by Scott Lasser
“Connor,” says Schwager.
“Yes, Connor. I ask myself, when did we start naming our children Connor?”
“And the answer?” asks Schwager.
“When we started marrying shiksas. I was one of the first. That’s how I got a Kyle.”
“Always a pleasure, Sam.”
Sam says his good-bye, then dials Cunningham’s office and tells the doctor’s girl that he’d like to schedule the operation for Monday the sixteenth. Could the doctor arrange it?
“What operation is that?” she asks. She sounds about twelve.
“The bypass. It’s my second. It’s nothing to look forward to.”
“You’ve spoken to Dr. Cunningham about this?”
“No, I just thought I’d schedule it, felt like having a guy root around in my chest.”
“I, uh, don’t understand,” says the girl.
“Of course I’ve spoken to Dr. Cunningham.”
She puts him on hold and he gets an earful of a local radio station, something the station calls classic rock. Classic rock? What could that possibly mean? He hangs up. Cunningham will call him. In the meantime he decides to have a smoke, but when he finally fishes the pack from his jacket pocket, he finds that it’s empty. A minor inconvenience. He’s almost proud of himself that he smoked a whole pack. It’s not so bad wanting things. Desire. It’s what makes the world go round.
XII
That morning she went to the barricades. She walked the whole way, past people, hordes of them, moving in the opposite direction, everything on the island flowing north, like a river in Maine. The subways were down, the PATH trains; thousands were walking, dazed, an army in retreat. To the south the smoke rose, a huge ash black column that turned white at the top, and tilted east. Otherwise, the sun was bright; it was a day almost without shadows. At the barricades—powder blue with yellow lettering—she found a row of newbie cops, still in their khaki academy uniforms, and a throng of people trying to go south. “I live there, damn it,” one guy kept saying, a big man with a shaved scalp, though Cat could make out a small headband of stubble—he was going bald and had obviously decided to get ahead of it—and hundreds of droplets of sweat.
“You can’t go,” said one of the cadets. “You can’t. Not now.”
There was a young woman trying to get to her boyfriend. “Please please please,” she said over and over, though no one listened. One cadet kept repeating, “None shall pass. None shall pass. None shall …” Both sides had their mantras.
She moved down the line. This was Fourteenth Street, miles away from the attack, and were it not for the barricade it might have been difficult to know something had gone awry. Kyle’s cell phone was going straight to voice mail. Someone finally picked up his office line, but the someone was in London, where the calls had been routed. Kyle’s building was evacuated, the woman said. As far as the woman knew, everyone was safe.
Maybe the air smelled funny. It was Cat’s first day in New York for a long time. Six years? Seven? Maybe the air here always smelled funny.
She moved west. By Seventh Avenue she found a real cop along the barricade. He was older, perhaps a teacher at the academy. She explained that her brother was missing. He didn’t answer his cell phone. She was worried. She could feel it physically, a panic clutching at her stomach.
“No one knows anything,” the cop said. “But you don’t want to go down there. Forget about the phone. There were cell antennas on the towers, so lotsa calls aren’t working. He’s gonna get outta there on foot. If I was you, I’d go back home and wait for him to walk through the door.”
She turned to leave, but a woman grabbed her. An older woman, perhaps fifty. And then Cat thought, Oh my God, I’ll soon be fifty. The woman held her arm. New Yorkers—strangers—never intentionally touched, but this woman had a firm grip on her bicep, had her stopped in her tracks.
“What is it?” Cat asked.
“Can you tell me, “the woman said, “how to get to Queens?”
Queens? The woman lived in Queens? Was it possible to go to work in the morning, and come home in the evening, and have no idea where you’d been?
Cat knew where Queens was. She knew because whenever she rode the subway she stood at the map and studied it so she wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone. Queens. Up and to the right. North and east. She whirled around.
“Thataway,” she said, pointing.
The woman nodded and walked on. Thataway? Where did that come from? It was something Cat might have heard on a TV Western when she was a kid. But now she was facing uptown, and she, too, needed to walk north and east.
