Crybaby Bridge - Part IV
In Part III, word about Sam’s abortion spreads after the sleepover, but Tissy added that Sam bragged about it. Sam feels even more isolated from her teammates and turns down Kristen’s invitation to join the group for a movie. Tissy tells Sam she hates her, and Sam and Ben go ghost hunting at night.
Read Part IV to see how it ends.
Sam could hear the low humming of the car motor and the trees creaking. She heard a splash somewhere beside her and shivered at the whorls of cold air drifting through the open windows. And maybe, under the rest of the noises, she heard movement on the bank. “Turn the car off,” she said. “So we can hear.”
“But what if we have to make a quick getaway?” He pulled the keys out of the ignition.
“Are you trying to freak me out?” Sam kissed his shoulder.
And then the sound of sobbing rose from riverbanks. It started on their right, before a chorus of cries joined in on the left. “Oh, my God,” Ben said. “What the hell?” He fumbled with the keys, but Sam stopped him. This was what they’d come here for. If they left, they’d always wonder.
The crying increased in volume. Sam had heard that coyotes could sound like women screaming. Or maybe that was wolves.
She was so quick to try to rationalize it. She hadn’t really expected to experience anything supernatural, but why not? The stories must come from somewhere.
Bits of laughter cut through the noise. Sam exhaled slowly. She heard choked whispering. “Relax,” she said to Ben, who was craning his neck out the window. “It’s just a trick.”
“What the hell kind of trick is this?”
“It’s the girls on my team. I told them we were coming.” Her eyes were adjusting, and she was surprised to find how well she could see in what she’d first perceived as total darkness. She could see Ben clearly now. He looked older, with parts of his face thrown into shadow. She could make out the shape of the metal girders and the white line marking the side of the road. She could even see the slow, erratic swaying of the trees.
A scream rose from the bank and Sam jumped. She forced herself to laugh, but the sound came out more like a cough. “All right, assholes,” she yelled. “Nice try.” She reached for the handle, but couldn’t bring herself to open the door.
There was a ping as something struck the side of the bridge. Then something flew over the railing and hit the car. Rocks and sticks and pebbles bounced across the pavement, sounding like rain on a skylight. Something thumped against the car door. “Cut it out,” Sam shouted. “The joke’s over. I know it’s you guys.”
Someone made an exaggerated hooting sound, like a cartoon ghost, and the group erupted in giggles. “Help me, Mommy. Don’t do it!”
“That’s enough,” someone hissed, and Sam felt a stab of anger when she realized it was Kristen.
“What the hell, Kristen?” she shouted.
After a beat, Kristen called, “We’re just messing around.”
“No,” Sam said softly, just to Ben. “They did this to scare the shit out of me. Because they’re horrible.”
“Probably it’s just, like, a sort of hazing?” Ben was trying to reassure her, but there was more question than statement in his voice.
“This is even meaner than it seems,” Sam said.
Ben started to say something and then stopped.
“What?”
“I just don’t understand. Why do they hate you so much?”
Sam was afraid that if she tried to answer, she’d start crying. “Take me home,” she said.
Ben didn’t make any move to turn on the car. “Maybe you should talk to them,” he said. “Show them there are no hard feelings.”
But all she had were hard feelings. She stepped out of the car. “The fun’s over. Come up here and fucking talk to me.”
Sam heard the girls climbing up the riverbank and the splash of upturned rocks rolling into the water. “You have to admit, we got you pretty good,” Mel said, when they’d made the trek up to where Sam was standing.
“And really, the joke’s on us,” Kristen said. “We’ve been sitting here freezing for the past hour.”
“What in the fuck is wrong with you?” Sam said. She turned to Tissy. “How could you think that what I did is anything like what Mary did?”
“That’s not what we meant,” Kristen said. “Really.”
“That’s why she came up with the idea,” Sam said, gesturing to Tissy, who shrugged, as if she couldn’t be bothered to confirm or deny.
“What’s going on?” Ben said, climbing out of the car. “I’m missing something.”
No one would meet his eyes.
Then Tissy said, “Sam claimed she hadn’t cried in ten years, but I thought she was lying. I wanted to see if we could scare her enough to make her cry.”
Ben looked from Tissy back to Sam.
“Get it?” Tissy said. “Crybaby Bridge.”
“Okay,” Ben said, leaning against the car. “Well, I guess it’ll take more than that. You definitely scared the shit out of me, but she’s dry-eyed.”
“She’s lying,” Sam said. “Right before I moved here, I had an abortion.”
Ben laughed weakly, but he caught on before he made the mistake of saying that that was impossible.
“Get it?” Sam said. “Crybaby Bridge.”
“It really wasn’t like that,” Mel said, and a few of the other girls chimed in.
“I’m sorry,” Sam said to Ben.
“I just don’t understand.” Ben ran his hand through his hair and studied the trees behind Sam’s teammates.
“I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how you’d react.”
But Ben wasn’t paying attention to her. He was focused on the other side of the bridge. “What is that?” he said.
They all turned in unison to see what he was staring at. There was an old woman watching them. She held a bundle in her arms, but she was too far away for Sam to see her clearly.
“Is this part of the joke?” Sam asked.
“No,” Kristen said. “Who is that?”
The woman began to move towards them with awkward lurching steps. Ben clambered into the car, accidentally striking the horn. The woman stopped and turned to face the noise. “Get in,” he whispered. The woman was only about ten yards away. “Oh, God, what is that?” He leaned forward and squinted.
