MONDAY MORNING, AS RENATA heads for the subway, the bookman beckons from behind his table. Either he’s out early or she’s late again. Since she went back to work last week, she hasn’t been as punctual as usual. Why rush? The single pressing thing remains the morning news. The ordinary items don’t interest her; she needs only to hear the announcers’ voices. The startled, bewildered, and, as the hours passed, excited voices of that Tuesday two weeks ago linger in her ear. She’d recognize the tone right away, like a new kind of music you can’t get out of your head, a background to everything else. So far, for thirteen mornings, nothing but a slight edge to the usual blandness, as if the announcers, too, are expectant, almost tired of waiting. Once that’s done, she takes her time, no more watching the clock or running down the stairs. This morning she paused to kiss the sleeping Gianna goodbye and smooth her spiky blonde hair, which popped right back up. Wrapped in a tangled sheet on the living-room couch, Gianna opened one eye and made some small sounds, then rolled over. Renata tucked the sheet around her.
The bookman keeps smiling and beckoning, so she stops at his table. Is there something special he thinks she might like? No, just a new batch of children’s books in fairly good condition—Goodnight, Moon; O’Aulaire’s Greek Myths; a few Ramona books; Tales of the Round Table. Someone’s child has grown up, or died, or disappeared. Also a battered collection of travel books: Let’s Go Brazil; Exploring the Philippines; Wonders of the Holy Land.
“Nice weekend?” he asks. Then, without waiting for an answer, “Come with me a minute. I have something to show you.” He reaches out to take her arm in courtly fashion.
“Where? I’m on my way to work.”
“It’ll just take a minute. Around the corner. You’ll see.”
“What about the books? Can you leave them?”
“No one ever steals the books.”
She goes along, past the café and the Thai restaurant and Blockbuster, until they reach the local market with its big neighborhood bulletin board out front. There he stops. For as long as she can remember, the bulletin board has displayed a changing array of notices, three-deep, angled helter-skelter like a cubist collage. Roommate Wanted Non-Smoking. T’ai Chi Class Forming. Computer Problems? Don’t Fret, Call Yvette. Moving? Strong Sam Lugs Anything Anywhere. Now, of course, many of those commonplace notices have been plastered over by the Missing signs. Lars Paulsen, worked on 101st floor of the North Tower, tinted aviator glasses, mustache, stud in left ear, class ring. Judy Nguyen, walks with slight limp, six months pregnant, wearing black sleeveless dress and pearls, diamond engagement ring. The bookman stands silently by as if there’s something Renata should be seeing, but what? She catches sight of a dark scrawl in Arabic on the brick wall beside the bulletin board. She can’t decipher the first word, but anyone could figure out the meaning, since below is a crude drawing of a bull’s-eye with an arrow in the middle. The next words she can read: “Bin Laden, bomb Tel Aviv next! Terrorism breeds terrorism.” It’s ugly, especially alongside the Missing signs, but surely the bookman couldn’t have brought her here just for that.
She looks at him, baffled, until finally he points to an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet at the lower left. The grainy photo is large, occupying the top half of the page, frontal view, pouting face. MISSING: Jenny Halloway, Stuyvesant High School student. Short blonde hair, it says, sleeveless print dress, red backpack, wearing silver bracelet (but she wore no bracelet when Renata first saw her), butterfly tattoo on right hip. Forget the backpack, long gone. Renata’s never seen any butterfly tattoo, but then again she’s never looked. Gianna tried on the new clothes alone in the Gap fitting room. At home, she’s shy going in and out of the shower, always wears one of Renata’s robes.
“Your girl,” he says. “Your niece.”
“How...? No. It must be a mistake.”
“These are the parents,” and he points to the letters in large block type, carefully centered. Lionel and Celeste Halloway, a phone number, an address in Tribeca so close to the site that they must have had to show ID to get home that first week. “URGENT. PLEASE call right away. She was passing the WTC Tuesday morning and never arrived at school.” Did she always take detours or did she have an errand? Or was she planning to cut classes that day?
“A schoolgirl,” he says. “They must be so worried about her. They must be suffering.”
This sounds better in Spanish than it would in English. Suffering, Renata thinks: they use that explicit word in the Romance languages so much more readily than we do. What would we say? Upset, frantic, devastated? Suffering is much better.
