9

JAMES HAD TOLD VALERIE that he wanted to be a chef, that he hoped to open his own restaurant. She’d taught him how to make tarte aux pommes. Taking the subway downtown this morning, he would have been imagining lightness — eggs in cloudlike pastry, crêpes made of air. I’ll put your tarte on my menu one day, he’d said.

Valerie glanced at her watch and counted back two hours. In New York City, it was ten past nine in the morning.

She had to keep busy. Keep trying the phone.

She’d left the butter out overnight. The dough for the tarte had to be made ahead, then chilled. In the cupboard were dry ingredients for baking. A bowl of crisp red apples sat on the counter, ready to be washed. She surveyed everything in the kitchen, walking with care like a hospital patient hooked up to time and its steady drip of news, forced to make a ponderous moment of each second because that was the only way she could absorb things. A rope and ladder, my ordinary life.

***

When you bake, said Gerard, you look like a Flemish woman in one of Rembrandt’s paintings. You hold that particular light of day. That silence.

At this moment, she held nothing. She was a dust-mote sifting through light. All of us are dust, she thought. There was no point trying to make sense of things. On the kitchen counter, between the bins of sugar and flour, was a mini-TV, full to the brim with bad news, with commentators trying to sort things out, to fit this mayhem into some structure, into a story with a coherent plot. What a joke, she thought. In her hands she could feel the hum of life, and she understood that the day’s good work would strengthen her. She turned the TV’s sound off.

Her spirit went looking for Andre, rifling through her messy closet of a life in search of some comparison to this tragedy, something she already understood. Doesn’t this remind you of the time when…? Images drifted before her eyes. It’s a bit like this, said memory. Try this.

She thought of her childhood, and the plane that disappeared.

Only this catastrophe wasn’t like that.

It wasn’t like anything at all.

***

When Andre was sixteen, Valerie took him to Groves Island, her childhood home a few kilometres north of the city boundary. There she’d gazed out over Long Island Sound from a ragtag cluster of old frame houses, their front steps peeling paint and creaking underfoot. Andre said, It’s old here, Mom, and she said, New York City’s old, too.

New York’s a different kind of “old,” he replied.

Everything changes in different ways, she’d said to him. Everything flows, nothing abides — those were the words of a Greek philosopher whose name had slipped her mind. When she was a child, she’d lived in the north end of New York City, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Aunt Ann and Uncle Joe were Groves Island people, and her aunt and mother were sisters. After her father’s death, Valerie’s family moved to the island to be close to their relatives.

Life changed for her, but the island began to change, too. Valerie told Andre how it used to house an army base, and how its main street, once nooked and crannied with bars and honky-tonks, now played host to chaste and pretty coffee shops, organic greengrocers, fitness clubs. Her childhood home remained the same. Their mother had kept up the old wood-frame cottage with the screened-in porch, a family gathering-place entangled with wildflowers and haunted by their youth. The house was Karen’s now.

Some things grow older and younger at the same time, Valerie told her son. Like a scabby old bulb that puts out a green shoot every year.

Like New York, he replied.

After their visit, Valerie and Andre returned to Toronto, and her son grew into a young man who longed to live in his mother’s hometown. He was a restless kid, always running late for class, taking the stairs two at a time. Like a herd of elephants, his father used to say. Slow down.

Greased lightning, said Andre.

He did business in the South Tower, eighty flights up.

Mom, I work out. Don’t panic.

Her thoughts were melting in the heat of fright.

***

The phone rang. It was Gerard. His voice was a gale-force wind that howled through her body. Valerie had to sit down.

“You’re all right?” she asked.

“I am safe,” he said. “It is horrible—”

“Have you spoken to Andre?

“Yes.” He paused. “He tried to call you, but—”

“Where is he?”

“On his way out of the building. I am off to find him.”

“Sois prudent,” she said. “Be careful.”

“It is madness, total disorder. The authorities—”

“Give Andre my love.”

“That son of ours, I’ll give him a kick in the pants. I had to yell at him to leave the building.”

“Because of James?”

“No one knows where James is. Please don’t ask me.”

His voice was strained, like the sound a branch makes, creaking under the weight of ice.

“I’m here,” she said. “It’s okay.”

Gerard cleared his throat. “Try to imagine,” he began.

***

Gerard had his back to the tower as it exploded into flames and he saw its shattered reflection in the building glass up ahead. Merde, he yelled, and looking behind him at the darkening cloud of smoke and ash, the spiral of computer paper, spreadsheets, email printouts, he felt certain that whatever had happened was no accident. He and his cameraman ran down the slope of Wall Street, through the crowds of men and women trying to escape along the zigzag of side streets to the north and south. Gerard was heading in the direction of the river, to South Street, then northward to the pier. He knew Manhattan. He knew that there was an escape route by sea, that it was too dangerous to run back up Wall Street to Broadway. On the pier he found a water taxi, and he told the driver that they were Canadian journalists. He asked the driver to take them downriver a kilometre or so, then into the bay, drifting south of State Street and the Battery.

Up ahead, Gerard could see the skyline of Lower Manhattan, the fiery wound in the North Tower. It was almost nine a.m. Eastern Daylight Time and he was already on the phone to Montreal. He told them about the crash, and they patched him into the morning radio show. They were going live to air. Gerard started to talk. Only he wasn’t sure what he was talking about, or if his words were making sense.

Time was unspooling from its reel. He spoke for hours, or seconds.

Then he remembered his son.

***

While he was doing his live report, he witnessed the second plane crash. He described what he saw, but someone else was talking — a calm, dispassionate man, not Andre’s father. Moments after he hung up, his cell rang.

“Hello, Dad?”

Pale as a seashell, Gerard gripped the deck rail.

“Andre, are you all right?”

“They took the hit a few floors below, but there’s a stairwell open.”

“You get the hell out of that building.”

“James is trapped next door. I told him—”

“Bout de crisse, never mind what you told him. Move your fucking ass. Right now.”

***

“You used to yell,” said Valerie, “when he took the stairs two at a time.”

“He always did the opposite of what I said. God knows—”

“Don’t be afraid. He’s got a head on his shoulders.”

“I’m not afraid, chère Valerie. Just angry.”