Begrudgingly, Jacob had to admit that it was somewhat pleasant to listen to West Side Story and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours over and over again on the flight back (the only two withstandable CDs of his mother’s that he could find). And with a fresh set of pens and a pack of Kleenex, he managed to get all the way through Book 24 before they touched down in New York. That night, after Oliver fell asleep watching another nature program, Jacob got up and finished the concluding notes in the study. He worked all night without sleeping, and during the ride to Anchorage House, he read and reread the notes. It was the hardest he’d worked on anything since Shitstorm, and he wasn’t even a little sad to be giving it away.
That morning, before the wake-up rounds began, Jacob slipped the annotated copy of The Odyssey onto the bookshelf in Ward III. By lunchtime, it was gone. As he patrolled the outer hallway, he saw Ella in the cafeteria in deep-reading mode. Maura’s chatter from the other end of the table wasn’t causing even the slightest distraction. Ella’s eyes flew between the book and the notebook. In Feingold’s group, everything about her demeanor suggested that she was no longer present, besides bodily, in this universe. And as Sissy tried to get everyone to make hand puppets out of paper bags that afternoon, Ella glued on eyes and ribbons idly, her smile stretching and collapsing like the bellows of an accordion playing inaudible notes.
At last, in the afternoon Jacob had the chance to talk with her briefly in the common room. Paul was watching, he could tell, and so were Dr. Dorothy and Dr. Wilkens, from where they were conferencing next door, but Jacob had no reason left to care. Whatever happened, this thing was hers.
Ella clutched the book as if it might run away. “You did this?”
“That?” Jacob looked carefully. “Appears to be the work of a fellow named ‘Ho-mer.’”
Ella looked at the ceiling, as if the right words might be up there. “Well. Thank you. I mean. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You did already. Just before there . . . when you said ‘thank you.’”
She got a look as if contemplating many, many things that she couldn’t possibly find the time to say. At last she settled on “Okay, this time you have to explain though. Why?”
“Just something to take with you when you go.”
“No, I mean, why this book? Not that I’m—not that I don’t love it. I love it.”
Jacob wanted to tell her that it was something he’d needed to reclaim; something someone else hadn’t been able to finish; a journey he’d needed to take, vicariously. He wished there was time to sit and explain it all. But she was due to be picked up just after his shift.
“A while ago I saw your mug in the art room. You wrote ‘Odysseus’ around the rim.”
“Uh, yeah. In Greek,” Ella said. She could hardly keep from laughing. “My boyfriend—” She had to try again. “My ex. I don’t know what he is. Anyway, his middle name is Ulysses.”
Jacob felt himself blush and wondered if this was the guy he’d seen in her prom photos.
“Ulysses? What, is he from Brooklyn or something?”
She danced backward a little. “No, his parents are big Civil War nuts. They do those re-creations and things? He hates it. But I always thought it was kind of sweet. I was going to get it tattooed on my wrist. Anyway, I learned to write it in Greek like that so nobody would figure it out.”
Then, moving up onto the window ledge for a moment, she lowered her voice. “We were still dating the first time I was here, and I was kind of obsessed, talking about him all the time and doing stupid stuff like weaving his initials into these Native American dream catchers that Sissy was having us make. She told me I had to knock it off. Said it wasn’t healthy.”
He was sure his face was red now. “Sorry. I guess I thought it was your favorite book.”
“Well. It is now,” she said.
