There was an issue of Time Out magazine with an ad circled for a performance of the Netherlands Dance Theater. There was her “To Do” list that she always kept on her night table. Louie, karate suit? Special dinner Thursday—order ice-cream cake. A couple of phone numbers of baby-sitters she wanted to try for the weekend, part of her new plan to leave Wendy free to live her own teenage life. A few scribbled notes: Vacuum cleaner bags! Coffee! Cover the gray!
Her bathrobe was hanging on the hook on the bathroom door. On the counter, the red nail polish was out. She had worn the sandals.
Wendy picked up a book, open on her nightstand. Understanding Your Teenager. And a thinner volume: Pablo Neruda, Veinte Poemas de Amor, in Spanish and English.
She walked through the familiar room as if it were a museum. She didn’t have to study the photographs, she knew them all—the one of her mother and Josh on their wedding day; Josh holding Louie right after he was born, his hair even crazier than usual, with the biggest grin. One of her and Louie at the beach the summer before, and another of Wendy by herself, paddling a canoe in Maine.
Wendy had never liked this picture. She wasn’t smiling, and her expression was firm, almost to the point of looking mad. The wind had been very stiff on the lake that day, and the canoe had been hard to handle. Josh had wanted to help her, but Wendy said no, she wanted to steer herself. It took forever to get that boat in to shore, but she had done it.
I wish you wouldn’t choose that picture to have up, Wendy had told her mother.
I don’t need a picture to tell me how pretty you are, her mother said. What I like about this one is how strong you look, how determined you were that day. I look at this and I know you’re going to be a survivor.
It was past two when Wendy finally went to bed. With everything that had happened, she still brushed her teeth. She put on her rabbit pajamas from the night before. Nothing else was the same, but her clothes were. She got under the covers.
All day she hadn’t cried, and even now, alone in the dark, waiting for the tears, none came. It was as if someone had injected Novocain in the place where crying happened, and all she felt was this horrible gray numbness. She stared at the ceiling, the glow-in-the-dark stars her mother had put there so long ago that they hardly glowed anymore. The poster of Madonna, in her cowboy hat. Her science fair ribbon, First Place. Topic: Why Do Your Ears Pop?
Outside the window, there was an unsettling stillness—no sirens, no planes overhead, just the sound of the late-night delivery trucks. Wendy had been listening for the sound of Josh’s key in the door but he hadn’t come home yet. Twice she heard Louie cry out, but he’d gone back to sleep both times.
She thought about the night she and her mother had been home in the apartment, watching a rerun of Grease on TV. Louie was just a baby then, but he was asleep, so it was just the two of them sitting on the couch, and the words came on the screen, We interrupt this program ...
It was the news that Princess Diana had been in a car accident. At first all they said was “badly injured.” Then the news that she was dead.
Her mother had started to cry. I know it’s crazy, she said. I never even got to see her in real life. There was just something that made me like her so much. Maybe because she was a single mom, too.
Wendy got up from her bed and walked over to her backpack. She took out her Walkman, still with the same CD in it that she’d been playing that morning, a million years ago. She slipped on the headphones and skipped to number seven, her favorite, the lullaby Sade wrote for her daughter. She climbed back into bed and wrapped the blanket over herself, though she was still shivering.
She had played this one for her mother once, and after that her mother had made her push the Repeat button so they listened to it ten times in a row, at least. She tried to sing along with Sade. “I will always remember this moment,” she sang. Off-key, of course. But crying.
For Wendy now, it was like that time in Maine when they had turned on the water at the cabin they rented that summer, and all they got was a choking sound, and air. She wanted to cry, but nothing came out. She thought about Prince William and Prince Harry, waking up in a palace somewhere that long-ago summer morning, having someone (the queen maybe? Prince Charles, who had already broken their mother’s heart?) tell them their mother’s car had crashed in a tunnel in Paris, and now they would never see her again. She thought of Louie, sitting on her lap, studying the picture in his Babar book, of Babar’s mother, lying on the ground, shot by hunters. But it’s just pretend, right, Sissy? he said. Maria, bent over the motionless body of Tony, in West Side Story. No no no. Sade again, asking the moon to protect her daughter as she slept. No moon now.
In English class, they’d had a vocabulary word recently that was new to her, as few of them were—the verb keen.
It’s a sound a person makes when they’re grieving deeply, her teacher said. It might not be loud and dramatic, but it’s like the saddest sound you could imagine, the sound a mother might make over the body of a dead child.
Or the other way around, it occurred to her now, as in the darkened room, in the dim glow of the blue plastic stars, she heard a sound she barely recognized, and because of the strange numb feeling, it took a moment to realize the sound came from her. She couldn’t cry, but she was keening—the same one word, over and over, though it had been years since she’d actually called her mother that. Mama.
She didn’t think she’d fall asleep, but she must have, because then she woke up and it was morning. For about three seconds, she forgot what had happened, and it was like regular life, but with this creeping memory that something wasn’t right.
Josh was in the kitchen. He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday. He had their photograph albums out and he was turning the pages very slowly.
We need a picture, he said. We have to make flyers. At the hospitals last night people were putting them up. I should have thought of that before.
