6

A BLUE METAL SKY, gripped by a pair of giant bar magnets. In the split second before she understood what was wrong, Valerie heard Gerard’s voice and saw a picture that was not on the screen. Comme les aimants, he’d said of the Twin Towers, and she’d laughed. The words for magnets and lovers are close in French. They’d been visiting New York, the four of them, riding the Staten Island ferry. Mama, what’s so funny? her son asked. Andre was six, Chantal, four, and she repeated his question, because she always repeated what Andre said.

Robert’s voice cut in. Un avion a écrasé, he said. A plane went right through the building. One of the towers was dark with smoke.

Then Valerie saw what everyone else saw.

Marguerite’s son was on the phone from Montreal. He’d just seen it, live on TV.

When Valerie was young, she’d seen a plane disappear into the sky. It never returned. Maybe it just did. The thought prickled the back of her neck.

Gerard’s watching this, too. She imagined him eyeing the glass-fronted buildings along the East River, his cameraman ready to shoot when the sky broke into a metallic shriek behind them, the sounds of an immense iron fist crushing through concrete and steel. In the building’s reflective glass, he’d see fire.

He’d turn around.

***

Her reactions were too slow, as if time itself were turning into a thick and gelatinous substance, like the waves of Lake Ontario in winter. Yet in spite of this, her thoughts quickened, awash in a flood, sluices bursting open, sounds pouring into her, and perhaps she was only imagining that the barrier of her physical self had dissolved, that in the heat of fire, her soul was melting into every other soul. Help me, someone yelled. Stay calm, said a woman on the phone. Help is on the way. Break a window. Take a damp towel, roll it up, cover the base of the door. A man’s voice was shaking. The earth is the Lord’s, a psalm of David’s. He began to recite, knowing he was about to die.

“How many people work there?” asked Marguerite.

Valerie didn’t know.

“They say fifty thousand in the towers,” said Robert.

Space had collapsed, like that blue tent of a sky. And with it, distance. Chantal! Andre! Gerard!

She thought of everything, and all at once.

Life is a struck match, lit by grace. All it is. All it ever was.

Time is over.

***

The TV voices faded. In the screams and cacophony of fire, there was the sound of a rescuer’s voice, her sister’s. Look, Valerie. Look.

She was falling away and downward into memory, into a green shimmer, a golden luminescence, a girl of ten peering into the eyepiece of her sister’s microscope. Cy-to-plas-m, Karen sounds it out. The round blobs are chlorophyll, she says. They swim in it.

Cyto— ?

—Plasm. It’s — basic.

Valerie wonders what she’s looking at.

Pond grass epidermis, says Karen. One cell thick.

Karen’s seventeen, her sleek, dark hair in a page-boy, her glasses off, her vision deep enough to see the invisible parts of life without the aid of an instrument. She’s wearing a pink sweater-set, a grey skirt, loafers and knee-socks, and she’s about to take part in the Science Fair at Groves Island High — the only girl who’s entered the exhibit. Valerie looks again, imagining that she sees through the eyepiece a line of emerald chloroplasts afloat in a river of gold, but the gold fades as the green grows into a formless blur in her field of vision, a green pond of light sorting itself into the fine detail of duckweed and bracken. She imagines pond grass, clumps of it at the water’s edge, cattails protruding from their fronds.

When she was little, Karen would tell her that if you put a cattail in water overnight, you’d have a kitten in the morning. Valerie was mad when it didn’t happen. Now she’s ten, picturing these tall brown spikes near the water, looking hard into the eyepiece as if she might find them, if she were about to see something wondrous, a soft form that’ll scamper across the rocks, wet and hungry.

A dark shape, that’s what her mind’s eye conjures up, but nothing she’d ever seen before, nothing feline, nothing to do with the grasses. A huge brown-coated object, floating face down.

She pulls away.

What’s the matter? asks Karen.

Nothing, says Valerie, but she doesn’t want to look anymore.

Later, she tells herself. She stops remembering and glances up at Marguerite’s TV. There are too many dead as it is.

***

“Gerard, where is he?” asked Marguerite. Her eyes were afraid.

Valerie felt too stunned to answer.

“In what part of New York City?” Marguerite picked up the telephone and dumped it in her lap.

