by Rumaan Alam
“Look.” She shook the phone again.
“I can’t see.” In those moments of waking, it was impossible to see anything. You had to force your eyes to focus. But really he meant the phone had gone dark.
She jabbed at it. “Oh, here.”
“What?” He remembered last night, but could not push himself from sleep into wakefulness so quickly. “It looks like no one murdered us.”
She ignored this. “The news.”
The screen before him said nothing. “Amanda, it doesn’t say anything.” Just the date, just the same photograph, a snapshot of the kids they’d used as their Christmas card two years before.
“It was just there.” She needed Clay to share the burden of this information.
He yawned; it went on for a long moment. “Are you sure? What did it say?”
“Of course I’m sure.” Was she? Amanda studied the phone. “How do you see the alerts? It’s not opening the app. But there were four. That same one about the blackout, then another one about the blackout, and something about that hurricane, and one that just said ‘breaking,’ and it was—”
“Breaking what?”
“It just said a bunch of gibberish.”
“They abuse that ‘breaking.’ Breaking, polls show the Liberal Democrats take the lead in the Austrian congressional races. Breaking, Adam Sandler says his new movie is his best work yet. Breaking, Doris Who Gives a Fuck, inventor of the automatic ice cream maker, dead at age ninety-nine.”
“No, like it was. Not even words. Just letters. It must have been a mistake.”
“Maybe that’s the network. The cell network? Maybe there’s something wrong with that? Would a blackout affect that?” Clay didn’t know how the world fit together. Who truly did, though?
“You think there’s something wrong with the cell phones? Or is it just where we are? Because my phone’s been spotty since we got here. It worked in town, when I went to the grocery.”
“We are sort of far away. This happened last year, too, remember? And that place we rented wasn’t nearly as remote.”
Or, she didn’t say, something so bad happened that even the New York Times was affected. Amanda stood and drank from the bottle on the bedside. It was room temperature, and what she most wanted was cold water. “Four news alerts. I didn’t even get that many on election night.” She went to the bathroom, studied the phone as she peed. It did not tell her any more.
Clay pulled on the boxer shorts he’d lost in the night and looked out at the backyard. Despite the portent of storm, it seemed like any other summer morning. Even the wind seemed to have abated. Indeed, had he looked—closer than it was possible for him to look—he’d have understood the stillness as a response to that wind. He’d have noticed that the insects had gone quiet; he’d have noticed that the birds were not calling. Had he noticed, he’d have noted that it was like those strange moments when the moon passed before the sun, that temporary shadow the animals did not understand.
She left the bathroom and passed her husband waiting for his turn. “I’ll make some coffee.” The phone felt heavy in her thin cotton pocket.
Rose was at the kitchen island with a bowl of cereal. Amanda remembered (it was not so long ago) when the girl had needed adult intercession to fetch the bowl, fill it, slice the banana, pour the milk. She had tried not to resent it at the time; she had tried to remember how fleeting those days were. And now they were gone. There was a last time that she had sung the children to sleep, a last time she had wiped the feces from the recesses of their bodies, a last time she had seen her son nude and perfect as he was the day she met him. You never know when a time is the last time, because if you did you could never go on with life. “Hi, baby.” She scooped dry coffee into the paper filter. Another normal, beautiful day, right?
“Can I watch a movie on your computer?”
“The internet is out, honey, otherwise I’d let you watch Netflix. Listen. I have to tell you—”
“This vacation sucks.” Rose had a point to make. Injustice.
“—last night, these people—the Washingtons—the people who own this house, they had to come by, there’s been—” What noun did she need? “There was a problem. With their car. And they were not far from here, so they came here, even though they rented the house to us for the week.” You had to be willing to lie, to be a mother or maybe just a person. Sometimes you had to lie.
“What are you talking about?” Rose already didn’t care. She wanted to text Hazel and see what she was doing. Hazel was probably watching television right that very minute.
