The top of my mother’s kitchen table was once an old barn door, its sharp edges softened by decades of family dinners. There is still a keyhole where a lock once fit, and woodworm boreholes like pinpricks, filled with years of food grime turned the consistency of earwax. When I was little I loved to root around in each hole with a fork, making tiny piles that seeded the tabletop like termite droppings. I sit here now, poking at the table with the tip of a ballpoint pen. Peter should have been here by now. It’s Mum’s birthday and we’re taking her out for dinner. Our reservation is at eight. I pick up the kitchen phone and call the time. “At the tone, the time will be . . . seven . . . twenty-five . . . and fifty seconds. . . . At the tone, the time will be . . . seven . . . twenty-six . . . exactly.” The new kitten walks into the kitchen. Marmalade back, white paws, yellow eyes. He looks up at me, wanting attention. I put him on the table and he starts eating the termite crumbs. Somewhere in the apartment I hear a crash. I push back my chair and go down the hall.
Mum is on a stepladder, alphabetizing the bookshelves.
“Oh good,” she says. “You can help me with the poetry section.” She pulls a stack of books off the shelf and hands them to me.
“Peter’s running late.” I sit down on the floor and start sorting books. “Does Primo Levi go in poetry?”
“I can never decide. Put him in philosophy for now.”
I pick up The Collected Poems of Dwight Burke from the top of a pile and open it. On the front page is a handwritten dedication, scrawled in faded blue fountain pen: For Henry’s girls, who are sweeter than pachysandra, with hope that your lives will be filled with poetry and spice. Love, Dwight.
“This is mine.”
Mum glances down from the ladder. “I believe it’s yours and Anna’s.”
“You’re right. I’ll send it to her.”
“I’d keep it here. It’s probably worth a fortune by now—a signed first edition of Burke. Jeremy will just want her to sell it.”
On the back cover of the book is a faded black-and-white photo of Dwight Burke in a seersucker jacket and polka-dot bow tie. His face has the same kindly expression I remember from my childhood, a pleasant WASPiness.
“He was a nice man,” I say.
“Such a tragedy,” Mum says.
“He wore penny loafers with nickels in them. I should write to Nancy.”
“Your father always thought he was a homosexual.”
For years after Dwight Burke drowned, there were rumors he had killed himself—that Carter Ashe, the man he had gone to return the book to that spring day when my father and I went to collect his boxes, was Burke’s lover. That Burke, a devout Catholic, was overcome with shame and guilt. My father insisted the rumors weren’t true. Burke’s clothes had been found in a careful pile on the banks of the Hudson, perfectly folded—everything but the boxer shorts he was wearing when they pulled him out of the water. “If he were planning to drown himself,” my father had said, “why keep on his boxers? Dwight would have wanted to go out of the world the same way he came in. He was a poet. He loved symmetry.”
“Author or subject?” Mum says. She’s holding a book about Gandhi. She has moved on to biography.
“Subject. No one really cares who wrote it.” I open the book of poetry in my hand. The poems are alive, odd, buzzing with insects and tender grasses. As I skim through, a verse catches my eye.
At the crest of the hill two stallions
backs black against a nectar wash
graze on the green-tang clover,
acorns to sniff out.
We lie together beneath the flowering hawthorn,
your white collar unbuttoned.
Once, I heard the sound
of wind under water, breathed in the sea
and survived.
I hope my father was right, that Dwight’s drowning was an accident. I hope he left his lover’s house that morning wanting nothing more than a bracing swim; that he lay on the banks of the Hudson River, listened to the water flowing past, breathed in the crocus blossoms, the sour-tart smell of crabgrass. He stripped down to his underwear and waded out into the muscular water, floated, watched clouds run across the sky, the flocking birds. He turned to swim back, but the landscape had changed. Now he was drifting past an unfamiliar shore, pulled by a current too strong for him to fight.
The doorbell rings twice.
“Anybody home?” Peter calls out.
“We’re back here,” Mum calls. “Don’t let the kitten out. He keeps trying to escape through the front door.”
Peter is carrying an enormous bunch of flowers, daylilies and pale pink garden roses.
“Happy birthday, Wallace,” he says, handing them to my mother. He looks around at the piles of books everywhere, my mother on the stepladder, alphabetizing. “Very festive.”
“I’m too old for birthdays. I’ll change my blouse and then we can go.” She hands me the flowers. “Can you put these in water?”
