London Bridges

Teddy Sinclair spent the rest of his life hoping to see the world. For fifty years, life got in the way. Teddy found himself at home more often than college because his mother never was quite the same after his father’s death. His spring breaks were spent in his town’s crumbling library despite invitations to Tennessee, Florida, and Mexico. Mrs. Sinclair needed him, more than they knew. He graduated with a degree in engineering only to return to work in the mines. When his wife moved in next door, Teddy went over with a cake because she wasn’t his wife just yet. It wasn’t a very good cake, but Dana found out Teddy kissed better than he baked. They got married in August in his town’s crumbling church despite the leak in the ceiling. When Isabella was born, the December sun shone for an entire week. It was then Teddy decided he wouldn’t wait until the last year of his life like his own father did. As soon as Izzy was old enough to understand, Teddy told her stories. He told her about her grandfather and California, her mother and Maine; most importantly, he told her to get out. The world deserved to be seen, and Izzy should be the one to do it.

In the year after Teddy’s death, Isabella booked a flight to London and sat alone at the departure gate. She clutched her father’s coat tighter. The Sherpa collar had once been bright, but Izzy tucked her chin into its faded lining. She had taken the coat to bring her father with her. He never did get to leave, but it was hard to know what the dead might regret. Perhaps their home was the place Teddy simply belonged when so many others did not. The perpetual greyness of their West Virginia town eventually settled over everything. Izzy feared her mother would be next, and although she didn’t necessarily want to leave her so soon, she was comforted by Dana’s endeavor to spend a few weeks in Maine with her sister Darcy. These places Izzy’s father had built in her memories were sacred. They were also separate. The thought of returning home after her trip was enough to send Izzy’s stomach rolling. Without her father, she could not fathom a way her home might still exist, at least in the way that she wanted. The doctors had been telling them to get out for months, but they had thought it best at the time not to listen. Still they were marked. Grief clung to Izzy and Dana like coal dust, chalky and black. Just when Izzy thought she had finally shaken it all free, she would find more tucked into the creases of an old shirt or within the pages of a favorite book. London, she knew, was only a distraction, but at least it was a way out.  

Dana rolled down her window, having passed the sign out of West Virginia hours before. The dying light’s air was chilly, but she leaned into its windswept caress. She had been driving for ten hours already, not that she noticed after five. Dana hadn’t driven this way in years, but it still felt as familiar as Teddy’s hand on her back. It was a small comfort, if any at all. Hardly anything penetrated the fatigue that had settled in Dana’s bones. The flickering motel sign ahead beckoned, and though Dana could probably finish the last four hours tonight, she wanted to call Izzy. Her plane would’ve landed by now. Dana knew how difficult it could be to uproot yourself, especially when it wasn’t your decision. Leaving Maine thirty years ago had been at her mother’s behest. Until that point, she had spent her entire life on her family’s secluded ranch, had gone to church every Sunday, had done every little thing right except one. Dana had never lived without some kind of support system, so when she arrived in Teddy’s town, upset and alone, she’d held onto him. He’d let her. But he was gone now, and it was time to return to what she knew.

The sound of gravel up the drive drew Darcy’s attention to the window. Unwilling to hope for the best, she pulled the gossamer curtain to the side and peered out. The sun shone like it always did and it always would. It glinted off of her younger sister’s copper hair the way fresh pennies seem to glow against cement. The distance from the window to Dana’s car held the years at bay. She looked the same as the day she had left, when Darcy had locked herself in her room for a week after watching Dana’s taillights blink out over the hill. Looking at her now as she pulled a single suitcase from the backseat, Darcy felt a reckless urge return, to sweep her sister up in her arms, to shake her, to never let her go. It had been years, didn’t she know? But Darcy held herself up at the front door, unable to cross its threshold. She hadn’t cared about Dana’s pregnancy. That had been their mother’s fight. Ignoring your own sister for thirty years, however, was a different matter entirely, but the closer Dana got to the house, to Darcy, the frustration faded. Darcy found herself crossing the porch, stumbling down its wooden steps. Dana’s suitcase fell hard on familiar soil as the two sisters embraced.

Marcus had been waiting at Heathrow for over two hours when he decided the airport’s baggage claim had nothing on his heart. The air smelled like dust. A palpable kind of dust that floated through the air, tickling his nose at first, until it coated his lungs and sat there like a weight. He’d been feeling heavy lately, uncomfortably so, but when his ex-girlfriend texted just last week, asking him if he just might be able to pick her up from the airport, he couldn’t say no because he’d been living out of his car. Of course he could make it. Their flat was in the city, but Miranda had locked him out of it. It was a metaphor for his life, he supposed, because as silly as it sounded, home was with Miranda. When she stranded Marcus six hundred miles and an ocean behind, any attempt at recovery had been insufficient. Now the air would always smell like dust, and it sat in his lungs the way her kisses held his breath in his throat. There was nothing left for him in London. Marcus would tell her so, he thought, moving through the crowd toward her flash of auburn hair. He reached out for her shoulder, her name on the tip of his tongue, and was only mildly surprised to note he had the wrong girl.

