The Laws of Gravity

by Liz Rosenberg

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll definitely thank them.”

  “Sisterhood is always looking for active new members.” He must have seen the alarmed look on her face because he immediately added. “It’s not required. Just a thought… —Well,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “I shouldn’t hold you up. You must be very busy, settling in with Iris, getting used to a new place, all of that.”

  “Yes,” she said, though she had another month of maternity leave, and with Iris asleep and breathing against her chest, she could not think of a single thing she had to do today. Take a longer walk, maybe? How many times had they already gone out into the neighborhood today? As long as she moved along slowly and steadily, Iris slept in the front-slung carrier. But as soon as Abigail stopped and sat down, her daughter would startle awake, crying as if she’d just realized she had landed in a foreign country.

  “If you have any problems or concerns, I’m right there”—he pointed at the Jewish Center down the block, past all the evergreen shrubs—“I’m available. To talk. Or just to listen, for that matter.”

  “Thank you,” she said. The rabbi’s offer sounded genuine—so unlike anything she had ever heard as a child at her parents’ old synagogue, where the rabbi harangued them to attend services more often, show more dedication to their Torah studies, contribute more money to Israel. “That’s—lovely—of you.” Lovely seemed like the wrong word, but there didn’t seem to be a right one.

  The rabbi—Teddy—shrugged, embarrassed. He shoved both big hands into his pockets and looked off toward the Center again, as if someone were there and waiting for him. Probably, she realized, someone really was. He was not on maternity leave, after all.

  “Lovely is not a word I often hear in regard to myself,” he said. “So you’ve given me something very nice to think about.” Above the enormous sleepless rings, his eyes were large, brown, and intelligent. “See you.” He turned with that same light swing in his step and headed back down the walk.

  Abigail walked around the block once, twice more, then circled back to her apartment. Half their things were still in cardboard boxes. It was the apartment of a woman who looked as if she might still change her mind about everything. Who did she think she was kidding? She and Iris were in this thing together; there was no backing out now.

  Iris looked at her now as if she expected something to happen. Going to services once in a while might not be such a bad idea. If only Abigail had asked when they were. That would have been a friendly thing to do. She’d meant to ask about the nearest health food store, too, and if there were any good restaurants within walking distance.

  Iris stared at her with eyes as black as two shining mirrors. In their hotel in Thailand, her daughter had sat happily through long meals playing with the different kinds of sugar packets—blue, yellow, pink. Stacking them like playing cards or spreading them over the table. She’d never tried to tear one open.

  “This is one very easy baby,” her mother had said, “you’re being spoiled,” and Abigail didn’t argue. She had a feeling she was blessed; almost as if she were cheating. Other babies from the orphanage cried all night. Some threw tantrums in the hotel. Iris watched Abigail with those intelligent thirteen-month-old eyes that seemed to drink in everything at once. Abigail had the feeling she was storing up language, soaking that in as well, and that when she began speaking, it would be in phrases or sentences instead of in single words. Once Abigail dreamed that Iris explained a complicated math formula to her father, the judge, and she woke up relieved that it was only a dream. That was all she needed, a baby prodigy.

  Abigail checked her hair in the mirror, brushed and redid it, parting it on the side, which made her look—what? Older? Younger? Less matronly, anyway.

  “Out we go again,” Abigail said, trying to make it sound normal. They walked across the frozen lawns and tiny paths toward the Jewish Center.

  “Yes?” said a young woman. “May I help you?” She was clearly Asian, and Abigail thought she might have been imagining it, but it seemed as if the woman were Thai.

  “I’m here to see the rabbi,” Abigail said.

  “New to the congregation?” the woman asked.

  “Yes.—No,” Abigail said. “I’m the new tenant, in the apartment building the Center owns. Three B.”

  “Ah! Well, I’m J. D. Pakul,” the woman said. She leaned through the open sliding glass window to shake hands, then thought better of it and stepped out of her office into the hall. “It’s spelled J-a-i-d-e-e.”

