Louder Than Love

by Topper, Jessica

  Backing out, I pondered the fate of Don Gato and the cat that came back the very next day. And how much lighter you would take life if you knew you had nine of them.

  Pigeon vs. Statue

  I dreamed about Adrian Graves that night.

  Which was weird and improbable, since I had never laid eyes on the man.

  I blamed all that talk with Marissa. And the chocolate.

  On Friday morning, I fanned my body out like a sleepy snow angel in my soon-to-be-donated bed and waited for Abbey to perform her ritual six a.m. tear-in-and-leap. Number-One Mom Rule: She had to fall asleep in her own bed, but she could come in during the wee hours to wake up with me. Although she often spun her little body around like a demented pinwheel during sleep, flopping arms and kicking legs, she was still a warm and delightful thing to curl up next to.

  I flipped onto my belly and stretched. There was a time in the recent past when I could bury my nose into the sheets and still smell a vague lingering of my husband, his scent locked deep within the fibers of the mattress upholstery. Real or imagined, it was a mixture of his shaving cream, clean sweat, and that papaya shampoo he preferred, and was uniquely him. I inhaled deeply and realized I had slept alone in this bed for many more nights than together with Pete. Yet I still expected the smell and the memory of him to envelop me each time I lay down.

  It was time. My friend Leanna and her husband, Ed, would arrive in a few short hours, and we would yank it out of the house and hurl it into their truck and be done with it. The thought was cathartic yet tragic at the same time. I felt like I was putting a faithful pet out of its misery. Crying my eyes out as it sat stoic and silent, accepting the end was near and waiting for it.

  Rolling to my side, I placed one hand on the hollow of my hip, a place where Pete liked to rest his fingers. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; it wasn’t part of the plan.

  Ah, but Man plans and God laughs.

  Isn’t that the most annoying thing people feel compelled to say when something bad happens? Now truthfully, does God, with all his divine wisdom, really have such time to waste? Does he get his kicks by squashing his thumb into each and every Day Runner and PalmPilot out there, saying “Ha HA, take that!”?

  I guess I’m not a very spiritual person. I don’t think things always “happen for a reason,” everything must be “God’s way,” or (and this is one of Karen’s favorites) “He only gives you what you can handle.” I simply believe, and I am sorry to sound crude about it, that shit happens. Period.

  Sometimes you are the pigeon.

  Sometimes you are the statue.

  I heard the shuffle and drop of two feet in the next room and braced myself for the machine-gun pitter-patter of Abbey, my little whirling dervish of footy pajamas and sweat-soaked curls. The girl had yet to master telling time, but she had an uncanny knack for beating my alarm to the punch. The mattress bounced with all thirty pounds of her. Settling into that soft hollow between my armpit and breast, she quickly drifted back to sleep. Allowing me to drift back into my memories.

  If you really are from the other school of thought, then I guess you could say Pete and I were doomed from the start.

  ***

  We met the first day of our Intellectual Freedom class at Columbia. I fell for the cute journalism major sitting next to me amid a sea of information science students. And Pete fell asleep next to, as he later put it, the prettiest future librarian in the room. His head dropped on my shoulder that first day, and each day after. I had him pegged for a narcoleptic until my friends and I saw him working the door late one night at our local college music club.

  I wouldn’t call this door guy a bouncer. He wasn’t like the thick-necked, tribal-tattooed, biceps-flexing guys from Brooklyn who paced around the West End Gate. But he was there every night to collect our five dollar cover charge and deposit a big X in black Sharpie on the back of our hands that wouldn’t wash off for half a week. He always had a nice, albeit tight-lipped, smile for me and amused eyes, warm and brown. On one occasion, he’d had on a fedora that reminded me of a hat a 1950s newsman might wear perched jauntily on his head. All it needed was a press card tucked into the brim and he’d be all set.

  “New hat?” I’d queried, watching as he Sharpied the thin skin between my wrist and knuckles. The guy grinned fully, exposing a crooked front top tooth and somewhat longer than normal canines.

  “Nah. Bad haircut,” he’d replied, pulling off the hat with a flourish to display a head shorn as close as a market lamb in spring. “Beware the barber of Astor Place.”

