Love Saves the Day (31 page)

“First I’m not grieving enough,” Laura yells, “and now I can’t get over it. Which is it?”

“Stop with the logic games, Counselor. I’m not your client and we all know you’re not my lawyer.”

“Maybe
you’re
the one who needs to grow up! Stop trying to be the king of community activism and
get a job
. Charity begins at home.”

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a job right now?” Josh shouts. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch your
profession crumble up and blow away into nothing, and have people telling you day after day how the only job you know how to do doesn’t exist anymore? When you’re nearly
forty
? Does it occur to you at any point during the fifteen hours a day when you
aren’t here
to think about how
that
feels? Or are you too busy totting up in your head
exactly
what you contribute and
exactly
what I contribute?”

“Who’s the oblivious one, Josh?” Laura yells back. “When’s the last time I worked a fifteen-hour day? Has it ever occurred to
you
to wonder what might be going on with
my
job?”

“No, I don’t
wonder
about your job!” It sounds like Josh has slammed his fist down on the kitchen table. I curl into a tighter ball under the living room couch, thinking,
Please stop, please stop, please stop. Sarah is dead. I can’t take this, too
. “Just like you don’t sit around your office all day wondering what’s going on with me. You know what I wonder about? I wonder why I never get to go out to dinner, or make plans with friends, or talk about a vacation. I wonder why I sit around here night after night
alone
. I think about the night we met—we danced, we talked, we had
fun
. We had a lot of nights like that. When was the last time we did any of those things? And I guess we don’t have to do anything on our anniversary, either, because another night at home will be such a
blast
! If you ever once came home and suggested we go out and
do
something, I think I’d have a heart attack.” I can hear Laura breathe in sharply when Josh says
heart attack
. “I know how important it is to you to make partner. But what are we doing here?”

“That’s not fair.” Laura’s voice has tears in it. “You
knew
how demanding my job was. You told me it was one of the things you loved most about me, and now you’re second-guessing it when
my job
is the only thing bringing any money into this house. How can we do any of those things if we don’t have money to do them with?”

Josh’s voice is quieter now. “What’s the point of having all the money in the world, Laura, if we’re miserable?”

When Laura speaks again, she sounds hoarse. “I didn’t realize I was making you miserable,” she says.

“Laura, I—” Josh starts, but Laura doesn’t let him finish.

“I have to go,” she says. “I have to get to my job while I still have one.” She walks to the closet, and I hear her open it to pull out her purse and heavy shoulder bag. Then she walks out the front door, slamming it shut behind her.

The apartment is silent after Laura leaves. The only thing I hear is the sound of Josh pacing and rain pounding on our windows. Josh walks around and around the kitchen and living room, and then he walks up the stairs and back down the stairs and up the stairs again. I hear him opening drawers and slamming them back closed, and once it sounds like he kicks something. Every so often I hear him say,
“Dammit!”
under his breath. I don’t think he’s looking for anything specific as he walks around and opens drawers. I think he’s trying to find a way to feel less anxious. He
must
feel anxious, because I don’t think
I’ve
ever been this upset. I haven’t heard humans yell like that since I lived outside with my littermates. The doorbell rings, and I can hear Josh open the door and say a curt, “Thanks,” to whoever is there. He walks into the kitchen, and I hear him set something on the counter. Then he grabs an umbrella from the tall stand near the front door like he’s angry at it and goes out. The apartment is silent once again.

Sarah is dead. Sarah is never coming back. I’ll never see her again. Maybe we were just roommates, but we loved each other. All those times Laura told me things about Sarah, how could she not have told me
this
? And then I have an even worse thought: What if Laura and Josh don’t want to be a family anymore because of the vicious words they just said to each other? What if they don’t want to live with each other? What if neither of them wants to live with me, either? They might not love me like Sarah did, but if Sarah is really gone forever then there’s nobody else in the whole world to care even a little about where I live or what happens to me.

What I should do now is finish my breakfast, like I do every morning. If I do everything the way I usually do, Laura and Josh will have to come back and be happy together the way they usually
are. Except I can’t quite manage it right now. My chest is hurting and so is my stomach. The hole in my chest from Sarah’s not being here has moved down to my belly. Now it’s in both places.

It’s the new smell from the kitchen that finally draws me out from under-the-couch. There’s a bunch of flowers on the counter, arranged in a glass vase. The flowers have little drops of water on them from the rain outside, and the spicy-earth scent of them fills the whole downstairs of our apartment.

I know what kind of flowers these are. They’re the same kind as Laura is holding in the pictures from when she and Josh got married.

The smell of the flowers pulls me up. Almost before I’ve made the decision to do it, I’m sitting on the counter next to them. I remember the cat grass Sarah used to keep for me when we lived together. When my stomach felt upset like it does now, the cat grass would help make it feel better.

Josh must know how upset I am, and that’s why he had the man at the door bring flowers for me to eat. He knows I like to eat the things he leaves on the counter.

