Astrid Sees All

by Natalie Standiford

  The grave was a neat rectangular hole with a pile of dirt next to it.

  I couldn’t look at it.

  I looked at the sky. It was vast. Vast and empty.

  There was nothing up there.

  No clouds. Nothing.

  I knew there was a universe up there somewhere.

  Planets and stars and galaxies,

  infinity,

  the night world.

  The sun hid it all.

  I felt the Earth spinning under my feet.

  I felt its weight.

  Its gravity.

  Its dark magnetic pull,

  pulling me down,

  down to the bottom of the sea.

  That’s the last thing I remember.

  * * *

  Over the next few weeks, Laurel and Mom recounted the rest of the day to me many times, hoping to trigger my memory.

  At the cemetery, they said, I asked, “What’s going on?”

  Mom said, “Shhh. It’s almost over.”

  Laurel said I gawked at the priest and the mourners, at the casket and the freshly dug grave, with an uncomprehending look on my face.

  Prayers were intoned.

  The casket was lowered into the ground.

  Friends and family surrounded us to express their sympathy.

  I whispered to Laurel, “Are we at a funeral? Who died?”

  That’s when she knew something was wrong. She and Mom hurried me back to the limo.

  I asked, “Whose car is this? Where are we going?”

  “Home,” Mom said. “Everyone’s coming back to our house for lunch, remember?”

  “Everyone? How many people?”

  “I don’t know. A lot.”

  “Is it a surprise party?”

  Laurel and Mom looked at each other in alarm.

  “For my birthday,” I said.

  “Phoebe, your birthday is in March.”

  “What?”

  “It’s December.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Christmastime.”

  They reminded me, as gently as they could, that Dad had died. That we had just attended his funeral. I took in the black clothes, the tearstained faces, the limo, the line of cars trailing ours with their headlights on. For a second, they say, my face registered comprehension. “Oh. Oh, yes.”

  But as the limo turned onto our street, parked cars lining the curb, I cooed, “Someone’s having a party,” in a teasing singsong voice.

  And when we opened the front door and found the house bustling with people, I yelled, “Surprise!” Everyone looked up from their plates of ham and pasta salad. A few people laughed uncomfortably.

  “You can’t fool me, Mom,” I said. “I guessed there was a party as soon as I saw all the cars out front.”

  Mom led me upstairs. “Where’s Dad?” I said. “Dad! Dad!” I ran into my parents’ room, where the bed was piled with coats. “Dad?”

  They sat me down and told me again: “Dad died. Remember?”

  I didn’t understand. I didn’t believe them. Before this fact had time to sink in, my memory was wiped clean again. I forgot why I was wearing black, forgot why the house was full of people, forgot that it wasn’t my birthday, forgot why I couldn’t find Dad anywhere.

  Mom was afraid I’d had a stroke. She left Laurel to manage the wake and drove me to the emergency room. Laurel told everyone I was drunk.

  * * *

  I hadn’t had a stroke. Something at the cemetery—perhaps the sight of the grave—had shocked me into amnesia. Every minute or so I forgot where I was and what I was doing there. Mom would remind me, and I would sort of understand, but then I’d forget again. Over and over I asked: Why am I in the hospital? Did I have an accident? Where’s Dad? I remembered who I was and who Mom was. But I couldn’t remember that Dad had died, or that he’d ever been sick.

  The amnesia would dissipate after about twenty-four hours, the doctor said. Much of my memory would return. But I probably wouldn’t remember the events of that day. Any memory of the burial or the wake would be lost forever.

  They kept me overnight in the hospital. I woke up every few hours to find Mom sitting in a chair beside my bed. I asked where I was and what had happened. She shushed me and told me to go back to sleep. She’d decided it was cruel to keep telling me the bad news when the shock of it hit me fresh every time.

