by Rumaan Alam
“Nothing.” Ian coughed. He looked embarrassed. “I put my hands on my head. My face on the road. I waited. I counted. It took forever. Ten minutes. Minutes and minutes. Hundreds and hundreds of seconds. I kept counting. It was like when Ivy was born. And the nurse said, Count with me. Count. Keep counting like your life depends on it. Make Mom breathe, Mom, meaning Cheryl, get her to breathe. That’s what I did. I did that.”
This was still inside of Rebecca’s body, this counting, this breathing. Jacob would be twelve in the fall. A dozen years since she’d been in that room, outnumbered and afraid, breathed as her body tore asunder and the baby who became the near man in the next room, the one watching cartoons with his brother and his brother’s niece, entered the world. Had she ever lain down in the road? Rebecca knew that she had not. Why don’t we do it in the road? That song had made her blush, as a girl.
“So he needed to tell you. You can see why. All little boys want to be police officers when they grow up. Some little boys need to be told why that’s not the best option.”
“I can’t quite—this is terrible.” Christopher was reaching for something better to offer.
“Obviously nothing happened. You’re here telling us this story. You didn’t do anything wrong!” Rebecca felt hysterical.
“He did something wrong.” Cheryl was determined. “He was who he is. That’s wrong.”
“That’s not it.” Ian put a hand on his wife’s forearm. “But I lay there. On the road. Then they came over. One of the cops. He said, Get up. He said, Go home. He said, Don’t speed. He said, That’s it.”
“What do you mean that’s it?” No gesture seemed right. Rebecca wanted to throw something at the handsome wallpaper that Joyce Cohen had recommended.
“I got up off the road. The one car drove away, then the other, then the last. They got back into their cars and drove away. I was still holding on to my keys. The keys they thought were a gun. I got back into the car. I was all wet and dirty. I sat in the car, I turned it on, I drove home.”
“They must have thought you were someone else. They must have been looking for a black BMW and your black BMW drove by and they thought, well, they thought it was the car they were looking for.”
“Rebecca.” Cheryl was shaking her head. She bit into the cake. “Rebecca.”
“She doesn’t know, Cheryl. They don’t know. They didn’t need to know. But now you do need to know. This is what happens, Rebecca. It happens when you’re a black man, it’s going to happen to your black son. And you need to know that it’s coming. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
Rebecca looked at them. She felt at once calm and enraged. “Christopher. Will you tell them to turn the television down? I can’t hear myself think.”
“You see why I sent Jacob out of the room.” Ian was still apologetic. “But he should hear it, too. He’s to be his brother’s keeper, right?”
Christopher left the room.
“I don’t know what to say.” Rebecca wanted to cry. “You’re a good man.”
“That I am.” He still knew it, she could tell, the way he said it. Ian knew this, would never forget it.
“It doesn’t matter how good you are, Rebecca. A black man is still a black man.” Cheryl drank her tea, calmed. “He came home. He didn’t want his dinner anymore.”
“But this was a mistake. A terrible mistake. Ian, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.” She had already said that.
“Andrew’s going to be nine. But he’ll be twelve. Sixteen. Twenty-one. He needs to be told the things he needs to know.” Ian was gentle. “Black kids don’t get to be kids much longer than twelve, really. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, you understand, Rebecca. I have so much respect. You’re wonderful parents. You love Andrew. But I hope you’ll tell him this story. Or I hope you’ll let me. I think he needs to hear this from me.”
“A living, breathing black man. Just the thing they’re always saying we don’t have in our families.” Cheryl was triumphant. “A kind, smart black man who wants to help.”
“Cheryl.”
“No, it’s fine, Ian. Cheryl is right. They do say that. Bush said it. Clinton has probably said it. I’m sure you’re right. We’re very lucky to have you, of course. It takes a village. Isn’t that Mrs. Clinton’s book? If you’ll help me with this, help Christopher and me with this, well, that’s very kind of you. But don’t you think”—Rebecca thought—“it’s getting better? It’s going to be different. You were born before man walked on the moon. Andrew was born in 1988. A lot has changed.”
