City on Fire (16 page)

Nearer now, he heard the click of the conductor’s ticket punch, a tiny, elegant noise, like a beak stabbing at a tree. He dug in his jacket pocket and came up with a crumpled glove and a stick of Juicy Fruit gone brittle in its wrapper. And what if the conductor was onto him? What if they were searching all eastbound trains for a boy, 28 waist, 34 length, with missing pants? He didn’t want to call attention to himself, so he stopped humming. He had made up his mind—he owed it to Sam—to get home without getting caught.

Maybe it was a good thing, then, that there’d been no news of her yet. Because say she was at Bellevue, say some anchor had come on the radio between Wild Cherry and the Sunshine Band and said, like, Central Park shooting, trauma center, Bellevue; could he be certain he wouldn’t still be on this train, trying to escape, trying to convince himself that he could be more help to her if he was free, with no one knowing the whole thing was, indirectly, his fault?

He tried again to pray. He wasn’t sure for what—to go back in time, do things differently, make her get better?—and he’d thought, back at Penn Station, that this was the problem. But it wasn’t. Nor was the problem his nonexistent Hebrew, or the welter of distractions, the little hum of the train’s toy engine, the townships rattling past, the other passengers, the clickety-click of the conductor’s puncher; it was the silence behind all these, the answering silence. And maybe Charlie Weisbarger got no answer to his prayers because he didn’t know whom to address: the G-d of Mom and Dad, who had (though he did his best to forget it) plucked him from an orphanage when he was ten weeks old, or the intercessory Virgin to whom his biological ancestors had turned for help, or the longhaired, easygoing Jesus who was Just All Right with the Godspell kids at school … ? Before he could arrive at an answer, the conductor was standing over him. “Tickets, please, all tickets.”

“I think I got on the wrong train,” he heard himself mumble, untruthfully. “Is this the Garden City?”

“This is the Oyster Bay, kid. Do you not listen to announcements?”

“I meant to go to Garden City.”

The conductor, a short man, was large of hand, impassive of face—it was a long shift—but wiry like the boy’s father had been. Adoptive father, Charlie forced himself to remember, yet the best and only one he’d known. “You’ll have to get off at the next stop, go back and transfer.”

“What if I just stay on? I could call my mom to pick me up at … uh, Glen Cove or something.”

“You still need a ticket.”

“But I only have enough money for Garden City.”

This, too, was a bluff. But maybe some trace of his insanity gambit still clung to him, or maybe the conductor took him for homeless and felt sorry for him, or perhaps he was simply infected by the urge to turn his back on the malice of the previous year, because he just said, “Jesus Christ, kid. Do whatever you’ve got to do,” and moved on.

No, this was definitely a glimmer of divinity. Some force out there wanted him to get home, and was preserving him for a greater purpose. As soon as he knew he was home free, he would scour every newspaper, call every hospital, if necessary, to find out about Sam. By the time the wires slowed again and the train hit Flower Hill, he was already, in his mind, at her bedside, making amends.

13

CURTAIN UP. Or there were no curtains up. Where was she? A large window. Light on a painted wall. Right: the new apartment. The fourteenth floor. Brooklyn. Like almost everything in her life right now, the curtains were in a box somewhere in the great jumble of boxes, likely the very last one she’d think to look in. Regan believed, or believed she believed, that the contents of boxes shifted around when the lids were closed, and even sometimes teleported from box to box, so that whatever you most desired at any given moment was wherever you weren’t looking for it. Was this a metaphor for something? Light from the east-facing window smashed into her face like a blunt-force trauma. Was this a metaphor for something? And why hadn’t she noticed it before? She was usually up earlier, was why. Someone was up—she could smell eggs, and the TV was on in the living room—but it wasn’t, apparently, her. Why couldn’t the TV be in a box instead, and the curtains be up? Chalk dust seemed to cover her mouth and throat. Her thumb throbbed. Pain crept from her temples back into the vault of her skull, where her withered brain now sat, tiny ruler on its outsized throne, nattering to itself instead of doing what it should have been doing, which was sleeping off its hangover. She’d had too much champagne—had thrown it up, she recalled now, on the edge of the FDR, which accounted for the chalky mouth, though she must have brushed her teeth, she wouldn’t have gone to bed without brushing, would she? Honestly, who could remember? She felt sure that if she turned over, away from the sunlight, the back of her brain would slosh against her brainpan, and the pain would start to oscillate, but she had to do it or she’d never fall back asleep. Holding shut the curtains of her eyelids, she took a breath and rolled, groaning. Some undercurrent of activity in the next room came to a stop. “Mom?” She should really get up, she wasn’t sure how she felt about Will using the stove while she slept, but eggs smelled like death. This was a symptom of her hangovers, she remembered, which, at the time she’d put hangovers behind her, had become baroque profusions of symptoms. Synesthesia. Racing pulse. Auditory oddities. Grandiosity. Self-loathing. Neurosis. An inability, once awakened, to do the only thing that could cure her, which was fall back asleep. She pulled a pillow over her head and peeped cautiously at the nightstand clock. 8:15. How could they already be awake, when on any other morning, getting Will out of bed this early would have been like pulling teeth? Why, in the box of her life, couldn’t they still be in bed, dreaming sweetly, pure potential? The pain meant business now, hurrying back toward her cerebellum with dirk and dagger. In her mind, she rehearsed next steps. Sit up. Brush again; drink from the faucet; wash down aspirin. Prepare her face to meet the faces … Ugly, but necessary. Because if there was one thing Regan knew about herself it was that she wouldn’t be falling back asl

