Newton's Third Law

by Abby Provenzano

illustration by Amy Yang

Aaron and I had a science teacher once back in middle school who told us that there was a biological presumption that symmetrical faces were more beautiful. So, the closer you were to symmetrical, the closer you were to beautiful. Back then, beauty was synonymous with perfection. Maybe it still is.

I think the teacher’s point was to dispel this notion, to point out that it was a myth. I don’t know, I stopped listening, more focused on the paper airplane Aaron was folding. His forehead was scrunched up, and he was laughing. He tried to launch the plane—it did an immediate nosedive to the floor, which only made us laugh more. But after school I did stand in front of the bathroom mirror with a sheet of construction paper, alternating between covering each side of my face. I scrutinized the right side, then the left, trying to conjure a picture of what I would look like if my face consisted of two sides that were exact mirror images. I don’t remember my conclusions.

What I do know, though, is that symmetry tends to show up in the arcs of our lives. Whether it’s beautiful or

perfect or not is up to whoever’s looking at it.

It’s a Wednesday, late February or early March, one of those cold and dreary ones. I figured it should be a day that isn’t out of the ordinary. My work briefcase sits in the passenger seat next to me—I didn’t take it out after returning home from the office a few hours ago. I’m driving the same car I got in the divorce, though it’s long past the time I should have looked into an upgrade. The letters I wrote almost a week ago rest on top of the briefcase.

I am tired as I drive, but exhaustion has long since settled in my bones. I am calm. I listen to a jazz station and entertain myself by trying to guess which song will be the final one I hear before I reach my destination. I don’t bother ruminating on my unhappiness, my loneliness, my failures, my futility. There has been plenty of time for that. I hum along to the low bleating of a tenor saxophone and let my mind drift.

I grew up in a tiny Maine town on a lake, so small that there was a post office, a scattering of houses, and a grocery store, which was an hour’s drive away. Our house was old, a fixer-upper my parents never ceased fixing-upping, though they did it with heart and soul and quite a bit of formidable progress. We had a big barn and no animals, unless you counted the bats. There were horses up the road, though, and I have many fuzzy memories of velvety lips chomping crab apples from my hand. Two things stand out of all that time with great clarity: Aaron and the Bridge. Aaron was the boy the school bus picked up two stops after me. I put my backpack in the seat next to me to save it, and in return he gave me his Go-Gurt at lunch when his mother had packed him a blue one. I remember

thinking she was some kind of genius because she kept the Go-Gurts in the freezer. They tasted infinitely better frozen, somehow, yet I never thought to ask my own mother to do the same.

I remember playing marbles with Aaron after school, his eyes squinted and the tip of his tongue poking out of his mouth as he scuffed a wobbly circle into the pavement with chalk. We crouched at the edge of the parking lot, heads bent together, shooting the marbles one after the other. We played for keeps. Day after day, swapping the same marbles back and forth. I always shot for his milky blue one, the one with specks of every color of the rainbow. He’d frown and wipe his palms on his jeans and aim at my cat’s eye. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” he’d recite shrilly, mimicking our teacher. “You take mine, I’ll take yours. A marble for a marble, right, Mr. Newton?” He laughed while I shoved him and rolled the cat’s eye between his fingers.

Aaron would call my house on the weekends and say, “Well, come on over. What are you waiting for?” Many sunny afternoons were spent doing who-knows-what, everything blurring together. Aaron and I goofed around during class and played on the same after-school sports teams and traded baseball cards and CDs and built a fort in my barn for overnight camping trips and rode our bikes on the dirt back roads and tried to wrestle under my father’s carefully pruned apple tree and did all the things you do with childhood best friends who aren’t forgettable.

