We fade into the sea of mourners, and for a moment I feel almost cozy in our shared pain.
I survey the field of the Affected. There are men in suits carrying framed photos of their dead wives. There are seven-year-old kids grinning and missing the point because they’ve never known life with their mother or father. There are ancient mothers with puffy eyes and gruff men with shiny, new wedding rings. There are kids our age—looking at their phones, in groups, with wrinkled suits, crying, wishing they were somewhere else.
I’m looking at them.
Until I find that they are looking at me.
I wish away my silvery hair and my height. I wish away my mother’s sharp, recognizable features and Cruz’s handsome face. I wish away the article most of all.
A girl with short blue hair and big brown eyes smiles and waves at me, as if she knows me. I wave back as a reflex.
She takes a few steps in our direction, so that we’re in earshot.
“I love you guys,” she says. “So badass.”
“Oh,” I say. I guess she means me and Isla and Delilah and Charlotte. But I don’t know what it is she likes about us—our long hair or my sunglasses or the way we answered the reporters in short, surly statements, leaving Angelika to fill out the article with elaborate descriptions of the Curse, of the old days of Devonairre, of her dead husband and our responsibility. I have no idea what about us could possibly be badass. I’m practically dressed as a pioneer woman today—wool itching my calves and my neck. Mom’s right, though. Underneath there’s wanting and feeling and the length of my legs and the ways they could wrap around Cruz.
They can hide it, but they can’t make it disappear.
“No comment,” I say like a person on TV. The girl with blue hair scrunches her nose and rolls her eyes. She walks away but not before snapping a picture of me and Cruz.
A few men in their forties overheard the blue-haired girl point me out, and their eyes light up with that same recognition. More men’s and women’s faces flash on the screen, more names boom over the speakers, but even here, even now, we are more compelling.
“Bitch,” one of them mumbles under his breath.
It makes my knees ache. It makes my throat close.
“This new generation. So entitled,” his friend says.
“What the hell is she wearing?” a woman behind them says. It’s the same question women ask when we’re in short skirts or tights. We are wrong, always, no matter what.
There are other whispers around us now, growing like rolls of thunder, the beginning of a storm.
Fame-whores.
Sluts.
Selfish.
Attention-grabbing.
Careless.
Hilarious.
Feminist.
So fake.
The sanctity of the event.
Rubbing our face in the—
Not caring about who they—
The real victims—
That street—
Those girls—
“Okay, all right, we gotta get out of here,” Cruz says. I’m dizzy from the way people are looking at me. It brings me back to Jack’s funeral and the awful way they looked at us then. We aren’t allowed at sacred events anymore. We aren’t permitted to mourn the people we’ve lost.
Maria and Mrs. Chen and Ashley are busy pulling Mrs. Rodriguez into an embrace as Alejandro Rodriguez’s picture hits the enormous screen. I want to take a moment and look at his face, but it’s our moment to leave. Even my mother has stopped listening to the things people are saying about me as the alphabet moves toward my father’s name. She’s so busy waiting to hear Patrick Ryder she doesn’t notice Cruz taking my hand and moving me away from the crowd, away from the Memorial.
We slip past the people who don’t know me but hate me anyway, or admire me, or pity me. We move quickly so that by the time the Devonairre Street ladies remember to keep their eyes on us, it will be too late.
It takes time getting out of the park. The field is crowded and even with my head down, my long hair is a giveaway. I try to tune out the words they’re whispering about me.
I pause only when I hear my father’s name. We are almost out of earshot, but not quite. We turn around, and there he is on the screen. Smiling. He had big front teeth and a scar on his chin. He had my pale skin but dark hair. I can’t breathe.
“I know,” Cruz says. “He’d want you to get out of here, though.”
And that much I know is true.
Cruz and I make it to the edge of the crowd, then to the edge of the park, then to the sidewalk. There’s police tape everywhere, keeping people out of the park. It’s like a quarantine.
“Are we who people think we are?” I ask. He laughs.
We haven’t laughed in a while. We’re still holding hands. We grip harder, our palms going numb from the pressure.
“We’ve never been who they think we are, right?”
I search the sky for an answer. Then my hands. I look at them like they might be able to tell me who I am. I pull at the key around my neck.
I shrug. “They used to say I was brave, but all I felt was sad. I never match up with the thing they say I am. Seven years ago I was only allowed to be Lorna Whose Father Was Killed in the Bombing and nothing else. And now I’m this other thing. And I can’t be anything else but that girl in the picture.”
“The Falling Girl,” Cruz says. He nods at the mess of things I’ve said, and I think he is the only person in the world who understands every word.
“The Falling Girl,” I say, except I think I already fell.
The Fallen Girl, I think, and shiver at how right it sounds.
26.
We go into the city, Cruz and I. We don’t talk about it, we just hop on the A train and get off at Times Square, like our fathers have been calling us there.
“We can stay down here,” Cruz says before we emerge onto the street, when we’re still on the subway platform. It’s the nicest platform in the city—glossy black tiles on the ground and a mural of the Affected on the walls. It had to get renovated after the Bombing, and they made it a strange combination of sleek and crafty.
