by Gae Polisner
The news repeats itself; everyone’s waiting on new information. The stations replay the planes hitting, the wall of smoke, and speculate as to the groups in the Middle East, whose names I’ve never heard of, that might be responsible. Some terrorism expert comes on and says we should fear more hits, be prepared, stay inside. A senator comes on to say he suspects the mastermind is someone named Osama bin Laden.
I’ve never heard of him, but I bet Dad has.
A new clip now airs of President Bush being told of the attacks, a secret service guy leaning down to whisper to him while he reads a picture book in a classroom to a group of kids.
The president nods, and his face shifts, changes for a split second, but then he goes back to reading to the kids. After another minute he gets up and leaves the room, impressively calm.
Yet another clip plays of the president announcing that U.S. military forces are on “high alert.” In this one he seems more nervous, and his eyes are filled with tears.
I switch off the television and head back to my room just as the girl is walking out of my parents’ room.
* * *
“Hey,” I try not to let on that she startled me.
“I had to go to the bathroom,” she says. Her eyes dart away as if she’s embarrassed.
“No problem,” I say, but I can’t help wonder why she didn’t use my bathroom, the same one she showered in earlier.
“And I’m really sorry about all this,” she adds, but keeps walking past me back to Kerri’s room.
I follow her. “Sorry about what?”
“Me, here, like this.”
“Don’t be. I’m sorry about the accommodations.” I gesture around Kerri’s room, at the cheesy bedspread and purple walls, at the Hanson poster that hangs there like a blister. “Besides, I’m the one who brought you here.” She looks to where I nod, so I say, “That is not my taste, by the way, I swear.”
She cracks a smile, so I add, “My little sister was obsessed with them for a while. Now it’s *NSYNC. She has no taste in music at all. She’s all about boy bands and Radio Disney, anything lame and pop. Probably because she thinks one day she’s going to be the star of her own Nickelodeon show.”
The girl smiles again. “How old is she?”
“Twelve.”
“Where is she now?”
“In LA, with my mom. Long story. But the short version is that they’ve been gone all summer. They were supposed to come home today, but with the—” I stop. It’s the first normal conversation we’re having, and I don’t want to say anything that might set her off or trigger something. If she was down there, and is traumatized, and now can’t remember anything, there may be a good reason.
“Anyway,” I say instead, “it turns out they’re not coming home for a day or two, maybe more, so it’s okay for now if you stay here. I don’t mind the company. Really.”
I look back at the wall, at the dreaded Hanson brothers on the piss-yellow background.
“Thanks,” she says, looking there too. “‘MMMBop’. Hanson. Yeah, I think I remember them.”
DINNER
Dinner is weird.
Then again, everything else is, so why shouldn’t dinner be?
For starters, I’m the one who makes it.
I’ve watched my dad whip up pasta enough times to know mostly what to do, so I boil water and pull some fresh ravioli and a container of Dad’s sauce from the freezer, trying to remember what else he adds in.
It feels strange to be doing normal things like cooking with the city a mess, the world a mess, and my dad still out there somewhere in the middle of all of it. But Dad would tell me to. He’d be glad I was making us dinner.
Dad is the cook in our house. His father—my grandfather—was Irish, but my grandmother, Anna, was 100 percent Italiana. An “off-the-boat” Sicilian. She taught all three of her boys to cook “the Sicilian way,” which means Dad only buys homemade pasta from Messina’s or Savino’s or a few other places in Williamsburg. Every couple of months, he makes sauce from scratch from stewed tomatoes, garlic, and basil, which he portions out and keeps in meal-sized containers in the freezer.
I defrost one in the microwave, cut up a few cloves of fresh garlic, and put that in a pan with some olive oil. When the garlic sizzles and the sauce is loose, I drop a bay leaf in, and turn the heat down and let it all simmer. That’s about as good as it gets considering I never cook.
