She calls to me now across the sweating fog and with a shiver, I am with her.
Before now, there was a warm electric night in August, and she’d looked like pretty trouble lighting her last cigarette at the foot of a street lamp. She was quitting this time for good. She said it from the corner of her mouth and her invisible words were followed by a curl of smoke. It always seemed odd to me to celebrate an end with another quick beginning, but maybe I didn’t know the implacable nag of comfort as she did.
The times that we had broken up before, she’d always come back, wordless and tearful and desperately affectionate and hopeful eyed. And foolish or loving, I’d never turned her away. So maybe my comfort was just different from hers. She savored hers in a breath and I, a touch.
I held her hand as we walked in that loose fingered way that pretends at cool composure. Writhing blue plumes followed her from her other hand, mixing with the boudoir halos of sodium lights that led us in their curving procession toward the river.
“Do you think we’ll ever be this young again?” She asked. An odd question, but not for her.
“In another life perhaps.” I said, staring straight ahead, watching our shadows.
I had found love in those shadows once, stretching out onto the flat cobblestones of a nearly vacant city square where we’d eventually ended up dancing. I’d been humming (or maybe she) and a street lamp stood at our backs and made us great gray giants in the space beyond. I’d watched her shadow tilt and rest its head on my shadow’s shoulder. I’d felt her hair pooling, spilling down my back.
This time, our shadows slinked across the pavement toward somewhere hungry and accursed. “We should change streets.”
“Why? Oh—“ she chuckled “you’re not actually afraid of a bridge are you?” There was a chiding smile in her voice.
I slowed my stride, tried to tug her back without answering.
But she was right to laugh. It was superstition. A statistical oddity that made the Porter’s Island Bridge “the suicide bridge.” It wasn’t astoundingly high, but the water below was shallow and the rocks were plentiful and the legend of Weeping Maria tended to keep the bridge lonely at night. Cars passed quickly and rarely was there ever anyone to talk a person away from the railing. That was all there was to it—a self-affirming urban legend.
Still, as the tower and cables of the bridge loomed ahead, I felt the dread of a place where so many people had stood and watched the grand expanse of night sky and dropped to their deaths. I watched them in my mind, one by one, faceless human shapes plummeting through the wide lightless air. They always jumped at night.
She stopped thirty feet onto the bridge and folded her arms over the railing. The river whispered its labored gurgle below and she sighed.
“It’s pretty here.”
“It is.”
“I wonder if Weeping Maria really lost the ring or if she threw it.”
“It’s just a story.” My words came out half statement, half question.
“Yeah, but it’s a better story if she’s complicated instead of clumsy.”
I gazed at her and her smallish smile. She looked like all there was in the world with the distant black mass of Porter’s Island behind. I wanted to be close to her, but I didn’t dare lean as she did to watch the moon licked strip of water below. I compromised with a pair of hands on the railing and braced against the emptiness beyond the cold length of metal. The rail could have been as wide as my leg and felt no more substantial.
“Maybe she did throw it away.” I paused. “But if she did then she’s evil, isn’t she?”
She didn’t answer me.
The story of Weeping Maria was a simple one—a blocky gem cut into facets by many different tellings. She was, by most accounts, a lovely young immigrant girl from Mexico or Guatemala or some other place south. A beggar, a flamenco prodigy, an apple picker’s daughter, the child of a nun who had become pregnant and, disgraced, found her way to a brothel—the details of Maria’s youngest years were varied.
Ever consistent was the man. A handsome and wealthy and nameless rancher’s son had fallen madly in love with Maria. He proposed with a diamond ring worth more than everything Maria owned or would ever own. Then on the old stone bridge that had spanned the river where the modern one now stood, she lost the ring to the water. Some said that the diamond was so big, that in the shallow water she could still see it, soaked in moonlight and glinting from the bed of a wide gray stone. She leaned, reaching, full of hope and sorrow. Then she had leaned too far.
Years later it was said that her ghost walked the bridge on quiet nights. She would appear behind a person walking or standing by the rail, and with a voice like honey she would ask the person to get her ring. They would always oblige her. But being a girl born from poverty, where a good pair of shoes was something to covet, she would implore the person to remove theirs lest they get ruined by the river.
Whether it was more folklore or not, those that jumped allegedly always left a pair of shoes behind, standing side by side, toes pointing off into oblivion.
If Maria had thrown the ring, then asking people to fetch it wasn’t an act of sorrow—regret perhaps—but perhaps something unknowable and sinister.
“It’s probably a good time to go back,” I said, rubbing a circle into a bare patch of back between green spaghetti straps. “There are other pretty things in this town, some of them close to bartenders and food.”
She had long since finished her cigarette and now twisted the filter between her fingers.
“Fair enough.” She began to stand, then froze. “Look.”
A man was walking the bridge two hundred feet or so away. He had come from the Porter’s Island side, staring directly at us. He was mumbling something unintelligible, rocking slightly back and forth.
“He’s drunk,” I said.
