The Bridge Read online

  For Ned and Amy

  and

  For every human being who has ever felt the world would be better off without them

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part A

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part B

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part C

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part D

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Author’s Note and Resources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  APRIL 17, 3:54 P.M.

  Can’t I have this one moment to myself, please?

  This thought sears in Aaron Boroff’s mind as the sobbing girl passes behind him. She’s interrupted his solitude as he stares down at the undulating Hudson River from the south side of the George Washington Bridge.

  He senses her presence as strongly as he feels the concrete walkway shaking frantically below him. He glances right and watches her walk toward New Jersey, head down. Then she stops maybe a hundred feet from him, approaches the ledge, and stands there, looking down at the empty space below her, just as he’d been doing.

  He turns and glares at her. It’s hard to see details from this distance. She’s short, with long jet-black hair. Devastated, definitely. Same reason for being here? Probably.

  He wonders: Which one of us is worse off? His gut twists. Her, of course. I’m such a fucking coward to even be thinking of ending my life. People will forget about me because thinking about me is too embarrassing. I’m a failure in every way and I probably won’t even manage to kill myself right.

  At the same time, he can’t imagine withstanding this hole in his chest even a moment longer. Too, too much. It’s like when he was eight and he wanted his mommy—only to remember she wasn’t living with them anymore. Thinking this makes him sob audibly, and even though the vehicles and the wind and the buckling bridge are louder and more chaotic than anything he’s ever blared on his headphones, the girl turns her head toward the sound, toward Aaron.

  It is too far for eye contact, really. What they share is the basic idea of eye contact. And Aaron feels it for both of them. Awkwardness.

  Why couldn’t she have walked just a little farther?

  This is Tillie Stanley’s time, and here is this interruption, this lost waif of a boy, his hair blowing in the hectic, wild wind. Tall, narrow, leaning in on himself like a branch about to snap. And she thinks, Does this boy have to be here? And then she thinks, You know what? Fuck him. I am so tired of letting other people dictate my life.

  She looks away and grasps the nearly petrified metal railing with her hand and lifts her leg onto the other side so that she’s straddling it. If he even tries to walk in her direction, she’ll let go and end it. That’s how serious she is. Her throat bone-dry. Her chest empty. Her head spinning wild.

  Then the boy straddles the railing, too, and Tillie is like, Oh, come on. Suddenly they’re facing each other like they’re playing a deadly game of dare.

  Aaron wants to scream at her—Leave me alone! This moment is mine. This is all I have left.

  Tillie’s brain is mottled with warring thoughts she can’t quite decipher—she only knows they’re getting in her way. Be a big girl, she berates herself. Pick up your damn thick leg and walk far enough away that he can’t see you anymore. But she’s stuck there. She is too far gone, much too far gone to imagine suffering even one more minute of this life. No. Oblivion is the only answer. Whatever comes after—nothing or a lot of something unknown—cannot be worse than this. It’s time to stop. To end.

  They remain that way for a few seconds. Then a few seconds more. Eye contact without being able to see each other’s eyes.

  And then, at 3:57—

  CHAPTER 1A: APRIL 17, 3:57 P.M.

  Aaron watches as the nameless girl throws her other leg over the railing and pushes off. Before his eyes, she is diving, dropping. Sideways, upside down. Falling.

  It does not look like Aaron expects it to look. It’s not beautiful or noble or anything that makes sense. It’s a bungee jump without a cord, then a smack into the waves, a hole in the water, and she’s consumed.

  No sound comes from his mouth. He cannot breathe. The girl was there. And now she’s not.

  He cannot even consider doing what she just did.

  Panicked, he pulls his leg back to the safe side of the barrier, his entire body jittering. The whir of cars blitzes his reality and steals his ability to process. This is outside his realm of understanding. He was supposed to die but he didn’t, and a stranger did.

  Should I call 911? And say what? How will that help her?

  But her family! They’ll never know if I don’t—

  Holy shit. Holy shit holy shit holy shit.

  He takes his phone out of his pocket and dials.

  “Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

  He has to scream to be heard and his throat is too dry, too hoarse. “I just—a girl. Jumped.”

  “What’s your location, sir?”

  He shouts it like it’s a question. “George Washington Bridge?”

  “Stay right there. What level? South side or north side?”

  He wonders if this happens all the time. It must.

  “Upper level—”

  “I can’t hear you. You have to speak up.”

  He screams it. “Upper level! Um. South side. I—”

  “Are you a danger to yourself?” the woman asks, and he thinks, Good question.

  He yells, “I don’t know! Maybe?”

  “Stay right there. I’ll stay on the line with you. Stay. Right. There. You hear me?”

  Nothing freaks him out more than hearing her say these words in this tone. Like he’s in danger.

  Oh my God. Oh my God oh my God oh my God.

  It’s hitting him:

  He almost jumped to his death.

  So close.

  He came so close.

  And she came closer.