Most of the streetlights on our block are out, deliberately broken by crackheads, who prefer the shadows. Peter and I walk home from dinner down the center of East Tenth Street, arm in arm, making ourselves a larger, less appealing target. Half the ground-floor apartments have beware of dog signs in their windows, though we rarely see anyone walking a dog.
“Your mother was on excellent form tonight,” Peter says. “She was practically beaming when we put her in the cab.”
“She loves to be pampered. She pretends to scorn it, but take her to an overpriced restaurant and pick up the check? She acts like a delighted little girl who just got a new doll from Daddy. Also, she adores you. You make her feel young.”
“And you?” Peter asks.
“I am young.”
“Do you adore me?”
“Most of the time. Sometimes you’re just irritating.”
He pulls me to him, breathes me in. “You smell good. Lemony.”
“Probably the cheese-clothed lemon wedge they gave me to squeeze on my fish.”
“Eau de Sole. Because every woman has one. I think we could market that.” Peter laughs.
“Not every woman,” I say.
When we open the door to our apartment the air in the room feels charged, staticky. A faint metallic tang in its molecules. The phone is ringing and ringing, unanswered. Next to it, on the bookshelf, a vase of tulips has overturned, water pooling.
“Fucking cat stepped on the answering machine again. I’m going to strangle that damned cat.” I throw my coat on the table and storm into our bedroom. There are two large windows in our bedroom. One on the right, over the bed; the other, which opens onto the fire escape, mostly obscured by heavy metal security bars that can only be opened from the inside, in case we need to make an escape. The window above our bed is now lying across it. Above the bed, a gaping hole, a splintered wooden frame. There’s a man squatting on the windowsill. He grins at me, eyes glazed, seemingly unaware that he is teetering on the edge of a four-story drop. His greasy hair is matted, weeks of unwashed filth webbing the surface, as if spiders have nested in it, their microscopic eggs warmed by his damp, cradle-capped scalp. Somehow the man has managed to climb across the side of the building from the fire escape, span the free fall, and bash in our entire window frame. On the fire escape, outside the unlocked window bars, I can see our TV and VCR, the tangled cords of the answering machine.
The man follows my gaze, then looks back at me, cocks his head, as if deciding whether to go or stay. He wets his lips with the tip of his pink tongue and smiles. I scream for Peter, but it comes out as a whisper. Leering, the man starts to climb back into the room. My entire body coils. If I run at him right now, take him by surprise, body-slam him, he will fall backward into the night sky, splatter onto the cement, lie there, eyes wide open, while some other crackhead picks his pockets. I hurtle toward him like a battering ram before I can change my mind. And then I’m flat on my face, legs kicked out from under me. Peter strides past, tall, menacing. He is holding a kitchen knife. When he speaks, his voice is measured, blade-cold.
“Go out the way you came in,” he says. “You can have the television—it’s a rabbit-eared piece of crap. But you will leave the answering machine. There’s a number on there I need.” He takes a few steps forward. He is terrifying, powerful in a way I have never seen. A wolf, transformed by the full moon. “Now,” he growls. “Before I have your blood on my hands.”
The man backs out, leaps like a cat from the window onto the fire escape, picks up the TV under one arm, VCR under the other. I listen to the clang of his shoes descending the metal stairs, the rasp and rattle of cords dragging behind. On the floorboards beside my face, there’s a spray of red. I’ve cut my chin. In the far corner of the room, the closet door slowly pushes open.
“Peter,” I warn. “Behind you.” Then I close my eyes to whatever is coming, wait for the creak of heavy footsteps on wooden floors. Instead, something silky brushes my face. I open my eyes. Next to me, the cat is licking my blood off the floor.
Later, after the police have come, after the answering machine has been dusted for prints, after we have swept up shards of glass and splintered wood, after I have forgiven Peter for shoving me to the ground, for the scar on my chin that I will carry the rest of my life, Peter asks, “If I hadn’t stopped you, would you really have pushed him out the window?”
“I guess so. I don’t know. I just reacted.”
Peter frowns, looks at me as if he’s seen something just under the surface of my skin, tiny broken capillaries, or a bluish hue—something that shouldn’t be exposed to the light, and I feel the creep of shame, of exposure.
“You would have killed a man over a TV and VCR?”
“Not the TV. He was coming back inside for me,” I say. “His eyes were black.”
“We need to get out of this neighborhood before you end up in prison for murder.”
“Screw you, Pete. I was terrified.”
