Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  “Little brother, are you still there?” she said after a long pause. “Were you listening to everything I said?”

  “I’ve always been here. It’s you who went underground,” he said, but affectionately.

  “Will you forgive me?”

  “Of course. But please don’t call me little brother.”

  “I’m sorry.” Another long silence, and then she told him, “Now here comes the hard part.” This was the part where she acknowledged that Jacob was his son as well as hers (“Yes, yours, no more mincing words”) but that she could not imagine complicating what the boy knew about his universe already. He knew that Lewis wasn’t his “original” father, but he’d stopped asking who that father might be.

  “For now,” said Alan. “He’s stopped asking for now. And he hasn’t stopped thinking about it.”

  Marion sighed. “You’re not the only head-science guy around here.” She told him that she hoped Alan, maybe Greenie and George as well, could find their way back to California soon, that they could all get together. “Have a picnic in Golden Gate Park? Would that be insane?” She wished that something could bring her east, but her parents were happily settled in Del Ray Beach and didn’t miss New Jersey one bit. “And no more reunions for me,” she added. “None of any kind whatsoever.”

  She mailed him five pictures of Jacob, two including herself, none including Lewis. Alan gazed at them, trying to feel a recognition. He didn’t—but it didn’t matter. He kept the pictures in his dresser, under his T-shirts.

  They spoke every few weeks all summer long. They traded stories about George and Jacob, the common phases the two parents had gone through, the great differences in the two boys’ temperaments and tastes. Without planning it that way, they took turns calling. Once when Alan called, Lewis answered. “Why hello there,” he said, as if Alan’s voice were a delightful surprise. Only in August, because Marion had mentioned Greenie a third or fourth time—clearly wanting him to open up and talk about his wife, his marriage—did Alan tell her that they were separated. “Irrevocably, I think.” At the risk of sounding callow, he told her quickly, almost dismissively. Marion told him how sorry she was. He told her that he was sorry, too. Why hadn’t Alan told her before? At that, he laughed honestly. He said, “I’m not the only head-science guy around here.”

  Jerry—in Alan’s book, king of all head-science guys—worked now not in a doorman building on Madison Avenue but in a defunct school building on Flatbush Avenue. He had become a tribal leader, dispatching guerrillas to fight for the city’s walking wounded. By September, Alan was working four hours a week in the defunct school’s defunct gymnasium, running group therapy sessions for couples with drinking problems. There was no air-conditioning, and sometimes the portable fans were turned up so high that the participants had to shout their confessions and grievances. Alan went home to George hoarse and exhausted but mentally vibrant and drained of self-pity. He had also enrolled in two forensic social work courses. That afternoon, he would have been attending the third class of each course, back to back, if the terrorists had not interfered.

  ALAN WONDERED WHAT GEORGE, years from now, would remember of this day. Even in the weeks to come, would it change the way he saw his world? His little world, Alan thought, but that was not right. Wasn’t the world, to any child, much larger than it was to the adults around him?

  Alan had said to Greenie that he would speak to George in greater depth about the incident with Diego and the horses, once they had settled back in New York. But his efforts to keep that promise were feeble at best. The first time Alan tried to edge his way toward asking what had happened, George cut him off brusquely. “Nobody talks about that now,” he said, looking his father straight in the eye with a confidence that was nearly chilling. For an instant, Alan could easily see the younger boy as the one who had cooked up the foolish scheme.

  Once George left New Mexico, he seldom spoke of anything he’d left behind—not counting his mother. He was vocal in his compassion toward animals. He scolded a friend at the playground who chased pigeons; he asked Alan why rats had to be poisoned. Whenever he saw a horse—on trips outside the city or in Washington Square, where mounted police patrolled in pairs—he stopped to be impressed, but there was no more talk of palominos, Appaloosas, or Tennessee walking horses. He mentioned Consuelo once every few days at first—he might tell Alan the way she made his favorite sandwich or what books she liked to read with him—but even these references had ceased by the end of summer.

