Crybaby Bridge - Part I
Rebecca Turkewitz knows how to spin a ghost story. There’s something so immediate to her characters, people who find themselves haunted by stories both real and supernatural.
This month’s story, “Crybaby Bridge,” follows Sam, a high school girl whose family relocates from Massachusetts to Indiana, yet trouble seems to have followed her. She doesn’t fit in with the girls on her basketball team, and spends her time out of school with her older boyfriend, someone with whom she can’t totally be herself. With flavors of Carrie and a good urban legend, “Crybaby Bridge” takes a hard look at the roles we put ourselves—and others—into and the trouble that can lead us to.
I spoke with Rebecca about the release of her debut collection, Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press) last July, and I was taken with her ability to craft such original, spooky, queer ghost stories. “Crybaby Bridge” is part of her collection, and I’m thrilled that we can publish it in The Rejoinder: what better tale to serialize than an edge-of-your-seat, modern ghost story?
-Michael
Sam had been living in Cedar Creek for five months before she discovered it was haunted. Her parents had dragged her to Indiana in August, and now she was spending her last two years of high school surrounded by cornfields in The Lawn Mower Capital of the Midwest. Sam’s parents claimed they’d relocated for her mother’s new job, but Sam suspected the move had more to do with the trouble she’d been getting into back home in Massachusetts. Cedar Creek didn’t seem like a place where there was any trouble to be had. Although the town had a stark, eerie quality to it, Sam wouldn’t have guessed that its ordered, sun-streaked streets hid anything sordid or dark or interesting. She assumed its dead were all lying happy and unharassed in their graves.
Sam learned about the hauntings from the girls on her basketball team during the bus ride back from their first away game. The girls, hair slick with sweat, eyes trained on the dark landscape rumbling by, teased each other about the ghosts of Klan members that were rumored to roam the lonely stretch of highway. Sam slid her headphones off and said, “KKK ghosts? That’s a story I have to hear.” The other girls seemed surprised that Sam had been listening. Sam knew they didn’t like her. She wasn’t one of them and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise: throw her head back and laugh at their terrible jokes, paint her nails the school colors, drool over the wide-faced dopes on the boys’ team, shout ‘this is my jam’ at every song on their warm-up playlist. But they were coming off of a win—a good, hard-fought win—and there was the promise of the Friday night that lay ahead of them, so for a moment there was a sense of camaraderie.
“No, really,” Sam said. “I love a good ghost story.”
“Then you moved to the right town,” Kristen, the team’s starting power forward, said.
Cedar Creek had once been home to an asylum for the criminally insane, the site of a natural gas explosion, and the hometown of a serial killer. An undertaker at the cemetery near the train tracks kept the right big toe of every woman he embalmed, so now a swarm of nine-toed ghosts wandered the property. A janitor had hung himself from the pipes in the high school basement, and you could still sometimes hear him struggling with the ropes through the vents. Crybaby Bridge, near the border of Centerville, was haunted by Mad Mary Walcott, who had killed her newborn and then hung herself. At night, a passing motorist or patient thrill seeker might hear the sobs of the drowned child or see a baby’s footprints pad across the windshield.
Once Kristen started recounting the stories, the other girls jumped in. They talked over one another in hushed, gleeful tones, adding morbid details or correcting bits of misinformation.
“How do you all know so many stories?” Sam asked. “Is there a ghost guide to Cedar Creek I can get my hands on?”
“We grew up here,” Tissy said. “I’m surprised you’ve taken an interest in the town. I thought you came to Indiana kicking and screaming.” Tissy was the team’s starting point guard, but Coach Betcher had made it clear that Sam was competition for the spot.
“Trust me, I’m not here by choice,” Sam said. “But I’m stuck for another year and a half. I might as well have some fun.”
Kristen started to say something, but Tissy threw her a look. They sat in silence until the bus pulled into the high school parking lot.
“I never would’ve thought Cedar Creek had such an awesome dark side,” Sam said to Kristen as they were filing off the bus.
“What do you mean by that?” Tissy asked.
“This place is painfully tame.”
“And you must be so fascinating,” Tissy said. “Because you have a tongue ring.”
“Guess I hit a nerve,” Sam said without turning to see Tissy’s eyes roll under her perfectly mascaraed lids.
The girls piled off the bus, talking about older brothers who could buy them beer, parents who’d be out late, movies they might watch if nothing else panned out. They avoided looking at Sam. She had a date with Ben, anyway, and she didn’t want to be the type of girl they would invite, but in these moments she felt the other girls’ pity, which she couldn’t stand. She hadn’t been popular in Somerville either, but there’d been other girls like her—girls who were on the outside of things and wouldn’t want it any other way. Back home, there were friends she knew so well they were like extensions of herself. They would have laughed at these uncomfortable moments with her preppy teammates.
Her parents were waiting to drive her home. Basketball was about the only thing they didn’t fight over these days. She slid into the backseat and slammed the door.
“Hey there, MVP,” her dad said, putting the car in gear.
Her mom squirmed around in her seat. “What a game! You barely left the court. Coach Betcher must love you.”
“She seems to,” Sam said. “But she’s the only one on the team who does.”
“They’ll come around.”
“I doubt it.”