Along the way she came to a long line of people snaking around a courtyard of a building. She got in the line—pure instinct—and then asked the man in front of her what they were waiting for.
“To give blood,” he said. He was a stocky guy in a suit, a dime a dozen in New York. “They’re gonna need lots of blood.”
She wanted to help, but she couldn’t wait. She had to get back to Kyle’s, to see if he was there.
The first plane, they said on the news, hit at 8:46. By the time Cat got back to Kyle’s apartment it was almost three. That’s when she knew, but still she waited. Then it got dark, and she knew again. She sat in her brother’s pristine living room, pulled out her cell phone, and called Michael, who was home with Connor. She called her father, the first time in almost a year.
“Give him time,” her father instructed. “It could take him a long time to get there.”
“Dad, it’s dark outside.”
He didn’t understand, insisted that Kyle didn’t work in the building, that he had to be okay. Here was a man who had been to war, and he believed this.
She hung up and rushed out of the building, down to Third Avenue, walked three blocks downtown when it occurred to her that there was hardly a car on the street, just a couple of slow-moving cabs. Except for a few dour-faced pedestrians, the sidewalk was empty. She stopped. She didn’t know what she was doing. She was standing by a bus stop and she put her hand on its shelter, to steady herself. No. No, no, no. He was gone, he couldn’t be gone. He was the person she was always supposed to have in her life. He was the other half of her; other than Connor, the only person on the planet connected to her by blood. He was what she had.
She didn’t realize she was sobbing, almost choking, till a policeman was holding her. “My brother,” she managed to say, “didn’t come home.”
The cop walked her back to Kyle’s. She was off-kilter, unsteady on her feet, as if they weren’t her feet at all. Still, by the time they got to Kyle’s building, she’d started to right herself. And then she knew what to do. She walked with purpose across the lobby, rode the elevator to Kyle’s apartment, and, once inside, she went to look for the drawer with the pictures.
Now, in the stillness of the wee hours, she lies awake, guessing at the time. Two? No, that would be bad, because she didn’t go to bed till eleven, didn’t fall asleep till well after that, having turned the clock face away from her so she couldn’t see it, so she couldn’t know just how little sleep she was going to get. No, she hopes it is five-thirty, time to get out of bed, moments before the alarm will buzz, after something like a full night’s sleep.
She glances at the corner of her blinds. It’s still dark outside, too dark. Night. She throws an arm over her eyes but it’s no use, she’s awake. She rolls over and checks the clock: 4:43. Close enough, and something of a relief. Out of bed, she stumbles to her living room, then over to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. The linoleum is cool on her feet, waking her completely. Let it go, she tells herself. Let it go. Sleep can come tonight. There’s always time for sleep.
She would like to call Tommy, but of course it’s too early. Usually she suppresses the urge to call him, waits for him to call her, and he does, every couple of days. She knows it’s a bit early, but she’d like it to be every day. They’ve had two dates since he kissed her in the ice-cream parlor, two meals at restaurants, maybe
four or five hours to peel back the layers of who he is. “The child is the father of the man,” goes the saying, and she thinks this might be right. He was a boy of such potential that merely being a well-regarded doctor, a saver of lives, is somehow a disappointment. Perhaps anything would be a disappointment. Even me, perhaps. But he does call, and they have plans for Friday night.
She’s ready to go get her run in before Connor wakes, but she decides to check the Times online. Usually, she waits till work, but it’s only a quarter after five; she has fifteen minutes before she has to hit the pavement and run circles around her building. Siobhan is there. It’s her, added now to the list of the dead. Cat’s photos are under her keyboard at work, but there is no doubt this is the woman. “Siobhan Boyle,” reads the first line, “was a woman in a hurry.” She’d grown up, as Kyle had said, in Babylon, Long Island, then attended SUNY Stony Brook. She’d worked in fashion before going to Wall Street and becoming a bond broker, one of the only women at her firm. And she had a young son.” ‘She was a unique person,’ her father, Gregory Boyle, said, ‘and she left us the gift of this little boy.’”
