“Ma would have hated this. She would’ve wanted you to take care of yourself, to be here for me and my sisters, for your grandchildren,” she’d say, pushing more and more food in front of him. She’d taken to feeding others (everyone except herself) with an alarming zeal over the past seven months. She’d cook all day, layering the freezer with pans of lasagna and enchiladas, containers of chili and homemade soup, more than the family could possibly eat. Her hands were in constant motion. If she wasn’t cooking, she was scrubbing a pot or polishing flatware or zealously wiping down counters as if she were eliminating scurvy from a dangerously filthy ship. The furrow between her eyes never disappeared now. She’d delivered his first grandchild three months earlier and had already dropped the pregnancy weight and then some; there was a new slackness to her jawline. Her pretty brown eyes, always so engaged and eager, were often watery and bloodshot and unfocused. “You’re working yourself into your grave,” Maggie told her father.
“Poor choice of words,” Tommy said, trying to keep his voice light instead of bitter.
“You know what I mean, Dad.”
Tommy knew. He showed up at the pile every day because it was his wife’s grave, as much of a grave as she’d ever have anyway. Ronnie had been an office manager for a financial services company on the ninety-fifth floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. Before the planes hit that morning, Tommy and Ronnie had passed each other in the outdoor concourse between buildings, as they did many days when Tommy was heading home from the occasional late-night security guard shift and Ronnie was arriving. She was supposed to be off that Tuesday but had decided to go in and help her boss clear out a backlog of files.
“I’ll take an extra day next week,” she’d told Tommy. “I’ll enjoy it more if I get this work out of the way.” They’d kissed in the lobby, talked about what to do for dinner. “Load the dishwasher,” she’d said, giving him a little squeeze on his upper arm.
“Roger,” he’d said. She’d smiled and rolled her eyes a little; they both knew he’d forget. He was tired after working all night but not too tired to notice her short skirt, how fine and high her ass looked beneath the center seam of the gray wool, how shapely and firm her legs were after three daughters and, soon, a grandson.
Through the excruciating hours and days and weeks following that morning, he’d thought repeatedly about that moment: Ronnie’s long, strong stride in the bright morning sun, how those legs should have carried her down to safety, how he should have been there to catch her. He remembered the shoes she wore that day, red patent leather with a little cutout for the toes. She always wore sneakers to commute from their house in the Rockaways, but would stop in the concourse lobby to slip on her heels. She cared about things like that.
“Appearances count,” she would tell their kids. “If you want people to judge you based on the inside, don’t distract them from the outside.”
His eyes had followed her that morning as she’d walked to the elevators. He would always be grateful for that, at least, how he’d stopped and admired the little sway of her derriere, watched her swipe her employee ID, press the up button for the elevator, gently tug at the hem of her skirt. How his heart had softened thinking what a fierce specimen of a woman she was, how lucky that she belonged to him.
“Mom would have hated you going there every day,” Maggie told him repeatedly in the following months. “She would have hated you putting yourself at risk.”
Tommy didn’t care what Ronnie might have thought of his days spent digging through the pile, but the concern on his daughter’s face wore on him. Her husband had pulled him aside recently to delineate how poorly she was still sleeping, the frequency of her nightmares and crying jags. How her grief had transmuted from her mother’s absence to fear for her father’s health, a sticky certainty that he was using the pile to slowly kill himself and that he wouldn’t even live to see his first grandson’s first birthday. Maggie repeatedly asked Tommy if he’d help with the baby so she could go back to work part time. He knew the request was just her way of trying to get him away from the site. With the cleanup only weeks away from being finished, he decided to give notice and help with his grandson to give Maggie and her two sisters some peace of mind. They deserved it.
TOMMY SPENT HIS LAST MORNING at work walking around and shaking the hands of the men and women he’d worked with side by side for twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, for months. Soon they’d all be gone, this unlikely, contentious family of firefighters, ironworkers, electricians, construction workers, police, medics. They’d spent months dismantling the ruins of the buildings and it was time for all of them to return to their lives, including him, whatever that meant, whatever life was going to be on the unimaginable other side of the pile. He took his rake and went to his usual position, still believing that today, his last day, might be the day—the day he found something belonging to Ronnie.