  “I’m Abigail.”

  “And who might this be?” the young woman asked, peeking at Iris. She was wearing high heels of an unusual plum color, which matched the plum-colored belt she wore around her black dress. Chic but modest. Her long black hair was pulled back in a long braid down her back. She could not have been more than five feet tall without the heels. Abigail felt like a giant. “Your little girl looks Thai,” she said.

  “She is,” said Abigail.

  “You know,” Jaidee said slowly, tentatively, “there’s a small but tight-knit Thai community right here in Manhasset. There are two good Asian groceries. Sometimes we bring in musicians or folk dancers from Thailand. You and your daughter would be welcome to come to those events—if you’re interested.”

  “I would love it,” Abigail said.

  Jaidee grabbed a pad of paper off her desk and began writing in neat, spiky handwriting. “I’m going to put down my name and phone number, and also the names and addresses of the two stores.”

  She tore off the sheet of paper and handed it to Abigail. “The rabbi is in a meeting,” she added. “His schedule is fairly full. Was it anything urgent?”

  “No,” Abigail said. She could feel herself beginning to blush, the curse of the red haired. “I just wanted to—ask him a few things.”

  “What you’re doing for this little girl is an enormous blessing,” Jaidee said. “Giving her so many opportunities.”

  “Actually,” Abigail said, “I’m the one who feels blessed.”

  Jaidee nodded, studying Abigail a long moment, pursing her lips. Her daughter had a similar small smile, the ends of her lips tucked up. “If you had one small pet in that apartment,” she said slyly, “I think that would be acceptable.”

  Nicole awoke in the middle of the night as if someone or something were crouching on her chest. Her teeth were chattering, but she had been sweating in her sleep. Sometimes she could not distinguish between night terrors and the side effects of the chemo.

  Jay held her hand in a tight grip. His long fingers wrapped around hers. She gently extricated her hand. He looked so much younger asleep. The dimness of their bedroom at night disguised the white strands in his hair, making it all a shining blond again.

  “Jay,” she said. “Are you asleep?”

  “No,” he said immediately. “I was just thinking.”

  She shifted onto her side to see him better. “What were you thinking about?”

  “If I move the boxes onto the court, the kids won’t have to run through the mirror.”

  He was dreaming again about coaching. She was used to that. She smiled. “Good idea,” she said.

  “I love you madly,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” she answered. But she could not stop shivering. She sat now with her arms around her knees, looking out over the winter view of the harbor, past the streetlamp on the corner of Potter’s Lane. Snow fell softly around it, blowing like a white scarf. How many nights, she thought. How many nights had she sat there in bed like this, taking everything for granted, reading a book instead of talking to Jay, going to sleep without making love? Why had she wasted a single hour? Now lovemaking exhausted her; she felt her body struggle to rise, only to fall back again, worn out and weak. More often than not these days she lacked the energy even to try.

  “I’m so sorry,” she’d told Jay, but he’d assured her, “I’d rather hold you than make love with anyone else.”

  In some strange way even that made h
er sad. Jay had few friends—men didn’t seem to need close friends the same way women did. There was a math teacher in his block that Jay hung out with once in a while. He talked now and then to his best friend from elementary school, but that friend lived in Seattle; they had not seen each other in five years at least. Jay’s mom was a worrier, his dad had left the scene decades earlier; he wasn’t close to either of his brothers. She wasn’t sure Jay confided in anyone. She worried about him being lonely when she was gone. He would not listen to her. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said. “Not without me.”

  He thought he was making things easier on her. He did not realize how much harder it was this way. It meant she could not tell him the truth. Not really. Not the bad parts. She couldn’t tell him that she was terrified much of the time; she couldn’t tell him when she felt like crying. She could not picture a future. Sometimes the thought of the world going on without her—simple daily chores and errands, school days and summer months, spreading out with her a zero, erased, like a child marked absent—just froze her in her tracks. She changed now out of her sweat-soaked T-shirt and pulled on one of Jay’s old sweatshirts. She padded down the hall to Daisy’s room.

