All those things, surely, but this time it was Tom who said they’d better get to work. There were all those dead crows and jays, for instance, that people had begun depositing at their doorstep—having decided, for some reason, that the crazy artist and her bird-loving husband needed to say, or do, something about the sudden appearance of this mosquito-borne malady called West Nile virus. While the bearers of the dead birds would arrive rubber-gloved and even, sometimes, surgically masked, the birds themselves wrapped in multiple plastic bags, Addie handled them indiscriminately. There was no reason to worry about infection, she knew; they were, in all likelihood, dead not from West Nile, but from poisoning by the pesticide sprays coating the fields and streams of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York. Chemicals like Dursban, diazinon, ethyl parathion—all aimed at killing mosquitoes, mosquitoes that would then be eaten by birds that were soon falling, dead, into suburban backyards throughout the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic states.
And so Addie was at work again, quietly this time, in her charnel house. Here, by early 2001, she spent her afternoons, after mornings spent, once again, in the field with Tom, stuffing a seemingly endless series of crows (the jays, birds she’d always hated, she had less use for—even dead). She used models of these crows in her last major assemblage, titled River Nile. This river of black birds, flowing through a spare white room, was a surprisingly beautiful and moving work, especially in the wake of the September 11 attacks. And especially for those who knew, by the time River Nile appeared in her New York gallery, that Addie was ill once again, the cancer filling her womb and making its way toward her lungs.
And what was Tom doing? At first he was broadcasting the news that, one morning in May 2001, he had spotted a rare cerulean warbler on a wooded ridge near his and Addie’s home. Then, when news of this sighting of such a rare and splendid species was barely noted at Burnham College, he was keeping strangely mute when Addie claimed, a few days later, to have spotted a Cuvier’s kinglet. A bird that had never been seen before, except by John James Audubon (assuming he had been truthful). A pretty little bird very close in appearance to the ruby-crowned kinglet, except for a head stripe that, Addie insisted, more closely resembled that of the golden-crowned kinglet. Tom kept quiet, as well, when Addie went on to call for a change in this species’ status, from either long-extinct or—in most people’s estimation—a myth to a so-called hypothetical: a species whose existence in a given region is open to question because of the lack of an actual specimen, or a “bird in hand.” But also a bird whose sighting, by a serious enough observer, merits its inclusion in official checklists as a possible, or hypothetically present, species.
Interestingly, Addie claimed to have spotted the Cuvier’s kinglet on the ridge above Nisky Creek the morning after the developer Bert Schafer made an irresistible offer to Burnham College, for three hundred acres of college-owned land, including this very ridge. Here he planned to build his largest housing development yet, along with a “minimall” holding a supermarket and several other stores. Addie and Tom’s hope—a feeble one, to be sure—was that the college might be shamed into resisting the sale of this land, or at least the portion of it immediately surrounding Nisky Creek, on the grounds that Schafer’s planned development would imperil one or possibly even two rare species of birds.
And finally, on the afternoon of September 11 came Bobby’s reappearance in Scarlet’s life—this time knocking on her door, shell-shocked and trembling. He hadn’t gone to work that day, he told her that afternoon between rounds of inarticulate sobbing. In fact he had been fired the week before. He was on his way to clear out his desk, and he’d just stepped out of a subway station several blocks away from the World Trade Center when the explosions happened, and the world fell down around him, raining death and ashes.
Scarlet also learned that Cynthia had, by then, kicked him out of the house. That he’d been staying with friends on the Upper West Side, just two blocks away from her apartment, since being fired. And that this was the first time, that week, that he’d been sober for more than a few hours.
He told Scarlet these things, that afternoon, while she held him, trying somehow to calm his uncontrollable shaking, under a pile of blankets in her bed. “I don’t know where to go,” he’d said, when she’d opened the door to find him standing there, covered in dirt and ash. “And I can’t get warm. Could I please just come in long enough to get warm?”
