It’s only the minutiae of life that are important....Confronted by the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole.
JOSEPH ROTH
SO OF ALL THINGS, on this singular day Renata has a baby to see to. On a day when the city’s entire attention is consumed by bewilderment, grief, rage, and fear, she has thrust on her this diversion. It happens that she’s not totally new to child care, but she’s never tended a baby of this age, around six or seven months. Jack should know his age. In a more lucid moment he would remember when Carmen took maternity leave, but Jack is not lucid. He’s lying face down on the couch wearing a towel, having just emerged from the shower, and, like others who were within a mile of the attack, stuffed his clothes into the garbage. He plans to get up and start phoning right away, but he needs a few moments of inertia first. Before the shower he called his parents in Santa Fe and his brother in Albuquerque to let them know he was alive. Soon he’ll try a wider circle, as far as “technical difficulties” permit. Through it all, the TV plays. “We are prepared to spend whatever it takes....” “We hunt an enemy that hides in shadows and caves....” The President’s features have shed their merry, cartoon-rodent aspect and rearranged themselves into lines of sobriety, as if by a few swift strokes of the animator’s pen. “Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish—”
With the baby in her arms, Renata stares out the living-room window. One of the panes in the casement window is flawed: the glass is wavy. It makes everything seen through it wavy too. On the street, alone or in small groups, people have slowed down, drifting through the ashes underfoot like sleepwalkers. They shimmer through the wavy glass; their shapes are uncertain, tentative; their bodies ripple. The sidewalks ripple too, and the moving cars, the signs on the shops across the street. The walkers are moving through a new medium, not quite as fluid as water, not quite as vaporous as air. It is a fluttery, trembly ambiance, and they’re not used to it; behind the wavy glass, they move with hesitation. From what Renata can see, they’re not talking much, probably not only from shock but because the rancid air makes them reluctant to open their mouths. Only on TV is there no shortage of words. “This is total war, real war. This is a wake-up call for America.” “Make no mistake, we will win.”
“I have to get in touch with Carmen’s mother,” Jack mumbles. “To tell her. And that the kid is okay.”
Renata is in no hurry to give up the baby, now that he’s here. Somehow having the baby with them makes it more bearable. Thousands are dead, the TV says, thousands more injured, doctors and nurses are gathered at the hospitals waiting for the onslaught of the wounded, downtown is ankle-deep in rubble and dust, the unthinkable has happened (though the instant after it happened it wasn’t unthinkable at all, simply no one had had the wit to think of it), and on top of everything, another kind of butchery is in progress, not bloody but insidious, an assault on the common language. With all that, Renata lingers in this unlikely niche of pleasure, this baby she has never given a thought to in her life.
“I forgot his name. Isn’t that stupid?”
“Julio.” Speaking the name sets Jack to weeping again, so Renata sets Julio down in a nest of blankets on the floor, then joins Jack on the couch and strokes his back.
“Just a few more minutes, then I have to get started. I can’t just lie here.”
“Take your time. The phones are no good anyway.”
“I’ll go and give blood. I’ll go down there and do something. What about your mother?”
“I spoke to her. She’s okay. Look, before you go anywhere, could you stay with him while I get some things from my place? I didn’t even bring a toothbrush. I can’t take him out in this, at least until...” Until the dust settles, she was about to say, but the cliché is too apt. She and Jack always get a laugh out of those cliché-come-true moments. Not today, though.
“You’re staying?” For months he’s been trying to persuade Renata to come live with him, but she’s hedged.
“It’s better for him here than at my place, isn’t it?”
“Is this what it takes to get you to move in? A national disaster? International.”
That sounds almost like the old Jack. But again they can’t laugh, barely smile. Not yet. Maybe in countries where they’re used to flying steel beams and pulverized concrete, choking air and compacted cars draped in dust, they can joke more readily. Not here, not yet. Not till they discover how many bodies are under the rubble. Not till she knows what happened to the bookman.
It’s not hard to take care of a six-month-old baby, she finds. Easier than the last time she was called on to care for a child. That child was older, with questions, fears, the beginnings of a history. They talked. And as so often happens when words come into play, lies and dissimulation come with them. The child, her dead sister’s child, asked where her parents were, and Renata had to make up a story. The child was too young to understand the true circumstances. I’m your aunt, Renata told her, and for the three-year-old Gianna, that was sufficient. At first she asked a lot of questions about the couple she believed were her parents, then after a while, when they never reappeared, she stopped asking. So many of the answers Renata gave were lies anyway and weighed on her conscience; they still do. She felt more honest when they played with the toy farm she’d saved from her childhood, making up fantasies about Farmer Blue and his family. With Julio, now, it’s simpler. No chance for lies; nothing much is needed beyond affectionate murmurs that earn a gurgle and a smile. Julio doesn’t know he’s bereaved, bereft; if he misses his mother he can’t say so; his cries might mean anything and are quickly soothed. Renata picks him up, gives him a bottle, changes his diaper from the supply in the blue bag, so efficiently crammed with bottles, nipples, Pampers, and extra clothing, demonstrating what a provident mother Carmen was, so briefly.
