by Noah Hawley
She rises from the bed and goes into the bathroom. Her bladder is the size of a penny. She has her clothes all laid out, the black turtleneck, the oversized silver jewelry, but standing in front of her suitcase she changes her mind. She chooses the white turtleneck and the white pants. She stands in front of the bathroom mirror putting on her makeup. She will have to drink white wine today. Red is too dangerous. She doesn’t have the same control over her hands that she used to. She is always spilling things, always dropping them. Her oxygen line trails behind her as she walks around the room, stopping every few minutes to rest. Outside the snow slows. She remembers lying on a Brooklyn sidewalk when she was eight making angels in the snow. She was the quirky girl in glasses the other kids didn’t talk to. Staring out at the gathering white, she pictures herself standing in the middle of the street. The air would be cold against her skin. She would walk up Park Avenue dressed all in white and for a moment she would be a young woman again. Her lungs would be healthy, her heart would be strong. The snow would stop falling and the sun would come out, rising above the tallest building. It would light her face, and in that moment she would be warm, despite the chill. She would close her eyes against the blinding bright. She would become a beam of pure light.
She has heard that people who die of exposure just fall asleep. The Eskimos put the elderly out on the ice, leave them to die. She tries to imagine what that’s like, to step onto a block of ice and float off into the ocean surrounded by black water, killer whales, and time. It is a lonely image, and yet in those final moments how beautiful the world must be. She remembers the last time she saw her mother. It was at Florence’s wedding. Doris didn’t want to go, but there was part of her that needed to be there. She was a newlywed herself, and Joe had yet to meet any of her family. They had been married at City Hall with just two witnesses, strangers they had met in the waiting area. As the day got closer she got nervous. She tried to get out of it. Joe said whatever you want, but I’m happy to go. He had no idea of the truth, that her aunt was really her mother. On the day of the wedding they took the train out to Long Island. Everyone acted happy to see her. They all cooed over her handsome husband. All the relatives were there, even Cousin Jackie from California. Doris clung to Joe’s hand the whole time. He promised not to abandon her, not even for a minute. He was such a gentle man, so patient. Doris watched her mother from afar, sticking to the periphery. She was like an antelope studying a predator from a safe distance. The ceremony was endless, one of those indulgent, narcissistic me-fests that Doris has always hated. Afterward there was a reception in the dining hall. Joe told her he had to use the bathroom.
“No,” she said.
“I can’t hold it forever, beauty,” he said.
“Then I want to go, too.”
They went looking for the bathrooms. She was fully prepared to use the men’s room, to go in with him, but just as they got there her cousin Frank and his brother (what was his name?) walked past them and entered the men’s room. She hesitated.
“Just use the ladies’,” said Joe. “I’ll meet you back here in three minutes.”
He reached out and touched her chin. She made a pouty face. Don’t leave me, she thought. He smiled, kissed her lips.
“If you can’t find me, I’ll probably be hiding behind that plant,” she said, pointing.
“Okay.”
He started for the men’s room, but she wouldn’t let go of his hand.
“Three minutes,” he said.
Reluctantly, she let go. He went into the men’s room. She went into the women’s. Inside there were a half-dozen stalls. The walls were white, the floor. It was as bright as the snow is now glistening in the sun outside her hotel window. She went into a stall and sat on the toilet. This was a mistake, coming here. She didn’t know these people. They didn’t want her.
She was at the sink washing her hands when her mother came in.
“There you are,” she said.
Doris thought of her husband standing on the other side of the wall. If she screamed would he come? She didn’t know what to say. She dried her hands.
“What a day,” her mother said. “I can’t believe that’s what you’re wearing, though, pants.”
Doris didn’t speak. She felt as if her lungs were two birds flying away.
“And who are you with? Is that a wedding ring? Did you get married?”
Doris nodded.
“And you didn’t invite me?”
“We didn’t invite anyone,” said Doris. “We got married at City Hall.”
“Hmmph,” her mother said, expressing her disapproval.
“Would you have come?” asked Doris.
“Well, we’ll never know, will we?” This was her mother’s way—to offer hope only after it was too late.
“I have to go,” said Doris.
Her mother moved in front of the door.
“You haven’t told him, have you? Your husband?”
“Told him what?”
“The truth. About me.”
Doris felt like a bug under a magnifying glass. Her mother watched her.
“Not yet,” said Doris.
“He doesn’t really have to know. It was so long ago. And your aunt did such a good job raising you.”
Doris nodded. She could scream and he would come. She knows this for a fact. She could open her mouth and let it all out, and her husband, her glorious husband, would burst through that door. He would take her away. He would rescue her. But she felt hypnotized by her mother’s gaze. She was the mouse in an open field who freezes when the hawk descends.
Her mother reached out and touched her hair. She did it softly, the way a lover would, pushing a loose strand back behind Doris’s ear.
“You look pretty,” her mother said. “I like your haircut.”
Doris wanted to run. She wanted to curl up.
“Maybe we could get a cup of coffee sometime,” her mother said. “We’d have to find someplace quiet, out of the way.”
The bathroom door opened. Cousin Julie from Trenton came in, almost running into them.
