Chapter 24: Daylight

The next Thanksgiving, we left Newark airport at ten in the morning in a rented gray sedan, with the sun out and the sky clear.

Quinton drove.

I sat in the passenger seat with a pie box on my knees and Dorothy's gray scarf around my neck.

"You're doing it again," he said.

"Doing what?"

"Holding that pie like it's a bomb."

"It's Renee's bakery. If I drop it, she'll know from Texas."

"She will."

The highway curved north.

In the distance, above the trees, I could see the towers.

They were gray steel, with long cables dropping from them to the road.

My stomach did something small.

I let it.

"We can take the Tappan Zee instead," Quinton said. "It's twenty minutes longer."

"No."

"Sabina."

"I want to see it."

"All right."

He took the exit for the approach.

Traffic slowed, and then moved, and then we were climbing.

The sun was high and bright.

There was no rain, no storm, no wind.

I looked out the window.

The river lay far below, wide and blue and glittering, with a tugboat pulling a barge upstream and a line of white clouds over New Jersey.

Down the long railing on the right, a man in a Giants jacket was walking a dog.

A girl on a bicycle rode past with her ponytail flying.

It was an ordinary day on an ordinary bridge.

"It's smaller," I said.

"Is it?"

"I thought it'd be so much bigger."

"It's the same size. You're bigger."

I laughed.

Then I stopped laughing, and I put a hand on the dash, because my eyes had filled.

"Sabina?"

"I'm fine. It's just..."

I looked at the right-hand lane.

A year ago this week I had stood there with a fever and a coat and no keys, watching a car's taillights get smaller.

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