The woman began creeping forward again. Ben fumbled with the keys and tried to jam them into the ignition. “Get in!” he yelled and then pulled Sam onto his lap. She scrambled over him into the passenger seat, and then leaned out the open window. The woman approached the car. She had long black hair and bruised eyes. As she got closer, Sam was less sure of her age; it was hard to tell what were wrinkles and what were shadows. The woman looked confused and angry. The bundle in her arms squirmed and the face of a small brown dog appeared from the cloth. Sam screamed and the car jumped to life. Ben threw it in gear and backed off the bridge. The other girls were sprinting towards two cars parked in the high grasses next to the road.
“Wait,” Sam said, turning to catch another glimpse of the woman. “Ben, wait!”
Ben veered off the road so he could whip the car around. The wheels spun in place and then jerked forward. “Is she following?” Ben gasped.
“Stop,” Sam said. She tried to open the door but Ben sped up. Sam wrenched around and watched the woman fade to nothingness.
Her teammates’ cars were still dark. They were probably frantically searching for keys, unlocking doors, clutching each other. Sam wondered what the woman would do to them if she reached them. Sam didn’t like where her thoughts went from there: the woman’s hands scratching at their pretty faces; the woman dragging the girls back to the bridge and holding their heads underwater until they stopped jerking. Sam didn’t like that she wanted this.
Ben was breathing heavily, and his eyes were wide and unfocused. Freezing air rushed through the car. Sam motioned to his window and he rolled it up.
“That couldn’t have been a ghost,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking, but that wasn’t Mary.”
“How else do you explain it? You saw her.”
“It must have been one of your friends, dressed up or something.”
“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “Did you see how scared they were?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“You said you’ve seen a ghost before.”
“That was different. This is just a made-up legend. There never was any real Mary Walcott. No one actually drowned her child in the river.”
“Why not?” Sam said. “That kind of thing happens.”
Ben shook his head. “Maybe we should call the police. Maybe it was an old woman who was lost or something. Maybe she needed our help.”
“You believed the ghost story enough to take me.”
“If I believed it was real, I never would’ve taken you.”
Cornstalks raced by Sam’s window, looking like waves rolling across the surface of a tremendous ocean.
“Do you want to go somewhere?” Ben asked.
“I want to go home.” If only Sam could have a moment to catch her breath, to stop running from whatever was chasing her and just let it hit her. The car turned onto a road she recognized.
“Once you’ve calmed down, we need to talk,” Ben said.
“If you want to break up with me, that’s fine.”
“Don’t make me the bad guy,” he said. Then his voice grew almost tender. “So you really did that?”
Sam nodded.
“And you’ve been lying to me about it for months?”
“I didn’t know what you’d think. After all, you’re a good Christian boy.”
“That’s not fair. You can’t really think of me as just that. Can you?”
“Well. How do you feel about it?” Sam wouldn’t look at Ben. In the pocket of silence before his answer, she watched the headlights catch the green eyes of a raccoon.
“It’s not the choice I would have made.”
Anger flared through Sam’s whole body. “You’d never have to make it.”
“No, but I can understand. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have done it. I’m saying I wouldn’t have.”
“That’s the problem with everyone. You all seem to think you can understand.”
“Sam,” Ben said. “I’m not the bad guy.”
“Right, because I am. Go to hell. Or does the phrase offend you?”
“You’ve hurt me.” Ben’s voice faltered. “I thought you were a different sort of person than you are.”
“What kind of person am I?” Sam asked. When he didn’t respond, she added, “At least this was fun while it lasted.”
“We should keep talking about this,” Ben said.
“Don’t worry. You can just be done with me.”
Ben drove down her family’s long driveway and put the car in park. The porch light was off. Ben was shaking a little, maybe crying.
Sam leaned back and closed her eyes. An image of the woman’s desperate, lined face appeared. Sam snapped her head forward and gripped the door handle. “It was Mary Walcott,” she said, suddenly sure. “I hope she finds you. I hope she comes for you tonight.”
She climbed out of the car. The way was lit by Ben’s headlights. She stopped with her hand on the cold doorknob, the strange new sounds of the field whirring around her. She knew that even after all that she’d done to him, Ben would wait until she was inside. Her anger left her, and she wondered how to face the days, the weeks, the months ahead.
*****
When she stepped inside, she gasped. But it was only her mother, nodding off over a book.
“The porch light went out. I wanted to make sure you got home. Are you all right?”
Sam watched Ben’s headlights recede. “How does someone know if they’re a bad person?” she asked.
Her mother took off her reading glasses, considered. “They never think to ask questions like that.”
Sam began to cry. She went to her mother, who’d forced Sam into this unfamiliar town and uprooted her when she’d most needed to put down roots. Who’d only wanted to keep Sam safe.
“Honey,” her mother said. “What’s wrong?”
“You made me feel so ashamed,” Sam said.
“I didn’t know what to do,” her mother said, with no need for clarification. “I was scared.”
Sam rested her head in her mother’s lap. “But I’m not ashamed,” she said. “I’m not.”
Outside, the frozen brush snapped as some creature slunk by the house, making its nightly rounds. If Sam had gone to the window, she wouldn’t have been able to make out shapes in the dark. Anything could have been out there.
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.
Read an interview between Rebecca Turkewitz and Michael Colbert.