One time he pooped in that pool, sitting as a little naked fat baby in the sunshine. He smiled, he pooped. I scooped the little floating biscuits out with a cup.
When angry, anxious, despairing, Pete loses his speech again. I can almost see it bleeding out of him in these moments, as blood drains from a frightened face.
When it happens, Dennis will try to touch Pete. Approach him, try to envelop him in a bear hug, or, if our boy won’t allow that, then simply a hand on his arm, his back, his burst of dark hair. Breathe, he’ll say, just breathe. It’s OK, it’s all going to be OK.
And this always, when I see it, ignites even more turmoil in my brain, in my chest, because I both believe and do not believe it’s going to be okay. I love and hate my husband for his reassurances, for his demeanor of steadiness. It feels to me like the bedrock of our family’s life, and its fault line, the shiftiest quake zone in the most volcanic region on earth. This because, so often, I simply don’t buy it—the comforting vision he’s selling—and I know that often he doesn’t either.
And how do I react, when Pete becomes stymied and speech-strangled? I feel the hot steel cord tightening around me, the cord that is still umbilical, the searing live wire. I become his cracked mirror, refracting his despair, mixing it with my fear for him and my love.
I try not to show him my distress. I try to pull myself together and be a grown-up, of course.
What do you want to tell me, my darling? How is it we have so many secrets from each other? Things you don’t tell me, and I have things I don’t tell you. I used to deal daily with your poop and we had no secrets, no space between us.
I took his hand into mine. A warm and alive object that had once rested in my hand so often, it seemed an extension of my body. My son, do you remember walking around the city hand in hand, day after day, along shop aisles and subway platforms, across every street crossing, every square of every sidewalk, miles and miles hand in hand?
He pulled it away. He squeezed his eyes closed and rubbed them, taking a long shaky breath. Reddened splotches down the sides of his nose, a few small angry pimples on his chin. He gave his head a little shake, as if to toss the tears away.
I didn’t want him to catch me watching him, so I stared down at his feet. His sneaker still bore that legend: ANTIFA RAGE BRIGADE. And now another, I hadn’t noticed: DAX VIVE. This, I recalled, was one of the scribblings in the bathroom at school, per Vong.
Maybe this would help him find his words again, to talk about this. As he settled a bit, I leaned over and ran my finger over the inked white canvas. “Who is Dax?”
“Some kid killed by fascists, ten years ago. In Italy. Dax Cesare. He’s famous there.”
“Why this concern about fascists? Is that from your AP Modern Euro class?”
He snorted. “No.” He looked at me directly, rims of his eyes still a bit swollen and pinky-red. “This is a coming storm. You just don’t want to see it. You want to bury yourself in your cozy life.”
I let the words sink in. But I do feel danger, every minute, I wanted to say. My cozy life is closer to calamity than you would ever dream, my dear one.
You don’t say that to your struggling child.
“Believe it or not,” I said, “I still have ambitions and desires. Things I want to create. Even moms have dreams.”
His lips bent into a smirk, but I could see him considering this, a little furrow in his forehead.
“It becomes hard to hold on to it,” I said.
“A giant part of the problem is late-stage capitalism,” he said.
At least he has found a passion. “So how did you truly get into this, sweetheart,” I said gently. “Was it that Dmitri?”
“No. No. No. It was not that Dmitri.” He stood abruptly. He paced a bit, his jaw muscles clenching. He made some soft swallowing sounds, as he sometimes did when his tongue got locked. Then he turned to me. “Open your eyes, Ma. This is me. Now. This is who I am now. It’s real. It’s happening. Really real and really happening.” He turned and stalked into the house.
ABBY, APRIL 24, 2015
Really real and really happening.
In the hotel room in the late afternoon, I heard sirens through the thick curtains. They grew louder as I sat in the desk chair, smoothing my hair in the mirror there. Allowing myself to study the reflection. Allowing myself to rest for a bit with what I saw. A seasoned woman in a black sweater, about to fuck someone new for the first time in twenty-two years. Feeling the enormity of it, and at the same time thinking this does not matter. This woman, she is a temporary assembly of atoms, here so short a time, she belongs to no one and nothing.
