The Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page B

riding the bus pressed up against the flesh and smells of strangers. Would it be more or less depressing, overall?
    Christa leads the way to the back, which is populated by a row of rough-looking black men conversing in loud voices. We find the last two seats, facing each other across the aisle. My seat is sandwiched between two of the talking men, one of whom smells so strongly of cigarettes I almost feel like I’m smoking one myself.
    The seat upholstery is stained with spilled coffee and discarded gum, but the bus is pleasantly cold and the floor is clean. It jerks onto Second Avenue with a grunt of steam and the men who quieted when we shuffled in resume their conversation.
    “Yo, you saw that motherfucker Davis?” the man on my right says. “Comin’ up on me in the warehouse like why you just sittin’ there?’ I say, ‘I’m on break, son.’ He like, ‘Break end two minutes ago.’ I said, ‘Yo, fuck you, man. Check your goddamn watch.’”
    “You say that? For real?” In his animation, the man on my left—the smoker—catches me in the ribs with his elbow. I resist the urge to rub at the bruised spot with my hand.
    “Hell yeah, I said that. Why not? Bitch don’t own me. He might think he do but he don’t.”
    “Man, you gonna lose that job.”
    “Yo, fuck that fucking job.”
    Their voices get louder as the bus pulls into the next stop. Across the aisle Christa stares at me, a half smile on her face. A small child sits on his knees beside her, facing the window and crunching Cheerios. Occasionally he spits one out of his mouth and into her lap.
    “Mama! Mama! Look dat. Fire truck! Mama!”
    His mother glances up from her smartphone long enough to pat his back. “Fire truck. What color is it?”
    “Red! It red. Go woo-woo!”
    She smiles. “Woo-woo, that’s right.”
    I know Christa doesn’t have children, but did she want them, at some point? Did cancer get in the way? Suicide certainly would take on a new dimension if kids were involved.
    At the hospital there was a woman who’d swallowed a bottle of pills with her two-month-old baby in the room. The doctors said it was postpartum depression, but that didn’t stop the other patients from judging her. Even among our sorry ranks, that was the ghetto realm of suicide—for a mother to leave her child behind.
    But I looked in that woman’s eyes and recognized what I saw there. A despair so deep and wide there would be no crossing it. How could you burden a baby with that abyss? Killing herself would have seemed to her, in that dark place, like the kindest option.
    Under Christa’s bench across the aisle is an overstuffed navy blue backpack. I look around at the passengers seated nearby and try to puzzle out whose it could be. A banner ad above the window—“If you see something, say something”—shows a backpack abandoned in exactly the same position beneath a subway seat.
    Isn’t it just a matter of time before something like this happens in America? In New York, which is so densely populated a terrorist could cause major damage just by walking out into the street with a homemade bomb? Everybody thinks it won’t happen to them, but this is exactly how it
could
happen. How it
will
happen. On a quiet weekend morning, when you’re distracted with something else. It will come at you, blindside you, and you won’t be prepared.
    A man seated to Christa’s right leans down and picks up the backpack. I hadn’t noticed him before; he’s young, maybe college-aged, with a prominent pimple on his chin. He unzips the bag and pulls out a browning banana.
    The bus lurches onto the street again, and Christa automatically reaches up to keep the little boy beside her from falling. The contact of his pudgy arm against her hand seems to shake her. Her half-smile slips, replaced by a flash of sorrow so quick you’d almost miss it if you weren’t looking closely. The child’s mother thanks her, and the smile returns and then just as quickly fades away