by Sue Miller
On September 11, Billy woke early. She’d waked once before, actually, when Gus got up to leave for the airport, but she’d pretended to be asleep that time. This time she couldn’t do that. The puppy was crying. Reuben. She’d named him Reuben. She peed and brushed her teeth, she got quickly dressed and went into the living room. As soon as she saw Reuben, she gave over to him again, just as she had the day of his arrival. He was charming, even beyond the charm most puppies have. His winning awkwardness on account of his size, his sad brown eyes, his immense paws, the rounded shape of his head, his long pink tongue, the clean way he smelled—everything about him gave her pleasure. He was in his crate now, the crate he was already almost outgrowing. He was making a noise that sounded like an old woman keening.
Now he saw her and he yipped. He began scratching frantically at the floor of his crate. She picked up some plastic bags and the keys and the leash from the hall stand. She came and unlatched his door. He sprang out and ran to the front door of the apartment. When she opened it, he thundered downstairs and stood impatiently by the outer door. She heard a little anxious cry in his throat. “Good dog,” she said, opening the last door.
He almost fell down the porch stairs in his haste. As soon as his feet touched the sidewalk, he squatted and peed.
She lavished the praise on him that was part of his training, patting him, scratching his long, floppy ears. Then she hooked the leash to his collar and they started out, around the three-block circuit that constituted the walk she took with him twice a day.
It was a perfect day—cloudless, mild. There were many fine things about having a dog, all of which she was reluctant to admit, but one of them was simply how much more frequently she got outside. She knew, of course, that this wouldn’t be the pleasure it was today come January or February, but for now Billy liked it.
Especially today, when Gus was gone. Today, tomorrow, Thursday. He wouldn’t be home until late Thursday night. He was flying out to Los Angeles this morning. His father had died—Leslie had called on Sunday with the news.
It was strange for both of them. Neither wanted to go. They hadn’t seen him in years. There was the second wife to deal with, and she was also what Leslie called “a high-functioning drunk.” But Gus had been named executor of his father’s will and there was a service of some sort Wednesday, so they agreed they ought to be there. After the call, Billy and Gus had sat and talked about it with more affection and friendliness than they’d been able to muster in months. Than she’d been able to muster, anyway.
It couldn’t have been worse timing for him—his school started this week. But he’d called the headmaster and the chair of the department right away. He’d spent all day yesterday—Monday, the first day of classes—at the school. He’d met with his kids and outlined the special projects he wanted them to work on over the three days he’d be gone.
And this morning he’d left the house at five-thirty to get to the airport on time while she pretended to sleep.
She felt his absence as an enormous relief. Three days of not acting as if she didn’t know it was over. Three days of not having to sit through dinner with him. Three days of not feeling angry at him and then at herself for allowing the whole thing to happen, for ignoring all the ways it should have been clear from the start that it wasn’t going to work. Three wonderful long mornings of work without having to bicycle over to BU.
And in the afternoons she would get herself organized to find an apartment. She had to. It might be too expensive, it might be in a crummy neighborhood, but she needed to do it. After she and Gus had gone to bed Sunday night, she’d lain there next to him as he slept, planning it—the lists she’d check, the neighborhoods she was interested in.
When she got back home from the walk with Reuben, she fed him, and then she made coffee for herself, coffee and toast, and went out onto the back porch to sit. Reuben padded behind her and lay down by her feet. She would take him with her when she left, she had decided this already. After all, he was hers. He’d been given to her. He’d been given to her to make it harder for her to leave, and harder it would be. But in an odd way, it had strengthened her conviction that she needed to do it.