  The next morning, a nurse brought a tray of pancakes and juice. I was disoriented. But my minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour memory was working again. I knew that it was December, not March. I understood why I was in the hospital. I remembered that Dad was dead. I even remembered the funeral—up to the part when the sky made me dizzy. I didn’t recall Dad’s coffin being lowered into the ground, or yelling, “Surprise!” at the wake, or driving to the hospital with Mom, or being examined by doctors the day before. Those memories are still lost to me.

  I spent four more days in the hospital while doctors ran tests to make sure my brain was okay. I felt fine. There was nothing wrong with me. The amnesia had been a blip, like an allergic reaction. Like Mom’s swollen tongue. I wanted to go back to New York, to my life, but Mom thought I should stay home and rest. I could go back later, when I was well. New York isn’t going anywhere, she said.

  She was mistaken: New York is always charging forward and threatening to leave you behind. It is going somewhere, always.

  * * *

  The house felt solemn and empty and wrong, as if someone had moved the furniture around just enough so that you couldn’t remember how it used to be. I was desperate to get away. I felt the weight in my stomach and remembered where it had come from. Ivan—I thought then—had paid to make the weight go away, but it was still there. I had to return to New York and confront him. Then, maybe, I would feel light again.

  But the amnesia had freaked Mom out. She said I had a strange look in my eyes—a dead, dull look. My grip on reality was fragile. I wasn’t well enough to live on my own in New York. I needed someone to look out for me.

  I argued and fought, ranted and raved, pacing my room like a caged tiger, but she would not be moved. I was the child on the leash, safe but humiliated. Humiliated but safe.

  I spent the endless afternoons in the living room playing old records, one after another, in the random order that I found them: Oscar the Grouch Sings the Songs of Sesame Street; Up with People!; In the Wee Small Hours; The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart; Piano Concertos by Sergei Rachmaninoff; The Sound of Music; the Disney soundtracks to Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and the weird and scary Darby O’Gill and the Little People. This record now entranced me: the spooky music, the dancing leprechauns, the banshee’s wail, and the headless coachman opening the door of the Death Coach and moaning, “Get in….” I listened to it at least once a day.

  Mom indulged this for a week before she begged me to stop playing that record. So I listened with headphones, waving the album’s cover at her and shrieking like a banshee whenever she passed through the room.

  I longed for Carmen and wondered what she was doing, remembering scenes from our past: Gossiping in the Blue Room. Dancing at the Gatsby party. Playing the jukebox at the Dublin House. Singing What’s Opera, Doc? on the lip of the Lincoln Center fountain.

  Late at night, in bed, I heard the banshee wailing. In my dreams, I went outside to meet the Death Coach. I woke up to find myself in my nightgown on the front porch.

  The next night I sleepwalked in the street, barefoot. A police car picked me up and brought me home. My feet were dirty and cut; I’d stepped on broken glass. Mom took me to the emergency room to have the cuts treated. She told them she was worried about my emotional state. They kept me overnight for observation. In the morning, they released me, but Mom got upset, insisting I needed more treatment. “She’s a danger to herself. I can’t watch her all night.”

  The doctor maintained that there was nothing seriously wrong with me. I was an adult. Mom couldn’t force me to check myself into the psych ward. So she brought me home.

 
When I remember those days now, I see the stress lines around her eyes, the tension around her jaw, the fear and the sorrow in her expression. If I noticed it then, I didn’t care. I couldn’t feel anyone’s pain but my own.

  She got the name of a psychiatrist from one of her friends and made an appointment for me. “Tuesday afternoon,” she said. “Not too early, so you can sleep in.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Phoebe, please. You are not facing this. You’re making yourself sick.”

  “What do you want me to face?”

  She sighed and rubbed a knot in the wood of the kitchen table. “Your feelings,” she said quietly, as if she knew how weak and silly the word would sound to me.

  “I’m feeling my feelings,” I sneered. “What do I have to do to prove it? Do I need to make my tongue swell up so badly I can’t talk? I don’t know how to do that! Tell me how to make my tongue swell up and I’ll do it. What’s the secret?”

  “You will go to this appointment,” she said through gritted teeth. “Or I will take you to Sheppard Pratt—”

  “What!”