Holy shit, Cat thinks. Here it is.
• • •
The next morning she is on Northwest Airlines, sitting in row twenty-one of a twenty-four-row plane, her shoulder against the window, her legs at a slant away from it to get a little more room. She breezed through security, but only because the guards had their hands full with several large Arab families, the women’s hair covered by head scarves, the men in dark, worn-out suits with open shirt collars. The other travelers looked nervous, but Cat wasn’t. She’d studied the security tapes of the 9/11 hijackers, who were neat and efficient and looked nothing like these frumpy Arabs. It is hardly surprising to see them at this airport. Cat had read that Detroit has the highest concentration of Arabs anywhere on the globe outside the Middle East. It makes little sense. That the north of Michigan is filled with Swedes and Finns has a geographical logic, but finding Arabs in Detroit is like finding Eskimos in Phoenix. Still, they are here.
On the plane, with more than fifteen minutes till takeoff, she calls Michael, then gets Connor on the phone to tell him good-bye. “I love you so much, Mommy,” he says, to which she replies, “I love you, Angel Boy.” After she hangs up she takes a deep breath. Everything is okay, she tells herself. I’ll see him tomorrow, maybe, or the next day. She calls Tommy and gets his voice mail, as she often does. He’d told her to call when she was leaving. “I’m still planning on Friday,” he said. “But, of course, don’t come back just for me.” She hangs up before the beep. At this point it’s probably better not to call so much.
She turns off the phone, slides it in her purse, and puts the purse under the seat in front of her. She pushes her shoes in next to it. She tries to get comfortable in the seat, then puts her head back and closes her eyes. She loves flying alone. You get two hours of peace, two hours when you don’t have to talk to anyone.
She walks off of Forty-third Street into the New York Times Building carrying her purse and dragging a suitcase with rollers, as if this were a hotel and she were checking in. The suitcase is small, the kind that fits in a plane’s overhead bin. She’s not staying long.
She is here for Laura McCann. This was the woman who interviewed her about Kyle. Cat called her yesterday—she had saved McCann’s direct number—and left a message. McCann called her back and left a message while Cat was in flight. Cat has flown seven hundred miles and right now all she needs is a phone number.
In the lobby she pulls out her cell phone and again calls McCann; luckily she answers. Cat explains that she’s looking for this lost boy, that she needs McCann’s help. “It’ll take no more than five minutes of your time,” Cat says. “I’m in your lobby. Could you come down? I’ll explain everything. Please, for this little boy.”
Cat waits, looking around the gray lobby, noticing its martial quality, the armed guards, the cameras, the barricades. Ever since the attacks everyone has gotten more careful. And then there was the anthrax scare. Cat tries to remember, did they ever catch the guy who did it? Did they ever find out why?
“Ms. Miller?”
Cat turns and looks down at a short, dark-eyed woman, basic dark slacks and light blouse, midlength hair that doesn’t look like it gets much attention. This, Cat thinks, is Laura McCann? On the phone, with her throaty, almost patrician accent, she sounded tall and worldly. This woman can’t even be thirty.
Cat shows her a copy of Siobhan’s “Portrait of Grief,” with Siobhan’s father’s name underlined. She says she’s looking for this man, and could the Times provide his phone number?
“Why don’t you look him up in the phone book?” asks the reporter.
“Yesterday I called thirty-four Gregory Boyles. Also G. Boyles. I tried Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Babylon, Long Island. Nothing.”
“What does this have to do with the little boy?”
Cat produces her brother’s page. “This is my brother, the one you wrote about. On September tenth he told me about Siobhan, that she had a child, and that he suspected he was the father. The next day he died and so did she. But the little boy is still out there.”
Laura McCann nods, thinking.
“There are privacy issues.”
“You found him,” Cat says.
“Wait here,” McCann says.
