He had to. This is his whole world. Summer’s chatting to Lena about the dog or the weather or her life. Whatever the topic, he can’t hear through the door. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the ease and familiarity and comfort with which she moves and speaks on the front step of her lifelong home. It says that this is her world, too.
Subject: It’s Me Again
From: SaraBeth
To: Elizabeth
Date: May 17 at 9:30 AM
Hey Mom. Got a sec? I was thinking about growing up and trying to remember if you ever just left, and I don’t think you did. You always seemed happy in that big old house, redoing it over the years. See, what it feels like is I haven’t been happy lately. Like I’m not taking care of me. And I thought if I could just get away from the sadness, it might help. It felt right when I walked away, but then I worry about what Tom will think, and Rach. I’m scared, Mom. What if they don’t forgive me? What if I lose them too? You always said to follow my heart, growing up. Does that still work?
Sara Beth looks up from the computer terminal. Here, in the hotel lobby, computer stations for the customers’ convenience. When she rereads the email, it hits her how her mother did go away. As she restored their farmhouse, she delved deeply into its stories by journeying into old newspapers and town records and journals. So she has that now. An answer.
Back at The Plaza, Rachel has to get used to the stillness. The room should have been filled with dishes and silverware and pots of coffee and telephone calls and reservations and plans and talk. Especially talk.
For over twenty-five years, they talked when they passed notes in school and clung to the telephone in the evening, then started letter writing in college until they were living in the same town again. Then it was face to face over coffee, in the car, at their weddings, in their new homes, throughout pregnancies, at Whole Latte Life. They talked everywhere from online to Ferris wheels to Carl’s wake, where Sara Beth spent the entire time fixed leaning forward in her chair giving Rachel a hushed commentary on the flower arrangements, the visitors, the greetings, eliciting a smile every now and then with a fashion comment or an almost unheard “Oy Vey.”
So it’s all wrong that she drink her coffee alone now. Is this how their girls’ weekend out, and all that it means, will end? She really can’t accept that and when the telephone rings, lunges for it.
“Sara?” A beat of silence ticks.
“Rachel?” Tom asks.
“Tom. Oh gosh, I thought you were Sara Beth.”
“Why would I be? She’s with you, isn’t she?”
“Hold on a second.” Rachel walks quickly to the window, looks pointedly down at Manhattan. People walk, cars drive past. Sara Beth might be there, right below. She returns to the telephone believing that.
“Okay, sorry to keep you waiting.” Sara is just down in the courtyard, maybe glancing up before turning in to The Plaza. That’s what she’ll have Tom believe. “What’s up?”
“What’s going on Rachel? Where’s my wife?”
“Well, that’s why I thought you were her.” She could be in the elevator right now, nearly back in the room. “I think she’s downstairs at the desk.”
“The desk? Put her on. I know she’s there.”
“No, really.” Stranger things have happened; her key might be slipping into the lock as they speak. She turns to the closed door. “Not right now, she’s not.”
“And do you happen to know why she hasn’t called home in two days?”
“Well, didn’t she?” Okay, she’s digging in her purse for the key. “When we got here Wednesday night.”
“She hasn’t called. Would you put her on?”
Rachel turns back to the door, watching the knob carefully. “Didn’t she leave a voicemail?”
“No. And if you don’t put her on right now, I’m coming to New York on the next train.”
“No, wait. Tom. Listen.” She looks around the room. It is coming, right now, reality. Like the Acela, it’s coming so fast, just a blur, knocking her off the tracks. “She’s really not here.”
“What?”
“Oh cripe. I don’t know where she is.”
“Jesus Christ, if you don’t start making some sense, Rachel—”
“Tom.” She sinks into the chair.
“What do you mean, she’s not there? Was she ever there with you?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Well where the hell is my wife now?”
“Listen.” She presses the phone to her ear with both hands. “Please. Don’t talk. Just listen.” Then she closes her eyes and waits. When he says okay, then okay again softer, like he already knows, she tells his wife’s story.
“You mean she walked out of the restaurant alone? By herself?”
“Apparently.”
“What’s wrong with this picture?” His voice rises. “It’s been two days and you haven’t called me?”
“I know something’s wrong, but for some reason she didn’t want you to know. She asked me for this personal time. In her note.”
“Her note? She planned this?”
“I don’t really know.”
“And you obliged her.”
“Well. Yes. And no.”
“Come on, already. She’s fucking disappeared!”
“Wait! Now wait a minute. I didn’t sit around. I went to the police right away.”
“Well thank God for that. Have they found her?”
“Not exactly. The thing is, that note bought her some freedom. There’s not much they can do with no criminal act.” What happens next scares her. It makes her press her fingers to her temples against a headache. Tom doesn’t talk. She’s not sure if he is even still on the line.
“You knew this?” he finally asks. Well. She’s never heard that tone before and doesn’t care if she never does again. “And you didn’t tell me?”
“Hey I’ve been looking for her. Constantly. And she caught me off guard asking this favor, you know? To keep it secret.”
“She went over the line with that. Way over,” Tom says. “And so did you.”
“Me?”
