Rules for Moving (ARC)

by Nancy Star

  months—theirs was a building of complainers—because

  she’d never been good with names. To compensate, she’d

  mastered a genial expression that suggested she really would love to chat if only she had more time. The doormen

  didn’t care. To them she was the introverted wife of Aaron Dash, a man who was friendly enough for both of them.

  As a neighbor, Aaron had many appealing qualities.

  In the elevator he was quick to offer to hold a leash, a

  baby, a package. Whenever a sign went up announcing a

  new committee, it was almost always Aaron’s name that

  topped the list. He loved meetings of all kinds, except

  AA. He refused to go to one of those.

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  For Lane, meetings were like social gatherings: to be

  avoided. As for the elevators in her building, she dreaded them. It wasn’t that she was claustrophobic; she actually

  liked small spaces. Rather it was because Aaron too often

  boasted to their neighbors about her job, which meant

  Lane sometimes found herself cornered in the elevator by

  someone whose name she couldn’t remember, asking, at

  times urgently, for advice. As if she could solve anyone’s problem in the time it took to get from the lobby to the

  eleventh floor.

   h h

   h  h

  She didn’t bother with her key. When Aaron drank he

  left the door unlocked. As soon as she put her bag down

  on the console table in the small foyer, she saw him

  sitting on the marital pullout. He was wearing a sports

  jacket, slacks, and shoes with no socks. She could not

  explain why it bothered her so much, this latest affecta-

  tion, even in the winter, no socks.

  The TV was off, his phone wasn’t in sight, no

  newspaper, magazine or book was at hand. He saw the

  question on her face and answered it. “I’ve been waiting.”

  A moment passed. “Luckily,” he said, and Lane tipped

  her head wondering what could possibly come out of his

  mouth next, “Milo’s mother graciously agreed to turn their late-over into a sleepover. Since obviously you forgot to

  get a babysitter to pick Henry up.”

  “Did you ask Henry if he wants to have a sleepover?”

  Their apartment had never felt big but now that they

  hated each other and had to pretend they didn’t, it felt

  like a closet. “Wait. Why do we need a babysitter to pick

  him up?”

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  “Because of the dinner party.”

  “Why would I go with you to a dinner party?”

  “Because it’s for work. Because it’s important. Because

  you said you would.”

  Had she? It was possible. “I’m not going. I’m calling

  you a Lyft.” She found his phone on the kitchen counter

  next to the bottle of bourbon. “What’s the address?”

  Usually a question like that—these days any question—

  would be enough to trigger a rat-tat-tat of protests. I drive better drunk than you do sober. You don’t trust me because you don’t trust anyone. But tonight Aaron didn’t protest. Maybe he was too drunk to protest. He called out the address.

  She plugged it in his phone.

  It would be expensive, Aaron taking a car from the city to Port Somewhere on Long Island. But he was too drunk to

  drive. She didn’t have any protective feelings for him, per se—by now she was up to about 30 percent disinterest,

  70 percent disgust—but he was Henry’s father.

  “The car will be here in four minutes. You better

  go down.”

  And just like that, he did.

  When she called Milo’s mother to apologize—there’d

  been a mix-up, she wasn’t going out after all, would it be okay if she came to pick up Henry now?—the mother

  asked if Henry could still spend the night. The boys were

  having so much fun. Of course Lane agreed. It would

  be better, Henry not seeing her like this, in a funk. He

  could read her face like a book.

  She made herself eggs and after she cleaned up, opened

  her email to scan for a Roxie letter into which she might disappear. She hadn’t yet settled on one when the doorbell rang.

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  Their building had a front desk staff to announce

  visitors, but it wasn’t unusual for a neighbor to stop over to have a word with Aaron in the evening, reporting

  trouble on the committee that decided Christmas tips,

  or needing help developing a list of Best Practices for

  Owners of Big Dogs. But tonight when she opened the

  door, a uniformed policeman was standing there.

  His eyes looked sad. She paled and held her breath.

  “May I come in? It’s about your husband.”

  She put her hands to her chest and said, “Thank god.”

  He didn’t flinch. He was one of those cops who looked

  as if he’d seen it all.

  She quickly explained, “I was afraid it was going to

  be about my son.”

  He didn’t care. He asked her if she wanted to sit down

  and she told him she was fine and stayed where she was.

  She was fine except for her heart, which was beating so

  hard she was sure he could hear it.

  He got to the point. Her husband had driven his car

  into a concrete barrier on the Henry Hudson Parkway

  and perished.

  She was repeating the word, perished, when it occurred to her. “He wasn’t on the Henry Hudson. He went to

  Long Island. He would have taken the L.I.E. and—” She

  stopped. Aaron didn’t drive to his dinner. She hadn’t let

  him drive. She leaned against the wall and let out what

  felt like all the air in the world. “It wasn’t Aaron. He took a Lyft. I called it for him. I’m sorry for whoever it was, but it wasn’t my husband.”

  The policeman took out his notes. “Driver’s license

  said Aaron Dash.” He looked up. Lane nodded. He proceeded to read the make and color of their car and then

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  their license plate. “That yours?” She nodded again. “You

  know the name of the passenger?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The woman he was with didn’t have ID.”

