Today we begin a week of fiction at Sunlight.

by Lauren C. Johnson 

Four years after the bridge collapsed, my mom filmed us with a brand-new Betamovie BMC-100. It was the three of us and the bird. The bird was blue. The bird was a budgie. The bird’s name was Tweety, and the bird said, “I love you.”

I’m five years old with pink cheeks to match the inner tube around my belly. I know I’m five because my mom asks me how old I am, and I hold up my hand. It also says May 9, 1984, on the left side of the recording. My dad and I sing “Twist and Shout” before I pitch myself to the brown shag carpet and beg to go swimming. The apartment complex pool is huge—at least, that’s how I remember it now—and my parents always float me in the shallow end. The camera pans to Tweety bobbing his head at his reflection. Palm fronds peek through open windows and floor-to-ceiling glass doors allow in so much light, it’s hard to imagine trouble could ever befall us.

While my mother was recording this mundane morning in our one-bedroom Tampa apartment—the first person among her sisters and cousins to purchase a consumer-ready camera—construction crews were rebuilding the Sunshine Skyway, though my parents did not acknowledge it—at least, not in this recording. And I was too young to concern myself with any particular anniversary.

Anyone who lived in the Tampa Bay area at the time remembers May 9, 1980. How, that morning, remains of a tropical storm blanketed the bay in rain and fog. How a freighter ship called the Summit Venture miscalculated its route and struck a support column, collapsing 1,400 feet of the Sunshine Skyway bridge and roadway. How, unable to see through the squall, six cars, a truck, and Greyhound bus filled with tourists drove over the precipice and into the bay.

My mother was at home, holding me in her lap, as she watched WTVT reporters re-play the Mayday call:

“Coastguard!”

“Get all emergency equipment out to the Skyway Bridge.”

“Stop the traffic on that Skyway Bridge!”

“Did either span of the Skyway go down in the water, over?”

“The west span went down, west span, over.”

“Any vessels in the area, proceed and assist! There are reports of people in the water!”

The footage played on loop. A photo of a Buick Skylark stopped inches from the drop, 150 feet above churning water. The driver, now safe, speaking to reporters with a shaky voice, stunned and perhaps a little awe-struck to have caught a glimpse at death and survived. The rain was so heavy I couldn’t see the roadway. But I got a bad feeling when the Greyhound passed me and disappeared, lights and all, into thin air.

And the bridge with mangled steel jutting into space. Who could believe this mess of concrete and trusses was the same bridge that had ferried 30,000 people across three counties each day and was the longest in the United States when it opened twenty-nine years before? The same Sunshine Skyway that stretched across this Florida bay like the gates to paradise.

My dad was a taxi driver. At 7:30 a.m. on May 9, he found himself without passengers, so he pulled into the McDonald’s on the Pinellas County side of the bridge. He heard the news on the radio and crossed himself.

Here’s how he tells the rest of the story. Two little old ladies dressed in matching alligator suits flagged him down in the parking lot. They were tourists heading toward Miami, and they had tickets for the same bus that had drowned in white water. By the grace of God, my dad said, they’d missed that bus by five minutes, and they would live to see another day. They offered my dad $1,500 to drive them to Miami from St. Petersburg.

He did the math. If they left at 8:30 a.m., they would reach Miami at about half past noon. He would fill up the car, grab lunch, and hit the road by 2 p.m. He could manage the rush hour traffic in Pinellas and Hillsborough Counties; that was nothing otherworldly.

Helping those poor old women was the Christian thing to do.

He thought my mother would be happy with the money.

He was happy with the money.

But he didn’t account for the traffic radiating from the bridge collapse down the coast. He tried to call my mom several times from a pay phone, but she didn’t pick up. When he finally made it back to Tampa, it was midnight. My mother says she wanted to slap him when she heard those keys in the door. Maybe she did; she had paid two visits to the morgue that evening to look for him among the mottled bodies.

My parents still acknowledge May 9th each year, but they don’t fight about it the way they used to. They’ve survived other calamities that, to quote Joan Didion, change life in an instant. Events called PET scan, CT scan, endoscopy, esophagectomy, MRI, and brain metastasis.

Inoperable is its own kind of Mayday call.

Avastin, Keytruda, and TrueBeam radiation are treatments strung like beads on the rosary that hangs from my dad’s rearview mirror. By the grace of God, may you never learn the language of oncology.

I live in San Francisco, but I fly home often. On clear days, I can see the Sunshine Skyway as the plane descends. The reconstructed bridge (pictured here) is taller, cresting at 180 feet, with two beams rising from the center and cables connecting to the deck. From a distance, these structures look like giant sails. The bridge looks like the gates to paradise, but I know people who still drive hours out of their way to avoid it—to feel secure in a world where the ground can fall from beneath one’s feet.

At home, we watch the movies my father digitized from those crumbling VHS tapes. It’s the three of us and the bird again. The bird is green. The bird is a conure. The bird’s name is Dragon.

We’re safe in a sunlit morning that stretches on without end. My mom and dad ask if I have anything else to tell the camera. I say, “I love you.”

Photo of the reconstructed Sunshine Skyway Bridge by Joseph Corl on Unsplash