The Dismantling

by Brian Deleeuw

  She pulled her knees to her chest. “Do people, other donors—do they ever wish they hadn’t done it? Do they ever think it wasn’t worth the money?”

  He realized he’d been unconsciously preparing himself for some version of this question ever since he’d found her at Abraham. The answer he came up with now was truthful, if also narrow. “None of them have ever told me that,” he said. “Not that I’d necessarily be the first person they’d want to talk about it with.”

  “How would you feel if they did?”

  “I think I’m honest with people about what the surgery’s going to be like, about what kind of recovery they should expect. We pay them exactly what we say we will. If they regret it afterward, I can’t think of anything we could do differently to prevent them from feeling that way.” He realized he was parroting language he’d heard first from DaSilva, and it gave him the discomfiting sense of being manipulated from a distance, even if what he was saying was true. He shrugged. “But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t feel badly about it. I’m not trying to take advantage of anybody.”

  “But not badly enough to stop.” She peered at him over the top of her knees. Her expression was neutral, as though she really was curious and not simply trying to challenge him.

  “This isn’t my life’s work, Maria. Don’t make me defend it too much.” He paused. “And if you think you might regret having done it, you should just tell me.”

  “I don’t regret it. I just wanted to know.”

  “You don’t? Not even a little? After everything that’s happened?”

  She closed her eyes. “You don’t understand what my life was like before this.”

  “No. I’ve tried to imagine it, and I’ve failed.”

  “You’ve imagined things?”

  “I’ve tried.”

  “But you want to picture it.” She seemed equal parts intrigued and wary.

  “When I was a teenager, I always tried to imagine what it would be like to be my sister,” Simon said. “And even though I spent every single day living in the same house and going to the same school, I had no idea what it would feel like to live her life from the inside. Eventually I had to accept that you can never truly understand another person’s experience, never truly know them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t keep trying.”

  “And now you want to imagine your way inside me?”

  He hesitated. “I want to try to understand how you lived before you came here.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Your sister who died?”

  He felt his stomach drop, as though he were hearing about Amelia’s death for the first time. “How did you know that?”

  “I looked you up online. This was before I came to New York. There’s not much there, but it was easy to find the articles about her drowning.”

  Of course. Simon remembered the newspaper coverage, small items in Newsday and the Post, a larger piece in the Wave, the local Rockaway paper. Two Hasidic kids from Mott Avenue had spotted Amelia’s body hooked around the rotted pilings near the groyne at Beach 60th, in front of the abandoned Edgemere lots, as the tide went out early on the morning after Simon lost her. Accompanying the Wave’s reporting of their grisly discovery was a small color headshot of Amelia, inset into a larger black-and-white photograph of the desolate stretch of beach where her body had been found. Project towers crowded the waterline to the east, where the land curved out into the ocean; in the foreground snaggletoothed wooden pylons, remnants of an old jetty, jutted out of the water next to the more recently built stone groyne. The photo of Amelia had been taken from the St. Edmund’s yearbook. Simon remembered her staring straight into the camera, her streaky blond hair piled on top of her head in a careless knot, the collar of her dress shirt askew. Her lips were mashed together as though she were holding back a laugh. Simon imagined her in the little room off the chapel where they did the yearbook shoots, trying to look bored or serious or sophisticated—anything but a goofy teenager—and yet unable to resist whatever cheesy line the photographer had deployed to get her to smile. When the photograph was taken, the spring before the accident, Amelia had been a goofy teenager; by the time she died, less than a year later, she had become something else, more ingrown and complex, more angry, halfway to being an adult.

  “That’s how you knew I grew up here,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Maria frowned. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “It’s all right. Sometimes I forget it’s a public fact, you know? That she died.” He paused. “It used to frustrate me, how bad I was at thinking my way into anyone else’s life. It made me feel like the worst kind of narcissist. But after I started working for DaSilva, I became better at it. It’s part of the job: people tell me about themselves, tell me things that sometimes only their families or closest friends might know. I don’t have to ask. I don’t even necessarily want to know. Anyway, I think I’m pretty good now at building an idea of somebody’s life from a few scraps of fact. But you . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t figure you out at all.” He smiled. “Although I guess that’s at least partially because you keep lying to me.”

  But Maria didn’t smile. “Why do you care?”

  He looked at her helplessly, then looked away. “I care about you.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I mean it.”

  His words hung in the air, dissipating like mist.

  “I’ve done things no person should ever have to do,” she said.

  This stopped him short for a moment, but he recovered and forged on: “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It might not to you.” Her voice was sharp.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to push you.”

  She sighed. “Let’s stop talking for tonight, okay? Just sit here with me for a while.”

  He leaned back into the couch and watched her out of the corner of his eye. She stared at the television, a flush high on her cheeks. She changed the channel to a nature program about creatures that live on the floors of deep ocean canyons, in total darkness, pale limpid things clustered around vents that released boiling steam. The lights of the deep-sea probe shone, like X-rays, straight through the creatures—tiny tubular shrimp, pygmy crabs, waxen slugs. Fifteen minutes into the program, Maria’s eyes drifted shut. Her head listed forward then snapped upright. She looked around, startled. Her eyes found Simon, and it was a second or two until the muscles of her face relaxed. She told him that she needed to sleep now, and so Simon left, promising to come back to see her again soon.

