Hope and Other Punch Lines

by Julie Buxbaum

  “What were you thinking?” I ask.

  “No comment,” he says, and now it’s my turn to laugh. “Seriously, though, tell me what you have in mind.”

  “I want us to do a series of interviews with my grandmother and record some of her best stories and memories before they all get eaten up by her dementia. I want to literally make them into tangible things. Do you think you can help me?”

  “Let’s do it,” Noah says, and my whole body tingles. “I really like the idea of hearing someone’s best memories instead of their worst, for a change.”

  “Right?”

  “Right,” he says, and this time, I’m the one who leans in for a kiss.

  “But I have a favor to ask first,” he says, his voice suddenly a little nervous and shy. “I have one last person I need to visit. Will you come with me? Please? You don’t have to be Baby Hope. You can be Abbi.”

  “Of course,” I say. “Anywhere.”

  We are in the pregnant woman’s living room, though of course she’s not the pregnant woman anymore. Just like Abbi isn’t Baby Hope. Sixteen years changes things.

  Her name is Charlotte Dempsey, and she has four children, and works part-time at the local library. “That face! I’d know it anywhere.”

  When we did our interviews, everyone seemed to be mentally drawing a line from the baby in the photograph to the girl in front of them and measuring the vast distance between the two. This time, Charlotte is connecting me to my dad, which I assume is less of a line and more of a hop, skip, and a jump.

  “I was so happy when you called. I mean, I only knew your dad for four minutes, but I have a lot to tell you about him anyway,” she says. We are sitting across from each other on faded gray couches in a house cluttered with happy kid junk.

  “Thanks,” I say, and feel a stab of the sort of envy my mom must have felt when she saw this woman at the mall. If there had been no 9/11, would bedtime have meant rowdy pillow fights with a slew of brothers instead of only my mom and me and a library book? Who would I have been if we added up to more than two?

  “You know that he was a hero. That goes without saying. Everyone was running one way, and he chose to run the other,” Charlotte says.

  “I like to run in every direction,” says the youngest boy, who is putting together a Lego Death Star on the floor, looking up at me from under his too-long bowl cut.

  “I bet you do, bud,” I say, using my camp counselor voice. He nods at me seriously.

  “That’s Jaden, my baby. He’s five. Jason is my eldest. He’s fifteen, and then there’s Joseph and John in between. I’m obviously outnumbered.” She points to the family portrait on the fireplace mantel. The picture is a few years old and was likely taken at a Sears. It in no way follows the rule of thirds.

  “We named Jason after your father. A friend told us that in the Jewish tradition, you can honor people who’ve died by using the first letter of their name. We knew your dad was Jewish and decided to keep going with the J’s. All my boys are named after him. We wanted to thank him every way that we could.”

  “That’s really nice. I bet he would have loved that,” I say, though it feels weird to speak on his behalf. I have no idea what my dad would have loved or did love much beyond what my mom has told me: his University of Michigan hat, pickle sandwiches, terrible puns, our family, and apparently, random acts of heroism.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss. I told your mother right after it happened, though I realize now I was probably the last person she wanted to see. I never got a chance to give my condolences to you.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and Abbi reaches over and squeezes my hand. “Honestly, I’m not even sure why we’re here. I guess I wanted to put a face to the story I heard. I appreciate you taking the time to meet me—us, me and Abbi.”

  “I have this family, these four perfect, beautiful, pain-in-the-ass children who wouldn’t have been born if it weren’t for your dad. Every single day I think about your mom and you, because I realize your loss was our gain. I’m not going to sit here and pretend there’s anything fair about that. I was the last person he rescued. There were people before me, but I was the last,” she says.

  “Five other people,” Abbi chimes in. I haven’t wrapped my head around that number yet. What about the three kids Charlotte had afterward? Should we add them to the tally, or do they get erased by the ones my dad never got to have with my mom? And what do these numbers mean, anyway? My father was a hero, regardless of whether you can count the people he rescued on one hand or two.