“There was a problem with the car and they weren’t far away and they knew we were here, but they thought maybe they could just come and explain and—” It was not even hard to dissemble. The children couldn’t hold complex things—even simple things, really—in their heads, and also they didn’t care, beautiful narcissists.
Clay in his boxer shorts and sleepy eyes. “I’ll take some of that coffee.”
Amanda filled a mug. “I was just telling Rose about the Washingtons.”
“Dad, the TV isn’t working.” Rose tugged on his arm. He was the one who would care. He was the one who would help her.
The hot liquid splashed onto his right foot. “Easy, baby.”
“Did you forget to put your bowl in the sink?” Amanda had read a book on how to talk so kids will listen. “Clay, you should put clothes on. Those people are here.” She heard the rudeness in this. “The Washingtons. They’re just downstairs.”
“Dad, can you fix it?”
“Let’s just slow it down.” Maybe they’d been too permissive about screen time, parceled out like the narcotic that it was. Clay was unable to resist her entreaties. As a toddler, she’d called for Daddy in a way that was very specific. A girl needed her father. He put his coffee down and fiddled with the remote control. Snow, a bit of poetry for what you saw when the signal was broken. “Yeah. This doesn’t look like it’s working.”
“Can’t you, like—reset it or something? Or go up onto the roof or whatever?”
“No one is going on the roof,” Amanda said.
“I’m not going on the roof.” He scratched at his belly, stippled with hair, swollen from midnight pasta. “Besides, I’m not even sure if the problem is here, on the roof, or—somewhere else.” His gesture indicated everything around them. Who could answer for the world at large? Was it even . . . still there? “Why don’t you go sit outside. I’ll come join you—I just need to talk to Mom for a second.”
Rose would have preferred television, but also she just needed a task. She would accept her father’s attention. “You’re coming.”
“Just give me two minutes.” He looked past her at the morning, pale yellow and reluctant.
She said “Fine” the way adolescents learn to pronounce it, with all the fervor of any four-letter word. The morning was quiet. It was pretty, but not as interesting as a television show.
Rose slammed the door behind her without entirely meaning to. It was definitely nicer wherever Hazel was. Her television would never not work. Her parents let her have an unlocked Instagram account. Rose sat on one of the white metal chairs and looked at the woods.
Where the yard shrugged away from the house, the grass grew patchy and was then just dust and leaves and weeds at the hem of the woods or wilderness or whatever it was. In the space beyond that, Rose saw a deer, with abbreviated velvet antlers and a cautious yet somehow also bored mien, considering her through dark, strangely human eyes.
She wanted to say “A deer,” but there was no one there to hear her. She looked over her shoulder into the house and saw her parents talking. She wasn’t supposed to go in the pool, but she wasn’t going to go in the pool. She walked down the steps onto the damp grass and the deer just watched her, barely curious. She hadn’t even seen that there was another beside it—no more. There were five deer, there were seven; every time Rose adjusted her eyes to try to understand what she was seeing, she was seeing something new. T
here were dozens of deer. Had she been up higher, she’d have understood that there were hundreds, more than a thousand, more than that, even. She wanted to run inside and tell her parents, but she also wanted to just stand there and see it.
14
RUTH WOKE WITH LUCID EYES AND SUDDEN MEMORY. THAT familiar sensation of jerking awake when you’re falling asleep, something you take for private idiosyncrasy then learn is part of the human condition. The quotidian sounds of morning: water in pipes, someone else’s footsteps, a conversation from another room. She was desperate for Maya. She was in bed but also still in the car, thinking of the girl: baby at her breast, toddler on her lap, ten with thick limbs and box braids, terse teen in flannel shirt and too many earrings, college girl, blushing wife, radiant mother. Every version of Maya overlapped in Ruth’s mind. The green light on the cable box showed her that the power still flowed. Her cell phone still did not seem to reach the world, but she hadn’t expected it to. She let George sleep, crept upstairs.
