by Jill Ciment
Fatigue settled over Edith like a mist, yet her pulse thumped wildly as if she’d just had a fright. Along the periphery of her vision, she noticed the familiar scintillation that invariably heralded a migraine. She’d forgotten to pack her headache pills, too. Where was Kat when she needed her? She had no choice but to lie down, though the Housing Department still needed to be called to get a copy of their mother’s lease now that the original had been eaten. When the first volley of pain struck just behind her right temple, she tried to shield her eyes from the blinding explosion, but her left arm was missing. Had it been blown off in the blast? She saw it on the bed beside her. She tried to lift it. It might as well have been an I-beam. The next piercing barrage left her skull ringing. When she came to, she was safely back in Price, Bloodworth’s silent library. She should look up “act of God.” She rolled the stepladder over to the wall bricked with New York tort law volumes, and pulled down the relevant tome. She sat at her desk and opened it, but to her surprise and escalating fear, all six hundred and seven pages were blank. On the far side of the library, Kat burst noisily through the mahogany doors, and once again, Edith felt that amalgamation of dread and monolithic love that she always experienced whenever she saw Kat.
“Edie, oh, Edie!” Kat shouted hoarsely, then froze. “Are you dead?”
“Quiet! You’re in a library.”
Shielding the manuscript from the sudden downpour, Kat bolted across Fifth Avenue. She didn’t have an actual appointment with the editor from Sutton House, though when they had spoken on the phone two months earlier, he had told her that his mother had been a huge fan of Dr. Mimi’s column; he could still remember her reading the choicest letters aloud to his father at breakfast. He promised to look at the collection as soon as Kat culled the archive down to the hundred best, impossible a task as that might be.
She had only planned to drop off the letters with his secretary this morning, and was surprised and grateful when the editor himself came out of his office to greet her, an unexpectedly thin man twig-necked like a heron.
“You look just like the newspaper picture of Dr. Mimi that I remember,” he told Kat.
He seemed so friendly and affable, Kat wondered if they wouldn’t sign the contract today. She wanted badly to bring Edith some good news. She had no idea what Sutton House would pay, but whatever it was, she’d finally be contributing. Even before the evacuation, Edith had worried about money. Kat couldn’t begin to guess what a librarian might have been able to save for old age, but it couldn’t be much, despite Edith’s lifetime of frugality. Even as a little girl, she’d squirreled away her weekly candy allotment while Kat gobbled up hers, and then, when Kat ached for sugar, Edith would sell her M&M’s at a nickel apiece. As far as Kat knew, besides the four years at Skidmore, her sister had never left home. The summer they turned twenty-one, Kat begged Edith to join her at Woodstock, take acid, and dance naked under the stars. Kat honestly believed that if Edith had just one out-of-body experience, she’d at least have a choice whether to abide by the laws of this unjust world or chase after ethereal gusts of grandeur, as Kat planned to do. Instead, Edith had taken a summer internship in Price, Bloodworth’s library and fixed her fate. By thirty, she was stout and middle-aged. Why would she scrimp and deny herself during youth, with all its electric pleasures and titillating temptations, so she could eat well in old age? What? Salisbury steak? The astringent life Edith subjected herself to pained Kat.
Sitting across from the editor in his cramped, messy office, Kat watched his agreeable face frown as she handed him the manuscript. She had kept all the contenders in a three-ring binder, each letter sheathed in its own plastic sleeve. Some of the letters were more than fifty years old. The paper ranged from the back of a Chock full o’ Nuts place mat to a wedding napkin. More than one had been penned on toilet paper. Kat believed that the handwriting said as much as the words. The grieving wrote so lightly, it almost looked as if they wished to disappear too. The infatuated scribbled away in loopy exuberance. She was still hoping to persuade the editor to reproduce the original letters as photographs, not just plain text.
He weighed the manuscript in his hands as if it were a brick of pig iron. “You do realize we publish novelty books, not encyclopedias.”
