The Whole World Over (63 page)

At first, George wouldn't move. He whined in protest. Alan held out
his free hand until George surrendered and took it. They walked toward
the river, where the sky had begun to turn from blue to a buttery yellow.
The open water seemed to amplify the sirens as they rose and fell, some
prolonged and moaning, others staccato, ululating, pleading. At times
their collective noise became nearly symphonic.

WITHIN A WEEK OF RETURNING
from New Mexico with George,
Alan had accepted his mother's offer of her aging Toyota, and he had
phoned Jerry again. "I think I need to work with crazier people than I
do," he said. "Is that a terrible thing to say?" Jerry had laughed. "Not in
the slightest. Let's get you up and running with the wolves."

Alan did these two things to keep himself from curling up in a corner
and mourning the death of his marriage. Not that George, with his emotional
resilience and energy, would have let his father curl up for so much
as a catnap. Alan enrolled him in a simple summer camp, run by his old
nursery school teachers (this was to make
Alan
feel secure), but every
weekend they got in the car and left the city. They went to New Jersey,
where George's grandmother was happy to see so much of him, where
the boy could run and dig and splash on the beach; to friends' country
houses; to trails that wound along cliffs in the Catskills. One weekend
they stayed in a lighthouse on the Hudson River. They bought food to
cook in the decrepit kitchen, inviting the keeper (a former dot-com boy
wonder in a Deadhead T-shirt) to join them. Warily, George ate lobster
for the first time.

Perhaps Alan had made the mistake, for too long, of expecting
Greenie to broaden his horizons. Now he would do it for himself, and
for George. In time, he suspected, he would have to give George back to
Greenie, but for now he would make the most of having him close. He
took George to the
Intrepid,
to the Cloisters, to a Yankees game where
they sat near the very top and—Alan having forgotten the sunscreen—
felt their noses turn pleasantly pink. A fine layer of gratification began
to form, like a dusting of snow, in Alan's psyche. Yet George alone could
not have brought his father this much peace.

Marion had called the day she received Alan's letter—also less than a
week after he had returned. She began with an apology. She had been
much too cruel; she had held against him the petty sin of silence. How
was he to have guessed that she had become pregnant (to her own surprise,
she insisted), that she hadn't really meant to make their good-bye
in that parking lot so final? She'd been trying to be tougher than she
was—tougher and less attached to her past. "I was furious when my
parents told me they were selling that house. Never mind that I'd grown
up to see it as tacky, as so
New Jersey.
" She laughed. "I mean, it's the
only place I grew up, right? I went to that reunion knowing it was the
last time I'd be there. My house."

She had called late at night. Alan had sat on his bed and listened to
her talk. Just her voice, all the tension and resentment of their last meeting
fallen away, gave him enormous pleasure. He enjoyed the sound of
her voice so much that he felt no urgency to speak.

"Little brother, are you still there?" she said after a long pause. "Were
you listening to everything I said?"

"I've always been here. It's you who went underground," he said, but
affectionately.

"Will you forgive me?"

"Of course. But please don't call me little brother."

"I'm sorry." Another long silence, and then she told him, "Now here
comes the hard part." This was the part where she acknowledged that
Jacob was his son as well as hers ("Yes,
yours,
no more mincing words")
but that she could not imagine complicating what the boy knew about
his universe already. He knew that Lewis wasn't his "original" father,
but he'd stopped asking who that father might be.

"For now," said Alan. "He's stopped asking for now. And he hasn't
stopped thinking about it."

Marion sighed. "You're not the only head-science guy around here."
She told him that she hoped Alan, maybe Greenie and George as well,
could find their way back to California soon, that they could all get
together. "Have a picnic in Golden Gate Park? Would that be insane?"
She wished that something could bring her east, but her parents were
happily settled in Del Ray Beach and didn't miss New Jersey one
bit. "And no more reunions for me," she added. "None of any kind
whatsoever."

She mailed him five pictures of Jacob, two including herself, none
including Lewis. Alan gazed at them, trying to feel a recognition. He
didn't—but it didn't matter. He kept the pictures in his dresser, under his
T-shirts.