Why did I text him? A slow day at the office, a bad morning at home. Those weren’t the reasons, of course. There were no reasons.
I sat resting my palms on the cool of the glass-topped desk. The wailing vehicles passed beneath the window and then sounded farther and farther off. As they traveled away, I let them tow everything with them but the things in this room.
Then he knocked on the door and it began in the little entry, my back pressed up against the light switches.
He wrapped one arm around my waist, his hand found a space where my sweater rose up, his hand found the skin over my hip, his mouth was on mine. I ran my fingertips over his face, soft and rough, and his ruthlessly trimmed hair, a bit bristly, nothing shaggy or beachy about him, this man seemed incredibly tart and clean. I breathed him in deeply, kissing his neck, lime and ice and metal.
He stepped back then, picked up my hand and kissed it with a smile. “Not to rush,” he said.
I sat down on the bed and bent to slip off my shoes. “Good to see you, again, Detective,” I said. I felt bravado. Whether it was false or not, I just decided to go with it.
“Glad you got in touch,” he said. His teeth were even and pearly and small. He unbuttoned his shirt, approaching, until sleek cinnamon-hued skin filled my field of vision, and though I felt doubt and fear tickling at the fringe of my consciousness, I willed myself to stay in the moment, brushed my hands down over all his exhilarating strangeness and let all thinking cease as I lay back, my grip asking him to follow me down, falling and falling and falling.
He was still asleep, when I left him there, five in the evening, for the subway home.
Crossing the lobby it struck me again: how far off center I’d strayed. How very askew. Not only doing what I’d just done, but choosing this hotel in which to do it. The Marriott on Lexington and Forty-Ninth. The gunshots, the rabbi’s blood pooling on the ballroom parquet, I remembered now how Eli looked when he told me about it, gesturing with those wiry restless arms, his eyes glittering.
Back then, I didn’t understand its significance. I’m not sure Eli did either. He was just excited by his proximity to the crime.
But historians who analyze such things now say that Meir Kahane’s killing planted the seed of hate that reached full fiery flower on September 11, 2001.
By 2001, Eli had been gone almost ten years.
And now, as I hurried across the hotel lobby, a bit breathless, mouth and heart and pussy a bit swelled up and a bit raw, head lowered though it was unlikely I’d run into anyone I knew, I thought, even the year 2001 was spiraling away into distant history.
I stepped out of the hotel into a downpour. Across Forty-Ninth Street, I thought I saw a girl in a raspberry-colored coat, lingering, loitering, as if waiting for somebody, an umbrella hiding her face.
ABBY, APRIL 27, 2015
A phone buzzes differently when the news is very bad.
“Pete has confessed,” said Headmistress Vong. “And there is a detective waiting to see you.”
It wasn’t who I feared it would be. Instead, a round-shouldered and wide man in a beige windbreaker was standing next to Pete when I entered Elizabeth Vong’s office. He introduced himself as Lieutenant German Pizziali. He had crossed black eyes. Dennis rushed in right after me, disheveled, face a bit sweaty after running from the subway, and he hurried to Pete and took his ha
nds and said, “Are you OK, sweetie.” Our boy looked scared out of his wits.
“Confessed to what? Is this a criminal proceeding, has he had legal representation?” Dennis demanded. I felt a wave of immense gratitude for him.
“Yes,” I chimed in. “What kind of due process do you have here? And anyhow what’s the charge?”
“Don’t say another word,” Dennis said to Pete, placing his hand on our boy’s head.
“The trash can incident. The investigation has finally been completed,” announced Vong, enthroned behind her desk.
“We had a backlog, only two guys on staff, our juvenile-crimes lady is out on baby leave,” explained Pizziali.
“Pigeons. Decapitated,” said the headmistress.
“Pigeons?” I looked at Pete, who avoided my gaze.
“Headless,” the detective said, “pigeons without heads.”
“Is it illegal to decapitate pigeons in this city?” Dennis demanded.
“Pigeons are conscious beings,” said Vong.
Pizziali shrugged. “Flying rats, I always say.”
