Billy, she thought.
The last time she’d visited, she took a cab directly to his office. Together they’d strolled across the Brooklyn Bridge and back. A chilly spring evening, the sun setting early. In the towers every window was lit, a thousand panes of fluorescent light.
All day long she tried to phone him, cursing the recorded voice—All circuits are busy. Please try again later—that foiled her attempts. And that night, gripped with panic, she did what she’d sworn not to. She dialed her mother’s house in Concord. The number floated like a buoy to the surface of her memory, the first telephone number she had ever learned.
A deep voice answered the phone.
Daddy?
A tide of feeling hit her, a tropical storm.
Billy’s here, he said. They got out of the city. It took them all day, but they got out.
And she was passed from brother to brother; to Ian and Sabrina and Srikanth; then to a refugee she didn’t know, Scott’s girlfriend Jane. Was passed, finally, to her mother. And here Gwen lay flat on the deck, her home rocking beneath her, and stared up at the glittering sky.
They talked a long while. Gwen thought about the signal that made this possible, that bounced her voice into space and down to the house in Concord, mighty and infinitely small.
author’s note
For various kinds of help and support, I am grateful to:
The MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Eastern Frontier Society, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers
Dr. Elizabeth McCauley and Dr. John Brauman
Karen Reed
Dan Pope and Thomas O’Malley
Claire Wachtel, Dorian Karchmar, Jonathan Burnham, and Michael Morrison
Dr. Michael Cardone
About the Author
JENNIFER HAIGH is the author of the New York Times bestseller Baker Towers, winner of the 2006 PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author, and Mrs. Kimble, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and was a finalist for the Book Sense Book of the Year. Both novels were number one Book Sense picks. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping, and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area.
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Credits
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Copyright
THE CONDITION. Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer Haigh. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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The Condition Page 41
