Little Panic

by Amanda Stern

  I don’t have a baby, but I do have a dog, and I understand my job even more clearly now.

  Back at home, after the park, Busy puts one sweet little paw on my leg, and as my love swells, the dread comes with it: One day, this perfect little beast will be dead. What am I going to do without her? So many people I’ve loved have died or fallen away. Now I’m afraid that all the time I have with this dog will be spent anticipating the day I no longer have her.

  Since I was small I’ve had one foot in the future, never fully present with the time and space inside which I’m standing. Growing up, my mom always focused on what I didn’t have or couldn’t do; she was always in the future somehow, too, trying to get me help, trying to fix me. My dad also was focused on the externals: how we looked, acted, and how we did in school. The focus on what I lacked took precedence over what I had, and without realizing it, I adopted that way of thinking—my lack became my focus, too. Without meaning to, I co-opted a precept I didn’t and don’t actually believe.

  I want to raise a dog the way I would a child—to be self-reliant without the need for enmeshment. I will be present and attentive. I will nurture even that which I do not understand. I will try to understand. I will put myself second. I will be a good mother and pay attention. When there is no longer any Busy in my life, I will think back without regret, grateful that I was conscious and present with her for every one of her days. So I stop and look into the eyes of this dog I still think is too skinny and too little and I say, “Busy, I am your forever mama and this is your forever home and we are a forever family.” Then she puts her head on my leg and falls asleep.

  Maybe Javi was right and there really are two kinds of people: those who worry and those who are grateful. But we’re not beholden to the “kind” of person we’ve been. If I worry all of Busy’s life, I’ll have missed it. If I’m always so afraid of death, I’ll never actually live.

  I try hard to stay present and attuned to the moment, but I can’t help it, a few minutes later I lower my head and make sure she’s still breathing.

  Take Care of the Animals

  I’m thirty-one and have finished my first book. I have a literary agent, and I clean my brother’s yoga school for money; I’m dating a few different people, but no one seriously. After a long period of things not being all right, a phone call with Kara has shocked me into making some choices.

  I call her, crying and depressed.

  “Are you taking your medicine?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You know, something occurred to me the other day.”

  “What?” I’m standing, staring at the chair I’m too depressed to lower myself into.

  “Maybe you should go away somewhere. To a farm in the country. Help with the animals. Life would be so much more manageable for you. You could go for a few months, or longer if you wanted,” she says.

  “A farm?”

  “Yeah.”

  I can smell the country and picture the surroundings, the calm slowness of being in nature, and while I do feel that pace would work for me, I can’t shake what she’s really saying to me—that the real world is too much for me.

  “I’ll think about it,” I tell her.

  When I hang up I sit on my desk and look around my messy apartment. My bedroom floor has been turned into my closet; half-finished art projects are scattered about. I had a bowl of popcorn for dinner last night, and the bowl is in the closet where I fell asleep crying. This is not the apartment of an adult. Can I really not survive the world like everyone else? Kara has presented me with an out. Life would be so much easier on a farm taking care of animals, but is that the right choice for my life? There is so much I want to do, but life does seem harder for me than for others. Do I want to leave real life for a simpler, easier state of existence? The idea makes me feel embarrassed for myself, but it also makes me angry. I know I’m more capable than it seems, but in my family I’ve been the emotionally unstable one for so long, I’m not sure anyone expects much of me, and that’s the standard I’ve been living down to.

  I haven’t heard from Paul, or any of the acting kids, in years, and I am surprised when he calls. He’s married now, to a woman named Claudia, and he’s still acting. We catch each other up on life, and since I know better than to ask after Jonathan at this point, I ask about his parents instead.

  “They’re doing really well,” Paul says. “Considering.”

  “Considering what?” I ask.

  Then, silence.

  “Oh my God. You don’t know,” he said.

  I want to vomit.

  “We didn’t really call anyone or anything; we just let the word spread, but I guess it never reached you,” he says.

  “When did it happen?”

  “Two years ago,” he says.

  “What was the date?”

  “February 21, 1999.”

  “Was there a funeral?” I ask.

  “Yeah. I’m sorry, Amanda. We didn’t do a good job of telling people. It was overwhelming, but I have some small things of his that I’ve given people over the years. You should come uptown sometime and pick something out,” he says.

  “Okay.” I’m quiet for a moment. “Can you tell me why he stopped talking to me?”

  Paul takes a big breath. “He didn’t know he’d live for ten more years. He thought it would be fast, and he didn’t want to put you through any of it. He didn’t want you to see him get ugly, with sores. He moved to New Mexico, away from everyone. It wasn’t just you he cut off, but you were the first. It was unimaginable for him to leave you with memories of him at his worst.”

  “Wow,” I say. “That’s just…That makes me really angry.”

  “I know. That’s why I never told you. I knew if you knew why, you’d force your way back into his life, and he just couldn’t handle you seeing him sick. He just…he couldn’t. He could barely handle his own family seeing him that way.”

