Late Air

by Jaclyn Gilbert

  “Nancy!” Caroline had opened the door. “Oh my God!” Nancy returned Caroline’s hug stiffly. “It’s so good to see you,” Caroline said, her arms gripping Nancy tighter, longer, than she could have anticipated. She was still near the door to the stairwell; not too late to tug it open and rush down the twelve flights. But as Caroline welcomed her in and told her to make herself comfortable while she went to the kitchen to make tea, she tried to focus on the moment: how Caroline’s hair was dyed the same jet black from when they were roommates. By their sophomore year at Michigan, Caroline had disappointed Nancy by joining a sorority, dwindling Nancy’s already slender cast of friends.

  Marjorie used to remind her of Caroline in her perfect manner of dress, her positive outlook on the world. But Nancy had been wrong to assume Marjorie would be there for her after Jean, and as she scanned Caroline’s stunning apartment, her eyes landing on one of the arch-shaped windows she’d seen from the street, she pictured herself looking up at the windows from the street, where she could have stayed, should have stayed. Why would she risk Caroline’s judgment too?

  She sat down on the sofa, one of distressed red leather, and admired a crystal vase full of fresh calla lilies on its adjoining end table.

  “Herbal or caffeinated?” Caroline said, holding out several loose-leaf canisters. “This one is from Japan.” She tipped the canister so that Nancy could smell tiny rosebuds mixed with fragrant greens. “We were just there in December,” she said. “In Japan.” In college, Caroline’s hair had grazed her waist, dull then, but now it shimmered, this near-perfect bob.

  “Herbal is fine,” Nancy said. Visiting Japan had been on her bucket list since she was eighteen, a fact that made her sad and happy—sad because she could not imagine traveling there alone—and happy because she could not remember the last time she’d recalled such a list.

  Caroline brought out two black pots on a tray. She sat next to Nancy on the sofa, close enough to grab Nancy’s hands in hers.

  “Tell me,” she said. “What brings you to the city?”

  “Just a weekend away,” Nancy said, trying to smile, because after all, she’d initiated this visit.

  “Well, I’m thrilled you decided to stop by, and I’m so lucky I’m home! Jim’s away on business and James is taking tae kwon do on the Upper West Side. Usually I’m out running errands.”

  Nancy laughed, though she couldn’t affirm that lucky feeling.

  “Oh,” Caroline went on, “I’ve been meaning to congratulate you on your work at Beinecke. I read about it in the Times . . . forgetting what it’s on now, excuse me!” She laughed while pouring more tea, this trickle of pale amber liquid.

  “Wordsworth and the Napoleonic Wars,” Nancy said. She tried to take a few more sips of tea, but the chamomile was almost too sweet.

  She thought of the Master’s Tea she had gone to with Marjorie, how she and Marjorie had laughed over Annette’s correction: this is my home, and as Caroline excused herself to get more honey, Nancy tasted, more acutely, the bitterness Marjorie had left her with. One morning after Nancy had continued to miss work, Marjorie had called to see how she was doing. Nancy couldn’t remember exactly how it had come out, but Marjorie had made a comment that she didn’t understand how it could have happened. Most babies were three months, not seven, when SIDS happened—Marjorie hadn’t said it, but there’d been only judgment in her voice, this implication that she must have forgotten to check on Jean or had laid her down with too many blankets.

  But Nancy had come to see the real truth: that Marjorie simply couldn’t relate. Marjorie needed to be surrounded by “friends” who held up the mirror of her own life—and that day on the phone, she had been yet another reminder of Nancy’s nightmare: that everything she’d believed to be true about friendship and unconditional love was false. Mirrors lied—and she’d had no words to fill the silence through the phone that day. She’d simply hung up, and they’d stopped speaking after that.

