Chapter 45
Chapter 45:
The moving truck driver asked Bridget where she wanted to go, and the question — simple, logistical, the kind of question that normally required a three-second answer — produced a silence that lasted long enough for the driver to check his rearview mirror twice to make sure she was still conscious.
“Elmwood Terrace,” Bridget said finally.
The name tasted like a step backward.
Elmwood Terrace was the apartment she’d rented when she first came to Halcombe — a studio on the fourth floor of a building that aspired to respectability and achieved adequacy. Thin walls.
A kitchen that doubled as a hallway.
A window that faced another building’s window, close enough that Bridget could hear her neighbor’s television through two panes of glass. It was the kind of place that existed to be moved out of, and Bridget had moved out of it sixty-three days ago with the joyful certainty of a woman who would never return.
She called the landlord from the truck. The phone rang six times. The landlord — a woman named Mrs.
Chen who communicated exclusively in the tones of mild disappointment — answered and confirmed, with audible surprise, that the apartment hadn’t been re-let. “Didn’t expect you back so soon,” Mrs.
Chen said, in the voice of someone who was not surprised at all.
Bridget arrived at Elmwood Terrace at four in the afternoon, and the Nolan family was waiting for her.
They stood at the entrance to the building complex like a delegation from a country she’d tried to leave — Roy, her father, thick-armed and thin-tempered, wearing the same canvas jacket he’d worn for a decade; Marge, her mother, standing slightly behind Roy the way she stood behind him in all things, her face set in the particular expression of a woman who had been angry for a long time and had learned to carry it like luggage; Bridget’s grandparents, smaller, slower, bewildered by the city but sustained by grievance; her brother, sullen and silent, already eyeing the truck; and several children — cousins, nieces, the extended Nolan network — darting between the adults like satellites around planets.
They were clean. Neatly dressed, in the careful way of people who didn’t have many clothes and took care of the ones they had. There was no shame in them, no self-consciousness about their presence in this city neighborhood that clearly wasn’t theirs. They stood with the solid, unshakeable certainty of people who were owed something and had come to collect.
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Bridget’s first instinct was to tell the driver to keep driving. Her second instinct — the one that won, because Bridget’s survival instincts had been overridden too many times today — was to understand that there was nowhere else to drive to.
The driver opened the back of the truck. The luggage began to descend.
“Bridget! Pay what you owe p>
Roy and Marge were at the truck door before Bridget had finished unbuckling her seatbelt. Roy’s voice was loud — not shouting, exactly, but pitched at the volume of a man who had spent his life communicating across fields and saw no reason to adjust for urban proximity.
What happened next had the quality of a natural disaster — not planned, not coordinated, but inevitable, the way water flows downhill. The Nolan family descended on Bridget’s luggage with the efficiency of a team that had done this before, or perhaps simply with the instinct of people who recognized value and had been denied it.
The grandparents — stooped, arthritic, but surprisingly quick — unzipped bags and sorted contents with the practiced speed of market vendors: designer clothes into one pile, cheap items discarded onto the pavement. The brother grabbed a leather handbag Bridget had bought with borrowed money and stuffed it into a duffel without examining it. The children, following the adults’ cues, collected loose items — shoes, scarves, a jewelry box — and ferried them to the family’s van with the busy purpose of ants dismantling a picnic.
“Let go! That’s mine — those are my things — you have no right p>
Bridget pulled, grabbed, reached, but the arithmetic was against her: one woman versus eleven hands. The suitcases came apart.
Clothes spilled onto the sidewalk.
A makeup case hit the pavement and cracked open, lipsticks rolling into the gutter. Onlookers gathered — the particular Halcombe crowd of dog walkers and retirees and delivery drivers who materialized whenever public distress offered free entertainment — and murmured and pointed.
Roy addressed the crowd with the unselfconscious broadcast of a man who had nothing to hide: “My daughter stole the family savings! Took every penny and disappeared! We have a right to take what’s ours p>
The crowd murmured. The murmur was not sympathetic to Bridget.
Upstairs, in the apartment she’d hoped never to see again, the Nolan family made themselves at home — which is to say, they occupied every surface, opened every cabinet, ate everything in the refrigerator, and established, within the first hour, a domestic regime in which Bridget occupied the position of servant.
Cooking.
Cleaning. Laundry. The chores arrived in an unending sequence — not requested, demanded, with the implicit understanding that refusal would be met with public disclosure. The Nolans knew what Bridget had done. They knew about the borrowed money, the severed contact, the years of silence. They knew, with the particular clarity of people who had been wronged, that this knowledge was leverage, and they applied it with the methodical consistency of a tax collector.
“If you don’t want the whole neighborhood to know what kind of daughter you are,” Marge said, folding her arms, “you’ll put on that apron and start cooking p>
Bridget put on the apron.
She cooked. She cleaned. She scrubbed the bathroom on her hands and knees while her brother watched television and her father counted the money in her purse. She washed her mother’s clothes by hand — because Marge didn’t trust the machine and because making Bridget wash by hand was, itself, part of the punishment.
And when the chores were done and the family was fed and the apartment was clean, they told her to go out and find work. To earn. To produce money that could be sent back to the village to repay what she’d taken.
Bridget left the apartment at seven in the morning and returned at nine at night, and the cycle repeated — chores, demands, sleep that wasn’t rest — and each day she looked a little less like the woman who had walked through Heron Lake Manor in designer shoes and a little more like the girl she’d been before she’d left the village: tired, used, transparent.