It was a silly, unlikely desire and one he couldn’t shake. Every morning as he crossed the Gil Hodges bridge and followed the Belt Parkway to downtown Manhattan, he imagined coming across something of hers while sifting through the debris—anything—her reading glasses in the fuchsia leather case, her house keys on the Cape Cod key chain she’d used for years, one of those red shoes.
On his worst days, he was angry with Ronnie, angry that she hadn’t sent him a sign, some small reassuring object. He knew this was just one of the many irrational thoughts he’d had over the past months. For weeks he was sure he’d find her, still alive and huddled under a pile, dirty and tired and coated with that omnipresent gray dust; she’d look up at him, extend a hand, and say, Take your sweet time why don’t you, O’Toole?
He knew from the first wrenching moments he saw the wreckage on television, before the towers even fell, that she didn’t have a chance. Still, he’d spent the first few weeks digging frantically where he imagined she might have fallen. And then, for a disconcerting number of weeks, he’d had an overwhelming desire to taste the ash, to take it into his mouth. The only thing that stopped him was the fear that someone would see and send him to the tent for grief counseling and not allow him back. Finally, he’d gotten himself assigned to the raking fields nearest the north tower, a silly distinction because there was little rhyme or reason as to how the piles of debris arrived at his feet; still, it reassured him. He spent his days with a garden rake in his hands, hoeing for artifacts. His desire made him a fastidious spotter. He’d found countless objects. More wallets and eyeglasses than he could count, faded stuffed animals, keys, backpacks, shoes; he made sure each and every one was tagged and bagged, hoping it would give some other family relief, however anemic.
Still, this one idea persisted: that he would find something of hers, and as long as he was there digging through the carnage it was possible—it had happened, just not to him. Salvatore Martin, retired EMS, who worked the 5:30 A.M. shift seven days a week had drawn his rake through a tangled pile of cable and dirt one bitter, frozen winter day and staring up at him was a photo of his son Sal Jr. on a laminated corporate ID, slightly burned around the edges, picture intact. Sal had quit the following week and everyone thought seeing the plastic badge had been too much, had sent him over the edge. Tommy knew the truth. Sal had found what he’d been looking for—proof, a talisman—and so he was free to leave.
Tommy’s last afternoon on the pile. He decided to find his own souvenir to take that was of this place where Ronnie had last lived and breathed—something easily pocketed to sit on his desk or the windowsill above the kitchen sink, something he could bear to look at every day. As he raked through the rubble, considering his options (a piece of stone, a pebble—it couldn’t be anyone else’s personal effect, he wouldn’t do that), one of his coworkers hollered for him.
“Tommy!” It was his friend Will Peck. Most of Will’s engine company in Brooklyn had been lost when the towers went down; Will had stayed home that morning with the stomach flu. They’d both been there since day one, embracing and exorcising their
particular demons. Will waved him over to where an excavator had just dumped a heaping pile of dirt and dust and mangled metal.
“We got something here, O’Toole. Might want to come over and take a look.”
WHEN TOMMY HAD BRUSHED THE DEBRIS AWAY from the sculpture and understood what he was looking at, he could barely contain his glee. Oh, she was feisty that one, waiting until practically the very last hour of his very last day, but she did it! The minute he saw the hulk of metal emerge from the dirt and dust, he knew it was from Ronnie. In spite of its damage, he could see the tenderness of the couple’s embrace. The woman in the sculpture had one of her legs draped over the man’s leg, exactly the way Ronnie used to sit when they were alone, when she’d move in close and swing her leg over his and put one of her arms around his shoulder and draw him close with her other arm.
Am I too heavy? she’d ask.