CURTAIN UP. TV still on, though not cartoons anymore; the wall-muffled voices were too adult for that. Also: the shower was running. Flannel pillowcases shrouded her head like a mummy’s, but inside there was simply nothing. She couldn’t have tied her shoe right now. She was amazed she even had the language left to think with, assuming people thought in language at all. She let the crack of light between the pillows widen. It was almost ten, the clock said. To drowse further would have been an abdication; she’d had her eight hours, more or less. And yet every movement took her further beyond the envelope of warmth her body had hollowed out in the night. She had to try to find her way back to that exact posture. But what had roused her this time? It wasn’t the clock, since she hadn’t set the alarm, and it wasn’t the TV, since that was on already. No, it was the sense of being watched. With heroic effort, she turned onto her back and let her injured hand flop out of the way, and there, just inside the bedroom’s open door, were popsicle-stick legs jutting from a nightgown. Hair wild with static. It was Cate.

“Will said not to come, but I said you would want me to.”

Each syllable was a miniature hammer tapping at the dam that held back Regan’s headache. She peeled the cover off of a warm wedge of bed and patted it. “Come here, sweetie. But be … easy, Mommy’s head hurts.”

It was too late. Any uncertainty had vanished as Cate scampered over and catapulted into the bed. And of course it was a kind of relief, to have this little furnace wriggling in next to one, reminding one that there were other and more important bodies than one’s own. A hand crept across her forehead like a small domestic animal, feeling her for fever, as she’d done so many times for Cate. It had become one of her favorite feints, when she didn’t want to go to Keith’s. Mommy, I’ve got a fever, feel my forehead.

“I’m fine, honey.” Lines were forming in the lineless face, cinching it into a moue of displeasure. Realizing how her breath must smell, Regan covered her mouth. “Sorry.”

“Mommy! What happened to your hand?” Cate was already examining the bandaged thumb like a fortune-teller, and as much as it hurt, Regan loved this, the thoughtless thoughtfulness, the way Cate, at six, hadn’t quite internalized-slash-hallucinated the difference between her own pain and the pain of others.

“It’s nothing, sweetie. A scratch.”

“Do we still have to go to Dad’s?”

“Absolutely.” A spasm exploded out of Regan’s head as she sat up. “Listen, do you think you could bring Mommy a glass of water and some aspirin?”

“Will won’t come out of the bathroom.”

“Don’t tattle, sweetie. Anyway, it’s in my bathroom. There should be a first-aid kit on the counter. The bottle says A, S, P … If it’s not there, it’s in one of the boxes.”

Having a job to do seemed to soak up the anxiety that otherwise swam around Cate. She was her mother’s daughter. But it took her a quarter of the time it would have taken Regan to find the aspirin. She watched, satisfied, as her mother shook three pills into her hand, and then monitored to see that she washed them down with water. “You’re going to make a great doctor someday, Cate.”

“A pony doctor.”

“A veterinarian. Now, honey,” Regan said, almost whispering, enlisting Cate in a conspiracy. “I need about twenty minutes for these to start working. Do you think you can make sure your brother doesn’t come in?”

