Ten

JACK’S FIRST WORDS ON Sunday morning were ill-chosen.

“They’re coming to pick him up tomorrow. I spoke to Teresa yesterday, while you were out. Carmen’s mom. They’ve got a flight from San Juan.”

“Good morning to you, too.” It was a loveless night. A happier night might have tempered her sarcasm. All three slept densely, even Julio.

“I’m sorry it came out like that. It’s because I’ve been dreading telling you.”

He was padding around the living room barefoot, wearing a black satin Chinese robe Renata had bought him at a local thrift shop, the kind of robe suave movie stars sported in their penthouse apartments in 1940s films, ambling toward the living-room bar to pour a couple of martinis. But Jack didn’t wear it with the same aplomb. The robe was open to the waist, revealing matted chest hair and an incipient paunch; the sash hung down to his knees; his hair was rumpled from sleep, his voice was thick, and it wasn’t an hour for martinis even if there had been a bar in the living room. Ten o’clock. He was generally an early riser, but he was exhausted after days of hauling crates of work clothes, picking his way over mounds of smoking rubble, breathing bad air, and dashing to the victims’ services clearinghouse over at the West 55th Street pier, then back to his office to cope—without benefit of Carmen and on phones that worked intermittently—with hysterical or near-catatonic clients who needed clothing, shelter, day care, and Valium, many of them locked out of their Battery Park City apartments, which were shrouded in ash and littered with glass. He could have used some sympathy, but Renata was not in a giving mood. She sat, freshly showered and neat—a sharp contrast—on the rug next to Julio on his belly, trying to learn to crawl. “Attaboy,” she cheered him on. She was pleased with herself because she’d found the will to turn off the TV after a few words from the Medical Examiner’s office on the usefulness of DNA samples in determining the identity of the victims, then a snatch of the President’s latest speech (“My message is for everybody who wears the uniform to get ready”), and settled down with her Arabic grammar and dictionary. She didn’t wear the uniform, felt far from able to rid the world of evil, but if there was something she could do to help, she’d do it. If it meant puzzling out the welter of diacritical marks above the Arabic letters, so be it.

“Well, I don’t want to be here when they come,”

“You don’t want to meet them? I’m sure they’d like to meet you. To thank you for—”

God, he could be so obtuse. “I prefer not to. Anyway, I have to go out of town.” Until this minute it had been a vague intention: in a few days or weeks, once she’d checked with Denise at work, once boarding a plane didn’t feel suicidal. Peter could hold out that long. Now, in her pique, she decided she had to go immediately. Grace had said, Find her. She’d listen to her mother for once.

“You do? Where?”

“Away.”

Like a seasoned working mother, with one hand she jiggled Julio’s rattle and with the other, turned the pages of her book. She’d never had so much trouble with an alphabet before; the letters were cursive, and half a dozen of them looked alike. The vowel signs were perversely arbitrary, in fact the whole language was a masterpiece of arbitrariness. Yet she was catching on, hunting down the elusive designs. She was helped by some translations from the British papers shed found on the Web. A mullah speaking in an Islamabad mosque: “This is the wrath of God....The demolition of such a huge structure was not caused by the suicide attack. It was God’s work, who intensified the impact of the crashing jet aircraft.” Not so. The mullah ought to read the papers she read, the engineers’ and architects’ technical reports, their rueful hindsight: he’d see how mistaken he was. The killers had learned from their 1993 attack that the towers were more vulnerable at the top than at the bottom. The wrath of God simply didn’t figure.

“Away where?” Jack repeated.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, Renata, it matters.”

“Houston.”

“Houston.” He started winding the satin belt around his index finger, winding and unwinding, tightening it so the finger turned white, then letting the belt drop. “Now? With the airports in chaos? There were two bomb scares yesterday. I mean, what’s in Houston that’s so urgent?”

