Mary Anne took her sneakers to work in the
morning. She left the job on time that
afternoon, putting on the footwear before closing up her desk and locking
it. As she drove on to the bridge she
realized she needed to go to the bathroom.
But that wouldn’t matter in less than five minutes.
On the bridge she
pulled to the side of the road and purposely scraped her car against the
railing to ensure she was as close as possible.
Without hesitation, without stopping for even a breath or a thought, she
put the car in Park, opened her door, walked ahead a few feet and turned to face
the bumper.
Beyond her car, Mary
Ann saw a pickup truck slow to a stop instead of pulling around her. She felt
her face burn with embarrassment to have a witness. She sucked in her breath
and began to run back toward her car, to jump behind the wheel and flee. At the last moment she changed her mind. Stepping on the front bumper she launched
herself up to the roof where she turned quickly and jumped over the railing.
In pure fright
MaryAnn’s eyes opened the widest in her life and she could see the river below,
the green lawns running down to the water’s edge, the blue sky and the puffy
white clouds of a gorgeous summer afternoon.
She seemed to hang suspended above it all, as if God wanted her to
realize what she was giving up.
“Did you think you
could get away from me?” said the voice as MaryAnn hung over the river. “Take a trip to eternity without me? Fat chance! We’re going to wait right here
until I’m ready.”
Eternity waited below
while the voice lectured MaryAnn. But
she wasn’t listening. Her mind’s eye saw
the scene she’d just left behind, someone getting out of his car and looking
toward her. Had he been a little
earlier on the scene, he might have caught up with MaryAnn and talked her down
off the roof of her car. How MaryAnn
wished the man had done so. For she no
longer wanted to be dead. She wanted to
live, but she was already over the railing and falling, although for some
reason she was arrested in mid air and the whole world around her was unmoving
as though a button had been pushed and
the tape stopped. MaryAnn was not
relieved. She was in the act of dieing
and she was terrified. She wanted the
tape to start up again so that her death would soon be over. It was supposed to last only seconds, but at
this rate it could go on forever. She
could feel her heart beating at a speed she had never before experienced. Her head felt like it would explode with
pressure. Her nipples signaled the
freezing cold her body now felt and her bowels had already loosened, evidently
in anticipation of their uselessness at the moment of death. And that mocking voice that had been with her
since her mother’s funeral got louder and louder.
“You can’t do anything
right!” it said.
“Let me go, Mother!” her soul screamed.
“You’re not going
anywhere, Fancy Lady,” the voice hissed.
“You can’t lose me. You’re dead,
you little bitch and I’ve got you now!”
MaryAnn fumed and her
anger mixed with her terrific fear in an awful combination of hate. Her stomach threw its contents up into her
throat, but a scream from deep within pushed everything out from her mouth at
high speed, Lunch sprayed out over the
river and as it descended to the water it looked like flames.
The world was moving
again. Mary Ann was not. The man who had left his car and ran toward
MaryAnn was now leaning over the railing.
He must have crawled up on the roof of her car. MaryAnn saw the man wore a bright yellow hard
hat and at that moment he threw a leg over the railing and jumped, landing next
to her on the scaffolding.
“Don’t move!” he
shouted at MaryAnn while he dialed his cell phone.
Her blouse and
underwear had somehow been pushed up to her neck and the man quickly pulled her
shirt down to her waist. Soon a crew
appeared above. They hauled her up like
a sack of potatoes in a paint spattered tarp.
The crew and ambulance technicians were quite nice to her. So was the man in the hard hat. That surprised her since he had risked his
life to rescue a woman who had been so ready to throw her own away.
A psychiatrist
was her first visitor at the hospital after she was settled in a room
for the night. MaryAnn spoke with him
for an hour. She had never met a
psychiatrist before. He heard about all
the troubles in her life. But she never
mentioned the voice.
When the doctor left
and closed the door, leaving her alone, MaryAnn felt the fear return.
“Almost, honey,” said
the voice of her mother when the room wound down to a deadly quiet. “We’ll have to find another way to have you
join me.”
“I’m not coming with
you, Mother,” MaryAnn said to the wall
in front of her.
“Of course you are,
darling,” said the voice. Where did you
think you were going when you jumped off the bridge … to heaven?”
David Griffin copyright 2011
