Horizon

— I'd like to talk to you about your daughter.

I looked at his mouth. Then the other one behind him, the camera already resting on his shoulder. Already in position. His eyes were open like holes in a door.

— Logan Mercer. Four hundred thousand subscribers. This is my cameraman, Benji.

The street behind them was clean and empty. Sun everywhere. Mowed lawns. Perfectly straight mailboxes. Drawn curtains across the way.

— What I do, he said, is tell stories like Samantha's. Stories that deserve to be heard.

Samantha.

My hand closed over the wood of the doorframe. Closed and stayed. The wood cracked under my thumbnail.

Behind me in the hallway her rainboots were still under the coat rack. One lying on its side. The dust had drawn a line around them. The floor was clean because I swept around them. A spider had spun a thread between the left boot and the foot of the rack. The thread hadn't broken.

— We could talk inside, sir. Five minutes. I drove six hours to come see you.

Six hours of driving. He added nothing. He waited. I waited longer.

Behind him the other one had already shifted. He was filming the steps. Gathering it all piece by piece. The busted doormat. The WELCOME half-eaten by mud. The peeling banister. The number nailed to the wood. The camera opened its mouth and the house went in.

— This is the place, Samantha? This is it?

He said my daughter's name. The word started facing me. It ended facing the red light. The sound turned with his eyes.

I grabbed the front of his denim jacket and the fabric scraped my fingers and I yanked him toward me all at once. His head hit the doorjamb. A dull thud. A sound of hollow wood. Almost nothing. His mouth opened. What came out wasn't a sentence. Just broken air. His hands went up to his mouth, fingers wide open, palms toward me, and I saw he had never been hit in his life.

He staggered sideways on the porch. He missed the step. He fell badly, one leg folded under him.

— But what the —

His mouth was moving.

— Sir, I drove six hours.

The cameraman hadn't moved. The lens was still up. He was still filming. The kid was backing away. His arms weren't. His arms held the camera high, the lens aimed, the frame steady.

I went down one step. Then the other. And I hit him.

The right first. The cheek. The mouth. Then the mouth. Then the mouth. My fists corrected when the head turned. They came back to the mouth.

My knuckles found the skin. Then the soft underneath. Then the hard. On the third blow his teeth laid my index finger open. I felt the bone behind it. I heard the camera fall from the other's hands and hit the concrete. A sound of plastic. A sound of glass. The camera was on the ground. The lens still pointing at the porch.

— Sir, sir —

He was already backing away. The lens aimed askew toward the steps, toward the grass at the edge of the driveway.

— Phil, no —

Someone in the street. A neighbor behind a hedge. Someone I'd maybe known for twenty years. I didn't look up.

The breath. The sound of meat against meat. The wood groaning under our weight. No more street. No more houses. No more voices. Nothing left but the back-and-forth of my arms. The weight of my body dropping into every blow. The space between the blows closed up. Then there was no more space.

I hit him until he curled into a ball, arms over his head, red on his teeth, blood running onto the gray slats of the porch, into the grooves of the wood where Samantha used to sit in the summer to take off her shoes before coming inside.

I didn't stop. The door was open. Samantha's rain boots were still in the hallway. The left one lying on its side. The shape of her foot in the rubber.

Then the shock tore through my back. My body folded all at once. Entirely. I fell and the world came back.

— On the ground. Stay on the ground.

I already was.

My body was shaking without me. My cheek against the concrete. Blood in my mouth. The same sky as before.

A knee drove between my shoulder blades. The handcuffs clamped shut on my wrists. A sharp little sound.

The world came back in pieces. Radios spitting codes. A car door slammed too fast. Orders.

Logan was three feet away. Curled up in the grass. Hands over his face. Blood blackening at the edge of his mouth. Blood in his beard.

He was breathing through his mouth. Short, wet little breaths. He wasn't looking at me. His eyes were open. They hadn't blinked.

That was when I felt my hands.

The swelling rising. The split knuckles. The torn index finger. Dried blood in the creases and between the fingers and under the nails. My blood. His blood. Mixed together.

My hands were still closed. I opened them. It took time. As if the last blow wasn't finished.

I looked at them. Resting on the concrete in front of me. Handcuffed. Swollen.

The wedding ring had disappeared. The flesh had swollen and pushed over the metal and the finger had swallowed it. A furrow of white skin remained. A hollow circle. Nineteen years. The gold was somewhere underneath. Under the flesh. Under the swelling. It wouldn't come out.

The car turned left onto Oceanic. I didn't say anything. Neither did the cop up front. We drove like that until the bridge because you always go over the bridge. There is no other road. I felt it before I saw it. The change beneath the tires. The asphalt giving way to metal. The hollow sound rising through the floorboards.