So I put my whole face into the middle of those flowers and breathe in their delicious smell. Then I start to eat. I chew on the leaves and stems and the soft parts of the flowers themselves. I eat and eat and wait for my stomach to stop twisting around so much, and when my stomach doesn’t feel better right away I eat some more …

… and now there’s nothing except Badness. I feel the Badness all over my whole body. My stomach heaves and spins trying to get the Badness out of me, but it doesn’t work. I throw up and catch my breath and throw up again, and still I can’t get the Badness out. I’m thirsty and try to drink from my water bowl, but the Badness rises up and throws the water out of my mouth as soon as I take it in. It’s making everything look funny. Small things look too big and things that are far away look too close and my legs won’t work right and my mouth won’t stop making water. I bump into things
because I can’t see them right and they’re playing tricks on me, sneaking closer when I’m not looking, on purpose to make me trip over my own feet. All these things are happening, but none of them is making the Badness go away.

I try to meow for help, so that somebody can hear me, like that day when Sarah and I first found each other. But when I open my mouth I throw up again and it just makes me feel dizzier. I try to walk to a cooler part of the room, maybe under-the-couch or down the hall away from the big windows, but my legs aren’t working right. I fall over once and then twice, and then I realize I’m not getting closer to where I’m trying to go because I’m walking in circles.

When I lived with Sarah and my belly felt upset, she would stroke my forehead and say,
Shhh, little girl. Don’t worry. Everything’s okay. Everything’s going to be just fine …

But everything’s not going to be just fine, because now Darkness comes to work with the Badness. It’s like a black sack has been thrown over my head. Except after a few moments, I notice that my body feels lighter, like I don’t weigh anything. The closer the Darkness comes, the farther away the Badness feels.

And then, it’s the strangest thing. Sarah is here! I can’t see or hear or smell her, but I can feel her in the room, like the silent hum when a TV is turned on even if there isn’t any sound or picture.
Sarah!
I think. But now the Darkness is going away again, and I know somehow that if it goes, Sarah will go, too. I struggle to keep my eyes closed, to stay inside the Darkness where Sarah and I can find each other.

Sarah!
I think.
Don’t leave me, Sarah! I knew you’d come back for me! I knew you’d find me again! I knew you’d

And then everything is Darkness and Silence.

L
AURA TURNED FOURTEEN IN THE FALL OF 1994 AND BEGAN ATTENDING
Stuyvesant High School down in Battery Park City. For the first time, she started taking the bus and subway on her own every day. Once, this would have terrified me. But Mayor Giuliani had taken office by then, and he’d started cracking down on things like graffiti and street crime and the homeless guys who’d come right up to your car window with a squeegee while you were stopped at intersections. He got rid of the corrupt cops who for so many years had taken bribes and allowed the street-corner drug dealers to go about their business. There was no question that New York City in general and the Lower East Side specifically were growing cleaner and safer by the day.

There were mixed feelings about all this on the LES. Nobody liked crime, of course, and it was a relief to feel that our streets were less dangerous. On the other hand, we were rather proud of
our graffiti. People like Cortes and Keith Haring were acknowledged as legitimate artists pursuing a legitimate art form. There were people who grumbled that Giuliani was a fascist. Maybe he is, I’d reply, but you know what? Drug dealers are fascists, too. Now there was nobody to menace my daughter and her friends when they walked down the streets, to tell her which corners she could linger on and which she couldn’t.

“Quality of Life,” Giuliani’s campaign was called. Many of us were in favor of it at first. But eventually we came to realize just how nebulous an expression “quality of life” is. If you wanted to, you could interpret it to mean almost anything.

Later, after the dust had settled, lawyers and reporters would try to create a chronology of what had happened on June 3, 1995. We were able to ascertain a few definite facts—that a concerned citizen’s 911 call really had started the whole thing, that there really were a few bricks that had slipped from our apartment building’s rear façade. Nobody disputed that our landlords had disregarded necessary repairs over the years. Margarita Lopez, the city council member for our neighborhood, would later confirm ninety-eight Class B (serious enough to warrant court action) and Class C (supposed to be repaired within twenty-four hours) violations on record with the City. We tenants had banded together in the past, chosen representatives, complained formally to the City. But the City had done nothing for us. All of us living there were old, or we were immigrants, or we were poor. We worked. We paid our rent every month and our taxes every year. But, in the end, we were expendable.

There was money coming to us, the lawyers insisted. Somebody had to pay for what had happened. I attended a few meetings, but my heart wasn’t in it. What difference could it make? And when we ended up getting nothing, or next to nothing, I wasn’t surprised or even disappointed. We were too broken by then. We were a group of Humpty Dumptys, and there weren’t enough horses or men in all of New York to make us whole again.

It was a Saturday morning. Laura moved with brisk purpose through the apartment, wearing a nightgown with a cartoon drawing on it of a girl who stood in the window of a tenement building much like ours. The girl in the drawing had thrown a clock from the window.
Jane Wanted to See Time Fly
, the caption said. It was a child’s nightgown, even though Laura had grown so much in the past year I could hardly believe she was the same girl. It wasn’t a nightgown I would have worn at her age. But when I was Laura’s age, I was already trying to be older. Laura would turn fifteen in only five months. I had been fifteen when I’d met Anise. A chance meeting a lifetime ago, in a secondhand store I’d never intended to go into. And somehow, from that day, events had unfolded one after the other and brought me here. I had a teenage daughter, and this was where we lived.