“And we believe it is connected to the bathroom graffiti. Because there was a bit in the bathroom . . .” Vong looked down at the open file, scanning. “Off with their heads.”
ABBY, APRIL 28, 2015
I am sorry to hear about this latest with Pete. But I will reach out to Pizziali, I know the guy. Leave it in my hands. I was glad to hear from you, even if the circumstances are not the best. I wanted to get in touch, but you said not to, so I’ve been waiting. Thinking of you, probably too much.
I’m reading this text, past midnight, when the doorbell rings.
Beside me, Dennis doesn’t stir.
A knock now, insistent.
I peek through the window alongside the door. A figure, dark against the dark, glint of metallic shoes.
Fresh from clubbing, perhaps.
My heart clenches, stops, I feel a wooze coming on. Her? Here?
When I open the door, we stare at each other. Hard to say who looks more frightened.
Have you gotten your head straight? she says.
I am dumbstruck to see her, to realize that she has found me, instead of the other way around.
No, she says. I can see that you haven’t.
And then, at once, a thought comes to me: bundle her in your arms, bring her inside, show her—show yourself?—your life. The good in it. Despite the recent turbulence.
I swing the door wide and gesture her forward.
She raises her brows in surprise, but steps inside.
I usher her along the hallway, into the kitchen, where we will be farther away from the sleepers upstairs. She is absorbing the house, in all its cluttered corners, keys and mail on a table, the sofa strewn with rumpled pillows, man-sized shoes left with their tongues lolling on the rug. She turns slowly around, examining every inch, it seems, with unblinking eyes.
Then she whispers, who is that?
I whip my head around. A slow-moving shape turns the corner at the foot of the stairs. One of the boys, Benjamin, maybe? Wandering sleepily for a glass of milk, as he has been known to do, in the middle of the night.
In a bit of a panic, I lunge for the basement door, urge her down the stairs. Thankfully, she moves fast, gripping the wobbly banister and feeling her way. I follow, shutting the door softly behind us. As I reach the foot of the stairs, I can hear the fridge opening now, a cabinet, a glass being set down on the countertop.
A tiny bit of light leaks into the gloom from a back casement window, and my eyes adjust. She is staring at the shelves of my wrapped paintings. She reaches out and runs her hand over one rectangular spine. Fine grit slides down the paper to the cement floor. She looks at me. Abigail, she whispers.
I say nothing.
Is this your work?
I say nothing. She continues to brush dust from the paper-covered flats. It is your work, she says. Do I see a glaze of tears on her face, or is it in my eyes? Above us, I hear the footsteps of my son, back along the hallway, up the stairs.
You need to go now, I say.
The street is deserted, the night sky moonless and cloudless, just a few pinprick stars mutely watching. I am appalled at myself for inviting her in, I will her to disappear. She trips over our buckled front walk, steadies herself. Then she turns to face me, to face the house. She looks up at the roofline, down to the low stoop, scanning the whole of our little domicile. She looks at me.
Burn it down, she says.
She turns and takes a few steps into the darkness and then she vanishes. I sink to the hallway floor. I wake at five in the morning, still lying there.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, APRIL 30, 2016
This past weekend, she’d bored a date, an investment analyst named Samir, with her musings about the meningioma, about how she couldn’t see it but perhaps she could almost sense its presence, lurking in those images.
“Or maybe there’s just nothing there,” he said. He would rather discuss the poire pochée or the lavender sorbet that they were sharing in alternating spoonfuls.
She couldn’t talk anymore about food. Food was the only thing anyone in Montreal wanted to talk about anymore.
Samir turned out to be a skilled kisser, able to activate a current, and she would have liked to take him to bed. It had been a while. But the North American Neurological Association conference was in session. Her superiors had flown off to the designated resort in San Diego, and they had not invited her along this time. They tried to frame her being left behind as some kind of advancement—she would “direct coverage of the lab.” “This could be a kind of test flight,” Laurin had said with a smile in the weekly floor meeting, “for our doctoresse.”
No matter, she thought. Let them hit golf balls and sun themselves. She had a plan. She agreed only to meet Samir now and then for a sip of red wine at Bar le Pins, after which she would return to the much more compelling brain of Abigail Willard in the lab.