People are helpful, too. The ashes and rubble and thousands dead and injured remind them to be kind to the living while they can. Back at her own apartment, for instance, when she checks to be sure the neighbors are alive, she gets a warm greeting from Mrs. Stavrakos, the habitually snarling widow on the first floor. Today Mrs. Stavrakos is ashen-faced, smoking, with an open bottle of gin beside her chair and the TV on. (“This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil. But good will prevail.” “Make no mistake, we will hunt down and punish those folks who...” Already it’s beginning to sound like a rerun.) Renata accepts a quick drink of gin though she doesn’t really like it. Thanks, but she can’t stay; she has a baby to take care of. To her astonishment, Mrs. Stavrakos produces four jars of baby food she keeps in a cabinet for when her daughter visits from Astoria with the kids. “Who knows if any stores’ll be open. Take them.” She dusts the lids with a dish towel. The gay couple on the second floor who run the antique shop on Remsen Street answer the door together, holding hands and crying. And here Renata always thought they were unnaturally cheerful. But everyone appears to be transformed—it’s like the Metamorphosis, where tears are the universal solvent, rearranging every accustomed shape. Gerald and Henry are both fine; their shop is a mess but never mind. The thing is, though, they have a close friend who works for Cantor Fitzgerald and they can’t get him on the phone. She steps inside and they all embrace. She’s never been in their apartment before and, no surprise, it’s crammed with antiquey knickknacks from the shop. She tells them about Carmen and Julio. Gerald, the tall, thin black one with shoulder-length dreads, insists on giving her one of their collection of stuffed animals, a panda, and Henry, the short, white, moon-faced, balding one, ties a red ribbon around its neck. The Polish woman on the third floor is fine, too, only all her English has departed from the shock. When Renata speaks to her in Russian she’s overjoyed. On any other day she wouldn’t be eager to converse in Russian, language of the despised oppressor, but today she won’t let Renata leave, recounting over and over how she would have been on the subway except she was getting one of her migraines and stayed home. And now, believe it or not, the headache has gone away. Imagine that! Usually they last for days.
So far, so good, but the smartly dressed young couple who’d just moved in on the fifth floor and begun noisy renovations aren’t home and that’s worrisome: they seem like the type who might work at one of the big investment houses.
Her apartment is exactly as she left it a couple of hours ago when Jack called. Hours that feel like days, everything is so altered. It’s a bit more dusty than usual—yes, all the surfaces are covered by the fine film that leaves a grayish patina on her fingers (such a splendid day that she’d left the windows open)—but nowhere near as dusty as those apartments in lower Manhattan that she’ll soon see in the newspaper, where each object is shrouded in white, everything suddenly a plaster cast of itself, like the inside-out plaster cast of the child’s bedroom at the Sensation exhibit where she met Jack and they laughed together at the captions. “The resemblance to a tomb is inescapable. It’s as though the artist has sealed off her memories. And we are...left only with traces from which we might try to guess what once took place inside.”
She tosses some things into a backpack, clothes, makeup—can’t start letting go now—and a few of her folders; she needs to have her clippings and scraps of language nearby. If she ever did move in with Jack, she’d have to do something about that unseemly habit. Keep the stuff out of sight, at least. Jack wouldn’t want it around. He thinks her paper-hoarding is foolish, obsessive, irrelevant.
She will miss the calligraphy hangings, the boldness and delicacy of the writing as well as the stories of rescue and recovery she invents for their meanings, but they will wait for her. What she does need is the Transformed Lives folder. It seems prescient, as if she’s gathered its tales just for today, when transformation is rife, most of all beneath the fallen towers. All flesh evolves to the condition of dust, but slowly, slowly, so that each generation, which has to learn the lesson anew, can get used to the idea. Today’s shock was its speed, flesh transformed to instant dust. The stories in the Transformed Lives folder, whose characters have become her silent companions, seem more than ever valiant today, so hopeful that life can renew itself in a fresh guise. Take Letitia Cole, the former classical music composer who now belly dances in Morocco. She “likes being a Jew in an Arab culture,” especially as “her fathers family was originally from Palestine. ‘It’s all Semitic. It’s all the same. It’s terrible we’re not brothers.’ Belly dancing is her ‘little gesture of peace.’ ” Where is she dancing now? Renata wonders. Is anyone watching her gesture of peace?