The Bridge was the one over the little river—too shallow, the adults always cautioned, to be considered a real river—that flowed towards the inevitable end of the lake. Technically, you could squeeze a midsize car across it, but that was a rare sight. It was mostly just pedestrian. If the

Bridge had any forename, it was long forgotten by everyone. Named or not, it was the place where the rowdy teenagers from all the adjoining little towns congregated when the weather grew hot. I’d watch out my bedroom window as they perched on the far side of the thin railing together, cackling and shoving at each other until they dived in, one by one. Their excitement, eagerness, and joy in this kind of freedom was palpable to me even at an age too young to fully understand it. When my mother caught me looking, she’d slam the shade shut and scold me about how dangerous it was. The water was too shallow, she’d say, shaking her head. There were so many rocks right under the surface that those foolish high-school kids couldn’t see, she’d warn. It was only a matter of time before somebody broke their neck—what did they think they were, invincible? I’d nod along with her and then, in her absence, turn right back to the window.

They liked to do a lot of jumping and diving at night, when the sun and the criticism of people like my mother weren’t beating down on the backs of their necks. I’d hear the laughter and shouts late into the night and imagine them breaking the surface of the water, shaking droplets off their slick bodies, clambering out to go back to the Bridge to jump again.

The sky outside is dark as I pull to the side of the highway bridge on I-395, the connection between Bangor and Brewer. I ended up living in Bangor, and it has been nice enough. In the late and the dark, there aren’t many cars around, and I don’t want to be able to see the water before I do it.

I push on the brakes and the car eases to a stop. I

I squeeze the keys, the jagged edges poking my skin, and glance again at the small pile of letters balanced on the briefcase in the passenger seat. There are four in total, and what they lack in length, they also lack in any true meaning or revelation. One for my parents, one for Annemarie, one for whoever happens to come across my abandoned car, and one for Aaron.

When I first started planning, I asked myself if I should return to the Bridge, if it mattered to me, but I decided against it. I want to be sure.

The symmetry’s still there, of course. Can’t miss it.

There were a lot of smaller moments in between, naturally, but there’s no point in combing through the little details and specifics that make up the totality of my childhood. I’m not even sure I could. At the time of the only moment that mattered, I had just turned thirteen, which meant that I was now old and therefore a candidate for proving my prospective maturity, coolness, and manhood. At least, that’s what Aaron said when he decided we should try out the Bridge.

I don’t remember what I said in response, though I’m sure I resisted. At first. The Bridge was, after all, tall enough to evoke a gut reaction, and I was never one for wildness or daredeviltry. I was never one for freedom, either, Aaron told me hotly, and maybe that was what did it. Convinced me, I mean. Or, as was true for a lot of my time with Aaron, I was never convinced but still ended up going along with his plans. Pranking the substitute teacher with a rubber frog, for example. Changing costumes halfway through Halloween night and taking an identical route for double the candy. Attempting to round a sharp corner on my bike without holding the

handlebars “like they do on TV.” Either way, we found ourselves on the Bridge after one of the last days of school in the early summer weather, studying the running water below.

Aaron said it was deep enough, that he couldn’t see any lurking rocks. That he was one of the best swimmers in gym class—this was true—and couldn’t wait to join in on the fun. “We have to get in with the older crowd,” he told me in a tone that meant our futures depended on it. “We can’t be stupid little babies forever.”

I—who had up to that point been unaware that I was a “stupid little baby”—was the one who came up with the idea for a practice run. That I know for sure. You’d think I’d want to know every little detail, would have clarity after the constant reliving, but I suppose that’s something I use to hide with. It’s easier as only a main, vague idea, like on a storyboard.

The practice run was to ensure that we would know what we were doing when we joined the older group. No embarrassing screams on the way down, or flopping instead of diving, or losing our nerve and never leaving the Bridge’s rail. I tried to picture myself hurling my body off the Bridge, somehow keeping perfect form and epitomizing whatever manly image would impress the others, and I shuddered. I instead pictured my younger self hovering at my bedroom window, watching my own perfect dive and applauding.

I still didn’t want to do it, but Aaron did. And he was so excited about it, his body practically vibrating as he hopped off his bike and met me outside my house a couple days later, that I thought, what the hell.

We had decided to go to the Bridge in the evening,

after dinner, so that fewer people would see us, but we would still be able to see the water—our target—for our first jump. We had decided to jump in together.