  “I can’t find the local jar from the farmers market,” Caroline said. “But this will have to do.” She held up a plastic bear with a yellow cap and asked Nancy if she wanted any. Nancy shook her head, but Caroline wanted to hear more about her work, as though it might be the only way for them to connect, and Nancy tried to do that, to fill the time, the silence beneath it all, with her work on Wordsworth and his Alfoxden Notebook. Caroline nodding dimly, the same way she had in college, when Nancy would go on about a particular painting or a book she’d been reading, clinging to the safety, the formality, of ideas. Caroline had always lived her ideas, Nancy thought. She didn’t overthink them.

  “Well, Jim and I really have been wanting to visit New Haven,” she said. “We’d love to take James. But he’s not so little anymore!” She pointed to a photo of her son next to the baby grand piano. On its ledge sat another vase of white calla lilies.

  “Are you alright?” Caroline said, reaching for Nancy’s knee. Nancy flinched, unable to remember, for a moment, what they’d been talking about.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, fixing her eyes more firmly on James’s photograph. “He’s so handsome. How old is he now?” Of course Nancy knew he was eight years old—three months and ten days older than Jean would have been—but she let Caroline tell her anyway and then add:

  “He’s starting boarding school next year. Can you believe it?”

  Nancy couldn’t, but she did not say that either: that she had no concept of time, how decades could be compressed into individual years and months and weeks so that her child might have one day grown up like James.

  But now Caroline wanted to give the grand tour. Nancy didn’t say anything, merely followed her past the bookcase and the piano and then the dining room table Caroline said she’d had custom built by an Italian carpenter in the neighborhood. Nancy could just picture Caroline, Jim, and James pressing cloth napkins to their lips after every sixth bite, silverware clinking against china plates, knives and forks flashing in the candlelight as they switched hands, all the while James speaking excitedly about his studies and piano lessons, his tae kwon do.

  It was the life Nancy had grown up with in Michigan: the dinners and country club tennis lessons and golf matches. In Murray, she had resolved for the opposite life, for her future to follow an opposite course.

  Caroline held up a lion’s tooth from last year’s safari in Kenya. And then a silk-and-ebony fan. “Japan was not warm,” she said, tugging her sweater. “Next year we have to go somewhere warm again, to survive this winter!”

  Nancy smiled, relieved to be bypassing a tour of the bedrooms, that she could safely return to the sofa. They poured the last of their tea, and Nancy took frequent sips as Caroline went on about the city, her own work, more of her travels. Nancy felt content to stay silent, half listening, half remembering; she’d been living this double existence for almost eight years—death more present than living—parroting all the things people were supposed to say in these kinds of situations, the cold winter temperatures, the latest tragedies and successes in the news, as if there was nothing between them, not the pain or the worries and disappointments that filled Nancy, unexpectedly, throughout the day—the endless triggers.

  “What are your plans tonight?” Caroline asked suddenly. “We could go out for dinner? It’s still early, I know, but I could fix us some appetizers here.”

  “Oh,” said Nancy. “That sounds lovely, but—”

  “Or we could order in. James will be home soon. I’d love for you to meet him. The restaurant I was thinking of is this wonderful Italian place off Lexington with homemade ravioli.”

  “Actually,” Nancy said, “I have to be downtown for a show. I don’t have tickets yet, so I should get there early to stand in line.”

  “Which show?” Caroline’s eyes looked wide with recognition, as if she sought out theater on a regular basis or was part of some pseudo-elitist Off Broadway circle.

  Yet Nancy knew Caroline deserved more credit. She had graduated summa cum laude in political scie
nce, and Nancy had been in awe of the ease at which she’d consumed Plato their freshman year, and then how she’d cranked out A papers while still enjoying a vibrant social life; upperclassmen, most of them attractive males, had knocked on their door daily and persistently with exclusive invitations to parties.

  “Incident? Everyone’s talking about it.” Caroline had already gone for the Times and was flipping through the arts section.

  “No,” Nancy said. “It’s a tiny production. You probably haven’t heard of it. The Wandering Jew.”

  “Oh, I haven’t heard of that. Who’s directing?”

  “I can’t remember,” Nancy said, feeling her throat in her ribs. “It started at the Yale Repertory, but then Bleecker Street picked it up. It’s a tiny production, written by Eugène Sue in the 1800s. I acquired one of his scripts years ago. He has a real gift for portraiture.”

