The Incurables

The Bridge

The Bridge Standing at the north end of the Main Street Bridge, Sheriff John Lewis saw, no more than fifty feet in front of him, a man and a woman hoist themselves from the pedestrian walkway onto the bridge’s topmost guardrail , grasp each other’s hands, and leap as if they were intending to dance into the sky. It was 6:13 on what was otherwise an ordinary April evening. Sheriff Lewis immediately formulated an explanation : They’re bungee-jumping. And a consequence: I’ll have to arrest them. Even when he reached the smooth, round rail from which they’d jumped and saw no bungee-­ jumping equipment attached, he held firm to his understanding of what had happened. He allowed a moment to pass before he placed his hands on the rail and 3 _ The Bridge 4 stared over the side of the bridge. On the bicycle path 165 feet below lay the body of the man. A few feet from the path, in the overgrown grass, dandelions, and Queen Anne’s Lace beside Celestial Creek, was the woman’s body. He pulled back and shook his head, as if to clear the pair of images from it. But when he looked again, the scene was the same. He reached to his hip, lifted his cell phone from its case, and dialed what he thought was headquarters. “I’ve got two suicides off the west side of the Main Street Bridge,” he said to the woman who answered. “John? What’s going on? Are you all right?” He realized his mistake with her first syllable. “Marybeth, I’ve just seen two people kill themselves.” He told his wife where he was. He asked her to call 911 and have them send a car and an ambulance. His hands were shaking too much now for him to dial his cell phone. He leaned over the rail again. A woman in electric lime jogging shorts and an Ohio Eastern University T-shirt was standing a few feet from the bodies, her hands covering her mouth. “Please step away,” he shouted down to her. “This might be a crime scene.” He didn’t know if he was using the right language. “Please step away.” She looked up at him, her face contorted in what looked like disgust or agony. “I’m the sheriff,” he explained, “and I’m coming down.” By the time Sheriff Lewis labored down the stairs at the northwest corner of the bridge, he was winded and red-faced. He was sixty-four years old, and he’d been sheriff for less than a month. When Sheriff Lewis reached the bike trail, he moved first to the man’s body and put his thumb on the man’s wrist. He felt a strong heartbeat but was sure it was his own. He lumbered over to the woman and did the same, but the drumming pulse he felt was also doubtless his. He looked up at the woman in the lime jogging shorts. She seemed frozen. The Bridge 5 “They’re dead,” he said. When he heard the ambulance’s siren, he added, “I think.” The ambulance and the police car arrived simultaneously, driving from opposite ends of the bike trail, which was just wide enough to accommodate the vehicles. The two well-toned men in the ambulance confirmed Sheriff Lewis’s hesitant pronouncement . Sheriff Lewis glanced over at Officer Mark Highsmith, who had joined the Sherman Police Department only two weeks earlier. He was the only employee in the department with less time on the job than Sheriff Lewis. “What do we do now?” Sheriff Lewis asked him. It wasn’t Officer Highsmith who answered, however. “Pray,” said the woman in the lime shorts. _ “You acted in a completely professional manner,” Marybeth assured him. It was a few minutes before one in the morning. They were in their queen-sized bed, in their dark bedroom, their air conditioner rattling in the window. “You did what was necessary . You handled the situation with grace.” “I called you,” he said. “But you told me exactly what to do,” she said. “So that you could handle the situation with grace.” Marybeth, who was nine years older than Sheriff Lewis, had had two strokes in the past eighteen months. She used to mountain-climb and go white-water rafting, but now she left the house only to attend physical therapy sessions. Sheriff Lewis used to be the inactive one. Before...