  “I wish you had called to tell me. I wish I had known. All this time, two entire years, he’s been dead and I haven’t known.”

  “I’m sorry. We did the best we could. We let a lot of people down.”

  “Send your parents my love, and you, too, okay?” I say.

  “Yeah, I will.”

  “And Paul? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you lost your brother.”

  “Thanks, Amanda. I’m so sorry you lost him, too.”

  When we hang up, something happens to me I can’t describe. I feel enraged and reckless; I want to obliterate myself. I’m so ashamed I spent the last two years not knowing Jonathan was dead. How can I account for that time when everyone was mourning and I was drinking and fucking and laughing and going to parties, in between having panic attacks over things that meant nothing—nothing compared to this? I’m a terrible person. I didn’t know, I didn’t know. Why didn’t I know? I never even assumed he was dead; it never crossed my mind.

  I still can’t believe that for someone so attuned to death, I missed the ones I should have been there for. I’ve had two best friends die, and I didn’t get to say good-bye to either of them because their deaths were withheld from me. People have been keeping the difficulties of life from me since I was small, protecting me from my own truth. I can run away to the country and live on a farm and keep protecting myself from the world as if I really am helpless, or I can fight back against the world and face off against everything I fear, one fear at a time.

  Certainty

  It’s been three years since my mom sold our house. One afternoon I’m early to meet a friend and close to MacDougal Street. I’ve passed the house before, but that was before the new owners moved in. I feel the urge to spy on them, see if they’re treating the house right. I walk on the Dante side of the street, facing the row of houses, but it’s too dark to see inside. I notice that the facade looks faded. I see dried watermarks. The house has been crying.

  I want to know who took our place, to see who is standing where we stood, saying and doing and thinking where we did all
those things. They don’t know about us, just as we didn’t know or think about those who came before us. I want to tell them about Dead Man Smith, and warn the kids that Norman Bates lives in the basement. They should know about Ciggy, Sasquatch, and the lady on the corner; and if Jimmy comes back, they should direct him our way. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Even if I ring the bell and tell them everything I think they should know, I’m just a firsthand person telling stories to a secondhand person, who will inevitably tell some third-hander, and on it goes, until the people I hope will be remembered aren’t people at all, but the stories of people who were once real. I guess that’s who we all are. The stories of ourselves other people tell. Somewhere, though, is the story of us that never got told, some original self that never happened.

  I cross the street and notice that newspapers and trash have collected on the ground outside the front door. The camera Jimmy put up is rusty and broken, dangling by its wires like a nearly severed head. The windows in front are covered by cardboard, so I can’t see inside, down the hall, and into the secret garden. The paint is chipping, the window guards are rusted, and the gold letter slot on the front door has grown a green patina. As I stand and stare, passersby eye me, suspicious. I want to reassure them I’m not a Peeping Tom or, worse, a tourist. I used to live here; this was my home. But now, it seems, we sold it to a ghost. It feels too early for me to be on the other side of this house’s history, but here I am, locked out, with the view blocked by cheap cardboard. No one moved in. I open the mail slot, but I can’t see anything.

  Someone bought it and let it sit here for years, and it’s grown saggy with despair. Stale tears have eroded the paint, leaving milky streaks down its front. Now it’s twice the price. Only wine and real estate are covetable with age. There it sits, the house I grew up in, where everything I feared would happen, happened; where the people and things I love no longer converge and can’t be found. All the garden kids are gone. No one lives new lives on top of our old one. There are no children racing around, sliding down banisters, racing out into the garden; there is no one giving thought to the people who came before. Three years on, the house stands like a premature gravestone. If Jimmy comes back, he won’t know where we went.

  As a little girl, when I left for my dad’s house on the weekends, I always feared the house would be gone when we returned, and in its place a black empty rectangle. But this is worse. The house is here, but its soul is gone. The garden is no longer mine, nor is the school around the corner. Everything important in my life used to orbit in relation to this house, and this house meant my mother and my mother meant home and home meant safe and those things together meant I wouldn’t die. Until Etan Patz disappeared, at least.

  * * *

  When I was in sixth grade, a man was apprehended for luring two small boys into the sewer system. His name was Jose Ramos, but the newspaper dubbed him “the Drainpipe Man.” A known pedophile, he was finally sent to prison in 1985, but he became a suspect in the Patz case when it was revealed that he dated the woman who occasionally cared for Etan. That woman, Sandy, had walked Etan to the school bus in the weeks leading up to his disappearance. Without a body, the Patz family could not pursue a wrongful death suit, and so, in 2001, twenty-two years after their six-year-old son disappeared, his parents declared him legally dead.