  “But wasn’t Sue a novelist?” Caroline asked, eyes gone small, pinched. “And why, if it’s tiny, do you have to stand in line?”

  “Oh,” Nancy said, pretending to rummage through her purse.

  “I can’t believe I haven’t heard of it.” Caroline went to the dining table for New York magazine.

  “Forget it,” Nancy said. “It’s silly. I don’t need to go.” She set her hand on top of her bag. “I came here to see you.” For as much as the gesture made Nancy cringe, she felt this little pulse of curiosity for what it might be like to reexperience the company of an old friend.

  They went to the Library Hotel on Madison, where Caroline ordered them two twenty-dollar dirty martinis. “I didn’t even ask what you wanted.” She laughed. Her bracelets clinked, reminding Nancy of Caroline’s hippie days, when she’d worn dozens more up her arm and had dusted her eyelids in matching gold.

  Caroline looked at Nancy and said, “I assume you’re happy at work.”

  “Of course,” Nancy said, unsure if she was more surprised by Caroline’s continued suddenness or how unfazed she was by her own question. “I’ve been there ten years,” she said. “Almost.” She sipped her drink.

  “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Forgive me if I’ve asked you this already. But you like New Haven? I keep wanting to show James the campus, to plant the idea early in his mind, you know?”

  “You’ve said that,” Nancy said, somewhat relieved to return to the surface of the Caroline she knew.

  “Said what?”

  “That you want to bring him to New Haven.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes.” Nancy licked her lips, wishing she hadn’t already eaten both olives from her drink.

  “Well—” Caroline said, her eyes evading, but also circling, closer to the thing Nancy now felt she was raring to announce any moment, that she knew, that she was so sorry, and then Nancy would have to sit with that expression again, its triteness, its vapidity.

  “It’s stupid,” Caroline said. “I’ll just say it. One of my friends, a very good friend, actually, is a department head at the Morgan Library, and the literature curator just left. He asked me if I knew anyone, and of course I thought of you, but we haven’t been in touch. And then you showed up here, and I just keep thinking to myself, it’s meant to be!”

  “Oh,” Nancy said, struggling to breathe, the tightness of her eyes too much to hold, to keep from shattering.

  “It’s just an offer,” Caroline said. “Think about it. I’d be happy to put you in touch with him. And I think you would really love it there. My friend—Martin, he’s really open. You’d have a lot of freedom to manage exhibitions, to acquire new collections—”

  Nancy should have been relieved, but she wasn’t. She felt defeated, like Caroline’s suggestion about changing jobs meant she appeared more generally lost and lonely than she was capable of pretending she wasn’t, and wouldn’t it have been better, maybe even liberating, to have just told her what had happened? But it felt too late now.

  “I don’t . . .” Nancy took a long sip from her martini, tears withheld, but she could taste the salt. She set the glass down. “It’s tempting,” she muttered.

  “Really? I’ll send out an intro email on Monday, and you can go from there. Exciting!”

  Nancy calmly excused herself to the restroom. She wished she’d been firmer; that word, tempting, replayed in her head. She supposed she’d taken refuge behind it, and now she was stuck. Caroline would want to know where she’d live if she got the job, and then if she had any attachments to the city, or maybe Caroline was like Marjorie: simply too self-absorbed to express such sensitivity. Nancy supposed Caroline had asked her very little about her private life when they were roommates all those years ago.

  Inside a bathroom stall, she guarded a thick wad of toilet paper in her hand, and she began to hear herself breathing. Was this what it would be like tonight, alone in her hotel bed?

  Her back was hunched and aching. She stared at her shoes. Black and beaten boots she used to only wear for walking, not every day like now, because she was terrified of shoe stores, of trying different styles on.

  When she returned to the table, Caroline had already paid the bill. Before Nancy had a chance to say anything, Caroline reached across the table for her hand.

  “I’ve failed,” she said. Black smeared under her eyes and her lips trembled. “I knew what happened.” She wiped tears. “I failed to reach out to you, to be there for you. I’m truly sorry.”

