winter coat was left in the employee break room, but despite the cold wind off the water she didn’t even notice. Four minutes later, she was pounding on her neighbor’s front door.
“Open up!” Kim cried. “Please!”
Kim went around the house, looking into the windows. The lights were on, but she couldn’t see anyone home, yet she was sure Sandra had to be there or at the restaurant. Sandra’s car was parked in back.
“Please! We need to talk!” Kim called out as she pounded her fist on the back door.
Finally, the door opened. Sandra Berkley stood in the doorway, her eyes outlined in red and her face blotchy. Her hands trembled as she let Kim Lee inside. She didn’t say a word at first. Instantly, she started sobbing— uncontrollably so.
“Sit down, Sandra,” said Kim, who was crying now too.
“I’m sorry,” Sandra said, “I couldn’t live with it any longer. I’ve never forgotten the screams.”
“I know,” Kim said, her own eyes welling with tears. “We all know.”
“I heard Christina cry out for me as the bus started to sink. I just stood there. I didn’t know what to do.”
“You were in shock.”
Sandra fought for some composure, but it was a losing battle. “I didn’t even try. I just …”
“No one blames you,” Kim said.
“I blame myself. I know what I did and didn’t do. I know how I felt after.”
Kim wrapped her arms around Sandra’s shoulders as she tried to console her. The sobs came in waves. Sandra tried to speak in the breaks between her tears.
“I was glad, Kim,” she said. “I was glad that Katelyn survived. I stood there listening to the screams, knowing that I had my daughter and that she was hurt but she was alive. She was going to live. And for what? She’s gone now too.”
“You’ve suffered so much, then and now,” Kim said.
Sandra stopped long enough to lock her crying eyes on Kim’s. “Forgive me, Kim.”
Kim Lee shook her head. “No, no forgiveness is needed. You did all that you could.”
“Did I? Really, Kim? Really?”
“I’m sure you did. No one knows how they will react in a moment like what happened on that bridge. No one. You did the best you could in a terrifying time.”
“I don’t know,” Sandra said, looking for something that maybe Kim could finally give her.
“I know you did,” Kim said.
The women talked a while longer. They cried; they hugged. Kim didn’t tell Sandra that she had questioned why Katelyn had been spared, when Christina was taken. And even so, in that very moment in the Berkleys’ house, no two women were ever closer, a bond so deep, borne of such tragedy.
The Port Gamble gossip line, thought by many to be sublimely accurate, had failed miserably when it came to the true trouble reverberating in house number 23. The Berkleys’ rows were not about a marriage crumbling because Sandra was drinking. It wasn’t about a restaurant failing, or settlement money that had been squandered. It was a marriage falling apart because Sandra Berkley could not face what had really happened on the Hood Canal Bridge and the shame and misplaced guilt that came with it. Booze had been her medication. Anger had been her weapon against a husband who had wanted to help her work through her guilt.
After she was sure Sandra was going to be all right, Kim Lee left for home, shaken and relieved by the meeting. She composed herself before ducking inside. Beth was watching TV, texting, drinking a sugar-free Red Bull, and reading a book.
“You look completely trashed,” Beth said, glancing at her mother. “What did they make you do now? Re-add everything five minutes before shift change? Your job so sucks.”
Kim had hoped the short walk in the night air would take some of the puffiness from her eyes.
“Nothing ever adds up,” she said, going into the kitchen. “Pizza tonight?”
Beth looked back down at her phone. “All right. I’ll call it in. You always get thick crust because you think it’s a better value because it weighs more. I like thin crust.”
“Fine,” Kim said, heading into the kitchen. She braced herself on the counter a little and steadied herself by taking in a deep breath. She unfolded the letter and read it one more time. After seeing Sandra, it no longer seemed like a suicide note.
I want you to know I’m so sorry that I didn’t save your daughter or the other girls. Sometimes, I wish I could go back to that day and do it all over. I’d do things differently. Please forgive me. I don’t know how much longer I can live with what I did.
Sandra
Kim shredded the note and stuffed it down the garbage disposal. She turned on the water and, as the noisy contraption did its thing, she wondered if it was worse to lose a child or live with the guilt that yours had survived. She was glad that she never had to face that. Sandra’s cross to bear weighed a million pounds.
Later, after a couple of slices of thin-crust pizza and some distracted conversation between mother and daughter, Beth excused herself to her bedroom and texted Hayley and Taylor.
BETH: MOM IS STRNGR THAN NORMAL 2NITE. BOSS PROB YELLED @ HER. WISH I HAD HER PROBS. HER LIFE IS SO EZ.
HAYLEY: TELL ME ABOUT IT. THEY KEEP SAYING THAT THINGS R HARDER IN THE ‘REAL WORLD’ BUT THEY HAVE NO IDEA HOW F’ED UP IT IS @ KINGSTON.
TAYLOR: DEF THE WORST.
As Kim Lee placed her head on the pillow, she was transported back to that day almost ten years ago, standing on the Hood Canal Bridge as the sirens wailed and all the mothers cried. Seeing Sandra hadn’t brought it all back, because it had never really left her. She, like all the other moms, hated that damn bridge. Just hated it.
chapter 38
SOME BRIDGES, LIKE THE NEARBY TACOMA NARROWS or its far sexier cousin, the Golden Gate in San Francisco, are a marvel for their stunning beauty, arching over dangerous waters or defying gravity as they connect two high points over a deep chasm.
The Hood Canal Bridge is a marvel too, though not for how it looks. It literally floats atop the water for which it is named as it carries Washington State Route 104 across Hood Canal and connects the Olympic and Kitsap peninsulas. At the time of its construction in 1961, depths of more than three hundred feet made it impossible for a suspension bridge to be built there. So it floats. Concrete pontoons hold up the roadway just above water level.
Fifteen thousand cars cross it every day, its drivers and passengers thinking nothing more than how beautiful the Olympic Mountains are, with the eagles soaring overhead, and the occasional submarine cruising for the navy base in Bangor.
A few families cross the bridge and remember the darkest days of their lives. The Ryan family was one of those. Valerie Ryan in particular couldn’t stand driving over the span. It was the primary reason why she went back to school to complete her psychiatric nursing degree. All of those jobs were on the Seattle side of the bridge. She didn’t want to find herself crossing Hood Canal for the mundane reason that her job was there.
The girls knew about the accident, of course, but traversing the bridge on those rare trips to Port Townsend or Port Angeles brought the occasional questions about what happened that rainy, windy March 21 years ago. For some reason, the girls sought clarity of only one detail—not of what happened but of exactly where it had been.
Taylor, in particular, seemed to hone in on the spot where the draw span connected with the main bridge deck.
“It was here,” she said when she was seven and they were heading home from a visit in Port Townsend.
“Somewhere around here, yes,” Valerie had said.