At the door, she glances at the twenty-dollar bill under the vase on the table, the bill that turned up at her feet in the paper storm. Let it lie there. Just as she’s about to leave, the phone rings.
“Renata? Are you okay? Oh God, Renata, you can’t imagine what...” The voice is sobbing, hysterical.
“Linda? Is that you? Are you okay? Take it easy.”
“I’m okay. I was at work but...Oh God.”
“What is it? Who?”
“Roger.”
Roger, the boyfriend, transcontinental sexual athlete, in-flight stud. “Oh my God, where was he? Not—?”
“He was supposed to,...he was almost on that plane from Boston but,...he got a—” She can’t speak, can’t stop sobbing.
“Tell me! Is he all right?”
“Hold on.” Linda coughs and clears her throat. “He was in Boston and he was coming down for a quick visit but—”
“Please, just calm down. I can’t understand you. Is he okay?”
“He was waiting for the plane but he got a call on his cell that his mother had an aneurysm so he...he didn’t get on and he booked a flight back to London. And now—”
“Linda, stop crying. He didn’t get on the plane, is that what you’re saying?”
“No. I mean yes. He’s still in Boston. He didn’t get on, but he was supposed to. He almost did.” She’s sobbing again.
“Pull yourself together. He’s all right. You’ll see him soon.”
“He can’t fly anywhere now. Not even here. He could have been on that plane.”
“But he wasn’t. Got that? He wasn’t. He’s fine.”
“Okay. Okay. He wasn’t. That’s the thing, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, I’m better now. Is everything okay with you?”
“Yes. Well, not exactly.” She tells her about Jack and Carmen and Julio. “What about everyone at work?”
“I don’t know. They all went home. I sat for a half hour because I thought he was on the plane and I couldn’t move. Denise stayed with me a while, till she reached her son—he’s okay—then she left too. Then Roger called and I sort of collapsed and then I walked home through the park. Coughing all the way. The air.”
“I saw it. From the bridge. Look, I’d better go. The baby,...I’ll call you later. I won’t be able to go to work for a while.”
“Don’t worry, there won’t be much work going on. He wasn’t on the plane. I have to remember that. And then his mother,...well, she’ll have to manage without him.”
Back at Jack’s place, he fills her in on who’s accounted for and who’s not. Everyone in his office, accounted for. Most of the people he knows at the Port Authority, missing. Others, he’s not certain yet.
“I’m going out. I’ve got to do something.”
“How? There are no trains.”
“Somehow. Are you okay here with him?” he says at the door. “You don’t mind?”
“No, I’m okay. Be careful.” More than okay. She likes it. She doesn’t ask if he tried calling Julio’s grandmother in Puerto Rico. Anyway, no planes are flying, the skies are eerily silent, so she has a few days.
After he leaves, Renata hears voices in the hall and wanders out with Julio in her arms. The neighbors are commiserating and exchanging things—bread, aspirins, towels, milk, a bottle of bourbon, Valium. For an instant she has that sensation of watching through wavy glass again, but in the bustle of ordinariness it quickly passes and everyone solidifies. A gray-haired woman is pleading for Prozac, Paxil, anything, but the younger people explain. “It takes weeks to work. And you can’t just take anyone’s. You don’t know the dosage. What you want is the Valium.” An Indian woman from across the hall gives Renata an outgrown stroller and bassinet she was saving for Goodwill; another woman gives her a sling for carrying Julio on her chest. The man from next door whom she’s never seen but knows by his voice—he clomps through the hall day and night, talking loudly to his dog, “Attaboy, Merlin, how’s about a run along the Promenade?”—turns out to be a balding fifty-year-old with an eye patch and a withered arm. He coos at Julio. “Merlin loves babies, here, let him pat Merlin, he’s very gentle.” Everyone likes a baby. The bookman would like Julio too. As soon as she ventures out again, she’ll bring him to show the bookman. If he’s still there. He wouldn’t be daunted by the smoky air or the littered streets; if he’s alive, he’ll be manning his table, handing out bananas and saying God bless you. If not...No, don’t think about it. Don’t go there.
By the time Jack returns in the early evening, it’s clear that the throngs of the injured will not materialize after all. Only a small number have been brought to the hospitals: burn victims, broken limbs and abrasions. Shock. Any others still living will have to be dug out, extracted like precious metal. Very soon, in a miracle of modern efficiency, huge machines that resemble prehistoric creatures will be stretching their steel necks, baring their teeth and claws and preparing to mine the rubble.