In the kitchen, Ruth picked up the telephone Danny had suggested installing. The contractor had some kind of hold over George. Men of G. H.’s generation didn’t think of affection for other men. That had made it the more charming and then annoying to watch G. H. fall under Danny’s spell. The man was a manual laborer; G. H. had gone to Harvard Business School. But Danny was muscled and capable in his chambray shirts, sleeves rolled over firm forearms, sunglasses perched on the back of his head. She pressed the receiver against her ear. Not the steady basso of a phone ready to be dialed; the dirge that told you the thing was already dead. For a terrible moment Ruth couldn’t quite imagine the sound of her daughter’s voice. What did Maya, today’s Maya, the real person, sound like?
As an adult, she was the same as she’d been as a child, mostly bemused by her parents. She favored long, strange dresses in a riot of colors and patterns. Her children were called Beckett and Otto and toddled around on the back lawn naked. Ruth didn’t understand their names or the fact that they had foreskins, but she kept this to herself. She put the phone down, too forceful, maybe.
The couple were in the living room. The man was barely dressed, the woman in her comfortable clothes.
Amanda tried not to show that she was startled. “Good morning.”
Ruth returned this pleasantry, as was normal. It was insincere or inaccurate, or perhaps both. “The telephone is still out.”
“We were just— Amanda had alerts on her phone this morning.”
“What did they say?” Ruth wondered why her phone had told her nothing. She never could quite master the damn thing.
“The same thing, a blackout. Then something about that hurricane. Then an update, then something that was just gibberish.” This was the third time she’d explained it; the information felt even more meaningless now.
“Let me get you some coffee,” Clay said. He felt embarrassed, undressed.
“A hurricane. That’s something.” Ruth tried to make it mean something.
“Is it?” Clay handed her a mug (her mug).
“Well, yes, maybe it’s related. To the power outage. That could be. There was Hurricane Sandy, of course. I don’t remember hearing that this one was bound for New York, but I wasn’t paying close attention, I have to admit.” They’d all heard, she knew, that those storms of the century were going to be storms of the decade. That there might have to be a new category introduced to accurately describe the kinds of storms, now that humankind had so altered the ocean.
“I’m not sure what to tell the kids.” Amanda looked at the stranger as though she might have some advice, then turned toward the French doors, and they all did, all looked at Rose, standing down in the yard.
“How old is she?” Years ago, Ruth was asked to help out in the school office. Dalton wanted to increase diversity. Now Ruth was immune to kids’ germs and mostly impervious to their charms.
“Just thirteen. Last month.” Amanda was protective. “But still kind of a baby at heart. So I would love to keep . . . things between the adults.”
“There’s no need to worry them.” At school, Ruth treated kids as the selves they’d inevitably be. The boys who would turn out handsome and therefore catered to, the girls who would turn out pretty and therefore cruel, the rich ones who would become Republicans, the rich ones who would become drug addicts, the rich ones who would exceed their parents’ expectations of them, the poor ones who would prosper and the poor ones who would skulk from Princeton back to East New York. She knew that childhood was a temporary condition. But being a grandmother had made her soft.
“I don’t want the kids to panic over nothing.” Amanda tried not to imply that this was what Ruth and her husband had done.
Ruth’s mother would have invoked God. Life was about making sure your children do better than you did, and Ruth’s atheism was a definite improvement. You can’t get through life dismissing the incomprehensible as divine. “I don’t want to scare anyone.” But she was afraid. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“We have—there are eggs, cereal, you know.” Clay held a banana, not knowing how like a primate he looked in that moment. “I’m going to go get dressed,” he said, quite forgetting his promise to his daughter. He had a plan.
Ruth sat. She felt safe in small talk. “So. What is it you do?”
This Amanda understood. “I’m in advertising. On the client side. Manage relationships.” She sat, too, crossed one leg over the other.
Ruth took her turn. “I’m retired now. I was in admissions. At the Dalton school.”