Jacob, who hadn’t been nervous talking to a girl since around the third grade, found himself at a loss. “You always looked as if you were trying so hard at everything here. You’re a smart kid, and you’re going to do great things with your life, and I guess it sucks that it’s always going to be a little harder for you than for other people, and you’ll have to stay on your medication, and sometimes you’re still going to see a homeless guy on the street or something and it’s going to break your heart, and you’ll want to crawl under a rock somewhere and hide everything good that you’ve got to offer from the world because it’s going to seem like the world doesn’t deserve it, but I promise it does—”
Jacob was talking so fast and gesticulating so wildly that he was running out of breath. Paul was staring at him now like he had three ears. He was glad that he couldn’t see Dr. Dorothy out in the hallway, and he hoped she couldn’t see him. His lungs felt like rocks in his chest, and it was as if a great swarm of bees were building a honeycombed hive inside his skull. He felt the whole room wobble like the door to Oliver’s pickup truck, and then Ella was grabbing something—it looked like a paper bag for him to breathe into. He snatched it and held it up to his mouth, forcing out a deep breath that inflated the bag before either of them realized that it was, in fact, her hand-puppet from art therapy. Its googly eyes rattled as he inhaled, and the green pom-pom that had been its nose fell silently onto the rug.
Ella laughed first—a shocked and delighted giggle that she seemed unable to settle—and as Jacob mimed a little defensive stamping on the offending clown-puppet, that set her off even more. The other patients were all cracking up, and in a moment he felt Dr. Wilkens’s hand on his shoulder, coaxing him to head over to the nurse to get checked out.
Jacob tried to say he was fine, but it didn’t come out. He gave Ella a farewell salute, and she clutched the book to her chest again, mouthing the words thank you as he took shaky steps, backward, out of the room. After getting a little orange juice into his system, the nurse said she thought he’d be all right, but Oliver sent him home early just to be sure. It was only as he rode the bus back that he remembered the other thing he’d meant to write in the front of the book—that he’d signed up for Facebook, using his new phone. But in his haste to leave he’d left it in his locker. He thought, maybe in the morning, then, he’d send her an invitation, so they could be friends.
Sometime later that night, with no book to annotate, cold ginger beef in a takeout container at the foot of the bed, and more hilarity on the television, Jacob decided he’d wait another day or two. Tomorrow he’d get up and go through those gates again to Anchorage House. And she’d be off in her real life, and maybe it was all just better if he left it that way.
OCTOBER
October arrived, and with it the golden leaves around Anchorage House began to fall into the duck pond where Jacob, once again, resumed his daily vigil. Under the willow tree he would stand and think about what he’d said to Irene in the hospital, her smile, their conversation the night before about Hector, and the way Irene had felt in his arms when he carried her down the steps of the Met. He thought about the way she’d bent down before the pyramid walls and how she’d looked standing in front of the painted field of poppies. He remembered her on Shelter Island and how, out of everyone, she’d told him last because she’d known that of all of them, he was the one it would break. He’d always thought that being a cynic would prepare him for something like this, but she’d known that only made it worse, because it made you think you wouldn’t care, and yet of course you would. He thought even further back, to the way she’d looked in the hot tub that night on the roof of the Waldorf Astoria, opaque bra against the snow-blown skyline of Manhattan. He hadn’t gone to her wake, wasn’t planning on going to see the show Sara was organizing, of all the things Irene had been working on that year—not because she’d wasted herself on them but because he didn’t see how any of them could be more powerful than her simple being.
Jacob waited for the old routines at Anchorage House to resume their comfort, but week after week he found no
trace of the numbness he’d known before Ella. There were more hellos at Oliver’s office door and the same old snide remarks from Paul, this time about the new behavioral therapist—Dr. Patricia Cain, whose bosom seemed to occupy Paul’s every waking thought. Jacob was ready to find him a pacifier to suck on.
About the only real change was with Sissy Coltrane. She’d gone from being oddly friendly around him to being downright chummy—acting as if they were old buddies, asking if he was thinking about getting some different job soon. At the height of it, she even handed him an assortment of brochures to continuing education programs that she claimed to have stumbled upon one day in a public library somewhere. The programs ranged from nursing to publishing to information technology.
“Oliver told me you were thinking about going back to school. You know, I just feel like you can’t ever underestimate the value of a nice change. I lived out in the Midwest for a while after college. I worked on a ranch. Can you believe it?”
“I can, actually, believe that,” Jacob said.
