“Hello?” my father answers.
“I’m okay.” I lead with that.
There’s a deep breath on the other line, then quiet tears. I hear him say he’s okay over and over again to my mother, who wails. “Thank God, Michael. Where are you?”
“I’m home. Listen, Dad, I need to speak to Rebecca.” He conveys this backward to my mother, like my translator. He needs to speak to Rebecca. Then silence. “Can you put her on please?”
His voice is hushed. “Michael, we thought she was with you.”
Blood drains from my head and I bend over the sink in case I throw up. The only scenario in which Rebecca was out of the house but still safe, the only scenario in which Jackson is safe, just fell by the wayside. I mumble some promise to call my father later and hang up. He’s still talking as I bring the phone away from my ear.
I call her number again, and again it goes to voice mail after one ring. Underground, or turned off.
I search the apartment for some note from her, some indication of where she went. She could have gone to the police, to report me missing, but she wouldn’t have wanted to drag Jackson to the station. There’s no earthly reason she would have left this apartment with its locked doors and familiarity to venture out into the hottest day of the year with a one-year-old in tow. There’s nowhere safer than where I’m pacing right now.
The clouds of smoke in midtown Manhattan. Whatever occurred beneath. There’s no reason for Rebecca and Jackson to be there. There’s no reason for them to be there. There’s no reason for them to be there.
I can only hope routine will provide the answer. Rebecca took Jackson to Fairway, or to the Laundromat, or even to a bar along Van Brunt, needing a drink today more than ever and not caring about chiding looks. This is Red Hook. A mother can bring a baby into a bar and drink in front of it. This isn’t Park Slope. I giggle at that, promise myself to tell that to Rebecca when I see her. After I hold our son.
Then I go running from the apartment as fast as my ruined legs will carry me.
I head straight for the tail end of Van Brunt Street, checking in storefronts, head on a swivel for strollers. Fairway has closed for the day, a bored security guard turning me away. He sympathizes when I tell him I’m looking for my wife and son, but he hasn’t seen anyone like that since they closed three hours ago. I give him my cell phone number in case they come by. I run back out of the Fairway parking lot, and turn to run to the pier, where the view of lower Manhattan has drawn a crowd. I have to push people aside, calling Rebecca’s name, looking for her amid the crowd. People mostly ignore me, a few jostle back, a few hush me, bearing silent witness to the spreading smoke. When I reach the end, I turn around and double-check, pushing the same people through the same crowd, calling out her name.
She’s not at any of the bars on Van Brunt. However much our intentions had been to get recognized at the local places, no one on staff at either Hope & Anchor or Fort Defiance knows who I’m talking about when I ask them if they’ve seen Rebecca. “She gives you cookies!” I shriek to stunned, guarded looks. Why are they even setting up? Who the fuck is eating here tonight? Where are my wife and son? By the time I get back outside, the scent has changed. There’s smoke descending over Red Hook, an electric winter scent, a char to the air. I’m breathing ash. I swear to God I’m breathing ash. Where are my wife and son?
I run down the streets of the Interior, even as my legs burn and my feet blister and every step brings worse pain than I can imagine. Still I run, searching for a woman pushing a stroller. I run up and down, block by block, past empty soccer fields, past the locked swim center, past the projects, where only a few people sit outside, everyone else glued to their television. I run through Coffey Park, the Interior park, where Rebecca has never taken Jackson, even though it’s just as bucolic as any other New York City park, because we are afraid, because we live in fear of where we live and I’ve forced her to live here and now I don’t know where she is or where our son is and I abandoned them both. I ask any group of people congregated, without hesitation, without dignity. I beg them to let me know if they’ve seen my wife and son. I force my phone into their face, the battery almost drained again, show them pictures of the two of them. Heads shake, eyes cast sideways, shared looks, as if it’s a conspiracy, as if they have my family and aren’t telling me.
No, it’s that I’m sweating profusely and ranting and today has already had enough drama.
