but I made it to the water unopposed. I ran through the wet grass of the park at the base of the bridge, past the cross-sectioned sample of the Golden Gate’s suspension cable and a few tourists giving peace signs for the camera.
Up on the span, there didn’t look to be anyone else around, except for the occasional bicycle whizzing by, its rider as lean and arched as a greyhound. I started walking, hoping I wasn’t too late. Cars rumbled over the metal gratings. In the distance, rain clouds went on doing their usual wetwork, but the sun was bright and glary here.
“They tried to build an antisuicide barrier, you know.” She’d been hidden, or maybe even hiding, behind one of the tall red stanchions at the center of the bridge. As I passed by, she began to speak. I might not have noticed her if she hadn’t. “This was back in the seventies. But they couldn’t make it happen. You know why? Because people thought it would be too ugly. It’s just not the Golden Gate Bridge if it’s all covered in safety nets and railings.” Zelda crossed the narrow cement sidewalk and leaned out over the edge, gazing down at the flecked blackness of the bay. “Now, you might think it really doesn’t matter one way or the other—if a person wants to kill herself, she’ll just find some other way to do it, right? Wrong. It turns out that most people make these decisions pretty lightly, on the spur of the moment, and if they can’t do it at the precise moment when the thought occurs, they often don’t do it at all.” She stepped up onto the lower bar of the railing. I went to stand next to her.
That’s pretty fucked up, I wrote in my Moleskine.
“Is it? I learned about all this more than three decades ago, and I still haven’t decided. On the one hand, yes, it sounds terrible to value some old bridge over a human life. But on the other hand, why should a human life be worth more than the beauty of this bridge? A lot of people died to build it, you know, and they died so that it would look like this. And it’s lasted a lot longer than your average person does. So maybe it is more important.”
Maybe. Just don’t jump off it.
“Speak to me, Parker. Speak a single word and I won’t.”
That’s not fair.
“It’s as fair as what you’re asking.” She went up on her tiptoes, and I noticed the delicately scalloped skin between her heel and ankle. She put her elbows on the railing. My whole body was tensed, ready to spring forward and pull her back if it came to that. “So how would you do it, if you had to?”
Do what?
“Off yourself.”
I frowned. I haven’t thought about it.
“Of course you have. Everyone has.”
She was right, of course. I mimed throwing back a handful of pills.
Zelda gave a measured nod. “Pharmaceuticals can be good. But difficult to keep them down. People always underestimate the lifesaving power of regurgitation.” Now she began to lean forward, folding all the way over the bar, so that she looked like a towel on a rack. “I told them to let Nathaniel go,” she said. “And you were right. It felt good. I mean, not good good, but, you know, good. And then I came here. I could’ve done it already, you know. But I decided to wait. I couldn’t leave you without a real goodbye.”
You don’t have to leave at all, I wrote, in big scrawled letters. I changed everything about myself so you’d stay. What was the point of all that if you go?
She must have heard me writing, but she stayed bent over the railing, so she couldn’t see what I’d written.
“You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a lifetime, Parker. Maybe two. I’m a very lucky girl.”
I leaned way out over the water, so I could hold my journal in front of her face, and I felt my feet lift up off the sidewalk and my weight shift forward. In another couple of seconds, I would’ve gone over myself. But Zelda had sensed what was happening. She straightened up just in time to pull me back onto the path. I scrabbled for the railing and dropped the notebook in the process. It flipped end over end, splashing silently into the water: Now, Never, Now, Never.
Then Zelda was hugging me so tightly it felt like