  Was George a cold child at some level? Did he have no lasting remorse? Or was he simply resilient, strong because—like his mother—he was happy by nature? For all that Alan had learned about human motivations and pathological patterns, he could not fathom the innermost George. No matter how well you knew your own child, wouldn’t your love always distort your perception?

  Joya grilled Alan constantly about being a parent. She was reading every book under the sun, despite his warning that once the baby arrived, she would throw them all away. She expected to hear by Christmastime that a baby was waiting for her across the Pacific Ocean. The agency would send a picture of the baby by e-mail. Alan had agreed to go with her, and now he realized that perhaps this would help him find a natural way to meet Jacob as well. He would fly George to New Mexico, then travel to Vietnam with Joya. If they could return to San Francisco in good time, he might be able to spend a week there before returning home. Joya told him she had enough frequent-flyer miles for a round trip to Pluto, so she’d send him wherever he needed to go. “Those miles were supposed to be my honeymoon in Thailand and Japan,” she said, “but I guess I’m skipping that phase. At least I knew I’d be going to Asia. I just didn’t know why.”

  Joya was so busy redesigning her life that she no longer had the time to scrutinize Alan’s. Or that was how Alan chose to interpret the way she steered clear of discussing his estrangement from Greenie. At first he missed Joya’s bossy advice, her editorials on what he’d done wrong and how he should fix it; was he now a lost cause? But once he realized the selfishness of this anxiety, Alan was content to devote all their communications to his sister’s plans.

  That evening, when he and George returned to the apartment from walking Treehorn, Joya’s message—concerned but chastising—was the first of two on the answering machine. The second was from Marion. Alan wanted to speak with both women, but he would wait until George was asleep. And then it dawned on him: the lines from the outside world had cleared.

  As soon as Treehorn had settled down, George began eyeing the blank television screen, though he did not ask Alan to turn it on. Yes, it was clear he did understand that the world was very large. “Is Mommy okay?” he asked suddenly.

  “Yes,” said Alan, surprised at his own less-than-honest conviction. “Let’s read,” he added quickly. “Why don’t you read to me?”

  George chose Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Halfway through, Alan wondered just how coincidental this choice had been. Watching Bartholomew Cubbins run frantically about the Kingdom of Didd, trying to thwart the green goo, he couldn’t help thinking of Rudy Giuliani.

  Greenie called when the royal trumpeter’s trumpet filled with oobleck.

  She cried when he answered.

  “We’re fine, we’re both fine,” he said twice.

  “Where have you been, where have you been? Why haven’t you left the city? Why haven’t you answered your cell phone?”

  “I haven’t used it in months,” said Alan. “I’m sorry. Where are you? You know, I tried to call you.”

  “Can I speak to George?”

  “It’s your mother.” Alan handed the phone to George.

  “Mommy, hi, we’re reading. We are in the middle of the story.” He listened to his mother. Alan heard the flow of her voice, rapid, expressive.

  “Treehorn is okay, too. We went for a walk and we saw a lot of police cars.” After another minute, he turned to Alan. “Daddy, is my school canceled?”

  “I don’t know abo
ut school, George.” Since taking George out of his classroom, Alan hadn’t given school a thought. How could life of any normal sort resume—yet what would take its place? He asked for the phone.

  “Listen, Alan, I want you to take George to Maine, up to the island—for a week or something, just till the city seems safe again, and then we can talk—”

  “Greenie, where are you? You’re skipping so far ahead here. Listen, we are fine, we really are—”

  “How do you know you’re fine? Think of all the people in those towers who were certain they were fine when they got up this morning, Alan!”

  “Greenie.” Slowly, insistently, Alan drew from her that she was calling him from a rest stop in Oklahoma, that there were no rental cars to be had in New Mexico—or anywhere else—once all the planes had been grounded, that Ray had forbidden her to drive cross-country alone and had, so generously, loaned her his driver, to get her at least partway back to New York. Nothing, however, would have kept her from George. She spoke breathlessly, almost angrily, in a headlong rush of words.

  Alan suddenly understood that she was on her way there, to the very room in which he sat, and that once she reached George, she might refuse to leave again without him.