  “—where they will keep you until you are well enough to come home.”

  “The mental hospital? It’s a prison!”

  “It’s not a prison. It’s a very nice place. Zelda Fitzgerald was treated there.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “If you continue to be a danger to yourself, if you sleepwalk in the street, cut yourself, anything like that, I can and will do it. Or you can see this Dr. Lyons and hope and pray she can help.”

  No doctors, no hospitals, no talking about feelings could help me, I was sure of it. The only thing that would cure me was throwing money in Ivan’s face. I was enraged at my mother: that she wanted to lock me up at Sheppard Pratt, that she thought she could force me to do anything, that she kept me from doing what I had to do.

  And then, on Christmas, I got a stolen turban in the mail. Thanks to Carmen, I escaped.

  * * *

  Now it was September. Carmen was gone. And I was trapped underwater at the bottom of the sea, unable to breathe.

  28 THE ROOSTER MAN

  Every night for weeks, I wandered the streets in search of her. I should have been looking for work, for some way to earn money, but this was all I did. This was my job now. I walked for hours, taking a different route each night: down through NoHo and SoHo to Tribeca, east to Chinatown and Little Italy, up through the Lower East Side, back to the East Village. I passed row after row of posters of a demon-eyed Ronald Reagan and the words

  PLUTONIUM. HALLOWEEN.

  Toby had come up with the idea. He said that four more years of Reagan was the scariest thing he could think of.

  I peered into coffee shops and bars and bodegas and restaurants, parked cars and phone booths and alleys. I was a whale, swimming the streets, beaming out sonar, beep, beep, beep. I knew the chances of finding her were tiny—she might not even be in New York—but I felt compelled to look, to scour every corner of the city, to do something good for once.

  One night, very late, the feeling of being followed returned. I saw no one, but every doorway loomed in shadow, a hiding place. I tried to convince myself that I was imagining this feeling, that I was paranoid. I was afraid of losing my mind again. Maybe I was sleepwalking. Maybe I was dreaming. It was hard to tell anymore.

  I finished my wanderings and returned to Avenue A well after midnight. The park was quiet and still, the park people settled into their tents, dreaming of bongos.

  I reached for my keys. Something moved in the shadows near the Eighth Street gate. I peered through the dark.

  Plaid sports jacket. Plaid tie.

  It was him. I hadn’t seen him in a long time.

  Come in, Phoebe, come in….

  I wanted to join him. I felt the pull of it.

  I’ll come, I said.

  I crossed the street. I hesitated at the entrance to the park.

  Where had he gone?

  “Dad,” I said out loud.

  I listened. A breeze rattled the rusty leaves.

  “Dad.”

  Nothing.

  I’d lost him.

  He was dead. I wouldn’t see him again.

  Then, from deep inside the park, came a squawk, a flap of wings, and a shout: “Atti!”

  I ran along the winding path, leaves crunching under my feet. Dark lumps huddled on benches and on the ground, sleeping or nodding. None of them was Carmen, I saw it instantly, I could tell by their shapes.

  At last: in front of the General Slocum memorial, a small figure lay crumpled on the ground, her left sleeve rolled up, a needle on the ground beside her.

  “Zowie…” she whispered through bluish lips. She rolled her head, her eyes closed. I peeled back an eyelid to check her pupils. Pinpoints. She gasped for air.

  “Carmen! It’s me.” I tried to force her to look at me, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open. I rubbed my knuckles on her sternum. Her eyes fluttered.

  Wings flapped again, over by the benches. The silhouette of a tall man, watching us. The rooster had landed on his shoulder. He made a phlegmy sound in his throat, a cough or a laugh, it was hard to tell which.

  “We’ve got to go.” I pulled Carmen up to a sitting position, wrapped one of her arms around my neck, and hoisted her to her feet. “Come on. Walk.”

  We stumbled along the path, her feet dragging, her head drooping. She was barely able to stand, incoherent, nearly unconscious. If Dad were here… I thought, but he’s not. He’s not. It was only me.