The bookman goes on talking but his voice, soft, kind, unjudging, comes from far away, because a black screen is moving in from all directions, above her head, rising from the ground, at the peripheries of her vision. She knows the feeling. She nearly passed out in the police car after they found Claudia’s body, and again a year later when they lowered her father’s body into his grave, even as the neighbors were whispering what a brave girl she was, organizing the whole funeral all by herself. She won’t pass out now, though; she’s older and stronger; she resists. She sits down on the pavement and lowers her head to her knees. The bookman crouches beside her. “Can you get me some water?” He disappears into the market and a moment later is back with a bottle, which he unscrews and holds to her lips. She forces her eyes wide open to catch the fading light.
“Thanks. It’s okay. I’m okay now.”
“Sit a few minutes. There’s no hurry.” A couple of people are hovering nearby. “Everything okay,” he says in English and waves them away. “No problem.”
After a while she gets up. At the bottom of the notice is a fringe of small strips, each with the Halloways’ name, address and phone number, same as for the notices of computer wizards and house-cleaning services and language lessons. Accent Elimination, reads a notice partly hidden by MISSING Jenny Halloway. What will they think of next? But if you wear a turban or are brown-skinned, even accent elimination won’t do you much good these days.
The bookman tears off a strip and holds it out. “Here. You’ll need this.”
“She’s doing fine with me. I take good care of her. She was lost, you know. Something terrible happened and she was lost—”
“Yes, she was lost. And it’s lucky that you found her. That she was found by a good person. Her family will be so relieved. Here. Take it.” He presses the tiny scrap of paper into her hand, and then, as she refuses to close her fingers around it, he tucks it into her purse. “Come, I’ll walk you to the subway.”
“Thanks, but you don’t have to. I’m fine. I want to stop for some coffee.”
She slips into the café, and once she sees him moving on, returns to the bulletin board, waits for a moment when no one’s passing, tears off the notice and crumples it. She’ll toss it out in the subway station. Yes, hurl it in front of a moving train. It will be as if she never saw it. It’s just a piece of paper. Nothing has to change. The bookman means well, sure. But it’s not fair. She’s lost too much. She will not think about those people, Lionel and Celeste Halloway, whoever they are and however they came to possess Gianna’s photo. She will not allow them to be real. Let the train wheels grind down their suffering.
Children’s books are an excellent way to learn the structure and syntax of a language. From the stack on her desk Renata chooses one about a desert boy named Abdullah from the Age of Ignorance—meaning the pre-Islamic age—who saves his camel from a band of marauders. Meanwhile, she’s looking forward to lunch with Linda. Lunches with Linda are reliably entertaining, and today’s will be especially so if Linda has been reunited with Roger. If her weekend has been uneventful, there’s always her store of arcane knowledge, like the bit about the composer who might never have existed but for his one piece of music and one historical reference. Just this morning Renata found a tease of an e-mail from Linda. “Since you’re deep into Arabic, you might like to know this, from Stendhal, On Love: ‘I see in their convention for divorce a touching proof of the Arabs’ respect for the weaker sex.’ Things have sure changed, right? And not for the better. This must have been in the Age of Ignorance. ‘During the absence of the husband from whom she wished to separate, a wife would strike the tent and then put it up again, taking care that the opening should be on the side opposite where it was kept before. This simple ceremony separated husband from wife forever.’ Clever, no? See you at lunch.”
Close to noontime, as she struggles through an editorial in the Beirut Star—so much less appealing than the adventures of Abdullah and his camel—there comes a knock on the door. “It’s open,” she calls absentmindedly.
When she looks up, leaving off at “America has been made to know the suffering that so many other countries understand all too well,” instead of Linda she finds Jack, carrying his jacket, his white shirtsleeves rolled up as if he has a major task ahead.
“What are you doing here? Is something wrong?”
“No, I’m fine.” He seems anxious, though, running his hands through his hair, biting his lips, all the conventional signs. He’s so unoriginal, it strikes her.
“I’ve never been here before. Interesting.” He gazes around at the shelves piled with papers and periodicals, the stacks of dictionaries, the children’s books, the lists of words tacked to the wall, color-coded to the adjacent maps. “You weren’t easy to find.”
“I’m not supposed to be. You want to sit down?”
“Sure. What are you doing?”
She holds up the Beirut Star. “My lessons. ‘This is the wrath of Allah....When Allah catches hold of you, there is no escape.’ Stuff like that. What are you doing? I mean, what brings you here? Is everything okay with Julio?”
“Fine, last I heard. There’s something I must tell you. You’re not going to like this, but I have to.”