I collapse onto my knees in the middle of Coffey Park. This is where an older black man with stoic eyes is supposed to put his hand under my arm and help me up, hand me water, tell me everything is going to be all right.
He doesn’t exist. Or if he does, he has his own trouble to deal with on this batshit day. The scattered few who see my spectacle don’t want anything to do with the crazy white man, and I can’t blame them, so instead I stay on my knees and heave.
The truck. The thought hits me upside my head. If Rebecca decided to try to come and find me, she wouldn’t have done so on foot. If she didn’t want to get my parents’ help, she would have needed a car, and the easiest option is the shared truck from the studio. That’s where I sprint to last, leaning my shoulder into the door as I turn the key.
She’s not here. The key for the truck sits in the drawer where it always sits. Tony wrote on the chart that he parked it at Imlay and Pioneer yesterday evening. No further entries. I go there next and find an empty truck.
The walk back home feels longer than the walk from the Cloisters. I’ll call the police and report her missing, along with Jackson, and hope they’ll give this more attention because of the baby element, the mother-and-child element, than they otherwise would, especially today. After that, I’ll call her parents, start by finding their number—we buried it somewhere—I don’t have it in my phone. There’s always the slim possibility that she got the fuck out of the city somehow, that she swiped a Zipcar and decided to drive to Connecticut. That she would seek her parents as a safe haven strikes me as the most ridiculous explanation of all, but any port in a storm.
I unlock the front door and climb the stairs, my knees buckling with every step. I’ll need to spend the next few days recovering if circumstances let me. I’ll need to recruit my parents, which means I’ll need to explain why I wasn’t with my family today, why I was at the Cloisters. My fingers fumble with the keys, salted tears sting the fissures the sun has carved.
The front door catches and the scent of cookies hits me. “Rebecca?” I call.
Her head appears in the sliver of door. She’s put the chain on. “Keep your voice down; Jackson is asleep.” I shut the door, let her slide the chain off, but nothing happens. I’m still standing in the vestibule outside of our apartment. I open it again and there she stands, just out of reach, still barricading me out with this chain. She shakes her head. No, Michael. No.
“Where have you been?”
Her eyes go furiously wide. These are her eyes from when Jolie would relapse. Incredulous eyes. “Where have you been, Michael?”
“I came home!” I fume. “I came home and you weren’t here! And Jackson wasn’t here! Where the fuck were you?”
“We took a walk.”
“You went out in this? Have you seen the smoke? Do you have any idea what’s been going on today?”
She clenches her fists and wraps her arms around herself. “We’ve been inside all day and I’ve been crying. It’s freaking Jackson out, so I took him on a walk. We didn’t go far.”
“I was running around for an hour trying to find you. I ran all over Red Hook.”
“I don’t know.” She sounds exhausted. “You missed us.”
Start apologizing, Michael. Open your mouth and say, “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.”
“Please let me in.”
Her face turns to stone. I recognize this look too. This was the look she gave Jolie when she no longer trusted her and now aimed only to never get hurt again. Carefully, as if she had been rehearsing al
l day, she says, “You made a choice.”
“I made the wrong choice. I made the worst choice. I chose selfishness and irresponsibility and cruelty. I’m so sorry. Please let me in.”
She gets closer to the door. I could reach through and touch her if she wanted to be touched. I could rub her hands like I do when she’s nervous and uncertain and needs me. Rebecca lowers her volume. “If there’s something you need I’ll pass it through the door, but you’re not staying here tonight, Michael.”
My eyes flit over her shoulder and land on the table I made with my two hands, of wood I bought and planed and shaped and smoothed and polished. A table to last us our lifetime of meals, for homework frustration and stilted family meetings, to sneak late-night cookies with our son, to toss keys onto when our hands are full and for me to sit at and watch Rebecca in her kitchen, in her element, dazzling me with her Rebecca-ness.
It lists to the side, imperceptible to everyone but me. I cut one leg an eighth of an inch shorter than the others, a careless mistake compounded by laziness, because it was the fourth leg I had cut, and because who notices an eighth of an inch? Who looks at a painting and sees its flaws?
