The Delaware Memorial Bridge Is Really Two Bridges

The article said you abandoned your Corolla roughly mid-span and jumped from there. All these years, that’s stayed with me, the word roughly. The suggestion of sloppiness. Of impulsivity. I can’t help but feel insulted on your behalf because that wasn’t you. The you I knew would have made sure to find the precise point of highest elevation: 175 feet of clearance, it says on Wikipedia, which is just beneath the lowest droop of the main cable. If that was still too rangy for comfort, you would have measured by, say, dropping a single heavy object—a cinder block, a car battery, a flower pot—every few feet right and left, counting to the splash with a stopwatch. You’d have made railing marks with an orange Sharpie like the growth chart you marked in decimaled ascension on the basement door––that is, until the summer you left me and mom and the marks stopped as if I were the one who vanished. You would have done these drop tests a few times over a few months, three bucks a pop in tolls, crashing at the Wilmington apartment of your almost-priest buddy who used to work the purse seine boats with you and tried to get you off the paint thinner. You’d have been speedy, too, averting the bridge cops. No peak holidays or rush hours. Only those crisp pre-dawns when the cutout of Philly to the north and silhouette of the Salem cooling tower to the south look like opposites. The Delaware River’s own antipodes, sentinels at the gate to your next life. 

The article said the incident caused only minor disruption to traffic. To this day, that bothers me. As if a commuter—say, a lady driving up from Christiana to her early-shift second job in the bakery of the Pennsville IGA—experienced only a mild blip in her routine. Some brake taps to gawk at police lights, a lane change to avoid rubberneckers. As if she hadn’t been a witness. As if she wouldn’t see you do it again every time she made the crossing to loop and fry dough for union pay minus tolls. Imagine how she must have replayed the things she hadn’t done: pulled over, talked you down with a box of glazed day-olds, commiserated over Phillies trades, showed you a wallet photo of her daughter, the salutatorian and full-ride––anything until the cops showed up. 

Unless she was familiar already with the brief shelf life of a rescue, having talked down a jumper once before with a cherry fritter—a freshman track star at U Penn, a note left describing what her high school coach had done to her—and decided that you, wind-wobbly stick of a man, weren’t worth the trouble, knowing you’d only come right back to this spot and be successful, like that freshman did and was, and then what would happen to the little faith she had left in the spontaneous impulse to goodness? 

The article said you jumped from the southbound span. Which has never made sense to me. The police report must have gotten it wrong. You wouldn’t have come up from Baltimore only to cross the bridge and turn right around to do it. Unless you had your reasons. I remember family trips to Uncle Pete’s down in Dover, your grumbling that they’d kept the singular Delaware Memorial Bridge even after the second span was built. Maybe at some point you learned about the bridge’s dedication to the war dead from New Jersey and Delaware, how each span acknowledges a different conflict. The northbound span, World War II. The newer southbound twin, Korea and Vietnam. Maybe you picked the southbound to make a statement. Maybe you made sure to wear, say, your favorite Lee Rider, the one measled with insignia patches, snarling bears circled with Viet-nam: Sorry About That. Maybe you liked the idea of ending things in a place retroactively dedicated to you. Because otherwise you would have jumped from the northbound, right?

Unless you crossed because your real destination was through the Barrens and past the hopscotch of marsh islands to our street, our driveway, our front door. Maybe you lingered there awhile before making your U-turn. To make yourself feel better, you imagined yourself a weary knight in retreat, unable to slay the twin-headed beast of home and family, but at least able to corner it, quell it, spare its life. You liked how that painted you. You could picture it as album jacket art. Bad prog-rock art like on those mossy albums Mom chucked the day she finally cleared the garage of your shit and Uncle Pete said you’d done us all a favor. 

The article said most jumpers jump in summer. You jumped in winter. 

The article said that search crews never found your body. Which leaves me wondering about a lot of things. If this was your hope. If the vault over the rail was fluid like a gymnast on a pommel horse. If you were a coiled fist or errant feather. If your fall felt like album art. If I crossed your mind for even a second. If anyone ever found your remains. A slim finger of neck bone, say, expelled through the Delaware’s throat, washing up on another continent, tangled with your dog tags. If there’s an alternative version. The wind a cup, lofting you slantwise. You burbling to the surface, dragging your not-so-broken and not-so-hypothermic body onto the embankment, miserable after all your Sharpied planning, but compelled to hitch a ride from a lonesome and unquestioning trucker to our old address, driveway, front door. If you’re there now, still, wondering, too. Whether to stay or go. To haunt or move on.