The Laws of Gravity (29 page)

He dragged it upright and leaned it against the real estate office. No one had seen him, no one else had noticed. What kind of a moron puts something like that out in a parking lot, he thought, but he was already back in the car, his gloved hands shaking so badly he could not drive. He sat for several minutes, his heart still slamming, adrenaline coursing through his system like a poison. When he looked down at his gloves—they were high-quality Italian black leather gloves, decorated all over with tiny holes, like hundreds of puncture wounds—he saw the strange black-gloved hands of a killer.

The Hardest Thing

Of course Daisy knew that her mother was sick—she was not stupid, and besides it had now been in all the papers. Nicole could not prevent Daisy’s friends from talking about that. She couldn’t stop the teachers from cornering Daisy in the hall and murmuring their concern. Nor could she do anything to blunt Daisy’s own powers of observation. If she had a doctor’s appointment, Daisy seemed almost to smell it; if Nicole felt tired, or depressed, or frightened, or in pain, Daisy would offer to rub her shoulders or her back. She did not want her daughter to become her keeper, and Daisy was inclined that way, always had been. She bandaged Barbies, put them into their Barbie beds, and took their temperatures with a play thermometer. Daisy took the ones with half-chewed arms from the discards of her friends, and tried to nurse them back to health. As a result she had an odd assortment of dolls, to say the least. Jay and Nicole secretly called them One-Legged Barbie, Bite Victim Barbie (a friend’s dog had left bite marks all over one arm), Amputee Ken, and so on. Nicole tried to be grateful for the times her daughter hung on her neck, and not to feel hurt when, as happened more
and more these days, Daisy stayed away, tiptoeing out of the room to the safety of her father’s robust good health and lively company.

With Jay she had the opposite problem. He was always on her, at her, he seemed to need to be touching her, as if to reassure himself that she was still there. They still hungered for each other, but she found herself exhausted and depleted afterward, as if she might never rise back up again into her body. He seemed to harbor the illusion that he could love her back to health. But she hurt a good deal of the time. Her chest ached, her stomach throbbed, all of her joints felt rusty. Her mouth and throat stung from sores.

These days she preferred to lie snuggled up against him, or simply holding his hand, that last bastion of strength and safety. She would will herself to stay up all night long, at least one night, gazing into his sleeping face. But then, sometime around four or five in the morning, close to dawn, she would give herself over to sleep, and when she woke again, Jay and Daisy were already gone for the day.

At least now she had Mimi to talk to again, or more important, to listen to—her beautiful corny jokes, the sound of her calm voice at the other end of a phone. An oasis in a desert. Her best friend was back in place, and that was serious comfort. Mimi, Jay, Daisy, Julian. But it was a lonely business, this dying. You had to leave the world unescorted—no matter how much the people around you loved you, no matter how hard they clung to you, or you to them. The clinging sometimes made it worse. Nicole turned to the company of acquaintances when the pain of leaving all this behind overwhelmed her, where there were no threads to disentangle, no ties to bind her. She stayed in touch with Ruby, Darnell’s mother. Darnell and Daisy were as unalike as two third-graders could be, but ever since kindergarten
they had gotten along—and they had always ended up in the same class. Darnell acted out a lot—“He doesn’t always listen,” Daisy would report disapprovingly—but he was sweet-tempered, and as Daisy said, “He’s funny.” The class clown, just as Ruby had predicted all those years ago.

If Ruby also remembered talking about the woman who had been diagnosed with cancer when her child was in kindergarten and died a few years later, she never mentioned it. Nor did she try to pretend that Nicole was healthy, or just “tuckered out,” as many of the other mothers did. They’d invent some excuse for the way Nicole looked, or simply sidle away, avoiding her on the school playground where she came to pick Daisy up. She didn’t have the energy to stand there for hours, like the other mothers, so she just sank down on the edge of the sandlot, watching Daisy run. Sometimes playing on the swings with her best friend, Claudia, sometimes chasing Darnell through the jungle gym. Nicole would lie in bed all day, reserving her strength so she could get up and do that one simple task, to be a human being for her daughter after school.

Aunt Patti visited, too. This took some self-sacrifice on her part, and self-sacrifice did not come easily to Aunt Patti. She was terrified of the expressway. So she took all the back roads from Little Neck to Huntington. She had shrunk so much over the years that she sat perched on a pillow and still could barely see over the top of the steering wheel of her Subaru. She was the kind of woman who took traffic jams personally; she could never get it through her head that this was simply how Long Island
was
, these days. It was a giant, slow-moving tangle, like a ball of gnarled yarn. There was no way around it. But Aunt Patti seemed to believe if she had left a half hour earlier, or taken Jericho instead of Hempstead Turnpike, or not stopped at that particular bakery, she would have simply glided through some imaginary open road that had not existed for fifty years.

Aunt Patti was more comfortable as host than as guest. She would arrive in her old Blackglama mink coat, bought in her heyday on TV, wearing a polka-dotted black-and-white scarf over her head and dark glasses—an ancient version of Marilyn Monroe. She had a key to Nicole’s house, so after rapping twice to announce herself, she would sail inside, shed the coat and scarf, and make her way to whatever room Nicole was occupying—often the back room behind the kitchen overlooking the backyard, sometimes the bedroom, where Patti would knock again, more softly, waiting for Nicole’s “Come in.” She would make her way through the house, carrying a coffee cake wrapped in string, or a bag of chocolate and cinnamon
bobka
, a quart of strawberries. She never came empty-handed.