  “When your dad found me, my clothes were on fire. He used his jacket to put out the flames. Wrapped me up like a burrito, scooped me up, and got me out of there. While he was carrying me, he asked my name, and when I said Charlie, because that’s what I go by, even though I’m technically a Charlotte, you know what he said?” she asks, and we shake our heads, because of course we have no idea what he said. What could you possibly say in a moment like that? Nice to meet you, I’m Jason. Lovely day for a run.

  I picture it for a moment: My dad carrying this woman in his arms. He looks like an action hero. His face smudged with grease. The ultimate badass dragon slayer.

  I feel myself swell with pride.

  “Your dad said, and I swear I am not making this up, he said Liar, liar, pants on fire.” Charlotte smiles tearfully at us. “The whole world was burning down, I didn’t know if I was going to die, I was scared I might lose my baby, and he managed to make me laugh. A hysterical laugh, maybe, but I laughed.”

  I look at Abbi and Abbi looks back at me, and huge grins overtake both of our faces. I feel unadulterated joy.

  “His last words were Liar, liar, pants on fire? Like he was making a joke about you being literally on fire,” I say, to make sure I understand exactly what she’s telling me. “He said that? Out loud? To you? On nine-eleven?”

  “Yup,” Charlotte says. “I know it sounds inappropriate, but I swear, it was the perfect thing. I was terrified and his silly joke brought me back to myself. He made me feel better. He reminded me that I was alive.”

  That word fate, which reared its head when I saw Abbi at Knight’s Day Camp all those weeks ago, pops into my brain again, and this time it doesn’t even make me feel a little embarrassed or uncomfortable.

  For the first time in my entire life, I feel a direct connection between me and my father. When I was younger, I thought of him as a question mark—an entirely unknowable entity, or worse, a void. Recently, he’s morphed into a comic-book superhero—spandexed and fearless—which has felt equally untouchable. But now I realize that it’s unfair to distill him down to a single decision—turning around—as enormous a legacy as that may seem.

  “Wow,” Abbi says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “Your dad told the first nine-eleven joke ever. Ever,” she says.

  “And it killed,” I say, with the confidence of knowing that my dad, whoever he might have been, would have loved that terrible pun.

  “Groan,” Abbi says, but she’s smiling.

  I think about my father’s last words. Only slightly more hilarious than heartbreaking, and grounded wholly in the truth.

  The perfect punchline.

  I could laugh or I could cry.

  I choose to laugh.

  Later, at home, my grandmother and Paula are eating pizza in the breakfast nook, and my mom perches on the counter. My dad sits at the stool around the kitchen island.

  “Are you guys staging an intervention or something?” I ask, and grab a slice from an open box. “What’s going on?”

  “Your ChapStick is a little smeared,” my grandma says, and smirks.

  “The Noah problem wasn’t about you after all, I hear,” Paula says.

  “What Noah problem?” my mom asks. “Why am I the last to hear about everything? How are you feeling, Abbi? Any coughing?”
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  “Nothing bad,” I say, which is the truth. My incision has started to heal. I can imagine my lungs again being just another part of my body one day, like my belly button or my knees. Something I don’t think about much, beyond my asthma. “There was no Noah problem. There was, at one point, a Noah misunderstanding. All’s good.”

  “All’s good, huh?” my dad asks, and looks over at my mom and beams with pride. They talk out loud without saying a word.

  My dad: See, you were worried for no reason. She’s developmentally right on target.

  My mom: We should send Dr. Schwartz champagne!

  “Listen, I know your dad spoke to you a little about…us…him and me, I mean, and I wanted to let you know that sometimes he’ll be staying over here,” my mom says, laying out the words slowly and carefully, like they are somehow explosive if not handled correctly. “I know it’s a little confusing.”