When the ravioli is done, I drain it and pour it into a bowl with the sauce over it. I leave a hunk of Parmesan on the table with the small hand grater in the center, wheel Uncle Matt in, and go to get the girl. But when I reach Kerri’s room, she’s not there.
For a second I panic. Maybe she left. But then the bathroom door opens and she comes out looking normal, eyebrows raised questioningly at me.
She’s dressed in her own clothes, my PopMart Tour T-shirt and pajama pants folded neatly in her hands.
“I’ll put these on your sister’s bed,” she says.
“Are you going somewhere?” I sound too alarmed, desperate. But I can’t help it; I don’t want her to get hurt, wandering out there alone. Not to mention, I don’t want to be left here, with just Uncle Matt, in this disaster.
“I should, right?”
“No! I mean, where would you go? It’s getting late, and it’s not safe out there. Even my dad said—” I break off. All I can think of is her going back out there, on the bridge. With the city—no, the whole country—under attack. “You need to stay. I really want you to stay. There’s a hospital a few blocks away, and a police precinct. Have some dinner, and I’ll ask my uncle what we should do. He’s a cop, too, like my dad. I mean, not now he isn’t—not anymore—well, you’ll see. But I can bring you there after, or tomorrow. Tomorrow is better. Better to go when it’s light out.”
She looks away, unsure.
“Please stay,” I say again. “You can’t go out there, not knowing.”
* * *
I sit next to Uncle Matt where Dad usually does, so I can cut up his ravioli into pathetic little mashed-up pieces. The girl sits on his other side, where I normally sit.
“This is my uncle, Matt,” I say, “And this, Uncle Matt, is…” Who? The girl with the wings? The suicidal amnesiac bird girl? “This is the girl I told you about.”
Uncle Matt’s head bobs up toward her with effort, and she smiles. Not with pity, though, the way most people who know him do, gawking like my friends when they finally see him post-accident, no matter how much I try to prepare them.
He grunts his half-formed “Hello,” and lets his head loll back to the side.
“Uncle Matt was a lieutenant in the NYPD, like my dad, but in a different unit. He broke his neck and jaw,” I explain, “and fractured his skull, in an accident this past summer. The wires in his mouth just came out a few weeks ago. There’s still a plate in there, though. Over here.” I pat the side of my cheek at the jawline. “So it’s going to take a while before he can talk well again. But the doctors say the swelling is still coming down, and he could improve a lot. And he is getting better, right, Uncle Matt?” I don’t wait for an answer. “Come on, now, eat.”
I take his hand and move it forward to close it around his fork, then stab up a speck of pasta and move it to his mouth. He opens weakly, like a baby bird, and lets me slip it in.
“I’m doing all the work.” I frown. “You know you’re supposed to do it for me. Like Karina says. Oh, and no comment about the food. I already know it’s not as good as Dad’s.”
Six months ago, Uncle Matt would have laughed at that, but now he just makes a lame gurgling noise.
I get up, pour ice water into each of our glasses, slip a plastic straw in his, and hold it to his lips. He sips, a small bit dribbling down the side of his chin. I look over at the girl, who’s pushing her food around with a fork.
“Not good? My dad is the chef around here.”
She forks up a bite. “No, no, it is. Really. It’s—” She doesn’t finish, because Uncle Ma
tt interrupts, blurting something that sounds like gibberish.
“Ace … cubs … bah door! Op-eh … Sev-uh spays … guh … in … han … Ace … wife … Four hars…” It’s not the first time he’s done this. Lately, it’s like he has Tourette’s. He nods at me—and keeps going. “Four hars … run … kitch-eh … too lay…”
My eyes dart to the girl, slightly embarrassed. He started doing it a few days ago. Like some new brain neurons are firing, and he doesn’t quite have control over them. It sounds like a senseless jumble, but it’s not. I know exactly what he’s doing—saying. It’s a good sign, actually. A really good sign.