Pamela, it must be. She’s caught hold of him and there’s no escape. The misery she offers is better than the misery I offer. Qualitatively speaking. Suits him better. Okay, fuck it, then. Let him go. She’s so irked with him for invading her sanctuary and ruining her lunch plans that she’s ready to ditch the whole thing. So she thinks. Although she won’t be thinking that in the middle of the night, wanting his warm body, or when she sees him and Pamela in some local restaurant, holding hands or clinking glasses.
“You have to? Okay, let’s hear it.”
He reaches into his ancient briefcase, its leather worn shabby—a good girlfriend would have bought him a new one long ago—and pulls out a sheet of paper. “This came in the mail last week. I didn’t get around to opening it till today. With Carmen gone and things so frantic I can’t keep up.” He reaches out to hand it over but she sees what it is and won’t accept it. He lays it on the desk squarely in front of her, on top of the Beirut Star.
“Renata,” he begins in his judicious tones. “This child has a family. They need to know where she is. They want her back.”
“I’ve seen it.
“You have?”
“Just this morning. On Clinton Street.”
“And?”
“And nothing.” She rips the paper, halves, quarters, eighths.
“Oh, give it up. They must be all over town. Maybe they just didn’t think of trying Brooklyn right away. Anyway, I wrote it all down.”
“You did? You mean you would...”
“Yes, I would. It has to be done. If you were thinking straight you’d see that. What are you planning? To keep her around like a pet? To indulge some...” He catches himself. His voice softens, becomes the crooning Jack-voice he uses in intimate moments. “Look, Renata, I do sympathize. I can imagine what this means to you. The child you told me about, your sister’s child. You lost touch somehow and you miss her, so—”
“Stop it. Will you stop it this minute!” She gets up and stands behind her desk, fierce, like a teacher reprimanding an insolent student. “You can’t imagine anything. You have no idea what you’re talking about, you know that? Stop interfering in things you know nothing about.”
“Okay,” he says calmly. “What don’t I know? Tell me.”
“I can’t tell you here.” Not in her haven, where she does the one thing she can do happily, where she can be...Well, she’s not sure who, only not that person carved by the chisel of loss. She hardly ever thinks about all that melodrama while she’s here, up to her neck in words. She doesn’t even want the walls to hear. To absorb the knowledge and echo it back at her, spoiling her peace of mind.
“We’ll go out, then,” Jack says. “We’ll go to the park.”
She gathers up her things without speaking, and in the hall, pauses at Linda’s door. “I have to cancel my lunch date. You might as well come in and meet Linda.” Linda’s been curious about him for a long time. Good, let her have a look. He’s more than presentable; Renata even feels a kind of pride. See this choice specimen who could have anybody and wants me! Before they enter she assesses him through Linda’s eyes, the thick shoulders, the very slight paunch, the sturdy thighs, the abundant coarse black hair flecked with gray, mussed because he keeps running his fingers through it, the ice-blue eyes, generous lips....But why bother to catalog his assets when she’s about to lose him?
“Linda, hi. Jack dropped by, so I thought we’d stop in and say hello.”
Linda’s been staring into the computer as if it were a crystal ball, her elbows on the desk, cheeks cupped in her hands. She looks up brightly, her face shiny with enthusiasm for whatever obscurities she’s tracked down, her red curls a tangle, her huge earrings jiggling. She’s dressed in New York black, tight sleeveless Lycra, more like an East Village waitress than a research librarian.
“So this is the famous Jack. What a surprise!”
Immediately his body grows alert, the sexual voltage rises. He’s wondering what Renata has said about him. Let him wonder. “Renata’s kept you a secret,” he says. “Good to meet you.” They shake hands. “Are you a linguist too?”
“Not exactly. More of a fact-checker.”
“She’s modest,” Renata says. “There’s nothing she doesn’t know. She has a photographic memory.”
“We’re all freakish in some way,” says Linda. “You’ve got to be, to stay here. Aren’t we lucky they’ve got these back rooms for people like us?”
“I’m really sorry,” Renata says, “but I can’t have lunch. Something’s come up that we’ve got to talk about.”
“Oh yeah, sure.” From Linda’s knowing laugh, Renata can tell what she’s thinking: that they’re taking a leaf from her book, going off to some closet or stairwell for an urgent fuck. Both women chuckle, while Jack keeps his all-purpose flirtatious smile, mildly confused.
“No, really. I’d ask you to join us but...it’s kind of a family matter. Some other time.”