Never. Even when she was nine months pregnant, she was never too heavy in his lap. He loved the feel of her fleshy thigh on top of his, how she’d press against his chest. The posture was so intrinsically hers, so intimate and familiar that when Tommy saw the statue, even covered with grime and grit, it took all his restraint not to whoop and holler, to tell everyone what its appearance meant, whom it was from. But he couldn’t be that cruel, couldn’t flaunt his luck in front of the others. He closed his eyes for a minute, silently thanked his wife.
The Kiss sat there until Tommy’s shift was over and it was night. The statue was secured to a flatbed cart and he volunteered to wheel it over to the Port Authority’s temporary holding trailer, where the piece would be documented and photographed before being handed over to the authorities in charge of artifacts. In an exquisite piece of luck, the Port Authority worker doing documentation that day had gone home early. Standing at the trailer’s door, Tommy knew what he had to do. It had proved absurdly easy for him to wheel the sculpture up a plank and into the back of his pickup and drive it home. He knew it would be weeks or months, possibly never, before anyone noticed it was missing. Among the piles of scorched debris—all the personal possessions and pieces of buildings and tires and cars and fire trucks and airplanes, who would even remember this thing? Who would think to ask where it had gone?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Melody had been sitting in her car outside the small consignment store on Main Street for almost an hour. Her coffee in the cup holder was cold. She was wasting gas because it was too chilly to turn the car off and sit for more than a few minutes without running the heat, but she still hadn’t worked up the nerve to go inside and talk to Jen Malcolm who owned the store and whom Melody knew a little bit because Jen also had children at the high school, two sons, and because Melody had occasionally sold a piece of furniture to Jen in the past. Items she’d bought and refinished but didn’t quite work in her house and were too nice, she thought, to sell on Craigslist and too bulky for eBay. Jen always liked the pieces Melody brought. Most of them sold, and Melody would earn a little extra money doing something she genuinely loved to do. Today’s errand felt different.
Melody turned the key in the ignition, cutting the exhaust but leaving it in the position where the radio would still play. When she got too cold, she told herself, she’d go inside and show Jen the photos of all the furniture in her house, the many pieces she’d spent years hunting down at flea markets and estate sales, her favorite finds, the valuable items acquired for a song from sellers who didn’t know any better: a neglected Stickley table that someone had criminally sponge painted, now stripped and restored; a black leather Barcelona chair pocked with cigarette burns and other unsavory stains she’d reupholstered in a bright turquoise tweed; and her favorite, a beautiful oak drafting table that tilted. Nora and Louisa had used it for years to draw or do homework or just sit, side by side, reading a book. She would sell all of it to appease Walt and slow him down. She would sell anything. Almost.
MELODY KNEW NORA AND LOUISA called her the General behind her back, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care because she also knew what it was like to grow up in a state of anarchy, in a house with parents so hands-off they were nearly invisible. Melody knew what it was like to have teachers ask, hesitant and concerned, if her parents were going to come to a parent-teacher conference. She knew what it was like to search in vain for their faces in the school auditorium during a play or a concert. She’d vowed to be an entirely different type of mother, and having twins never set her off course. Some days she drove herself crazy, running from one daughter’s after-school activity to the other’s. She charted the time spent with each child, making sure to even it out as far as was humanly possible. She never missed a single concert, play, soccer game, track meet, Brownie meeting, choral performance. She packed a healthy lunch every day, including one indulgent sweet on Fridays. She wrote them encouraging notes and arrived fifteen minutes early for pickup, so they would never stand in a parking lot alone, wondering if anyone was going to show up to bring them home, wondering if anyone even realized they were gone.
She remembered their first exploratory trips upstate as if they’d happened yesterday. Driving north, watching the scraggly city trees gradually replaced with the stately elms and elderly pines of the Taconic. Nora and Louisa asleep in their respective car seats in the back, both sucking away on identical pacifiers. Melody had instantly loved their small village with its quaint dress shops and bakeries, all the women pushing strollers while wearing jogging suits the color of sorbet. It was nothing like the grime and cacophony of their street that was technically in Spanish Harlem.
