When Gary finishes, he glances at Rosalie. She feels her shoulders contract into an involuntary shrug as she breathes into her microphone.
“I’m proud of the budget that we’ve been putting together,” she says in a squeaking falsetto. “Given the restrictions we’re facing, that every district is facing, I think we’ve done a fantastic job of putting our students first.”
She grasps a sheet of paper and waves it in panicked illustration.
“I’m especially proud of the cost cutting we’re going to do through retirement buyouts. It’s a great way to infuse the district with fresh blood, and the only way to avoid losing extracurriculars.”
John Duffy clears his throat. “If I may respectfully interject,” he says in a voice like a sludge-filled river. “It’s just not enough, Rosalie.”
There is a whisper of fabric in the audience, as people shift in their seats.
“We can’t expect the community to accept another tax hike. The high school was irresponsible, and it’s time to pay the piper.”
Gary Tighe begins to mutter something in defense, but John continues. His eyes are trained only on Rosalie.
“The taxpayers have sacrificed enough. Now it’s time for our students to sacrifice. They’ve been coddled, they’ve never been told no. It won’t kill them to go a few years without new sports uniforms, without another school psychologist.”
“John,” Rosalie begins, fighting to keep her voice level, “our job as adults is to make sure our students don’t have to sacrifice.” As she speaks, she thinks of him on her lawn in his pink polo shirt, eating from a paper plate, and hates herself for having fed him.
“Rosalie, that’s just not realistic. I know you’re new to the board, but you’re not that young.”
There is a rumble of laughter from the public.
“It’s not just about sports games and bake sales,” John continues. “Really, sometimes I think this board needs to be clearer about its expectations for candidacy. If you don’t understand business, you can’t understand budgets, and you’re not qualified for a seat. It’s a disservice to our students and to our community.”
“Okay,” Gary interjects. “Thank you, John. I think that’s enough. Why don’t we go ahead and open the public forum.”
Rosalie’s mouth is dry. She lifts her water cup and maintains a wry smile directed at the far wall of the library. She stares at the display of periodicals, crammed with arguments and opinion, words printed in aggressive black text, the voices of everyone but herself.
As expected, the gray-haired woman is the first at the podium. Her words are more spat than spoken, like gun spray. Rosalie leans back into her seat and tries to relax her shoulders. No one is going to make her speak anymore. The other board members respond to the woman’s speech with their masculine drones, extinguishing it. She listens, then, to the mothers who rise, one by one, and put their fears into the microphone, their voices transformed into overamplified bird chirps. She sits back and becomes like a coral reef, allowing the voices to mingle and wave over her. After the public has risen to go, after the A/V staff has dismantled the overhead projector, she rises and smooths down the creases in her charcoal pants. The wry smile has hardened on her face. She nods at her colleagues, collects her notebook, and drives home.
At dinner the next night, Rosalie detects tension at the table. Noah does not look up from his plate, and there is a slight distortion on Nayana’s face. Rosalie has the sudden suspicion that the children know about the board meeting, that they’ve heard about it at school. She wonders whether the other parents might have criticized her by name. She does not taste her dinner.
Afterward, while Noah is helping in the kitchen, she asks lightly, “Is everything okay, honey?”
“Of course,” he says, wiping the counter. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
These words are spoken frankly, with no note of sarcasm or accusation. Rosalie turns to look at her son, but he does not meet her eye, and his face reveals nothing.
That night, Rosalie adds another blanket to the bed. It is, incredibly, already November. Like every year, the autumn has swept past too quickly and been stripped bare. These unadorned days will soon be gone, too, cloaked by the holidays. Then the year will end and Nayana will fly away.
It would be right, Rosalie thinks, to secure some time alone with the girl while she can. She schedules a Saturday appointment at a salon. They can get manicures and have their hair done, and perhaps Nayana can have her eyebrows and facial hair waxed before Thanksgiving. It must be hard for her, Rosalie thinks, living with dark tufts over her lip and at the sides of her face. She wonders if there are opportunities for basic grooming in Bangladesh, of if girls just have to make the best of their lots.