Ah, just because they’d been sleeping together for eight months, he thought he had the right to know. As a romantic, he wouldn’t like seeing their relationship defined in such graphic terms, but Renata liked it. It was lucid and simple and factual. In any case, he cared where she went and what she did and what she thought and felt. None of her evasions could change that. And she cared the same about him. Most of the time. Only not right now, as he was preparing to take Julio away from her.

Did eight months of bed and companionship—she resisted calling it love—give him the right? How would she know? Before Jack, she’d never stayed with any man long enough to learn the web of rights and obligations. Or long enough for anyone to know much about her beyond the dailiness. With Jack, she’d been drawn into an ominous coziness, especially since Julio arrived: a little family huddled against the savagery outside, like Bodo and Zuna and their children.

“I asked you what’s so urgent, all of a sudden.”

“These are too many questions for me, Jack.”

“You really don’t know how to do it, do you?” He tightened the belt around his waist, twirled one end in circles in front of him.

“Do what?”

“Life. Be with someone.”

“I told you that a long time ago.”

“You also told me you were interested in learning how. One thing is, you let them into your life.”

“This, these last few days, isn’t ordinary life.”

“All the more reason. But all right. All right. What about Julio? What am I supposed to do with him while you’re away?”

Hearing his name, Julio raised his head and chest and gave a happy grunt. Renata leaned over to chuck him under the chin. “Yes, that’s you! You know your name! That’s great!” For Jack, she shrugged and finally closed the book. Were they about to squabble like a married couple? Whose turn to stay with the baby? “Day care. That place he was in when you picked him up.”

“They can’t still be down there. The street is cordoned off.”

“I’m sure you can find out where they’ve moved to. If anyone can do that, it’s you.”

“What is this trip? Something to do with the Arabic?” He waved vaguely at the book.

Why not make it easy and say yes? How about that, posing as some kind of latter-day Mata Hari. What was in Houston? NASA. Oil wells? Arabs? Never mind. It was too silly a lie, not even serious enough to merit a place in the Bliondan hierarchy of prashmensti. Silence was better. Silence—emenast—was a form of lying, too, but at least it was clean, it wasn’t wrong words.

“No, nothing like that. I just have some business. It should be quick. I’ll call as soon as I’m back.”

“Sounds like a man is involved.”

“No! Well, yes, a man, but not in the way you mean.”

“Someone from the past.”

“From the past, yes. But not—”

“But now it’s become the present again? You might have told me. I’m fed up with your mysteries, your past, whoever’s waiting for you down there. I won’t go through this a second time.”

“You are so wrong about this, I...I just can’t tell you. I’m not like Pamela and you know it.” It was perverse not to tell him, only now was not the moment, not when she needed her strength to face Peter after so long. Not with Julio squirming around on the rug—and on this last try he almost succeeded. He’d be crawling any day now, but she wouldn’t see it—he’d be with his grandmother by then.

“Look, it’s my uncle, my father’s brother. He’s sick. Dying. I have to go see him. Cindy told me yesterday. He’s her ex-husband.”

“Your uncle. Funny you never mentioned any uncle before.”

“I mentioned him the other day. Did you ever call Pamela, by the way?”

The tiniest hesitation. “No.” She knew he was lying. For spite. He turned away and hunted for the remote.

“Can’t you trust me for two days? This is some kind of obsession with you.”

“Trust.” He gave a nasty laugh. “What can you trust nowadays? We trusted that it was safe to go into Manhattan.”

“I’ll explain everything after. If I leave tomorrow, I can be back Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“You’ll have a hard time booking a flight. They’re all backed up.”

“I’ll manage.”

He was already in front of the television for his fix, the latest installment in the Reality TV hit series.

“This is a new kind of evil,” came the voice. The lines of the President’s face, the taut, small quivers of his lips, were so familiar by now, it was as if he’d moved in with them. “We will rid the world of the evildoers. They have roused a mighty giant, and make no mistake about it, we’re determined.”