The driver didn't turn his head. The other one turned his the wrong way.

The flowers. The photo. The dead candles.

I saw them slide past in the window.

Samantha. Her prom smile.

— Dad take it.

— I took it.

— I wasn't ready.

— Look at my mouth.

— Yes you were.

— It's the best one.

The plastic frame still had the cracked corner I'd taped up the month before.

My wrists were behind my back. Handcuffed. Swollen. Logan Mercer's blood was drying between my fingers and pulling at the skin.

The shrine slid backward. Three seconds. After that there was nothing left but the bridge and the wind and the car moving forward.

We kept driving.

A boy and a girl were leaning against the railing. Kissing. The sun caught in their hair. Twenty, maybe. Samantha's age. Shane's age.

The boy held her by the hips. Softly. Without thinking about it. They were standing in almost the exact spot where Shane had lifted Samantha over the metal.

I looked at those hands.

The boy's thumb moved half an inch on her hip. A small movement, round and slow and tender.

The car kept going. I followed them with my eyes. The boy. The girl. The sun in their hair. His hands on her hips. Until the window carried them away.

At the trial I sat in the third row. The wood of the bench dug into my back. Shane was thirty feet away. White shirt. Borrowed tie. Hands flat on the table.

Thirty feet. I could see the seams of his shirt. The crease of his tie. The little triangle of skin under his ear where Samantha used to press her mouth. She'd told me one night. Laughing. Dad he has a spot under his ear when I kiss him there he shivers. She had laughed. I had laughed too. Now I was staring at that spot from the third row of a courtroom and my hands were resting on my thighs and they weren't shaking.

The defense attorney stood up and he said there is no body.

He said it in a flat voice. Almost tired.

The prosecutor stood up. He opened a beige folder. He read the statement Shane had given to the detectives the night of his arrest. His voice was flat and steady. Every word dropped into the room like a stone down a well.

The two of them had carried her. Him and his roommate. The bridge was empty. The railing was cold under their hands. They had lifted her. They had let her go.

Carried. Lifted. Let go.

Then he said Samantha weighed a hundred and nineteen pounds.

And that weight came back into my arms.

Into the muscles. Into the tendons. A hundred and nineteen pounds. My arms knew before I did. I had carried her when she was a baby and she fit entirely in the crook of my elbow. I had carried her when she was four and fell asleep in the car. I would climb the steps. The third one creaked. I'd set my foot on the edge. The seventh one too. The other side. I did that every night with my daughter in my arms and she slept and the wood stayed quiet because I knew how to keep it quiet. It's about the only thing I ever did right.

And now that weight was in my arms in a courtroom. The weight stayed. My arms closed. They were squeezing air. The air weighed a hundred and nineteen pounds.

A hundred and nineteen pounds. Almost nothing. Two boys could lift her over a railing and let her go.

Good evening sir. Shane had said that shaking my hand. Sir.

He had come to eat at our house. A Thursday. Maybe a Friday. He had said good evening sir and he had shaken my hand. He had helped clear the table without being asked. He had stacked the plates correctly. The big ones on the bottom. The small ones on top.

I stared at his hands on the wood. Perfectly flat. Perfectly behaved.

They made me walk past him.

Logan was sitting on the bench, head tipped back against the wall as if the cold plaster could calm something. Split lip. Swollen cheekbone creeping up toward his eye. Blood had dried in his beard in little black crusts. Benji beside him was looking at the floor. The camera was gone.

Logan saw me. He sat up abruptly.

— That's him. I want to press charges. This guy is an animal. A public menace.

The ice pack trembled in his hand. Condensation ran between his fingers and dripped onto his jeans in heavy drops.

— I offered him three thousand dollars. Three thousand dollars for a documentary. On violence against women. And look what he did to me.

He pointed to his mouth. His cheek. The black hole where a tooth was missing.

The cop at the desk looked up. He looked at Logan. The ice. The mouth open over the hole. Then he lowered his head and went back to typing.

Mitch closed the door behind me.

His gaze dropped straight to my hands. I looked down too. We stood there, the two of us, on either side of the desk, looking at what I had brought back into the room. The busted knuckles. The split skin. The blood already black in the creases.

— What are you doing Phil.

— The guy came to my house with a camera. He said Samantha's name.

He didn't move.

— That's not what I'm asking. What are you doing with your days.

I shrugged. Then I spoke.

— I still make coffee for two. Out of habit. The second coffee sits on the counter until evening. At night I empty it into the sink and I rinse the cup and the next morning I make coffee for two again.

I looked at my hands on my knees.