  “Alan,” she continued, “I need you to call one of my cousins in Boston and go to Maine. There are keys to the house in my dresser, but you need to let them know you’re going. Please. I cannot sleep—I will die of worry—if you don’t do this.”

  “I have a life to live here, Greenie,” said Alan. With George, he was tempted to say. She had her life with Charlie.

  “Alan, no one there is going to be leading a regular life for days, probably weeks. Maybe never again!”

  “First I was supposed to move to New Mexico, Greenie. Now I’m supposed to move to an island in Maine? Where next? Marrakesh? Beijing?” Alan glanced at George, who was watching him, newly worried.

  “No, Alan—just, please, for now…I’ll get there in a few days. I want George—I want you both out of the city. They’re saying the air from the burning towers could be poisonous to breathe. Please. Until they know more.”

  “I’m paying close attention to the news right here, and I haven’t heard a thing about poisonous air,” he said. But he wrote down the numbers of her cousins. She told him that the marina would still be open; he could get a launch to take them over. There should be a boat at the island. No one closed up the houses before October. She asked him to find his cell phone and keep it with him. She would call him twice a day until she could get there.

  “And what will you do once you get here?” he asked. “You’re planning to quit your job?”

  “No,” she said. “No, I’ll go back. I just—”

  Just what? Just want to have your motherly cake and eat it too? he thought, before recognizing how hilariously apt that would sound. “It’s okay, Greenie,” he said. “We’ll talk tomorrow morning. We’ll be fine, we really will.”

  After he hung up, Alan realized that he could not remember the last difficult conversation in which he had been the one to reassure her.

  In bed, in the dark, he listened a long time to the never-ending sirens. It had become the sound of extreme mourning, but you had to see it as hopeful, too. Let each siren be a rescue, he thought, as close to prayer as he’d ever come, someone pulled from the wreckage and restored to a family. He imagined an aerial view of the city, the city as river upon river of throbbing red lights. Ironically, the only people up there to see it would be fighter pilots, tucked tight in their armored cockpits. When Alan listened hard enough, sometimes he heard them, too.

  EVERYONE WANTED TO GIVE BLOOD. Or clean socks. Or blankets. Or musical entertainment. Or, as a last resort, money. In an epidemic of survivor’s guilt, people were haplessly desperate to give. On Seventh Avenue, donors whose blood was not needed, and who knew it, lined up anyway along the walls of the hospital. Cooks at the James Beard House, across the street, piled tables with pastries and fruit to feed these superfluous donors.

  Alan saw the first newly flaunted flag on Thursday—safety-pinned to the backpack of a roller-skating teenage boy with shredded jeans and fuchsia hair. Graffiti became patriotic, public spaces religious. Bus shelters were shrines, papered with pleas that reminded Alan, inescapably, uncomfortably, of the missing-pet notices he posted for Saga. On Friday, when the rain came down in torrents, when George’s school resumed, the candles guttered and collapsed, the ink on the notices ran, the photographs of the lost people buckled and blurred.

  The air had begun to smell not just foul but ominous. Alan believed the smell was one of burning circuitry and building components, but others believed it was flesh. Jerry said it smelled much worse in Brooklyn. Even the wind is a capitalist, mindful of real-estate values. What a world, he e-mailed Alan. Alan had not been to Brooklyn since Monday; he had been looking after George, talking to clients on the phone. When he returned, said Jerry, there would be more work than ever. City officials wanted to subsidize therapy for people traumatized by the attacks.

  Alan dropped George off at school, where the halls echoed with absence, and told the teacher he’d be back to pick up his son before noon. He went home, packed their bags, and took Treehorn for a walk. After stopping at the bank for cash, he found himself on the northwest corner of Bank and Hudson, fighting the wind to keep his umbrella intact as Treehorn strained against the leash, pulling him off balance. He shouted the dog’s name twice, wondering what could be so urgent, when he heard “There’s a good girl. That’s my girl.”