“They say that things are changing. It looks the same to me.” Cheryl began stacking the plates.
“Please, leave that. Cheryl. When the time is right. Of course, I will trust you to talk to Andrew about . . . about the things he needs to know. There are things that you know. A black man. Things that you know that I can never know. But I want you to keep your mind open, your heart. Things will change. The life Andrew’s going to have, it’s not going to be the way your life was. Not the way Priscilla’s life was.” This was a risk, talking about Priscilla in this way, but it felt right. The woman was dead, dead too young, yes, but she represented the old, the past, the once upon a time. They had transcended that stuff. Bill Clinton was the first black president! Rebecca had given Andrew—and Jacob, too, both of them—Bill Cosby, and Michael Jackson, and Michael Jordan, and Thurgood Marshall, and Oprah Winfrey. They had a picture book about Martin Luther King.
“You don’t know, do you, Rebecca, what my mother’s life was like?”
“Cheryl.” Ian was trying to keep the peace, but the peace had been broken, or was no longer needed.
“No, it’s fine, Ian. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I never did. But, Cheryl, you know that Priscilla mattered to me. To our family. She was part of our family.” Rebecca’s words caught in her throat. “Then she made us a family. You did, too. You made us into a family. And now it’s too late. We are a family. It’s binding. It’s irrevocable.”
“My husband comes in here and tells you the truth. You need to listen.” Cheryl was sharp.
This—a real rebuke—had never happened. Rebecca accepted it. “I am listening. I’m sorry, Cheryl. I am listening. Ian, I cannot believe this happened to you. I am so sorry that it did. Let me talk to Christopher. He’s still so young, Andrew. He’s my baby. But yes, of course, we’ll tell him this. You can. When the time is right.”
Cheryl and Rebecca gathered up the dishes, ferried them into the kitchen, while the fathers and the children watched television. Andrew and Ivy were both yawning, and even Jacob looked tired, that profound exhaustion of adolescence, asleep until noon. They said their good-byes at the door, as they always did, as though they could not bear for the evening to end. Maybe Rebecca couldn’t. There still seemed to be something she needed to do. She embraced Ian as she always did, but this time, this night, she kissed him, on the ear, on the temple, on the forehead, because it seemed warranted.
The tea or the conversation had proved sobering. Christopher drove home and Rebecca couldn’t sleep not because she was worried about him but because she was too hot and too cold, distracted, unhappy. She remembered a night in London, years ago, Andrew still a baby, in diapers. He’d wept miserably, and Rebecca had gone to comfort him, shushing him, imploring him not to wake his grandma.
“Where’s Jacob? Where’s Jacob?” The boy had been crying but was still mostly asleep, weeping for his brother.
“He’s right here, honey. He’s right here.” The older boy was asleep in a tangle of sheets they’d improvised on the bedroom floor. He snored, oblivious. “Jacob is right here with you.”
She couldn’t imagine loving someone so much that you mourned their absence even in their presence. What anyone thinks about is a mystery but what a child thinks is an especially poignant one. Had he been dreaming, that baby Andrew, weeping over being left behind, forgotten? Was this not reasonable? Didn’t he, more than anyone, know about being left behind? Rebecca’s heart, jet-lagged a
nd foggy, broke. All she ever wanted was for her children to be happy. Despite what Ian and Cheryl said, she was certain they would be. Andrew, his natural equanimity, his sweetness, his beauty, which was near regal, he had such dignity for a boy of eight: Andrew would be a man welcomed by the world. Everyone would see what she saw, she was sure of it.
30
SHE WAS MOSTLY ACCUSTOMED TO DAYS ALONE. THE DAYS WERE never so long. She forced the boys to brush teeth and wash faces. She made toast or oatmeal. She had her work and then her work. The former was reading student poems, never so good but never so bad, either. It was department meetings or the office hours during which tearful and self-absorbed young writers would turn up under the guise of wanting to chat when what it was they sought was transformation. Teach me, they said, but all they wanted to be taught was how to be Rebecca. That she could not instruct them on. They were too young to appreciate the luck and chance that goes into making a person. She was forty-two years old and it was impossible to summarize for them what it had taken for her to transform from weeping undergraduate to poetess in black pants. She tried to take the poet out of it, reminded them of their responsibility, to sing of arms, and the man. And besides that, she wrote, constantly.
