The Lantern Bridge

At this time of year, flower petals flow downriver among the blaze of autumn leaves. Follow the petals upstream, and you’ll come to the source: bouquets of roses and lilies and all the flowers the living sanction to honor the dead tied to the railings of the Lantern Bridge.

The wooden bridge is an old thing, its splinters and aches each a testament to the storms that ravage the Midwest in summertime. The bridge possesses a rich folklore to it. The story goes that a long time ago two lovers, kept apart by their families, met at the bridge in secret; that one night, in the dead of winter they decided to run away together and were lost to the fury of a blizzard. The story goes that their families lined the bridge with lanterns to guide the lovers home, kept the lanterns lit even after they found their thawing bodies in the spring. Her face held to his chest, his heart at her ear to whisper his love for a few moments longer than his failing lips, a halo of melting snow encircling two lovers frozen in their eternal embrace. 

Between the bouquets of roses and lilies, Lin Hua ties a ribbon to the same splintered railing she and her sister used to leap from during the summers of their childhood when the river ran slow. It was a year ago today that Mei plunged into the river one last time, her red heels standing to attention at the center of the Lantern Bridge and her dress pockets filled with stones. It occurs to Lin that her sister would’ve hated all these flowers— if she had put that in a suicide letter perhaps everybody else would’ve known. If Mei had written a suicide letter at all it would’ve given everybody some peace of mind.

Lin’s shoes sound on the wood as she crosses over the river, a percussive and steady beat that interrupts the steady gurgle of the river and intermittent rattle of the wind through the trees. One the opposite shore, she walks a ways down the bank until the Lantern Bridge just barely peeks through the tree branches and brush. In the water, Mei’s reflection stares back up at her: critical brown eyes set above severe cheekbones, her dark hair like a cloud of ink swirling around her head. Casting her shoes aside and lettering her clothes fall away, Lin steps naked into the river.

. . . . .

It was the unplaceable blame between Arthur and Mei that had torn their marriage apart. The questions, the unspeakable answers. Who was the one to leave their three-year old son alone in the backyard? Who wanted the pond in the first place? Who found the body? The death of their child had left a gaping hole in their marriage that both she and Arthur realized could not be satisfied with the empty love left between them.

“Please,” Arthur begged Lin over the phone, “check up on her.” It was the first time she’d heard from him since the funeral six months before. “She won’t return my calls, refuses to see me. Something’s wrong. I know it.”

They say there are signs a person leaves before they kill themselves. Mei had always possessed a melancholic disposition, had always been fiercely protective of her privacy. But when Lin showed up at Mei’s doorstep that autumn day, she seemed so calm, so collected, how could Lin have known that her sister had already resigned herself to the river?

“The district transferred me to the middle school,” Mei said as the two sisters sat together in the living room. She’d been the librarian at the local elementary school for nearly ten years before now. “I suppose they thought they were doing me some good, moving me with the older kids, but I didn’t mind being around the young ones. I really didn’t,” she said, taking a sip at her coffee.

“I’m sure they just didn’t want to cause you any extra pain,” Lin replied. She hesitated, “It’s all right to not be okay.”

Mei thought over Lin’s words carefully, her brow furrowed and lips pursed. When the women were young, people often thought the two were twins, and only a year and a half apart they essentially were. But from their twenties into their thirties Lin had cut her hair and let it go gray while her sister kept hers hanging down to her waist and adopted their father’s severe gaze. Mei looked back at her sister with that gaze now.

“I’m tired of people tiptoeing around me,” she said. “I don’t need you doing it too.”

. . . . .

Wading into the river, Lin shivers as the water climbs up to her thighs and then to her waist. Winter had already settled into the silt of the riverbank, clinging to the warmth of her body as she sinks deeper and deeper into the water until she’s up to her neck. Orange and red leaves cling to her skin, petals from the Lantern Bridge tangle in her hair and she feels like Ophelia: a ring of flowers around her head, floating sweetly downriver.

What would people say if they heard that the second Hua sister had succumbed to the river? Mei’s little Ohioan town had been so quick to write off her death as racial inevitability—the paper had thrown in a statistic about Japan’s skyrocketing suicide rates at the bottom of the news report. Never mind that they were Chinese. Never mind that Mei had never left this side of the Mississippi. What stories would people tell of the Hua sisters? Would they fade into legend like the lovers of the Lantern Bridge? Would they reunite their souls in poetry?   

  Mei’s ghost draws Lin further and further from the shore, her presence so strong she almost wonders if some part of her is still alive within the river, wonders just how far she’d go to find her sister again. The rocky bottom of the bank slopes deeper, the water lapping at her chin as she balances on tiptoe against the current. Lin takes a deep breath, shuddering as the air fills her lungs, and plunges her head beneath the surface.