  “Whoa.” I jokingly stepped back, then reconsidered. “Can I rub it for good luck? I’ve got a final on Monday and I shouldn’t even be out tonight.” He had modestly obliged, lowering his head and allowing me to rub my palm over the soft stubble.

  He had a laugh that you just wanted to bottle up for future use on a cloudy day. I liked the way his wolfy smile changed the whole look of his face, but had a feeling he perfected the closed-lipped version out of a self-conscious effort to avoid showing the world.

  The rest, they say, is history. I got an A on my test, and Pete’s hair eventually grew back. I finished my master’s that year, one of the last students to graduate from Columbia’s School of Library Service before they closed their doors. Pete had one more year of journalism school, so I moved into his tiny apartment on 110th and Broadway and we settled into domestic bliss. His first job out of school was copyediting for a major current affairs magazine, which he loved. Mine was the Public Library, which I hated. It was Pete who got me an interview at the magazine’s research library. Within three years, I was heading up my own team of researchers as director there, and Pete was off making a name for himself at the Observer.

  Jobs brought money, which bought a co-op on the Upper West Side and a glittery carat of promise. Silver Hammer, our favorite Beatles tribute band, was playing “In My Life” at the West End Gate as Pete met me at the door and placed a big black Sharpie X on my hand and a diamond on my finger amid cheers from friends and family. The same band played at our wedding a year later, and I can still remember twirling in my white Betsey Johnson dress and singing “When I’m Sixty-Four” with Pete. I think there is a picture of it somewhere, snapped that night by Pete’s younger brother, Luke, a professional photographer moonlighting as best man.

  News of Abbey arrived on New Year’s Eve, 1998. She was definitely not something we had planned, but we toasted and kissed in Pete’s office high over Times Square, squirreling away our little secret until the spring. She was due on both of our late grandmothers’ shared birthday. We toyed with the idea of naming her after them, but figured Lily Millie Lewis was too much for one little girl to handle. Pete took one look at her dark hair swirled up into a slick Mohawk and her perfect matchstick fingers and was in love.

  “Abbey,” he announced, “after Abbey Road.” And it was perfect. Exactly thirty years to the day the Beatles released their masterpiece, we introduced ours to the world.

  We liked to think of ourselves as spontaneous practical minds, heads in the clouds with feet planted firmly on the ground most of the time. It was a delightful combination. Nothing was too impossible to dream up, yet we had several years solidly mapped out ahead of us. How about a family sabbatical? Why not France? On the day of the wreck, we were discussing our options abroad for the following year. We wanted Abbey to have the opportunity to parlez Français before she started nursery school, a well-researched one she had been placed on the waiting list for soon after the results of the first ultrasound. (Which is actually not that uncommon a practice in Manhattan.) The newspaper was willing to grant Pete his request, even after their generous allowance of six months of work-from-home paternity leave.

  That had been another plan of ours, once the baby arrived: I would stay home for the first six months of her life, and then Pete would take over for the remainder of her first year. We wanted at least one of us to
personally witness each and every milestone, rather than to be told “she took her first steps” or “she talked today” by a nanny as she punched the clock and rushed out the door.

  Pete’s paternity leave was forced to end three weeks early, when his senior editor needed him to cover a story down in Washington on some foreign diplomat from some country I had never heard of. He had tried to explain the significance to me the evening before, but it hadn’t registered; too many two a.m. feedings had fogged my brain. France and the sabbatical couldn’t come soon enough.

  We commuted together that morning, the day of the wreck, for the first time since Abbey was born.

  In my mind, it will forever be a wreck, not an accident. An accident is what happens when Abbey is too busy playing to make it to the potty on time. Or when a waiter carrying a tray of dishes crashes into a door swinging the opposite way. Accidents can be apologized for, smoothed over, explained away.

  A wreck is different.

  A wreck . . . does just that. It damages beyond repair.