Cate nodded.

“Twenty minutes, I’ll be up, I promise. Now come here.” She plastered a kiss on Cate’s forehead, and as she lay back against the pillows and let her eyelids drift south, she could hear the girl skipping off to wait outside the kids’ bathroom to lord it over Will.

CURTAIN UP, AGAIN. It was nearly noon, the clock said, and the bone-white walls and brilliantined floors around her throbbed with yellow light. There were windows on two sides. The real-estate broker had gone on and on about “southern exposure”—it had seemed to be her rejoinder to every reservation Regan voiced about the apartment, which she’d had to find on short notice. “Oh, but the exposure is magnificent.” Regan’s disposition toward all of humanity had been pretty mistrustful at that point, and so she couldn’t quite credit the enthusiasm of the woman, who was after all trying to sell her something. They’d had southern exposure on East Sixty-Seventh, too, but all it had meant was a nice view of the windows of the nearly identical building across the street. And after a couple of weeks in this new place, she’d forgotten about it, just as she’d forgotten about the other selling points. Utilities included meant you were at the landlord’s mercy for the temperature and duration of the heat and hot water. Cozy bedrooms/closets meant one or the other, take your pick. They’d moved in right in the middle of the lightless part of the year, when the sky warmed at best to the hue of skim milk. By the time she got home from work, the last sun would be bleeding off the horizon beyond the World Trade Center, and just before she pulled the blinds, the canted bowl of the harbor would appear to her as a sheet of lead, broken only by the lights of a slow-moving ferry. Now she understood: here in Brooklyn Heights, there were no obstructions to block the view, and when, as today, the clouds parted, midday light poured off the water like a second sky. It was like trying to sleep on the surface of the sun.

She peeled back the gauze she didn’t quite remember putting on her thumb. Against the orange coverlet, the slash looked livid, possibly infected. Besides which, there was that other affliction: her father, sixty-eight and at best halfway senile, was going to be arraigned on Monday. She wished again that her brother were here to help her stay upright. Still, the light on the walls and bedspread and on the gold hair of her arms answered to something deep in her body. And there was the imminent likelihood of coffee, which, with great foresight, she’d bought yesterday. So much for alcoholism. Okay, world. Okay. She was getting up.

SHE SHUFFLED into the big room in slippers and bathrobe, careful not to spill her steaming coffee, or to trip over the boxes piled inside the doorway. The Christmas tree looked lonesome in its corner, with no furniture to surround it. All it took to turn a tannenbaum unlovely, it turned out, was direct sunlight. A few twists of wrapping paper had blown like dust bunnies into the corner. A wreath of dry needles decorated the floor.

“Geez, Mom. You look like Edith Bunker,” Will said, and turned back to the TV before she could compose her face into whatever reaction he wanted. The separation seemed to have aged him already. The way he closed down now when around her, became inward and world-weary, was prominent in her ledger of regrets. She sat down on the couch beside him, and he stared and stared at the commercials, as if the answers to life’s great questions might at any moment flash across the bottom of the screen. In the old apartment, they’d had a strict limit, five hours of tube per week; he might have exceeded that already today, but of the many elements of the old dispensation that had suddenly evaporated, this one seemed, for now, the least worth haggling over. “Where’s your sister?”

He shrugged.

“Well, I appreciate your making her breakfast.” She brushed the wet hair back out of his eyes. She knew he thought he was ugly, because he was at that age, but to her, even in pajama bottoms and one of Keith’s old stretch-necked tee-shirts—even if he would never forgive her—he was beautiful. “You’ve been great to her, through all of this. I know it’s going to mean a lot to her someday. It means a lot to me.”

“Mom—”

“Okay.” She offered him her mug, and he took a sip of coffee, trying not to let her see him grimace at the taste.

“Cate said you weren’t feeling good,” he said.

“I’m fine, I’ll be fine.”

“Did you have a good time, at least? Did you see Grandpa?”

“He and your grandmother loved the Christmas gifts,” she said. The kids didn’t know about the Mayo Clinic visit, and now wasn’t the time.

“Cate’s in her room, I think, packing. It’s like she’s got to choose her five best stuffed animals and all her best picture-books and every single last sweater she might want to wear.”