Up close, Darcy thought Dana looked like a stranger. Her little sister had always been the pretty one, but only traces of that vibrancy were visible now. Dana trembled in Darcy’s arms before reaching into the pocket of her cardigan for a photograph. She held it between them like a silent peace offering, the last image of a life that could never be seen again, only explained, but never in enough detail and never with the right words. The selfish part of Darcy didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see the possibilities of all she had missed, but she grasped the picture with delicate fingers anyway. She noticed Dana first, the way she beamed at the man and child instead of the camera, so taken with the ones whom she loved that the rest of the world did not seem to matter. Darcy hoped the man was her husband. He was handsome, with a round face and kind eyes framed by lopsided spectacles. Darcy could see what had drawn her sister to him. His arms circled the child, the girl who looked everything like her mother but not at all like him, as though she were the most precious thing in his world. Darcy realized that he knew. He knew, and he did not care. Darcy didn’t bother to stop the tears as they rolled down her cheeks. The breeze moved clouds across the vast blue sky and rattled the screen door their father never got around to fixing. Chickens clucked in their coops. Welcome home. Welcome home. Darcy took Dana’s hand and led her inside.

Dana was pleased to find out that some things did not change. Her father’s lounge chair still swallowed her whole, though it no longer leaned back quite so far that her feet left the ground. The sunlight warmed her skin in the way West Virginia’s watery version never could. The dust in her throat was dirt and not coal, and though it shouldn’t have, the distinction comforted her. Teddy wouldn’t have known what do with himself, with all of the blue skies and fresh air. Fear had kept him in West Virginia; Dana knew this. It would’ve kept her Maine, had her mother not forced her to leave. But maybe fear wasn’t quite the right word. They had been content, Teddy and Dana, and although Teddy could tell a good story about all of the places he’d never been, the narrative distance had been enough. She had loved him for making her feel safe, supported, and needed because that stability had felt like home. But Dana started to realize that her family had begun in flight. It had thrived on a risk that turned out to be love. Isabella would like it in Maine, Dana thought. And if she didn’t, they had enough time and plenty of ground to find the perfect place to hang their hats. It was one thing to dream, another altogether to see it through. Dana wasn’t much of a storyteller, but Teddy deserved to know. She traced the familiar faces on the photograph before flipping it over, pen in hand. Dear Teddy…

Izzy stood before a kiosk selling postcards. Although she had called her mom after the plane had landed, there was something about the tangibility of a postcard that Izzy enjoyed. I’m thinking about you, it said, and you could hold it in your palm like holding someone’s hand. She studied one with a picture of Westminster, Big Ben looming over the river. A red double decker bus captured mid-float down the street. The scene was technicolor, perhaps just a touch gaudy, and it reminded her so much of her father’s stories of far-off places that her heart squeezed thinking about it. This one would do perfectly. Her father would’ve loved it. She nearly told him so before realizing that the man who tapped her on the shoulder was not, in fact, her father. He was more boy than man, with dark hair that curled behind his ears and thick glasses that didn’t sit quite right on his nose. He looked surprised to see her, as though he had been expecting someone else, but the disappointment of discovering a stranger never crossed his face. Instead, he smiled, and Izzy felt it in her toes. He spoke with a British accent, and when at last he offered Izzy his hand, she shook it. London, she felt it in her heart, just became the smallest bit familiar. 

“I’m Marcus.”

“Isabella.”

“Pleasure is mine, Isabella. What brings you to London?”

She hesitated. Grief brought her to London, but it didn’t have to stay that way. “An old man with a story.”

“Is it a good one?”

“It’s a sad one, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good.” 

“I suppose you’re right.” Marcus smiled like it was an apology. “I could use a good story.” 

“Everyone could use a good story.” Izzy just hoped she could do her father justice. The key to her father’s tales had lived within the storyteller himself. Now that he was dead, the details that had made Izzy’s childhood so vivid drifted aimlessly through the atmosphere. Perhaps if she was strong enough to pull them together, she’d find a missing piece. “Are you looking for someone?”

“No,” he said. “Not anymore.” 

The resignation behind his honesty struck Izzy. Marcus spoke the truth of a man who had not found the thing he had lost but had finally let it go. “How well do you know London?”

“How well do you know this story?”  

“Well, part of it is mine.” Though the answer surprised her, when she pulled her coat tighter around herself, she felt her father’s reassuring hug. “I think part of it has always been mine, but I can’t decide where it’s going next.”

“Then in return for your story and a cup of tea,” Marcus said, offering an arm, “I can get you to wherever you need to go.”

About the Author

Kate Knab is a senior English major with a concentration in Creative Writing and minor in Spanish at Arcadia University. Along with being a Fiction and Poetry Editor for Quiddity, she is the treasurer of Sigma Tau Delta and an editor for The Compass. When she's not traveling or writing, Kate spends her free time trying to teach Spanish to her goldfish. If that proves to be a dead end for fame and fortune, she aspires to be a writer and full-time editor.  This was piece was selected by the Arcadia University English Department for the Excellence in Creative Writing Award.