Fearless (17 page)

She nodded, not to agree, just to show she had expected that. Her mother was being literal: Carla and Bubble had gotten on the plane to visit her and her husband in their new home. Carla sighed for an answer. She thought, my mother is crazy.

“She wanted to come here. I told her that was crazy.”

“Good,” Carla mumbled. She missed her mother and didn’t want to see her.

“She said she’s going to New York. She’ll be there when we get back.”

The whole family would gather. They would fill the house with black clothes and food and tears.

She shivered. Manny rubbed her arms. Her mouth was dry and tasted bad. “I need a toothbrush.”

“Okay,” Manny said. But he didn’t move, didn’t get out of her arms.

The door opened and Bea Rosenfeld looked in. Carla noticed the glasses first, the big square frames sailing on her nose and two glistening jewels at the corners. She remembered that she had spoken to this woman, but not where or when or about what. For a moment Carla thought that Bea was also a passenger and that they had talked on the runway.

“Hi, I’m Bea Rosenfeld,” She said to Manny. “How are you doing?” she asked Carla.

Carla nodded.

“I heard the news about your son. I’m very sorry.”

Manny’s arms got tight, the hard muscles bulging out from the smooth skin. And he held his breath, as if waiting for something terrible to happen.
What was his problem?

“I also heard from the nurse that you didn’t want any tranquilizers. I told her I thought you were right. Throwing blankets on a fire may put it out, but covering feelings only makes them burn inside.”

Carla thought Bea was interesting. She remembered they had met in the emergency room. But she felt no need to answer.

Manny took a breath and shifted. Carla slid off him and reached for the pillow. She had to hang on to something. Manny said: “We don’t know for sure. They’re sending for his records to check the footprints.”

“Oh…” Bea’s tone was hesitant for the first time. “I see. Did they tell you how long that would take?”

“They said it wouldn’t take long. They send it through a fax machine. You know?”

They could be talking about anything
.

“Who are you?” Carla asked Bea.

Bea smiled at her, as if she were an intelligent child. “You mean what’s my job?”

Carla nodded.

“I’m a thanatologist. That’s a very long word which means that I try to help people who have lost someone—isn’t that a funny way to talk?” Bea shook her head. “The words we use for death. ‘Lost someone,’ I said. What I meant was, when someone close to them has died.” She looked at Manny to include him. “I also work with people who are dying.”

“That’s very nice of you,” Manny said in an awkward mumble.

“No. I do it for myself.” Bea, still calm, her jeweled glasses hobbling slightly, focused on Carla. “My daughter was killed in a car accident when she was sixteen. She went out to the movies and she never came back. Every time I cried they gave me a sedative. Every time I asked a question they told me to forget. And I never saw her body. They said it was nothing I would want to look at. I’m sure they were right. She must have looked horrible. But now I wish I had seen it. As for the drugs—it took three years for me to stop taking pills and they didn’t get rid of my grief. When I stopped taking them, the grief was still there as if she had died the day before. It’s better to cry and scream bloody murder. You can’t cry for three years.”

“We’re not looking at the body,” Manny said very definitely. He was so positive that Carla thought he must have already seen it.

“Why…?” Carla asked. Her mouth was dry. Her top lip peeled off from the bottom. The skin tingled afterwards. She touched it to check if she was bleeding. No.

Manny meanwhile answered her question with a stare. “They just said there’s—I mean—if it’s him—there’s not much to…”

“I don’t know,” Bea’s hand went up. “If there’s nothing to recognize, then…” She came over to the bed and asked with a gesture if she could sit. Carla didn’t have the energy to answer. Bea took that as a yes. She settled next to Carla’s head and put a hand on her hair, stroking. The gooseneck reading lamp hung over the bed, brightening only a circle. Bea’s head looked big. The jewels in Bea’s eyeglasses darkened in the shadows just outside the lamp’s spot. “What happened in the crash? Were you holding him?”

“Oh!” Manny cried out. Carla shifted to see him. Manny was sweating, although the room was cool from the air-conditioning. He shook his head at Bea.

“What?” Bea asked him.

Manny glanced at Carla and went back to Bea. “Can we talk outside?” he pointed to the hall.