  • • •

  He rode the F train to Roosevelt Island, got out, and walked down Main Street. He stopped at the island’s single bar, empty except for a drunken old man nursing a whiskey, and drank a pint of ale while watching cable news on mute. The outgoing president hunched behind a podium, looking weary and peevish, more than a little happy to be getting out of the house before the roof collapsed on his head. Simon could see that falling asleep in front of him—exposing herself like that—had made Maria uncomfortable, nearly angry. I’ve done things no person should ever have to do. The statement was melodramatic, but her delivery had been matter-of-fact, dispassionate: he believed her. But what was it that she’d done? The drunk at the other end of the bar grumbled something at the bartender, who changed the channel to a sports network, some kind of NFL analysis show. Simon sipped his beer and watched two wide-shouldered guys gesticulate in a studio that looked like an imitation of the command center of the starship Enterprise, done from memory. The program was difficult to follow without the sound, and Simon had mostly stopped paying attention when the screen suddenly cut to Howard Crewes sitting in his leather and bronze study.

  Simon stared at the television, his brain lagging a few seconds behind his eyes. The initial shot cut to a split-screen of Crewes and one of the program’s in-studio hosts. They framed Crewes from the shoulders up. He l
ooked startled, his eyes fixed wide-open, as though someone had told him to make sure he didn’t blink too much.

  Simon waved at the bartender. “Can I get a little sound?”

  “Different game then,” Crewes was saying. “Different rules. Different attitude.”

  “You weren’t flagged for what happened on that play,” the host said.

  “No. That’s how we were taught. That’s how we played.”

  The screen cut to a still shot of Alvin Plummer prone on the turf. Crouching medical staff obscured most of his body, his legs protruding with unnatural rigidity. Simon thought of the disappeared video, of the potent unscriptedness of watching the injury live.

  The knit-browed host asked, “Do you think enough steps have been taken to prevent another Alvin Plummer?”

  “I don’t know if you can ever eliminate the chance of something like that happening. The speed on the field . . . Things move too fast.” Crewes glanced away from the camera. “But I hope a player today, in that situation, maybe he uses his shoulder, or he goes low instead of high. Maybe he thinks about a fine, or a suspension, and then he takes a little off the hit.”

  “You never had a chance to reconcile with Alvin Plummer before he passed away earlier this year.”

  Crewes frowned and seemed about to say something, then changed his mind. “I never spoke to Alvin, no.”

  “What—”

  “I tried,” Crewes interrupted. “I tried, but his family, they didn’t want that to take place.”

  “Well, and what, uh, what would you tell Alvin now, if you could?”

  Crewes stared at the camera for a few uncomfortable seconds, his lips pursed. Finally he said, “I’d tell him I didn’t mean for that to happen to him. I’d tell him I was just playing the game the way I always played it. It was nothing personal.”

  “And that’s something I think he’d absolutely appreciate hearing,” the host said, idiotically. “Howard Crewes, four time Pro Bowler, 1990 Defensive Player of the Year. Thank you very much for your time, Howard.”

  “All right,” Crewes said.

  The camera cut back to the studio. “Fifteen years ago this Sunday,” the host said, “Alvin Plummer became the last player to be paralyzed during an NFL game. Has a new focus on helmet-to-helmet contact lessened the chances of such a catastrophic injury happening on the field again? Or are these new measures just . . .”

  Simon stopped listening. Crewes had looked awkward on camera, caught halfway between contrition and defiance. Apologizing for something that could have happened to any other player made him angry, and it didn’t bring Plummer back either. But Simon could tell he still craved some form of absolution. Maybe Lenny was right. Maybe Crewes had wanted Lenny to live for his own sake as much as for Lenny’s. Simon drained the last of his pint and left cash on the bar. It didn’t matter now. The surgery was over, and Lenny was alive, and the why of it was irrelevant.

  • • •

  THE next afternoon, Maria called him and said she’d decided to rent a safe-deposit box in which to store her cash. She chose a bank in Downtown Brooklyn, near the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, and Simon went with her to transport the money, hanging out in the bank’s lobby while a clerk led her belowground to the deposit boxes.

  Simon didn’t mention that he’d met with DaSilva at the Health Solutions office that morning to deliver his update. He’d told Peter about Maria’s plans to one day open a restaurant—Peter had simply rolled his eyes—and also that she’d admitted to severing all ties to her life in Los Angeles but still without telling him why.

  DaSilva had frowned. “Are people back there looking for her?”

  “I guess her friends are.”

  “Family?”

  “I’m not sure she has one.”

  “How about the police?”

  “I don’t think so. At least, she didn’t say anything about that.” The police? He didn’t want to admit to DaSilva that the possibility hadn’t even occurred to him.

  “Well, she probably wouldn’t either way, right?” DaSilva paused, the heavy-lidded eyes seeking council inward. “Okay,” he said finally. “If she wants to stay hidden, let’s help her stay hidden. Keep checking in on her until we’re absolutely sure she’s not going to get sick or disappear again. At least a few more weeks. Does she trust you?”