  “I’m almost seventeen, not five. It’s not confusing at all.” I take a second slice of pizza. I’m suddenly ravenous. I blame the kissing. “So Dad’s moving back home?”

  “We’re taking it slowly,” my mom says. “We’re not rushing into anything.”

  “You do realize you already have a child together, right? No one would call you guys getting back together rushing.”

  “Your mom would call it rushing,” my dad says.

  “Your mom’s a cautious lady. I respect that,” Paula says.

  “Your mom’s dumb,” my grandmother says, and we all look at her, unsure who is talking right now. If it’s the dementia, the version of my grandmother who I recently caught dancing with my dead grandfather in the living room, or just my grandma, who in the best of times doesn’t mince words. “What? Why are you all looking at me like that? I’m wearing pants, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, you are, and we appreciate it,” I say.

  “You don’t mess around with love. When you got it, you hold on to it. Simple,” my grandmother says.

  “Nothing is ever that simple,” my mom says, but she looks thoughtful, like she’s weighing my grandma’s words. She takes a sip of wine, puts the glass back on the counter. My father watches her and for once stays quiet.

  He’ll wait.

  “Maybe it is,” I say.

  “Not for nothing, but you’ve been in love for, what? Five seconds?” Paula’s tone is teasing, not mean.

  “I’m not in love,” I say, and the entire room erupts with laughter. I wouldn’t be surprised if they broke out into “Noah and Abbi sitting in a tree.”

  “What? I’m not!”

  “Then you’re dumb too,” my grandmother says.

  The sixteenth anniversary of 9/11 and my birthday fall on a Monday, the most descriptive day of the week.

  A beginning.

  The ceremony starts at 8:45 a.m., as it does every year, to mark the time when the first plane hit the first tower, to recognize when the world broke into a before and an after. I got up early this morning and blew out my hair and painted my nails a mature pale pink. I’m wearing a recently dry-cleaned dress that my mom picked out and ballet flats and I look both like me and not like me at all. At the last minute, I put on my fox earrings to add something familiar.

  This summer I realized that an essential part of growing up is relinquishing all the myths you’ve previously bought into about yourself. And so now a print of the Baby Hope picture hangs on my bedroom wall. I think of it like something more than bad hotel art, something less than a family artifact. We still have an uneasy relationship, the photo and I, though I feel like we’re moving toward a truce. Sometimes my eyes sweep across the picture and I can almost look at it as an impartial observer would. I often discover a new detail I didn’t previously notice. The silver bangle on Raj’s wrist reflecting light. A corner of blue sky.

  Before I leave this morning, though, I take a long look at Baby Hope. I see a one-year-old immortalized in a single, terrible moment, and then decide that’s an unfair reduction. I know she’s more than that. Baby Hope is a symbol of optimism, a busted frontier myth, the idea of persevering even when all looks lost.

  She’s also no longer me.

  Once upon a time a girl was captured in a photograph.

  Those four fairy-tale words finally make sense—once upon a time. We can be both fixed in time and outside of it. It can bend us to its will, and sometimes, if we are lucky, we get to bend it back.

  Now, though, another question haunts me: What does happily ever after look like in a broken world?

  Today, while I listen to the names of the dead, I will hold Noah’s hand. We will say our prayers in the quiet of our own minds. I will feel overwhelmed by love and grief and gratitude for my own outrageous good fortune. Afterward, we will walk home together, our hands still linked, and eat birthday cake.

  I’m 95 percent sure Noah has made me a crown.

  And I tell myself that this, all of this, the terrible and the good, could be what happily ever after looks like: A Monday. A beginning.

  As much as Abbi and Noah’s story and the town of Oakdale feel real to me, this book is a work of fiction. There is no Baby Hope photograph except for the one that I hope now lives within our collective imagination.

  I write to make sense out of things—to order my thoughts—and I’ve long struggled with those moments that cleave our lives, cleave us, into befores and afters. And there seems to me to be no bigger shared before and after than September 11, 2001. As Noah says, I often think about “all those people waking up on [that day] not knowing everything was about to change, everything, and then I think about all those people waking up this morning who may have to go to sleep in a different world from the one in which they woke.”