The muralist painted thousands of Affecteds’ faces onto the long walls of every line of the Times Square subway system. He didn’t paint the Victims, only the families.
I forgot all about it.
“Are we somewhere on here?” I ask. We came to get away from being seen, but if we wanted to truly escape being known as Affected, Times Square probably wasn’t the place to come.
“We’re by the One train.”
“You’ve looked?”
“It felt weird, thinking there was some picture of me somewhere that I’d never seen. It was keeping me up at night.” Cruz looks embarrassed. He shouldn’t be. I’m surprised, though, that he has secrets from me.
Everyone has them, I hear my dad say again.
“I try to pretend it’s not happening,” I say. “Like, I heard about the mural and decided he’d probably never get around to painting my face, so it was no big deal.”
Cruz puts his hand on the back of my neck and we don’t discuss going to look at ourselves. We don’t need to see a painting of the way we look—we’re right here.
I don’t take in the other Affected on the walls either. I want them to have their privacy.
When we get out of the subway and onto the street I remember why I never come here. I have memories of the old Times Square—neon and flashing and crowded with gawking tourists. I remember the tall buildings caging us in, and the constant stream of yellow cabs honking on the street, and the cartoon character mascots asking you in their smokers’ voices if you wanted to take a picture for a few bucks.
I pretend that no one is noticing me, but some people on the subway definitely did and someone will here, too. There’s no hiding. Especially
not today.
“Devonairre Street feels far away,” Cruz says, stretching his arms high above his head like the real problem with our street is lack of space or something.
The streets are crowded with people with candles.
“Not that far,” I say.
Next I notice the buildings, the ones that aren’t there anymore. The rebuilding has been slow. In the immediate few blocks there aren’t any buildings that reach higher than a few stories, and there are dozens of empty lots, places where skyscrapers used to be. Places where people used to be.
“This was a bad idea,” Cruz says.
“It was a joint effort. I didn’t want to be in Brooklyn. But . . .”
Cruz and I look at the same things—a few storefronts with psychics, a bunch of wreaths and flowers and photographs strewn about as mini-shrines to the people we’ve lost, and street artists selling photographs and paintings of the old Times Square.
Remember, remember, remember, the whole place seems to be calling, which is really only an awful reminder to me that other people are allowed to forget.
“You want a picture? You want to remember?” an old man with an accent like Angelika’s calls out to us. We shake our heads no and try not to make eye contact with him. A crowd of white-candled kids our age push by us. They don’t look at us, and the man doesn’t recognize us, and we’re grateful for the moment to take it all in alone, without being observed.
“I want them to rebuild it,” Cruz says, looking around. It’s not in shambles anymore. The rubble is gone, the dust and ash are gone, but he’s right—it needs to be taken off pause. It needs to become whatever it will be in the After.
“My dad would have loved a project like that,” I say, thinking of his blueprints and the stories he told about how the Brooklyn Bridge was built, why Penn Station was rebuilt, the wonder of Grand Central Station, the glory of the Twin Towers, which I still look at hearing his voice in my head.
“I can picture your dad rebuilding the city,” Cruz says, and I can picture it, too. I smile at him. It hurts, but it also helps, sometimes, to picture the what-might-have-been, the lives they could have had.
The lives we could have had.
“That’s her!” one of the other artists calls out. She’s a middle-aged woman with very white sneakers and a nasal voice.
“Hey! You shouldn’t be here!” someone else says. “You’re that girl! That Cursed girl!”
“That shit’s a joke,” a guy our age says. “Pretentious Brooklyn assholes.”
“This is a sacred space,” the woman who saw us first says.
I laugh. I don’t mean to, but calling the place where five thousand people died sacred is so wrong. Sacred implies beautiful and clean and healing, and this place is the opposite.
“She’s laughing!” someone says.
“Of course she’s laughing; didn’t you read about her and her friends?”
“Where’s your respect? How dare you come here? And today of all days!”
Candles extinguish from the spit that comes out of their mouths while they yell. Some people move away from us, like we’re toxic. Others move closer to us and I’m nervous they might touch us or hit us or forcibly remove us. Tons of people take pictures with their phones. I can already see them up on the internet with captions declaring who I am, when I’m not even so sure.
“Who’d you lose in the Bombing?” I ask no one and everyone. I look from person to person. Most of them look at the ground. One woman in ripped jeans pulls her shoulders back.
“We’ve lost so many New Yorkers,” she says, indignant. “There are so many Affected. So many. And you being here is a slap in the face. This isn’t for you.”
“But who’d you know?” I’m surprised at my own voice. It’s deeper than I thought; it carries farther. Many of the candle-holders have stopped walking. All the painting-sellers have stopped shouting at passersby.
“I’m sorry?” The woman rolls her eyes, looks at the other candle-holders, licks her lips.
“Did you know anyone who died in the Bombing? Did you lose a single person?”
