Love Saves the Day

by Gwen Cooper

  What I should do now is finish my breakfast, like I do every morning. If I do everything the way I usually do, Laura and Josh will have to come back and be happy together the way they usually are. Except I can’t quite manage it right now. My chest is hurting and so is my stomach. The hole in my chest from Sarah’s not being here has moved down to my belly. Now it’s in both places.

  It’s the new smell from the kitchen that finally draws me out from under-the-couch. There’s a bunch of flowers on the counter, arranged in a glass vase. The flowers have little drops of water on them from the rain outside, and the spicy-earth scent of them fills the whole downstairs of our apartment.

  I know what kind of flowers these are. They’re the same kind as Laura is holding in the pictures from when she and Josh got married.

  The smell of the flowers pulls me up. Almost before I’ve made the decision to do it, I’m sitting on the counter next to them. I remember the cat grass Sarah used to keep for me when we lived together. When my stomach felt upset like it does now, the cat grass would help make it feel better.

  Josh must know how upset I am, and that’s why he had the man at the door bring flowers for me to eat. He knows I like to eat the things he leaves on the counter.

  So I put my whole face into the middle of those flowers and breathe in their delicious smell. Then I start to eat. I chew on the leaves and stems and the soft parts of the flowers themselves. I eat and eat and wait for my stomach to stop twisting around so much, and when my stomach doesn’t feel better right away I eat some more …

  … and now there’s nothing except Badness. I feel the Badness all over my whole body. My stomach heaves and spins trying to get the Badness out of me, but it doesn’t work. I throw up and catch my breath and throw up again, and still I can’t get the Badness out. I’m thirsty and try to drink from my water bowl, but the Badness rises up and throws the water out of my mouth as soon as I take it in. It’s making everything look funny. Small things look too big and things that are far away look too close and my legs won’t work right and my mouth won’t stop making water. I bump into things because I can’t see them right and they’re playing tricks on me, sneaking closer when I’m not looking, on purpose to make me trip over my own feet. All these things are happening, but none of them is making the Badness go away.

  I try to meow for help, so that somebody can hear me, like that day when Sarah and I first found each other. But when I open my mouth I throw up again and it just makes me feel dizzier. I try to walk to a cooler part of the room, maybe under-the-couch or down the hall away from the big windows, but my legs aren’t working right. I fall over once and then twice, and then I realize I’m not getting closer to where I’m trying to go because I’m walking in circles.

  When I lived with Sarah and my belly felt upset, she would stroke my forehead and say, Shhh, little girl. Don’t worry. Everything’s okay. Everything’s going to be just fine …

  But everything’s not going to be just fine, because now Darkness comes to work with the Badness. It’s like a black sack has been thrown over my head. Except after a few moments, I notice that my body feels lighter, like I don’t weigh anything. The closer the Darkness comes, the farther away the Badness feels.

  And then, it’s the strangest thing. Sarah is here! I can’t see or hear or smell her, but I can feel her in the room, like the silent hum when a TV is turned on even if there isn’t any sound or picture. Sarah! I think. But now the Darkness is going away again, and I know somehow that if it goes, Sarah will go, too. I struggle to keep my eyes closed, to stay inside the Darkness where Sarah and I can find each other.

  Sarah! I think. Don’t leave me, Sarah! I knew you’d come back for me! I knew you’d find me again! I knew you’d

  And then everything is Darkness and Silence.

  13

  Sarah

  LAURA TURNED FOURTEEN IN THE FALL OF 1994 AND BEGAN ATTENDING Stuyvesant High School down in Battery Park City. For the first time, she started taking the bus and subway on her own every day. Once, this would have terrified me. But Mayor Giuliani had taken office by then, and he’d started cracking down on things like graffiti and street crime and the homeless guys who’d come right up to your car window with a squeegee while you were stopped at intersections. He got rid of the corrupt cops who for so many years had taken bribes and allowed the street-corner drug dealers to go about their business. There was no question that New York City in general and the Lower East Side specifically were growing cleaner and safer by the day.