“I’m joking,” Peter says. “Well, mainly.” He laughs.
I grab the answering machine from the bureau and head into the living room. “You said there was a number you needed?”
Peter follows behind me. “Elle. Please. Come on.” He picks a pack of cigarettes up from the coffee table, pats himself down for a lighter. “You risked your life to save a drowning man, for fuck’s sake. You’re hardly a killer. I’m the one who threatened him with a knife.” He looks around for somewhere to put his ash. Settles for the geranium pot.
I turn away, pretend to look for something on the bookshelf.
“Bastard must’ve nicked my ashtray.”
“It’s in the dishwasher,” I say.
Peter comes over to me, turns me around to face him, serious now. “I wouldn’t give a toss if you had drawn and quartered that pig, hung his innards on a flagpole. The only thing I care about is that you are safe. You’re my wife. The love of my life. There’s nothing you could ever say or do to change that. I was just surprised, is all. I’ve never seen that side of you.”
I wish so badly that I could believe him. But I don’t. Some things can be forgiven—an affair, a cruel comment. But not the dirty, vile instinct lurking like a tapeworm in the dark folds of my gut, ready to emerge the moment it smells bloody meat. Until tonight, I thought it was gone. Pulled from my mouth inch by inch, foot by foot, year by year, leaving only the hollow space, the memory, of where it had once nested.
Peter pokes the tip of my nose with his finger. “Now, no more grumping, missy.” He goes into the kitchen, comes back with an ashtray and a saucer of milk. “Here, kitty, kitty,” he says, placing it on the radiator.
Tell him, I think. Let him see you. Kill the worm. Be clean. But instead I say, “Cats are lactose intolerant.”
That night when we get into bed I feel a distance from him far greater than the crumple of sheets between us. The fault line I have cemented. I love him too much to risk losing him.
My plane clears the last spiky, desolate ridge of mountains. Below me, an endless suburban sprawl, a drab blanket on the earth, the low-hung shimmer of the Pacific barely visible in the distance. The plane shudders through a gyre, lowers its landing gear with a rough throat clearing. Moments later, we hit tarmac and the passengers cheer. We are always expecting the worst.
I go straight from LAX to the hospital, dragging my heavy carry-on behind me, pushing through air and space with aggressive, panicked need. I cannot be too late. I cannot be too late. There’s a taxi waiting for me—Jeremy has arranged everything—but the driver is lazy, unobservant. He manages to miss every light, slows to let other cars merge, carefully picks out the Murphy’s Law route. By the time we pull up in front of the hospital, my teeth are ground to a chalk, and I’ve gone from 15 percent to 10 percent to shoving a few dollar bills in his hand and saying, “Asshole,” under my breath.
Inside, a guard points me to the elevators and I run, air-lifting my suitcase off the polished palazzo floor. A crowd of people are ahead of me at the elevator bank, all looking up, hoping to divine which elevator will arrive first. By some miracle, the doors directly in front of me open. I press 11, then hit the doors close button repeatedly, hoping they will shut before anyone else gets on, but nothing happens. A woman in a head scarf and wig steps in just as the doors are closing. Cancer. The elevator sits there. Shut, tomblike.
“I think this one is out of service.” I press the open button. Press it again. I can feel a claustrophobia rising inside my chest, as if my body itself is trapping me. But then the elevator starts to move. It rumbles slowly up one floor and stops, opens its doors. When it is clear that no one is getting on, the elevator pulls away and heads up one more flight. Again, we stop, wait an interminably long time.
“Some kid must have pushed every button,” I say.
“It’s Shabbat,” the woman says.
“You must be fucking kidding me.” I’m on the Sabbath elevator, which stops on every floor. “I don’t have time for this shit.”
The woman looks at me as though I have contagion. Moves away.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—” I’m finding it impossible to breathe. “You don’t understand. I can’t be late. My sister is dying.”
The woman stares at the ceiling, mouth pinched in sour contempt.
I have always considered myself a tolerant person. Each to her own. Yet right now, when what’s on the line is not punishment for turning on a light switch but whether I will get to my beautiful sister in time to say goodbye—to climb into the hospital bed beside her, hold her in my arms, admit it was me who tore her Bobby Sherman poster, make her laugh with me one last time—right this second, I feel only pure rage at the stupidity of all religions. I close my eyes and pray to a God I don’t believe in that Anna will wait for me. I need to tell her what I did.