She watched without acknowledging. Then the man buckled at the knees, folded into a shadow of his own making, whined loudly, pitifully. He made me uneasy and at once, I realized how alone and isolated we were. His screech startled me, raised the hairs on my arms and neck. If he wasn’t drunk, if he was mentally unstable, he might see a pair of strangers as something threatening.
“We should go. We can tell someone to get the guy some help.”
“I don’t—“ she trailed off. Took a slow step toward him.
“Hey. I think going over is a bad idea.”
“See.”
“What?”
“…pero…”
I felt a sudden jab of dread, cold and dank and suffusing my middle. I grabbed her wrist and felt my clammy hands slide against her warm skin as she took another step.
The man stood slowly, shaking, peering through space at us and at nothing. I was so focused on his face that I didn’t notice right away what had changed about him. A small thing, a loss—his shoes.
Had I had any strong thought, I might have said something entirely useless, but the man’s wail filled what room I had for words.
“Lo siento mucho, mi amor!”
I’m so sorry, my love!
I felt urgency in the pull of her wrist. My dread swelled. The man sidled over the rail, looked behind him, fell.
There wasn’t so much a splash, but a wet crack and then the hush of the river cutting through the dark.
——
The day after, I sat in a cafe and ignored the bustle and sipped a coffee that had stained my mouth with bitter char. A touch of sugar made it cloying. She moved a poached egg yolk around with a fork until finally it burst and bled into the hollow of her plate. She looked frail, sleepless, and her fresh pack of cigarettes was already missing four.
“So you really don’t remember? You were staring. Pulling away from me.”
She winced. “No. I don’t remember him jumping—I don’t remember him at all. I remember feeling good—great really—like the world of you and us and the night and the city were all part of some riddle that I had solved.” She groaned miserably and put down her fork. “Now I just feel this throb of regret or embarrassment or something in me and I don’t know what it’s from, but it’s there.”
“I wanna help.”
“You saw a guy die. You actually remember it. So I feel like I should be helping—ugh, lo siento, I thought I wanted these eggs, but I can’t.”
The dread tickled. “You just did it again.”
“What? Oh fuck—the Spanish? What did I—“. She pushed away her plate and folded down onto the table. “Jesus. Is there something wrong with me? PTSD or something?”
“I don’t know.” I reached out a hand for her arm. She brushed her fingertips along my knuckles and spoke sideways into the table top.
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever loved you more than last night. I remember that. I remember leaning and feeling weightless and naughty and so fucking full of this, like, separate, inexhaustible well of happiness. And then you were pale and grabbing me. I thought you’d gone crazy.” She sighed and deflated a little more. “I guess I had.”
——
She withered and she bloomed for three long days.
Lo siento.
No entiendes.
Perdóname por favor.
Her little Spanish interjections became more fraught. Peppered into conversations then uttered alone in quiet moments through clenched teeth. She remembered none of them.
She’d awake, clawing up the bed sheets, sweating and searching the darkness wildly—“lo siento!”—heaving in breaths before falling back onto the pillow, still for another hour or two or three.
At times she seemed to rebound, bright and affectionate, staring luridly at me as I made toast or played on my phone. Her gaze then was like something borrowed from a blushing moment in a sultry story—a look that was only mostly her.
Jódeme como esta noche es el final de nosotros.
She would grasp and suck my tongue and still remembered only rags of what she’d done.
Five days after the bridge, she was scheduled to have a meeting with a therapist. She hadn’t been to one in years and for the most part, that had been okay. But she had never been so frayed in the time that I’d known her. She paced our small apartment fitfully and neglected the plants she loved and pounced on me with unreserved passion that felt increasingly more like desperation.
She tried again and again to explain. Perhaps she thought I needed her to if I was going to see her as normal. Or perhaps she needed to for her. “There’s—there’s an itch I can’t fucking scratch. A question I’m expected to answer, but I don’t know the question and maybe I never did—am I making sense?”
She sat at our coffee table where we ate our dinners and she flipped her pack of cigarettes over and over again. She hadn’t opened it, hadn’t smoked all day, but perpetually seemed just on the verge.
“I don’t understand what you’re going through, but yes, you’re making sense, I think.”
“Christ. Half the time I’m not even sure if I’m speaking English. I don’t know some of the phrases I’ve said. How does that work? Jódeme?—Fuck me? I didn’t learn that in school. I mean, what the fuck.”
“I don’t know. And it is weird, undoubtedly. But in two days, you’ll talk to a doctor who might be able to explain something. Right?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” She stared at the tumbling pack, moving, static. Her fingers repeated the motion. “It’s like quitting kinda. Feeling an urge to eat or drink but nothing feels right. You forget sometimes that you’re craving a cigarette. The solution is simple and it makes you crazy because there’s the urge and there’s you trying to be healthy.” Flip. Flip. Flip. “I want you to fuck me. I don’t, but I do, and you’re going to because I don’t know what my cigarette solution is. Okay?”
——
That night, she fell asleep quickly and I watched her for a while. None of her fret ever seemed to invade her sleep until she’d startle awake. Her face was warm peace, and she hadn’t smoked all day and she hadn’t celebrated a thing about it.