Renata was determined. And she did manage to book a flight. She pleaded a medical emergency and cited the name of the hospital she got from Cindy. It wasn’t very hard. Maybe no one was eager to fly to Houston on a Monday morning; New York in fall was so beautiful, despite all. September is its finest month.

What does a family with a young baby do on a glorious September Sunday afternoon? They were so glutted with TV it was like poison in their eye sockets. Only the real world could clear it out. The park? The Promenade? Maybe a drive to the country? But it was a pain to drive anywhere. So many streets and bridges were still closed, like quarantine. The great temptation was to drive across the Brooklyn Bridge, just reopened, to the site, where they could stare their fill. It was enticing, the unimaginable made palpable; it was where they belonged, like the widowed who can’t keep away from the graveyard. It was Reality Tourism, the game they couldn’t play anymore now that it had turned real. Already, sightseers were drawn there in flocks, if they could find a route, with the subways so haphazard. You could see them on TV, creeping around the periphery, peering for a view through their cameras, restrained by police barricades and the armed men in camouflage. Surprising that apartment-dwellers with the best views hadn’t begun selling tickets—or perhaps they had. Yet who could blame the tourists: they needed to see for themselves. However bad the stench, the real was healthier than the TV screen.

But it wasn’t a place to take Julio. Instead, as a parting treat, they decided to show him the ocean. Coney Island. Honky-tonk. He was too young for the rides or for a hot dog, but they let him lick an ice-cream cone and he was overjoyed. He lived in the present. Would he ever remember his mother? Renata wondered. Of course not. What was an infant’s memory? Even now, his mother had become a dimming blur; she was the face of love just beginning to detach from its surroundings. Love would take on other faces. He wouldn’t remember Renata’s face either.

Despite the glitz and the noise of the rides and the Skee-Ball galleries, everything was subdued. No soldiers in sight. The faces on the boardwalk were grim: the old fat Russians with their sturdy laced-up shoes and their canes, the women powdered and bleached, the men balding—what horrors were they recalling?—and the teenagers skittering lithely on their skateboards. The few happy faces, the handful of people cavorting in the water, must have been from another planet. Hadn’t they heard? Jack was tense and withdrawn as he walked beside Renata, pushing the stroller. They went down to sit on the sand. He stared out at the ocean. Julio tried to eat sand. They barely spoke. This was what they had come to, in only a few days.

In a coffee shop on the boardwalk the TV was on, no escape even at the edge of the sea. “What this war is about is our way of life, and our way of life is worth losing lives for.” The secretary of defense, channeling Gertrude Stein.

It was a relief when the outing was over, even for Julio, fretful in the back seat. Just as they were getting out of the car on Jack’s block—that ease of parking a sad reminder, a benefit any car-owner would gladly have sacrificed if only the world could revert to its pre-Tuesday state—Renata glimpsed a familiar figure sidling along. It was the girl from yesterday who’d stared at the photos of the Missing on the hospital wall and stared at her. In an instant, the figure vanished around the corner. It might have been a trick of the sliding-down sun or a memory of the optic nerve, but no, Renata was certain: same flowered dress, same short, brassy blonde hair, same floaty, aimless gait. She was carrying a plastic bag, maybe for the money Renata had given her. She must have seen them, too, the sullen little family. She must have been waiting. Lurking. Why did she run away, then? Renata thrust Julio into Jack’s arms, raced to the corner and looked, but she was nowhere in sight.

“Where’d you run off to?” asked Jack.

“I thought I saw someone I knew.”

With the world turned surreal, notions of the supernatural were tempting, notions of transformation. Had the girl metamorphosed into a tree, perhaps? A parking meter? But Renata wasn’t yet so far gone. The simplest explanation was, the girl had ducked into a building or a shop. Although God knows what transformations she’d been through in her young life.

Another simple explanation: she must have followed Renata home on the subway yesterday.