She sat with her coffee, her feet propped up on the porch rail, and looked out through the trees at the other rooftops in the neighborhood. Gus lived on the middle floor of a triple-decker just over the line into Somerville from North Cambridge, near the commuter line he caught every day to go out to teach. The houses here were only a few feet apart, sometimes just the width of a narrow driveway. Most had aluminum siding. In front they all had little yards, scraps of lawn or gravel or dirt, many of them protected by chain-link fences. But the backyards were deep and lush with trees. You could almost forget you were in a city. Looking out now, she thought how she would miss this. As though he understood what she was feeling, the puppy heaved a great sigh.
She finished her coffee and went inside. Reuben followed. She put him in his crate and looked at the clock in the kitchen. Seven-thirty. He should go out again in a couple of hours. She went into her study and turned on the computer.
At about quarter to eight, her cell phone rang. She opened it and looked at the number. It was Gus. She felt a quick tug of the irritation she had been trying to stay in control of, and closed it without answering.
She worked well. She was trying to shape up the play about Ray and Elena and his big con, fussing with the beginning of the second act, which had seemed expository to her. By the time she stopped to walk the puppy again, she’d made what she thought was good progress—she’d put into dialogue about a third of what had existed as stage directions or notes to herself.
Reuben was asleep. He woke as soon as she touched the door of the crate. She took him quickly outside. Again, he peed as soon as he reached the sidewalk, and she gave him a treat.
The streets were quiet. The kids must all be back in school, she thought. As she rounded the corner by the Ell-Stan Spa, the little convenience store that marked the beginning of the tiny local commercial strip—a Laundromat, a pizza place—she noted that there were six or seven people clustered inside, all standing, all watching the wall-mounted TV. On it she could see a talking face, and then the screen filled with roiling, tumbling smoke. She thought immediately of Waco, those terrible images of the fire. It must be something like that, something awful that had happened somewhere out in the wide world.
She turned Reuben around and walked quickly back to Gus’s. Inside, she went immediately to the second bedroom, Gus’s office, where the tiny TV was. She turned it on just in time to see a replay of the collapse of the South Tower, the billowing dust and debris, the strange tribe of ghostlike people coated with white emerging from the thick rolling cloud—running, looking behind them, terrified.
She watched for a long time in stunned horror as the events unfolded and unfolded, and then were played over and over again. At some point maybe several hours later, she paid attention for the first time to where the planes were coming from, where they were going. It occurred to her then that Gus might have been on one or the other of them.
It couldn’t be, she thought. It was too unlikely.
She found her cell phone and played his message. “Hi, sweetie. We’re getting on the plane, so I just wanted to hear your voice for a second. You must be walking Rube. I’m thinking of you. I’ll talk to you tonight.”
She played it again. Then she hit RETURN CALL. There was no sound on the other end of the line. Nothing.
Frantic now, she went through the papers on his desk, looking for a note, something he might have jotted down about the airline, about the flight number. She couldn’t find anything.
She was going too fast, that was it. She made herself stop, she went through everything more slowly. Here were his papers, his innocent papers. Plans for the semester. Notes, quickly scribbled about what the students could do while he was away. Bills. A postcard from a friend traveling in Europe over the summer, with a detail from a fresco by Fra Angelico reprodu
ced on the front.
There was nothing about the trip, the reservation, the airline.
She tried to call Leslie at home. The phone rang and rang, and then a message came on in Leslie’s calm, modulated voice. After the beep, she couldn’t think what to say, so she hung up. And then remembered abruptly that Leslie would be on her way west, too. She had been planning to fly out from the little airport in New Hampshire. Manchester, that was it. Manchester on a connecting flight to some hub probably, and then the final leg from there to Los Angeles.
She tried calling a few airlines—American, United, Delta—but she couldn’t get through. Everything was busy. What would she have asked anyway? She wasn’t certain what time he was leaving, she didn’t know whether it was a direct flight, or even what the airline was. There must be thousands of people in exactly her situation, trying to learn something.
She tried Gus’s school. Maybe someone there knew something.
That line was busy, too.
She played his message again.
On her way to the bathroom, she saw that Reuben had left a puddle in the hall. How long since she’d walked him? She couldn’t remember. Where was he, anyway? What time was it?