  Though historians (and novelists!) have grappled with and will continue to grapple with the myriad political ramifications of 9/11, I am much more interested in the personal legacies of loss. How they seep in and alter our daily fabric in a million unseen ways almost two decades after the fact, and also the converse: how life goes on. How we continue to fall in love (or fall in love again). Despite the predictions, how we continue to joke and, of course, to laugh.

  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that while Oakdale doesn’t exist, the community of Middletown, New Jersey, which lost the greatest number of people outside New York City on September 11, 2001, does. I chose to create a fictional town for a number of reasons, not least of which is because it felt overreaching and presumptuous for me to co-opt a real community, especially one that’s still healing. If you’re interested in learning more about Middletown, a good place to start would be Gail Sheehy’s nonfiction account, Middletown, America: One Town’s Passage from Trauma to Hope.

  I also want to note that “The Dust Lady” is a real photograph, and its subject has a name: Marcy Borders. Sadly, Ms. Borders died in 2015 at the age of forty-two from stomach cancer, and it’s widely believed that her illness stemmed from her exposure to toxic chemicals on 9/11.

  As many as four hundred thousand people are believed to be affected by medical conditions connected to September 11, and almost seventy different kinds of cancers have been linked to exposure at Ground Zero; many are aggressive and difficult to treat. Although we rarely see it mentioned in the news, more than a thousand people have died since the attacks, and this number is only expected to rise.

  An entire generation has been born since 9/11, and for many of my younger readers, I realize that day may feel remote, something that belongs only to their parents or grandparents or their history class. I hope this book encourages them to continue learning and to close that gap. As Abbi says at one point in our story: “Sometimes it feels like those towers are still falling and will never stop.” I think it’s everyone’s responsibility to continue to bear witness until they do.

  First and foremost, a giant shout out-to Jenn Joel, who is one of the smartest and sharpest people I know and who makes
me a better writer. Thank you to Beverly Horowitz, for her relentlessness not only in her editorial zeal, but in supporting my work. I’m lucky to have her in my corner.

  A forever thank-you to Elaine Koster, who got this whole shebang started.

  Giant hugs to Jillian Vandall, who is a rock star publicist and an A+ person.

  Huge thanks to all of the wonderful people at Random House Children’s Books: Barbara Marcus, John Adamo, Dominique Cimina, Kate Keating, Elizabeth Ward, Kelly McGauley, Hannah Black, Rebecca Gudelis, Cayla Rasi, Adrienne Waintraub, Kristin Schulz, Lisa Nadel, and a million other awesome people I will kick myself for not mentioning as soon as this goes to print. I’m deeply grateful to the international rights team at ICM and Curtis Brown, and in particular to Roxanne Edouard. Thanks also to Nicolas Vivas, the Hatchery, and the Fiction Writers Co-Op.

  High fives to the amazing Lola Wusu, Charlotte Huang, Lucy Kaminsky, and the rest of my amazing village. You all know who you are.

  And finally, the biggest, most ginormous thank-you to all the readers who make this writing-books thing possible. I’m so, so grateful for your support.

  Love to my dad, to Lena (who is sorely missed), to Josh, to Leia, to my beautiful nephew sweet baby James (welcome to the world, little guy; we already love you), and to the whole Flore clan. Special thank-you to my mom, Elizabeth Buxbaum, who is loved and remembered every single day.

  And finally, thank you, Indy, my homespot, for making everything possible, and to Elili and Luca, my heart, for making everything matter. I love you guys to the moon and back and back ad infinitum.

  Julie Buxbaum is the New York Times bestselling author of Tell Me Three Things, her debut young adult novel, and of What to Say Next. She also wrote the critically acclaimed The Opposite of Love and After You. Her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two children.