Remember Mia

by Alexandra Burt

  “You’re not serious, are you, Dad? You’re kidding, right?”

  “Estelle, I’m very serious. Do you know who Adolf Hitler was?”

  “Of course I know. The dictator of Nazi Germany. I hope this isn’t a history lesson.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s your birthday after all,” he says and chuckles.

  “What does Hitler have to do with this secret?”

  He lowers his voice, bends down, and whispers in my ear: “What if I told you that he sent spies to sabotage the secret.”

  “And did they?”

  “No. The FBI arrested them.”

  “The FBI is involved?” This is so much better than anything else I could have imagined.

  We reach the Main Concourse and Dad grabs my hand. I look at him and then follow the direction of his eyes upward. We are standing under some sort of astronomical mural. The background is blue, the constellations golden. It covers the ceiling of the entire Main Concourse. I’m getting dizzy looking up. I lower my head and hold on to his hand.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “That, my love, is a design by a French painter. How many stars do you think are there?”

  I’m feeling queasy. I decide not to look back up and I just guess what I conceive to be a fairly accurate number. “Five hundred.”

  “Two thousand five hundred stars. It’s supposed to be the Mediterranean sky. The larger stars are the constellations.”

  “What’s so special about it and why did the spies try to sabotage it?”

  “Oh no, this isn’t the secret the spies tried to sabotage. We’ll get to that later. I just wanted to show you this because the painter made a mistake without knowing.”

  “A mistake?” I scan the mural.

  “Yes, he used an old antique manuscript. Took them a long time to figure out the reason why he made the mistake. See, they ended up being backward. Back then the cartographers displayed the zodiacs as they appeared from the outside looking in.”

  “Do you have that manuscript at home?”

  He laughs and says, “That would be like having the Mona Lisa hanging in our living room. But I have a replica. I’ll show it to you when we get home. Let’s go.”

  He tightens his grip around my hand as we walk to the back of the terminal. We reach an old service elevator. He pushes a button and the door opens immediately as if it had been waiting for us. We get in and the elevator descends, screeching and shaking. I love the moment right before the elevator stops and my body feels weightless, as if the entire world pauses for a second.

  When we get out, we are in a utilitarian part of the building. The room is huge, its ceiling higher than I expected a ceiling to be underground. One side of the room is covered with boxy metal containers with controls and the other holds old machines that look like colossal clock gears. The floor grates are large and vibrate through my shoes. I feel hot air blowing through the grates, and I hear giant fans underneath me.

  “Here we are!” My dad is elated. I feel like I’m letting him down, as if I’m supposed to know the significance of this room. “M42,” he adds.

  “Right.” I don’t know what else to say.

  “This is a very important part of the terminal. Only a chosen few know about this secret basement. You’re standing in M42, the secret sublevel. How about that?”

  I look around and I have to admit that the large gears protruding from the ground are very mysterious but I’m still disappointed. “Is this what the spies tried to sabotage?”

  He lowers his voice as if he’s trying to keep his answer a secret. “If the spies had disabled the converters, they would have shut down the entire terminal during the Second World War. It was so guarded that anybody down here without permission would’ve ended up in jail. Or shot.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  I don’t know what to say, and shrug.

  “It means that you’re standing in a spot that isn’t on any map, any blueprint. Every building ever built has a blueprint, every building has to be designed on paper before the builders put brick on top of brick. Walls hold up the roof, floors hold up the walls, that sort of thing, and architects calculate and plan every inch of a building. You’re in a room only a few people know about, yet millions pass over it every day. Pretty fascinating, isn’t it?”

  I ponder it for a while and I’m starting to understand his enthusiasm. “I guess I shouldn’t tell anyone about this, right?” I say and add a conspiring wink.

  His brow furrows, but only for a moment. Then he smiles at me. “It’s our secret. One day, maybe ten or fifteen years from now, there’ll be guided tours, TV specials. And then everyone will know about this place.” He checks his watch. “But for now, it’s our secret. What do you think?”

  “It’s pretty cool, actually. That we’re here when it’s still special.”

  “I think so, too. I knew you’d love this place,” he says and hand in hand we walk back to the elevator that takes us back upstairs to the main terminal buzzing with people, insectlike, fulfilling their destinies and a complexity of tasks, demonstrating what a wonder the world really is.

  —

  That night, as I lie awake and stare at the ceiling in my room, I try to understand what has happened, not the details or minute particulars of my daughter’s whereabouts, but my possible part in the direction my life has taken.

  I close my eyes and travel back to my childhood, I feel the chenille bedspread under my fingers and hear the old oak tree scratch the windowpane. The only filter people have is their childhood and as my parents’ ghostly apparitions materialize, I concede my parents were physically there for me; they fed me, clothed me, and provided for me.

  And then it hits me. My father never pulled me off a ledge, never ran into the street after me to save me from an approaching car. I don’t remember receiving any physical affection from my mother but I assume that she sat with me when I was sick as a child, and I’m almost sure she sewed my Halloween costumes.