At the salon, they sit together, their fingertips dipped in cuticle-softening solution.
“Are you close with your mother, at home?” Rosalie ventures.
“Yes, of course,” Nayana says in her forever lilting voice. “She has no one except me and my sisters.”
It is very difficult, Nayana explains, to be a widow in her country. There is virtually no chance of her mother finding another man to marry. Rosalie is impressed by the girl’s unsentimental understanding of this, her poise in speaking about it. “That’s very sad,” she comments.
“It’s different here,” Nayana says, glancing at Rosalie. “People can find another chance. Women can marry again. Orphaned children can go to new families.”
Rosalie nods, enjoying the cool sensation of the solution at her knuckles. She lifts her fingertips from the bowl and admires the softened, pinkened skin. When she looks at Nayana, the girl’s face is somber.
“Noah told me about his father,” she says. “I am very sorry.”
Rosalie holds her fingertips aloft, glistening.
“What about his father?”
The girl stares with her overlarge mongoose eyes. She speaks again in a softened voice. “That he was a victim of the terrible day, in the offices of the World Trade Center.”
Rosalie brings her hands into her lap and wipes the fingertips on her jeans. She feels the usual knife stab at the sound of the words World Trade Center, but it takes a long moment for her to parse the rest of the girl’s sentence. She turns it over in her mind, but it still makes no sense. Michael, thank God, had been nowhere near the towers that day. This is something she has reflected upon innumerable times, and for which she has offered prayers of thanksgiving along with those of healing for the less fortunate.
“He showed me the name, the . . . plaque in the park,” Nayana continues. “He showed me his birth father’s name.”
Rosalie stares at Nayana. “His birth father? What are you talking about?”
Nayana looks back in terror. “He told me how his birth mother died when he was a baby, and how, after 9/11, he was an orphan. You and Dr. Warren were very kind to take him in. Especially with so many children already.”
Rosalie feels the blood hammer in her eardrums. She forces a plastic smile.
“I see. You say that he showed you a name on a plaque? What was the name?”
“Thomas Callahan,” the girl whispers.
The blood has entered Rosalie’s face now and fills the vessels behind her eyeballs. She nods and blinks slowly, spinning for a moment the way she had that cyclonic morning, grasping for new bearings. She remembers the name Thomas Callahan. He’d been a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, she believes, one of the five local men incinerated that day. She knows the plaque, of course, though she hasn’t looked at it for a long time. It’s become part of the scenery, embedded in the boxwood shrubs, as invisible as the flagpole beside it. With the passing years, the names in the granite have lost their raw wrongness and assumed a permanent, fated quality.
Rosalie and Nayana are quiet while the manicurist girls dab their fingers dry and paint their nails with cool brushstrokes. As they are ri
sing to leave, Rosalie looks at Nayana and sees that the girl has been transformed. Her eyebrows are thin and arched. Cleared of its brush, her face is arrestingly intelligent. A new pair of earrings catches the light at either side of her head, and there is an iridescent blue sheen to her hair, inimitable by any Caucasian. Her body is lithe and graceful as she stands and puts her purse over her shoulder.
“Thank you,” she says to Rosalie with a slight bow of the head.
Noah does not look up when his mother enters the room. He is seated on the braided rug in his underwear, examining some jarred specimen. There is a greasy cowlick at his hairline, exposing a set of blackheads. His mouth twitches as he peers into the jar.
“Noah, can I ask you a question? Nayana told me something strange today.”
“She’s lying,” Noah says simply, after Rosalie has finished.
“Why would she lie?”
“How should I know? I don’t know what makes her do things.” His eyes rise but stop short of his mother’s face, somewhere near the clavicle. “I don’t even know why she’s here, to be honest.”
Rosalie blinks. “I thought you liked having her here.”