  I remember distinctly how it felt to be pushed against him on that packed A train during morning rush hour. I had my wrist curled on the pole for balance, and he had an arm curled around me to anchor both of us. It was jarring and disconcerting to be out in the fast-paced public together after months spent in that new parenthood cocoon. But I was able to block out everything, from the sardinelike suited travelers swaying silently in unison to the squeal and clack of the cars as we hurtled downtown, simply by pressing my face into my husband’s neck and inhaling. Shaving cream and papaya shampoo.

  To the casual observer, Pete could still pass for a college student, with his cocoa-brown locks forever in his eyes and his quick and warm lippy grin. He still reserved baring his goofy wolf teeth just for his two favorite girls. That day, he was wearing army green cargo shorts, a pair of All Stars, and a Yo La Tengo T-shirt that had clearly seen better days. The only things vaguely grown-up about him were the scruff on his chin and the wardrobe bag that carried his suit. The interview was scheduled for three o’clock, so he had plenty of time to head to his hotel and make the transformation from Manhattan hipster dad to Washington watchdog journalist.

  Behind Pete’s head and above the rows of orange and yellow seats of hard plastic ran a Poetry in Motion poster, the MTA’s way of injecting culture into you whether you wanted it or not. I remember it was a poem by Stephen Crane, “A Man Said to the Universe.” The title sticks with me to this day, and I keep reminding myself to find and reread the poem, but never do.

  We hopped off at Penn Station, and rather than kill time in the air-conditioned terminal, Pete walked me up to the steamy street level and bought me a coffee at our favorite street vendor. We had both forgone breakfast, choosing to spend maximum morning time with Abbey before turning her over to Ilana, our occasional babysitter turned regular nanny.

  And so we spent our final moment together chatting while he chugged an Orangina and I blew across the top of my We are happy to serve you Greek key trim coffee cup. Nothing memorable or profound; had we been making a romance movie with a dramatic, tear-jerking good-bye scene, we never would have made it past the cutting room floor. No rainy, foggy airstrip runways in Casablanca, just a rushed good-bye at the doors of Penn Station as people careened around us from every direction.

  “If you think of it, could you go to B&H on your lunch hour? I dropped some film off last week.” His lips touched my forehead, my nose, and each of my temples as if performing an erotic sign of the cross. His own nose, so straight and Grecian, pressed against my earlobe. “The roll from Central Park.”

  “I’ll try. What time does your train get in on Sunday? Maybe we can meet you.”

  “Not sure. I’ll call you when I get to the hotel. Love you!” Our kiss was hasty as he allowed himself to get sucked into the flow of traffic heading down the stairs to catch the 7:05 Regional.

  Sun Kink

  I walked to my office, two blocks west of Penn. I loved getting to work before any of my staff. I could catch up on e-mail, work uninterrupted on a particularly tough query from an editor, or sometimes just sit with my cup of coffee and brainstorm. And occasionally, I would work out. The magazine had renovated the Tenth Avenue building that year, complete with a gym on the top floor and basketball courts on the roof. Having to close an issue weekly was stressful, and people tended to put in long hours and late nights. It was great having the gym to work off some energy, or to build some up.

  In my case, it came in handy when working off the baby bulge. Not that I had a lot; I was one of those lucky ladies who all the other moms hate, fitting back into my prepregnancy jeans a few months after delivering. Still, I was having a hard time getting my abs in shape. Of course, my friends would only commiserate so much. “Kiss my big fat lily-white ass!” was Marissa’s favorite retort if I complained about my weight or how my body looked. She had been heavier than me our entire friendship, but it was never really an issue; we joked, we complained, we complimented equally. But it was hard to press home to her that it’s all in what you’re used to. I was the heaviest I had ever been, so I felt it and saw it, even if no one else really did.

  After an hour and a half of playing catch-up in my office, I beelined to the gym. My exercise of choice was running; outside of work, I would zoom Abbey through the park in her jogging stroller like it was our own personal rickshaw. At work, I used the treadmill. My favorite one was closest to the wall and to the TV, where I could catch up with the morning’s news by reading the closed captioning as it flickered past. Sometimes I ran on my lunch hour, but that was really just an excuse to catch the trashy talk shows.

  That morning, I set the timer for thirty minutes. I set the incline to 15 percent and the speed at four miles per hour. Al Roker was miming the weather on the screen, and I studied the day’s highs as I began my ascent.