Opening the binder, he flipped through the three-hundred-plus pages. Kat noted a look of discomfort sweep across his affable expression. “I’m sure each one of these letters deserves to be included, but we agreed to keep the number under a hundred. And this one is in pencil. I can barely read it. Where’s the typescript with your mother’s replies?”
Kat had invested so much in this book that the heroic effort it took to maintain her composure faltered. She could no longer blink back the tears.
The editor found her some tissues. He kept a stash handy in his top drawer. Kat couldn’t help but wonder how many of his writers he made cry.
“I don’t usually behave like this, but you can’t imagine what the last two days have been like,” Kat said, taking a Kleenex and blotting her eyes. When she lowered the tissue, she could see him staring at the slightly ajar door like a castaway fixes on the horizon in hope of a rescue ship. She took charge of herself. It was her moment to chase after a gust of grandeur. She reached across his desk and opened the binder to the penciled letter he’d dismissed. “It’s supposed to be difficult to read, that’s the point. Look at the signature: ‘Bereft in Plattsburg.’ It’s the mark of grief.”
But he didn’t look down at bereavement’s fingerprint. He remained focused on the exit.
“These letters are an oral history, a public diary. And they’re not just words, they’re artifacts,” Kat said, keeping her tone impassioned but subdued to hide her tears. “Seeing how a hand carves out meaning with a pencil point lets us remember that the human touch is essential.” She closed the binder and placed her hand on it, as if she were about to swear on something sacred. “Please, all I ask is that you read these letters with an open mind.”
He did not say no.
When Kat got outside, the storm was raging. She dreaded facing Edith without the salve of good news. She darted into the first refuge she found, an old-fashioned Midtown bar—garnet-red stools, a sticky counter, and an ancient bartender whose wooden face told nothing. She shook her head, like a dog does, to fling off the water. The only other patron, a slight middle-aged man with hairy wrists, was dry. He must have already started drinking well before the storm. Why not be friendly and sit beside him?
“I usually don’t have a cocktail before noon, but I’ve come from my publisher and I could do with a drink. Stoli,” she called to the bartender, wondering how she would pay for both it and Edith’s prescription, which she intended to pick up before returning to the hotel. She had less than twenty dollars in her purse. She might as well go for broke. “Make that a double, please.”
An electric storm the likes of which Ashley had never seen before drenched her within seconds, but she couldn’t walk any faster hauling her heavy red suitcase stuffed to bursting with Vida’s finery. By the time she reached the glass tower on the river, her suitcase’s seams had come unglued and the red color, which she had painted over the ugly gray cardboard with exhilarating anticipation of her upcoming adventure in America, now dripped what looked like a trail of blood. The doorman from yesterday ran outside with an umbrella and offered to carry the bleeding suitcase, but she shook her head. It was all she owned. In the lobby, it nearly fell apart in her hands. She opened the latches. Just as she feared, everything was wet and ruined. A sorrow she suspected had little to do with the stained plunder surprised her, and a hiccupping sob escaped before the tears came.
“Hey, hey, don’t cry,” said the doorman. “We’ll put everything in Mr. Sam’s washing machine.”
“I lock myself out.”
He kindly offered to use his master key, and then carried her bloated bag for her, holding it together as best he could. In the elevator, he snuck a glance at her breasts when he thought she wasn’t looki
ng. Her sopping wet T-shirt was nearly transparent. The ZIBERAX lettered across her chest looked as if it had been tattooed on her naked breasts.
“You’ll need to press the button,” he said after the doors closed and they didn’t ascend. His hands were occupied trying to keep her suitcase from bleeding on his shoes.
But Ashley didn’t know which floor the actor lived on. She pressed all thirty buttons.
“In Russia, you press all or you go nowhere.”
Outside the actor’s apartment on the second floor, the doorman set down her now shapeless suitcase on the welcome mat, which quickly turned red, before opening the door with his master key.
“Thank you, you very kind to poor Russia girl locked out in storm,” Ashley said.
“You an actress too?” he asked, after he set her worldly possessions on the actor’s wooden floor. A red lake instantly formed.
“I new Ziberax girl. Big secret. Don’t tell.”