  Nancy felt her own tears release in the way they’d wanted. To be seen naked for the woman who’d once taken shelter among books in their dorm room and the college library, and now to still seem to be that woman in every way, except that they both knew she wasn’t. She would never be again. And maybe it was better that way, to hear the words I’ve failed, for the worst to be spoken, for what would always live in her to be named.

  SEVENTEEN

  Thursday

  9:31:45 a.m.

  Murray met Lisa outside Becky’s new room on the sixteenth floor; she had moved out of the ICU. Lisa had texted that morning, just after seven. Doug would be in the office for the next two days, so he could come.

  Today she wore a green sweater, sleeves cropped to reveal thin wrists, one of them bound with a small leather watch.

  “She’s speaking more every day,” Lisa said. “Sometimes she reverses the order of words, but the ideas are there.”

  From inside the room, something crashed, something loud, piercing Murray’s eardrums and making him close his eyes. When he opened them, he looked around, and it was quiet. He heard his heart beating in his head, but he was sure he’d heard a crash.

  The door to Becky’s room had been left partly open. Then he heard some moaning, followed by high-pitched laughter. Lisa rushed in first.

  Brown liquid had pooled around her bed. It smelled like pureed vegetables: baby food and chicken broth. More of it splattered over her neck and forearms, which were still taped with IVs. She drew a finger to her nose.

  “Stop that,” Lisa said.

  When the nurse arrived, Lisa had to steady Becky’s jerking arms.

  Becky’s feeding bottle, now half-empty, ran through a clear tube. Some of her hair had grown back, but it lacked thickness. Vitality.

  “I’m sorry.” Lisa looked at him, crying.

  Becky groaned, her words slurring. “I don wantto!”

  Lisa held both of her hands over Becky’s hands. She shushed her, said it would be okay. She brushed away some hair.

  “Couch!” Becky said, laughing hysterically. But then her face relaxed, saddened. “I stay here,” she said. “Not go to.”

  “That’s progress?” Murray asked incredulously. And as soon as he said it, he could see on Lisa’s face it had been the wrong thing.

  Lisa’s eyes fixed on him. Her mouth quivered. She released the grip on Becky’s hands. “What?”

  “I thought you said she was six,” he said, part of his gaze on the nurse’s station.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “On Apgar. Whatever it was. Glasgo
w.”

  “You know,” she said, “I really don’t know why I even make an effort. Or take the time.” She’d started crying again, her shoulders hunched. “Doug was right. You don’t care about our daughter!”

  He tried to speak, but thoughts blended with words. He didn’t know what he’d said. Had he said anything?

  “She’s just a means for you, isn’t she?” Her voice, words, they amplified. “I never felt right about it. The way you recruited her!” She was pointing her finger at the ground, not looking at him, but then she did. She met his eyes.

  “My problem is I always try to see the best in people.” She wept. “I was raised that way. Becky too . . . I should have taught her to be stronger.” She wiped mucus from her mouth. “The first time she came home for break, she was thin as a ghost. She didn’t even want to go to the movies. Her favorite.” She clutched her elbows. “She always loved the movies. Since she was a little girl.”

  “That’s enough,” he said. The shadow of a cart rolling by. Supplies. “Lower your voice.” He tried to keep his voice low. Diminutive.

  The door to Becky’s room had been left open. She moaned again, louder this time.

  “Go!” Lisa shouted. “Get out!”

  He saw a nurse coming this way. That way: Out of the station, out of the room?

  At the elevator, he could barely breathe. He stopped and turned around to see if it was really her: Lisa, less than fifty feet away, convulsing as another nurse tried to steady her. He felt more tightening in his ribs. More shaking by his wrists, his knees. She waved her arm at him. “You stay away from us!”

  He drove, not thinking about where he was going or why. His phone lay on top of loose change and odds and ends, shoe spikes and safety pins, in a small tray by the shifter. He tuned the radio to the first clear station, something acoustic, but then it went religious. He turned the knob, again and again, settling into static.