  Daisy’s one white-socked foot was sticking out of bed. As usual, she was sleeping cockeyed, at some crazy angle, her head far down from the pillow. The little girl was getting so long. A skinny beanpole. Nicole could remember when the whole length of Daisy’s newborn spine was shorter than the span of Jay’s outspread hand. She remembered Jay flying Daisy around the room, still asleep, wearing one of those footed infant onesies. Now Daisy slept wearing one white sock and one colored one—in honor of the superstition that one white sock would bring a snow day. Nicole gazed over her daughter’s sleeping head out through the sheer curtains. Yes, the snow was still falling, but not heavily enough to cancel school. She brought her hand down lightly on top of Daisy’s mass of wavy hair. In the darkness it might have been any color, but of course it was that almost pinkish strawberry blonde, a color Nicole thought far more beautiful than her own had ever been.

  Daisy slept soundly, breathing in and out. Just the hint of a rasp, the remnant of a winter cold that lingered. Nicole slowed her own breathing to match her little girl’s. This is eternity, she thought. Right here this minute. This girl, this room, this love. She felt calmer almost at once and edged a little closer to the bed, as if to bring the safety closer as well. It doesn’t matter so much, she thought, whether I live or die. Daisy will be all right, Jay will be all right. Life will go on. Someone else might have thought it with resentment, but she said it over and over to herself, like a mantra. A new thought that gave her room to move. Breathing again. Life will go on. Life will go on.

  LATE DECEMBER 2011

  Doing the Job to the Best of Your Ability

  All of Sol’s efforts to bring the cousins to some agreement had fallen on deaf ears. In fact Ari Wiesenthal, the defendant, kept his hands literally over his ears or cupped over his eyes all during the first meetings. Flannery raised his bushy eyebrows at the judge as if to say, “This is what we’ve got,” but the judge persisted. Whatever the law might dictate, there was no logical reason to deny this woman some amount of the cord blood. It was highly unlikely to be contaminated in the process, unlikely even that she would need all that had been stored. But there was something impenetrable about Ari Wiesenthal, as if he had retreated into some private walled-off space, a private logic of his own.

  “I’m protecting my family,” he kept saying. “Family first.” Wasn’t his cousin also family? the judge wondered. He saw no obvious enmity between the two. They sat mirroring each other, arms identically folded, their legs crossed and facing. But families are like icebergs—only a fraction shows above the surface. “I have rights under the law, too,” Ari insisted.

  Katrina Turock glowered. That high-heeled foot bounced impatiently, like the smart kid in the class having to listen to someone else’s boring homework assignment read aloud.

  “Why don’t you ask the plaintiff to reconsider her selfish position?” she said, jerking her head toward Nicole. “This case is going to judgment. Despite our best efforts. Over our protests. If you were hoping for some happy family reconciliation scene here, you’re going to be disappointed.”

  The judge was disappointed but not really surprised. For every rare instance where a family situation resolved peaceably outside the law, there were three where each side stubbornly held its ground. He was used to this, if saddened by what it said about humanity—and about family. Sol was by now resigned to human nature as he found it. Only in someone as young as Iris could you hope for purity.

  What did surprise him was DeNunzio’s reaction to his calling off the press. DeNunzio phoned his chambers that same afternoon. Disappointment appeared to be the word of the day.

  “Disturbed and disappointed,” DeNunzio said in his quiet, sibilant voice. He sounded, looked, and behaved a good deal like the most powerful man then on the US Supreme Court. Sol had a flash of intuition that one day DeNunzio himself might become part of that august body. DeNunzio was only in his fifties, he was well connected, and he was a politico. Somehow the idea made Sol shudder.

  “To lose an opportunity to bring attention to the work we do here…” DeNunzio said. “It is unusual to shut out the media so absolutely—on what basis?” he added.