  I hustled Carmen’s slack body across the street to our building. “Stay awake. We’re almost home.” I dragged her into the vestibule and threw myself against the inner door. It burst open, the lock still broken. I kicked it shut behind me, hoisted Carmen onto my back, and hauled her upstairs. Help! I screamed. Help help help! But the screams came out in nightmare whispers. I couldn’t make enough noise, all my breath went to my legs, to pumping my thigh muscles.

  Round the second-floor landing. Up to the third. We’d nearly made it. I pulled out my key.

  Then, from below: a slam. Thuds. Panting.

  He was in.

  I rammed the key into the lock and turned it.

  Footsteps running up the stairs. A grunt.

  I hauled Carmen into the apartment and threw my weight against the door, turning the bolt. The cats fled.

  The doorknob rattled. A fist pounded on the wood. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “Open the door.” His voice low but intense. “Open the fucking door.”

  Carmen lay under the kitchen table, unconscious, turning blue. I ran into the living room. Where was the phone? I kicked aside papers, books, cereal boxes, clothes….

  The rattling stopped.

  I held my breath. Quiet.

  I tiptoed to the door and pressed my ear against it.

  In the hall, footsteps, moving away, clomp clomp clomp clomp… A clinking sound. Footsteps coming back, clomp clomp clomp clomp…

  The knob rattled again. I recoiled. The sound of metal on metal, a key crunching into the lock.

  The door burst open. A tall white man in a black knit cap. Familiar face. He grinned and rattled a ring with two keys.

  “Hey hey! This is Oswald’s place, isn’t it? Did you know he kept a spare set hidden out in the hall?” He shut the door and bolted it. “I wonder how old Oz is doing these days?” He grinned, baring a chipped front tooth. “I know you. Don’t you remember me?”

  “I don’t know you.” I backed into the living room.

  “You bought me some potatoes. A few weeks ago. Remember?” He laughed that cough-laugh again.

  He’d shaved off his beard. But it was him.

  “Huh, girl? Remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “You were nice. I asked a lot of people to help me that day. You were the only one who did.”

  He pocketed the keys and stepped around Carmen, giving her leg a little kick. One of his boots was held togethe
r with duct tape. He made his slow, deliberate way toward me.

  “You know what I did with the potatoes?”

  I said nothing.

  “Huh? Do you know what I did? Answer me!”

  “No.”

  “I put them in a soup. You know what else I put in the soup?”

  I backed into the cardboard box we used as a coffee table.

  “Katinka!” He laughed. “You know why they never found her body? Because I made soup out of it. Then I fed it to those people in the park.”

  I barely understood what he was saying. I kept backing away from him, blindly scrambling for the phone. My hand landed on an ashtray. I threw it at him.

  He ducked. It missed him and smashed against the wall. Ashes rained on the floor. “Hey. Don’t do that!”

  I threw a book. It smacked him in the chest. He caught it and kept coming. “I thought you were nice.”

  My leg bumped the couch. I picked up a bowl, cereal dried along the sides, a spoon clattering to the floor, and threw it as hard as I could. It nailed him in the forehead.

  He growled.

  He sprang.

  I dove behind the couch. He pounced, banging his knee on the radiator. I slipped out from under him, my hand rolling over something smooth. The Scooter’s bat.

  I gripped the bat.

  No matter what, I would not let go of the bat.

  I crawled out from behind the couch and swung it at him, swishing air. He launched himself at me and knocked me to the floor. My head hit the wall. He bashed his fist into my face. My knee jerked up, a reflex, and rammed his crotch.

  He grunted and rolled off me. I sprang to my feet. I saw stars.

  He lifted his head. I raised the bat.

  I felt the Earth spinning under my feet.

  I felt its weight.

  And its gravity.

  It made me dizzy.

  But I did not black out.

  I roared

  and cracked the bat

  down

  on

  his

  head.

  He howled and curled up on the floor.

  I hugged the bat and fell onto the couch. My eyes filled with some viscous liquid. I blinked and wiped it away.