And so, there we were. Like a snapshot from my kiddie Kodak camera. Standing on the side of the railing with only the water before us, side by side. We had stripped to just our boxer shorts—all knobby knees and jutting-out collarbones and pale, freckly skin. I gripped the railing behind me and pushed my back against the peeling wood. I looked down at the rushing water and felt the roar of it deep in my belly. It crashed on towards the lake, moving fast, indifferent to the two of us hovering overhead. I was trembling, but not for the same reasons Aaron had been earlier. I didn’t want to jump. I said this out loud to Aaron, but my voice must have been lost, drowned out by the sounds of angry water beneath us—or maybe he just ignored me. Either way, he tapped my wrist to signal the start of the countdown. He was grinning. I clung to the rail even harder, knuckles white.

I heard his voice, loud and clear, then and now and sometimes in my dreams. An echo across an endless chasm. One, two, three! His body rocked backward and forward on each number, and on three, his knees bent to push off and his hands left the railing, coming together in preparation to dive. I bent my knees with his, my hands shaking and stretched out before me with all that grayblue underneath, and for one milli-moment both of our bodies were coiled like springs, poised and ready. And then—

I straightened to push off and grabbed for the railing behind me again instead. I was about an inch above the ground—I did jump up, just not exactly off. My naked legs and back crashed against the rail in fear and

desperation. They’d bruise later. I folded myself as tight as I could against the rail of the Bridge.

Aaron jumped, of course. In all my scrabbling with the rail, I only caught the second half of his jackknife dive, his body straight and still as he sliced into the water. I like to tell myself that I saw him smiling, screeching, even, with glee. He had to have been happy.

There was a splash of white foam, arching across the rest of the water, and as I waited for his head to pop up and his exuberant yell, I wondered what he’d say or think of me. Had he realized that I hadn’t jumped with him? That I was a coward, a baby, the opposite of what we were trying to be? Had that been what he was thinking about as he plunged in? Or would he turn towards me in the water with triumph in his eyes first and then, in realizing I wasn’t there, look up with disappointment etched into his face? I squirmed, my body still tense, never loosening my grip on the rail. I waited.

I waited.

I waited.

I don’t know how long it took for it to click in my brain that something was wrong. The remains of that day are tangled up in a knotted, indecipherable mess that I am unwilling to sort out. I know that I started yelling, that I scrambled over the rail and landed hard on the packed dirt that made up the road of the Bridge, scraping my forearms and my knees. I know that I ran down to the embankment, still yelling, and that others began to join me. Somebody pushed me away, someone’s arms were on my shoulders, and I was still waiting for Aaron’s head to break the surface. I couldn’t see. I spit his name from my mouth, over and over. The sounds of the river and the voices mingled together in one increasing howl.

It was the shallowness, or a hidden rock, or maybe a combination of the two. The variables didn’t matter; the equation always added up to a broken neck. They got him out, I was told, before the river took him out into the lake for a perpetual back float. This was supposed to be comforting, I think. I don’t remember thinking about much except that I had never left the Bridge the way I was supposed to. Even when I’d realized something was wrong, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to dive in after Aaron.

It happened a long time before this night in my old car on this dark road, and yet—there has always been a pull from the Bridge. Everything circles back to the Bridge, somehow. As if everything in our little lives happens under some great mirror, and the Bridge’s presence in the first half of my life must be reflected in the second. It took me until my late thirties to acknowledge this. The Bridge is the only true constant of my life, and I do believe that to be true.

Many things have happened since then, of course. I left that small town, that small clustering of nothing, as soon as possible. I never looked back, save for small, insignificant glances. I tried to be noble, to use my experience as some kind of sign and put a positive spin on it. I ended up in medical school. Somewhere in there I found myself leaning over a cadaver, feeling nothing but disgust and revulsion—or perhaps just feeling nothing, period. I dropped out. A crisp white coat and frozen look of reassurance had never had my name on them, anyway.