  But once I look for more than the average proof of affection, I come up empty. It all comes down to this: I don’t know how to judge my parents’ love for me. Life never prompted them to take extraordinary measures, never urged them to declare the depth of their love beyond genetic affection. They cared for me. Beyond that, it was run-of-the-mill obligation. And again, my satchel holds no jewels. Just rocks.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Tell me about Jack,” Dr. Ari says.

  We have finally arrived at the chapter named Jack, the man I was to marry only a year after we met. Speaking of him starts to unsettle the ground.

  It seemed I went from my parents’ house in Bedford to Nell’s house in Jersey, and then off to cheap apartments in basements. Last stop before North Dandry was Jack’s apartment on William Street.

  “Jack used to call me his princess, he was old-fashioned in many ways: flowers, gifts, opening doors, that kind of thing.”

  I remember Jack’s apartment, perched on the thirty-sixth floor of the Gotham Tower Condominium Building, with its unsettling echo between the walls.

  “This is a big place,” I had said and tried, unsuccessfully, to keep my heels from clattering on the slate floor.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Jack took off his coat and sat his briefcase on the enameled lava countertop. The gesture was an indication of things to come; when I think of Jack now, I see him either putting on a coat or taking it off, coming or going, but never really being there.

  “What’s the price of admission?” I asked lightheartedly, eyeing the tin ceiling promising to last a lifetime.

  Jack stood by the window, enthralled by the stunning view of the city. “Your soul,” he said jokingly, his shadow disturbing the perfect sheen of the hardwood floors.

  Dr. Ari watches me fold my arms in front of my c
hest.

  “Jack lied about money from the beginning. I believe he mostly lived off his mother’s inheritance or some sort of insurance, he never said. He had flipped some houses during law school, mostly successfully, but there was no way he could’ve afforded the place he lived in with his salary alone. And after we got married, we had money problems almost immediately and Jack eventually took a job in Chicago. It was a temporary job but it paid well and it would allow us to get out of debt soon or so he said.”

  Dr. Ari takes off his glasses and polishes the lenses with a cloth he keeps in his desk drawer. Is he ready to look closer or is he just tired of smudges infesting his world? He taps his pen on the folder in front of him, then opens it, shuffles papers around. He wants to make sure he gets it right.

  “Mia was six months old and it must’ve been a difficult decision for your husband to leave you behind in New York, considering the state you were in.”

  “Women raise children alone every day.” My mother was a saint, Jack had told me. She never raised her voice at me. Raised me by herself.

  “Tell me how you were feeling.” Dr. Ari reels me back in, not willing to let go of what’s on the other end of this rope.

  I look around his office, trying to focus on anything that will allow my heartbeat to slow. The pounding in my temples is painful, as if there is something trapped inside of me trying to escape.

  I tell him how I was tired, overwhelmed, covered in spit-up. How going out just meant having to put on clothes and fake a smile for the world around me. How my bad days started with watching Jack leave in a dry-cleaned suit and a starchy shirt, smelling of shoe polish and coffee, and how I descended into darkness the moment the door closed behind him. Then Jack came home and I was still alone and I descended even deeper. How I couldn’t keep up with Mia’s demands, how Jack told me, in so many words, to snap out of it. And how all those months of Jack telling me to get it together had finally paid off and by the time he went to Chicago I had managed to turn myself inside out, like a dirty sock, into a better, more cheerful version of myself.

  “Did you ever see a doctor?” Dr. Ari’s eyes are observant and concerned.

  When I tell him a doctor prescribed antidepressants, he asked if I ever saw a professional, a counselor or psychiatrist, and if I ever attempted therapy.

  “Imagining the sound of my own voice made me sick just thinking about it.”

  I hold myself perfectly still and lower my eyes. I focus on the manila folder in front of Dr. Ari. His hands are folded, resting on top, his manicured nails shiny and perfectly shaped. I wonder what the file holds. Police reports, medical files, photographs, newspaper articles.

  “I don’t want you to think that it was all doom and gloom. The fact that I created a miracle wasn’t lost on me, not for a second. I loved Mia so much I thought my heart was going to explode out of my body. But when she started crying all the time, I believed she wasn’t well. And then the days became endless.” The last words prompt me to shake my head.

  Dr. Ari’s eyes have the generic expression reserved for the borderline insane. “Did you feel like a bad mother when you couldn’t stop her from crying?”

  A rush of heat overtakes me. “I did what the doctors told me to do but nothing worked. It’s not that I chose to be incapable, I just thought that . . . I wasn’t enough. I felt watched, observed, under a microscope. Watch the crazy woman who can’t take care of her baby. Wherever I went people gave me advice—do this, do that, don’t rock her so hard, rock her more, let her cry it out, hold her—everybody and everywhere, nurses, women at grocery stores, at the park.”

  Dr. Ari pushes my journal toward me. He pulls a deep breath in and then lets it go, releasing his frustration. It fills the room with heaviness.

  “You didn’t write in your journal yesterday. Why not?”