Outside it was a balmy, sunlit day. Though by that time, the acrid smell of smoke had already begun to wend its way toward upper Manhattan, to the air outside Scarlet’s building.
Hours later, when Bobby finally slept, Scarlet turned on the television and, like everyone else in the country (except Tom and Addie, who were, at that point, trying desperately to reach Scarlet via the impossibly overtaxed New York telephone lines), watched the footage of planes crashing into the buildings and exploding—and bodies flying from the high windows, floating through the sky like desolate black birds—over and over again.
V
hypotheticals
eighteen
MAY 2002
TOM’S HANDS, GRIPPING THE big metal steering wheel of the Cider Cove Seafood House’s refrigerated truck, are soothingly familiar to Scarlet. When she looks down at her own hands, she is struck by the similarities—the same long, bony fingers, nails narrow and blunt.
“Who do you think I look like?” she asks. “Addie always said Grandma Sturmer when she was young, but taller. I can never see that when I look at pictures. Do you think I resemble anyone from your family?” She has only met one aunt from Tom’s side of the family, one of his older sisters—a tiny, white-haired woman who, when she visited them in Burnham years ago, seemed ancient to Scarlet.
“Thinking about such things now, are you?” he says with a laugh. “If it’s the source of your height you’re looking for, I don’t have an explanation. Though I’m told my father was tall, by the family’s standards—around six feet or so, they said.” He takes a sip of coffee and checks the rearview mirror.
Between them, on the torn vinyl seat, is a nearly full thermos and a basket, packed by Cora that afternoon, filled with enough food for a daylong journey, though they are only making the two-hour drive from Cider Cove to Burnham.
“I don’t know where you’re going, though I can guess,” Cora said as she handed the basket to Tom, in the deserted parking lot behind the Seafood House. “At any rate, there’s enough food here to get you to Scranton, if you happen to see reason along the way.” She looked tired and worried when Scarlet stepped up to hug her good-bye.
Lou chose not to come along to the restaurant cooler, where Cora helped Tom and Scarlet slip Addie’s body into the simple cotton gown, free of any buttons or zippers, that she’d just finished sewing. Before they left, after sleeping through the afternoon and into the evening, Lou gave both Tom and Scarlet brisk hugs. “Be sensible, Tom,” was the last thing she said.
As they pulled out of the parking lot and then drove along the silent street, passing by Cora’s one last time, Scarlet realized Lou was there, hidden in the shadows on the porch, watching them. She could see the red ember of her cigarette.
Now Dustin travels behind them, driving Tom’s car. They are, Tom says, “right on schedule”; they should reach Tom and Addie’s cottage on Haupt Bridge Road by ten.
Which is when the real work will begin. So, Scarlet decides, now is the time to start asking Tom some questions.
She has started with the easy one. So her height might have come from her Irish grandfather—no great revelations there. Presumably the same could be said about her reddish hair, though Addie “thought maybe” she remembered Uncle John’s hair being sort of red when they were young. It is amazing, and a little frightening, how little Scarlet knows about her extended family; she’s been thinking about this often, since her first prenatal appointment a week ago.
“Do you think Cora knows, Tom?” she asks next, unconsciously patting her stomach.
“Tha
t you’re pregnant? I thought you said you told her that much at least.”
“I did tell her that. You know what I mean.”
“Well, neither Addie nor I told her, if that’s what you’re asking,” he says. “Addie felt the news should come from you.”
“No, it’s not that—I didn’t think you’d told her. It’s just that . . . I don’t know. Sometimes over the last few days I just felt like she knew. She almost didn’t seem surprised when I told her I was pregnant, and she never once asked me about the father.”
“I’d imagine she thinks it’s Alex, wouldn’t you?”
Scarlet sighs and shifts in her seat; the springs are practically poking through the ancient vinyl. “I suppose so,” she admits, disappointed in herself, now, for not taking the opportunity to tell Cora over these last few days. As she’d told Bobby she would.