It lists to the side because I had other places to be than in my workshop, cutting an eighth of an inch off of three more legs for a table I didn’t want in the first place.
“I walked through Manhattan today. Someone attacked our city, and I thought I was going to die, Rebecca. I promise I did. And I realized that the only people who matter to me in this world are you and Jackson. You’re who I love. Please let me in.”
It’s the luckiest excuse I’ve ever stumbled upon. I was in it and it was terrible and that’s what inspired my epiphany. Take me back because I bore witness to tragedy. If I can convince her then I can convince myself. Rebecca’s hand goes to her mouth, but I can’t tell what the emotion is behind it. “Why were you in Manhattan in the first place?”
“Stupid reasons. I’m a stupid man and I’ll never be this stupid again. I promise.”
Dammit if I don’t think for a hot second that she’s going to relent. The beeper goes off on the fridge. Another batch of cookies is done. They smell like home. Rebecca lets it beep, lets it beep even though Jackson is sleeping and the cookies are overbaking. Dammit if I don’t think it’s because she’s going to let me back in.
But she shrugs. “No, I’ll bet you’ll never be this stupid again, either, Michael. And I don’t care what you saw today. You put yourself in the middle of it. You should have been here, with your wife and child.”
“Rebecca …”
“We don’t recover from this,” she hisses. “I don’t care if you never see her again and if no one ever finds out. I’ll know, Michael. Every time I look at you I’ll know that I’m your consolation prize. I have more fucking dignity than that,” she seethes. “Jackson has more dignity than that. He’s not the old toy you pick back up because you broke your new one.”
“That’s not what this is. Please let me in.”
“Do you need anything?” she asks, with a heavy pause between each word. “If not, you need to go now.”
I marvel at her dry-eyed face, her unwavering voice. All this time, I thought I was the stronger one. I take a few steps, slowly backing away from the door. There’s no moving her today. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Tomorrow we’ll start to fix this. Tomorrow I’ll beg. I’ll beg on both knees. For now, do I need anything? Charger, change of clothes, toiletries, cash if she has any on her—I scamper through a list of what I need. Do I tell her item by item and wait in the hall?
No, wait. Don’t start later. This needs to happen now. I kneel, one leg at a time, like dissembling. Like a building crumbling onto itself. I get on both knees and beg. “Please, Rebecca. Please don’t leave me. Please.”
“I’m not the one who left,” she says, and shuts the door in my face. This time the dead bolt turns.
Paul Fenniger
Three Months from Now: October 20, 2010
I run the brush over the corner, touching up one of many patchy areas one last time. The wall seems to absorb the paint, greedy and spongelike. Or I’m using the wrong paint. Always a possibility. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but Jenny seems pleased. She comes into what used to be her office and supervises my work, brings me autumnal cocktails of her own invention, runs her hands over the smooth walls and smiles to herself.
This should have been finished a month ago, but it’s been a busy time, and Jenny has been good about not pressuring me. I got another off-off-off-Broadway gig, this one actually paying up front, to perform some Molière.
She’s the one who brought up the idea of converting the room to an entirely new, as yet undefined purpose, or at least stripping the shelving, taking out every slat of wood, unscrewing every screw, spackling over every hole, and repainting so that the space would look completely different from before. From all of the befores. In August, when Jenny and I had our feet under ourselves a little more steadily, she came to me with the suggestion, and I bought tools the very next day. Jenny didn’t explain why she wanted this done, just that she did.
I didn’t need an explanation. Every brushstroke brings me new heights of contentment.
Dismantling the shelves took a few weeks. They were put together with an electric screwdriver, whereas I’m relying on nothing more than wrists and dedication. Jenny heard me cursing under my breath and came in to see what the trouble was. “He really screwed deep,” I muttered, and she went red, and I went red, and Jenny and I avoided each other for the rest of the day. We stumble like that, or I trip over my own feet and take her with me.
