Love Saves the Day

by Gwen Cooper

  But those people were different from us. The people who stayed in SROs had no formal contracts; they paid on a nightly or perhaps weekly basis. Technically, the squatters had no legal claim to be where they were. We held signed leases in our own names. We paid our rent every month, as formally and contractually as any millionaire with a Park Avenue pied-à-terre. What had happened to those other people could never happen to us.

  Maybe it was when Mayor Giuliani pulled up in a Town Car. By then the crowd was enormous. At first people were cheered by the sight of the mayor striding confidently into that building. He didn’t wear a hard hat, either. How dangerous could the building be, if the mayor himself was entering it?

  But then the murmurs went around again: Why was the mayor here? Why should he concern himself with us, with our one little building? Maybe it was a goodwill gesture, an attempt to garner votes in a neighborhood that hadn’t supported him in the last election?

  But, then … why didn’t he make eye contact with anybody, or give us even a parting wave, as he exited the building and disappeared back into his car?

  One of our local community board members, an architect, was circulating. “Don’t worry,” he told people. “I went around back and saw the damage they’re talking about. Two, maybe three bricks, and that rear wall’s at least six bricks deep. There’s no way this building is going to collapse.”

  Few people seemed comforted at hearing this. I noted that. Noted, too, that at some point the crowd had started to lose faith in the idea that whatever was happening here today was a rescue mission. A breeze blew up and I shivered, drawing Laura closer to me.

  I don’t remember all the events of that day as clearly as I should. Maybe I just don’t want to. Or maybe, perversely, too much of my memory got used up in the wrong places. Because the parts I remember most clearly are the ones I would give anything—all the remaining years of my life—to forget. The rest of it comes to me in fragments.

  The crowd sighed and surged and swelled and collapsed inward upon itself, only to expand again. Rain fell harder, and people huddled under umbrellas or simply stood motionless and got wet, and then the rain subsided. Faces blurred and shifted around me, as if I were standing still in front of a merry-go-round. The Bengali couple from the fourth floor threaded through the crowd, their three children following them like ducklings in a row. The Polish woman who lived across the hall from us and took in laundry muttered something, to nobody in particular, about the clothing she still had piled up in her living room.

  “Five thousand dollars I have in that apartment,” Consuela Verde, Maria Elena’s mother, said to me. The two youngest of her five children clung to her beneath an enormous flowered umbrella, still wearing their pajamas. Anger and anguish competed for toeholds on the rounded contours of her face. “All our lives, my husband and me worked for that money. All the money we ever have. We no trust the banks. And now these hijos de la gran puta”—she spat on the sidewalk—“now they will take it from us. You watch and see.”

  More hours ticked by. Rain-fed puddles deepened and joined to form small rivers that rushed over feet and carried bobbing, twirling dead leaves toward drains. My stomach churned in time with the movements of the crowd, its anxious circles, the growing sense that something wasn’t right. It had been hours since the toast and cereal I’d eaten that morning. Somebody pressed a paper cup of hot coffee into my hand. But my stomach recoiled at the thought of it, so I carefully set the cup down on the asphalt beside me.

  Nothing happened to indicate any repairs being made to our building. Why were we kept waiting in the rain? Why, when the building had remained standing for so many hours, couldn’t we go in and at least collect a few of our things?

  A leg would grow uncomfortable from my standing on it too long, and I’d shift my weight to the other leg. I halfheartedly swung my umbrella around whenever the wind changed direction. Still, I was soaked through. I tried to re-button my lopsided shirt one-handed and succeeded only in making it more lopsided. My purse began to feel too heavy hanging from my right shoulder, so I switched it to the left. It occurred to me that I was long overdue at the store, that Noel would be worried about me. But I didn’t want to leave to find a pay phone. The thought faded. Sometimes I decided to count how many people in the crowd had blond hair, how many red, how many brown. It was easy when you could see the tops of everybody’s head. I remained within the crowd, so I could hear what was going on, and kept one eye on Laura, who stood with Mr. Mandelbaum across the street.