  “There’s a child involved,” Sol said shortly.

  “There are ways to protect the interests of children without it seeming as if the Supreme Court of Nassau County has something to hide. The OCA is surprised. Pescatori is surprised. I must say, it puts me in an awkward position.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” Sol said.

  DeNunzio sighed, a sound that traveled clearly through the receiver. “You may be making more trouble for yourself than it’s worth,” he said. It was almost but not exactly a threat.

  Sol said nothing.

  “Well, good luck with it,” DeNunzio said in his soft voice, and then hung up.

  Flannery was less subtle. “Why? Why? You deserve this attention and approbation,” Flannery said. “We all do. We labor in silence. Anonymously. All the briefs, the ratio decidendi, judicial opinions carefully worked out and written—no one reads them. Not a word. Stones down a well. Unless the media brings the world’s attention to bear upon the case. Of course a trial with a jury would create more attention, but even so—”

  “I am not,” the judge said icily, “looking for attention.”

  “That’s right,” Myra said. “You know what it would be like around here, the press swarming up our asses day in and day out? Pardon my French,” she added.

  “It would be invigorating!” Flannery said. “Lively.” He appealed to Myra. “Tell me, wouldn’t you like to see your face on TV?”

  “Flannery,” Myra said, “I don’t even like to see my face in the mirror.”

  Being barred from the courtroom did not keep the media’s attention entirely away from the case. The local papers kept up a running commentary on Judge Richter’s advanced age: he was, they said, scheduled to have retired that December and had barred the press from this important case to hide his disabilities as an adjudicator. They played up the human interest aspect, milking it for all it was worth. Nicole’s photos showed her as a young beauty, or as someone so thin and haggard it was amazing she hadn’t yet expired. They ran the same photo of Ari Wiesenthal each time, a picture in which he seemed to be snarling. There were plenty of glamour shots of Katrina Turock and one or two thumbnail photos of Sol himself, looking ancient and palsied. Sarah assured her husband, “You don’t look like that. Not even first thing in the morning.”

  “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on,” Sol said. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, he reminded himself. His one commitment had been to uphold the law, to be the most informed and unbiased judge possible. This case was his last, and his worst. He dreamed about it, brooded about it, felt helpless in the face of it. Logic, philosophical inclination, precedent, led him in one
direction, and one direction alone. He knew that; his clerk Flannery knew it; he sometimes suspected that everyone involved knew. But still, he felt himself pulled elsewhere. The impulse to rescue. It was unfathomable at his age. A mystery. It did not help, this uncanny resemblance between the plaintiff and his own red-haired daughter. Even her last name, Greene, reminded him of his own long-lost grandfather, the one-armed tailor, Nathan Greenplotz.

  “Is there anything that might allow us to consider the merits of her case?” he asked his attorney, Ned, in private. Ned was young, but bright and diligent. Flannery appeared at just that moment, of course, carrying a large pile of briefs that he dropped onto the table with a thunk.

  Before Ned could answer, Flannery piped up. “You know there isn’t. That’s the beauty of the case! It’s airtight.”

  “How about the duty to rescue? Ned—what about the letter?”

  Again Flannery jumped in. “A letter is not a contract. What if someone signed a contract to chop off his own leg and then changed his mind? This is not a contractual issue. Justice can punish a man for behaving illegally. It cannot force a man to do the right thing.”

  “Then what is the point of it?” Ned asked, unexpectedly. He seldom entered into theoretical disputes; he never got between the judge and his chief clerk in one of their arguments. “Justice should be more than a matter of punishment.”

  “Justice is more than a matter of punishment!” Flannery cried. “The law prevents antisocial behaviors. It creates a structure of acceptable and unacceptable rules. And, in case you never got past fifth-grade civics class, the judiciary balances out the powers of the executive and legislative branches.”

  “I got past the fifth grade,” Ned said mildly. He never bragged about the Stanford degree. Sol doubted if anyone else in his court even knew about it.