by Peter Heller
“Right. I know the block well.”
“Well. I…I called because I thought—I have a story to tell you. Is this a good time?”
“Please. I was just finishing something up.”
A beat, she could hear Gabriela trying to decide the best way in.
“I was going to start by telling you about something that happened while I was at Sarah Lawrence. But let me back up. I should begin earlier so you understand. My mother’s name was Amana Penteado Ambrosio…”
TWO
“Amana, in Tupi-Guarani, means rain. That is how I thought of her when I lay awake at night in my apartment—just a sec.”
A rustling, the sliding of maybe a chair on a wood floor.
“Okay, I’m back. I want to—I don’t want to intrude.”
Celine shook her head. She felt fully awake for the first time in weeks. “Intrude? You’ve pretty much set the hook. I just had an idea. You said you were up in the Heights?”
“Yes.”
“It’s very close. Why don’t you join us for dinner? My husband Pete just went up the hill for provisions.”
“I—”
“I think he’s going to make his famous Wicked Mac and Cheese.”
“Hah!”
“He’s from Maine,” Celine added, as if that explained it.
“I just got back from a run. A two-second shower and—you live on the dock, don’t you?” Gabriela had done her homework.
“At 8 Old Fulton. It’s the red door, you can’t miss it.”
The young woman who showed up at the door must have run. It didn’t seem that even fifteen minutes had passed. She was wearing a loose cotton mid-length summer dress with a batik pattern of tiny elephants, and running shoes. Her wet hair was tied back in a ponytail, her face was flushed, and she came bearing flowers that she must have gathered in passing from the gardens that overflowed the wrought-iron fences en route. Celine approved: Stealing roadside flowers was a family tradition; her own mother, Baboo, would gather up her work gloves and clippers on Fishers Island afternoons and tell her daughters it was time to go “highwaying and bywaying,” which meant appropriating bouquets from the generous hedges and thickets that crowded the country lane. Celine noticed that Gabriela also carried a thick manila file tied with string.
Celine took the handful of wild roses and tall grasses and the girl leaned down and kissed her on both cheeks. She was much taller than Celine. She was not a girl, of course—if she’d graduated in ’82 she’d be in her early forties, the same age as her son, Hank—but Celine could not help thinking of her as a youth. Her tan, oval face, her green eyes full of lights, her bowed mouth. On her left temple was a scar, a ragged arc like the edge of a leaf. Gabriela was one of those women whose beauty could not be parsed because it was mostly energetic—it hit one like the first scent of apple blossoms.
“Thank you.” Celine took the flowers to the sink where she filled an empty olive oil bottle and snugged them in, hastily arranging them with her mother’s swift eye. She turned. Gabriela was taking in the room with an expression Celine was not unused to seeing in her friends’ first visits. The girl’s eyes traveled to the gold-leafed skull, to another human skull emerging from a rock hollow with a barbed-wire crown of thorns, to a black altar cluttered with knives, bottles, dolls, crosses; the stuffed crow with a doll in his beak; the totem pole of human and animal bones.
“That altar,” Gabriela murmured.
“That’s to Baron Samedi, the Haitian voodoo god of the underworld. That’s him in the corner in the top hat. Two visiting Haitian friends became possessed walking in here. I thought we might have to call a mambo.”
“Gee.”
“Gee is right. Come, come, sit. Here.” Celine led Gabriela to a wrought-iron café table. “I heard you eating crackers on the phone and it seemed like a good idea.” In truth, Celine never went too long without eating. HALT. It was her AA training. Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired—don’t let yourself become any of those, if you can help it. Her favorite snack was a chunk of Lindt chocolate bedded on a tablespoon of peanut butter. She could have lived on it.
They sat. Gabriela said, “I loved the article about you. I called an old friend, a retired dean who knew you, and he said that you were one of the best in the country at solving very cold cases, cases many years old.”
“Renato? He’s sweet. Searching for birth families is by definition a wading into cold cases.”