Noah scoffs quietly, in a way that makes her think of his father, then lowers his eyes again. “All I mean is that it’s not like it’s helping her, living here.”
Rosalie feels the floor spin beneath her feet. She has a momentary flash of the school board meeting, feels that whirlpool wanting to tug her under. She lifts her chin, breathes in.
“Why did you lie?” she asks firmly.
“I told you, she’s making it up. Why would you believe her and not me?”
Rosalie does not answer. All at once, she wishes that Nayana had never come. She wishes she had never volunteered her home to any stranger.
“What difference does it make, anyway?” Noah says. “It might as well be true.”
“What might as well be true?”
“You know, about my birth father.” Noah’s voice lowers, trembles. “He’s never here anyway. It might as well have been him.”
“Pardon me?”
Noah is silent, holding the jar to his eye.
“What did you say?”
Noah shrugs, and his mouth squeezes to the size of a button.
Rosalie stands dumbly in the doorway for another second, a wax mold of a mother. Then, as if enough applied heat has melted her joints, she moves swiftly. In one fluent gesture, she takes the jar from her son’s hand and catapults it to the wall. She is surprised by the momentum. The thick glass cracks cleanly on impact and shatters upon the hardwood floor, radiating shards onto the rug where Noah sits. His hand is still aloft, cupping air, and he raises his eyes to his mother in pale alarm.
The floor whirls as she turns and goes back through the door, closes it behind her and makes the latch snap shut.
When Michael comes home from the hospital, Rosalie sits mutely beside him as he watches the news. He leans back into the couch cushions and assumes a pose of relaxation, of a neurosurgeon having met the demands of his day. She will never know what his eyes witness within hospital walls, what scans of clotted lobes they examine, what eddies of blighted tissue. She does not presume to fathom any of it, has learned not to ask. Tonight, he has disrobed to a black T-shirt. Sitting beside him, the spinning feeling, which had subsided during dinner, returns. There is something disruptive about his presence, as if he were a dark magnet with alternating charges, first attracting, then repelling.
Michael turns his head and looks at her. She wants to speak, to force the moment into normalcy, but her larynx is constricted. She should, she knows, tell him about their son’s transgression, but there is something in the way he looks at her, something blunt in his eyes that muffles her. She scrambles to rationalize this. There are, of course, many things that she does not talk with Michael about, things too complicated to discuss in the short time they have together, things not worth unloading, not worth confusing or burdening him with. All she wants to do now is stand up. She just wants to stand from the couch and go somewhere else, into some other room. But she is strangely unable to move.
Sinking into the cushion, captive, she thinks of Thomas Callahan. She hadn’t known him when he was alive, but had seen his photograph and obituary in the newspaper. A kind, competent face. A father of three: a boy and two girls. His face comes to her now, in the colors of life, and she pictures him here on the cushion beside her, an unborn moment. She thinks of the phone call he might have made from his desk in the last clear seconds before the world caved. For a moment she wishes she’d been the one he’d called, the wife who’d heard his warm breath in the mouthpiece. She feels the collapse as if it were happening inside her. She feels a plunging grief for his children. A plunging grief for Noah.
The television news purrs on, and she remains in place beside her husband, pinned in his shadow. The collapse is still happening, always happening. She feels herself shrinking, becoming infinitesimal, a cone of dust. The children are in bed in their rooms, their little hive cells, asleep or awake. Rosalie sits far apart from everything, disintegrating.
She opens her eyes and looks at the television, a car commercial. An American couple achieves the top of a mountain, commanding a vista. She breathes in and breathes out. It is all right to retreat. She will pull back, she will redraw her boundaries. She will find her balance. When she emerges again, she will be refreshed, reenergized. She will be the best Rosalie she can be. The best and only.
AFTERGLOW
HAROLD’S WIFE is up on a stepladder, doing something to the drapes. A pattern of leaves and vines, framing a point-blank view of the sound.
“How strange,” she says, “I’m having such a sense of déjà vu right now.”