She went in the kitchen and looked at the clock on the stove. One-thirty.
When she was done in the bathroom, she went into the living room. Reuben was back in his crate—he’d gone there on his own. He was asleep, his head sticking out through the open doorway, resting on his paws. She didn’t wake him until she’d cleaned up the piss. Then, bending over his crate, she spoke his name. He sprang to instant eager life, and she took him out for another walk. The streets were still silent—everyone, she assumed, indoors by the television, by the telephone. Except in New York, where everyone was panicked, on the move.
At two-thirty, Leslie called. Her flight had been canceled and Pierce had driven her back home. She was calling to ask whether Gus had actually left, to say that one of the planes was Gus’s. She’d heard the number and recognized it—they’d conferred about flight times and she’d written it down.
When Billy said yes, there was a little moan on the line, and then silence.
“Leslie?” Billy said.
Leslie’s voice was uneven when she spoke. She said, “He must be dead. I think there’s no way he can’t be dead.” She breathed audibly, unsteadily. “Oh, Billy, I think it’s true. I think it is,” she said. She started to cry, and then tried to check herself.
Billy wasn’t sure what she said back. She was sorry, she said that. “I can’t believe it.” She said that.
Leslie said she had kept hoping that he wasn’t on it, that he somehow didn’t make it, but she’d tried his cell and there was no response. And he would have called, surely, if he could. If he were alive.
“No, he called,” Billy said.
“He called?”
The hope in her voice was painful for Billy to hear. “He called when he was getting on,” she said quickly. “Just when he was getting on.”
Leslie started to cry again. “Oh, what did he say?” It was hard to understand her.
“He said just that. That he was getting on. He said he’d talk to me tonight.”
“Oh. Well.” She was pulling herself together. She blew her nose. “I’m so glad you got to speak to him.”
“Yes,” Billy said, feeling already how false a position she was in.
“I know … I know,” Leslie said. “This is … a terrible time. To talk. But we will … I will call you, if I hear anything. I’ll call. Anything.”
Billy said yes. Yes, she’d call, too.
About half an hour later, the phone rang again. Billy almost jumped. It was Leslie. Her voice was stronger. She thought Billy should come up to Vermont. That she shouldn’t be alone. “Alone with this,” is what she said. If she didn’t want to drive, Leslie would arrange for a car to bring her.
“We could help each other, don’t you think?” she asked.
Billy couldn’t imagine anything she wanted to do less, but she kept her voice calm as she said that she wanted to stay in the apartment—that’s the way she put it. She had the puppy, she said. She just wanted to stay here with him.
When she got off the phone, she turned the television off. She went into the bedroom and lay down. The images from the towers played over and over in her mind, inescapably. She couldn’t remember which was the South Tower, which was the North. Which was Gus’s plane. She thought of Leslie’s voice, breaking. She thought of him, the way it must have been—the disorder, the panic and the chaos in the airplane. The understanding you would have—how long before?—of what was going to happen. And then surely the instantaneous death. Surely.
Or perhaps not.
Her stomach gurgled. She hadn’t eaten, she realized, since early in the morning. She got up. Standing in the kitchen, she ate a few bites of an apple. She set what was left carefully down on the counter, walked into the bathroom, and threw up. She stayed there, kneeling over the toilet, until her knees began to ache.
A while later, she walked the dog again. She fed him. Then she took him downstairs and walked him once more—she’d done things in the wrong order, she realized. She should have fed him before the first walk.
There were people out now, at the end of the day, moving around, standing in clusters on porches, on the sidewalk, talking to one another about it. An old woman walked toward her on the sidewalk. When their eyes met, she said, “Isn’t it terrible.” Her face was anguished.
“Yes,” Billy said.