“He also said you can go incognito anywhere, and that you once attended a diplomat’s party dressed as a man. He said you were an amazing shot and owned an armory of handguns.”
“Well. We shouldn’t get carried away. You were telling me a story,” Celine said.
Gabriela set the file on the table and drank a whole glass of sparkling water, refilled the glass. Her scar blazed. “You had cats,” she said. “I count two, in framed pictures.”
“Two loves of my life.”
Gabriela hesitated. “In San Francisco, the year of Miss Brandt—so it was second grade, I was seven—we had a little cat named Jackson. He was spotted like a cow, all black and white, but fluffy. So small he fit in my mother’s palm.”
Celine nodded. Everybody can agree on a kitten.
“Amana called him Moto, which is short for motorcycle, because of the way he purred. I said that he didn’t look anything like a motorcycle, and Mom said, ‘You probably want to name him something all-American like Jackson,’ so that’s what we called him.”
Celine smiled.
“He slept with me. I remember he would stick his wet nose in my ear as hard as he could like he wanted to crawl in and live in here. I wish he had.” Gabriela rubbed the corner of her eye and Celine thought she was exceedingly lovely.
“Why did you wish that?”
“He got lost.”
“Oh.”
“We used to let him go out into the back garden, which I guess was dumb. One day he didn’t come home. He was so small, he must’ve gotten over a fence and been nabbed by a neighbor’s dog. I like to think that someone thought he was a stray and just adopted him. For years afterward I prayed for that. I also left my window open. When I had my own apartment, my bedroom faced the gardens and I left my window open winter and summer so that he could smell me and maybe jump up onto the sill and come home.”
Celine could feel heat climb into her own face.
“And Mom, too. Rain. After she died I opened the window a little wider and when it rained I’d let the drops spatter on the brick sill and bounce onto my face and in the dark I’d imagine it was my mother coming to touch me. Maybe it was her in the rain. I used to think that maybe at night things could happen that aren’t allowed in the daytime.”
Gabriela reached for the water and refilled her glass, drank the whole thing again in one go. She looked out the windows to the bridge.
“Mom’s paternal name was Ambrosio. Very Brazilian. I loved that, too. When I was finally out of school, out of college, and had a minute to take stock, I made it my middle name.” She turned back to Celine. “I didn’t cry every night as a kid, I wouldn’t want you to think that I did. I was pretty tough.”
“Wait,” Celine said. “Wait. Your mother was Brazilian and she died when you were like—what?”
“The same year, second grade. In February.”
“Right. So you were—”
“I was seven. Well, eight. She died on my birthday.”
“How? I can’t re—”
“She drowned. On Big Sur. We were in this cove called Jade Cove, hunting for bits of green stone that looked like our eyes.”
Celine nodded.
“We all almost died. Pop tried to save her. A stranger drove me to the hospital. A cannery worker from Monterey. I still get letters from him. He lives in Santa Cruz with his niece.”
Celine felt herself inclining forward. In her experience stories fell into two phyla: those that followed predictable contours like the track of a game trail along a hillside, and those that were stranger from
the start, more feral, and that struck out cross-country on the merest whim. The strange ones had a certain scent. She handed the girl a cracker with blue cheese.
“Thanks. We were living in the Haight, in San Francisco, and it was my eighth birthday. It fell on a Saturday in February when the poppies would be blooming, so we decided to make the drive down to Big Sur, which was our favorite place. I remember I rode on Mom’s lap the whole way, just because I wanted to, and she squeezed me and was singing a Brazilian song in my ear. The song was about a rabbit who wanted the rice in the rice paddies but couldn’t swim. They grow a lot of rice in Brazil.” Her face blurred with whimsy. “Too much information, I guess.”
“Not at all.”