  Simon hesitated. “I think she’s starting to.” He felt as though he was somehow betraying her by admitting this, as though simply answering DaSilva’s question had converted his honest—if not yet fully understood—impulse to protect and help Maria into a plan, just another canny tactic.

  “That’s good. Keep it up, and maybe we’ll find out what the hell she wanted to leave behind so badly.”

  “What about Abraham?” Simon asked.

  “They haven’t called Cabrera again. Somebody’s eventually going to chase her down for that bill, whether it’s insurance or the hospital. I’m sure the people at Abraham think her story reeks of bullshit, but why would they want to get too involved?” He shook his head. “Still, I hate that she’s in their records now. It’s just another fucking thing for us to worry about, right?”

  • • •

  Simon and Maria left the bank together and made plans to meet the following morning. She told him she wanted to sit in a restaurant and eat a long, lazy brunch. She was feeling stronger, and she wanted to be out in the world again, among people living their regular everyday lives. In just a few days, the range of her walks around the neighborhood had grown from two blocks to five to ten; she’d lowered her Percocet dosage and her appetite had begun to return. And so on Saturday morning, Simon took her to Park Slope, which he considered the cradle of a certain kind of benign normalcy, the neighborhood equivalent of upscale comfort food. He met her outside the Seventh Avenue subway station. She got out of a taxi, wearing her leather jacket and a pair of tight black jeans he hadn’t seen before; apparently she was finally feeling well enough to start spending a little bit of her money. They walked slowly toward Prospect Park. It was the first of November. The sky was bright and pale and clear, with the high, thin light of a sunny day in late fall, the air crisp and chilly. The streets were crawling with people. A man in a caramel corduroy jacket and newsboy cap walked by, holding a coffee cup in one hand and the leash for a chocolate Labrador in the other. They passed stoops peopled by parents and children sharing breakfast sandwiches and glass-bottled sodas. Maria’s eyes flicked from person to person, as though she were filing away for later use details of their dress and bearing, their attitudes, their modes of being—an anthropologist jotting field notes, an actor getting into character.

  They turned onto Eighth Avenue and picked a café done up in the requisite French brasserie style: lacquered wicker chairs, black-and-white tiled floors, splotchy wall-sized mirrors, wood paneling, brass banisters. They sat near the front window, sunshine slashing across their table, dust motes dancing wildly in the air between them. On the other side of the window, a pair of French bulldogs were anchored to a wrought-iron bench. Simon and Maria sipped their coffee and read the menu, not speaking, and Simon wondered if he’d somehow erred in bringing her here, if this was not at all the kind of place she’d been talking about. The truth was that they were both outsiders here, pretenders really—a pair of infiltrators, neither of them truly comfortable in this sunlit social world.

  “What are you having?” He looked up: Maria was smiling at him, backlit, haloed. He felt relief at the sight of her smile. “I think I want a spinach and cheddar omelet,” she said. “Or maybe the croque-madame. Or maybe I’ll have both.”

  “Your appetite’s back.”

  “That, and it’s nice I can afford to order all this stuff. I’m used to being the one serving it.”

  They put in their orders and then resumed the conversation about Simon’s family. Maria had asked about his parents on their walk to the restaurant, and he�
��d said only that his mother had died when he was very young and his father was essentially a recluse whose relatives all lived in England. Now he elaborated, telling her that Michael was an only child whose own father was dead and whose mother was now a half-senile, sour old woman sequestered in a Bethnal Green nursing home. He explained Michael’s philosophy, how his father believed that the reverent excavation and preservation of family history—which included any interest in genealogy or family lore—was a narcissistic waste of time, primitive, like burning offal for the ancestor spirits. Michael disparaged what he called the “tribalisms” of excessive national, religious, or ethnic identification, which was why he made a point of being an Englishman who didn’t give a shit about drinking in an Irish bar—Derry Hills—with a “controversial” name. As he talked, Simon was aware that part of him hoped sharing pieces of himself like this would encourage Maria to do the same, but it was also true that he honestly wanted to open up to her. It had been so long since he’d spoken like this with anybody besides his father—Katherine Peel, he supposed, was the last other person with whom he’d shared anything even remotely personal—and he was surprised to find that he felt more engaged than anxious, more curious than insecure.

  “Have you met her?” Maria said. “Your grandmother?”

  “Only once. My father took me and Amelia to London to see her. She’s an awful woman.”

  He told Maria how he and his sister had spent mornings at the home, sitting with their grandmother in the cafeteria. The old woman, a complete stranger to them, sat straight backed in her chair, engulfed by a maroon cardigan, her veiny hands folded primly in her lap, her entire being radiating dissatisfaction. Each party clearly baffled the other. Simon and Amelia understood little of what she said, her accent a thick, muffling blanket wrapped around her words, but they divined that she seemed to find it unutterably disappointing that they went to a Catholic school, that they lived in a largely Irish American neighborhood.

  Amelia frowned. “But our mom was Catholic.” She turned to Michael. “Wasn’t she?”