Alone in the apartment, she filled the tub with hot water and laundry soap she found under the sink. She didn’t know how to use the washing machine. She couldn’t save the whites—they were now pink, like bubble gum—but she was able to rescue a black silk dress and designer jeans, any fabric or color where a tint of red wouldn’t be noticed. She hung them over the tub to dry, and then washed what was left of her worldly things—her hairbrush was now saturated in red, like a paintbrush, and her emery board looked like a bloody dagger. Around the suitcase, the red lake was rising. She considered the mess and shrugged in humble resignation, just as her mother had shrugged whenever she had looked at the mess of her daughter Anushka. She walked over to the big window facing the skyline. Lightning appeared to spark from turret to spike. Wet, windy slaps buffeted the glass. The normally sluggish black river had whitecaps. She’d never before seen weather as drama. In Omsk, the weather snuck up on you like an invisible gas: one instant you could breathe, the next frigid air scalded your lungs; one second you could see across the street, the next you were blinded by snow.
She heard knocking at the door and peeked through the eyehole’s wide-angle lens. The doorman’s ears appeared even bigger than usual.
“I brought you a clean doormat from the penthouse,” he said, rolling up the stained one and then rolling out the new one.
“You telling me penthouse owner say, yeah, sure thing, just take my mat?”
“No one lives there. It’s the model apartment.”
She’d never before heard the term “model apartment,” and it evoked a thrilling perfection, the apartment to which all other apartments aspire.
“It has an awesome view,” he stammered, shuffling his heavy feet in place. “Want to see it?”
The penthouse’s living room was as big as the shoe factory her parents slaved in. The ceiling was as tall as a telephone pole. Three out of four walls were glass. From the vantage point of the thirtieth floor, the tempest’s production became grander. Behind the skyline, banks and banks of clouds waited to come onstage.
She turned her attention to the furniture. The dining room table was set for six as if in preparation for a dinner party. The beds were made. The office desk had an open laptop, lit with icons. She touched the keys. They didn’t give. The computer was only a hollow plastic shell painted to look like a laptop. Did Americans decorate their homes with plastic electronics like her mother tried to beautify their hovel with plastic fruit? She wished her mother could see her eldest daughter now, but even if her mother had miraculously appeared, she wouldn’t have been impressed. To be impressed, you needed to want, and her mother appeared to want nothing. On wintery Sunday afternoons, after the family, except Anushka, returned from church, her mother would settle half asleep in the dark living room, her mind as empty as her pockets. And if Ashley had blinked and her father had miraculously appeared, he would probably have groveled to the doorman just because he was in uniform. Her father had spent ten years in a gulag. He was used to living in holes. He’d look around and then cower at being so exposed to the elements, like a mouse in an open field.
“I’m not supposed to let anyone up here. We should probably leave,” said the doorman as Ashley started to make herself comfortable on the sofa.
She patted the cushion beside her. “Come. Sit by me.”
“I could get fired if one of the real estate agents comes by for a showing.”
She’d sized him up correctly yesterday—a gelded draft horse that thinks he’s a stallion.
Back in the actor’s apartment, she hunted for food. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning. It must be lunchtime, though the black clouds made it look like midnight. She opened the refrigerator. Unlike Vida’s shelves, which held only a small ration of wilted vegetables and queen-sized chocolate bars, this actor’s fridge was stocked for a siege. She began to inspect the jars, bottles, boxes, and fruits only an oligarch could afford in Russia. She wanted to taste everything—pineapple (better than rock candy), Finocchiona salami (a fatty hard old sausage), Dean & Deluca Single Origin Truffles (tastier than Vida’s chocolates), Bella Viva dried fruit (she could buy the same kind in the Omsk marketplace), Dean & Deluca Mesquite and Stout Ale Mustard (she ate a spoonful), East Shore Dipping Pretzels (not salty enough), Lambrusco Wine Jelly (too much like medicine), hickory-smoked almonds (she finished the jar), butter caramels, olive oil, Grissini Breadsticks, and a carton of Yunnan organic green tea ice cream (it didn’t taste like tea at all).