“You’d love it.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “Just think about the poetry you could write in the mountains, the prairies. You know there are still places in this country that no human feet have ever touched? I miss the horses. Fishing in an icy stream on a summer’s day, blackbirds and locusts and all that. I’m telling you, the poems will practically write themselves.”
Jacob gagged. “That’s good, because I sure wouldn’t want to write them.”
Instead of getting annoyed, she slapped his shoulder, as if this were just typical Jacob. It was, but there wasn’t any typical anything between them, so why would she be acting like it?
“Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?” she asked.
After a little thought he said, “Think I’d really like to be a goatherd.”
“Brilliant!” Sissy clapped her hands as if he’d correctly identified a shape in a kindergartner’s lineup.
“I’d live way up on the side of a mountain with a long winding path down to the bottom. There’d be a river there, full of nymphs and woods nearby haunted by panpipes. And people from the town on the other side of the valley would cross the river and hike up the path and buy my goats whenever they needed to make sacrifices to the gods. I’d be known, mountain-wide, for having the best goats for currying godly favor.”
He could tell Sissy was mentally fitting him for a straitjacket. He just didn’t care.
“And there’d be this little cave on the far side of the mountain, at the right edge of the known world, where some horrific monster was rumored to dwell. The kind that spits acid and devours children whole. And anytime something went wrong, we’d all blame it on the monster. Bad weather, dead crops, sick relatives. Can you imagine? If evil was just this thing that lived down the road? Not some North Korean Napoleon or Afghani fundamentalist fanatic. Not some—some all-pervading uneasiness. Not some malignant cell on a mission. Imagine if you could point to a spot on a map and say, There—that’s where bad things come from.”
The phone rang on Sissy’s desk. Dropping her pencils in a pile onto the table, she swooshed over to pick it up. “Sissy Coltrane? . . . Oh hi, Oliver! You’re— . . . Oh yes, he’s here. Would you like me to send him over? . . . Oh. Sure. All right. Okay, bye now! Talk to you later.”
“Whither shall I wander?” Jacob asked, raising his arms to the ceiling.
“He says you’ve got a surprise visitor waiting out by the gates!”
Jacob felt the sudden weightlessness, the vanishing of all walls and floors and tables, the fresh new world of the top deck of a cruise liner. Had Ella really come back to visit him?
Wasting no time at all, he charged back to his locker, threw his jacket on over his work clothes, and marched outside and down the gravel driveway. A little green Prius was idling on the other side, its driver half hidden behind an enormous and fashionable pair of rounded orange sunglasses, hair trimmed short. He wondered what Ella could be saying to Winston that was cracking him up so much that he could hear him laughing all the way up by the old, disused, and slouching stables. But then she whipped the sunglasses off and Jacob saw her face.
It was Sara. He’d never seen her behind the wheel of a car before—back in college, George had driven them everywhere in his old beat-up station wagon. Now he recognized the haircut, and the glasses, from the Facebook photos of her and George at fancy cocktail gatherings in Boston, at the mahogany Harvard Faculty Club, at Tresca in the North End, in The New Bostonian’s corporate suite at Fenway Park.
Wishing the nuns had thought to dig a moat around the place, he waved as Winston opened the gates so Sara could drive in. She jumped out of the puttering car and ran to him—some feat in the cream-colored heels she was wearing. Mud splashed all over the old-lace bows on the toes as she tackled him in a slender-armed bear hug. He remembered the shoes had been Irene’s once—she’d blown almost two hundred dollars on them at Mel’s.
“Jacob!” she shouted, melting into his shoulders as she hugged him. Then, straightening herself up, she pulled a gold-embossed envelope from an orange ostrich-skin handbag that matched her sunglasses. “So this is where you work? Wait. I have to move my car before this nice man gets in trouble.”
He followed her back to the green Prius and climbed in. He was about to ask what she was doing here when she threw the gear into reverse. A black-and-white screen flickered on in the dashboard to show that the driveway behind them was clear, and a sensor went off when she got too close to one of the brick walls as she K-turned around.