“To do with the drapes?”
“Yes, to do with the drapes. And also you saying that. And this right now, too . . .” She turns from her perch on the stepladder and looks with wide eyes at Harold. “Now it’s gone. But it felt so real, like I knew what was going to happen next.”
Harold nods.
“It’s been happening a lot lately.” Carol steps down from the ladder, turning her head from side to side. “And you know what I keep thinking of? You know what keeps popping into my head? That time when we were in Spain, when we had our first paella together, at that restaurant with the flamenco dancer. Remember? The very dark restaurant that felt like a cave. All the candlelight. The flamenco dancer had a yellow dress, and you were wearing a red shirt.”
“Seville.”
“Right, Seville. It’s funny. I don’t have many vivid memories from that long ago, but that one just popped back. It feels like it happened yesterday.”
“It’s a nice memory”—Harold’s stomach clenches—“I wish I could remember it.”
“It keeps coming back now.” His wife shakes her head again, as if shaking the memory away.
Thinking of Spain, Harold can resurrect only one moment: sitting on a hill in La Mancha, looking over the arid landscape. There had been a bare tinge of evening’s approach, a retreating glow on the scrublands, an advancing mineral tint. They’d looked out at the distant town of Cuenca, its ancient stone houses jutting over a cliff, and he’d absorbed that picture into his brain, imprinted it there. He had deliberately frozen that moment when he turned to the woman at his side, soon to be his wife, and told her that he was happy.
Now Carol disappears into another room of the house. The tap of her clogs on hardwood floor punctuates the quiet. His brain continues to hold aloft the image of the Spanish vista. Then it quavers in his mind’s eye and goes dim.
From outside comes the bleat of a bird. An ugly tune. His wife’s clomping, too, has become irritating. Harold goes into his office, closes the door, and turns on his jungle sounds—a gift from one or another of his children. He sits on the easy chair and lets the jungle wash over him. With the shades drawn, the bright Sunday a
fternoon progresses unseen. The weekends are beginning to make him feel old. He is aware of vague aches in his body. His jog was hard this morning, and his cholesterol count is a problem, a maddening genetic hand-me-down. There are cocky young bastards in his office with designs on his leadership. Fifty-nine, he reminds them, is the prime of a man’s life.
But one day, he knows, the board will elect to force him out. They’ll retire him, impose a blank second act for his life. At that juncture, perhaps, he might like to enroll in medical school. People begin new careers all the time. His business experience would be helpful, he thinks, in making difficult judgments, dealing with difficult patients.
He sits at the computer and looks again at the admissions page for Harvard Medical School. They require a college transcript, test scores, letters of recommendation, an essay. He chuckles at the thought of the essay, his explanation of this sudden shift in his life, a man who could buy the whole medical school if he wanted.
He thinks about that. He thinks about buying a medical school, enrolling himself in it, paying the doctors to teach him.
The sound of raindrops and monkey calls deepens his reverie. Curiosity, he read somewhere, is part of the recipe for happiness. Perhaps following its pull is the only way to upend the mind’s more tedious, workaday functions. Perhaps happiness is nothing more than that—the cessation of logistics, a broad clearing of the decks.
He feels that his own potential for curiosity is still there, but atrophying more each year. Math and science had come so easily to him when he was younger. He’d always assumed that his life would follow that path—a brightly studded path of organs and numbers and knives. Instead, he found economics. It’s true that his inquisitiveness has served him well in his chosen field. He’s absorbed the tenets of finance, learned to handle the instruments of business the way a surgeon handles his scalpels, with a sure grip and steady purpose. He’s made leveraged buyouts, one by one, with clinical precision, taking his targets by surprise. In the best cases, it feels like hunting. Stalking a company, studying its inner workings down to the behavior of individual executives. He predicts the moment of weakness, then waits for it, sometimes for years. It is obsessive, he knows, but he always takes his quarry. It has kept him limber for decades.
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