  Then, on May 24, 2012, out of the seeming blue, a day before the thirty-third anniversary of his disappearance, a fifty-one-year-old man named Pedro Hernandez confessed to killing Etan Patz. I was forty-two years old and on my way to a picnic in Fort Greene Park when I received the alert on my phone, and I sat down on a nearby stoop, shaking as I read the claims. In 1979, Pedro Hernandez, then an eighteen-year-old stock clerk, was working at the deli adjacent to the school bus stop. When Etan arrived on the corner, gripping his soda money, Hernandez told him to follow him to the basement to get his drink. Hernandez claims that halfway down the stairs, something came over him, and he put his hands around Etan’s little neck and strangled him. He tossed his school bag behind the refrigerator, and put Etan in a box, placed the box inside a garbage bag, and, later that day, hauled the boy down the street and discarded him in an alley.

  I didn’t go to the picnic. I turned around and went home, turned on the news, and read everything I could. But I could not stop shaking. How could this be? I kept thinking. How is it possible that all this time, and all these years we’ve been waiting and looking and hoping, he’s been dead? It made no sense to me; it didn’t add up, not just because the story seemed odd, but because when it comes to this case, I am still a nine-year-old, just as Etan is still six. He disappeared between 8 a.m. and 8:10 a.m., but to me, he didn’t die. He’s been alive all this time because I never knew that he wasn’t. Despite the confession, we will never truly know what happened to him. He got swallowed by the in-between, and life stopped. For some of us life never started again.

  And yet, through all that, and through all those years, not once did my loyal house abandon me. It never disappeared or cut itself out from the world. We, my family, are the abandoners, leaving no one to care for the house that cared for us. The building is my memory, the one solid object that means my past, and here it stands now, an empty legacy that won’t carry any of us with it. Soon we’ll be the memories, but with no children of my own, who will remember me? I never gave birth to those who would miss me most. Will anyone feel the loss of me? Like Etan’s posters, will my memories simply be plastered over one sunny day?

  I still have my key, and people say to let myself in. But after all the years of being afraid someone might break into the house, I can’t now be the intruder. An era is over, my mother says at least twice a year, when the iconic places in the Village fall victim to inflated rents, when someone we’ve known forever dies. But we’re the era now, and we’re ending.

  The landscape is always changing. Behind every new store is an old one, behind every person is an entire lineage, and inside all of us are choices we make again and again until we decide to make better ones.

  * * *

  Now I’m late, and I rush down the street just as a cavalcade of young mothers three abreast push their carriages toward me. I step off the curb and into the gutter, the same one I sank into when my mom told me Melissa died. They pass and I watch their backs grow distant. I am not a part of that world, and I never will be. Neither will Melissa or Etan or Jonathan. We are all just moments in time, a blink in a trillion-year history, even if our existence sometimes feels endless. While I’ll never know if the life I never got would have been better than the life I have now, I do know the lives Etan, Melissa, Jonathan, and Jimmy never got would have been.

  To Be the Same

  When did it start? It started before I was born. It started before my mother was born. It started when friction created the world. When does anything start? It doesn’t; it just grows, sometimes to unmanageable heights, and then, when you’re at the very edge, it becomes clear: Something must be done.

  Left untreated, anxiety disorders, like fingernails, grow with a person. The longer they go untended, the more mangled and painful they become. Often, they spiral out of control, splitting and splintering into other disorders, like depression, social anxiety, or agoraphobia. We rise and fall upon a merry-go-round of their features. Separation anxiety handicaps its captors, preventing them from leaving bad relationships, moving far from home, going on trips, to parties, applying for jobs, having children, getting married, seeing friends, or falling asleep. Some people are so crippled by their anxiety they have panic attacks in anticipation of having a panic attack.

  I’ve had panic attacks in nearly every part of New York City, even on Staten Island. I’ve had them in taxis, on subways, public bathrooms, banks, street corners, in Washington Square Park, on multiple piers, the Manhattan Bridge, Chinatown, the East Village, the Upper East Side, Central Park, Lincoln Center, the dressing room at Urban Outfitters, Mamoun’s Falafel, the Bobst Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library, the main library branch, the
Brooklyn Library, the Fort Greene Farmers’ Market, Laundromats, book kiosks, in the entrance of FAO Schwarz, at the post office, on the steps of the Met, on stoops, at the Brooklyn Flea, in bars, at friends’ houses, onstage, in the shower, in queen-sized beds, double beds, twin beds, in my crib.

  I’ve grown so expert at hiding them, most people would never even know I’m suffering an attack. How, after all, do you explain that a restaurant’s decision to dim their lights swelled your throat shut, and that’s why you must leave immediately—not just the restaurant, but the neighborhood? If you cannot point to something, then it is invisible. Like a cult leader, anxiety traps you and convinces you that you’re the only one it sees.

  The small things you once overlooked begin to accumulate: your grandmother’s agitated voice messages when you don’t return her phone call inside of an hour, how out-of-sorts your father gets when someone is sitting at the table he’s reserved, your mother’s anger when someone makes a mistake. We expect anxiety in others to look like the anxiety that exists inside us, but it often doesn’t, and so we don’t recognize its sundry forms, even when the distress we feel inside our bodies isn’t our own but someone else’s.