Carla understood. He knew Manny couldn’t bear to hear about her cowardice: he would hate her forever.

“We should talk,” Bea said to Manny. “But I think Carla needs to talk right now.”

Manny and Bea went back and forth arguing in a whisper about whether she needed to talk. Carla watched them with interest, but she was hardly with them. She hugged the pillow, enjoying its bulk. She remembered that while she slept Bubble had come back into her arms. She had felt him warm and squirming, so real her heart ached with joy. She shut her eyes and longed for sleep.

“Are you sleepy?” Bea gently shook Carla’s pillow to bring her into the conversation.

She nodded.
Leave me alone
.

“Are you really sleepy? The nurse told me you were out all night and most of the morning. Are you sleepy or very blue?”

What do you think!

Bea studied Carla, searching out from her boat-like glasses into the fog of pain between them. “Tell me what happened,” she spoke almost in a whisper. “They say the plane was in trouble for a long time. It must have been very scary.”

Carla remembered Lisa the flight attendant. She remembered her face next to hers as they tried to get Bubble’s seat belt to work. Her chin was smeared with lipstick. Lisa tried to fasten his belt, which would have saved his life. Carla peered at Bea through the sharpening focus these thoughts gave her. She noticed parentheses of wrinkles on each side of Bea’s mouth and that her lipstick was redder than Lisa’s. Was Lisa alive? Lisa could tell them she had tried her best.

But what if Lisa didn’t say that? What if she told them that Carla was hysterical and all thumbs and that it was her fault, that everybody else could make the belts work.

But Lisa had tried and failed also!

“It’s okay, honey,” Bea said and stroked her cheek. She touched a tear that Carla didn’t know had slipped from her eyes. “Tell me. Were you very scared the whole time?”

She had clapped. She remembered her stupid, stupid clap. Jesus, I opened my fingers to clap! Her whole body shivered with the memory: she had loosened her hands just as they crashed. That’s why Bubble had been ripped from her. She had opened her hands. Because she was so eager to think everything was okay. Just like this stupid old Jewish woman who wanted to feel everything was okay. Well, nothing was okay.

I opened my hands and killed my son.

“Okay, babe, okay, babe,” Manny pushed Bea away and smothered her face.

Someone in the room was sobbing.

“Talk about it, honey,” Bea’s silly glasses were tossing above the waves in Manny’s hair.

“She don’t have to talk about any fucking thing! She don’t want to! Leave us alone!” Manny yelled at Bea even though she was a
yanqui
, as Manny called them, yelling without any worry about his Christmas tip.

“I don’t remember,” Carla said to the glasses as they were tossed back by the storm. “I can’t remember anything!”

That’s right. Don’t tell them anything
.

11

Carla was carried places. Picked up and put down, regarded doubtfully, and sometimes ignored. She was silent or as silent as they would let her be. Manny nagged her at first. Especially about using the crutches.

“Your muscles’ll get weak,” he said.

She didn’t bother to point out the obvious: that no matter how much she used her crutches the broken leg’s strength would be diminished. She said, “Leave me alone.”

All their conversations were arguments, only she didn’t fight for her side, except to be silent and refuse. The first was about how they would go home. It surprised her that Manny tried to convince her they should fly back to New York. She expected understanding.

“I understand,” Manny said. “But, babe, you know what they say. It’s like falling off a horse. You got to get right back on.”

What does he know about horses?

“It don’t have to be on Transcontinental. They’ll pay for any airline we want.”

“I don’t care about the money, Manny. I want to go home by train.”

“It ain’t the money! You think it’s the money? They’ll pay for any way we want. They’ll pay for a car. I’m just saying, you can’t give in. We won’t go anyplace ever again.”

“Good.” Carla nodded at him. “Good!” she repeated with as much strength as she could muster.

Talking hurt her. She complained to the doctor that her chest and sides ached every time she moved; a deep breath could be painful. He said her ribs were bruised. She had thought it was from all the crying, but the doctor told her that probably something had whacked into her during the crash. She couldn’t cry without feeling sore; she couldn’t yell either. Or laugh. Being unable to laugh was not a problem, however.