I was married at one point to a nice girl named Annemarie. She was nice, sure, but it didn’t take long for us to grow apart. We never fully understood each other,

or what we wanted. No kids, at least. She got the house and I got the car and everything else was divided into neat halves, close enough to mirror images that we were both satisfied. Now I hear from her twice a year, through a Christmas card and a birthday card. Generic messages, Annemarie whittled down to generic ex-wife. This year I received a merry snowman and a cluster of bright balloons. Have a holly jolly Christmas! Here’s hoping that this year is your best one yet! I’m not sure we should still bother. I glance at the envelope in my passenger seat with her name scrawled on it.

I had a falling-out with my parents after the divorce, though we began drifting apart long before then. I had been unruly and unmotivated in high school. Lonely. Now I work in sales, selling office supplies, though my boss told me recently that my heart isn’t in it. Whose is, though, if you stop and think about it?

Throughout it all, the Bridge. I’ve begun to recognize that it’s not so much that everything is coming back to the Bridge. Rather, it’s more the question of what might be different, what could have happened, if I had jumped, too.

It haunts me. I can no longer take the extra weight.

I don’t leave any lights on in the car. I get out, leave my keys in the door lock, and pat the hood. I zip my dark jacket up to my chin. There’s a light wind that bites through me, stubborn, cold. I peer through the driver’s side window to try to catch a glimpse of the neat stack of letters, but it’s too dark to distinguish anything. No matter. I know they’re there. Someone will find them. I turn away.

I stand with my hands on the edge of this bridge on

I-395, squinting my eyes at the black. I can hear the hum of distant traffic and the Penobscot River surging below me, the invisible lapping, the invisible welcome. This bridge feels less crude, more commercial. It’s definitely much, much bigger and higher. It’ll be a sure thing, then. The rail is rough underneath my palms. My hands sting with the feel of it, with the cold.

I examine the rail. The side of the bridge in front of the rail is too narrow for me to stand on; I’ll have to stand atop the rail itself. I’ll only have to balance there for a moment. I seize the rail and struggle to pull myself up. I’m not as spry or flexible as I used to be—my body creaks in protest at the jerky movements. I ignore it and heave myself halfway up, having to crawl and scramble to make it all the way to the top. I crouch there, hands gripping the rail on each side. My feet are solid beneath me even as I shudder. The wind rustles and stings my eyes and the tips of my ears. I am surrounded by the dark. I close my eyes.

I feel I must look the same, be the same, as I at thirteen. Aaron’s fingers brush against my wrist, his numbered pulse thrumming an unknown countdown.

I don’t jump, not yet. Why not? Am I afraid? Still a coward? I know I want to, this time. I know that on my way down I’ll finally grasp, for a milli-moment, that feeling of freedom I’ve been hunting and have never been able to find. The symmetry, beautiful or grotesque or meaningless. It’ll be enough. I will finally submerge myself in that watery space—that limbo—that I’ve waited all this time on the edge of for Aaron’s head to pop back up, to break the surface. What will he say to me when I see him again?

I guess I could use a countdown. One, two, three. I rock forward but stay perched atop the bridge.

One, two, three. This time, I hear the numbers in Aaron’s voice, the same voice I never heard again summoning me over the phone on the weekend, whispering to me under a teacher’s stern gaze, or screeching as we rolled around in the grass, trying to pin each other down. I hear the note of triumph in it as he stood over the water, as he held one of my prized marbles aloft. Aaron’s voice echoes across the path of my entire life, leading all the way from then to here. I keep my eyes closed. Darkness pushes all around me.

I imagine a boat in the dark water, the light of a single lantern. Or the headlights of cars peeking into the secrets of the night, traveling whichever way their drivers’ lives are taking them. Or some business or house with lights blazing, bright enough so that even from here I can see them, stretch my arms toward them and some purpose, and be invited in. Maybe a single winking star or the lights of a plane full of people who can see and not see. A sign in the sky from Aaron himself. A light, any light, to make the choice. If I see a light, I won’t jump.

I imagine plummeting into the darkness and floating down the river, part of its angry and inevitable path, dark water surrounding and filling me as I surrender at last.

One, two, three.

I open my eyes, squint against the brilliant brightness.