They spoke every few weeks all summer long. They traded stories
about George and Jacob, the common phases the two parents had gone
through, the great differences in the two boys' temperaments and tastes.
Without planning it that way, they took turns calling. Once when Alan
called, Lewis answered. "Why hello there," he said, as if Alan's voice
were a delightful surprise. Only in August, because Marion had mentioned
Greenie a third or fourth time—clearly wanting him to open up
and talk about his wife, his marriage—did Alan tell her that they were
separated. "Irrevocably, I think." At the risk of sounding callow, he told
her quickly, almost dismissively. Marion told him how sorry she was.
He told her that he was sorry, too. Why hadn't Alan told her before? At
that, he laughed honestly. He said, "I'm not the only head-science guy
around here."

Jerry—in Alan's book, king of all head-science guys—worked now
not in a doorman building on Madison Avenue but in a defunct school
building on Flatbush Avenue. He had become a tribal leader, dispatching
guerrillas to fight for the city's walking wounded. By September, Alan
was working four hours a week in the defunct school's defunct gymnasium,
running group therapy sessions for couples with drinking problems.
There was no air-conditioning, and sometimes the portable fans
were turned up so high that the participants had to shout their confessions
and grievances. Alan went home to George hoarse and exhausted
but mentally vibrant and drained of self-pity. He had also enrolled in
two forensic social work courses. That afternoon, he would have been
attending the third class of each course, back to back, if the terrorists
had not interfered.

ALAN WONDERED WHAT GEORGE
, years from now, would remember
of this day. Even in the weeks to come, would it change the way he
saw his world? His
little
world, Alan thought, but that was not right.
Wasn't the world, to any child, much larger than it was to the adults
around him?

Alan had said to Greenie that he would speak to George in greater
depth about the incident with Diego and the horses, once they had settled
back in New York. But his efforts to keep that promise were feeble
at best. The first time Alan tried to edge his way toward asking what
had happened, George cut him off brusquely. "Nobody talks about that
now," he said, looking his father straight in the eye with a confidence
that was nearly chilling. For an instant, Alan could easily see the
younger boy as the one who had cooked up the foolish scheme.

Once George left New Mexico, he seldom spoke of anything he'd left
behind—not counting his mother. He was vocal in his compassion
toward animals. He scolded a friend at the playground who chased
pigeons; he asked Alan why rats had to be poisoned. Whenever he saw
a horse—on trips outside the city or in Washington Square, where
mounted police patrolled in pairs—he stopped to be impressed, but
there was no more talk of palominos, Appaloosas, or Tennessee walking
horses. He mentioned Consuelo once every few days at first—he might
tell Alan the way she made his favorite sandwich or what books she
liked to read with him—but even these references had ceased by the end
of summer.

Was George a cold child at some level? Did he have no lasting
remorse? Or was he simply resilient, strong because—like his mother—
he was happy by nature? For all that Alan had learned about human
motivations and pathological patterns, he could not fathom the innermost
George. No matter how well you knew your own child, wouldn't
your love always distort your perception?

Joya grilled Alan constantly about being a parent. She was reading
every book under the sun, despite his warning that once the baby
arrived, she would throw them all away. She expected to hear by Christmastime
that a baby was waiting for her across the Pacific Ocean. The
agency would send a picture of the baby by e-mail. Alan had agreed to
go with her, and now he realized that perhaps this would help him find a
natural way to meet Jacob as well. He would fly George to New Mexico,
then travel to Vietnam with Joya. If they could return to San Francisco
in good time, he might be able to spend a week there before
returning home. Joya told him she had enough frequent-flyer miles for a
round trip to Pluto, so she'd send him wherever he needed to go. "Those
miles were supposed to be my honeymoon in Thailand and Japan," she
said, "but I guess I'm skipping that phase. At least I knew I'd be going to
Asia. I just didn't know why."

Joya was so busy redesigning her life that she no longer had the time
to scrutinize Alan's. Or that was how Alan chose to interpret the way
she steered clear of discussing his estrangement from Greenie. At first he
missed Joya's bossy advice, her editorials on what he'd done wrong and
how he should fix it; was he now a lost cause? But once he realized the
selfishness of this anxiety, Alan was content to devote all their communications
to his sister's plans.

That evening, when he and George returned to the apartment from
walking Treehorn, Joya's message—concerned but chastising—was the
first of two on the answering machine. The second was from Marion.
Alan wanted to speak with both women, but he would wait until
George was asleep. And then it dawned on him: the lines from the outside
world had cleared.

As soon as Treehorn had settled down, George began eyeing the
blank television screen, though he did not ask Alan to turn it on. Yes, it
was clear he did understand that the world was very large. "Is Mommy
okay?" he asked suddenly.

"Yes," said Alan, surprised at his own less-than-honest conviction.
"Let's read," he added quickly. "Why don't you read to me?"

George chose
Bartholomew and the Oobleck.
Halfway through,
Alan wondered just how coincidental this choice had been. Watching
Bartholomew Cubbins run frantically about the Kingdom of Didd, trying
to thwart the green goo, he couldn't help thinking of Rudy Giuliani.

Greenie called when the royal trumpeter's trumpet filled with oobleck.

She cried when he answered.

"We're fine, we're both fine," he said twice.

"Where have you been, where have you
been
? Why haven't you left
the city? Why haven't you answered your cell phone?"

"I haven't used it in months," said Alan. "I'm sorry. Where are you?
You know, I tried to call
you.
"

"Can I speak to George?"

"It's your mother." Alan handed the phone to George.

"Mommy, hi, we're reading. We are in the middle of the story." He listened
to his mother. Alan heard the flow of her voice, rapid, expressive.

"Treehorn is okay, too. We went for a walk and we saw a lot of police
cars." After another minute, he turned to Alan. "Daddy, is my school
canceled?"

"I don't know about school, George." Since taking George out of his
classroom, Alan hadn't given school a thought. How could life of any
normal sort resume—yet what would take its place? He asked for the
phone.

"Listen, Alan, I want you to take George to Maine, up to the island—
for a week or something, just till the city seems safe again, and then we
can talk—"

"Greenie, where are you? You're skipping so far ahead here. Listen,
we are fine, we really are—"

"How do you know you're fine? Think of all the people in those
towers who were certain they were fine when they got up this morning,
Alan!"

"Greenie." Slowly, insistently, Alan drew from her that she was calling
him from a rest stop in Oklahoma, that there were no rental cars to
be had in New Mexico—or anywhere else—once all the planes had been
grounded, that Ray had forbidden her to drive cross-country alone and
had, so generously, loaned her his driver, to get her at least partway back
to New York. Nothing, however, would have kept her from George. She
spoke breathlessly, almost angrily, in a headlong rush of words.

Alan suddenly understood that she was on her way
there,
to the very
room in which he sat, and that once she reached George, she might
refuse to leave again without him.

"Alan," she continued, "I need you to call one of my cousins in
Boston and go to Maine. There are keys to the house in my dresser, but
you need to let them know you're going. Please. I cannot sleep—I will
die of worry—if you don't do this."

"I have a life to live here, Greenie," said Alan.
With George,
he was
tempted to say. She had her life with Charlie.

"Alan, no one there is going to be leading a regular life for days,
probably weeks. Maybe never again!"

"First I was supposed to move to New Mexico, Greenie. Now I'm
supposed to move to an island in Maine? Where next? Marrakesh? Beijing?"
Alan glanced at George, who was watching him, newly worried.

"No, Alan—just, please, for now . . . I'll get there in a few days. I
want George—I want you both out of the city. They're saying the air
from the burning towers could be poisonous to breathe. Please. Until
they know more."

"I'm paying close attention to the news right here, and I haven't
heard a thing about poisonous air," he said. But he wrote down the
numbers of her cousins. She told him that the marina would still be
open; he could get a launch to take them over. There should be a boat at
the island. No one closed up the houses before October. She asked him
to find his cell phone and keep it with him. She would call him twice a
day until she could get there.