  His irritation engulfs me like a heavy cloud. I haven’t delivered the goods; I haven’t kept up my end of the bargain. Lately I think so hard my head hurts, every day, during our sessions, every night when I write in my journal, every waking moment, I think. Even my dreams are constant inquiries, intrusively probing for the truth. There’s a wall, and regardless of how hard I try to will myself to see what’s on the other side, it never manifests itself. Instead, I get headaches—pounding, dull headaches—right behind my eyes.

  “Tell me what you didn’t write down.”

  I raise my voice. “It was nothing, really. A large tree obstructing the view of a building. In my dream the wind moves the branches, makes them sway, but I can barely see past them. The windows are looking at me like eyes, I’m close, so close, but then it all disappears and I’m back where I started.”

  “In a dream a tree is never just a tree.” Dr. Ari tries to coax me back to the path of recollection, littered with pebbles supposed to trigger my memory, so I may continue with the story he longs to hear. He retrieves my journal and studies the last entry.

  Dr. Ari explained to me that I needed to verbally state my desire to recall my dreams as I am falling asleep. I’ve been using a special digital alarm clock that wakes me every ninety minutes starting at three o’clock in the morning, during or immediately after the REM periods of sleep. Last night something changed. The tree in front of the house has been a recurring image for some time but now I was inside for the first time. It was small, only a square room, really. There was a river running by the side of it, moving recklessly, its currents were powerful, almost raging. I was aware of the danger, I could almost feel the pressure the raging waters put on the walls around me. They were straining, screeching, and moaning. I could see water trickling through the cracks in the wall and I knew it was just a matter of time before the door would give way to the power of the flood. It was just a matter of time before the waters would gush forth and the river would pick me up and carry me away. In my dream I was searching for a way out of the house, and when the alarm woke me, I was still searching.

  As I nibble on my frayed nails, I remember how it felt, searching frantically, heart pounding, breathing rapid and shallow. Sometimes you remember one thing, and that one thing makes you remember something else, and before you know it, you remember everything.

  “What I neglected to write down was that last night I remembered searching for Mia.”

  Dr. Ari opens the manila folder and flips through the pages. He pulls out the North Dandry blueprint stapled to the property deed. A blueprint of a house, a map of its rooms, hallways, and doors. He unfolds it, and disappears behind it as if he is casually reading the Sunday morning paper. He realizes the words are upside down and he flips it over and continues to study. The waxen paper is strong; its creases resist any fold but the original one.

  For a moment I’m mesmerized by the sound of the waxed paper. I wonder if words and pictures imprinted on it alter its vibration. The sound of candy wrappers holds the promise of sweetness, wrapping paper evokes Christmas mornings and birthday wishes fulfilled.

  There were other maps once, my father’s maps, old and frequently handled. Touching them sounded like the passing of distance itself, parchment and vellum, lightweight and translucent. Made from sheepskin, its animal source outdated compared to the waxed paper floor plan Dr. Ari is holding in his hands. I can almost hear the blueprint of North Dandry starting to vibrate.

  Finally Dr. Ari emerges from his paper fortification. He puts the blueprint on his desk. The floor plan is littered with interior walls and hallways, their orientation downward from above. Dr. Ari is looking at God’s view of a human attempt to create shelter from his wrath.

  “Tell me about searching for her.”

  What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t look for my child?

  —

  I tried to force myself to think logically. I had read articles about parents who had left infants in the backseats of cars, in strollers, and even at day cares, forgotten like an umbrella on the subway or a shopping bag at a re
staurant.

  I stood on the sidewalk and looked left, then right. There was an abandoned red velvet couch on the curb, a cardboard sign—TAKE ME—propped up in the corner.

  I shielded my eyes with both hands to see through the tinted windows of my car. Nothing but an empty car seat stared back at me. I hit the unlock button on the keyless remote and the trunk popped open: Mia’s old rear-facing baby seat and an empty suitcase. I had switched prematurely to a front-facing seat because Mia seemed calmer when she was able to see me. The suitcase in the trunk was dented; the locking mechanism no longer worked. It was the same suitcase I had taken to Jersey so many years ago.

  I closed the trunk with a hefty thump. The street noises were familiar, it was Sunday and from the church across the street, Saint Joseph’s, organ pipes sustained the tones of an unfamiliar hymn. About a hundred yards farther down the street was the subway entrance. A homeless woman sat by the iron fence leading downstairs. A small dog cowered on a piece of cardboard next to her, a greasy bandanna wrapped around its neck. When I approached, the dog lifted its head. The woman wore at least three or four layers of clothes. Her eyes were closed but her posture was tense.

  “Excuse me,” I said and watched one of her eyes open. The dog, a scruffy-looking mutt, growled and got up. The woman put her dirty hand on the dog’s back. He lowered himself on the ground but kept an eye on me.

  “What d’ya want?” she demanded. The top layer of her clothes was a large black garbage bag with a hole for her head and two for her arms. Next to her sat two plastic bags bursting with everything she called her own.

  “Have you been sitting here long?” I asked.

  She sat in silence.

  “Have you seen someone leave my building with a . . .” I hesitated. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. I stepped closer and the dog let out a low growl. “A baby,” I added and realized immediately how insane I sounded.