“Of course she does know that Bobby stayed the week with you last fall, after the attacks. I imagine she knows you’ve been in contact with him since he checked into the clinic—though perhaps she hasn’t realized quite how close that contact’s been.”
He laughs, a nervous little laugh, and they exchange a quick look before turning their eyes away, Tom’s back to the highway in front of them, Scarlet’s to the dark woods, and occasional glimpses of the river, out the window to her right.
“Shouldn’t he be the one to tell her anyway?” he finally asks.
“He’s afraid to,” Scarlet says.
Tom shakes his head. “I think you both underestimate Cora, Scarlet.”
“It’s not that he’s afraid she’ll be angry. I think he’s afraid she’ll be angry but she’ll pretend she’s not. He thinks she’s never been entirely honest with him about what she feels. About him, about Richard. About everything that’s happened to them.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Scarlet says; what she doesn’t tell Tom is how awkward it all feels to her, to be caught between her dear old friend—the grandmother of the little mass of cells she’s carrying—and this strange, old and yet new love. She isn’t sure what she thinks, and she feels vaguely disloyal to both Cora and Bobby now.
“I don’t know what she’s thinking sometimes,” she goes on. “Jesus, I feel that way about all of them—Cora, Lou, Addie. They might get each other, but I sure don’t get them sometimes—” She catches herself, realizing suddenly that she hasn’t yet figured out how to speak about Addie in the past tense.
“Did you feel that way about Addie over these last weeks, Scarlet?” Tom asks then, slowing down and looking at her.
“No,” she whispers. “Not at all.”
“Neither did I,” he says as the Delaware River sweeps into view, filling the windshield for a moment before the road curves sharply north. “I found her less mysterious and more open, in the last year or so, than I had for years, really since I first knew her.”
For a moment Scarlet is afraid Tom might cry. There isn’t time for tears, she thinks. They have too much to do before the sun rises. And she has several questions she still needs to ask, while they are here, in the strangely timeless and anonymous cab of this big, noisy truck, with Addie’s small, quiet body riding behind them.
But instead of crying he laughs. “You know,” he says, “really, the only times we aren’t mysterious to one another are probably when we’re first falling in love, and then when one of us is dying. New love blinds us for a while, to all the things we don’t know. Wouldn’t you say?”
He smiles at Scarlet and she smiles back, aware that this last remark is surely directed at her and her current situation. She clears her throat and mumbles, “I suppose so.” Before she can think of something else to say, Tom slows down and turns to her again.
“Do you love Bobby, Scarlet?”
She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, knowing this question had to come. “I think so,” she says. And then she turns to look out the window, at nothing she can actually see.
“Because you know,” Tom says, “I’d support your having this child, with or without him.”
Scarlet looks at Tom, who’s watching the road intently. For a moment she is seized by an urge to reach for him, to curl up in his arms like she had as a child. But then she pictures Bobby, his face when she told him she was pregnant, crumbling with such a strange mix of joy and fear and everything in between, all those feelings registering in his eyes, the way he held his mouth, like some high-speed film of the sky, the weather. Like a mirror, a picture of her own wildly varied feelings. A map of her.
Instead of reaching for her father, she only nods toward him. “Thank you, Tom,” she says.
With or without him, she is thinking.
Does she love him?
She thinks she understands him.
She knows she wants to have his child.
When she makes love to Bobby now, she feels like she’s been given another chance at something. But she has no idea what that is.
Do these things add up to love?
At first she hardly recognized him when he knocked on her door. With his bloodshot eyes and his uncombed hair and his week’s growth of beard, he looked more like the old Bobby than the gray-suited businessman she’d met for drinks five years before. Except for the dust and ashes.
“Bobby?” she said, incredulous. She thought she might have been hallucinating. The whole day had been like that, after all, from the moment she’d turned on the television and realized, gradually, that the scene she was seeing—a plane flying into one of the World Trade Center towers—was real.
“I’ve been walking since this morning,” he said. His teeth were chattering. “You can’t believe what it’s like out there, down there. . . .”