“You should have called me right away. What’s wrong with you?”
“No, no stop it. It’s what’s wrong with your wife! You live with her, didn’t you see this coming? Don’t try to pin this on me and tell me what I should have done. Not after what I’ve been through. You’re not here, seeing what I have done.”
“But I don’t think you should be making serious decisions for Sara Beth.”
“I didn’t make them! Sara Beth did! It’s in her note.” She closes her eyes. “Tom, please come, okay?” she asks. “You need to be here. I need help.” She hears him take a breath, changing gears, working past his anger.
“I’ve got the kids.”
“No kids. No. Just you.”
“Just me. Right. Then what?”
“Well I don’t know. This is what I’ve been doing. I follow our itinerary in case she shows up somewhere we planned to go. Really, I can’t imagine her not coming back. I mean, she’s got to come back.”
“My God,” Tom says. “Where are you going today?”
“A few boutiques in the Village. Then the Empire State Building. I’ll call you all day, I promise. Every hour.”
She imagines Tom pacing, laying out some rescue plan in his head, as if you can plan for this. Like stockpiling bottled water and canned goods and extra batteries on a cellar shelf. What could you put on the shelf for this emergency? Cell phones and Kleenex, photographs maybe, favorite ones, where you are sitting at a kitchen table, laughing, relaxed, the sunlight falling like tatted lace across the linoleum, photographs to lay down and say See? Don’t leave. Nursery school Mother’s Day cards maybe, made with blue construction paper and white paste and glitter, sitting on the shelf next to the Kleenex. Ticket stubs from great concerts, when the music lifts you for an evening. Old silent 8mm home movies from a walk on the beach when you wore that big straw sunhat, during a summer va
cation when you stayed in a little white cottage, flower boxes filled with scarlet geraniums and snow white petunias, a film you’d run through a projector and watch with a teary smile.
“I can’t believe this. I’ll get my bag packed and call Melissa,” Tom is saying. “Maybe she knows something.”
“Okay. That’s good.”
He gives her his cell phone number. “I’ll be waiting for your calls. And Rachel? If you find her? Or if she shows up?”
Two days of tears streak her face now thinking of a whole life of 8mm home movies.
“Just tell her we miss her. The kids, too. And to call. To just God damn call.”
“Okay,” she says softly, nodding. Before he can say more, she sets the phone in the cradle.
“Maybe I should have brought her husband in from the start and let him handle this.”
“Why didn’t you?” Michael asks.
“I don’t know. Her note asked that I keep this secret, and we’ve always done little favors like that for each other.”
“Rachel, this is pretty big.”
“Oh, so were the others. I mean, you would think they were little, but they weren’t.”
They are on the eighty-sixth floor observatory of the Empire State Building, standing side by side above the city. The wind always blows this high up, but this wind has spring in it, and a little of the sunshine left to the May day while dusk falls.
“Like I took her daughters on day trips after she brought the new baby home. She had a hard time adjusting to Owen. And when my daughter was born,” Rachel smiles with the memory, “I was young and overwhelmed with being a new mother. The hardest thing was making supper, so Sara froze two weeks of dinners for me. I know, big deal, she cooked some dinners. But at the time, it saved my sanity.” She looks at him. “That’s why I’m waiting. Maybe I’m saving her sanity.”
The sun starts setting, leaving the streets below looking like silver ribbons. Building lights come on, twinkling like stars. Michael points out a few landmarks before asking Rachel what she keeps putting off herself. “It seems that by waiting for her, you believe she’ll come back. What if she doesn’t?” He takes her arm and steers her around a group of tourists passing too closely.
“I can’t even think about that. I feel bad that I knew something was off with her, but I let it go, thinking it was just a rough patch, maybe a little grief from losing her mom. So I owe her this much, this waiting. She’s my best friend, you know? Tom’s not too happy about this, but I’ll see what he says when he gets here.”
“That’ll be good. It’ll take the pressure off of you.”
“She’s worth it,” she says, stopping and looking out at the cityscape.
Michael knows Rachel worries constantly, checking her voicemail, trying Sara’s cell. He drops a quarter into a coin-operated viewer. “Take a look.”
“It’s pretty with the lights coming on in the skyscrapers.”
“Any guess what Manhattan’s very first skyscraper was, back in 1664?”
“Is this another wager?”
“Could be. Loser buys coffee?”
“You’re on.” Rachel considers the skyscrapers. “1664? Maybe a church?”
“Gotcha on this one. A two-story windmill. You’ll have to ante up.”
“A windmill.” The sky turns violet in the east behind the skyline. Rachel pans the viewer, and he figures she must want to turn it downward and scan the street, glancing over the pedestrians, keeping an eye out for that auburn head.
“Take your time,” he tells her, watching her press blowing strands of hair away from her face. “If the wind gets too much, we can go up to the hundred and second. I mean, if you want to. It’s more cramped there, but it’s enclosed.”
