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“No wonder your sister killed herself,” she says, hoping to stun and immobilize me with her words so that she can get away.
A train roars in the distance.
“Haven’t you figured it out by now?” she goes on. “You’re the common denominator. Everyone just wants to get away from you. Now get your fucking hands off me or I’ll tell them what you told me. I’ll tell them who Sienna’s real dad is and how you’re a wh—”
With that, something in me snaps.
I rear back. I push. It’s reactive, provoked. I don’t even think about what I’m doing, only how good it feels, how cathartic, my anger dissipating with each thrust. The first time she only jerks back and then recenters herself, aggrieved and in disbelief, saying, “What the fuck?”
But after the second time, her arms flail at her sides like helicopter propellors, trying to find her equilibrium, a toehold, an anchor. She doesn’t. Her knees lock, but still gravity and imbalance pull her over the edge. I watch it happen in slow motion. As she falls backward, her eyes go wide like full moons. Her hands reach out, grabbing at the air, but in the next second, I can’t see her face. She’s over the edge and what I see when I look down is graceful almost. She falls with ease, a lissome gymnast tumbling through the air.
She screams.
The landing is forceful. It’s driving and abrupt. She slams into the earth with a dull thud. I jerk, blanching, and then I stare at her lying face down beside the tracks, her scream suddenly silent, her arms bent under her, hair swirled around her head, strands lifting in the wind, the only part of her that still moves.
My heart is in my throat. I cling to the cold railing with my hands, staring down, open-mouthed, gawping, gasping, over the edge. I can’t catch my breath.
She’s dead.
I pushed her.
I can’t wrap my head around it. It’s not possible. This can’t be happening, this can’t be real.
But it is. I see her on the ground before me, blood starting to appear, tiny rivers of it that flow through the rocks beside the train tracks, cardinal red in contrast to the milky pastiness of the ballast.
I look around, searching. The earth is a void, my only saving grace. There were no witnesses. No one has seen what I’ve done. The only sign of life is in the cars that soar by on Lake Shore Drive, too far away and moving at too high of a speed to see what’s really happened here.
But soon people will come. A pedestrian or a train will pass by and find her, and then more people will come to lift away what’s left of her and to see what a dead body looks like.
I sweep my wedding band up from the deck of the bridge and slip it on my finger so I don’t misplace it.
I have to go before someone finds me here.
Part Two
Twenty
It’s hard to be at work. It’s hard to focus when my mind is all over the place. I thought about taking the day and calling in sick, but I’ve taken days in the past and don’t want to let them go to waste because eventually I might need them. And besides, I remind myself as I have so many times of late: I have to act like nothing is wrong, like caring for Caitlin Beckett doesn’t upset me more than any other patient, though it does, for different reasons. Because I’m the one who pushed her from the bridge.
Late in the morning, I make my way toward her room. She’s been in the hospital for just shy of two weeks now, every day the spitting image of the last. Nothing changes, so that I’ve become complacent, thinking she will never wake up, though still, every day for the last ten or so days, I’ve said a little prayer on the way into work that I’ll arrive to the news that Caitlin expired overnight. But so far no luck. I shouldn’t ever wish another person dead, but I do because if Caitlin dies then I won’t get in trouble for what I’ve done.
I’m not a bad person. I’ve just done something bad.
I step into Caitlin’s room, feeling a tightness spread across my chest as if the air is too thin in here, the oxygen lacking, making it hard to breathe. I wash my hands and then make my way to the monitor to check her vitals.
Mr. Beckett sits on a chair at the foot of the bed. He has a leather portfolio spread open on his lap, a yellow legal pad on the inside with the words Tanner & Levine printed on the top binding. I do a double take. Occupational hazard, he told me once, when he was doing research into the bridge and the likelihood of surviving a fall from it. I’m an attorney. I didn’t put two and two together. I didn’t consider that he was an attorney at the very place Declan Roche supposedly worked. That said, it explains how the firm name rolled so easily off Caitlin’s tongue the first time she told me about her husband in the coffee shop where we met. I think how scared she pretended to be when I arrived that night, how her coffee spilled, and I remember what Mr. Beckett said the first time we met, how Caitlin thought she could go to Hollywood and become a star. She is quite the actress.
Mr. Beckett stares down, jotting something on the pad while Mrs. Beckett sits beside the bed. There is a magazine open on her lap but she doesn’t look at it, letting her eyes rest instead on the lines of her daughter’s face, reading them. The bruises on Caitlin’s face are healing now. They’re not gone, but her body is in the process of breaking down the blood, of reabsorbing it so that they have a brownish tinge to them and are no longer black-and-blue. Her broken bones are healing.
I look at her. I think about the last conscious minutes I spent with her as I often do when I’m in the room with her. For as hard as I try, I can’t escape the image of her arms as helicopter propellors that day on the bridge, spinning, trying to pull at the air, to thrust herself forward so she wouldn’t fall over the edge, but then she did anyway and I could do nothing but watch.
I stare at Mrs. Beckett now as she looks at her, at Caitlin—at Nat—whatever her name is. I think of the things her husband has told me. I see the love in Mrs. Beckett’s eyes and wonder if Sienna treated me the same way her daughter treats her, I could still love her. I could, I think, because that’s what unconditional love is. I don’t know if there is anything Sienna could do that would make me not love her.
As I’m watching, my gaze going back and forth between Caitlin’s and her mother’s faces, it happens.
At first it is only an almost inappreciable ripple beneath the eyelid, the gentle lapping of waves against a shoreline, skimming the rocks and sand, so that I could almost convince myself it didn’t happen.
I stare, waiting for it to happen again, and it does.