. . . . .

Linh remembers watching Mei prepare for her son’s funeral. The care she took in covering up the dark bruises beneath her eyes, the attention she gave her brows, and the precision with which she painted her eyes. Mei caught her sister looking in the background behind her, her eyes catching Lin’s in the reflection of the looking glass as she applied her lipstick. Mei was so private about her grief. She never allowed her sister the opportunity to comfort her, and never offered any in return.

“You know, Lin,” Mei addressed her, not unkindly, “sometimes I feel that these days my vanity is all I have.”

They say drowning is not a forgiving death. Three to four minutes of immense physiological and psychological pain. Hallucinations and panic before the brain goes silent. It is not a beautiful death either. When her body washed up in the next town over, purpled and bloated, the coroner estimated she’d been dead for two days. Sometimes without realizing it, Lin finds herself fantasizing over that morbid image, dreams she’s in that boat, sitting beside the fisherman that found Mei. They say a dead body floats in ways something living never could. When Lin is beside that fisherman she can never fully picture her sister’s body. Instead, she watches him pluck a moth’s paper wings from the water.

Mei left no suicide note, no explanation, only unanswered questions and the only picture she could stand of herself atop the altar beside their parents’ portraits and her son’s, a stick of incense already burning before the Buddha.

Neither Lin nor Mei had ever subscribed to their immigrant parents’ old country faith. But when death confronts the faithless, what else is there to do but fall back into old, familiar habits?

“Lin.” Mei said her sister’s name in the car after her son’s memorial, the cemetery growing smaller and smaller in the rear window. Arthur had wanted him buried in the family plot. He and Mei had exchanged an empathetic yet loveless hug before taking separate cars. Lin watched out of the corner of her eye as inky black tears rolled down Mei’s cheeks and as she mopped them up with care as they fell. Mei had always cried so silently, expression affectless. Lin’s hand on the wheel; she could not comfort her sister and Mei would not have wanted her to. “In the end there really is nothing and no one,” Mei told her.

. . . . .

Lin often thinks back to those last few moments they were together that afternoon in Mei’s living room. How she had stood at the door like a stranger—awkward and unfamiliar.

“Promise you’ll call me,” Lin said.

Mei had stared back at her, as if not understanding. “Goodbye, Lin.” 

Those last few words, that final goodbye. Could she have said something different? Could she have done anything to change her mind? And then, always, Lin is hit with a wave of disgust and utter betrayal. Had she not considered the schoolchildren she had left behind, or how even though she left her husband he’d still been mourning her? Had she not considered that he too had lost a son and that Lin had lost a nephew, had she not considered that the both of them, yes, the both of them, were still mourning their parents, that she’d be leaving her sister with yet another empty seat at the table, another candle to light at the altar? To leave with no note, no nothing, just a command, a last will and testament to take whatever she’d left behind and bury the pieces. Nothing and no one. It had only become no one after she left.

Gasping, Lin breaks through the surface of the water, lungs on fire and chest heaving. Around her, the river, the wood, stands sill, stands silent. A water bug skitters past her, curious fish nibble at her shins. She wipes the water from her eyes and brushes the hair from her face. In the river, the only face that stares back at Lin is hers.

Standing there, alone in this river, in this forest, the rustle of the leaves and the babble of the current fade into a silence. For a moment, she considers throwing herself back down under. Maybe this time she’d bring back the dead. Bust instead, she wades back to the riverbank, slowly ascends out of the water until the entirety of her naked body shivers in the warming sun. She slides back into her clothes, and wrings the water from her hair. Her shoes in hand, she walks back along the riverbank, back towards the Lantern Bridge. She walks back over the worn and weathered wooden slats, past the flowers and cards and memories, and thinks of the lovers of the Lantern Bridge who died in one another’s arms, thinks of Mei and how if only, when she’d risen out of the water, she’d been there with her. Lin walks back to the empty house her sister left her, in all its cavernous and haunting stillness.

Lin sits in an empty living room, one chair too many and a coffee table too large for only one cup of tea, and she dreams of that Lantern Bridge. And she sees Mei, breaking through the surface of the water, her cheeks pink, warm. She sees her climb back up to the bank of the river, sees her emptying her pockets of stones. She wrings out her dress, plaits her long dark hair in a thick braid down her back, preening, scowling at her reflection in the river until she decides she’ll have to make do. Lin sees her come to the Lantern Bridge, reclaim the red shoes she left there long ago. She sees her cross over, the lanterns of the bridge beginning to glow orange as daylight fades, the sound of her footsteps a percussive and steady beat that interrupts the steady trickle of the river and intermittent rattle of the wind through the trees. Mei takes one look behind her before heading home.