“No, I like it here.” Here, where Sara Beth is supposed to be, she doesn’t say. They walk the perimeter of the deck, seeing New York from all angles. He figures Rachel is hoping for a miracle, hoping to see her friend walk through the door, or hoping to turn the curve and see Sara Beth gazing out at Manhattan, waiting for her. The Empire State Building stands on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth. She is looking for that miracle on Thirty-fourth Street.
The sun sets further and Rachel slowly walks, holding her jacket closed in front of her.
“Come on,” he says from behind her, placing his hands gently on her waist. “You’re cold. We’ll go upstairs to warm up and check back here later.”
She puts her hands on his and pulls them around her waist, leaning back into him. “In a minute?” The twilight sky spreads before her. “This is so peaceful,” she says. “Why couldn’t this be all?”
A star breaks through the violet sky, twinkling in the darkening eastern horizon.
“See that star?” Rachel asks. “Every summer my parents rented a cottage at the beach. I’d have one week with my father, one with my mother. It was a pretty place with winding roads and little old cottages.”
He turns when he hears the elevator open, and she glances over her shoulder at him.
“I always brought Sara and on the first night, we’d walk down to the beach after dinner and sit on the boardwalk. When the sun set, we’d watch the big sky over Long Island Sound, searching for the very first star. Whoever spotted it first got the wish that year. The first wish was special, the one to come true.”
“Were you ever first?”
“Oh sure.” She keeps her eye on the lone star over Manhattan’s eastern sky. “I would squeeze my eyes shut and whisper Star light, star bright. First star I see tonight…We still do it, wish on stars every summer. It’s one of those things you hold on to.”
“You found it tonight.”
Rachel stares at that star and silently makes her wish.
Not that he’s noticing intentionally, but it twinkles a little brighter in the sky as the sun sets. Michael thinks it is part of some constellation, part of an ancient connection in the skies, old and lasting through time, still shining on Manhattan. He closes his eyes for a second before leading Rachel upstairs.
They go higher still to the enclosed observatory on the hundred and second floor where the only evidence of wind is its whistle reaching inside.
“There are some who say that this place is very close to heaven,” Michael says after a quick phone call checking up on his daughter.
“An Affair to Remember.” Rachel brushes a wisp of hair off her face. “Deborah Kerr?”
“I think she was right,” Michael answers.
The sky has grown dark now and it’s scary to look down. Rachel can’t imagine being any closer to the sky. Close to the stars, she feels connected to Sara Beth.
“Do you know what stood here before this building?”
“Wasn’t it always the Empire State Building?”
“This was actually the site of the first Waldorf Astoria. They tore it down and hauled it out to sea, and a year and a half later, in 1931, this building stood in its place.”
They walk a little and Rachel figures he’s done with the story, surprised when his voice eventually continues.
“Once the foundations were in, the construction crews framed and built this building a floor a week, every week.” Michael gazes out onto the city, speaking as though he worked there when it happened. “The exterior walls are made of limestone and granite, but it’s framed with steel.”
“A floor a week? That’s incredibly fast.”
“The architects and construction company treated it like an assembly line. When the different tradespeople completed their work on one floor, they moved up to the next and repeated the same job all over again while a different crew moved in behind them.” Michael glances at her. “You following?”
“I think so.”
“The work overlapped,” he explains, walking carefully around other tourists. “You know, electricians and plasterers worked on the lower floors, while up above them, workers put together the steel frame and got that floor ready for the electricians and plasterers behind them, while the roof was still on
ly a drawing in the architect’s office. It was a tight operation. They even had a little railroad set up on each floor to bring the supplies where they were needed. So it’s an impressive building, but fourteen men were killed assembling this tinkertoy.”
“Maybe it isn’t the closest thing to heaven in New York. Maybe in a way, it is heaven. For those guys. They’re here.”
“Heaven in sixty thousand tons of steel, sixty miles of water pipe and three thousand five hundred miles of telephone and telegraph wire, with sixty-five hundred windows to look out from.”
“You know a little more than the average bear about this place.” With the skyline spread before her, she feels what Michael must feel so often from atop his horse, or emerging from the subway, or upon turning a corner and catching a glimpse of this landmark. “You said your grandfather was a mason. He worked on this building, didn’t he?”
“Side by side with Joe’s father. The two masons. And when you think that sixteen thousand people come to work here each day, and another thirty-five thousand come to either do business or just visit the building, well, it’s pretty damn amazing.”
“No wonder you’ve researched it. You’ve got a personal connection.”
“No research. I heard it all firsthand from my grandfather and later from Pop. You know, stories like having lunch out of a pail on the fifty-third floor beams, and the wind blowing construction debris from the upper floors. Stuff you never read about in encyclopedias.” Michael slips his hand into hers and they start to walk. “But that was a long time ago.” They turn to the elevators. “Careful,” he says as the doors open.
Stopping back on the lower deck to see if Sara Beth might be there, the wind touches Rachel’s eyes, her cheeks, blows her hair. She wants to feel it, to remember Michael’s New York heaven.
“What did you wish for?” he asks.
“I can’t tell. It won’t come true that way,” she says as he leans on the wall beside her.
“No, not tonight. When you were with Sara Beth at the beach. What was your wish when you were sixteen?”
Whole Latte Life Page 8