Back in the apartment, she went to Gus’s desk. She sat down. She went through his things again. She picked up the smiling photograph of herself he’d set in a clear plastic stand and looked at it for a long time, then dropped it in the wastebasket. She turned over the Fra Angelico postcard. On the back, in scratchy black ink, it said, “The things we are seeing! I hope you will too one day. We are drinking it in, along with what we are actually drinking in. Theo and Nina.”
She had no idea who Theo and Nina were.
There was so much of Gus’s life she didn’t know. Who would take care of all this? Who would it belong to? Who would dispose of it? Who was in charge of Gus now?
Leslie, surely.
Not me, Billy thought. And she started to cry for the first time.
She walked the puppy once more after dark, and then she brought him into bed with her. It was about ten. He hadn’t been allowed to sleep with her—with her and Gus—ever before, and he was confused. He stood up several times and came and planted himself by her head, panting his hot breath on her, his tail wagging.
She spoke sharply to him each time, and finally he lay down, his bulk curled against her rump. She could hear his breathing change when he went to sleep. She lay awake a long time. Twice she got up to pee. Once she cried, silently but long enough that, when she stopped, her face felt swollen and thick, she couldn’t breathe through her nose. The last time she looked at the red digits of the clock, they said 1:10.
Reuben woke her a little after three, mewling, scratching the pillow close to her face.
Gus had done the nighttime walks until now. Nighttime, early morning, the one before dinner, the last one before bed, all to show Billy how easy a puppy would be, how easy it would be if she just stayed with him.
She pulled on her jeans and a sweater, slid into some sandals, and they went out into the hallway and down the stairs. The moment she heard the outer door click behind her, she knew she’d screwed up. She’d locked herself out. In her mind she could see the key on the table. On the table where it should have been but wasn’t, next to the leash and plastic pickup bags. Where it wasn’t, because she’d been careless today. She hadn’t followed Gus’s orderly patterns, she hadn’t put things back where they belonged. Here, here was the price.
Reuben peed. She sat on the porch steps for a while. The dog watched her attentively for clues as to what was happening. Finally she got up and started to walk with him. A big walk. Might as well. One or the other of h
er neighbors in the house would let her in, but it would be hours before she could decently ring either bell.
She walked through the dark, dead streets. Everything was quiet, except for here and there the bluish flickering light in a bedroom or a living room—someone awake, someone unable to stop watching the events again and again, someone finding consolation, perhaps, in the theorizing, the expert opinions.
She walked south and west, over into the streets of Cambridge, toward Harvard Square, thinking she would go to the river, she’d sit in the grass there until the sky was light. As she walked, she thought reasonlessly, uselessly, swinging between a deep disbelief—the sense she had that nothing like what had happened could possibly have happened—and the horrified imagining, over and over, of how it would have been for Gus, slicing into the building, crushing it and being crushed.
In flight from any of that, she made herself think of the most practical issues. She wondered if the rent was paid up, where Gus had left the car, what she would do with all his belongings. She would move out, she knew that. She couldn’t possibly stay. It was Gus’s place. She didn’t belong there.
It occurred to her with something like relief that she hadn’t talked to anyone about splitting up with Gus—anyone except the one old friend in Chicago whom she e-mailed and called regularly. It would make it easier for her to get through it, to go through the motions of grief, which is what she’d have to do.
No! It would be more than that, more than motions. Of course it would. She did mourn Gus. Her throat ached with sorrow for him. It was awful, truly awful. That he’d died. That he wasn’t, anymore. The way he’d died. The cruelty of it, the enormity of it, the randomness of it. The wrongness of it—for how could it be Gus’s end? Gus, who was so sunny, so blameless.
She’d gone about a mile and a half—she was approaching Harvard Square on Ware Street—when she realized that the puppy was flagging, that, unconscious of him as she was, she’d more or less been pulling him for the last couple of blocks. She hadn’t ever exhausted the dog before, she specialized in such short walks. It was Gus who did the walks that really exercised him, that wore him out.