It’s not worth trying to resell the wood. It didn’t cost much regardless, I’m not sure I paid for a minute of labor—at least not financially—so each trash day I haul slats of pine to the curb. Each trash day a few more disappear.
I lost a week when Jenny and I took a vacation to San Diego. We went online and looked for cheap fares, found a fantastic deal and a cheap hotel, and got on a plane and out of New York for a week. We both needed it. We went to the zoo and pretended to meet each other for the first time. Jenny appeared to be going for kink, but I found this really sweet, pretending to fall in love with her again. I got to be myself, and still my mind would slide, releasing all those endorphins. From across a seal enclosure, her eyes meet mine—Erik Satie scores each fresh introduction. We had a lot of sex—frustrated, grippy, needy sex that segued back into our routines, back into the places we like to be with one another. The apartment seemed bigger the day we got back.
She’s been kind about the Internet stuff. More than kind. I don’t clear my browser history, and she has a list of my passwords, and from there she told me she’ll just have to trust. We’ll just have to trust. She amended that pronoun. After enough time reading over my shoulder, she decided to create her own accounts. The anonymity of the Web appeals to her in a way she never expected. She loves the instant reinvention.
Sometimes she narrates to me what she loves about me. As if I’m a character. “Years later she’d take for granted the grace with which he cooked, his movements efficient, his steps minimal. He could navigate a stove and an oven and a pot and a pan without any extraneous movement, only pursed lips to show a focus greater than he gave to the usual tasks. And it was his secret, this strange talent in the kitchen, this yen for haute cuisine, this agility.” If Jenny were to make me a character in her book, I hope she would be kind. I’d love it either way. It’s the sum value of my life, her words. It’s everything I live for.
I catch her staring sometimes, off into the middle distance for minutes on end, a completely new habit for Jenny, one I’ve never seen in our time together. She never used to go unfocused, and I know she’s thinking about him, and she’s wondering if she made the right decision, or if she’ll ever know if she made the right decision, if she’ll receive some confirmation one way or another.
And, to be honest, I don’t know why she chose me, either. I don’t know whether he did som
ething wrong or I did something right.
Ultimately, I don’t care.
Jenny comes in and ruffles my hair, charmed by the unintentional texture of the now yellow walls. She bends down and scratches a fleck of paint from my cheek with her nail, then kisses me where she scratched, then on my forehead, then on my lips, then on my lips, then on my lips.
And it’s okay.
Michael Gould
Six Months from Now: January 18, 2011
This took a wrong turn somewhere.
My baby boy is eighteen months old today. I’ve promised myself that I’ll stop counting in months once he hits two. He laughs at everything—big, full-belly laughs, guttural, dirty-old-man laughs that shake him like jelly and get everyone in the room laughing with him. Jackson Gould, the life of the party.
Rebecca takes him to Coffey Park, bundled up in the latest jacket that he’ll outgrow in another week. We buy disposable clothing for our son. I sit on a bench and wait until she rolls him up to me. Rebecca and I catch up cordially while Jackson walks around the playground on fat legs. The playground part of this park frustrates him—everything is built for kids much older—but it’s the closest to where he lives. Where he lives with his mom. It’s taken me a while to make that mental correction.
She paid my parents back, every cent of the Becky’s Bites loan. She made the executive decision to cut the mass of her cookies by 30 percent and the price per dozen by 25 percent, and somehow this math turned into an explosion of orders. When the economy is shit, a cookie for three dollars seems an affordable luxury. She’s in coffee shops and restaurants across Brooklyn now. She’s even hired two people for delivery, employees two and three of her empire.
Rebecca built something. I was looking elsewhere while she built something.
She thanked my parents with a glamour shot session for the two of them with Jackson. I came home to find a framed portrait of my parents holding Jackson, chin glistening and midsqueal. It’s on the mantel where the picture of me and Rebecca used to be. I didn’t ask my mother where she put the one it replaced.
Little Disasters Page 34