No one wanted his blood, Jack tells her. He left a case of water with other contributions near the site. Indescribable, the piles of tortured steel, the fires everywhere, the buckling pavements and the smoke, the smell. Above all, the strewn paper. He couldn’t get to his office—the streets were cordoned off. While he was looking for a path he saw another building collapse, a smaller one. “Just sank into itself. One minute it was there, then it wasn’t.” He’s restless, frustrated that all he can do is watch TV, and how many times can you look at the same images. The stream of ashen people trudging across the bridge, the man being laid on the stretcher, the woman sitting on the curb with her head in her hands....The plane drilling into the tower, the explosion of flame. Innumerable times. Then something new: the President’s address to the nation. “We are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.”
Julio starts to fret and Renata warms a bottle of formula. She can hear the TV from the kitchen. “Today our nation saw evil...Our financial institutions remain strong, and the American economy will be open for business as usual—”
“Not exactly inspiring,” she remarks as she prepares to feed Julio. “But at least he didn’t say ‘Make no mistake.’ ”
“What’d you say?”
“Didn’t you notice, earlier? How many times he said ‘Make no mistake’? Why does he keep saying ‘Make no mistake’? I mean, who’s likely to make a mistake?”
“Renata, come off it. It’s just an expression. What does it matter? There are more important things to worry about. Oh, and the footbridge across West Street collapsed on top of God knows how many people.”
Still, it matters, and will matter more in the days to come, but now is not the moment to explain, assuming she could explain. Not the moment to quote Socrates emblazoned on Linda’s door: “False language, evil in itself, infects the soul with evil.”
“I guess you’re right. Shh, Julio, your bottle is right here.”
She stays in Wednesday, cocooned with Julio and the TV set (“I have directed the full resources of our intelligence and law-enforcement communities to find...We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”), deferring the moment she must step outdoors and into the reality of the altered city. For now, she’s glad enough to wait for Jack and greet him with a kiss and a drink like a 1950s suburban wife.
He’s exhausted. He’s carrying three newspapers under his arm and a mushroom pizza. He had to wait a long time for the pizza. Half the neighborhood was lined up, it seems no one’s up to cooking, and they were shorthanded because the main pizza-maker’s brother, a cop from Staten Island, is missing. Jack reports that he hooked up with a group of young guys who got past the barriers to bring things to the men on the machines that appeared out of nowhere—sandwiches, coffee, work gloves, boots. Seventy-five people from the Port Authority are gone, many of whom he knew, so he has to be there doing something, doesn’t he? And of course Carmen. “They’re looking for survivors. Yesterday fourteen people were found trapped in a stairwell. The cops and firemen went wild when they came out. Since then, nothing.” Later he went to his office. Dozens of people turned up, asking for temporary housing, child care, what-not. He grows animated as he describes it all, a foot-soldier in the perpetual campaign to bring order out of chaos. Tomorrow he’ll shop on the way; the construction workers need all sorts of odds and ends—batteries, safety goggles, throat spray, Chapstick—and no one’s yet organized enough to supply them. If Renata has a minute, she might pick up a supply of chocolate bars and cigarettes and Tylenol; they need those, too.
The site is worse than it looks on TV “You can’t grasp it from what they show. It’s huge. Thousands of tons of steel tied up in huge knots. Crushed cars and fire engines all over the place. And the smell. It’s all still burning. It’ll burn for months, they say. Shoes strewn all over. That was the worst, the shoes. Some of the things I saw, I can’t even tell you.”
“You mean, like...bodies?”
“No bodies. Parts. I saw a foot...Never mind.”
This while they eat the pizza and drink a bottle of wine. Jack coughs a lot, eats a lot, even finishes Renata’s crusts.
Maybe Franco Donati, she thinks, the hapless Italian who took extraordinary photos of homeless people, could return from his father’s house in Padua and photograph the site. He could do it justice, he has the right kind of eye. No one can find the right words, but through his lens it would be more than seventeen acres of tangled metal and concrete and shoes and unspeakable body parts; it would enter history and become a symbol of something. Of what? Not the brightest beacon for freedom.
Talking relieves Jack, helps distract him from his guilt and grief over Carmen. He’s spread the newspapers out on the table, on the remains of the pizza. Already he’s looking at things on the large scale, what he likes to call the big picture. Already he’s making pronouncements about not giving in to rage, not making things worse than they are. He’s reading the papers in indignation.
“Look at this Post headline. ‘BOMBS AWAY’ ‘Who are they? Who cares? Cast a wide enough net, and you’ll catch the fish that need catching.’ ”
“It’s just words,” Renata says. “What people say when they feel impotent. It’s just crude. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Crude? You’re calling that crude? You mean ‘Bombs Away’ is only bad manners but ‘Make no mistake’ is really offensive? It seems to me ‘Bombs Away’ is dangerous. It’ll lead us into a war before we know it.”