“Um, my shift isn’t over for another hour, crazy.”
Sara flashed her eyes at him mischievously. “You’re being kidnapped! I’m sorry, but it was the only way. This morning I called Oliver, and he agreed wholeheartedly that you needed to be taken down to the city for a belated birthday bacchanal.”
“He said that?”
“Well, no, he said you’d become a ‘first-class mope,’ and I said you always were a first-class mope but that if you’d recently reached platinum mope status, something had to be done.”
They were speeding down the street toward the southbound Hutchinson River Parkway. Jacob knew that the more he resisted, the more Sara would insist.
“Could we make a quick stop at Oliver’s? I’m still in my uniform.”
Sara appeared delighted. “I get to see the flat?”
It took Jacob a moment to remember that he had told Irene all about “the flat” last year and that, as with everything in their circle, it had soon been repeated.
“How would you like to see the Szechuan Garden?”
Even after all this time, he knew her far too well.
Before long they were seated across from each other in his usual spot, just back from the side window. Jacob had changed his clothes at Oliver’s and now looked “dashing” according to Sara, in a blue striped shirt and dark wool pants. As they had their first round of Tsingtaos, she outlined the epic evening that she had planned for them: they were to eat nothing too filling here at the old Szechuan Garden, because she had a seven-thirty appointment with a caterer at Seventeen Madison, which meant they’d feast on free samples of passed hors d’oeuvres (including the chef’s famous pickled radishes), minted lamb lollipops, rock shrimp served on Himalayan salt blocks, and of course the signature sirloin Sriracha sliders.
After that there would be a cake tasting at Happy Puppy Wonder Cakes, down in SoHo, which had the best lavender buttercream frosting and the infamous “crack” cookie pie filling that had been deemed the “city’s crackiest” by New York magazine that summer. After that, dancing was possible, depending on the crowd at Niagara, to be followed by drinks at an Oscar Wilde–themed speakeasy called Dorian Gray’s, which was “secretly” located behind a full-length portrait of a French cavalier in an otherwise excellent crêperie on Allen Street. You had to
pull on one of the light fixtures next to the painting and then tell the painting how many in your party, and if there was room, the picture would slide over to let you in. If not, you wrote your cell-phone number on a piece of paper and slipped it through a small crack in the wall, and someone would text you when there was a booth available.
Jacob didn’t know where to begin: perhaps that there’d never been prohibition on alcohol in Ireland, where Oscar Wilde had been born, or in London or France where he’d later lived, and that he’d died more than twenty years before there was any need for speakeasies here in America. But he listened to Sara gush about these places she’d been dying to go ever since leaving the city. It was as if nothing had changed for her. She thought she could walk back in, and it would all be the same. She told him he was welcome to crash that night in her hotel room, where George would meet them in the morning.
Jacob didn’t see the point in arguing, seeing as he had absolutely no intention of doing any of this. They were on their second round of Tsingtaos, and it wasn’t quite five o’clock. He’d never seen Sara have more than three before needing to curl up and take a nap somewhere. Already he was planning on persuading her to come back to Oliver’s. He found himself only half listening to her as she spoke. Scarlet leaves scattered as the bus rolled up and sighed to a stop outside the window. Needlessly, he ran his eyes down the familiar columns of misspelled food items and pointed out his favorites to Sara.
She reached across the table and took his hand in hers. “I’m so glad to see you’re okay, Jake. We’ve all been worried about you.”
Her eyes were red underneath heavier-than-usual mascara. We all? Who did she mean, besides herself and George? Was she still talking to William, even? He thought about telling her that he’d nearly driven up last month, after Oliver’s dad died, but instead he asked, “How is Georgina doing?”
She let her eyelids flutter shut as if she couldn’t bear to look at him as she said it. “He’s hanging in there. He’s—you know. I think of all of us, he was probably the least ready for what happened.”
Why We Came to the City Page 32