“It’s like in high school,” Linda says. “Remember, some girls, they’d always cop out on a plan with their girlfriends if a boy asked them out? A subsequent engagement. Were you one of those?”
“I hardly had dates with anyone, girls or boys,” Renata says.
“No kidding,” says Jack. “And all this time I had you pegged for the popular type.”
She shakes her head in mock amusement. They’re carrying this little scene off well, she and Jack. No one would guess they’re in the midst of betrayal, revelation, recrimination. “Well, now it can be told. I’m sorry, Linda. See you later. Thanks for the Stendhal.”
“Oh, by the way,” Linda says, “I had to consult a map of St. Louis this morning, don’t ask why. Guess what I found for you? Broadway Street. Olive Street Road.”
“Thanks.”
“This must be serious business with you two. You’re not even excited. Okay, so long. Have a nice, uh, lunch.”
It’s usually impossible to find chairs in Bryant Park on a fine day at lunchtime, but they’re lucky: two pink-cheeked young executives, dark suit jackets slung over their shoulders, are just leaving. Jack darts over to take possession. The scene around them is urban bliss, the rainbow coalition out in force, in every age, shape, and variety of dress: plump ladies in saris, homeboys in baggy jeans, sleek girls with bare, bejeweled navels, homeless men in smudged sweatshirts, and dressed-for-success lawyers on cell phones, all eating out of plastic containers. There’s even a trio of cops, their holsters and billy clubs dangling over the delicate green metal chairs. And the ubiquitous men in camouflage, pacing, observing.
“You hungry?” Jack asks.
“No.”
“All right, I want to understand. You think I’m against you in this. I’m not. What’s it all about?”
“I didn’t lose touch in the way you mean. She was stolen. The couple who adopted her had to leave town in a hurry. They were dealing drugs, I think, and someone was after them, the cops or the robbers, I don’t know. They gave her to me, just brought her over one day and took off. She was three years old. So I took care of her, I did everything. She was mine. She was all I had left. My mother, well, you’ve seen her. And then one day—”
“What?”
“I was so careful. I tried to do everything right. I was so proud of myself, that I learned to do it, because before she came I was,...well, not in the best of shape. The first two years I worked at a day-care center so I could be near her. When she went to school I started taking classes too, but I brought her and picked her up every day. I got work I could do at home, commercial translating. But in the end I was no good. In the end I failed her. She was entrusted to me and I failed.”
“I don’t get it. What did you do?”
“She got stolen, I told you. Right out from under me. Ten years ago. It was on the merry-go-round in the park, I let her go by herself, she wanted to, it was a special horse, the kind that goes up and down....” It’s no use trying not to cry; she doesn’t care anymore. Let him see. It doesn’t interfere with her story, it’s not choking sobs, just tears rolling down her face. “I was standing there waving, but...I walked away for a couple of minutes...to get ice cream and then...she wasn’t there.”
Jack is holding both her hands tight. “The police?” he says finally.
“I did everything, believe me. I still do. I check with them every few weeks.”
He tries to take her in his arms. It’s awkward, with the metal chairs. “I’m so sorry. I’m terribly sorry. I had no idea.”
“That’s how I wanted it. I thought with you, you know, clean slate and all. I could be changed. Have a different life.”
“So now, you want to try again?”
“Look, it sounds incredible, but...when I saw her there, near St. Vincent’s, I had this funny feeling. Then when I got a good look at her,...I know what you’ll think, but it’s her. I can feel it. It’s like a miracle. But people do turn up, the cops say. Can’t you see the resemblance? If you’d ever seen me at seventeen, or Claudia,...well, no, by then she,...I know it sounds crazy, but its her. It’s like I was punished all those years and then the punishment was over. I got her back.”
“You can’t mean—”
“I do mean it! The thing that torments me is...I can’t...what she must have gone through all these years. You know what happens to lost children, kidnapped children. Why do you think she doesn’t speak? It’s unspeakable. I can only imagine. And she recognized me, too. She did. She followed me home. I didn’t chase after her. Remember that day we went to Coney Island? I saw her near your building. She knows she’s safe again. I don’t care....I don’t care how long it takes before she can speak. At least she’s back where she belongs.”
“Renata—”
“No! I won’t let anyone take her away again. Whoever those people are or how they got her. She’s mine.”
He keeps an arm around her and doesn’t speak for a long time. Then, “I can see how it feels like she’s yours.”