“Bombs away” has its appeal. Renata has known impotent rage and the lust for revenge, directed at anything handy. It’s tempting. But no doubt Jack is right. She’s never been one for the big picture. Today in particular she can see only thousands of small pictures, the faces of the dead in the newspapers. And the faces of the living. Julio is one. The bookman? She’d like to tell Jack about the bookman, how she didn’t chase him when he took the wrong turn, and where is he now? But Jack is so tired and guilty and desperate to talk that the right moment doesn’t come.
“And this letter in the Times today. Just listen. ‘Now is the time to call to mind our mighty heritage, to turn our plowshares back into swords to defend our time-honored freedoms. Now every heart must beat as one, every spirit pledge itself to the heroic challenge before us. Let us not waver from the duty that calls....’ ”
“It’s the same as ‘Bombs Away,’ ” she says. “In fact I prefer ‘Bombs Away.’ At least it has no pretensions. You want some coffee?”
Jack shakes his head. She’s not helping him.
Just before they go to sleep he flicks on the remote for a last look. Overnight, it’s become everyone’s favorite disaster movie: the plane boring into the tower yet again, the crowds running, the woman sitting on the curb with her head in her hands, the President’s face straining to appear grown-up: “Make no mistake, good will prevail.” This is the trailer. We’ve all seen the complete version already, yet we can’t resist seeing the highlights over and over.
“Come to bed, Jack. You’ve seen it a dozen times.”
He doesn’t move. He stands naked, the remote in his hand, watching the talking heads. A representative from the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy is heard from: “You can’t bomb these guys into the Stone Age because they already are in the Stone Age.”
“Did you hear that? Is that kind of thing going to do any good?” Nothing will do Carmen any good. “Please,” she urges. “There’ll be more tomorrow.”
Finally he turns it off and falls into bed with a heavy arm flung over her. She lies warmed by his arm, the bassinet with the sleeping child a few feet away, and for the short while it takes to fall asleep they feel like a makeshift family, strangers thrown together by disaster or war.
In the morning Renata resolves to get moving too. She can’t hide forever. They’ve been living like Bodo and Zuna from her old cave book, Jack braving the perils of the world while she hangs out in the cave, tending the baby. Enough. The air may be foul but the sky is so blue, a sky like a summons: come out, enjoy me.
First she calls Denise, her boss, at home, since the library is closed, along with other nonessential services.
Denise’s news is mixed. The good: her son walked down from the forty-eighth floor of the South Tower. “They told them to go back up, can you believe it? Thank God they were smart enough to keep walking. Most of them, anyhow.” But Tanisha, the cleaning woman for the linguistics division, lost her husband, a window washer. The sister of a guard. The nephew of someone in the Periodical Room. And that’s only so far. Lots of people haven’t yet been heard from.
After they go through everyone they can think of, Renata explains about Julio. “I’ll have to be out a few more days at least.”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll be open tomorrow, but your stuff is not exactly high priority. Oh, but wait, I almost forgot, there is something and you can do it at home. Guess who called—the State Department. They started at the top but it worked its way down to me. They need people who can read Arabic. They don’t have enough of their own. How’s your Arabic?”
“Nada. But I suppose I could learn. What am I supposed to do, be a spy? Intercept secret messages?”
“Very funny. They want to find out how this is going down in the Middle Eastern newspapers. That means Standard Arabic, of course, not any of the national dialects. And don’t go spreading this around. You know how they are in the government. So what shall I tell them? I mean, how long before you could read a paper?”
“Arabic is hard. It’s a totally different alphabet. Better make it a couple of weeks. You really mean they haven’t got people in Washington?”
“Apparently not. And the university professors don’t have security clearance and can’t take the time off. So they came to us. They’ll have to check you out. I presume you’re not a security risk?”
“Not that I know of. These guys work fast, don’t they?”
“Not fast enough,” Denise says with a snort. “There are rumors that they had warnings of this, you know, coded messages, but they didn’t put it together. Or something. Maybe it would’ve all been different. For Chrissakes, Linda could have put it together if they’d let her into their computers.”
Arabic, okay. It’s notoriously difficult to speak correctly, but reading should be manageable. She’d find a book. There’s Rashid’s Book and Record Store on Court Street. Or maybe the bookman has a basic grammar; it wouldn’t be the first time he’d anticipated her needs. Of course for that, he’d have to be alive.