They rented a condo on the less desirable side of town. For two straight years Melody would put the twins in a stroller and walk the streets on the other side of the tracks, literally. The commuter train divided the town into its desirable (nearer the water) and less desirable (nearer the mall) side. She didn’t know what she was looking for until the day she saw it. A small house that had managed to survive the kind of gut renovation and expansion happening on most of the surrounding streets. It was an Arts and Crafts bungalow that had clearly fallen into disrepair. The morning she passed by, a man about her age was loading a car with boxes.
“Moving out?” Melody said, trying to sound friendly but not overly curious.
“Moving my mom out,” the guy said; he was staring at the girls as people tended to do. “Twins?”
“Yes,” Melody said. “They’re almost three.”
“I have twins, too.” He leaned down in front of the stroller and played with the girls for a minute, pretending to snatch a nose and then hand it back, one of their favorite games.
“So what’s going to happen to the house?” Melody asked.
The man stood and sighed. He squinted at the house. “I don’t know, man,” he said, sounding beaten. “There’s so much to do to get it in good shape to sell. The Realtor says it’s not even worth the work, someone will probably tear it down and rebuild into something like that.” He pointed disgustedly to the house next door, a renovation Melody had watched—and secretly admired—over the past months.
“Yeah, that place is pretty awful,” she said. And then without thinking: “My husband and I have been looking for a house, but everything is so much bigger than we need—and can afford. I’d love to find something to fix up, not to change but to restore.” Once the words were out of her mouth, she knew they were true.
Walt had been against the house. He thought it was overpriced for what it was and feared a real-estate downturn. The seller liked Melody, but even with all the work the house needed—and it needed everything—he held firm on the price, which was more than they should borrow given that she didn’t work. (Her working had never been worth the price of child care and now who would hire her?) Walt’s salary as a computer technician in Pearl River was okay but not great.
The house’s interior was dated, but Melody could see past the ugly carpet and ’70s wallpaper to its excellent bones and understand what it could be: a home, a place her girls would feel safe and cared for. She loved
the tiny leaded glass windows, the breakfast nook, the window seat at the landing of the front stair, the enormous oak in the front yard and the sugar maples in the back turning brilliant shades of orange. She and Walt would take the front bedroom, the one under the eaves. There were two small bedrooms in the back, perfect for Nora and Louisa. She could see birthday parties in the yard under the maples, early morning breakfasts in the paneled dining room; she knew exactly where she’d put the Christmas tree. The Realtor had pulled up a corner of the living room carpet to show Melody the original heart pine floor. She fought for that house in a way she’d never fought for anything before.
“All the mechanicals are going to need an upgrade,” Walt had said, frowning. “Any money we have is going to go behind the walls, in the basement, under the floors—we’ll drain our savings for things you can’t see.”
“That’s okay,” Melody said. And it was. She knew how to do the other stuff, how to strip paint and steam off wallpaper and refinish. What she didn’t know she’d learn. The house would be her project, her job. Alan Greenspan was on her side! And Walt couldn’t argue with the concrete fact of The Nest.
But he did. For weeks. And when she thought they’d waited too long and the property would go to someone else, she’d broken out into head-to-toe hives. She’d been soaking in a tub of colloidal oatmeal, bereft, when he’d come to her to tell her the property—and hefty mortgage—was theirs. She knew his capitulation had finally come down to this: He loved her, he wanted her to be happy.
“Why can’t we move to a town where everyone isn’t a gazillionaire?” Walt would say to her every so often, usually when Melody was in a tizzy about something the girls needed—clothes, after-school activities, summer camp. But she didn’t want to move. They lived in one of the best school districts in the Northeast. Melody had learned where to shop, how to poke around for what the girls needed. She knew how to wait for sales and who would take money off when she said she was buying for twins. She always came up with funds when necessary—for special school trips or instruments so they could take music lessons. When they joined the ski club, she’d paged through old school directories and called parents of twins who’d gone off to college asking if they had any equipment they would be willing to sell and she hit the jackpot, a bored-sounding father who told her if she’d come clean his garage of ski equipment—along with the ice skates and tennis rackets and bikes that his daughters never, ever touched—she could have it all for free.
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