  Laura never left Mr. Mandelbaum’s side. He sat on an overturned orange crate, and Laura held her umbrella over his head so he wouldn’t get wet. For hours she stood protectively over him, the tallest woman in the crowd aside from me. Laura’s smooth, pale hand against the black plastic of the umbrella handle. Mr. Mandelbaum’s knotted hands twisting and untwisting the plastic bag he still gripped. Occasionally Maria Elena went over to talk to her. Once, I think, she tried to convince Laura to go someplace with her. I could tell by the gestures her hands were making. But Laura smiled wanly and shook her head no, motioning toward Mr. Mandelbaum. Maria Elena disappeared back into the crowd.

  I hovered as close to the barricades as I could without being completely swallowed up by the crowd. People from our building kept approaching the yellow line and the cops standing on the other side of it. They pleaded, raged, argued, wept. Those who didn’t speak English, or didn’t speak it well, brought their children as interpreters. I tried, too, to reason with the cops. Tension had become a living pain in my chest, but I forced myself to be calm. Years of working retail had taught me to speak calmly, smilingly, to unreasonable people. I had a child, I told them. My child needed clothing. She needed her schoolbooks. So many people had gone into the building all day and come out unharmed. If we could have a few minutes, only a few minutes to …

  “We’ll let you back in,” the cops told us again and again. “Once the building has been deemed safe for reentry, we’ll let you back in. You have nothing to worry about.”

  Every half hour or so, I helped Mr. Mandelbaum through the crowd and up to the barricades. I took him from Laura as if we were two parents exchanging custody. I held my umbrella over his head with one hand as we walked. I encircled him with the other, to protect him from being pushed by the crowd. He couldn’t be allowed to slip and fall. I had to remind myself to walk slowly, to pace my longer steps to his shuffling ones.

  Mr. Mandelbaum’s whole face beseeched the unyielding cops on the other side of the barricades. Their eyes never so much as flickered in his direction.

  “Please,” Mr. Mandelbaum kept saying. “Please let me get my cat out. She’s in there all alone. Please let me get her.”

  More than a few times, I tried to argue on Mr. Mandelbaum’s behalf. I circled the barricades looking for different faces, cops I hadn’t already spoken to. “He’s an old man,” I said. “He has prescription medication in there that he needs to take.”

  Nothing. No response at all.

  “Look,” I said, lowering my voice to a confidential tone. As if we were allies, partners on the same side of a negotiation. “The man’s wife just died. He lived here with her for fifty years. That cat means the world to him. Just let him get his cat out. She’s a living thing, too.” I repeated this sentence often, as if it contained magic words. An unanswerable argument. A living thing. “Couldn’t somebody at least get her for him? I could get his keys. I keep seeing people going in and out and—”

  Finally, one of the cops rolled his eyes. “Lady,” he said in an exasperated tone, “we got more important things to worry about right now than some old guy’s cat.”

  The crowd continued to grow. It became increasingly restive as the day went on—community board members, friends and relatives, tenants from neighboring apartment buildings swelled our ranks, until there were over two hundred of us and cars couldn’t drive down Stanton Street. Jostles became shoves. Murmurs rose to shouts. Chants went up. Who came up with them? How did everybody
know to say the same thing at the same time? “Give us fifteen minutes!” the crowd howled with one voice, fists in the air. “Give us fifteen minutes!” Or else they chanted, “Mr. Moriarty, stop this party!” referring to OEM deputy director John Moriarty, who was on-site that day.

  I did try to make Laura leave. The Red Cross had set up a relief center a few blocks away, and I tried to send her there. “No,” she told me. One hand fell to rest on Mr. Mandelbaum’s shoulder. “We’re not leaving until we know Honey is safe.”

  “Laura—”

  “No!” Her voice was edged with panic. “I’m not going! You can’t make me!”

  You can’t make me. A child’s argument. But Laura and I had never argued. We were as close as two fingers on the same hand, she and I.

  Eventually, somebody came to me with a petition. Somebody else came with an affidavit. I signed both. I was told papers were being prepared and notarized at the nearby middle school. A judge had been found who was willing to have the papers delivered to his home on a Saturday. For the first time in the nine hours since our building had been evacuated, I allowed myself to feel hope.