“Oh, my God,” she said, reaching for him and pulling him into her apartment, leading him to the sofa. “Bobby, were you there?”
He looked at her, then closed his eyes and shook his head as tears streamed down his face.
“I was three blocks away.” It came out as a whisper, pained and desperate. “I’d just climbed up from the subway.”
He opened his eyes, then gripped her hands. “I wanted to try to get there, to look for people—everyone I worked with would have been there, on the 102nd floor.” His face collapsed again, and he shuddered. “They wouldn’t let anyone get near. ‘Just keep walking,’ they said. ‘Head uptown.’”
He shuddered again, and his whole body shook. That was when she noticed how thin he was. It dawned on her then too that he wasn’t dressed for work on the 102nd floor of the World Trade Center, in his flannel shirt and torn jeans, below his businessman’s overcoat—too heavy for a warm day in September. Had he somehow known he would turn cold, she wondered, so cold it seemed that nothing could warm him, all that day and the next?
“I just started walking, with all these other people, just walking and walking, heading uptown, fast. At the corner of Varick and Canal people had stopped. They were looking back toward the towers.”
He stopped then, for a moment; he hadn’t opened his eyes the whole time he spoke, but now he squeezed them tighter, and Scarlet’s stomach clenched, knowing what was coming. She’d been glued to the television all day.
“When I turned around I saw three bodies, floating down. . . . It seemed like they took forever to fall.” He opened his eyes then, and stared at her. “I have no idea how long I stood there,” he said. He looked shocked at the thought, and he kept staring at her, though it seemed to her he was seeing something, or someone, else. Floating bodies? Richard?
She reached for him then. “Oh, Bobby,” she said, crying too as she pulled his head to her chest. She wove her fingers through his dirty, tangled hair and rocked him. “Why have you had to see such horrible things?” He wrapped his arms around her waist and held her so tightly she could hardly breathe.
“I knew this was your building,” he said. “I’ve walked by it lots of times, but I never had the nerve to buzz you before.” He was still crying, his voice and his breath both rag
ged, harsh. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Shhh,” she said and stroked his hair, his wet cheeks. “Of course you came here. I’ve been waiting for you to come here.”
She had no idea where such a remark came from. Yet when she said it, it felt so clearly, undeniably true that it stunned her. He pulled his head up and looked at her then, and they stared at each other for a long time. Finally he kissed her, and his mouth felt so warm and familiar that Scarlet forgot, for a moment, where she was. She shuddered then, and he took off his coat and wrapped them both inside it.
They lay down on her sofa, curled together. At times they talked, whispering like children—or like their teenaged selves, in a booth or on a blanket inside the old Cider Cove Diner—about their lives in the five years since they’d last seen each other. And then, for long periods, they were silent, listening only to their breath, watching the light at the windows turn dark, whether from night or from the raining of soot and ashes, they could not have said.
Sometime that night Scarlet warmed the bathroom as much as she could, letting the steaming water run for ten minutes. In that small, hot room she undressed Bobby and herself slowly, then stepped with him into the shower, where she washed the dust from his face and hair. Now and then he stopped her, reaching for her hand, holding it to his face, his mouth.
Later, as she dried and combed his hair while he sat at her kitchen table, slicing a loaf of bread, it shocked her to see strands of gray that hadn’t, in fact, been streaks of ash that washed away. Only then did she let herself remember: They weren’t teenagers anymore.
That night she piled extra blankets on her bed, and he clung to her, again, as they slept. For two days she didn’t leave his side.
She can’t recall, now, what she was feeling then. She wonders if anyone remembers what they felt for those first few days. She remembers watching Hollywood stars taking phone contributions, an odd assortment of members of Congress singing “God Bless America.” She talked to Addie and Tom, who wanted her to come home to Burnham. And the whole time she kept her eyes on Bobby, who had showered and shaved, but still couldn’t quite get warm.
In Hovering Flight Page 23