“You’re talking to me the way they talk to crazy people. That tone. I’ve heard it in the hospitals with my mother. You’re humoring me.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to...Look, you have a very strong feeling. Okay. If you want to be absolutely sure, you could do a DNA test.”
She shakes free of him. “How typical! I don’t want to do a DNA test.”
“Because you don’t want to know for sure.”
She weeps again, frantically. “You! You take care of everyone, all those people who come to you. I just want to save one person. One person! Five thousand people are gone, turned to ashes, and one is found. And you don’t want to let me save that one. I let her down once, I can never make up for that, but at least...She’s mine.”
“You can’t know for sure that she’s yours.”
“I’ve made her mine!” she cries, so loud that people nearby turn to look. She breathes and swallows and mutters under her breath, “I’ve fed her long enough.” If the child don’t look like you, if you feed him long enough he’ll be starting looking like you, the quilt-maker said. But Jack doesn’t know what she’s muttering about. He thinks she’s gone mad. Madder. “How does anyone know for sure? And she does look like me.”
“All right, maybe there’s a slight resemblance. But she may look more like those parents who put up the sign. They must feel the same as you did when you lost your niece.”
“It’s not my business how they feel. I know why you’re doing this, too. Don’t think I don’t. You’re guilty over Carmen. You want to do everything exactly right from now on. By the book. You made me give up Julio, but at least we knew who his family was. Now you want me to give up Gianna. Jenny, they call her,” she says with contempt. “Maybe they picked her up off the street. Maybe they’re the ones who kidnapped her ten years ago. Maybe...who knows what?”
“I am guilty over Carmen, you’re right. I may feel guilty for the rest of my life. But that’s not why.”
“It’s because basically you have the mind of a petty bureaucrat. You see a piece of paper and you’re ready to sacrifice me. You’re like those people in the child welfare agencies. They’re so busy with pieces of paper that they don’t keep track of real children who are meanwhile being tortured and starved to death. You see it in the papers all the time. Each time I read one of those stories I go through hell...” Suffer, she thinks. If I were speaking Spanish or Italian I’d say “suffer,” but it’s hard to say “suffer” in English without sounding pretentious. “I suffer,” she says, “thinking of what she must have suffered.”
“Look, this...the attack, the tragedy, it affects people in different ways. With your family, with all that went on, it figures....But try to be rational. Her parents are suffering too. At least call and talk to them. Or let me do it for you.”
“That’s the last thing I’d do. I don’t want you anywhere near her. Didn’t you see how she looked at you, how frightened she was that maybe you’d...God, I don’t know.”
“Shit, how can you even think—”
“I don’t mean you would. But...It’s been ten years. What’s she done in all those years? What’s been done to her? How can I just send her away, back to I don’t know what?”
“Renata, that child, your child, we can’t know what happened to her. And I swear I’ll do anything to help you find her, if she can be found. But this other girl...You have to do the right thing. I mean, think of her future.”
“What future? For all we know the future is more buildings coming down tomorrow, more attacks, more awfulness. You know there’s going to be war any day now. They keep promising us. They can’t wait to start killing someone, anyone. They’re men. They have to do something. The only thing that can relieve them is revenge. It excites them—you can see it in their faces. Bombs away. And then? Who says we even have a future?”
“We have to live as if there’s a future. Please, don’t make me do this to you. It’s better if you do it. You know you’ll have to give her back in the end.”
She can only weep; words are no use anymore. He’ll win. He has reason on his side, and the ones with reason always win. They’re so certain. Her kind of certainty disperses like smoke, in the face of theirs. But like smoke, its residue stays in the air for a very long time.
“I don’t know that. You know it. At least give me a few days, will you?”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.” He moves his chair close and puts his arm around her again. First she lets him; it feels good. Then she pulls her chair back.
“This is disgusting, you know? That I have to beg you for my life? Who the fuck are you, to decide about my life? What are you to me anyway? Compared to her.”
“I’m someone who loves you. And also wants to do the right thing.”
“If you only knew how pompous you sound. All of you. You could go on TV with all the others who are so sure they’re right. You’re no different.”
“I won’t argue that. You’re speaking out of rage. Look, how about a sandwich from the stand over there? I’m starved.”
“No.”
“I’m going to get something. I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t come back. I don’t want to look at you anymore.”
“Can I walk you back to your office, then?”
“Are you deaf or what? Leave me alone.”
“So, I’ll call you.”
“I know. You said that already.”