Valerie dialled. Answer, answer. Her mind began to close the circuit. Please be alive for me, Gerard. She’d forgotten Andre’s number. Gerard, you know it. Ringing, ringing. There’s no one here to take your call right now. The sun was gleaming on the table’s edge, its wood-framed glass cleaned and polished by Marguerite’s attentive hands. Gerard was working. Her husband didn’t like to be disturbed at work. She must have written Andre’s number down somewhere.

Gérard, je regardais le télé, I was watching TV, she said to his voice-mail. Quel catastrophe. She left him Marguerite’s number. She asked him for Andre’s. What a terrible feeling, she thought, to be so far away from a loved one who could be in danger. Worse was to realize how in the frantic thumping of her heart, his heart was beating, too. Yet it was possible that Gerard had no idea that this disaster was being televised, that even the residents of these remote islands were watching the fire with horror and dread.

It was one of those moments, thought Valerie, when the heart sees everything at once. She grew up in New York City, yet whatever remained of that distant past was flying apart, as if the plane had struck her. She needed to know where Gerard was.

On répond? whispered Marguerite, her eyes full of worry. She stared at the phone.

Pas encore, Valerie answered. Not yet.

She hung up. I hope he doesn’t have a silly ring-tone, she thought. Like “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” She started to giggle.

“What is so funny?”

“Gerard and I have been married all these years, and I don’t even know what his ring-tone is.”

Marguerite looked at her with consternation. She offered her chamomile tisane to soothe her nerves.

Valerie’s ring-tone was Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” a song her mother loved to play. Come and sit with me, she’d say, and she’d pat the piano bench. She introduced her daughter to Tchaikowsky and Mozart, and Valerie learned to hum their melodies, even if she wasn’t that interested in piano. Only the tunes had been mangled and crushed into ring-tones, hundreds of chirpy ditties all going off at once, and at that moment, the jangle of “Für Elise” was spilling out of someone else’s cell phone, yanking some poor guy away from his coffee and laptop, and he heard his wife crying that a plane crashed a few floors below her and how much she loves him, and Valerie’s hand was shaking as she tried the phone again. Only now there was no getting through to New York.

“We’ll have to wait,” she said, to no one in particular.

Marguerite set the tea tray down. “Does he have an email address?”

As if he’d be checking it right about now. “We’ll have a line soon.”

Robert was staring at the TV. “Les pompiers sont arrivés,” he said, as if the firefighters were parked outside.

Valerie slumped over, face in her hands.

Her mother’s playing the piano. From nowhere, the sound of it comes, the consolation of Mozart and Brahms. This was how the woman dealt with sorrow, with the sight of her husband sitting in his armchair, sipping rye, falling asleep, his soft snoring like a deep bass instrument playing its own tune. Your dad’s tired, her mother’d say. He worked downtown, in the office of the Medical Examiner. If he were alive this morning, thought Valerie, he’d have lots to do. A quiet and methodical man, his drinking was as careful as his lab work. When he’d nod off, her mother would stop playing the piano, go to him, take the glass from his hands, help him to bed.

He wasn’t belligerent. He was as still as a parched tree absorbing rain. Only her mother got fed up and stopped playing for him until the evening when he came home with a gift for her, a white silk Chinese dress, patterned with lavender wisteria. Are you going to try it on? asked Karen. Their mother was a slight woman with straight black hair, and the slender style suited her. She returned to the piano, wearing her pretty dress and a look of resignation. Her husband’s eyes were bright. He filled his glass.

***

Valerie called Karen in London. “Have you spoken to Gerard?” her sister asked.

“I can’t get through.”

“You will, honey. Wait a bit.”

The words embraced her. She’s four years old and her big sister’s patting her head, saying be a good girl — but she’s fretful, as children are who won’t be consoled. Karen’s promising to push her on the swing, to walk with her through the zoo and point out the animals. The zoo was close to the Bronx River. Dark and sinuous, slithering over the rocks below, a serpent in the grass that river was.

Valerie dried her eyes and glanced at the TV. There’s no way out, she thought. When the world starts to break, you break, too.

“What are you seeing on the news?” she asked her sister.

“The same thing you are.” Karen paused. “Over here, there’s speculation.”

“How do you mean?”

“That it might have been deliberate.”

“Who would have done such a thing?”

“The world is full of crazy people, sis,” she said.

Valerie tried to pretend she was wrong. Her sister had such empathy with the living world. When they were kids, butterflies would rest in her hair like flowers. Chickadees would feed from her hands. Life felt safe around her. She was just repeating something she’d heard.