Summer was hers. Rebecca had thought rapid change a condition of infancy but people are at essence mercurial. Jacob was moody to the point of silence and nights he tarried, shuffled from bedroom to kitchen, down to the den, refusing to sleep, though it was sleep he seemed to need most. The dark exhaustion collected under his eyes, especially Saturdays and Sundays, when he woke early(ish) to mow the neighbors’ lawns for a bit of spending money. Rebecca was shocked, pulling into the driveway, seeing the boy, stripped to his shorts, pushing the bright green mower over the slope of the McKinneys’ front yard, his shoulders locked, his arms muscled, his body lean and aerodynamic and wholly changed, his hair absurdly set with a palmful of gel, newfound vanity. She’d thought of the mother in a favorite storybook she’d read and reread the boys, years before, who, having become separated from her daughter, cries, “Where oh where is my child?” Where was he?
For now, he was away from her, they both were. Labor Day was Christopher’s, because she’d labored enough. He’d invited her along, a long weekend in Delaware. It sounded like traffic and heat. She invoked her work and was left to it. Rebecca woke at seven on Saturday, because she was thus conditioned, but slept until eight on Sunday, because she’d stayed up late the night before, drinking wine and watching television with the Norton Anthology open on her lap, mostly ignored. Ah, well.
She took a cold shower because the morning was hot. She played the music she wanted to listen to, too loudly, free from her sons’ scorn. All the people turn to hear her sad refrain, and catch the cry of pain that’s in her song. She couldn’t nail the notes like Liza. She remembered how Christopher, teaching Jacob his ABCs, had said “zed” instead of “z,” and she laughed aloud. She turned on the television while she was making another cup of tea, and the television informed her that Diana, Princess of Wales, was dead.
Rebecca let her wet hair go dry. She felt a sadness that obviated tears. Her own father had died two years earlier and she’d cried, pathetically, noisily, sobs with absolutely no dignity to them. Lorraine had not approved. Rebecca saw her mother roll her eyes, not that she wasn’t bereaved, but her model was decorum on the level of Jackie Kennedy, stoic faces and funereal black. Rebecca didn’t know what was the better luck: to have a bad parent you’re ever trying to outperform or a good one to whom you can never hope to catch up. She knew it wasn’t a footrace but an odyssey. Sometimes she felt sure of her step, confident in the pace, others, she didn’t want to run at all. Rebecca had sat at the table in the kitchen of her girlhood home and wept noisily. Even the children had found it unsettling.
On the television, they went over and over it. Diana was in Paris with her new paramour, they had left the Ritz, they had been pursued, there had been an accident, they were trailed by photographers and it was said they kept photographing her as she lay dying in the wreckage of the car. There was closed-circuit footage of Diana, dour, leaving the Ritz. She wore a black blazer and white pants. She looked as ever she did, though if you knew these to be her last moments, you couldn’t help see in her posture, her mien, the sense of her own doom. The irony. Diana was the huntress and her namesake nothing but prey.
Rebecca made that cup of tea, had a drink of water, but drifted back to the sofa and the television. Why didn’t Christopher call? Surely he knew. This was like a death in the family. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Christopher never knew or understood that Rebecca had this feeling about the princess she’d never seen. Maybe he thought it was an interest in pretty clothes and hollow glamour, something she should have long outgrown. Maybe Rebecca had kept this a secret, played this close, or maybe it was obvious and there was no one who truly knew what she cared about.
She had guarded her new work—that was the way—but the title she’d been using (though often that flourish came last) was “Diana.” The poem or poems had been months of work, but years of thinking. Rebecca hunted the woman for her own purposes. That the woman was dead now was astonishing, but perhaps Rebecca ought to have predicted it. She, Rebecca, was complicit, had helped use the poor woman up. She was a parasite, or a bird of prey. She’d done the same thing to Priscilla, turned her into a subject, an idea, the genesis of a poem, the moral of the story. Poets sang the past to help understand the future. This seemed idiotically predictable, Diana’s death, because in Rebecca’s life, good news and terrible news were always intertwined. She had gained the happiness central to her existence because Priscilla had died. Rebecca had a happy enough life, but she never got very far from this kind of thing, never far enough, death, as with Diana, stalked us all.