  Suddenly Laura was beside me. She held Mr. Mandelbaum’s arm. What was she doing here, near the barricades? I had thought, I had been certain, that we’d both understood the terms of our unspoken agreement. She was to remain safely across the street with Mr. Mandelbaum. If he wanted to try talking to the cops again, I would bring him over. There was no reason for her to be here. No reason at all.

  Yet here she was. “Fifty years I’ve lived here,” Mr. Mandelbaum was saying now. His voice was no longer a quiet plea. It had gained volume, agitated for the first time. “Everything I have in the world is in that apartment, but I don’t care. I don’t care! Just let me go to my cat. I’m begging you!” He dragged the wet sleeve of his coat across his face.

  The cops continued to ignore him. He was only an old man, after all. They didn’t budge for him. Their eyes moved only for Laura, moved up and down, taking her in. A tall, slender, beautiful girl, wearing jeans and a red cotton T-shirt that clung to her body in the rain.

  I could see Laura’s tight face, the crease between her eyebrows far too deep for a girl her age, as she fought to restrain her own tears. Tears for this man she loved, and the cat she loved almost as much as the man. I couldn’t hear her words, but I knew she was adding her own soft, murmured pleas.

  A gust of wind came up. It blew Mr. Mandelbaum’s coat backward, molded Laura’s T-shirt more tightly to her chest. The cops’ eyes drifted downward. Sly grins scurried across their faces.

  Something uncoiled inside me. It curled my hands into fists, set my heart to pounding so hard I could hear it inside my own ears. My body flooded with a surge of rage so pure and sharp that, for one exhilarating moment, it was indistinguishable from joy.

  The crowd roiled again, chaotic now. I was pushed hard from all sides. I struggled to remain standing. I had the wild thought that I had caused this, that my rage had spilled over and seeped into the people around me.

  But it had nothing to do with me. I had taken my attention away from the crowd for a second, and in that second the crowd-mind had reached a consensus I knew nothing about.

  A crane had arrived.

  It rumbled down Clinton Street. Its neck was yellow. Gradually the neck stretched itself up until it rose as high as our building’s roof. From the end of the yellow neck hung a brownish gray beak with a row of thick metal teeth, each longer than a man’s leg. The bottom half of the beak was a slab. It would catch whatever chunks the teeth tore out.

  Large metal containers and lighting trees were maneuvered into place. It had been hard to gauge the day’s passage under such a gray sky, but I realized with a kind of dizzy surprise that soon it would be nightfall. There were sounds of machinery switching on and off. Then only the low-gear rattle of the diesel engine of the crane’s cab.

  The beak opened its maw and poised over the roof, waiting.

  The crowd roared and surged and broke in waves against the police barricades. But underneath the waves, in deeper places, were currents and crosscurrents. Related to the waves, yet unaffected by them.

  Word was spreading. The judge was going to issue a temporary restraining order. The restraining order was on its way! Quick as light beams, from person to person, this message was communicated. Somebody shouted it to John Moriarty from the OEM. He took out a cellular phone and made a call. Nodded a few times in response to whatever the person on the other end said. Then he hung up and spoke into his walkie-talkie.

  “Do it now,” he said.

  The rattle of the diesel engine was drowned in a new sound—a loud, continuous hum. People screamed and sobbed. I could hear the wailing of children. For the first time, the police seemed nearly overwhelmed by the force of the crowd struggling to break through the tape and barricades.

  “My cat!” Mr. Mandelbaum cried out. Tears coursed thickly down his wrinkled face. “She’s a living thing! She’s still in there! Please! She’s all I got!” The plastic bag he still held twisted convulsively in his hands as he fell, kneeling on the pavement. “She’s all I got!”

  “Laura!” I yelled, bending toward Mr. Mandelbaum. “Laura, help me!” I looked up, and then I fell silent.

  Laura wasn’t there.