“I can list all of their names,” the woman says, but I can see her getting flustered, looking for words. She starts listing them in alphabetical order, the way some people have memorized them. “Aaron Abromowitz, Alice Akerson, Arthur—”
“I’m asking who you lost. Who you miss. Specifically.” I feel strong. The woman doesn’t have anything to say. She chooses to be sad today, but doesn’t have to be other days. She has a thin nose and too much blush. She’s awful.
“We all share the pain of—”
“This is where my father was killed. This is my place.” I point to Cruz. “This is his place. You’re all—you’re borrowing our feelings. Our fathers. You’re borrowing them to feel something of your own. But this place isn’t yours. This day isn’t yours. This heartbreak”—I get a pain in my chest, quick and hard and brutal—“this heartbreak isn’t yours.”
The woman doesn’t stand back, but people around her do. A few of them blow out their candles, and that feels good. Cruz takes my hand. That feels good, too.
For an instant it is ours, this terrible, ravaged place. The artists nearby don’t call out for tragedy-tourists to buy their paintings and photographs. The candle-holders lower their lights and make room for us to walk by them. The lady in the ripped jeans with the terrible voice and the list of five thousand names of dead people on the tip of her tongue keeps her legs planted but she shifts her shoulders a little so that she’s no longer facing us, and that, too is a victory.
She lowers her head as we cross 42nd Street.
• • •
By evening our photograph is all over the internet.
AFFECTED BOY AND CURSED GIRL REMEMBER THEIR FATHERS AMID CONTROVERSY.
I don’t read the article. But I save the picture and keep it with me, to remind me of something, I’m not sure what.
27.
“This party looks a lot like the other party,” Cruz whispers to me that evening at the Anniversary Party. We have one every year. It’s only ever been us. LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla. But this year the party has multiplied.
People I’ve never seen before arrive unannounced with six-packs and snarls. Guys with thick arms and girls with long hair give us hugs and look at my home like it’s a museum.
One of them picks up a saltshaker and another stands extra close to a photograph of our family on the wall, staring at our faces as if there were something to learn there.
“This reminds you of last year’s party?” I say. I’m distracted watching Isla dance on the coffee table and Delilah sit on the kitchen counter, starting a new round of red-and-white bracelets. Every girl here is already wearing one of them. Three girls have Charlotte’s braids. I can feel my picture getting taken and it makes my head hurt.
“The other party.”
It takes me too long to realize he’s talking about the night Jack died.
I look around. Isla on the coffee table, her hair piled up on her head, her shirt inching up past her belly button; Charlotte eyeing her like she might fall over, nursing a beer; Delilah in the kitchen; me and Cruz talking to each other from separate chairs while the couch stays empty.
Chairs seem safer.
I guess it’s the same but it’s different, too.
Delilah is alone.
Jack is gone.
Owen is gone, too, of course. Owen is gone like he was never here at all. I’m embarrassed by how little he actually meant to me. How far I was from love with him. I feel the absence of Jack and the shift in Delilah, but I can’t even feel the missing piece of Owen.
The place is crowded with wall-to-wall people. I didn’t invite them. Delilah and Charlotte and Cruz didn’t invite them. One of them asks for lavender tea. Another asks if there’s honey cake. They have done their research. The boy
s look like they want to be tough—they have pink hair or Brooklyn accents or black boots or flasks of their own. They have smirks and eyeliner or football jerseys and cigarettes. The girls have loose tops and key necklaces and zodiac tattoos and tarot cards on our kitchen counter, and one of them is wearing a heart sweater.
There is only one person on Devonairre Street who would want to turn a LornaCruzCharlotteDelilahIsla party into an all-school party of posers and hangers-on. And that someone is licking the side of her bottle of beer after some of it splashed out. She is smiling at a sophomore boy with a small nose and enormous jeans. She is wiggling her fingers at someone who just came in the door.
“It’s not that much like that night,” I say. I wonder whether Cruz is somehow blind to the people taking over my apartment, to the disaster his sister has created. To the way we are museum pieces and objects of interest but not actual people.
Or maybe Cruz is only looking at me.
“I can’t remember the sound of the crash,” Cruz says.
“That’s probably a good thing,” I say. “You don’t want to remember that sound.”
“You remember,” Cruz doesn’t ask but proclaims. I wish we were on the couch. We should be on the couch, legs touching. But instead Charlotte is on the couch with a long-legged, tattooed Indian girl I don’t recognize and she hasn’t looked over at Cruz and me for a while. Delilah won’t stop looking at us.
I was foolish to imagine her splitting a bottle of wine with me, toasting my father, cheering up me and Cruz and Isla with her favorite memories of our dads.
She’s here to convert people.
Kids have to pass by her to get to the booze. They can’t seem to decide whether they want to rub against her or avoid her altogether.
“You’re so beautiful,” a drunk girl whispers in my ear.
“Can you feel the Curse in your veins?” a drunk boy asks. His breath smells like beer and he leans away from me after he’s asked the question.
The Careful Undressing of Love Page 19