“Well.” Gabriela twisted the strap of the athletic watch on her wrist. “We got to the cliffs and they were on fire with poppies. I remember we ran down the trail, we were so excited. It’s a little pocket cove and it feels very wild but also sheltered, and I remember thinking this was our own private beach, just for us. The water rushed onto the pebbles and made the jade shine. Amana and I were racing each other to find a piece that looked like a green eye. She kept tickling me so I wouldn’t beat her. And then a rogue wave hit and swept the beach and knocked us off our feet and we were pulled in. I remember the shock of the cold and screaming for Mom and I don’t remember much after that. I guess we all got swept. We didn’t know it but a storm was coming in.”
“Whoa.”
“I know. I guess Pop somehow grabbed me and hauled me out. I was covered in blood and unconscious. Apparently he saw my mother trying to swim in the cove and more waves were coming, and he saw me all bloody and barely breathing and he made a split-second decision he would have to live with for the rest of his life. He gathered me up and ran up the trail and there was this older man there, the stranger. Pop shoved me into his arms and yelled to take me to the hospital, and then he ran back down the trail and dove in and actually swam after Amana. It was crazy. He had seen she was being swept north and he swam that way. I guess he almost drowned himself. He washed up on another beach two miles away.”
“Jesus.”
The girl nodded, her eyes focused on a place beyond the room.
“I woke up at Community Hospital in Monterey. All the blood was just a head cut. I guess they can bleed a lot.”
Celine nodded.
“The nice man waited by my bed. Pop didn’t show up all night and then the man had to go. I found out later he was a supervisor at one of the last docks along Cannery Row, and he worked Sundays. He promised he’d be back after work.”
Celine closed her eyes, conjured the hospital rooms.
“Pop didn’t show up that morning. I remember that with more terror than the accident. Where’s Daddy? I remember the confusion the way we remember some smells, the confusion and what must have been fear on the faces of the nurses. Where’s Mommy, I want Mommy! I began to cry, to wail. They kept asking me my name, my full name, I kept saying AmanaAmanaAmana, maybe they thought I was saying Mama I don’t know.”
Celine opened her eyes. Gabriela was speaking now to the tall windows, the dusk over the dock, and the East River, the wider world. Her fingertips rested lightly on the edge of the wrought-iron table as if she were playing a piece on a piano, counting the beats of a caesura.
“He showed up sometime in the afternoon. I was hysterical when I saw him. They told him that I was basically fine and coming around, and that it was clear he needed stitches in his head right now, and probably other places. I think they tried to make him sign some papers, they were tugging on his sleeves and he pulled away from them and carried me out of that hospital. He was never the same. I can’t have realized that then, but I know it now. He had swum and swum in the rough water and twice he thought he saw her ahead of him and tried to sprint there and lost her. And I guess he lost his mind.”
She turned to Celine, shook herself. “It’s a lot, I know. I can finish another time.”
They often said that. When they were getting to the part they least liked to tell, or had never told. Celine said, “I’m fine. Would you like some tea?”
Gabriela shook her head. The young woman looked around the big, airy studio as if seeing it for the first time. “Your art is kind of terrifying,” she said. “Did I already tell you that?”
“I think you might have. Do you want to take a break?”
“I’m okay.” She tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear, gave Celine an uncertain smile. “Well. Pop did the best he could. He was unhinged. We both were—”
The brass bell on the front door jingled and she saw Gabriela huff out a breath with what must have been relief. Round One, saved by the bell.
Pete carried in two cloth tote bags. Celine could see bunches of probably kale sticking out the top of one and rolled her eyes. For twenty years he had been trying to get her to eat a vegetable with little success. His tenacity was superhuman. Pete tipped his chin and gave his wife what no one else in the world would know was a smile, and he set the bags on the counter and took off his tweed newsboy cap. He cocked his head at the young woman and gave a friendly wave. He didn’t say a word. Pete, who the rest of the family called Pa, had grown up on an island in Maine where Reticence was the state bird. The rest of the family also called him the Quiet American. Celine waved a cracker at him and said, “Whew. I’m starved. Pete, this is Gabriela Ambrosio Lamont. She went to my alma mater and she is just telling me the most remarkable story. She’ll be joining us for dinner. Can you whip up one of your Blue Plate Specials?”