It’s half an hour before she returns. “Here,” she says.
She hands Cat a piece of printer paper, a copy of a page from a phone book. There’s a Gregory and Maryann Boyle underlined, with a phone number and an address in a place abbreviated to Yrktwn.
“Where’s nine-one-four?” Cat asks.
“It’s Westchester. North of the city. Go to York-town.”
Cat nods, thinking a rental car is the next step.
“Do you have DNA?” the reporter asks. “From your brother? So you’ll know if the child is his.”
“Yes, his company found a coffee cup he left on his desk. The police took a DNA sample.”
“But how did they know that the cup was his?”
“He didn’t work in the Trade Center, he went there that morning for a meeting.”
“Jesus.”
“Thanks for the number,” Cat says.
“The rescue workers,” says Laura McCann. “Did they find … anything?”
“Nothing,” Cat says. “Nothing at all.”
XIII
He wakes in his reading chair, the light from the window soft, something out of the afternoon. He figures he’s been out for several hours. He has the odd feeling that he has been visiting Goodman. Goodman, who made him a partner when he didn’t have to—Sam would have left Ford for just a little more pay—who bought Sam gifts, who confided in him, who treated Sam as he might have treated a brother. Through it all Sam never trusted him. Sam was wary of Goodman’s glibness, of those easy sales skills, the wide smile. Only at the end did Sam realize he’d been wrong about Goodman. This was almost twenty years ago, when one day Goodman called Sam into his office and asked, “How much would you want to retire?”
“A million dollars,” said Sam. He’d given this number some thought. He’d reached threescore and one year, as they might have put it in the Bible. Three-quarters of a million would have done it, but he’d learned it never made sense to ask just for what you needed.
“What if I got you twice that?” Goodman asked. “Would you feel okay about leaving?”
“Is this some kind of a test?”
It wasn’t. Goodman had an offer for the business. From Ford, of all places. It was for three times what Sam thought the business was worth. That was Goodman. He should have felt triumphant, but he looked tired, almost withdrawn.
“Is something wrong?” Sam asked.
Goodman was sick. Cancer, he said. Probably he was dying. He didn’t want to work anymore. He wanted to move to Florida and try to reconnect with his sons. They were not, at the moment, talking to him, and he knew he was running out of time. Their mother had t
urned them against him, he said. Sam had known Goodman for ten years, and finally he got the story. His wife had fallen in love with someone else, and when that didn’t work out she moved to Florida with the boys. Goodman went often, but the boys were young, and after even a month apart he started to seem like a stranger, till one trip she refused to let him see them. She said it was disruptive, confusing for them. He was turned away twice more. He hired a lawyer. He wrote the boys letters, but after a year she sent them back unopened. That was the worst, Goodman said, getting those letters back, with all he’d put into them, and they weren’t even opened. Still, the boys were teenagers now and able to think for themselves. He had, he felt, one last chance. He would move down there and see what he could do. He thought it would change things if the boys knew he was dying.
He died seven months later. As far as Sam knew, the boys wouldn’t see him. He left them all his money anyway.
XIV
She drives her rental car up a road called the Taconic Parkway, one of those names that seems to suggest a certain grandeur, though in truth it’s a typical road in the east: narrow, with bumpy, uneven pavement, dotted with scablike patches of new asphalt. She is heading for Yorktown, as though to a lesson of her country’s origin. The British surrendered at York-town. Still, it couldn’t have been this Yorktown; it was the one in Virginia, she remembers. The British had a band; it played a song called “The World Turned Upside Down.”
Origins are, for her, a tricky business. She was quite old when she learned of her own, seventeen, already five foot nine, as tall as her father. She had Tommy then. He was tall and fair, his arms muscular and veined from football, his body covered in the finest veneer of golden hair. He was just her age, but seemed older to her. He knew where he wanted to go, and how to get there. He was kind to her, but exciting, too, good and bad at the same time. Sometimes when she thought about him, it made her dizzy. She could disappear out of her life altogether.