  He starts crying. “Okay,” he chokes out, closing his eyes and feeling the wind chill the tears dripping down his cheeks. He wants hot chocolate. Hot chocolate and a blanket and his dad playing old records. And a window. A window safely separating him from all this.

  He stays on the line with her, and she keeps him talking, asking him questions. He gets that she’s only doing it because it’s her job, but it’s nice just the same, and she doesn’t seem to mind his short answers, and soon he kind of likes hearing her breathing and snapping her gum—orange flavored, he imagines. He thinks about asking her what her name is. What if he spoke to her boss and got her a commendation or something? He hears sirens blaring in the distance and thinks about his father being notified. How it would break him. No.

  “Shit.”

  “What, hon?”

  “I can’t … I’
m okay. I just. The ambulance. That’s not for me, is it?”

  “Just stay on the line with me,” she says, her voice remaining calm.

  He hangs up and runs. Back to Manhattan, down the winding, rotting metal staircase. He runs because if he’s not there, then none of this ever happened. He can try to be normal, and make this a normal Wednesday.

  He sees her falling. He can’t stop seeing her fall. He can’t stop her from falling. He wants to stop it. He wants it to stop. He wants to stop everything—except, apparently, his life.

  When he gets to the park on 178th, he numbly walks east, toward the subway. He replays the back of her sad head as she walked over to the spot. Her sobs. Her eyes that he couldn’t see clearly then—he sees them clearly now.

  He starts to ask himself:

  What kind of person jumps—

  Then he thinks:

  Oh. Right.

  He puts his earphones back in, taking the time to graze his ear with his finger. It feels spiritual, almost. This skin, these organs. Alive, unalive. The fine edge between the two. It could have happened so easily. He knows it. If she hadn’t shown up and taken his place, this living ear is never again touched by human fingers. It never again hears music, never again hears—anything.

  He felt it, the momentum that would have ended with a splash and oblivion.

  He shouldn’t be here anymore.

  He captures every detail of this scene, savors every single thing that he can still sense as an alive person. It all feels so tentative, this edge between living and dying, and he tunes in to the way the breeze, gentler down here off the bridge, brushes through his hair.

  He begins to laughsobhyperventilate. He bends at the waist and tries to expel the crazy pent-up energy from everywhere it’s been hiding in his body.

  Behind his eyes.

  His toenails.

  Every inch of his skin.

  On the other side of Manhattan, the Upper East Side, Britt is practicing her routine to Cardi B’s “I Like It” in the living room. She’s wondering when Tillie will be home. She cannot wait to show her older sister her new moves. She has this thing where she turns her body away like she’s shy, and then she jumps to face forward and does this shimmy thing. Tillie is totally going to love it! When Tillie watches her create her dance moves, she always pretends like she’s a talent scout trying to decide if Britt makes the cut. It’s fun. And Britt has this new joke she heard in her fifth-grade art class that will make Tillie laugh, and making Tillie laugh is the best because when Tillie’s dimples come out, Britt can’t help but be happy, too. Her sister is the only one who can make her feel that way, and she tries really hard to make Tillie feel it back.

  Okay, Britt thinks. Back to practice.

  She wants it to be perfect for when Tillie comes home.

  Across town, Molly Tobin languishes in her comfortable bed, in her comfortable home, feeling bored and pissed. She’s been stuck inside basically all day, which is what happens when you get suspended.

  Spence has a zero-tolerance policy for bullying. But what Molly did? It wasn’t meant to be bullying. If she was laughing in the video, it was in a this is so wrong way, not a make this girl’s life a living hell way.

  She was just trying to … whatever. She was there, Gretchen and Isabella were there, and the group mentality kicked in. This is how the Nazis happened, she realizes, and she hates that she’s so easily swayed, but more than that she can’t get over the injustice. Gretchen’s sex kitten video never got leaked, and it was way over the line. Way worse than what Molly did minutes later.

  God. It was just too easy. What girl who has even a slight weight issue, let alone an obvious one, does a spoken word poem in which she likens herself to a cow? And now Molly’s suspended, and she can forget Brown, forget Michigan (probably).

  If she had to do it all over again, obviously she wouldn’t.

  But it’s not like anyone’s offering her a do-over.

  In his bedroom on the Upper East Side, Amir Rahimi stares at a spot on the wall.

  Tomorrow, he’ll do it. Not it it. He can never do that. It would kill his mom. But what he can do is text Tillie. She deserves that, at least, and maybe it will help him feel less ashamed, because the feeling is too much.

  He can trust her with the truth, can’t he?

  She’s a very cool girl, after all. The coolest he’s ever met.

  “How was your day?” Aaron’s father asks when he gets home from work at 8:45.

  “Good,” Aaron says. He is eating a bowl of Froot Loops.

  “Did you eat?”

  Aaron points down at his bowl, and his dad rolls his eyes.

  “Did you eat anything with nutrition?”

  Aaron shakes his head.

  “Was I wrong to let Magda go?”