  There were mixed feelings about all this on the LES. Nobody liked crime, of course, and it was a relief to feel that our streets were less dangerous. On the other hand, we were rather proud of our graffiti. People like Cortes and Keith Haring were acknowledged as legitimate artists pursuing a legitimate art form. There were people who grumbled that Giuliani was a fascist. Maybe he is, I’d reply, but you know what? Drug dealers are fascists, too. Now there was nobody to menace my daughter and her friends when they walked down the streets, to tell her which corners she could linger on and which she couldn’t.

  “Quality of Life,” Giuliani’s campaign was called. Many of us were in favor of it at first. But eventually we came to realize just how nebulous an expression “quality of life” is. If you wanted to, you could interpret it to mean almost anything.

  Later, after the dust had settled, lawyers and reporters would try to create a chronology of what had happened on June 3, 1995. We were able to ascertain a few definite facts—that a concerned citizen’s 911 call really had started the whole thing, that there really were a few bricks that had slipped from our apartment building’s rear façade. Nobody disputed that our landlords had disregarded necessary repairs over the years. Margarita Lopez, the city council member for our neighborhood, would later confirm ninety-eight Class B (serious enough to warrant court action) and Class C (supposed to be repaired within twenty-four hours) violations on record with the City. We tenants had banded together in the past, chosen representatives, complained formally to the City. But the City had done nothing for us. All of us living there were old, or we were immigrants, or we were poor. We worked. We paid our rent every month and our taxes every year. But, in the end, we were expendable.

  There was money coming to us, the lawyers insisted. Somebody had to pay for what had happened. I attended a few meetings, but my heart wasn’t in it. What difference could it make? And when we ended up getting nothing, or next to nothing, I wasn’t surprised or even disappointed. We were too broken by then. We were a group of Humpty Dumptys, and there weren’t enough horses or men in all of New York to make us whole again.

  It was a Saturday morning. Laura moved with brisk purpose through the apartment, wearing a nightgown with a cartoon drawing on it of a girl who stood in the window of a tenement building much like ours. The girl in the drawing had thrown a clock from the window. Jane Wanted to See Time Fly, the caption said. It was a child’s nightgown, even though Laura had grown so much in the past year I could hardly believe she was the same girl. It wasn’t a nightgown I would have worn at her age. But when I was Laura’s age, I was already trying to be older. Laura would turn fifteen in only five months. I had been fifteen when I’d met Anise. A chance meeting a lifetime ago, in a secondhand store I’d never intended to go into. And somehow, from that day, events had unfolded one after the other and brought me here. I had a teenage daughter, and this was where we lived.

  I wasn’t due at Ear Wax until the afternoon. Still, I was up early because Laura was up early, and I sang in the kitchen as I fixed toast and cereal for the both of us. Laura was waiting for Mr. Mandelbaum to return from the cramped, ancient synagogue two doors down from our building. He had gone there to pray every Saturday morning for the past fifty years. Today was different, though. It was Shavuot, the holiday that celebrates God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses. The Yizkor, the Jewish memorial prayer for the dead, is recited four times a year. One of those times is Shavuot, and Mr. Mandelbaum would be reciting th
e Yizkor today for Mrs. Mandelbaum, who’d died in her sleep during the past winter.

  Mr. Mandelbaum hadn’t been the same since. His eyes would roam the room instead of looking at your face when you talked to him. The voice that had once boomed down hallways, audible sometimes even downstairs in our apartment, had faded to a whisper. He would forget to take his medication for days at a time. Even Honey seemed to sense the difference. She had always been close to him, always been “his” cat—his and Laura’s—but now she hovered near him constantly. Whenever we went up to see him, Honey was in his lap or sitting next to him on the arm of his chair. Her soft eyes looked anxious as they followed his every small movement. If Mr. Mandelbaum hadn’t remembered to shop for Honey, to buy her food and bring her the little tidbits of turkey she loved from the corner deli, he might not have remembered to shop at all.

