Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [48]
For a long time after Bridget left the Planned Parenthood office she searched for her bike. She was dazed; her head was pounding and her eyes were stinging. Maybe she’d left it by the bakery.
She walked up and down the streets in the blazing afternoon sun, trying to retrace her steps. Again the world seemed to have stopped and started anew. First there was the world that had Tibby and the Septembers in it, a fundamental center to her life and a source of deepest comfort. In a single moment that world had ended and a new one had started without them. A sadder world had started with just Eric and a mattress on the floor, but she’d left that behind too.
And so had opened the world in which she was itinerant, filthy, and pregnant but had a bike. And apparently now even that world had come to an end.
She stumbled upon her broken lock lying on the sidewalk a dozen yards from Planned Parenthood. So that was what happened to her bike.
She didn’t even stop for it. She kept walking. She pointed her body west and just kept going. She wondered if she could join one of the lower orders, like shrimp or termites, which were not burdened with consciousness.
By the following afternoon, her pack was too heavy and the sun felt too hot. Even the lower orders felt pain. Bridget stuck out her thumb. With her hair blowing around behind her, even messy as it was, she knew it wouldn’t take long to get a ride. She let the first two cars that slowed go by. The third had a man and a woman in it. She got in the backseat.
“Where are you headed?” the driver asked. He was in his late forties, probably, with a neatly trimmed goatee and a Hawaiian shirt.
“Where are you headed?” she asked.
“Sonoma.”
“That sounds fine.”
The wife turned around. She had frizzy light brown hair and a look of motherly concern. “Where do you live?”
Even with the mind of a termite, Bridget knew not to set off the alarms of kind, concerned people who were giving her a lift. “San Francisco,” she said.
“Do you want us to drop you there?” the woman asked.
“No thanks. I’m on vacation,” Bridget said.
“So are we,” the man said. “I’m Tom and this is my wife, Cheryl.”
“Sunny,” she said. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for the ride.”
Bridget parted ways with Tom and Cheryl at a gas station off Route 80, a bit south of Sonoma. She walked in the direction of the setting sun. By the time it dunked into the ocean, she’d made it all the way to Petaluma. She sat on a bench outside a bank and wondered about Eric’s cousin Anna and her wedding. It was the day after tomorrow, she thought. Or would have been the day after tomorrow. Anna belonged to the old world, along with Bridget’s bike and her empty uterus and her sanity. She wondered if Anna was even getting married anymore.
Bridget bought a slice of pizza on her way out of town and walked westward in the dark. Cars zoomed by and she figured one of them might kill her.
Over the next blur of days she slept in state parks, ate at diners and from vending machines, and slowly made her way as far west as she could, and that was the Pacific Ocean at Point Reyes. Her arms were dark red from sunburn, and her hair was dirty and matted, but she couldn’t feel anything anymore. She’d descended down through shrimp and termites to an even lower order, a thing without a central nervous system. Maybe a germ, an amoeba, blue-green algae.
She’d gotten to the ocean, but she couldn’t stop walking, so she turned south. She spent her days sleeping and walking from Inverness to Dogtown to Bolinas to Stinson Beach. You could go a long way in this direction. You could go all the way down to Mexico. She pictured herself walking through Half Moon Bay, Big Sur, San Luis Obispo, Redondo Beach, Ensenada, all the way out to Cabo at the tip of Baja, and even though she couldn’t feel anything she started to cry. It was an involuntary thing her body did, like the sweat that rolled down her back. She cried for a mile or so, and then she stopped and sat down.
At Stinson Beach she threw her pack on the sand. She realized she did feel something after all,