us, right? At least one someone saw us, and that someone found a phone and called the police.”
“We’re not kicking our legs back and forth,” I said.
The wind blew and I felt like I was falling, like I’d lost my grip, so I leaned back until the vertigo went away and I was left with the wind and a pretty woman sitting next to me on the bridge — a pretty woman pretending nothing was wrong, nothing out of the ordinary, even as her nails nervously tip-tapped a nylon rope tied to her neck.
Then the wind eased and we could hear a BART train half a mile off accelerating out of Fruitvale Station.
I glanced at the fingers of one hand. Only my thumb had been cut. I put it in my mouth, tasted dust and blood.
“After I finished the Talk,” she said, “my boy just looked at me. I started thinking maybe he was too young, maybe they were right and I shouldn’t have said anything. But his questions... he always has so many questions. Like, Where did Hammer come from? And he didn’t mean the pound, right?”
The breeze whipped one of her long black curls in front of her eyes. “He didn’t want me making up some fool story about storks, he wanted to know. So that’s why we had the Talk. But after?” She reached for the curl, wrapped it around her finger. “You know how some kids, when they have a question for you, they do that dog thing and tilt their head?” She tried to tuck the curl behind her ear but the wind got brutal for a second. “Know how I mean, right? When they look at you all confused? My boy never did that. He’s never been confused in his life. But he did it right then. Just that once. Went all spaniel on me and tilted his head, thinking about this hurt I just made real. You ever see your mom cry?”
“No.”
“Lucky you. First time my boy saw me cry. First and only. I’ve had plenty of reasons to, but I never did, until then. This wasn’t the birds and the bees. He got the truth. The awful, hurtful truth.”
I think she said hurtful, but we had the wind again, so loud, so high up. Above the buildings, above the trees. Maybe she’d said helpful?
“My boy looked over at Hammer, who was asleep on my bra. That kitty had dragged it into a spot of sun. My boy looks from his cat to me and he asks, It’s the same for cats as it is for people? I just nodded. Mom, he says, I think you better get fixed like Hammer so it doesn’t happen to you again.”
We laughed, both of us, and it was the prettiest sound I’d heard since I’d braced myself against the V support behind me. I took the cover of laughter to try and inch closer, but she’d gone quiet and as soon as my body moved, hers tensed. So I stopped, of course. I had to.
“That idea from my boy?” Again a soft touch to her belly. “The best advice I ever got. But stupid me, right? Did I follow it?”
A car crossed the bridge, honking, and the honk was contagious because two other cars, then three, joined in. The last was an orange Volkswagen, and, in honor of the day, black triangle-eyes and a blocky mouth had been shoe-polished onto the hood, transforming it into a rolling jack-o’-lantern.
She waited like she knew how, and then all those cars were over the bridge and gone. “You didn’t answer my first question about the sirens. Police or fire? I guessed fire.” Then she forgot that she was past it all now, forgot that beauty couldn’t sway her anymore and suddenly she was distracted by the view.
Alameda stretched out long and low on one side of the estuary; shopping center here, houses with their docks along the water starting there, but most everything screened by trees, so many trees lining the streets. On the Oakland side it was warehouses, the glass recycling plant closest with its smokestacks — tall and oversize like on the Titanic. Below them, rising from behind the chain-link fence, were icebergs of crushed glass glittering in the setting sun.
But then the warehouses stopped at the freeway — all traffic, no trees — and the buildings of Fruitvale began. Beyond there were houses on the other side of International, continuing on to 580, then up into the hills where the trees finally regained control.
She looked around us. “Is it always so pretty up here?”
“You are,” I said.
Her gaze came back, away from the hills, searched for the outboard motor someone had just started — there, a few docks down and away, the motor spewing smoke, the smoke more blue than black. Why wasn’t she looking at those clouds? The clouds that were behind everything, those beautiful clouds taking on color. In the late afternoon there was pretty all around — even Oakland looked pretty because we were far enough away that you couldn’t really see the city. If you could really see Oakland you’d turn from it like she’d just done. But now, almost dusk? With the sun picking out some of the windows — glint, flash — from some of the houses from some of the hills?
Glint, flash, glint, as the sun moved lower.
“Very pretty,” I repeated. “Please tell me you know that.”
Her fingers on the rope, strumming it. Her fingers so long. Not strumming. Tapping. Fast, fast, fast, slow. Why hadn’t I noticed that before?
“Do you still play piano?”
She tensed again, looked down at her fingers. Tap tap tap taaap.
She laughed. “I thought you were doing some mind reading there, something fancy. But you aren’t fancy at all, are you? And you most definitely don’t know pretty.”
Some hot, wet smell caught us — diesel, dead fish — swirled around and then was gone.
“Can you get that picture back in your head?” She smiled, thinking about her son again.
I nodded, then tapped my forehead like she’d been tapping — the first four notes of Beethoven’s 5th. Tap tap tap taaap.
“He’s going to be so handsome, the cute is a phase, I can tell. He’s going to leave that all behind and then...”
And then nothing from her.
“What, like Jim Brown?” I asked.
“Nah, he’s going to be more movie-star handsome than football handsome.”