  Laura and I tried to spend as much time with him as possible. But there were too many hours in the day given to school and to work, too many hours when Mr. Mandelbaum was by himself in that apartment filled with photos of the wife and son he’d lost. Too many hours with only his cat for company. The book Mrs. Mandelbaum had been reading aloud to him the night she died still rested, facedown, on the coffee table where she’d left it before going to bed. Laura had seen him only yesterday, heart torn at Mrs. Mandelbaum’s absence from the kitchen where she’d prepared cheese blintzes every year for Shavuot. Laura’s idea today was to take Mr. Mandelbaum for a walk, maybe to Katz’s for the blintzes they served there. Anything that would keep him from spending the rest of the day alone in his apartment.

  But it was pouring outside. Laura fretted at the idea of Mr. Mandelbaum being outside in this weather, fretted also that he might not have remembered to bring an umbrella with him when he’d walked to the synagogue that morning. He was apt to forget such things these days.

  It was nine when we heard the knock on our door. Laura, already dressed and hoping it was Mr. Mandelbaum, ran to answer it. I was in my bedroom, just starting to change out of my nightshirt. I heard an unfamiliar man’s voice, the upward tilt of Laura’s voice responding with a question. “Mom?” she called out. “Can you come here?”

  My hands fumbled with the buttons on my shirt. “I’m coming,” I called back.

  I had missed a button and my shirt was on lopsided. There were two firemen at our door. One of them, the younger one, seemed to notice my shirt but refrained from pointing it out. “Is there anybody else in the apartment, ma’am?” he asked me. Their yellow-and-black raincoats gleamed wetly, and I remember thinking their muddy boots would make a mess in the hall.

  “Why?” I wanted to know. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re evacuating the building,” the other one said. “Part of the rear façade has been damaged from the rain. There’s a possibility the whole building might collapse.”

  I heard his words, but it was information my brain instantly rejected. “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “We’re evacuating the building,” the older fireman repeated, patiently. “This building is in danger of imminent collapse, ma’am.”

  “Oh my God.” I felt a vein begin to throb in my throat. My mind whirred and skipped, a phonograph needle trying to settle into the right groove. I had a sudden, unbearable image of my daughter crushed beneath a collapsed building, her body broken underneath a pile of bricks and beams. I knew, though, that I couldn’t let panic alone, or the sharp pain of my heart thudding in my chest, determine my actions of the next few minutes. I had to force that image away for a second. I had to stop and think.

  It’s an impossible question to answer in the abstract, what you might take with you if somebody knocked on your door and told you that your home and everything in it could be destroyed in the next few minutes. It’s impossible because, when the moment comes, it’s always unexpected and you can’t think. Only later do you remember things like favorite albums or your grandmother’s wedding ring, or the metal lockbox of personal treasures stored on the top shelf of your closet. If you’re a mother, your first thoughts go where they always go—to what you’ll need to care for your child. Food, clothing, shelter, whatever you’ll need in the way of wallet contents and insurance papers to ensure those things are provided without interruption. And so, when my mind stopped skipping, that’s where it settled. Tell Laura to grab enough clothing for a few days, it said, while you get your purse, your phone book, and the insurance policies.

  “Quick,” I said to Laura, I could hear the rain lashing at our windows. “There’s a suitcase on the top shelf of the linen closet. Get it down and we’ll—”

  “There’s no time, ma’am,” the younger fireman interrupted. “This building could collapse any second.” Laura turned her face up to mine, fear and bewilderment in her eyes, but also trust. Not doubting for a second that her mother would know exactly what we should do.

  It was Laura’s face that snapped me into decisiveness. “Put your shoes on,” I told her. “Hurry!” Without a word, she ran off to her bedroom. Turning back to the firemen, I asked, “Is there truly no time to bring anything else?”