He was staring at a photograph of her mother in Nantucket last summer. She had on jeans and a T-shirt and her head was thrown back as if she was laughing. Telling him to quit taking so many pictures probably.
I think it might be better to use one of her in her work-type clothes, Wendy said. One that’s more like how she’d have been dressed when she went to her job yesterday.
Right, he said, but he was still holding the one from Nantucket. Maybe we could put two different pictures on the flyer.
Good idea. She put a hand on his arm.
Wendy looked at him sitting there—such a familiar face, but she had never seen him like this before. This morning, he reminded her of a kid. Like Louie, in fact. That same lost look her brother had when she read to him the day before.
It was unnerving seeing him this way. Josh, the one who came running to her field hockey game when she turned her ankle, carrying a cooler with an ice pack inside. The one who walked her to the bus in the worst weather, long after the point where everyone else went by themselves. I just want to see you get on safely, he said. Humor me.
This morning he looked at her and said, What are we supposed to do now?
Her mother was nine years older than Josh. When she met him, she was thirty-four. He was twenty-five. Your friends will think I’m a cradle robber, she said.
My friends will wish you’d robbed their cradle instead, he said.
When I’m forty-five, you’ll only be thirty-six, she said. When I’m fifty, you’ll be forty-one. I’ll be this old wrinkled prune and you’ll be this cool jazz guy with young chicks falling all over you.
Please, Janet, he said. It hurts me when you say things like that.
I just don’t know what I’d do if you ever stopped loving me this way, she said.
The only thing I don’t like about the nine years between our ages, he said, is those were nine years I didn’t get to know you.
Sitting at the kitchen table now—same place he had filled out her school forms the day before, and paid the bills, and did the taxes every spring b
ecause her mother could never do anything involving numbers—Josh stared at the blank paper. He had started five different versions and ripped them all up.
“Have you seen my wife?” he wrote, finally.
I think maybe we should just write “Missing,” she told him.
“Last seen on her way to work at the law offices of Mercer and Mercer, Tower 1, World Trade Center, eighty-seventh floor. Brown hair, hazel eyes. Wearing red high-heeled sandals and a red silk wraparound dress with purple flowers. Any information at all.”
The new dress would have blown open a little at the bottom when she walked over subway vents on the sidewalk. Or when a gust of wind came. Wendy could see her mother standing in front of the mirror at Macy’s last weekend, trying it on.
It’s too expensive, she said.
Get it, Wendy told her.
You don’t think it’s too daring for work?
You look beautiful.
It would go perfectly with my red sandals. We could share. This dress would look great on you, too.
Wendy knew it wouldn’t. Her mother had a waist. Wendy could see her there, twirling in front of the three-way mirror, like the ballerina figure inside her jewelry box, that started dancing when you opened it.
Okay, then, her mother said. You only live once.
A few of Josh’s musician friends and Josh’s sister, Andy, said they’d help put up flyers. It didn’t seem as important anymore to stay by the phone. Kate was going over to the armory to fill out missing-persons forms and then to the Chelsea Piers. She’d heard there were some people they’d found wandering around who couldn’t remember their names. A day ago, it would have sounded scary to Wendy to think of her mother like that, but now it would be good news. So what if she didn’t know who she was anymore. They could remind her.
Josh had gotten all the way over to Kinko’s before he found out he didn’t have his wallet, but they let him make copies of his flyer anyway. Everyone who saw them now had this sickening look of sympathy on their faces. Either that or you had to look at them with the same sickening look, because they were printing up flyers, too.
The mother of Louie’s best friend, Corey, came over to pick him up. Oh, honey, she said, putting her arms around Wendy. Life isn’t supposed to be this hard.
Don’t worry about Louie, Corey’s mother told them, hoisting his overnight bag onto her shoulder. Leave him with us as long as you need. You know how often Janet helped me out.
Helps, she said.
In the kitchen, Louie and Corey were doing karate kicks with each other. It was one of their usual games, but Wendy had never seen Louie act like this, yelping and lurching and punching Corey in the stomach as if he was drunk.
My mom’s in the World Trade Center, but it isn’t there anymore, he yelled.
Stop it, Louie, said Wendy
My mom got captured by space aliens.
You know that’s not true, Louie.
She ran away, he said. She fell out the window and nobody caught her. He was spinning in circles now. He was holding onto Pablo by the ribbon and flinging him. He was gasping for breath, and there was drool coming out his mouth. Another second and he was going to fall down.
Everybody’s just pretending. My mom isn’t ever coming home, he said.
Come on, Louie, Corey’s mom said, picking him up off the floor. Let’s go get ice cream.
I just got one question, he yelled back over his shoulder as they were going down the stairs. What’s a body bag?
Wendy had never seen Josh like this. They were halfway down the stairs before he realized he didn’t have the flyers. She had to remind him to stop at Wal-greens for tape, and when he got there, the first thing he’d picked up was Scotch tape, when what they needed was duct tape, so if it rained, the flyers wouldn’t come right down. But the weather was perfect. There was that anyway.
At least she isn’t cold, he said. At least she isn’t wet.