She decided that the bruise was the loss of Bubble, the wound from where he had been torn away. They identified what was left of her son from the hospital records and what she had known in her heart became fact to the world: her two-year-old son was dead. Evidently he had been found in a horrible condition. Even Bea Rosenfeld agreed that Carla shouldn’t look at his body.

They went home by train. That was scary, too. At one point the brakes screeched and the car lurched. Carla screamed and buried her head in Manny’s chest. He said, “It’s okay, babe, we’re coming into a station.” She hit him as hard as she could in the arm. He didn’t even flinch. She decided that once she was back in Little Italy she would never travel again.

And yet all of her hadn’t returned home to Mulberry Street. On the plane was where she really lived. Over and over she considered the choices she had made. She wondered if moving from the window seat to the aisle had been an error. She decided no. The ceiling had completely collapsed on the outer seats. The man missing an arm had been on the aisle, the window seat beside him had disappeared and that was also how his arm had been severed. And she knew that the man seated directly in front of her by the window had been killed. She had overheard him introduce himself to his neighbor and his name was listed among the dead in the newspaper.

No. If she had stayed put she would be dead. That was how close she had come, a last-minute decision made for a reason she could no longer remember. She could see herself squashed and sliced by the metal. She had to squeeze her eyes shut and curse in a whisper to shoo away the picture from her brain. Even in this misery she didn’t want to have died.

Carla read in the papers that Lisa the flight attendant had lived. All of the crew survived. Sure they did—they had safe seats and belts that worked. The reporters wrote that the flight was a miracle, the landing a great accomplishment, that by rights everyone should be dead. They were full of stories of bravery, especially one man whom the papers called the Good Samaritan. He had saved—an especially bitter fact for Carla—a couple of kids from burning alive in the wreck. From all the coverage, Carla got the impression she was supposed to think the crash was almost a blessing in disguise.

The worst thing was Bubble’s coffin. It was heartbreakingly small: a little mahogany box with tiny handles, its wood and brass highly polished, the length so short there could be only two pallbearers. She had come to the funeral with her grief exhausted, determined to be dignified. But the sight smashed her.

The best thing about the funeral was that no one was bothered by her weeping. Her grief was no longer solitary; she had plenty of sorrowful company. For most of the service her mother’s red face and bloodshot eyes blocked her sight of the priest and the small coffin. Her aunts wailed behind her. At the graveside her two closest friends linked arms as Bubble’s miniature casket descended into the earth. Their heads bowed toward each other until they touched and made an umbrella. Carla turned her back on this last sight of her son and moved under their covering, not to be shielded, but to be comforted.

Her relatives and friends visited every day after the funeral. Her mother sent her new husband home to California and slept on the living room couch. They made meals, they pushed Carla in a wheelchair when she got tired of her crutches. Her mother even held a tissue under her nose and said, “Blow,” as if she were a baby.

Each night the apartment was full of her relatives’ talk and it came around again and again to the lawsuit. Manny was the first to bring it up with Carla. “Tony’s got us the name of a lawyer to call,” Manny said. Tony was his illegitimate father. “He’s a big shot. His sister lives in one of Tony’s buildings. She’s an artist or something.”

“No,” Carla said.

“I’m calling him,” Manny said.

About a week after the funeral she overheard Manny tell her mother and aunts and uncles at the kitchen table that two other lawyers had phoned asking for the job. She lay still in her dark bedroom straining to hear them as they ate lasagna and argued in mumbles. She could distinguish her mother’s voice. Her mother was upset and she kept contradicting Manny about something. At one point Carla thought she could make out what her mother said: Don’t talk about money for a dead baby.

That’s right, Carla cheered her mother on. She worried Bubble’s soul might be punished for their greed. She had never seriously considered the consequences of people having souls until then, but it seemed to her there was no point in taking chances. Bubble was being judged now, if anything the Church said was right, and she thought: There’s nothing to judge about him except us. God will judge him by the kind of people we are.

At the funeral Father Conti had said babies were innocent and have a special place in Heaven, that Leonardo was smiling in Jesus’ lap. Carla remembered the boys in junior high used to say Father Conti liked to give them long hugs and asked to hear details of masturbation in confession. What he had to say didn’t seem to her hypocritical; it sounded foolish and that hurt her feelings.