To the Bridge by Rommelmann Nancy

Author:Rommelmann, Nancy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542048422
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2018-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

21

I was in San Francisco at a friend’s party drinking wine when my cell phone rang.

“You don’t know me, but I am going to do everything I can to make sure Trinity is not hurt any more than she has been,” the caller said.

I took the call to an upstairs bathroom. Contrary to what the caller said, I did know who it was, and I told the caller so.

“Okay,” he said, and that he was calling because he’d had “a couple of beers.” He was calling because he was mad—mad at me, mad at Amanda. She was “no angel” and stayed in her marriage only because “she was greedy, staying as long as there was money.” The caller was also mad at Jason.

“I know a million bad things about Jason, but I am only going to tell you a few,” he said. “He currently has a lawsuit against him from a paraplegic he was taking care of. You should check that out.” Also, that some years back Jason had smuggled “thousands of opiates back from Mexico, on Gavin.”

I asked if he was implying that drugs were packed into Gavin’s diaper bag or on his body. The caller did not know, or chose not to elaborate, or was making things up as he went along.

“He told Amanda they would make so much money,” he continued, but instead Jason “became an addict” and stopped going to work, telling his bosses Amanda was having a rough pregnancy and that he needed to be home with her, but she wasn’t pregnant. I noticed my cell phone did not have as much juice as the call might warrant. It was after midnight and the caller still had a lot to say: Gavin and Trinity had been very close, Jason was a neglectful father, Eldon was small for his age. The caller said that no one close to the families would speak to me and that he did not want his name mentioned. He twice apologized for having driven past my house. Had I, he wanted to know, driven past his? I told him I had.

It was twelve thirty. I listened to the caller breathing.

“I’m a Christian,” he said, “and unfortunately, I think Eldon is in hell.”

That the caller, that anyone, would add the concept of eternal suffering to the fate of a four-year-old boy murdered by his mother—what relief could this bring? Or was the point to extend the suffering of the living?

We were not going to debate Scripture, me standing in a bathroom, him cracking another beer and saying again that no one would speak to me.

“Listen, Jason is a heroin addict,” he said. “He used to score down the street from your husband’s business.”

The caller knew my husband’s business?

“I’ve been there before,” he said. I asked whether we could meet for coffee to talk further. The caller said we could “sometime,” but before we set that time, at 1:03 in the morning, my phone went dead in my hand.

In the wake of Amanda’s sentencing, those who reached out to me had information they felt was substantive.

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