One of the jazz guys, Roberto, was covering the Upper West Side. The trumpet person took midtown in the Fifties, and two other guys—sax and drums—headed east. Josh was handling SoHo as far as they’d let you go, and the Village. He wanted to be close to where she was, close as they’d let him go. Wendy was covering Chelsea down to Union Square.
It wasn’t hard to know where to put her signs, because already there were so many others. She didn’t mean to, but she couldn’t help stopping to read them.
Amalia Garcia, shown holding a baby in a pink ruffled dress. “Age thirtyone. Five feet four, 140 pounds. Has a butterfly tattoo on her left shoulder. Any information at all, please call”
Timothy Garvin, Fire Company 237, age twenty-four. The kind of person Amelia would have called a hunk, shown wrestling with his dog on the floor of an apartment somewhere. “Last seen heading into Tower 1. . . .”
Jessica Robards. Twenty-seven. Pictured in her wedding dress. “Has a mole on her right thigh and is wearing a cross with a ruby in the middle. Jess, we miss you!”
The part she hated about putting up the flyers was having people look at you with so much pity. She knew what they were doing, because she herself had looked at people that way in the past—usually homeless people on the street, holding up signs that said i HAVEN’t EATEN FOR TWO DAYS, or HAVE AIDS AND TRYING TO GET HOME.
She would prefer if people didn’t know it was her mother on the flyers. But mostly she could tell from the looks they gave her that people understood.
She’s so pretty, one woman said. I bet you’re feeling mighty worried, a guy said to her. Another man gave her a mimeographed pamphlet of Bible verses. A woman who was taping up flyers of her daughter put her arms around Wendy and said, Maybe they’re together.
By two o’clock, Wendy’s stack of a hundred flyers was nearly gone. She had saved a handful to put up at Union Square.
When she got there, she saw a few hundred people had gathered—putting up flyers or just looking. Someone had rolled out a bunch of white paper and taped it down on the sidewalk, and now people were kneeling on it, writing poems and messages. There were half a dozen satellite trucks from television stations and a reporter Wendy recognized, standing in front of a camera, talking. Along the fence at the south end of the park, people had been leaving bunches of flowers and notes. There were lighted candles and kids on benches playing music and Hare Krishna people in orange robes chanting. The fence was covered with flyers. By now, Wendy had seen enough of them that some of the faces actually looked familiar.
Have you seen this person?
Yes. On a flyer.
She pulled her roll of duct tape out of her backpack again. Also the scissors. She cut half a dozen pieces and stuck them on her pants leg the way she’d seen Buddy Campion doing at school last week, putting up campaign posters. She stuck one at the far end of the fence, right next to Amalia Garcia.
By now, it was actually hard finding a spot to stick up her flyers, but she was careful not to cover up even a corner of anybody else’s. That would be bad luck.
It was almost four o’clock when she taped her last flyer up at the Twenty-third Street subway station in front of the Flatiron Building. When she was done, she stood there for a moment, reading over the words again: “Red silk dress. Five feet four and a half, 113 pounds. Wearing red open-toed sandals.”
She looked at the face of her mother in her suit—a picture Josh had taken of the two of them on Take Your Daughter to Work Day three years ago—and the other, from Nantucket.
She thought about stories she’d read in magazines—about people getting murdered, or getting buried in an avalanche, or turning into a vegetable on account of riding in a car with defective tires or having a leg ripped off by a shark. She hated it about herself, but the truth was that a part of her liked reading those stories. She turned to them first when she leafed through the magazines at Just Cuts or the dentist. She used to study the faces of the people that awful things happened to, to see if there was any clue, when the picture was taken, that something awful would happen to th
em in the future.
Now the face in the picture was her own slim, beautiful, laughing mother. She knew the face better than anybody’s except her own. Only now, for the first time, it struck her that her mother looked different. Not quite like her mother anymore, but almost like someone who used to be her mother. She was always saying what a lucky woman she was, but all of a sudden she didn’t look lucky anymore.
Thursday morning neither of them—not Wendy, not Josh—mentioned this was preschool orientation day, the day that Louie had been planning for all summer, trying to decide which of his costumes to wear—the wizard suit or the cowboy or Aladdin. Wendy knew school had been canceled on Wednesday, but Amelia had called to find out if there was any news and let her know school was on again today.
I don’t feel like going to school, Wendy said. She looked over at Josh to see if he’d say anything, but he didn’t. He was staring at photograph albums again.
Josh’s sister, Andy, came over. You can’t just sit here forever, she said. Let me take you someplace.
Where?
We could go for a walk. We could go up to the Cloisters and look out at the Hudson River for a while. You could help me wash my car.
He looked at her as if she were a person from another planet. Why would I wash a car today? he asked.
I don’t know, she said. I guess you wouldn’t.
Andy had heard how they met, of course, but she let Josh tell her again.
It was a gig I almost didn’t take, he said. Give me a break—all the way out past Rahway for some dumb wedding where you know you’re going to have to play “Up Where We Belong” and they won’t even have decent food.
I did it as a favor for Roberto, period. The bass player he’d lined up canceled at the last minute. Not that this was a crowd that was likely to ask for their money back if there was no bass line.
The Usual Rules Page 5
