All but one. The last one in the line, the one opposite our house, had been merely decapitated, and whenever Gabe and I walked on that side of the road and passed the waist-high stub of the post I would touch it, trailing my fingers along the pebbly surface. I don’t know why this one was permitted to remain. Perhaps because it marked the most distant corner of the parking lot that the amusement area had become. Boaters, dragging their toys on trailers behind their SUVs, drove through the parking lot to a launch ramp beneath the highway bridges, and others parked their cars there while they strolled the boardwalk or fished in the canal. There were always cars in the parking lot, and there were several now as I crossed Beach Boulevard with the box containing Gabe’s ashes under one arm and walked to the stubby post and dragged my fingertips along its surface.

Ahead of me, the lift bridge grumbled with each car passing over it. To my left and two hundred feet above me, the high bridges roared with traffic. The steel mills flared, the waves on the lake whispered, and I walked in silence, my head down, carrying the ashes of my husband in my arms.

I had planned to scatter them on the lake, but not in daylight. It would look like littering, which is what it would be. And this late in the season, bathers ventured into the lake to swim in the warm waters. I was unsure how someone might feel emerging from the water with Gabe’s ashes clinging to his Speedo. Besides, there was something socially unacceptable about the idea of scattering your spouse’s ashes while others watched, as though you were performing some private act in public. No, it would not take place in the glare of day. Nor would it happen, I decided, on the beach in an onshore wind that would blow Gabe back onto the sand and—a hideous but somehow appropriate thought—onto me as well.

So I chose to scatter them from the lift bridge over the canal, whose waters flowed from the bay into the lake and would carry him toward the ocean like some sort of heaven-bound commuter. Gabe hated the idea of commuting. This trip would be different.

I was not maintaining the correct sombre attitude here perhaps, but I have always clung to anything that makes me smile in the midst of tragedy, even if it comes with a side helping of guilt.

Approaching the canal, Beach Boulevard rises to meet the lift bridge, creating room for people to stroll along the canal edge beneath the structure. I walked up the incline and almost across the bridge, a breeze off the lake teasing my hair. Cars passed and the glare of their headlights caught me, a lone woman with a metal box standing on a bridge late at night, prepared to—what? Leap into the water? Dump her garbage in the canal? Two cars slowed as they passed, their drivers staring at me, and when they did I resumed walking until I was at the far end of the bridge, waiting for a break in traffic.

When I saw no cars ahead of me and none approaching from behind, I lifted the box to the rail and rested it there. With one more look around to ensure that I was alone, I glanced up to see the bridge operator, a balding man in a white shirt, suspenders, and thick-rimmed glasses, watching me from the window where he worked, pulling levers and pushing buttons. His office in an ugly metal structure painted the colour of an avocado was brightly lit and set thirty or forty feet above the roadway, giving him an unobstructed view of road traffic and approaching ships. He was looking down at me with curiosity and perhaps suspicion. I didn’t want an audience, so I lowered the box and began walking back along the bridge toward home, preparing to set my alarm for an ungodly hour like three a.m. But I knew, I just knew, I would not rouse myself to do this. I had to do it now.

When I reached a point near the edge of the canal where the heaviest steel beam of the bridge blocked the operator’s view of me, I stopped. The steel beam was as wide as a small car, and in its shadow I could scatter Gabe’s ashes unseen by the bridge operator. I would have to hold the box to one side and ensure that Gabe’s ashes fell into the water and not on the canal ledge. It helped that the wind had shifted to my left. The breeze would carry the ashes toward the centre of the water if I lifted the box high enough above the rail.

No traffic was in sight. Out on the lake, a ship was approaching. I raised the box to the bridge railing and began prying off the lid. My hands were shaking so much that the lid slipped from my grasp and dropped directly beneath me, landing on the concrete wall of the canal with the sound of a cheap cymbal.

Gripping the edge of the container with both hands, I inverted the box and shook it until, in the glow of reflected light from the bridge, from the stars, from the hot radiance of the slag pits across the bay, I could see Gabe slip away in a grey cloud of sorrow, first rising with the breeze and hovering above the canal waters, then falling forever into darkness.

After all of him had vanished, I remained with my hands and my head lowered, waiting to cry. I felt sadder than I had ever felt in my life, but there was another emotion as well, and I recognized it as relief. I missed Gabe and I loved Gabe, and I would never in some way cease missing and loving him. But scattering his ashes to the wind and the water had marked something, an end or a beginning, or maybe both, and I was glad of it.

I stood with my head bowed until I realized tears would not be coming. This surprised and comforted me, although it appeared to be accompanied by hallucinations, because I heard someone call my name.

It’s Gabe, I thought for a heartbeat or two. No, it wasn’t. Gabe never spoke in a hoarse whisper, and Gabe never called me Mrs. Marshall. But someone had called me Mrs. Marshall, and he did it again. The voice came from the darkness beneath my feet, its owner standing directly under me, on the edge of the canal. I looked down into shadow.

“Mrs. Marshall.”

I looked around. No cars were approaching. The bridge operator was out of sight.

“Mrs. Marshall.”

Because I saw no one, I believed no one was there, and I’d be damned if I would stand on a bridge late at night talking to no one.

“I know what happened,” the voice said. “Listen to me. I know what happened.”

I saw a shadow within shadows below me, faint light reflected off a fainter image of a man, craning his neck to look up at me.

I was about to speak. Or maybe walk—no, run like hell—off the bridge and return home. I’m not sure because, before I could do either, I was almost knocked backwards by a blast from a few feet away, aimed directly at me.

11.

A sign on the bridge warns: caution—loud horn may sound at any time. The horn looks like the ones mounted on top of transport trucks that kids on highway overpasses want the truckers to blast on their way by, but it’s bigger and louder, set about six feet above the walkway. The bridge operator sounds the horn to warn pedestrians, cyclists, and dawdlers that the bridge is about to rise. I hear it several times a day from our house a hundred yards down the strip and from almost anywhere on the beach, always at a distance.

It blasted at me within arm’s reach, so loud it was painful and so startling that I dropped the tin box to bring my hands to my ears. My instinct was to run from the sound and off the bridge, and I did, even while the horn kept blasting. When it finally stopped, the near-silence was like the rush of a narcotic, a freedom from agony, and the softly ringing bell marking the lowering of wooden barriers to block traffic across the bridge was a soothing release.

I was off the bridge and stumbling down the incline. A pickup truck slowed as it approached the barrier, and the driver grinned at me when I passed and said, “What’s your hurry, sweetheart?” I didn’t stop running until I reached the bottom of the incline, where I leaned against a wooden bench to catch my breath and wait for my body to stop shaking.