“Maybe if you put in a little more effort. You didn’t exactly come in trying to make friends.”
“I wish you wouldn’t assume everything is my fault.”
“You don’t have to jump down my throat,” her mother said. They wound down the field-flanked roads towards the renovated farmhouse that Sam was supposed to call home now.
Her parents had been the supportive and enlightened kind who were always telling her to just be herself and encouraging her whims, until just being herself stopped meaning obsessions with fantasy books and wearing capes to school, and became having a college boyfriend and skipping classes. Now they didn’t know what to do with her.
“I’m going out with Ben tonight,” Sam said. “If that’s okay with you.”
Her parents exchanged a nervous look before giving in to the inevitable. If it weren’t tonight, it would be another night. Or she could just leave—she’d done that plenty of times before. “As long as you’re home by midnight. Not a second later.” Sam had made the mistake of telling them Ben’s real age: twenty-one. Part of the reason she got in trouble so much was that she hated to lie.
*****
Ben lived with his mother and now that it was too cold to be outside, he and Sam had to get creative about where they could be alone. That night, he took her to an unoccupied house that the construction company he worked for was fixing up.
Sam had met him when curiosity pulled her into the model train store in Cedar Creek’s town center. She didn’t understand how such a place could exist anywhere, nonetheless in a town of seven thousand. She hoped to discover something bizarre: a drug front, or some disheveled shopkeeper who hoarded the trains and couldn’t bear to sell any. Ben worked there weekends, doing delicate repairs with tiny tools that looked like medical implements. The way the shop stayed in business was disappointingly simple: most of its business was done online. She’d stayed for hours, talking to Ben about music they both liked, her life back in Massachusetts, his work in the train store, and how lonely he was living with his mother. She’d given him her number before he’d asked.
Ben took her to the top floor of the house, where a small window looked out over a row of rooftops and, beyond that, the inky spreading emptiness of unlit corn and soybean fields. Perhaps the Midwest did offer plenty of opportunities for hauntings, with so much of its land lurking outside the reach of the light.
“Are you sure I can’t come to your games?” Ben asked, settling against the bare wall.
“You’d have to deal with my parents, then. And driving an hour to the middle of nowhere just to sit in sweaty gym bleachers isn’t an ideal way to spend a Friday evening.”
“But I’d get to see you play. I’d cheer you on.”
“Rah, rah. Go team.”
Ben laughed and kissed her temple. “You know, I can’t quite put my finger on why, but you still don’t strike me as the high school sports type.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, finding his mouth with her own. It puzzled her that he was so ready to claim her, that he would happily sit in the bleachers and yell her name. And he wasn’t ashamed to have stuck around this Podunk town; he’d dropped out of Indiana University after a year. But Sam would like to see him in the stands and watch Tissy’s face cloud with jealousy before she could compose her queenly self. Ben was more attractive than he realized. Sam had seen pictures of him from when he was in high school, before working on houses had bulked him up and he’d grown his beard. His ego hadn’t caught up to his appearance, which at least partially explained his devotion to Sam.
Sam pulled him onto the floor. “You’re sure?” he asked when she reached for his belt. He asked her this every single time, so she figured he had some lingering discomfort about their age difference. The first time they’d had sex, he’d asked her if she’d ever done it before. “Almost, but not quite,” she’d said without thinking, and now she had to live with the lie and the long shadow it was bound to cast. She felt uneasy whenever Jeff, her previous boyfriend, came up in conversation. She suspected Ben would think differently of her if he knew more about that relationship. This was why she hated lying. She wanted to be loved for the person she actually was, or else it was no good.
Afterwards, Ben draped his jacket over them and she rested her head on his wide chest. She loved the little moments of peace after sex almost more than she liked the act. There was no pressure anymore to be clever or impressive. It was like the hours after a hard-won game or a difficult exam: little moments in which to rest.
“Are you glad you moved here?” Ben asked.
“I’m glad I met you,” Sam said. “But I hate school and most of the people at school. I’m basically just bored all the time that I’m not with you.”
“Even when you’re playing basketball?”
“No,” Sam admitted.
“What did you do all August, before you met me?”
“Nothing, really. Read, went running, fought with my mom, talked with my friends back home.” She’d had no one to spend time with except her parents, who exuded disappointment in her. She’d become obsessed with the fantasy of shedding her skin like a snake. At first, her relationship with Ben was just a way to tip her life from unbearable to slightly bearable. But now she missed him all the time that she wasn’t with him.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “I’ve seen one. A month after my dad left, I woke up and my grandmother, his mother, was sitting on the edge of my bed. She’d been dead for years.”
“That’s so creepy.”
“I wasn’t scared. She was there to comfort me.”
“Yes, but from beyond the grave.” Sam jabbed him in the ribs.
“Yeah, I guess. Why? Is the attic making you nervous? No one died in the house or anything. It’s just for sale.”
She explained about the conversation on the bus. It was the first time she’d felt like she had anything interesting to talk about with her teammates.
When midnight came Sam wanted to stay out later, but Ben convinced her to make curfew. This was one of the many ways he was different from Jeff. And better, Sam reminded herself.
To be continued…
This story was first published in Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, July 2023).
Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of the story collection Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, July 2023). Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in The Normal School, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University.
Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and check out more of her work here.