The Bridge Read Online Free PDF

time I’m ashamed to say that I’m hungry for it. Maybe it’s pure sensory deprivation, but I want more.
    I won’t ask for it. But I won’t let her climb up on that bridge again either. At least not today.
    “I don’t have much to offer you,” I tell her. “But we can do this one day. And then we’ll see. Okay? We’ll see if it changes anything.”
    She shakes her head in a way that shifts her hair over her face. There are streaks of copper in it and also strands of gray. I wonder, suddenly, what she looked like after chemo, when all her hair fell out. It’s difficult to picture her without eyebrows or lashes—denuded, softened, fragile. But she did look like that once. She went through all that, once.
    Was anyone there to help her? Did she let them if they were? She doesn’t seem like the type to be comfortable with vulnerability. Which means I’ll need to be very careful with this perverse drama we’re enacting. She might be perfectly okay with
being
someone’s savior, but being rescued herself? No, she wouldn’t approve of that at all. I can tell that much about her already.
    But that’s okay. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to make my intentions invisible.
    “It’s not going to change anything for me, Henry. I know what I have to do. But maybe it will change something for you.”
    I do my best to smile. “Maybe.” I know it won’t. But it can’t hurt for her to think it will.
----
    Our first stop is the Staten Island Ferry. Christa insists that we take a city bus to the terminal because it will be “a good experience” for me. I can’t imagine how covering myself with exhaust fumes and fast food crumbs will make me feel any better about the world, but I go along with it. If saving the poor little rich boy is how she wants to imagine this, who am I to get in her way?
    “I don’t have change, though, or a…a card. A MetroCard.”
    She hustles across the street toward the bus stop. “I thought you brought your wallet.”
    “I did, but—”
    “Wait.” She stops me at the curb. “Please don’t tell me you never ride the subway.”
    “Well…”
    “Wow.” She shakes her head. “Never? How do you get around? To work and everything?”
    “I have a driver.”
    “A driver.” She says it quietly. “So you’re not just rich. You’re like
rich
rich.”
    What else can I do but shrug? I can’t remember the last time I was with someone for whom having a driver was strange.
    “Does he have a name, this driver of yours?”
    “Charles.”
    “Oh yeah? I hope he wears a top hat.”
    “Actually, he’s rather fond of a cap he got from the Guyana cricket team. You wouldn’t believe how much that man knows about the game of cricket.”
    “So…what? You talk to him while he drives you around the city?”
    The bus pulls in, exhaling a plume of smoke behind it.
    “Sometimes. He’s an interesting guy.”
    Christa gives me a funny look. “I’ll use my pay-per-ride card for both of us, okay? I didn’t bother getting a monthly because…well…you know.”
    We get on the bus and I’m surprised by how crowded it is so early in the morning. What are all these people doing up already? They’re dressed and groomed for daytime, as though they’ve been awake for hours. What would I normally be doing on a Saturday at this time? Sleeping. Thinking ahead to some desultory brunch with work friends. Going to the gym, where I’d carry out the careful routine prescribed to me by a professional trainer. I had to hire someone to give me goals, having none of my own to speak of.
    I did go through these motions, though, despite the fact that they carried all the appeal of a plateful of gray ash. I’d been hoping, I suppose, that I could make myself normal by doing what everyone else did.
    I rarely stopped to wonder about this whole different set of
everyone elses
. To consider what would it be like to go through this other set of motions—awake at dawn, heading to work on a Saturday,