The woman started off again, heading down the beach, running slowly. Her cries carried back to us on the wind. “Annie! Annie!” she called. I looked around our circle: no one was settling back down. Parents called to their children, knelt next to them, stood anxiously, then sat down again, alert and straight-backed. They shaded their eyes and scanned the dunes, they looked furtively at the surf. The children stopped their screaming play. The couple next to us had drawn together. The mother in the black bikini had sat up and moved under the umbrella beside her husband. Their little boy sat still, watching, his tank suspended in the air.
The woman came back past us again, her feet pounding along the sand, kicking it up with each step. She looked at none of us, none of us, none of our children. There was only one shape, one body, that was the right one, and she couldn’t find it. “Annie!” she cried. “Annie!” It was unbearable, to hear it. “Annie! Annie!” We could hear how she was beginning to give way. She ran wildly on, past us, back in the direction in which she’d come, still calling out. But before we could even settle down on our knees again, she had made a wide wild loop in the sand and was running back again. Her arms were held out now, stretched open in the air. The gold bracelet glittered.
We were all standing up, now, all of us. All the children had stopped their playing. They had become quiet, and stood by the bare sandy legs of their parents. We were all watching the mother. From down the beach, beyond her, her friends reappeared, the three of them pounding back down the beach, without Annie. They were calling too, still, distracted, frightened: “Annie! Annie!”
The woman was nearly in front of us. We could hear her panting as she ran, we could hear how ragged her voice had become. Beyond her the surf never stopped, those huge green breakers pounding down, over and over. The mother never looked at the water, it was as though that was something she denied altogether. She was tiring, you could hear, and hope was running out.
The family near us had drawn into a little cluster. The father was standing now, with his silent son in his arms. His wife was next to him in the sun, her thick dark hair around her face. She was weeping. She wiped the tears away with her fingers, then she put her arms around her husband and her child, leaning her head against her husband’s shoulder. She closed her eyes and opened them again, looking at the mother, who would not stop, who ran and ran, and circled about aimlessly again, pounding past us once more on the sand. “Annie! Annie!” It was a torment.
I looked at Diana, but her face was turned away. We were standing, too. She had Jennifer held close to her, leaning against her. Jen’s arms were wrapped around Diana’s thigh. Jen was silent and frightened, her thumb drifting fearfully toward her mouth.
Then the mother, running past again, stopped right in front of us, her arms open despairingly. “Annie!” she called again, and then she sank suddenly down onto her knees.
I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear her giving up, though I could see she’d done everything there was to do—where else could she go? Her friends had come back, their faces twisted and distorted with the sun, the running, the fear. There was nothing more she could do, the mother. She was on her knees in the sand, and she put her hands up to her face, covering it: it was over.
Her friends caught up with her, and stood in a circle around her. One of them, with short tousled blond hair, stooped over her. She put her hand on the mother’s shoulder, speaking to her. The other two women still looked around, squinting against the sun. The shorter one folded her tanned arms aggressively on her chest, as if she could somehow take charge. The other woman took off her sunglasses and set them on top of her head. And they both kept slowly turning and turning, looking around and around, scanning the beach. But the mother stayed on her knees, her face covered with her hands. She shook her head back and forth, crying, in a terrible low voice. No one knew what else to do. It was over.
Then in the bright hot glare a moving figure appeared, a little girl in a white bathing suit, coming from the direction of the dunes. She was running through the families scattered across the sand, dodging in and out of them, coming down the beach toward us. As she came closer, the friend with the folded arms said something urgent, and the mother, still kneeling, raised her head. The little girl was running straight for her, and the mother opened her arms. As the little girl reached her, the mother flung her arms around Annie’s small body. She closed her eyes and began rocking, back and forth, on the sand. It was over. Now it was over.
The woman next to us started to sob openly. She was holding on to her husband and her son. Around me, the women were crying, covering their faces with their hands. The men were silent and stricken. Everyone could feel the rising terror that had pounded through the mother’s heart.
I looked at Diana, and I stepped over next to her, close. She kept her face turned away from me, but it was lowered now, no longer grimly lifted. I put my arm around her, and then I put my hand up and took hold of her chin, and I moved her chin gently around so that her face looked into mine. She let me do it. Her eyes were shut; she was crying. I waited. She took a long gasping breath, and tears flooded down her cheeks. Jennifer, frightened and silent, stood by her leg.
“Diana,” I whispered. “I love you.”
She did not answer.
“All right, you win,” I whispered. “We’ll have another. We’ll have six more, if you want. Ten.”
Now I could see that it was I who’d been wrong, and stubborn. All the things I’d thought so solid and weighty, like granite—why it was too soon for another child, why we must wait, and why the decision must be mine, not hers—were now tiny and flimsy, meaningless. They fell away, water sinking into sand, and I felt ashamed.
I meant it, what I was saying, but it was too soon for Diana to hear it, or to hear anything I said. She was still crying hard, her body was still gusting with sobs. She was still ravaged by that anguish, by the terrible vision of what we all fear most, the lost lost child.
It’s fear that takes you over, you’re helpless before it. It takes you over, sweeps you into that awful curling rise toward the breaking crash. The roar is loud and terrifying in your ears, and you’re reminded how weightless you are, how aimless your movements, how brief the moments before the next crash. How you have nothing to hold on to but each other.
Blind Man
It had been raining earlier, but was now stopping. The windshield wipers began to creak. They were now leaving streaks, instead of cleaning the glass. He turned them off and they quit, sliding weightlessly down into their hidden pocket.
He’d been on this highway for an hour, maybe, though it was hard to tell, they all blended into each other so smoothly: the exit sign announcing the shift onto the ramp’s stately decelerating curve; at its end a slow diagonal merge, then acceleration into the new current. It was hard to remember just how long he’d been on this one, exactly when he’d left the last.
He was, anyway, somewhere in Connecticut, on a high bridge over a valley. Below him lay the dense grid of a nineteenth-century mill town. Above the industrial jumble stood a handsome Venetian campanile of dark red brick, a white clock face on each side. Its slate roof narrowed upward to a needle’s point.
The bridge stretched from one hillside to the other. The traffic, weaving a complicated pattern, prepared for left-hand exits ahead. The signs for this place, whatever it was, were now behind him. He might never learn its name, or the source of its lost potency, or who had thought to erect a Renaissance tower above the grimy brick labyrinth. All these dismal industrial towns were ghostly now, their energy dissipated, industry gone. All that outrage over intolerable working conditions: now there were no working conditions. Ahead, on the crest of a wooded hillside, stood a large white cross.
He’d been told not to think about it, not to go over and over it, but what else was there to think about? It was what occupied his mind. Trying to think about anything else was a torturing distraction. He was never not thinking about it.
At night he lay in bed be
side his wife—also wakeful, also silent, her back to him in the dark—and went over it in his mind. It played there forever, an endless loop.
The soft blossom of smoke, like a sweet cloud of scent, drawn swiftly up through the narrowing shafts into the skull. Sucked down the long hard ribbed windpipe, then released into the spacious crimson chambers of the lungs. Drawn deeper, into the branching, diminishing pathways of the bronchi. Further still, into the depths of the soft honeycomb, the bronchioles, their membranous walls porous and thin. There the barrier between air and fluid was only one slight, slight cell thick. There the mysterious shift occurred: the smoke passed magically through the tissue, into the bloodstream. There it dissolved, becoming part of the smooth surge, pumping rhythmically through the interlacing curves of the vascular complex, flowing through steadily widening channels, headed swiftly and unstoppably for the brain.
He imagined its arrival there as an explosion: the sudden pulsing release of a million stars in the deep black sky of the mind.
He could not hold the two notions together in his mind: the physiological and the individual. The chemical reactions and Juliet.