“Oops, sorry,” she said.
Doris took the opportunity and fled. She pushed out through the bathroom door and ran into Joe. The mouse was in motion. Behind her the hawk circled for another pass.
“Whoa,” said Joe. “Slow down.”
“We have to go,” said Doris. “Now.”
Joe nodded. He didn’t argue, just took her hand and led her to the closest exit. The wedding was at the country club in Port Jefferson, and as they pushed through the double doors, Doris could see the blue waters of Long Island Sound. She headed for the waterfront. Joe hurried to catch up. She lit a cigarette. He lit one, too, put a hand on her shoulder. He was a foot taller than her and solid. She pictured him grabbing her mother by the throat and squeezing. Her mother’s feet would leave the ground. She would hang there in midair as the life was squeezed out of her.
“My father kept a belt on the wall,” he told her. “When we were bad he would make us take it down and bring it to him. Or not even when we were bad. When he felt like it. He liked to threaten me. I was so stubborn. I used to go get the belt before he even asked, just to see what he’d do.”
She smoked. Her hands were shaking. Her organs felt liquid on the inside.
“What would he do?” she asked.
“Hit me,” he said. He dropped his cigarette onto the grass, ground it out with his toe. He was her mountain, her savior. “It’s not the beating that hurts. It’s the fear. If you can conquer the fear, then what comes next is just a matter of time.”
Time. She sits by the window watching it snow and the past seems so far away. The good things. The bad things stay with you, but the good things recede. This is how it feels. Inside that country club her so-called family celebrated Florence’s wedding, everyone smiling, laughing, dancing. Standing there by the water, she wanted to take her lighter and burn the whole place down. She has that same feeling now. Her savior is gone. She sits
on the edge of the bed dressed all in white.
The past is a hammer.
The future is a sheet of glass.
An hour later Doris sits in the restaurant at the Waldorf-Astoria with her son David and his family. Tracey and the kids flew in last night before the storm. They sit in a booth by a window. Outside the plows have come, pushing snow onto the sidewalks. Handymen from the outer boroughs emerge from the sheltered doorways of prewar Park Avenue towers to shovel the snow back into the street. The salt trucks arrive, spewing their corrosive payloads. Already the city has returned to normal. Traffic fills the streets. Pedestrians in overcoats and winter footwear vault across frozen puddles. They wade through snowbanks. Inside the restaurant, the children are having a hard time sitting still. They haven’t seen snow in years, and then only in the mountains. Tracey tells Doris they’ve already been outside playing, throwing themselves into the powder. Her face is still flushed from the cold. Doris wants to like her, this woman, her daughter-in-law, but there is something about the girl that makes Doris think she laughs at her behind her back. David sits close to his wife, almost on top of her, his hand on her hand, as if now that she’s here he never wants her to leave again. To Doris, it looks like he has returned to his hiding place behind his wife’s skirt.
“Where’s your brother?” she asks.
He shrugs.
“I don’t know. I went by his room. He’s not there. He’s not answering his cell, either.”
She thinks about this. Maybe Scott fled, took a taxi to the airport, and flew home. She can’t blame him. She would, too, if she had a home.
“I like that sweater on you,” Tracey tells her.
“Me, too,” says David. “I didn’t know you owned anything white.”
“Ha-ha,” says Doris. She is the kind of soldier who shoots at everyone, expecting even small children to be armed.
“Grandma,” says Chloe, “did you know that aardvarks are nocturnal? That means they only come out at night.”
“Knock knock,” says Christopher.
David sees the distance on his mother’s face.
“How are you doing?” he asks.
She shrugs.
“Ask me tomorrow,” she says.
She sits there surrounded by family and she should be happy. She should feel comforted, but she doesn’t.
“Knock knock,” says Christopher. He scans their faces, looking for the one most likely to play. He is at that age where there is no place more boring than a restaurant. Soon he will start slipping sugar packets off the table. He will tear them open quietly and pour the sugar onto the floor.
“Who’s there?” says Chloe.
David squeezes Tracey’s hand.
“So the memorial’s at noon,” he says. “I figured we’d leave around eleven-thirty. Give ourselves plenty of time to get down there.”
“Is anyone going to come?” Doris asks. “With this weather?”
“They’ll come,” says David.
“Orange who?” says Chloe.
Tracey gives the baby his juice in a sippy cup. She acts nice, thinks Doris, like she cares, but does she ever call? It is not unreasonable to think of this woman as her enemy, the opponent who stole her son from her, who turned him against her. It is a mother-/daughter-in-law story that is centuries old. Boys stay loyal to the ones they can fuck. This is the bottom line. Doris finishes her wine, orders another glass. Her son watches her with a worried expression on his face.
“People will come,” he says. “Everybody loved Pop.”
She nods. He says this, but what she hears is, everybody loved him. No one would come if it was just for you. All your relatives, your friends, they only ever really liked Joe. You were the one they put up with. She smiles her bitter little smile.
“Did you ever want to be more than just a mother?” she asks Tracey.
Tracey blinks at the question.
“When I was six I wanted to be a ballerina,” she says.