The air can’t be good for Julio but he’ll have to take his chances like everyone else. Stroller or sling? The jaunty sling, connoting independence as well as a back-to-the-land earthiness, is what all the women use these days. But it suggests pregnancy, a condition Renata has never experienced nor desired, not after watching Claudia endure her pregnancy with loathing at age sixteen. She straps Julio into the stroller.
Outside, there’s an odd sense of freedom, ghastly parody of a holiday, all daily schedules disrupted, all ordinary obligations rescinded. No way to get down the street without stopping every half block to talk. For this is her turf, these are her neighbors, and though she’s usually reserved, just a nod and a smile, she’s as transformed as all the rest. Each shopkeeper has a story of someone who was trapped or who escaped. The shoemaker’s shop bears a hand-lettered sign: “Closed Due to Tragedy.” When she buys a paper, the newsstand man explains that the shoemaker’s wife was a cook in the top-floor restaurant. Lost. Definitely lost. The hot-dog stand mans son is a fireman but he’s all right, or rather, he has a dislocated shoulder because a falling body grazed him, and the hot-dog man is giving away pretzels out of gratitude. Renata takes one to share with Julio, breaking off little salty bits. Everyone fusses over Julio, and he gives his brightest smiles as people murmur their sympathy for his loss. Through it all Renata keeps her mind on her destination. She’s always been far-sighted. She’ll know a block away.
Just before she turns the corner from which she’ll spot him, or not spot him, she pauses to breathe, cough, and prepare herself: It won’t be your fault, how could you have known? Don’t exaggerate your importance. The bookman himself wouldn’t blame you. But its no use. Logic is rarely any use against guilt. She rounds the corner.
He’s there, straightening the books on the table. Such a happy surprise, maybe even the fourth degree in the Bliondan spectrum of happy surprises, kol-dradoskona. Instead of going weak in the knees and teary, she feels a surge of adrenaline and starts to run, stroller and all. Whee! Hang on, kiddo.
The bookman is surprised to see her with a baby and even more surprised when she throws her arms around his neck.
“You’re all right! I was so worried. I saw you going the wrong way. What happened?”
He doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He wants to talk about the baby. “Beautiful baby. I never knew you had a baby. God bless you, little one,” he says, bending down over Julio.
She has to remind him, and spills it out in hasty Spanish with grammatical errors, very unlike her.
Oh, that. His brother’s case. It’s been postponed. His daughter called and found out the court buildings are closed.
“But the subway! Remember you didn’t go the way I said? And I was so—”
Oh! Now he remembers. Yes, he understood her directions perfectly. But he realized he was early so he stopped in Starbucks for a cup of coffee.
Starbucks, she thinks. Saved by Starbucks.
And in Starbucks he met a friend and they got to talking. Then just as he was getting ready to go, it happened. All of this he recounts with a happy smile. Now she goes limp and has to sit down on the ledge of the building. At last he understands.
“You worried about me? God bless you.”
“Thanks,” and she bursts into tears.
He lets her cry, makes no attempt to soothe her, merely entertains Julio till she can compose herself. He understands that the tears are the accumulation of the last two days; maybe in his wisdom, he suspects they’ve been accumulating for the last two decades. In any case, he doesn’t need to know, and nothing surprises him.
He must have a life beyond the book table. Are his family and friends all right? It turns out he has a wife, four children, and nine grandchildren, all living nearby, and he recites all of their whereabouts at the moment of the calamity. None of them anywhere near the site, which strikes Renata as nothing short of miraculous—so many, and all safe.
He has no Arabic grammars. His featured selections today are antique comic books, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, Archie, Tales from the Crypt, and if Julio were older she’d buy a few. Instead she buys a Raymond Chandler mystery for Jack. One dollar, as always.
In between the chats and groceries and errands—chocolate bars, Jack said, cigarettes, Tylenol, Chapstick, cough drops—exactly like a young mother pushing her stroller through the day, she notices the words that have sprouted on the walls. Missing, Eileen Sefaris, wavy auburn hair, wearing gold chain and gray pants suit, burn scar on inner arm above right wrist. Colin Jones, 5’10”, heavy-set, Spider-man tattoo on left thigh, missing first upper left molar. Concepcion Delgado, black eyes, black hair, round light-brown beauty mark near left shoulder, bites fingernails. Scrawled, hand-lettered, computer-generated, all with photos: wedding pictures, graduation pictures, birthday parties—Albert V. Hirsheimer blowing out the candles on a frosted white cake with blue and green flowers—vacation photos, passport photos. Stefania Pignarelli, worked on 87th floor of South Tower, wearing striped miniskirt and black top, mole on right cheek, yin-yang tattoo on lower back....