This time, I was the one who woke, not to frantic Spanish apologies, but to a clock that read 2:09 AM. I turned over in bed and found myself alone.
Her phone sat on her bedside table, her pack of cigarettes. The bathroom door was open, the front door unlocked, her car sat quietly on the street outside our apartment. I don’t know how many directions I chose or how many blocks I walked or how many stumbling drunks I passed leaving the shuttered bars. I just know that the street lamps began to curve and felt a familiar knot twisting into me.
I followed the road into silence and the slow rise of cables and towers. The silhouette of Porter’s Island looked desolate. The bridge looked desolate. And a few hundred feet from where it left the land, I stopped. My dread had worn me for days, my helplessness and confusion, and all at once it poured from me and pooled against the railing—around a pair of shoes I knew too well.
Hers.
It was easier to collapse than to peer over the side, easier to weep than to squint impossibly through the darkness to find her broken body. I knew she was there. I didn’t need to see a thing. I held her shoes to my chest and slumped against the railing of the suicide bridge and tried to be numb. I almost succeeded for a second or two.
“Ella era una puta.”
The voice cut a gouge through my nerves. I had been alone. I was alone.
“Ella era tu familia.” My words cut just as deeply. I hadn’t thought them—she was your family? Whose family?
“Eras mi familia. Mi prometido. Tu me elegiste.”
You were my family. My betrothed. You chose me.
I searched around me. Nothing. No one. Just a voice, a woman’s sob, and the sudden shock of ice upon my neck. Another shock fell, a crawling rivulet, another after—stinging horrid pin pricks. Tears.
Maria.
“Lo sien—“ I halfted, tried to summon any words of my own and gagged on the effort. Silence was worse, clawing my throat raw as my lungs labored against my tightening ribs. “Lo siento mucho, mi amor.”
No. It’s what the man had said. Before he jumped. I’m so sorry, my love.
I staggered away, rose to my feet and fell back down again as I ambled toward the street. Then I was running, sprinting away toward solid ground, heart pounding as I tried to shake away the chill of those tears. I turned only once, and there on the bridge, wrapped in the haze of a street lamp and a blanket of fog, was a woman standing alone who hadn’t been there and always had. She held something small—I saw it glint in the sallow light as it flew from her hand, down and down and down.
Lo siento, mi Maria…
She shrieked. Anguish and heartache and rage—a keening, icy sound that rolled across the mist and rattled in my skull. Then she took a step forward, lifted the fluted cloth of a skirt, threw a leg over the railing. My heart strained for…her—for a love I didn’t know. A perversion of the love I’d lost. Her other leg followed, and for five of my breaths, she stared through the depths of the air down into the shallows of the river. She didn’t make a sound as she fell. Silence as I turned away, shaking, terrified and broken by it all. And for the long walk home, I wept for the wrong woman.
That was two nights ago.
——
The next morning they dragged a scattered body from the rocks, the second in a week. A Jane Doe.
She’d spoken of quitting cigarettes, of hungering and thirsting insatiably for a phantom comfort. She felt crazy for it and I think I know why. She was raging lust and hobbling torment in the end. Passion and guilt.
Ella era una puta.
A whore.
Restlessly, I dreamt of a girl without a ring, smiling flirtatiously for a man who had given one to his love. The girl wasn’t as pretty as the man’s new fiancée, but she made the man sweat. Her sensual lips that parted and pursed and curled at the corners, her messy curls that lapped her nearly naked back.
He had snuck the girl into his bed while his Maria perused the market, while she strode past florists and fruit sellers and cheap bars full of leering and laughing men. Maria’s life had been color—the coral pink of his favorite dress, the fire of a diamond, the ink of the night. And then it was only red—a pair of heels that weren’t hers, standing in his foyer, side by side. She climbed the stairs, listened to a woman’s giggle, a woman’s moan, she opened the bedroom door and the girl clawed up the bedsheets to hide her guilt.
“No entiendes!”
Maria understood perfectly well.
“Perdóname! Por favor!”
Forgive her? How? When the puta was famillia.
Maria had a sister. I know that now with certainty. I feel the truth of it. And I think in some way, the woman I loved became that sister. The lust remained and the torment remained, haunting her mind, but she couldn’t remember the rest.
I wish I had it so easy.
I remember too much. Of my own life and of Maria’s but I am missing parts too.
She—the woman I loved for years—I can’t remember her name. She is Maria in my phone now, on her socials, in my memories, but I know she wasn’t a Maria because I know the face I see in the pictures isn’t hers either. That face I have only seen for a moment as it screamed atop a bridge, nightly in the haze of my dreams, and now, in the windows of my hollowed apartment. She watches from the other side of the glass, weeping, impatient, angrily tapping the sound of footsteps into my mind. She wants me to come with her. To the river. To the bridge. And there are times when I want to. I feel the misplaced guilt of another man’s betrayal and I know the penance I must make. There are other times when I am filled with fear. I don’t want to die. But I lose more and more of my life and my love with each passing day.
This morning I awoke with my hand on my front door. Maria wept giddily through the peephole. And the only thing I could think to utter was: