“I don’t know why,” Elizabeth tells the policeman, Carlos, who apprehends her as she climbs the stairs to the Progressive K–8 art room—her intent finding spray paint, or maybe only a brush and oils. “I guess I was going to write something.”
Stop, he had yelled, as if she were a criminal, and she had turned to see a policeman standing at the base of the stairs, his hand poised, or maybe just too close, to his gun.
Given the heightened alert of the City, the looming storms, the melting subterranean freeze, and the speed at which the oceans are rising, their currents no longer predictable, the police have come to suspect that anything can and most likely will happen. Every day they drill their What Ifs:
What If a Pandemic?
What If Manhattan were put under quarantine?
What If terrorists arrived by submarine?
What If the power grid goes?
What If a Biological Event were introduced?
The point is, someone has seen something and said something: something at Progressive K–8, a darting light in the shuttered windows. The police have been notified. Carlos eventually arriving on his horse, Otis, boots shit-caked—he’d been mucking the new stables near Thirty-Fourth. And soon after, Bernice Stilton, Dr. Constantine close behind: she couldn’t get a cab in the drizzle.I
“Bernice,” Elizabeth says. “Could you please tell him I’m a parent?”
“She’s a parent,” Bernice says. “What happened?”
“Nothing I can ascertain,” Carlos says. “I found her here with a flashlight. She was on the stairs. She was heading up the stairs with a flashlight.”
“I was on my way to the art room,” Elizabeth says.
“The art room’s on the third floor,” Bernice says, helpful. “That makes sense,” she says, as Constantine arrives.
“Who are you?” Carlos asks Constantine.
“I’m the head,” Constantine says.
“And I’m the assistant head,” Bernice says. “The keys are mine. My responsibility. She said it was an emergency.”
“What emergency?” Carlos asks Elizabeth.
Elizabeth shrugs. “That’s the thing,” she says.
“She’s a mother,” Dr. Constantine says to Carlos, as if this explains everything. “I can vouch she’s a mother,” she says. She would rather just forget it, Elizabeth clearly out of sorts, maybe even a little unstable. Anyway, she does not want to see Progressive’s name sullied and things too easily fall apart: there was the time the four-year-old, Belle, pushed her way out the unmanned door—since alarmed—with her best friend, Lolly, the two—it was cute, actually—heading to Lolly’s apartment on West Tenth.
Carlos looks at the three women and then pulls the thick pad of paper from one of his many pockets.
Waste of time. False alarm, he does not write. He goes through the motions, signs his name, and notes the hour as Dr. Constantine and Bernice return to report nothing out of place but a miracle of the order they should all come see.
“Me, too?” Elizabeth says. She has been sitting in the dark window well, beneath the stitched-together quilt of the Class of ’79. They had almost forgotten her.II
“You, too,” Dr. Constantine says. And they follow her to the second floor, to K203, where the red glow of an incubator pulses in the corner, like an isolated heart, five newly hatched goslings asleep in a furry pile, their tiny beaks tucked under their tiny, tiny wings.III
“Beautiful,” Carlos says.
“Yes,” Dr. Constantine says.
His little girl had been in one of those incubators, Carlos says. Betsy. Born at twenty-six weeks with lungs too weak and small, the doctor said, he and his wife not even able to touch her, not even with the glove because she was hooked up to tubes. His wife was afraid she might jostle something and so she did not touch her and he did not and sometimes they wondered whether, you know, with the articles you see about bonding and so forth, they wondered whether they might have really screwed something up but their little girl fine now, a soccer player, a fourth grader but also so tough that they sometimes wondered. Margaret said she had a doctorate in education and please. She said, Please do me a favor and tell your wife not to worry. Please tell her not to worry.
They stand looking down at the goslings. Carlos asks permission and reaches into the incubator to lift the smallest one, the runt Claudia will be allowed to keep in the country, the runt she will name Pickles, its down still shell-stuck. Carlos holds it in his big hand, the runt settling down quickly, snuggling there tucked under the policeman’s thumb as if the policeman were its mother.
* * *
“A misunderstanding,” Margaret Constantine concludes.
“Don’t do it again,” Carlos says.
“I won’t,” Elizabeth says. “Temporary insanity,” she says. “Honestly, I promise. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
They push open the heavy doors and walk down the steps of Progressive K–8 to the street, where Otis waits. The rain has let up, the City’s lights softer somehow, exhausted as a child after a good cry.
Elizabeth pets the soft fur on Otis’s neck, remembering how, when she was a young girl, a horse seemed the closest thing to heaven.
“Why Otis?” she asks.
“A dog I had once. An ugly bulldog.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth says.
She realizes they are all waiting for her to move along, to do something, to be okay. She should go home. The thing is, she should go home. She had only wanted to read again the other stories, the stories of the women who have met the deadline early. Insane, they might say of their schedules. Busy, busy, they say. I don’t have a minute, they say. And still, It’s all good, they say. We’re fine.
“Best of luck to your son,” Carlos says. He mounts Otis, who shifts his weight and keeps chewing. Carlos’s raincoat, a duster, looks a cape in a different century.
“And to your little girl,” she says.
Carlos waves good-bye to Margaret and tips his policeman’s hat to Bernice. She blushes beneath the big frames of her plastic glasses and strokes the keys now safely tucked in her hand.
* * *
Elizabeth apologizes to Constantine and Bernice again—but they’ll talk about everything in the morning, Margaret says sternly.
She and Bernice wait, watching as Elizabeth rides her bike safely into the shiny, wet landscape, the random pulse of brake lights. Then the two, colleagues in a distant hierarchy, retire to one of the corner bars of the City often overlooked and for good reason. Screens hang like nattering stars in the dark and men slip from their barstools to form watery blurs that puddle and spread on the wooden floor.IV
“I don’t know what’s wrong with these women,” Margaret begins.
“Hysteria,” Bernice says. She ordered bourbon on the rocks with a twist to Margaret’s martini, and it did not take them long to be on their second. “They’re all hysterics. Just like the old days.”
“I don’t think so,” Margaret says. “I was there in the old days.”
“Anxiety then,” Bernice says. “The curse of the twenty-first century.” She would like to bum a cigarette off someone but remembers no one is allowed to smoke. Maybe that’s the problem now: everyone needs a cigarette.
“Who knows,” Margaret says.
“Not me,” Bernice says. “But I’ve been at Progressive a long, long time and I’ve never seen anything like it. You would think they’re all lining up to win the Nobel Prize. You would think the sun rises and sets on New York City. What more can they do? And this is what they get: loony tunes. I say, relax. I say it’s all too much. I say, enough.” She doesn’t quite know what she says, actually, but it feels good to be gossiping with the boss, to be sitting directly across from the famous Margaret Constantine, PhD, heir to the throne, or at least for the time being, author of a number of papers concerning primary education and blah-da-de-blah. They run together now, all the Margarets and Steves and Carls and Veronicas—this a place where the heads don’t stay too long before they roll out the door. Like the French Revolution. She would like to see Margaret’s head roll out the door or she would not. Truly. Margaret a much nicer person than anyone would think. Here in the dark of the bar Margaret almost kind. Her boss had gone through the drill pretty quickly: the reasons Bernice should be fired, the reasons she would not fire her.
And then Margaret Constantine tells the bartender to put it on a tab.
And then she says to Bernice, Let’s have another.
And then she says to Bernice, So, I understand you are not just the brains, but also the balls behind this entire operation.
But before any of it, Constantine turns to Bernice, Elizabeth disappearing into the shiny, wet landscape, and says, “I need a drink.”
* * *
“We were in Scotland, a graduation trip. I must have said something terrible but for the life of me, I don’t remember what. It hasn’t been the same since.”
In the dark, her boss looks almost pretty. She is pretty, actually. Bernice never noticed.
“Anyway, that’s that. You? You’ve never said.”
“You should call her,” Bernice says.
“Who?”
“Ariel.”
“I never know what time it is in New Zealand. I try to figure it out sometimes, just to see if she’s brushing her teeth for bed or for morning. Just to picture where she might be standing.”
“You could Google Earth.”
“Maybe.”
“You could zoom in. It’s easy,” Bernice says. She tells Margaret about her recent visit to Chita Goldman’s first-grade class. Chita Goldman was showing the kids how to Google Earth on the Smart Board and used her own apartment—rent-controlled!—in the Bronx as an example of a location on Earth.V
“I suppose I could,” Dr. Constantine is saying.
“What?” Bernice says; she’s lost the thread.
“Google Earth,” Margaret says.
“Right,” Bernice says.
“And you?” Margaret says. “Children?”
“Two boys,” Bernice says. “Dylan lives in Palo Alto. My oldest, Lenin, passed in 2004.”
Iraq, she says, the irony. Lenin recruited from the hallways of PS 124, a crappy school then and more so now—this before she organized Progressive K–8’s employees to strike for a better family education policy. Every year they invite her back for Veterans Day, she says. The commemorative reading of the names the children painted on a mural outside the gymnasium, a mural of doves and daisies and blue skies that has seen better days and still, she goes. She returns to the crappy school to see her boy’s name among the other names and to greet the little girls and boys who walk the line of now only mothers, shaking hands and thanking them for their sacrifice.
There’s a game on—basketball, some kind of rivalry that has the mostly men at the bar suddenly cheering, a point won or lost, fairly or unfairly, the referee a total dick, somebody’s shouting, a total, fucking dick.
“My sacrifice?” Bernice Stilton says, then nothing.VI
Margaret Constantine gestures to the harried bartender for the check, understanding that in the morning, or later in the morning, she and Bernice will meet again in the hallway outside of the administrative offices of Progressive K–8, where she will review her day’s schedule, asking her if she might do a little rearranging given the late night. But now, it seems, they are friends, good friends, sailors on the same choppy sea; they push away from the bar and stand a bit unsteadily. From here they negotiate the dark to the door out, their beacon the red neon in the windows. From the west, Eleventh Avenue or maybe farther, a sudden eruption of sirens deafens everything, another emergency passing, almost gone; they stand on the sidewalk, waiting it out.
I. Bernice Stilton had called Dr. Constantine on the unlisted number Constantine keeps with the hope of hearing from Ariel, time zones and whatnot, New Zealand impossible; the number only to be used in emergencies. Constantine answered—she had been sleeping over Vicram’s XXI, the chapter on the musings of his first wife, a woman who had agreed to free love, veganism, and meditation, and lived duly with it all until her untimely death from TB. “Hullo?” she said.
“Bernice,” Bernice said.
“Bernice?” Dr. Constantine said.
“Listen,” Bernice said. “I’ve made a mistake. I gave the keys to Elizabeth Fanning, Ben Hewitt’s mom. She convinced me she needed something but I’ve got a funny feeling.”
“Where is she?”
“At school, I presume,” Bernice said.
“I’m on my way—”
“Be careful,” Bernice says.
“Is she armed?” Dr. Constantine said, a joke.
“Not sure,” Bernice said, humorless. “I’ll meet you there.”
Not for nothing does Bernice Stilton live in Penn South with the other ladies from the Garment Union days; not for nothing did she meet Rudy Stilton on a picket line, did they name their first son Lenin, did she carry the card from the Communist Party. Not for nothing does she sometimes wake to hear the thwack thwack thwack of the helicopters that dangle over Chelsea at odd hours, helicopters pursuing something—terrorists?—through the dark. She happens to know they’ve housed Homeland Security not too far west from here, in the old thread factory on Eleventh, the one where they broke all the windows during Stonewall and looted in the Blackout of ’77 and now, revamped, its skin a photovoltaic green, the Feds have taken over three whole floors, just above Fox News and under Scorsese.
II. Was this it, then? Her sense of slowly disappearing? Like in that cartoon she watched as a little girl where the character dissolved not all at once but as if someone were taking an eraser, wiping her away? Could she start again? Could she forget what she had done? Could she ever, even here, be forgiven who she was?
III. Rebecca Hollingsworth had brought the eggs from the country last week, believing the project might boost her daughter Claudia’s standing among the clique of girls who, in no small measure, have spent the past months excluding Claudia Hollingsworth from every game they invent in the playground—Mommies and Babies, Cops and Robbers, Blondes and Brunettes. Claudia doesn’t appear to mind though Rebecca knows better. Or, rather, Rebecca minds. She has made up excuses to be there, to watch; Claudia sitting alone on the top of the monkey bars, talking to no one or to one of her imaginary friends. These times Claudia knows full well that her mother watches and so sprouts a pair of wings and lifts off from the monkey bars high over the City to observe the complexities of the traffic and the fascinating construction projects: the trucks, the jackhammers, the yellow and orange cones. Her imaginary friends suggest farther places, maybe returning to her country house to snuggle at the end of her bed, where it is always warm, and quiet, or possibly her grandmother’s farm in Canada, but Claudia says no, she needs to be back for Snack.
Last week Rebecca had appeared at the door to K203, Ms. Greene’s kindergarten class, citing the absence of nature from children’s experiences in the City, recent public scandals and school shootings elsewhere, the culture in general and commercialization in particular, carting the incubator, and the eggs the students might hatch as an experiment in kinder living, kinder a word, she would tell Ms. Greene and anyone else in the administration cornered to hear, that should be invoked more often, especially here, at Progressive K–8, a school on the forefront. And for that morning Rebecca had watched as her plan worked perfectly, as the other little girls—so kind!—gathered around her Claudia, touching her, hugging her, jumping up and down, laughing as Claudia beamed out from within them, from her place, suddenly, at the center of this world.
IV. A hundred years ago, sawdust and blood, the threat of something, but now just the smell of grease, the bang and clash of dishes washed too quickly by men paid too little. In her day, a June one in 1954, Bernice would have gone in back to ask them what, exactly, they earned. She would have wanted to practice her Spanish. But she’s grown tired of Labor, she’s grown tired of all that.
V. The kids sat in their kid chairs at their kid tables watching as Chita Goldman Google Earthed her apartment building in the Bronx, as she zoomed in—thirty-six years!—to show them a bird’s-eye view of its brick façade, nothing special, and the seventh-floor window that would lead to her living room and the faded rose pattern of Chita Goldman’s couch—it belonged to Nanna! If they could have gone in, and Chita Goldman explained that very soon they would be able to go in, given the advances of technology, drones the size of bees, pretty soon, Chita Goldman said, they would be able to go all the way into her apartment, to see the way she had left her dirty breakfast dishes on the red-checked tablecloth in the kitchen, to see her powder room with its windmill wallpaper, and the flowers in the vase in her bedroom, the kids now dead quiet as Chita Goldman went on, as she talked them through her entire apartment.
VI. Carlos rides away in the rain, shamed for all he did not say about the ugly bulldog, Otis. He could have told those women much more: How Otis would ride shotgun, his paws on the dashboard looking out, and how Otis’s eyes were black, and how Otis smelled of his wife’s powders tucked as Otis often was within the covers of their bed. How Otis was the first to rise and how Otis sometimes slept on his back, legs in the air like an overturned bug, his wife would say, pointing and laughing, never failing to be amused. How holding Otis he had watched the vet prepare whatever it was and prime the syringe and how he wished his wife were with him but she was not, this happening much too suddenly, this failure of something vital, Otis unable to stand, unable to eat, Otis’s black eyes wrong, as if trapped behind scratched glass.
He’d cradled Otis in his winter coat to where the vet lived, the vet unable to make it to the vet hospital but he would meet him in the vestibule and let him up to his apartment. Carlos remembers all this in the reflective light of the post-rain City, riding a bit distractedly up the bike path along the West Side Highway toward the stables, the joggers and pedestrians and bicyclists mostly inside due to weather except a few, a certain few, and so Carlos might be forgiven for not calling backup for the furious bicyclist, the bicyclist’s bicycle of the thousands of dollars variety now dented and thrown to the cement bike path, the bicyclist so furious he cannot speak. He shoves the person who has slowed him down, a young boy crossing the path to the river in search of something he cannot find elsewhere, something more than this, the bicyclist shoving the young boy against the cement barricades intended for suicide bombers, the young boy defending himself against the bicyclist and the policeman suddenly in the picture, a rookie who charges in alone, jumping off his horse to break it up. The switchblade intended for the bicyclist’s neck lodged in the policeman’s neck instead.
His blood was wet as the rain, the young boy would remember, will remember; the policeman’s blood staining the cement barricade red so that many years later, many years passed, the young boy, now an ex–con artist, will spill the red paint on the cement gallery floor, bleached for this occasion—the occasion of the artist—prepared and prepped, the announcements mailed, the party planned, the ex–con artist at work on the installation, etching the flowers in the red paint with his fingers, the petals, the details he’s known for—he’s done this before—as he remembers the dead policeman, as he never forgets the dead policeman, the rookie, or the look of his dumb horse still waiting in the rain.