Amanda couldn’t help sit up a little straighter. Perhaps there was an angle. Her children, not exceptional (still wonderful in her estimation!), could do with an advantage. She knew the tuition was a suggestion. Families like theirs relied on the largesse of luckier people. “That’s so interesting.”
From her old office Ruth sometimes saw Woody Allen, poking around in the house directly opposite. That was one of three or four interesting things about it. She was happy to be free. “And your husband?”
“Clay? He’s a professor. English, but also media studies.”
“I’m not sure I know what that means.” She said it like a little joke on herself.
Amanda was never entirely clear on it either. “Films. Literacy. The internet. The truth, that kind of thing.”
“At Columbia?”
“City College.” It seemed like a disappointment, since the woman’s first guess had been the Ivy but Amanda was proud.
“I was at Barnard. Then Teachers College.” Ruth was doing this routine because she wanted to understand these people a little better. It was a give-and-take.
“A true New Yorker. I went to Penn. Philadelphia seemed so urban to me. So exotic.” She remembered driving onto campus, her parents’ Corolla bursting with jersey sheets, desk lamp, shower caddy, Tori Amos poster. The place had looked flat. She heard “city” and had been picturing buildings reaching for the sky. Still, it was better than Rockville. REM was right: nobody says hello, don’t talk to anybody they don’t know. “I wish I’d gone to college in New York.”
“Well, I’m from Chicago.” Ruth said it like it was the best place to be from. “But I suppose I’m a true New Yorker now. More years there than not.”
G. H. had dressed—skipping the dirty underwear and sweat-in socks, not bothering with the tie—and made up the bed. Not making up the bed was no kind of life. He had tried to prepare himself, the usual ablutions, but was vague about what he was preparing himself for. “Good morning.”
Amanda stood to greet him, some formality she did not know was her nature.
“Any news?” He listened to Amanda’s report of what they barely knew and wished he could see the news, but he also wished he could see the market. He wanted information but also vindication. “The storm, I’m sure. A downed limb.”
“The landlines don’t go. That’s the whole reason Danny said to put one in.” Ruth didn’t mind being mollified, but she did not want to be lied to.
&n
bsp; “The power is still on.” G. H. did not want this overlooked. “Maybe today we should drive over to Danny’s.” If you were going to be under some kind of terrorist siege, you’d want to be with Danny.
“Who’s Danny? Are there neighbors nearby? We passed that farm stand, just before the turn onto the lane. There must be someone there. Maybe they know something.” Amanda did not know that the itch she felt was so like the one that afflicted her husband when he was too long without nicotine. She wanted away.
“What if. Collective hysteria. Groups of people get some malady that turns out to just be a shared delusion. Hundreds of people with tremors and fever, imagining a rash. They can even make their skin turn pink.” G. H. was only offering a theory.
Ruth brought her husband a coffee. “You’re going to call me hysterical—the word people, men, use for women.” Cassandra had, of course, been right about Troy.
“We saw the same thing. Something happened, sure, I think we can agree.” But this was a technicality, it was the nature of the world, things happening.
“You drove.” She meant he ran. “You were as afraid as me.”
“Well, the elevator.” Their floor was termed the fourteenth, but it was not. The building lacked a thirteenth floor because that was terrible luck. Simply pretending it wasn’t there was better.
Amanda felt embarrassed. She didn’t know these people and couldn’t watch them bicker. “Where does Danny live?”
“Not far. You can’t do anything in life without the right information. I’ll drive over there.” G. H. looked out at the day. The morning looked odd to him, but he could not articulate why, could not be certain it was not context instead of fact.
“I don’t want you going anywhere.” Ruth scoffed at the idea of seeking refuge at Danny’s, like he was their son instead of someone they paid. She was working through all the possible scenarios. Some Muslim with nothing to live for strapped into explosives. Another plane crash—why didn’t those happen more? It was brilliant to turn a plane into a weapon.
The little house felt safe. Amanda understood.