  Magda was the latest in a conga line of Columbia University graduate students Aaron’s father had given free room and board in exchange for adult supervision for Aaron. Magda was from Israel, smelled like sweet melon, and had once interrupted Aaron’s homework to say, “I’m going out with my sweater. See you in a few hours.” Now, sometimes when Aaron and his dad go out, they text each other, I’m going out with my sweater.

  “Nah,” Aaron says, focused on the one surviving Froot Loop, attempting to rescue it from the milk. He shivers, thinking of the nameless girl somewhere in the Hudson. Did she sink to the bottom? Did they get her body out? Could she possibly still be alive? Could he have possibly saved her life with that call?

  Don’t be stupid, he berates himself. She’s dead. You’re not. You failed her. Jury’s out on whether you failed yourself.

  He picks up his phone and retypes the words into the search engine: girl rescued Hudson George Washington Bridge jump. Still nothing from today. Maybe not every attempted suicide is covered? Maybe there are too many? And what does that tell you about the shittiness of this particular world?

  His dad sighs, puts his briefcase down on the kitchen table, and says, “Check in?”

  Aaron nods. His father has been insisting on check-ins ever since he went to that Warrior Weekend thing a couple years back. He came back filled with passion for life and regret for the times he had put work before fatherhood. He’d promptly quit his job at the bank and went back to school to become a social worker. Now Aaron and his dad are cash poor, apartment rich, and they check in every night.

  Of course, Aaron doesn’t tell him anything. Or at least not the kind of things that lead to a bridge.

  “You first?” Dad asks.

  Aaron shakes his head, and his dad relents and goes first.

  “Physically: bone-tired. Who knew that a freakin’ practicum would be more taxing than investment banking? I tell you what: I can’t wait until I have my own practice and I don’t have to do the endless rotation at Montefiore. Emotionally: joyful and angry. Mostly joyful, but this prick in a BMW ran a red light even though there were about a hundred of us waiting in the crosswalk, just about to cross, and you know that stupid, selfish drivers make me homicidal. Spiritually: somewhat connected. I meditated on my second break, but that doesn’t always last through a spate of bulimic teens. Mentally: pretty sharp for nearly nine o’clock, I must say. How about you, bud?”

  Aaron puts down his spoon and stares at his father’s forehead. That’s as close as he can comfortably get to his eyes, but he makes sure to make intermittent contact because if he doesn’t, Dad will ask questions. Aaron cannot answer questions today.

  “Physically: okay. My legs itch. Probably the grass allergy because I went to Riverside Park after school. Just to hang and do some writing.”

  His dad smiles that inimitable smile he has, the one where his right dimple rises perhaps two millimeters higher than his left yet his right eye stays still—a leftover from the Bell’s palsy he had in his twenties.

  “Emotionally: fine. Good. Joyful and a little sad, I guess.”

  “A little?” his dad asks.

  “Okay, sad,” Aaron says, rolling his eyes.

&n
bsp; His tone is playful. It is complete bullshit and it makes him sick of himself.

  Sad?

  Sad is hearing about a jumper on the news.

  Sad is not seeing it right next to you.

  Sad is not knowing it should have been you.

  “Go on,” Dad answers with an impish grin.

  “Spiritually: the same as yesterday. Not sure what to believe. Mentally: sharp as a tack. Done. Fini.”

  The fini gets stuck in his dry throat. It comes with a series of images of the falling girl and the gentle smack when she hit the water, a smack that was in reality anything but gentle. His dad is looking directly at him. Aaron averts his eyes.

  Dad goes over and kisses him on top of the head. “My dad radar is going off and I don’t know why. Am I projecting? You sure you’re fine?”

  Aaron shrugs. “I didn’t find out about Avenue Q yet. Thought today was the day but apparently not. And anyway, I’m not sure …”

  Dad looks at him, waiting for him to finish. Aaron won’t. He can’t. It’s too close to the truth. The stupid reason he wound up on the bridge.

  It wasn’t one thing, of course. And thank God for that, since killing yourself because someone didn’t like you in a play is too self-absorbed, even for him. But that was basically the last straw. On the subway home from school, when Sarah Palmer mentioned she’d seen their school production of Rent, stupidly—he was so painfully stupid—he asked how she’d liked it.

  “It was … okay,” she said. The train was heading into Manhattan, over the Bronx River.

  “Is that all?” he asked.

  She ran her fingers through her long brown hair. “I thought Kelly Jameson was really good.”

  Kelly Jameson had been Mimi to his Roger. Kelly was on the fast track to AMDA—the American Musical and Dramatic Academy—and everyone knew she was awesome. Sarah’s elusive statement ought to have been enough to get a normal kid to stop digging. But Aaron wasn’t normal and he sucked with social cues, and mostly he didn’t want to walk around miserable all night if she was simply forgetting to compliment him. They were pretty good friends, after all. And everyone had said he’d been a really good Roger. Marissa Jones had said his and Kelly’s duet of “Without You” was almost better than the Broadway cast album version. So he followed up.