The Night Bird

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Like a shiny Christmas display, red brake lights flashed to life across the five westbound lanes of the San Francisco — Oakland Bay Bridge. Two hundred feet above the frigid waters off Yerba Buena Island, the car horns, bangs, and skids of a chain-reaction fender bender transformed the traffic into a parking lot. Hundreds of gridlock-weary Bay Area travelers knew they were going nowhere fast. They turned off their engines, grabbed their smartphones, and settled in to wait.

Trapped in the rightmost lane, Lucy Hagen began to panic. Her fists squeezed closed; her nails dug into her palms. “Oh, damn, damn, damn,” she murmured, shutting her eyes. “Not up here.”

Her friend Brynn, who was behind the wheel of the top-down Camaro convertible, patted Lucy’s leg. “Hey, it’ll be okay.”

But it was not okay.

Lucy hated bridges. If she could have never driven across another bridge in her life, she would have happily done so, but Lucy lived in San Francisco. There was water, water everywhere, and going anywhere meant crossing a bridge. The Richmond Bridge. The Bay Bridge. The San Mateo Bridge. The Dumbarton Bridge. The Golden Gate Bridge. She took BART under the bay whenever she could, but too often, she had no choice but to venture across the tall spans to get where she was going. Bridges were her enemy.

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