He’s reciting cards with their suits as if they are people, assigning them actions. “Ace of Clubs at the back door. Opens it for the Seven of Spades.” That kind of thing. It’s a practiced skill called the method of loci, a memory trick in which certain types of data get stored in storylike sequences. Then the actions get deconstructed, re-broken down, back to their original form. In this case, to remember a basic deck of cards.
It’s downright smart what he’s doing. Brilliant, even. Because he hasn’t held a deck of cards in months. So, he must be remembering some deck he knew back then. Before his accident.
Still, my cheeks turn hot, and I feel bad for him. They sound like the ramblings of a crazy man.
The man Kyle calls Uncle Matt mumbles,
clubs,
hearts,
more.
Words that sound like suits in a
deck of cards.
Kyle looks at me,
apologetic.
But I like Uncle Matt and his garbled words.
They sound like the thoughts inside my head.
Uncle Matt is a genius and a memory expert. He has an IQ of 152. Only eight points lower than Einstein’s. I never got why he wasted it being a cop. I know that sounds wrong, but he could have cured cancer, or run for president, or been the next Bill Gates or something. I asked him about it once, and he said, “It’s easy to be smart if you’re born that way, Kyle. It’s infinitely harder to be brave.”
Maybe he’s right. Maybe smart is easy and brave is hard.
And, he hasn’t said this, but I know he must want to be out there with Dad and Uncle Paul. Being brave. Saving people. Doing his job. But I bet he misses the other part of his life, too. The memory competition stuff. Before the accident, he was planning to go to the U.S. Memory Championship for his third time. And he was planning to win it this time.
My eyes shift back to his plate, the small, uneaten pieces of pasta making me sick to my stomach. “Eat, Uncle Matt!” I say, too forcefully. “You’re starting to waste away.” I fork up a piece myself and move it to his mouth. “You have to eat and get stronger.”
Uncle Matt’s eyes move away, and he chews. When he’s finished, he mumbles, “Three … hars … bal-co-y … fi-uhs shahs … King … dia-onds. No. Sick … cubs.”
I glance sideways at the girl to see if she’s weirded out, but she’s smiling as she picks at her food.
(Glazed blue pots.
Flames …
Fruitfallingfromtrees …
Embôité attitude
Devant).
A jumble of words, images,
voices
half there, half not.
Floating,
disjointed,
disappearing.
Like the uncle’s words,
I watch them go by,
pop up,
disperse like
dandelion seeds.
(… “Smile, Papillon!”)
Coming and going of their own volition.
“It means something,” I finally say to the girl, feeling defensive. “The stuff that my uncle is saying.”
“I know,” she says. “I can tell. It sounds like playing cards or something?”
I’m surprised, and a little impressed. It’s like she’s somehow in tune with him.
I explain the method of loci, and find myself proudly telling her how Uncle Matt came in seventh at the US Memory Championship last year, sixteenth the year before. “This year, we seriously thought he could win. At least place top three, and a decent cash prize comes with that.” I catch her look, which is sympathetic, like she completely cares about every stupid thing I’m saying. “But that was before the SUV,” I say. “I used to help him train. The competition was in Boston this year. I was supposed to go with him.”
“What happened?”
“He was on his motorcycle on the BQE, after a date. The other guy—the one in the SUV—fell asleep. And, no, my uncle wasn’t drinking. Everyone asks that.” I always add that last part, because it’s the first thing people assume when they hear what happened. “He nearly died, broke his spine…” I look at Uncle Matt and stop. He doesn’t need to hear the ugly replay. The spinal cord injury. The swelling on his brain. The surgeries to try to repair things. Besides, she can probably figure it out by the mumbling and drooling and itty-bitty pasta pieces. By his ragdoll neck and dead-fish right hand. Which is the one that works at all.
She looks up, first at me, then over at Uncle Matt, who rolls his head up and says, “Ky-uh … where … you … dah?”
“I know,” I say, trying not to break down and cry. “It’s getting late. I wish we’d hear from him.”
“I’m sorry about your accident. That sucks,” the girl says, which for some reason makes me smile.
