Crybaby Bridge - Part II
In Part I of “Crybaby Bridge,” we meet Sam. New to Cedar Creek and clashing with her teammates on the basketball team, Sam can’t catch a break. But when she learns about the town’s ghost stories, something switches on for her. When she gets home from the game, she meets her boyfriend Ben out, feeling that she’s not being totally honest with him.
Read Part II to see what’s next.
Sam had met Jeff at a party in his dorm at Harvard. He was a genius; in high school he’d built a robot that could perform some sort of surgical operation. He skipped most of his classes, but was acing all his courses anyway. He said he only worked on things that interested him. Sam had interested him. He liked her wildness and that she didn’t seem to care what anybody thought of her. He liked that she would try anything new. Sometimes she would leave school at lunch and take the bus to his dorm and find him still asleep at one in the afternoon. Some nights she didn’t go home—and what could her parents do? Once, they threatened to get the police involved, but she’d called their bluff.
When she told Jeff that she was pregnant, an eerie calm came over him as he outlined what she had to do and how she had to do it. She saw her first flash of the person he was going to be. She realized that for all his talk about outsiders and weirdos, he was always surrounded by friends and admirers. In three years he would graduate and pass seamlessly into the world and what it expected of him.
Her parents lost it when she told them about the pregnancy, but her mom went with her to get things taken care of. In a way, her parents seemed relieved. They thought this would straighten her out and force her to start living up to her potential.
After it was all over, her parents refused to talk about it. They refused to say the word abortion. They told her it was better if she didn’t tell her friends, but of course she already had. She knew that it was sort of a big deal, but there hadn’t even been an operation. She’d been given pills, and there was some stomach pain, and then it had passed and became just something she’d lived through.
A few weeks later Jeff stopped answering her calls. Soon after that her parents announced the move. Then they’d arrived in this flat lonely place and Sam’s life had lost all its outlines.
*****
A week after that first away game, Coach Betcher persuaded the team to have a sleepover. It would be a way to build stronger relationships, she’d said while looking right at Sam. Sam knew word would get back to Coach if she didn’t go, and she wasn’t going to give Tissy, who’d offered to host, the satisfaction of her absence.
The evening of the sleepover was bitterly cold, and Tissy’s basement felt almost cozy. The first few beers rounded the edges of Sam’s resentment. When Tissy’s bright-faced mother poked her head down the steps, everyone fumbled to hide the alcohol while Tissy yelled to leave them alone already, and even Sam found this funny.
Then, one of the girls suggested playing Never Have I Ever, a game whose currency was secrets. In response, Tissy said, “I don’t think we all know each other well enough.”
“What are you talking about?” one of the juniors asked.
“She means me,” Sam said. “It’s fine. I won’t play.”
“Then you’ll overhear all the dirt on us and we won’t learn anything about you. The rest of us practically grew up together. We barely know you.”
Sam knew what she did next was important, but she felt like someone had stuffed a cushy towel inside her skull. “Okay. What do you want to know?”
“Let’s start with why you think you’re so much better than everyone in this town, aside from your cropped hair and your edgy music and the fact that you used to ride the subway. You seem to think you’re tougher than everyone here. As if we don’t also have punks in Indiana.”
“Come on, Tissy,” Kristen said. “Leave her alone.”
“You haven’t been through even half of what I have,” Sam said.
“Please,” Tissy snorted. “Try us.”
So Sam told them. She told them about Jeff and his friends. The overdose she’d witnessed. The canister of nitrous oxide they’d stolen from one of the college labs. And she told them about her pregnancy. She told them to shock them and so that they could understand the vast gulf between herself and this silly sleepover. And at least now they could judge her on the decisions she’d actually made.
And the odd thing was, her confession was like flicking a switch. Most of the girls visibly relaxed. They told her that it must have been horrible. They told her that Jeff sounded like a real asshole. They closed ranks around her, as if she was one of them. When no one else was looking she flashed a gloating smile at Tissy.