She felt sick but didn’t stop. She gorged as the storm raged outside.
Kat didn’t get back to the hotel until well past midnight. Lenny, the hairy-wristed gentleman from the bar, had paid for her drinks. At some point during the afternoon, they’d staggered back to Lenny’s place, a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. He was almost a head shorter than Kat, but Kat believed that horizontally everyone was the same height. His hairy wrists were just the beginning of his pelt. For someone steeped in an afternoon of alcohol, Lenny was an attentive, hopeful lover, and Kat couldn’t help but think, what better way to spend a rainy day than two strangers comforting each other? She might have fooled the world with her hearty sexuality, but she never could fool herself. She was lonely.
She quietly shut the hotel door so as not to wake Edith. She didn’t want a lecture on how irresponsible she was not phoning to let Edith know she was alive. Thank god she’d remembered to stop by the twenty-four-hour pharmacy to pick up Edith’s heart pills. She placed the vial on Edith’s side of their shared nightstand so her pills would be the first thing Edith saw when she woke up, in case Kat had to sleep in to ward off a hangover. She already tasted the chalky dehydration that promised a headache. In the dark, she shed her wet clothes, slipped under the sheets, and then pulled up the blanket. It was surprisingly chilly, though whether from air-conditioning or the storm, Kat wasn’t sure. Her pupils drank in what little ambient streetlight there was. She watched Edith materialize out of the gloom. Edith had fallen asleep on top of her blanket, in her bra and underwear. She didn’t want Edith to freeze, but unearthing the blanket from under her would only wake her. Kat stripped off her own blanket and covered Edith, then got back under the cold sheets.
She closed her eyes, anticipating the comforting wholeness that twins share when they sleep near each other. She had once attended an identical-twins conference, without Edith, and had met others who experienced what she had. Twins have been known to send each other messages in dreams, even when they’re sleeping in different hemispheres, though Edith didn’t believe any of that. Whether she believed or not, she was always waiting for Kat in sleep’s antechamber, though Edith took different spirit and animal forms. No matter where in the world Kat was, when she closed her eyes for the night, Edith’s presence came to her, like a scent, and Kat believed that she visited Edith nightly in exactly the same way. Tonight, however, all she could smell was Lenny on her.
Maybe Edith was only pretending to be asleep?
“Edie, are you awake?” she whispered.
She listened for a response, but
heard nothing. Sleepers’ exhalations were always discernable: silence was the lie. “Edie, don’t be mad at me. I got your pills. They’re on the nightstand.”
Again, nothing. Was she so angry that she wouldn’t speak to Kat?
“What do you want from me, Edie? I can’t live like a nun. I’m not like you. I can’t suffer loneliness with your stoicism. Is that such a horrible, unforgivable need that you feel you have to shun me?”
Kat switched on the light. Edith’s eyes were open, but she wasn’t looking at her. Kat rose. “Edie?” She stared straight into those pale blue irises. The forest-green coronas looked moist and alive, but the pupils were opaque. Nobody was looking back at Kat. She lowered her ear against Edith’s chest to listen for life but flinched when the skin felt cold. Kat’s heart banged so loudly she couldn’t distinguish any pulse but her own. She thought she’d heard a faint echo from deep within Edith.
She dialed 911. “My sister isn’t breathing. I can’t find her pulse. Help us. Please, help us.”
After dispatching the paramedics, the operator asked, “Could she be choking on anything?”
Kat knew that Edith wasn’t choking, but the operator’s commands filled her with purpose.
“Make sure her airway is clear. Are there any signs of trauma?”
Should she close her sister’s lids? Edith was such a private woman. She wouldn’t want strangers to see her soulless eyes. Closing Edith’s eyelids was the most heartrending sensation that Kat had ever experienced. The once blinking, widening, animated lids obediently shut.
The pandemonium of paramedics stilled only after it became evident that Edith wouldn’t be shocked back to life. The two men, older than Kat imagined medics to be, must have seen their share of weeping wives, howling husbands, and sobbing parents—but not twins. They were momentarily taken aback when they saw that the corpse and the bereft were identical.
