New York is chilly and curiously quiet when they return. Feeling cramped and restless in the small studio the first night back, they go out to eat at a bistro in SoHo. When they leave the restaurant, a fine snow is falling.
Walking over to West Broadway for a cab they pass a young boy sitting huddled in a shadowed doorway. Russell exerts coaxing pressure on Corrine's arm as she slows; he feels her missionary impulse kicking in, imagines the look of concern crossing her face, which is turned toward the boy.
"Wait," she says, disengaging her arm and walking over to the boy, then crouching down beside him. "Are you okay," she asks him. Russell's instinct is to protect her from the con, but coming closer, he can see what she sees. So young, barely a teenager, the pale face frightened and pathetic.
"I'm cold," the boy whispers.
Corrine takes off her scarf and wraps it around him, then turns to look imploringly at Russell. He reaches into his coat pocket, extracts the three dollars' change from the coat check, hands it to her. She gives it to the boy, then lingers. Russell has to exert gentle pressure on her arm to move her away. In the cab, she wonders aloud how such a young boy would come to be shivering in a doorway and what might be done to help. She is still brooding as they go up the stairs, as they undress for bed. Although he knows he will be able to forget the boy's face and sleep tonight, he understands that Corrine cannot, and he is almost proud of her for it. He looks out the window at the falling snow, then turns and takes his wife in his arms, feeling grateful to be here even as he wonders what he is going to do with his life in strictly practical terms. For years he had trained himself to do one thing, and he did it well, but he doesn't know whether he wants to keep doing it for the rest of his life, or even, for that matter, whether anyone will let him. He is still worrying when they go to bed.
As Corrine drifts off to sleep, she rolls toward him in the bed and mumbles, "Thanks." Russell isn't sure if she means for tonight, or for coming home.
Feeling his wife's head nesting in the pillow below his shoulder, he is almost certain that they will find ways to manage. They've been learning to get by with less, and they'll keep learning. It seems to him as if they're taking a course in loss lately. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours: knowing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold.
Brightness Falls Page 46