I relax a little, and we eat some more in silence, until the phone miraculously rings.
I give them privacy,
head back to the sister’s room.
Sit,
blank and restless.
With people but
totally
alone.
Lie down, try to sleep, but
the lake shimmers,
and shadowy things
dart like tadpoles through murky water.
(I wait and I wait, but
you don’t
return.)
I race to the phone, but no one is there when I answer.
I try Dad’s cell phone, but it rings through to voicemail.
I focus on Uncle Matt while Dad’s voice plays: “You’ve reached Detective Tom Donohue. Please leave your name, number, and reason for your call. If this is a true emergency, please hang up and dial 911.”
“Hey, Dad, it’s Kyle.” I try not to get choked up, not to sound like a baby. If he’s okay, he needs me in control here. I load the last of our dinner dishes into the dishwasher, then turn on the faucet to rinse the large pasta pot. “No worries here. Everything is okay. But we haven’t heard from you. And we just want to know that you’re all right.”
I hang up and wheel Uncle Matt to the living room for more news. The never-ending crawl at the bottom of the TV informs that the dead and missing number in the thousands.
It also reports a fourth building has gone down.
“Countless rescue workers are unaccounted for,” it reads.
I drift off.
The lake is gone.
The curtain lifts on a
white room.
Small and bare,
only a bed, a window,
and one buzzing florescent.
Pink peonies in vases line the sill.
I sit in a chair.
The boy stands, watches me from the door.
An orderly appears,
holds up a calloused finger,
then whistles while he sweeps silky, black strands
from the floor.
Finished,
he rests the broom against the wall,
looks up, and says,
“You can go now.”
At eight P.M. the phone rings again. I run to the kitchen, heart pounding, and pray.
It’s Mom, which is almost as good. I mean, good, but bad, too. Because what am I going to tell her about Dad?
She sounds worried and drained. “Hundreds of people in a small radius all looking for hotels,” she says. “And no phone calls getting through to New York.
You won’t believe the fiasco.”
I would, I want to say. I do.
She tells me LAX was evacuated, which I know, and that even in LA there are bomb threats.
“I finally called Kerri’s acting teacher,” she says, “the one who ran the camp. She’s very kind. So, for now, we’re staying with her.”
“That’s good,” I say, dreading the next question.
“So, did you speak to your father? I can’t get anything but his message thing.” Her voice is hopeful, expectant. Like she’s assuming I have.
“No,” I whisper. “Not yet. But he did leave me a message this morning. He said it was hard to make calls. So I’m sure he’ll get in touch, Mom. When he can. He’s probably so busy in there, helping. And the cell towers,” I add, remembering. “They went down, too…”
“Jesus, Kyle…” A sob escapes, and she blows her nose.
“I know. But you know Dad. He’ll be fine. I’m sure of it.” I try to sound like I believe it.
“I know, Kyle, thank you. Me, too, honey,” she whispers. “I just wish I could hear his voice…” She starts to say something else, to give me the name and number of the place where she’s staying, but I can’t hear—can’t think—because the call-waiting is beeping.
“Hold on, Mom! Shoot! Wait, never mind! Call me right back!” I hang up to let the other call through.
I can’t miss it. Caller ID shows that it’s Dad.
Air.
Water.
Wings.
Bone.
(How can you be gone?)
I freeze. I can’t get words out, because another thought hits me: what if it’s not Dad calling? What if it’s someone else calling us from his phone? Because he can’t, so they have to. And they’re using his phone to give us the bad news.
“Ky-uh … who … is … ih?” Uncle Matt asks, snapping me out of it. I breathe deeply, and croak out a hello.
“Hey, son, is everything all right?”
I double over with relief. I could cry. Okay, shit. Maybe I do start to cry.
He’s alive. He’s okay.
“Kyle, you there?”
He sounds hoarse, beyond tired. He sounds awful, but I don’t care. I’m so damn happy he’s alive.