“We can probably do that.”
Cooking was one of Pete’s many skills. On North Haven, as a boy, he had learned to pitch hay, milk cows, and build small boats. Also, to feed a family of nine when his mother was busy doing something else. Now, in Brooklyn, he channeled his talents into making healthy dinners that his wife would half eat, and into carving unabashedly erotic sculptures that the cleaning lady refused to dust.
Pete had attended Harvard like his father and all his uncles. He was an athlete and played football for a year, and while in Cambridge he became a card-carrying Communist, when being a card-carrying Communist could seriously screw with one’s prospects. After college he had enlisted in the army and promptly married a black civil rights activist named Tee, and when he got out of the service he moved with her to Brooklyn and edited the revolutionary civil rights magazine Liberator. Some of the most heartbreaking letters Celine had ever read were from Pete’s parents, asking him not to come back to North Haven in the summers with his Negro wife, and trying so hard to explain that it wasn’t because any of them were racist. The correspondence was eloquent and awkward by turns, and so hot with love and shame the stationery almost smoldered. This was all before Pete’s career as a Wall Street architect, an amateur historian, a long-haul backpacker, and a legendary drinker. Which brought him into Alcoholics Anonymous where he met Celine. The man was definitely a strange cat.
Pete cooked up his Wicked Mac and Cheese, with a side of optimistic sautéed bok choy, and tiny side salads, and the three ate mostly in easy silence. Gabriela seemed happy for the respite. One of Pete’s other talents was to allow long conversations to be nonverbal and to have his companions be comfortable with it. They finished, made a fresh pot of coffee, and put up the dishes. Celine and Gabriela walked slowly out onto the rough planks of the dock across the street and leaned against the railing. Night had settled. The incoming tide was tearing against the pilings, and the lights of Manhattan and of the great bridge were as grand and familiar to Celine as any constellation.
Gabriela said, “You can almost still smell it. Like embers.”
Celine waited. The Towers, their absence, would have had an effect on the girl, too. On everyone…she feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe, / As a calm darkens among water-lights. Those gorgeous lines from Stevens kept surfacing, like the refrain of a pop song.
Gabriela said, “I’m torn. The time with you has just flown. I haven’t felt so good in
someone’s company since I can remember.”
Celine felt the same way. She also knew the grip of an irresistible story. “There’s so much,” Gabriela said and glanced at her watch. “I promised Callie we’d play Scrabble at eight.” She turned to Celine. “It was our ritual at Sarah Lawrence, every night before finals.” She smiled. “Other students would be cramming and we’d have these killer games, head-to-head. It was our way of staying calm, I guess.”
“You want to keep the date?”
“I want to figure out how to tell the rest. Without—”
Without eviscerating the people in the world you love the most, Celine thought. She knew a little about that.
“Can you give me a day or two?”
“Of course.” Nothing surprised her. So many of her clients had come right to the brink. “I’m on the hook, you know.”
Gabriela’s smile brightened. Celine wondered if she had carried her own grief with as much grace as this young woman. Gabriela said, “I left my file on the counter. I’ll just go pick it up and say thank you to Pete.”
THREE
Hank lived on a lake in Denver, on the west side of town. He was a magazine journalist, a closet poet, and until recently he had shared his house with his wife, Kim. He was also an outdoorsman, something he attributed, oddly, to the influence of his cosmopolitan mother. Well, he was named after her father, Harry, who was a legendary sportsman. Over many summers it was she who had taught him to fish, and to swim, and to make the calls of a bobwhite, a whip-poor-will, a barn owl. Hank’s father had taught him to throw a football and to write a sonnet, and had read Jack London and Faulkner aloud to him when Hank was a very young child, but it was Celine who taught him to love nature in all her moods. And so, though he lived in the city, it gave him great solace to sit on his front porch and see almost nothing but grass, trees, water, mountains. His favorite part of the day was to drink coffee out there as the day was breaking, and watch the first light flush the snows of the Continental Divide. He was doing that when he heard the phone ring inside.