  Saga came toward them from under a café awning, clasping a paper coffee cup. It was obvious that she had not wanted them to see her. She was wet, and her clothes looked filthy. If he had been wrong to think she was homeless the day they met, he had doubts all over again. To hide her face from Alan, she bent low, petting and murmuring to Treehorn.

  “I like the coffee here,” she said to Alan, meekly, when she stood. She motioned toward the café.

  “Saga, you look terrible!” Alan exclaimed. “I’m sorry, but it’s the truth! Are you staying in the city—at Stan’s? You don’t look like you’re staying anywhere.” He held the umbrella over her head, but the gesture was pointless.

  “He’s back now,” she said. “He got a ride.”

  Alan ignored the non sequitur. “Why aren’t you home, in Connecticut? Did you get stuck here? You should have come to me!”

  She shook her head. “I think my cousin’s dead. Well, he must be. I don’t think they’re going to forgive me. Even if it isn’t my fault.”

  “Oh Saga, stop talking in riddles, please! Where are you staying?”

  “Around the corner.”

  “Let me walk you back there,” said Alan. “You need dry clothes, you need…Who are you staying with?”

  She shook her head again. “It’s just somewhere I stay.” No longer avoiding his eyes, she looked miserable yet defiant.

  “Come home with me now,” said Alan. “Please.”

  Saga let him take her arm, which he managed to do by giving up on the umbrella, which he closed and forced into a pocket of his raincoat. Almost immediately, it soaked through the lining and then his pants.

  He could hear her teeth chattering as they walked along. Just before they reached Alan’s building, she said, “I can’t believe he’s dead, but I know he must be.”

  “Let’s talk when we get inside,” he said.

  “We’ve been here before, haven’t we?” she said as they climbed the stairs.

  Alan stopped to look at her, alarmed. “Many times, Saga. You’ve been to my place a few times now.” Was she in shock?

  She laughed weakly. “No, no. I’m not that bad. I mean, you’ve rescued me in the rain before, only then we had the puppies. Including you, little girl,” she said to Treehorn.

  “Yes,” said Alan, relieved. “That’s when we met.”

  “Oh I know that,” said Saga.

  THERE WAS INDEED A PECULIAR déjà vu to that morning: Saga freshly showered, hair
in a towel, wearing clothes abandoned by Greenie, sitting at Alan’s table with a cup of tea, a view of rain pummeling the neighbors’ bushes and tiny plots of flowers. Yet this time, perhaps because Alan was focused on other things (locking windows, suspending the paper delivery, changing Sunny’s water), she could not stop talking.

  Saga had not returned to Connecticut because, in the trauma of Tuesday, she’d had a series of phone conversations with her family—mostly with a spiteful-sounding cousin named Pansy (her name a real-life red herring if ever there was one). “After everything she accused me of, it’s like suddenly I had nothing to lose,” Saga told Alan as they left the apartment to pick up George and get the car. “I wasn’t so afraid of them anymore.”

  As a therapist, you were both privileged and condemned to hear the stories of every conceivable family arrangement under the sun. Saga’s was not so terribly eccentric—a group of highly functional siblings with a rational parent—yet Alan marveled at the strange symbiosis of the relationship Saga described with this uncle of hers (the older, imperious voice on the phone).

  For all that he had once impatiently wondered about her, suddenly Alan knew more than he might wish to know. He worried that she had begun to see him as a savior, a role he felt unsuited to play for anyone, even someone he liked as much as he did Saga. But as Jerry used to say years before, during Alan’s training, “Don’t worry so damn far into the future. The future does its own thing without a lot of help from you.”

  Alan was glad he’d provided so many toys and other distractions for George, who sat in the backseat amid books, trucks, stuffed animals, and half a dozen tapes. Poor Treehorn had squeezed herself down on the floor. Alan had decided, in part because the aura and the odors of the city had begun to dig into his soul, that he would comply with Greenie’s wishes and meet her in Maine. He had no intention of staying there for more than a few days, but perhaps George needed a break from the air of disaster as well. In the sandbox, Alan had seen some of George’s playmates reenacting the attack itself. And now, after the strangely serendipitous meeting with Saga, he was glad that he could insist, so logically, on making sure she got home.