“That’s not what I—” says Doris.
“Then, when I was sixteen, I wanted to be a movie star, but I heard the hours were bad.”
“Funny.”
Tracey smiles. It is a mother’s smile, the smile you give a brave kid as you put a bandage on his knee, a bath-time smile when you have to put your foot down and insist that your child get in the tub right now!
“Don’t you like being a mother?” she asks Doris.
Doris looks at her son. A mother? To him? The question is a challenge, a caustic provocation, but thinking about it, Doris finds this wave of sadness wash over her, this fragile, sorrowful poise.
“I liked the moment when they were in bed,” she says. “After the lights were out, but before they were asleep, and you could stand over the bed and watch them burrow down. The way their breathing would slow and expand. The looks on their little faces.”
David watches his mother with something like awe on his face. This is the first time he has heard her speak of their childhood in a manner that is in any way reverential.
“You were good kids,” she says, looking him in the eye. He nods, speechless. “You were. If your brother were here, I’d tell him the same thing. You were fun and you were smart.”
“Thank you,” he manages.
“And your father and I loved having you. Every minute. You made him very proud.”
David sits there blinking, a father surrounded by his children, a grown man with a wife, and yet in this moment he is ten years old again, a boy who wants more than anything for his parents to love him unconditionally. “Maybe we should leave a little earlier,” she says. “Make sure we don’t get caught in the snow.”
David nods.
“Whenever you want,” he says.
The memorial is being held at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. One last time back down to the old neighborhood. It is the center of their family myth. This is how it is with families. There is always one unspoken moment when a family is happiest, when everything is just right. You don’t even know it’s happening at the time. It is the kind of realization that only comes later. Oh yes, that was the moment. For the Henrys it was when they lived in the West Village. It was 1979, 1981. They had the duplex with the loft upstairs. The kids were old enough to walk to school by themselves. They came home and performed skits based on lessons they’d learned in class. Once the kids got older, they started to pull away. Her husband started traveling more for work. By the time the boys went to college, Doris was spending more and more time alone. She hadn’t counted on this, that her family would prove to be temporary, that motherhood would change. She hadn’t realized that so much less would be required of her. That once her children were old enough, and her marriage had gone on long enough, they would all run efficiently on their own, like a factory that’s been automated. By the time her sons went to college, all they required was the kind of routine maintenance that could be handled by a robot. She found herself caught in a nostalgia for a family she still had. This is the nature of time. You feel things slipping away from you before they’re even gone.
David asks the waiter for the check. He has pulled himself together. As they stand to leave, he puts his hand on her arm. It is the first time she can remember him touching her unbidden since he got married. It is a loving touch, the protective hand of a son for his mother. Neither of them really know how to proceed, how to move forward from this point. They have been adversaries for so long. Their dynamic has become a dynamic of retreat, the tension of a rope being pulled in two directions. She can see on his face, for the first time in years, that he would like to bridge the gap, but he doesn’t know how. He is her son. He will never have another mother, and yet she makes it so hard for him to love her, so hard to call her Mom.
She checks her watch. They have three hours. Three hours until the memorial starts, until the guests arrive and the testimonials begin. She has three hours left with her husband, three hours to love him as she has always loved him, protectively, divisively, alone. Soon he wi
ll be everyone’s. They will stand and raise their glasses. They will offer their memories, their stories of youth, and in this way, retake possession of him. This, too, is the nature of time. You wait and you wait and it seems like forever and then the moment you’ve waited for, the moment you’ve longed for, the moment you’ve dreaded, finally arrives. And in those last remaining hours time moves at the speed of light, and you realize that what you thought would never come is now unstoppable. There is no way to put on the brakes, for the future you never thought you’d see is finally here.
PART THREE
KEYS
Scott Henry rides the subway. He is wearing a black suit and carrying a shovel. A soldier going to war, a Navy SEAL on a rescue mission. People look at him with disinterest. A man in a suit carrying heavy tools is hardly the weirdest thing they’ve seen today. He has a black messenger bag across his back, slung over his shoulders. There is a pair of wire cutters inside, a set of work gloves. It is ten o’clock in the morning. He has two hours before the memorial. Two hours to penetrate the perimeter fence, to enter his old backyard, find the spot and dig.
He gets off the subway at Christopher Street, walks holding the shovel over his shoulder, like one of the Seven Dwarfs whistling his way to work. His shoes are made of a thin black leather that soaks quickly in the slush. But he doesn’t slow or falter.
He is heading for his childhood home for what feels like the last time. After today he will not go back. It isn’t healthy. A man must get on with his life, stop living in the past. He makes this promise to himself, even as he disappears into a city of memory and loss. Around him the city roars with life. It doesn’t care who lives and who dies. It is bigger than everyone put together. Keep moving. This is what the city demands. Go on or we’ll go on without you. Scott stands up a little straighter. He fixes his tie. He stops at Greenwich Street, his eyes rising automatically to the gap in the sky that used to hold the towers. They were parents to all of us, mother and father. Even their destruction didn’t stop the city for long. Three thousand people died. The streets were covered in ash. People took a deep breath, brushed themselves off, and kept going.