Signs, what a good idea. It never occurred to her to put up signs for her missing. Claudia: age sixteen, 5’7’, slim, long black ponytail held in a wide chrome barrette, dark eyes, olive complexion, wearing jeans and Nike sneakers, striped tank top. But Claudia is not literally missing, not like the people on the walls, who might still be found: tanfendi-oude. Claudia was last seen alive in their shared bedroom on a hot June night—hot enough to have the windows wide open—eighteen years ago.
They were going over the assignments Claudia had missed. She’d decided—their mother had decided for her—to make up the work and take the final exams so as not to lose the whole term. They were in their junior year of high school. Renata had the task of bringing her up to date. They sat on her bed, Claudia on a pillow because she was still sore. She wasn’t cooperating.
“If you’re going to be that way let’s just forget it,” Renata said.
“I’ve got to do it some time.”
“Then pay attention.”
During the months of Claudia’s pregnancy, they had been close again—a truce. The stolen money and the five years of estrangement could not be forgotten, but they were set aside. Claudia had needed her sister. Now, with the baby gone, she was once more a stranger.
“Look, just give me your Spanish notebook, okay? I can do it in five minutes.”
Claudia handed it over and Renata filled in the blanks for verbs in the past conditional. “Okay, now the history. You can copy mine but you need to change the sentences. She’d get suspicious. Not that she has half a brain. She spent so much time on the Civil War that we hardly had time for the twentieth century. I left class one day to change a tampon and when I came back I’d missed the Vietnam War.”
Claudia barely smiled.
“All right, I’m going to bed,” Renata said. “It’s all here if you want it.”
She crossed over to her side of the room, dropped her clothes on the floor, pulled the sheet over her head, and fell asleep instantly. In the old days it was Claudia who fell asleep in three seconds, while Renata lay listening to the sound of her breathing, scaring herself with cave fantasies. Now each night she escaped as fast as she could; she never knew how long Claudia lay awake.
She woke to the sound of rustling. Footsteps, drawers opening and closing. The room was pitch dark but she sensed Claudia moving around. After a moment she could make her out, sitting on her bed and putting on her sneakers.
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t sleep. It’s so hot. I’m going out for a while.”
“Now? What time is it?”
“Go back to sleep. I need some air. I’ll walk Fox. He’s pacing like he needs to go out.”
“But it’s so late.”
“So?”
She opened the door and Fox bounded in. Claudia shushed him and attached the leash. Renata rolled over to look at the clock on the night table, a babyish clock in the shape of a teddy bear that she’d had ever since she could tell time; on Claudia’s night table was its identical companion. Nearly eleven-forty. Had it been two in the morning, she might have tried to stop her or threatened to wake their parents. She might have changed history, as in a uchrony. No, Claudia wouldn’t have paid attention. Renata had lost whatever influence she used to have. Let her go. It was hardly the first time—though rarely so late as this. She was old enough to go out as late as she liked. After all that had happened, she wasn’t a child anymore. Renata was the child.
Sleep had been her friend these last months. Now it turned enemy. When she next looked at the clock it was four-thirty and Claudia’s bed was empty.
She should have been on the alert even in her sleep. She should have slept lightly, the way mothers of newborn babies do, ready for the cry. But even in her sleep she was furious at her sister. She’d been furious ever since Claudia broke their pact. They used to be intertwined like clasped hands. But Claudia had yanked her hand away. Now Renata was tired of her too, tired of her troubles being the family melodrama, everyone fussing over her because she was the bad girl. Nobody fussed over a good girl.
She searched the whole house, even the basement they hardly used anymore. Long ago it had been their special retreat, where they played secret games and spoke the secret language. When she couldn’t delay any longer she knocked on her parents’ door, then pushed it open and called out. They pulled apart from the clinch they slept in. Renata turned off the TV they’d left on, some old black-and-white movie, people dressed in tuxedos and satin gowns, drinking champagne in a nightclub.
“What’s the matter?”
In the midst of the frantic questions, Dan noticed the dog wasn’t around. They were downstairs by that time. He flung open the back door and found Fox curled up on the deck. Stupid Fox. Why hadn’t he scraped and battered at the door? Why hadn’t he barked? He’d found his way home from wherever Claudia had taken him and dropped off to sleep. His fur was caked with dried mud; he shook himself off all over them, and Grace made a sharp shrieking sound and dabbed at her white nightie. Finally Fox barked. He wanted them to follow him somewhere and they were willing, but when he got to the corner he stopped and walked around in circles, pawing at the ground as if he didn’t know which way to turn.