5/5/5/5
ABBY, MAY 1, 2015
In midair, there is no reversing a fall.
“I will ask you again. What’s your complaint,” Dr. Singh said, rapping his stylus impatiently on the tablet device balanced on his knee.
How long had he been sitting there on his little wheeled stool? I hadn’t noticed him enter the examination room. “Yes—sorry. Fainting, headaches. Occasional vomiting. Dizziness. My neck is knotted, my shoulders feel achy.”
Hallucinations. Adultery. I didn’t say those out loud.
But at least I was here, docilely paper-gowned and barefoot, in the bustling Flatbush Avenue office of Dr. Avi Singh, our family practitioner. He had squeezed me in, when I’d finally called after waking in our front hall. I’d explained the symptoms that had plagued me since—yes, longer than I realized—since early this year, January perhaps. I should’ve seen him months ago but procrastinating on self-care is the bad habit of the busy working mom. Finally, the goateed MD checked me up and down, backward and forward, and could find nothing wrong. He peered again and again into my eyes with his little flashlight. He stood frowning at me for a long while, then at last he said, “I’ll order a CT scan. Strictly precautionary. I predict it will be clean. And I also predict that the symptoms will resolve if you reduce your stress. You are under significant stress, correct?” He glared at me. Yes, I admitted, I was under significant stress.
He nodded, satisfied. “All the mommies are under a lot of stress.” He jotted on a notepad, tore the page off, and handed it to me. “For your neck and shoulder pain, stretching and massage. This spa down the block does a very good shiatsu.”
Flatbush seemed unusually crowded. Kids just released from school, the beginnings of the commuter rush. On the packed sidewalk, I had several narrow misses with skateboarders. One boarder whizzed by with a flag flapping from a pole, red and black and with a logo I couldn’t quite make out. As I climbed the slope toward Grand Army Plaza, I heard shouting, chanting. A firecracker popping. A group of teenagers shoved past me, he
aded toward the noise.
As soon as I stepped into the Singh-endorsed spa, the hubbub was replaced by plinking harp music, babbling from a little electric fountain in a ceramic pot, the thick drowsy smell of many houseplants. “Welcome—walk-in?” said a sylph-like woman, appearing from behind a beaded curtain, winding long red hair into a knob atop her head. She took my bag and coat, poured a cup of green tea from an ornate urn, advised me on a thirty-minute deep-tissue therapy. “I’ll go tell Frida you’re here, she’s one of our most beloved practitioners.”
I returned to the street window, gazing out as I sipped my tea. Feeling a bit glum. Spotting a few more black-clad demonstrators, mixed in among the commuters and shoppers. One held a handwritten sign overhead: INTERNATIONAL WORKERS’ DAY. Then another: SMASH FASCISM.
I recognized that block printing—the same flared, loopy letters had appeared on the many handwritten cards Pete had given me over the years.
And yes, there at the bottom of the waving signpost was my boy, in the pack, a slouchy beanie pulled over his brow and a red bandanna wrapping his skim-milk face, but unmistakably my boy, next to a petite girl. The snaking pink hair, the cheekbones of burnished mahogany—I recognized her from the coffee shop, I’d met her a few months ago. Twiz, her name was? They were chanting in a group, like a team readying to take the field. The sound of their shouting was far away from this hushed sanctum, I couldn’t make out the words, but Pete raised his fist, and then he turned, and over the head of the dreadlocked girl, exchanged fist bumps with another kid. Yes, that was indeed Dmitri Petimezas.
They spurted into the center of the wide vehicle-choked avenue. Blocking rush-hour traffic? My Pete, planted before the chrome grille of an eighteen-wheel truck. He looked so puny, the truck reared up above him, a behemoth of steel, belching smoke. I was awash with terror, but also, deeper down, a subcurrent of awe. Should I rush out and grab him?
The truck’s horn bellowed. The marchers raised their fists higher and pumped their signs. Just then the truck’s cab door flew open, and then the driver burst out, a hulking man barreling toward the demonstrators, cheeks red and mouth twisted in fury, his arms swinging.
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