— I go on the internet. At night. I watch people talk about Samantha even though they never knew her. They set up in front of a nice lamp and they put on a deep voice and they tell the story of her death. There's one who made a ranking. The ten most mysterious murders in New Jersey. Samantha was number four.

I stopped for a second. Then I said:

— Between a gas station attendant and a jogger.

My voice trembled. I let it tremble.

— When it gets to be too much I turn off the screen. I go out to the bridge. I stay there.

— And then.

I looked up at him.

— There is no after.

He looked at me for a long time. Not harsh. Not soft either.

— Phil. If you keep going like this you're going to end up in prison.

I smiled. Or something close enough.

— If you end up in prison, he said, you won't be in the same block as Shane.

The smile vanished.

Mitch leaned forward. Elbows on the desk. Hands clasped.

— I've known you since we were eight Phil. You've never been an angry guy.

I said nothing.

— The guy with the camera isn't Shane.

— I know.

— Are you sure?

The lawyer came in. She signed where she needed to. She gave back what they'd taken from me. Wallet. Keys. Phone. She set them on the desk one after the other. I didn't read anything. I walked out.

Outside the sun was still there. Plastered across the hoods and the storefronts and the bare shoulders of the people walking on the sidewalk.

I put my hands in my pockets. The keys scraped against the open knuckles. The pain was small and sharp.

In front of me the street went both ways.

I didn't need to think for long. My feet already knew the way.

After a while I felt the bridge beneath me before I saw it. First the asphalt. Then the change in footing. Then the metal caught beneath the road returning the weight differently. The wind came in off the sea without hurrying. It smelled of salt and wet rust.

The shrine was there.

Small. Stubborn. Clinging to the railing. Flowers had blackened where they lay. Others were still holding on. Thin. Crumpled. The candles were dead. The frame with Samantha's picture was straight. The tape had yellowed at the edges but it held.

I got to my knees. The metal entered my kneecaps with its machine-like coldness. I pulled out the rotten stems one by one. They were soft between my fingers. Soft and damp and black. I straightened the others. Picked up what had come loose. Scraps of paper. Words written by people I didn't know. Taped down a corner of paper. Wiped the glass of the frame with my sleeve.

In the photo she didn't quite have her woman's face yet. Fifteen, maybe. No makeup. Hair tied back too fast. A blue thread knotted around her wrist that she'd kept all summer. In the shower. In the pool. In her bed. Until it broke on its own and fell somewhere one morning and she said dad my bracelet and I said we'll make another one and we never made another one.

She never looked straight into the lens. At the last second something always pulled her head a little to the side.

I took out the lighter.

The wind blew the flame out on the first try. I tried again. It died again.

So I closed my hand around the wick. Cupped it.

This time the flame caught. Low at first. Almost nothing. A little orange and blue thing shivering deep in my palms. Then it stood up. Small. Yellow.

Behind me the city went on without me. Ahead, the water. Black and wide and slow.

The flame held.

The wind blew and the flame held.

I stood up slowly and walked over to the railing.

Before me the sea opened up all the way. Heavy in places. Crumpled in others. Way out, the line cut the world in two. Sharp. Straight.

Samantha wanted to travel. She talked about it the way others talk about escaping. Not to run away. Out of hunger. In her room there was a big map pinned to the wall above the laundry hamper where she never put anything away. The hamper was always overflowing. Jeans. T-shirts. Balled-up socks. And above it the whole world. She had stuck colored pushpins in it. Red for the cities she wanted to see. Blue for the ones she would go to first.

Lisbon was blue.

For a while London had been blue too. Then she had moved the pin one Tuesday night and decided it would be Montreal. Because she had heard someone speaking French in a grocery store. A guy by the oranges. And for two weeks she swore it was the most beautiful language in the world. She had tried to learn bonjour and merci and je m'appelle Samantha and she pronounced everything wrong and laughed at her own mouth and it was over after two weeks. Over, like the yoga she had tried three times and quit, saying, daddy this is motionless torture.

The pin had stayed there. Blue. Stuck in Montreal.

The map was still there.

The pins hadn't moved.

She used to say daddy the world is big.

And I would say yes.

The world is big yes.

Big enough to keep what it takes.

I stared at the water. A hundred and nineteen pounds. The water down below was black. It was moving. Immense. Busy with something else.

The wind kicked up. It swept over the sea and rose to the bridge and slipped down my collar and touched my mouth and my eyes and my temples. It didn't smell like a girl's hair.

I leaned over a little. Just enough to feel the void answer. Just enough for my stomach to tighten and my hands to grip harder. Down below, the water. The sound it always makes. A sound that took no notice.

My daughter was somewhere in the world.

The sea continued its work without me.