The police wouldn’t look for missing persons until twenty-four hours had elapsed. Call her friends, they advised. Grace paced the living room, making little mewling noises. They called a few of Claudia’s girlfriends, or rather, they had Renata call, although those weren’t her friends. She and Claudia no longer had the same friends.
She never said she saw Claudia go out. She said she fell asleep early—not exactly a lie but not the whole truth, either. She didn’t want to be blamed. The last time she was blamed, five years ago, it skewed the world. The world tipped on its axis and had remained atilt ever since, so she’d turned inward. She wouldn’t be driven further inside that cramped space. Anyhow, she didn’t know any more than they did.
They got dressed and drove aimlessly around the neighborhood, Renata in the back seat with the mud-caked dog. He was getting her filthy.
“Oh. The river,” she said.
“What do you mean, the river?” said her mother.
“Down by the river.” Like everyone else in town, Grace and Dan knew the playground and the picnic area along the Palisades, but they didn’t know the narrow strip down by the water where the teenagers hung out, where they sat on the ancient rowboats with their feet dangling over the mucky ground and watched the barges go by, or walked out on the rotting pier to look with longing toward the city. No one would risk climbing down that steep rock face to the shore at night. It was too forbidding. But there was no telling what Claudia might do.
Renata told them there was a place they sometimes went. They parked and found the path, using the flashlight from the car. Fox panted behind them. The barest tinge of light showed in the sky. They all climbed down the rocks, but found nothing except the old rowboats.
“This is a waste of time,” Dan grumbled, so they climbed back up and went home.
Three days later the police dragged the river. They didn’t want to; there was no evidence of a drowning, only Renata’s insistence. She was very insistent. It wasn’t any mystical intuition, none of the uncanny vibrations that undulate between twins—they didn’t have that anymore. Simply, she knew what the place meant. Like the basement, it was a retreat, a place for secrets.
She and her parents stood on the shore with Fox alongside. It was near noon, bright and hot. Peter and Cindy were there too, along with a local reporter and several cops. With all those people, the place was ruined. Up at the top were police cars and half a dozen more cops. The sun was so strong they had to shield their eyes to watch the boat and the device used to trawl the depths. The boat wasn’t very far from shore, just a ways past the pier. They could make out the figures of the men on board quite clearly. One of them waved toward shore and a cop spoke to him on a walkie-talkie. “You might want to go back up,” the cop said. “They may have found something.”
Her father’s eyes had a look she would remember forever. The brown of his irises darkened till she thought they were turning purple. “We’ll wait here.” Then he motioned to Grace. “Unless you want to—?”
“No, we’ll wait.” She had had three days to compose herself. She’d stopped whimpering and settled into a kind of torpor.
They dragged in something big and dark and caked with mud, hauled it onto the boat and headed to shore. When they came closer and Grace saw the striped shirt in tatters, she sank down into the muck. A cop raised her up. A terrible smell drifted to shore; soon they could see Claudia’s face, green and bloated, her hair tangled with mud and reeds, her clothes shredded, her leg bent back at a crazy angle. To Renata it was like seeing herself, the way she might look, dead. They had to cover their mouths and noses because of the stench. Claudia’s stomach was puffed up, as it had been when she was pregnant. She’d just had the baby ten days before.
Her leg was broken, they were told the next day. Splinters from the pier were found in the gash in her knee. And there was a head wound; she must have hit the concrete abutment beneath the pier. It might have knocked her unconscious, it was hard to tell. But with the leg, she couldn’t have swum to safety in any case. It was judged an accident. A foolish girl taking a foolish risk. That was as far as the police hinted. What could she have been doing down there at night, all alone? they asked, but no one could answer. Not all alone, was all Renata could say. She didn’t know who or why, but not all alone. She was sure of that.
For a while, she would make up scenarios in her head, but she knew too little to speculate. The scenarios were like old silent films, blurred, with gaps, the film breaking at the crucial moments: Claudia on the pier, taunting, daring someone to dive in, the other person just outside the frame, casting a faint shadow. It’s just water. I dare you.
She was found, but she would forever be among the missing. She and the child she bore, the child Renata made her own, both missing.
In the book about June and Jennifer Gibbons, the British twins bent on destroying each other, she read that the Yoruba people of West Africa carve small figurines to mark the birth of twins. “If one twin dies, the figurine is cared for by the surviving twin, who feeds, dresses and treats it as his living brother or sister.” This is not something Renata would do. But Julio and the twenty-dollar bill, both brought to her by Tuesday’s tragedy, have elements of pretend, like Farmer Blue, like figurines.
When she gets home after her errands she turns on the TV first thing. There is the President, surveying the ruins of the Pentagon. “Make no mistake about it,” he says, “this nation is sad.”