***

Valerie’s father liked to fish the Bronx River. A photo shows him wearing an old cap, flannels, a vest and dungarees, his tackle and bait in hand. He was a tall man with dusty hair and blue eyes, a veteran of World War Two, one who appears awkward, uncertain if he wants the camera’s attention. You sense he’s trying to hide the fact that his eyes see more than they should. Worse is the feeling that if you look into his eyes, you’ll see his mind unravelling. He doesn’t smile. He lost all his friends in the war, said Valerie’s mother. The Japanese captured him in the Philippines, but he escaped. His friends did not.

Valerie realized that she’d never thought too hard about her father. Now she couldn’t avoid these facts. They were punching their way through the new idea that the crash might have been deliberate. On TV, the screen exploded in a roiling fireball, a bloated, disgusting spectacle, a rotten orange showering its garbage all over Lower Manhattan. Her mother used to say that no one wanted to know how their father had suffered. These were the folks who went and saw war films instead. A commentator viewing this plane crash said it’s just like a movie. Her mother would have answered by saying how vulgar. A plane hits a building, and this is how you entertain yourselves. Only Valerie found it hard to take her eyes off the screen. If Karen was right — if it wasn’t accidental — this loop would run in everyone’s head forever.

Pray she’s wrong.

“When did the plane crash?” she asked Robert.

“Just before you came in.”

His face darkened as he stared at the TV, his voice hushed, his eyes on the burning tower. It was the fault, he said, of too many planes zigzagging across an overcrowded sky, of buildings many times taller than they should be. Sooner or later, he insisted, an accident was bound to happen.

Marguerite scowled at her husband. C’étaient les kamikazes, she said.

Valerie’s dad had a buddy named Mr. Troiano who’d served in the Pacific during World War Two. The boys in her class said he’d been on an aircraft carrier that had been sideswiped by a kamikaze pilot who’d missed his target and plunged into the sea. The fighter passed right in front of his nose, said Matthew. Mr. T. could of pissed on the Rising Sun. Maybe that explained the hidden castle where the vet found safety, because nothing else could explain the huge key-ring swinging from his belt, the clinking and jangling sounds of the keys as he strode by. Tall and muscular, with thick, black hair — everyone thought he was a giant, like Bluebeard. In fact he was an engineer with the New York City Department of Public Works, and he carried the keys that opened and shut the intake and outtake valves at City Hall. He knew all about water mains, about pipes in danger of bursting. Can you go shut the tower valves, Mr. T.? Valerie could hear the clanking of his keys, the thud of his hard boots on concrete. He could fix the whole damn thing. Sure, he could.

Mr. Troiano scowled at talk of kamikaze planes, and she felt sure that her father would have done the same. Her mother said that whenever he remembered the war, her dad would grab his fishing tackle and leave the house. At this time of year, he’d fish in the lake and wetlands of Van Cortlandt Park, in the Pelham Bay lagoon, and on Twin Island to the east. He’d cast off from shore, or he’d rent a rowboat, exploring ponds and inlets and marshlands. She didn’t know that he ever caught much beyond the look of wild apparition that he carried home in his eyes. It seemed to his daughter that in the seclusion of a wooded inlet, he must have had visions. The souls of the faithful departed drifting among the trees and rivers; it was possible.

Everyone in heaven is a saint, said the sisters. Does that include soldiers who died in the war? asked a classmate who’d lost his dad. Yes, sister answered. You can pray to your father. Valerie’s dad knew a lot of men who’d died, some of them Catholics, his Irish fishing buddies from before the war. Only he’d stopped going to church. God understands, said her mother, when Valerie inquired after his soul. He fished alone.

***

The boat overturned, his body face down in the water. He’d been drinking, said the police.

Until moments ago, Valerie had never conjured up this scene, had never wanted to see it. Only she knew that time had been upended, that she couldn’t escape what had happened. Regarde le télé, says Robert. Look, Valerie. Look into the depth of greenery, says Karen. Cherish the plant with its one-cell layer of thickness, its emerald chloroplasts. Look at the dark stain shadowing the water — look at her father who drowned in search of his friends, look at time collapsing in fire and ash, his lost buddies crying out from the tower windows. Look at the flame at the tip of the match. Cup your hand against the gust of wind that takes it all away.