  “We’ll have it stabilized soon,” the younger fireman told me reassuringly. “You’ll probably be back in a couple of hours. We’re evacuating mainly as a precaution. Just take what you need for right now.”

  His words eased the knot of panic in my chest, but only a little. The image of Laura in a collapsing building was too agonizing to be dismissed easily.

  “Mom,” Laura said as she hurriedly laced her sneakers, “what about—”

  “Everything’s going to be fine.” I tried to sound soothing. “But we have to go now.”

  “But—”

  “Now, Laura. No discussions.”

  I wasn’t in the habit of speaking to her so sharply. She threw me a surprised look, but finished tying her shoes.

  I can almost laugh today, remembering how Laura and I raced to grab keys, wallets, umbrellas. At my urging (“Quickly!” I told Laura, tugging at her arm, “Run!”), we bolted down the stairs as if the building were already collapsing around us. We were breathless when we reached the sidewalk.

  Most of our neighbors were outside. We whispered among ourselves as we milled about in the rain. “A few bricks fell off the back of the building,” the performance artist from the ground floor told me. “Because of the rain. Somebody called 911. They should be able to fix it pretty easily.”

  It was a comforting thought. Then the police arrived with barricades and yellow tape, and the vein in my throat began to pulse again. All this because of a few fallen bricks? A crowd, larger than the twenty-five or so people who lived in our building, was starting to gather.

  It was Laura who first spotted Mr. Mandelbaum, in the thirty-year-old suit he’d worn to his wife’s funeral, clutching a small plastic bag in his hand. “We’re over here!” she called to him, waving. Laura and I angled our umbrellas so all three of us could fit under them while rain pounded staccato on the fabric over our heads. Laura’s face was pale and pinched, but in Mr. Mandelbaum’s presence she composed it into a serene expression as she quickly explained what was happening.

  Mr. Mandelbaum’s eyes swept past the cops, now busily using the barricades and yellow tape to create a perimeter around the building. It stood on the corner, and the barricade extended from all the way around the corner and around back to the narrow alley between our building and the one next to it. Then Mr. Mandelbaum looked up at the building itself. The red bricks rising into gray sky looked every bit as solid as any other building on the block.

  For a moment, I was pleased to see his eyes focus in a way they hadn’t in months. It was heartening, even under circumstances like these, to see his eyes flicker with life and interest. Then I realized it wasn’t understanding that focused his gaze. It was fear.

  “Honey,” he said.

  It’s an interesting thing to think about, how rumors get started. How a crowd comes to know something no one individual can account for. When did it happen? When was th
e moment of certainty? And how was it that we knew for sure?

  We had been told that the building could collapse at any second, but two hours later not so much as a single brick had fallen, not one visible crack had appeared in the structure. They had told us we would be allowed back in “soon,” but by noon not one of us had been allowed back in. Police officers and representatives from the Office of Emergency Management roamed freely in and out of the building, seeming unconcerned about the dangers we’d been warned of. Many didn’t bother to wear hard hats. In hushed voices people asked one another, Doesn’t that seem odd to you?

  Whispers ran among us as we all stood there in the rain, waiting to see what would happen. People talked about SROs whose occupants had been dragged from their beds in the middle of the night and scattered into the streets like cockroaches. The buildings would be demolished the very next morning to make room for expensive new condos and restaurants. There were the squatters who took over apartment buildings nominally owned by the City because the landlords had been unable to afford repairs or taxes. Buildings the City abandoned and neglected until they became crack houses. The squatters would chase out the dealers and addicts, bring in wiring, fix walls and roofs, plant gardens, make the building and sometimes whole blocks livable again. You would see children playing stickball on streets that only a few months earlier no child could have safely walked past. And then one day police would come to chase the squatters out, not letting them take any personal belongings with them. The City would “reclaim” the building and sell it for a profit.