  We had stepped into September, but the hot days scorched on. The subways smelled like piss and bologna baking in a thousand-degree kiln. People on the streets looked wilted and pissed off. Today would be no different, with highs in the mid to upper nineties. We were already at 91° F at 8:58 a.m., according to Mr. Roker.

  As I advanced from a fast walk to a steady trot, I let my mind wander. Abbey’s first birthday was approaching, and the in-laws were trekking in from Philadelphia. I had to figure out where to house them in our crowded two-bedroom apartment. They were threatening to stay with Pete’s brother, Luke, instead, but he had yet to tell them the apartment he shared with a “roommate” was actually a studio he was sharing with his partner, Kimon. So Pete and I were taking one for the team. 23:58 to go, 40 calories burned. Marissa and Rob had theater tickets next Saturday and had asked us to babysit. Maybe I would take the kids to the zoo. Did I pay the cable bill? It had been lying on the fireplace mantle for two weeks. Jennifer had better not be late to work today, that would make five times this month. Time to invest in a better jogging bra. Abbey had weaned herself a month ago, but good God, the girls hurt! Studying the TV rather than the treadmill display made time go much faster. Argh, 11 minutes to go, my legs are killing me, let’s run downhill. Incline at –1.5, 8 minutes to go, 190 calories burned. Hmm, übercute guy Dan from the legal department just got on the treadmill two down from me. 1:51 minutes to go, 151 . . . What are they saying? 7:05 a.m. train 151, 60 miles per hour, Pete’s train, DC, 9:07 a.m., mile marker 42.5, train 151, DC, three dead, 94° F, TURN UP THE TV, 230 onboard, 68 injured, TURN IT UP, 7:05 . . . DC . . . 151 . . . 60 . . . 3 . . . 00:00 . . . 00:00 . . . I can’t turn it off . . . TURN IT OFF . . . TURN IT OFF.

  I don’t know if I was screaming out loud or just in my head.

  I was helped off the treadmill by Dan from legal and Rich from marketing. They called up my assistant, Daisy. Somehow I was ushered home; somehow Liz was summoned from across town to come sit with me in silent vigil.

  Somehow I knew it was Pete. I knew before the police came to tell me and bef
ore the coroner confirmed it.

  My ears took in the information they gave me, and my brain filed that information into a cerebral cabinet that housed only my darkest thoughts and fears. What really happened to Pete sits there, written in an ancient guttural language I cannot decipher. The information that I am able to share out loud sounds more like a newspaper report: factual, objective.

  Push a button. Hear me speak it.

  An eastbound train struck a misalignment in the track at 9:07 a.m. on September 1 while traveling sixty miles per hour near milepost 42.5 between Newark, Delaware, and Aberdeen, Maryland. Four cars went down an embankment and overturned against trees. At first report, three people were killed, five were in critical condition, and sixty-three others suffered from minor injuries. By the end of the day, the number of deaths had risen to seven. The misalignment, often referred to as a sun kink, was determined to be caused by improperly tamped ballast and excessive speed in the 94° F sunny weather.

  Sun kink. I had existed for thirty years without ever coming across that term. Suddenly, it took over my daily life like some nightmarish mantra. One of the wrongful death attorneys once referred to it as a “thermal kink,” causing me to actually laugh out loud in my shocked state. My mind conjured up a ridiculous image of people in their long johns, getting busy.

  But sun kink . . . those words have taken on an almost mystical, pagan persona in my mind. A power possessed by a solar deity not to be messed with.

  The funeral played out like a wedding in reverse. Instead of eagerly searching around town for weeks like I did before the wedding to find the perfect shoes in the exact cream hue to complement my gown, I listlessly hunted around in my closet on the morning of the service to find black pumps to go with my black dress, black mood, black soul. Abbey and I were picked up in a limo, although there was no champagne chilling like there had been when Pete and I jumped into ours on our way from ceremony to reception. Best man and matron of honor had caroused across town with us that night; on the day of the funeral, Luke and Marissa sat on either side of me, squeezing my hands. Both sets of parents rode silently across from us.