The things Rebecca sat in her office thinking about likely had no ramification in the world. This was the thing she could never explain to her students, who considered verse tangential to the endeavor of being poets. It was the whole point, though, and it was pointless! It was never oracular, except by accident. It was describing, fruitless describing, notes on the present to some future generation who’d consider them a gloss on the past, and barely interesting at that. “Diana” the poem was a lark, a whim, as everything Rebecca had ever done. Diana the person was something real.
Of course, history would repeat. One of Diana’s perfect sons would grow up and marry a beautiful woman with lovely clothes and an inviting smile. Kennedy’s son had grown up, marrying that beautiful girl who looked like an animate statue, like Galatea, indeed, an ideal made flesh. Maybe he’d be president, and his wife would lead a tour of their White House. That Carolyn, she was a version of Diana, as Diana was a version of Jackie, as she was a version of someone else, and Rebecca herself was part of this genealogy, at least in her mind, which put her approximate to beauty, consequence, grace. She was a woman. Death was a betrayal, never mind its being a certainty.
Rebecca kept watching but there was nothing to report but horrible particulars. The woman was dead and the story, one story, was wholly over. She’d have a new ending to her poem.
“I can’t believe this.”
“I can’t believe it myself.” Diana had a voice as beautiful as her face, that soft Englishness, an accent that spoke to breeding, to authority, to comportment. It was how Christopher spoke, too, even after all his years in the United States, and it was something Rebecca loved without understanding why. Diana was sitting in the armchair by the window. She was still in her black blazer and white pants, which were quite spotless.
“I guess—you did good things. That must be a consolation, right?”
“I don’t feel very consoled.” Diana had a girl’s laugh, but there was a bitter flourish in it. “There is a vanity to charity. You do something good because it makes you feel good. It’s not all that different from buying an expensive dress, is it?”
Rebecca weighed this. “Of course it is. You did good things!”
Diana shrug
ged. “It made me feel important.”
“You are important!” Rebecca leaned forward. “You embraced that man with AIDS.”
Diana’s eyes twinkled. “It was all bigger than me. I was in over my head. Do you think less of me, knowing it?”
“So few of us ever get to change anything. But you did.”
Diana walked to the window. The summer afternoon was bright. “Did I, truly? Aren’t things rather—the same?”
Rebecca shook her head. “You’re being unfair. It’s—”
“I did walk on the landmines. You remember? I wore that vest. The mask over my face.”
“I remember.”
“That place. Girls and boys, their arms, their legs had been blown right off their bodies. These rounded knobs where their limbs should have been. You think it would be tough, like a bone, but it’s soft, the scar tissue. Soft as a newborn. There was a girl, I couldn’t hold her hand as she didn’t have one. I touched the end of her arm, it was just a bit of flesh, the size of an apple. You had to cry.”
“You used your gift. The cameras saw what you saw.”
Diana shrugged. “I was terrified. But I was very good at pretending.”
“I think, if you pretend, sometimes it comes true. If you pretend hard enough.”
“So you’ve pretended?” Diana turned to look at Rebecca. “You’ve pretended yourself to wherever it is you are now.”
“Sometimes I think that I have.”
“Is it something to be ashamed of? Something you’re proud of?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not so terrible. We all pretend. I had a fairy-tale wedding in a ridiculous dress.”
“I have my work. But my sons, they are real.”
“They’re a comfort. My first, you know—he’s to be the king of England, but I couldn’t believe it when he lost his milk teeth. When he learned to write. When he’d sing me a song.”
“My husband, he says that what happens out there in the world is what matters, but he also says that what happens out there in the world is mostly horrible. Immoral. Maybe evil. So maybe I hide, here, at home. Your boys are princes. Actual princes. But so are mine. They’re what matters the most to me.”