They stayed up until the beer made it hard for Sam to keep her eyes open. She was surprised to find that she didn’t want to sleep. The girls were lying sprawled across the basement floor in sleeping bags and under quilts, with little pockets of low conversation in each corner. Just as Sam was fading, Tissy turned to her and said, “Now I get it, Sam. That’s why you were so intrigued by Crybaby Bridge.”
Some of the girls sat up, hearing the danger in Tissy’s tone. The side conversations stopped. “I understand why you might be especially sympathetic to Mary Walcott, as she searches for her lost daughter.”
Kristen hadn’t been drinking, so she made the connection before Sam did. “Jesus Christ, Tissy. It’s not the same,” she said, and the pieces fell into place. Mad Mary, who’d drowned her unwanted child without remorse.
“You think what Mary did and what I did are even comparable?” Sam demanded. Tissy shrugged. “Thanks for reminding me how provincial this place is. Do you even know what provincial means?”
Tissy laughed. “You’re such a snob.”
“We’re supposed to be team-bonding, remember?” Kristen said. “Not fighting.” She got up and switched off the light.
The comparison was ridiculous: taking a pill and bleeding for a few days versus hurling a crying baby into a river. Sam wondered if Tissy was very religious—if she came from a family that picketed Planned Parenthood clinics carrying “abortion is murder” signs. Some of the girls on the team must be. Cedar Creek had more churches than stoplights, and as they’d driven through Ohio, Sam had seen a billboard that said, “Hell is Real,” followed by a list of sins. But the other girls had been so nice to her when she’d told them. And Kristen had been so quick to jump to Sam’s defense. Sam pulled a pillow over her head and tried to smother the seed of bad feeling that Tissy had planted.
*****
Sam napped for most of the next day, so when night finally came she couldn’t sleep. She pulled out her laptop and searched for information on Crybaby Bridge. The legend she found was stranger and more elaborate than her teammates had revealed.
Mary Walcott was the youngest sister in a family of modest means. She was always a little unbalanced, and her family didn’t allow her to go out very often. Somehow, she met and fell madly in love with a married man—a judge. The two of them started an affair. When she became pregnant, the judge refused to acknowledge the child. After she gave birth, her parents wanted to raise the baby as their own, pretending it was another sister. But Mary didn’t want that. She brought the baby to the judge’s house and demanded that he leave his wife. She caused enough of a stir that everyone in town learned of the transgression. Her family threw her and the child out on the street and Mary brought the baby to the bridge on Blacklick Road. She drowned the baby and then hung herself from the scaffolding. If she’d had any decency, Mary would have left it at that, with this shameful chapter in the town’s history closed. But she didn’t.
After her death, she kept on walking the bridge when the night was at its darkest. Her black eyes bulged from her head, and her neck bore a thick scar from where the noose had tightened around it. When cars stopped on her bridge, she banged against the railings and whipped up a nasty wind. Her baby sobbed into the night. Sometimes it sounded as if hundreds of babies were crying out.
The various accounts, like most retellings of legends, did not attempt to understand what Mary had been thinking. They didn’t wonder about the night Mary went to confront her lover: whether Mary’s heart lurched when she saw the silhouette of the judge’s wife peeking out from behind the curtain of an upstairs window. They didn’t describe how the anger at this man who’d betrayed her must have grown large in her chest. How the love for him that already lived inside of her didn’t make room for this anger, so the two emotions mixed together like different colored fogs. The stories did not consider these things, but Sam did. Sam thought about how Mary must have resented her pretty older sisters. How Mary might have loved the smell of wet leaves by the bridge. Sam wondered whether Mary’s last thoughts were of the judge or her baby or her family. Whether she wondered, ‘Would my parents take me back, after all, and would I want that?’ Or whether her rage pushed everything else aside.
After she closed her computer, Sam lay awake, scared and excited. She didn’t care why Tissy had brought it up; Sam was glad she knew the story. She felt, for the first time in a long while, fully alert: aware of herself and her thumping heart. Sound traveled strangely in the new house and from time to time a floorboard would pop or a window would rattle. She fell asleep imagining that she was an explorer, sent to Cedar Creek to discover all its mysteries.
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.
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