  “Laura?” I rose to my full height, stood on tiptoes. Laura and I were both tall. Even in a crowd like this I should be able to see the top of her head. So why couldn’t I? I left Mr. Mandelbaum with Hugo Verde, Maria Elena’s father. Watch him, I mouthed, pointing from my eye to Mr. Mandelbaum. Hugo nodded and leaned down to help Mr. Mandelbaum, still crying, shakily to his feet. I angled through the crowd, turning sideways to slip through crevices between bodies, using my hands to push people out of the way. I no longer felt separate from the crowd, from its terror and frenzy. I was a part of it. “Laura!” I called. “Laura, where are you? Laura, answer me!” I remembered when she was three, when she’d slipped away from me once at a block party. I’d found her that day, but I’d always had nightmares since then. Nightmares just like this. Laura was missing in a crowd, and I couldn’t find her. Anything could have happened to her. What if she’d fallen? What if the crowd was trampling her? “Laura!” The hard pain in my chest was now a black hole of panic. “I’m your mother! Answer me, dammit!”

  The crane, fully powered up now, swung back to gather momentum and made its first test swing at the top of the building. The deafening crunch of metal against brick echoed over the heads of the crowd.

  Then the head and shoulders of a girl pushed their way through an open window on the third floor. A fair-skinned girl with long brown hair. She wore a red cotton T-shirt. The sky was black now, the clouds had finally thinned, and the girl, the building, the metal containers waiting to swallow them on the ground below, all of them were spotlit by the blazing lights from the lighting trees. They looked superimposed against the black sky. Unreal, dreamlike. The girl waved her arms furiously. “Wait!” she shouted. “Wait, I’m in here!”

  “LAURA!” I shoved my way through the crowd again, so hard this time that people fell back as I muscled past them. Dear God, what if I couldn’t get to the barricade in time? Already the crane was pulling back, preparing for another swing. Its jaws gaped, glinted in the artificial white light. “Stop them!” I screamed. I kept screaming. “Stop them! Somebody stop them!” But my screams were swallowed in the crowd. Finally I got to the barricade and clawed at the arm of the nearest cop. “My daughter is in that building!”

  The cop looked at me and said something terse to the officer standing next to him, who rolled his eyes upon hearing it. The two of them motioned to a third officer to guard their post as they turned and ran into the building. The OEM official barked something into his walkie-talkie, and the crane was still.

  Needle-thin raindrops darted silver through the glow of the lighting trees. The crowd, emboldened by the unexpected pause in the crane’s movements, flailed against the police barricades with renewed fren
zy. My fingers curled, convulsing in rhythm to my anguish. How many more raindrops, how many more seconds, minutes, eternities until Laura was safely in my arms.

  Finally, the cops reappeared in the doorway, wrangling a struggling Laura between them. They’d put her in handcuffs, the metal glinting cruelly against the soft flesh of her wrists. My heart clutched in horror. My child, my child.

  When they reached the barricade, one of the officers unlocked the cuffs and pushed Laura toward me. I stumbled as the weight of her body fell awkwardly against mine, and my arms automatically rose to encircle her. My hands moved from her head to her shoulders, down her arms. Checking to see if anything was hurt, anything broken. “We could lock her up for disturbing the peace,” the cop told me. “Keep an eye on your kid, will ya?”

  My jaw was so tight it was painful. “Keep your hands off my child.” I pushed the words through clenched teeth with enough force to send a line of spittle down my chin. The cop took one look at my face and backed off.

  “Mom,” Laura was saying frantically. “Mom, I had her! I had Honey! Those cops scared her and she jumped out of my arms when they came for me. She ran under the bed. I know exactly where she is! Tell them! Tell them where she is so they can go back and get her!”

  My arm drew up into the air, hand open. It sped down to land across Laura’s face in a resounding slap. The force of it rocked her head back and to one side. She staggered, instinctively clutching the shirt of a person standing behind her to keep from falling.

  Laura’s already fair skin turned white. Chalk white save for the blood-red mark on her face, which took the shape of my hand. Her eyes widened. Raindrops gathered in her hair and spilled down the sides of her face.

  “ARE YOU CRAZY?” I shrieked. Except I was the one who sounded crazy. And even as I was screaming, even as I struck her for the first and only time in her life, even then a part of my mind was thinking, Oh, my child, my girl. That you should live to see a day like this one. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her until her teeth rattled in her head. “A CAT?” I screeched. “You risked your life to save a cat? Who cares about the cat! TO HELL WITH THE STUPID CAT!”