In the dark, in the close silence of the bedroom, the sheets and blankets became heavy and tumbled. They seemed to pool, carried by some hidden current. They collected in eddies around his legs, tangling his arms in dank swirls.
Each time he remembered, he was shocked by the silence of the fact, its perpetual inertness. There was never any change.
In the morning, he sat on the edge of the bed, the weight of another day upon him, light sifting dully in from under the window shade. He rubbed his face hard, palms rasping against his unshaven cheeks, trying to rid himself of the clinging wisps of the black nighttime world.
The thing was not to think about it. The thing was to be disciplined, to take control.
Though what if he did let go, let himself think about it? What if he just locked himself in the room of his mind and thought about nothing else? Because that was what he did anyway, he hadn’t a choice. He was already locked in there, and that was all there was in with him.
Approaching the hillside, the highway passed a grim Catholic church. High on the stone façade was a rose window, too small, and of course dark from the outside.
What he ought to do was review his notes, though just at this exact moment, he could not remember the topic of his lecture. The road ahead was gray, still grizzly with rain. Passing cars made a sissing sound. He was in the middle lane, driving fast, like the cars around him. Being in the midst of this speeding stream gave him comfort. He liked the notion of community, he liked the steady, infinite supply of power beneath his foot. He felt he was getting somewhere.
Being alone was a luxury. The small rented car, for which the university would reimburse him, was anonymous, a haven. The woolly dark red seats, the spotless gray carpeting, the bland mechanical eyes of the dashboard: it was like a motel room. He could do whatever he wanted, speeding across Connecticut among the other cars. He was invisible here, though around him he carried a kind of darkness, a cloud.
A huge truck passed on his left, the size of a small country. The roar was deafening. The silhouette towered alongside him, darkening his sky, streaming on and on. The gigantic wheels spun hypnotically by his face. His small car swayed, buffeted. It would be better not to think about it. Her hair had been in her mouth, there had been strands of it, dark and silky, lying across her open mouth. What else was there to think about?
His lecture, it now came to him, was on the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the ecclesiastical nexus of Byzantium, symbol of its enormous power, its astonishing beauty, its history of invasion and transformation. He shook his head and thought deliberately of that high empty space, the vast dome filled with silence. The shafts of still sunlight, falling on the ruined mosaics. The wide bare brick floor, worn smooth by centuries of slippered footsteps.
The lecture began with a slide of the exterior. “The dome of Hagia Sophia is only one brick thick. It is a perfect curve, mathematically without flaw. No one knows how this engineering feat was achieved. It is one of the great mysteries of ecclesiastical architecture, just as Hagia Sophia is one of the great symbolic mysteries in the history of Byzantium.”
He had given this talk many times, at universities, scholarly institutions, colloquia, and seminars. The first time long before she was born.
He moved sideways, into the fast lane. The little red car rocketed along, the tires sizzling against the damp pavement. Its slight frame seemed sturdy and flexible, like an airplane’s, designed to withstand buffeting and winds. Speed seemed to be what held the car onto the road. The roar was loud and steady.
At a flash in the rearview mirror he looked up. Behind him was a big SUV, threateningly close, its headlights blinking an imperative staccato. It was only a few feet from his bumper, he could feel its heavy breath. At this speed it would take only an instant, a tiny split-second shift, for things to go badly wrong. The pace held them all spellbound: his tiny red car, the SUV behind him, the gigantic rumbling trucks.
He put on his blinker and waited for the car on his right to pass. The lights behind him flashed again, impatient, looming closer. He felt a tightening on his scalp. The SUV bore down, closing the brief distance between them. The mirror was filled with the flashing lights. Too soon for safety, he slid sideways, nearly hitting the bumper of the car ahead. As he was still moving, the SUV roared past, barely clearing his car. Spray rose from its tires, coating his windshield with dirty hissing mist. Signal still blinking, he waited for another car to pass and then moved again, into the slowest lane. Abruptly, dangerously, too fast, he slid sideways again, moving off the highway altogether, onto the narrow shoulder. He felt the loose gravel suddenly rough beneath his wheels, the car juddering as it slowed. For a sickening moment it skidded. Then the tires caught, the car slowed and bumped unsteadily to a stop.
He was on a narrow shoulder, barely off the pavement. The car was cramped between a heavy metal guard rail and the road. The sound of the speeding cars was deafening. A giant trailer truck thundered past, wheels sizzling viciously along his window. Within seconds there was another. As each roared by, his small car—frail, he now understood, not sturdy—rocked and shuddered. The grime-covered trucks steamed past. He felt the shock from each one. He set his hands on the steering wheel. Something was flooding through him, like blood clouding into water. He leaned back against the headrest, looking into the traffic vanishing ahead.
The last week: he went over and over it. Juliet in the kitchen one morning, unloading the dishwasher. Bending over, her long dark hair falling weightlessly forward. He’d been at the table, reading. Juliet, a stack of plates against her chest, pushing against the swinging door into the pantry. A wrinkled yellow jersey, cutoff blue-jean shorts. Her limbs were soft, still childish—not plump, but cushiony. Her legs were tanned to a dark honey brown in front, lightening to a paler cream in back, on her calves.
His wife had called from outside.
“Yeah?” Juliet was vanishing into the pantry.
Ann again: something about the hose.
Juliet called loudly back. “What?” She was in the pantry then, stacking the plates in the cupboard. The crockery rattled. It was clear from Juliet’s voice—loud, indifferent—that she couldn’t hear her mother, didn’t care.
Ann’s irritation. “Juliet, would you please not walk away from me when I ask you something?” Ann was now in the kitchen doorway.
“Sorry, Mom,” Juliet said, reappearing, unruffled. Her round face, her short upper lip and bright narrow blue eyes, echoed Ann’s, though the dark straight eyebrows were no one’s but Juliet’s. She smiled at her mother, at once placating but also, mysteriously, pitying, as though Juliet were in a continual communication with some superior self, far beyond the reach of mortals. “Want some help?” she asked kindly.
They’d gone outside; he’d gone back to his book.
What did it mean, that moment? Anything? He examined everythi
ng, now, for clues.
Juliet had been in a kind of disgrace that summer; she was under a certain obligation to be placatory. She had screwed up. She had broken rules; laws, in fact. She had been sent home. She had not finished the college year, she had ended up instead in a group of institutional buildings in another state. Her academic reinstatement depended on good behavior. Her domestic reinstatement depended on good behavior. She was in disgrace.
Though in a way it was he and Ann who were in disgrace, for aren’t the parents absolutely implicated in the transgressions of the child? To be honest, aren’t the parents, perhaps, more responsible than the child? Didn’t they create the world in which the child found these transgressions possible, necessary?
And if you, the parent, have ever allowed yourself small helpings of private pride and satisfaction at your child’s accomplishments, if you have ever stood beaming at a graduation in the June sunlight, swelling inwardly over the award for religious studies and feeling that in some unexplained but important way your daughter reflects your presence, that she represents you and your codes, both cultural and genetic; if you have ever felt that your beautiful daughter was somehow flowering forth from you, so then, when another area of her endeavors is revealed— addiction, say, to crack cocaine—you will also feel the heavy cowl of complicity settle over your head.
At the beginning of this summer, when they’d brought her up here, they’d watched Juliet’s every move with anxiety. In those first weeks she’d acted stunned, silenced. Not sullen, exactly, simply mute: silenced. She did everything she was asked but without response. It was as though her thoughts were in a different language. She had withdrawn. She was elsewhere. She didn’t laugh. She spent hours silent in her room, the door closed. He and Ann, pausing unhappily outside in the hall, tiptoeing on the threadbare rug, could hear nothing from inside. Was she reading? Was she lying on the bed, curled on her side, eyes fixed steadily on the plaster wall?
A Perfect Stranger Page 9