“Jesus, Nicole, why do you keep the house so
dark
?” she would say.

“The glasses.” Nicole would gesture at Aunt Patti’s face. Aunt Patti would remove the sunglasses, but to retain her dignity add, “It’s still not very bright in here.”

“
I’m
not very bright.”

Aunt Patti pantomimed a laugh, then set about putting things away, serving Nicole tea and toast or pudding, watching her like a hawk till she ate a few bites. The sores in Nicole’s mouth and throat made it difficult to swallow. Aunt Patti was constantly trying to rearrange the rooms, as if that itself would make the house larger. She shared theater gossip and told old stories, especially about her late husband and her sister, Nicole’s mother.

“She was the pretty one, I was the smart one. Dark like a gypsy. I was always jealous of her, they made such a fuss over her. Sometimes I would give her a knip”—she pinched Nicole’s arm lightly to demonstrate—“in the crib. Then when she cried, I pretended I knew nothing about it. My first acting job.”

“You were a good big sister,” Nicole protested.

“Well. Maybe. The night before her last surgery I slept in the hospital with her. Brought my pajamas, slippers, an old copy of Nancy Drew. I wouldn’t let that bitchy night nurse throw me out. I just read from the Nancy Drew till your mother finally fell asleep. When the day-shift nurse came in, she tried to draw
my
blood. Your mother would have let her. Luckily, she was wearing the hospital bracelet, not me.”

Aunt Patti always had to be on her way somewhere else, even at her age. Parties, lunches, meetings, classes—she was always flying off to the next event. Nicole supposed if she had been born later, she would have been considered ADD and given medication. Instead she had become an actress, an eccentric. Patti was the kind of aunt who had called twice, three times a year. She sent gifts when she felt like it, seldom for occasions, and often threatened to come for a visit, but seldom followed up. All you had to do to make sure she never came was urge or press her. She hated obligations.

Yet she had been a better aunt to Nicole and her sister than Nicole’s mother had been to Aunt Patti’s two boys. “They’re boys, I never know what to say to them,” her mother used to confide to Nicole. “That Al is a rotten apple, and the brother’s not much better. They’ll never amount to anything.” She dutifully sent checks or gift certificates at Hanukkah and for birthdays and graduations—nothing personal.

Aunt Patti, on the other hand, hadn’t even shown up for Nicole’s high school graduation; she was rehearsing for some off-off-Broadway show. But when Nicole came down with pneumonia in college, Aunt Patti brought her a green-and-pink bead necklace that Nicole still treasured. Nicole let Daisy keep it in her jewelry box. Daisy was seldom around now for Aunt Patti’s visits. Nicole suspected it was because Aunt Patti could not bear the sadness
of looking at this soon-to-be-motherless child. She could bluff her way past Nicole—or so she thought—but she could never have fooled a child. Her acting was simply not that good.

In the interim hours, Nicole took up needlepoint. She no longer had the patience for books, and she could not bear watching television. The only TV shows she watched were Daisy’s goofy sitcoms on the Disney channel, featuring improbably beautiful teenagers who were supposed to be “homely” or “fat” or “unpopular,” who got themselves into one ridiculous scrape after another and then sang about them. But she didn’t really watch the shows. She watched Daisy watching them. The needlepoint on which she was currently working was a large linen canvas—thirty-four inches by thirty-four. It featured a seascape: waves in the background, wild roses in the foreground. It was wool tapestry, and the stitches were tiny, one slant line after another.

Part of her knew she would never finish it. The other part, the stubbornly hopeful one, kept at it as an act of defiance against the inevitable. Slowly but surely it came to life under her hands, the bright threaded waves and flowers creeping up along the blank linen.

She sat with her needlepoint by the large bank of windows at the back of the house, where she could watch the same process of life spreading across the wintry waste of the yard. She refused to stop loving the world just because she had to leave it. Snowdrops and crocuses pushed through the blank snow, in white and yellow-gold and purple. Next came the daffodils, the dainty orange-eyed narcissi, and the large trumpet daffodils, yellow as rain slickers, creeping in clumps across the old snow. The forsythia began to bud, then the pussy willows, then even the pink tulip magnolia that had been a Mother’s Day gift from Daisy the year she was only three.

Nicole thought a good deal about her past, as if she were watching a movie constantly playing in her mind. Childhood, adolescence, marriage, teaching, motherhood. Faces of people she had not thought about in years came to her, like the ones who appear in dreams. Some living, some dead. She’d remember scraps of long-forgotten conversations. Little romances. And moments came back to her as if they had been preserved in the back of her brain all along, just waiting for something to trigger them back to life. Skating around and around the community ice rink, holding mittened hands with Ari. Ancient vacations by the beach with her family. A nest of chicks, bright yellow, rescued by the dune buggy in which they were riding. It was one of her earliest memories, and she had lost it for years. I’ve had a good run, she would think. Short, but good.

Judge Solomon Richter could feel everyone walking on eggshells, eyeing him nervously as he set about emptying his chambers. He was closing up shop. The clerks and secretaries, the undersecretaries, recorders, security staff, and especially his own wife and daughter, appeared to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. He seemed altogether too calm, sorting through his law books, taking little with him, just a few boxes of books and memorabilia. In truth, now that the time had come, he was anxious to leave. And this shocked everyone, including himself.