She balanced on the tips of her toes, like a dancer, gracefully poised on the lip of the railing. Her feet barely made contact with the blocky stonework. It felt as if she were floating. She couldn't feel her legs. Headlights swept across the bridge. She felt their heat, felt the urgency of their gaze. Time was running out. Tires screeched as they deadlocked. Before the car finished skidding to a halt she heard one of it's doors open, heard the incessant beeping that comes when a key is left, forgotten, in the ignition. She heard heavy footprints moving quickly her way. A desperate hand groped out of the darkness, a ragged voice called her name. She couldn't face him, not then, and never again so she moved forward; stepped off the ledge into the waiting silence, into the beckoning void. Things were more distant then than ever. She felt herself hit the water but it didn't feel real, it felt like a dream. Darkness was finally falling over her and with it the solace she had always hungered for but had never known.
He watched her jump. His heart shattered the moment she threw herself off of the edge. Empty were his hands as they hung trembling in the air, he had caught nothing with them but wind in the wake of her final passage. Passion overwhelmed him, bringing him, too, up on and then off of the ledge. His body streaked through the air. Not fast enough. His empty hands broke the river's surface. Shock of cold brought convulsions to his form. He surfaced, gasping. Lungs filled and, adjusting to the cold, he dove down again. Inky blackness enveloped him. Even without sight he knew just where to go to find her. His love was that impossibly strong.
She had fallen like a stone, straight down, for the current was not strong, and was laying at the river's bottom. He came to her, folded her up into his arms and drove his legs against the murk to bring her up. Prayers came unbidden to his mind. He bargained with a god he did not believe in. He called on angels and he called on devils; sold himself to whatever force might change the truth that had settled heavily within his bones. She was dead before they broke the surface. He came up carrying a corpse. He laid it gently upon the river bank and sat mutely, staring off into the dark horizon until police and paramedics arrived. Those flashing lights brought no hope. That ambulance was a wagon of death.
The toxicology report told him nothing he didn't already know. She had so much liquor and Ambien in her system that officials were astounded that she'd even been able to make it to the bridge. The first time someone told him that it wasn't his fault he fell into a rage, a tremorous self directed violence which left the bones of his empty hands shattered. His fingers became jagged, kinked at unnatural angles. He had to be sedated. Many feared that he would follow in her wake. That he would never fully return to his life. He made slow progress but eventually his perpetual sadness began to recede. He went back to work. He spent time with family and friends, who were ever talking amongst themselves about the revival of his wit, the return of color to his face, of the renewed interest he began to show in all aspects of his life. He even married to a woman that all of those close to him deemed 'suitable', and had children. Two girls.
No one ever knew how much of his happiness was feigned. No one ever truly realized that his shattered heart could never fully mend. Until his death, which came on the eve of the anniversary of her death, fifty four years later, he was affected by sleeplessness. Many were the long, dark moments of the soul. Caught up in reverie. Every night thinking about that night. Snared, captured, imprisoned by a love that refused to fade. Wading through the tepid tar of fate's merciless decree.
She had left a note but never once in it did she mention him. Others had been surprised by this, had been offended and appalled, but he knew better. She hated saying goodbye to him. She hated being apart from him. They had loved each other too deeply, had complimented each other too perfectly for her to put her final farewell to him down in the vulgarity of the written word. She would have been incapable of writing the things that she would have needed to write and still commit herself to the finality of death. He didn't need to forgive her. He understood her. He knew why things had to be the way they were. He accepted that the devil of depression was a stronger force than their love. He was not bitter. His late nights were his time to be with her, the only way he could, in his mind's eye. His sleepless nights saw him at his most vigorous, at his most alive, traveling through the pastel corridors of his memories.
I know of these things because his youngest daughter is my mother. Because there ought be a special bond between grandfather and grandson. Because something within me reminded him of her, his long lost true love. He used to say that my eyes reminded him of hers. That we both had a kind of darkness swimming behind them. He worried about me. He knew of the beast that dwelt within my heart. He feared that he might lose another. So he brought forth his secrets, like buried treasure painfully dragged up from a dark, brackish abyss. He shared those deepest of intimacies in order to teach me of the fragility of life and the responsibility that we all hold to each other. Looking back I can see how he was speaking to her through me. Letting out all the things that had been building up within him for so long. Purging himself, finally, of a lifetime of tight lipped silences.