  “Brielle?” She ran through the facts in her head. Aaron

  had blown off the Lyft she called him. Then he called

  Brielle. Then he blew off the dinner in Port Somewhere

  to go somewhere else. She noticed that the policeman

  had jotted down Brielle. “Is Brielle dead?”

  “There were six fatalities. Your husband, his compan-

  ion and the passengers of the other car.” He ignored her

  widening eyes and continued, “A family. Must have been

  coming home from a ski trip. Snowboards stopped traf-

  fic in both directions.” He paused. “Brielle’s last name?”

  “I have no idea.” Lane didn’t faint, exactly. It was

  more of a sliding down unexpectedly, so that one moment

  she was standing and the next moment she was sitting

  on the herringbone wood floor in the small foyer of the

  apartment she’d been planning to leave.

   h h

   h  h

  She remained numb for the rest of the night, moving

  without feeling, talking without thinking, soldiering on

  through the necessary tasks
, each call pointing the way

  to the next. When she told the grim news to her sister,

  Shelley said, “Did you ring Mom and Dad?” When she

  called her parents, they asked if Aaron’s brother knew.

  When she called Aaron’s brother, he asked for the name

  of the funeral home. The man at the funeral home wanted

  to know if she’d been to the hospital yet. At the hospi-

  tal Lane was ushered into a small room where another

  woman was waiting. The woman introduced herself as

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  Brielle’s mother. Lane had no idea how she managed to

  say, “Sorry for your loss,” to the woman who was the

  mother of Aaron’s girlfriend, but she did.

  It was only when she finally laid her head on her pil-

  low and positioned her body at the very edge of her side

  of the pullout that it occurred to her: she’d been lucky

  about one thing; Henry was at Milo’s. She didn’t know

  how she would have gotten through the night with Henry

  watching, first the policeman, then the phone calls, then

  the trip to the hospital. She felt a second wave of re-

  lief when she realized she didn’t have to go through

  the motions of Henry’s bedtime ritual, Tell Me That

  Story. Henry loved the tradition, which Aaron started,

  of bedtime stories about his parents. Aaron’s stories were usually more exciting than Lane’s, because even though

  they started with a nugget of truth, by the end he often

  spun that nugget into fantasy. Perhaps she should have

  paid more attention to that, she thought now, how much

  Aaron enjoyed burnishing the truth.

  Whichever one of them was telling the story, the

  routine began the same way: by giving Henry a choice.

  Want to hear the one about the day I tried out for Little League?

  Want to hear the one about the day Dad and I got married?

  At some point Henry would pick. “That one. Tell

  me that story.”

  What story worth telling could Lane have possibly

  come up with on the night Henry’s father died?

   h h

   h  h

  In the morning, when she picked him up at Milo’s, Henry

  didn’t ask why they were taking a taxi home instead of

  the subway like they usually did, or why, when they got

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  to their building, she kept her hand on his shoulder and

  briskly steered him toward the elevator.

  News was spreading fast. She could see it in the eyes

  of the neighbors coming out of the package room.

  Inside the apartment, Lane waited until after Henry

  put his backpack on the hook, until after he took off

  his sneakers and placed them, toes facing out, under the

  console table in the hall, before telling him they needed

  to have a talk. Hands back on his shoulder, she guided

  him to the couch. She could feel him sensing it, that

  something big was about to happen.

  To avoid confusion, she made sure to speak slowly. “I

  have very sad news. Dad was in a car accident last night

  and he died. Do you understand what that means?” Henry

  looked at his feet and nodded. She put her hand on his

  cheek and felt his warmth. His skin was still baby soft.

  “It’s very sad. It’s okay to cry.”

  He didn’t, at first. His tears came later and when they

  did, Lane felt them in her chest; it was as if her heart—not a figurative heart but the actual organ—was bruised from

  seeing Henry so sad, bruised from imagining the family

  that never made it home from their ski vacation. About

  Aaron, all she felt was a blank space.

   h h

   h  h

  Once the official note was posted in the mail room with

  the special font they always used to announce that some-

  one had passed away, the news blasted through the build-

  ing. People who’d never spoken to her before stopped

  her on her way in, out, up, and down. She didn’t know

  their names. To her they were the knit-browed young

  mother who wouldn’t put down her tantrummy toddler,

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  and the young couple who, always in a rush, banged on

  the elevator button as if that would make it come faster,

  and the old man who twirled his wedding ring when he

  met her eyes. All of them were sorry for her and sorrier

  for Henry. He was, like his father, everyone’s favorite.

  Affection for him was passed from one doorman to the

  next. They called him the mayor of the building, shout-

  ing, “Morning, Mayor,” every day when he left for school

  and, “How are things at city hall?” every day when he

  came home.

  Not very good, he would have said if anyone dared ask now.

  No one did, but Lane knew they would. It was only

  a matter of time.

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  CHAPTER TWO

  At the graveside service, Lane felt boxed in by a wall of

  unfamiliar bodies with faces set in identical grim expres-

  sions. She could count on one hand the people she knew.

  Aside from Henry, none of them were family. Aaron’s

  brother—whom he never saw—turned out to be too ill

  to make the trip. Lane’s sister, Shelley, who lived in a

  London suburb, and her parents, Sylvie and Marshall, who

  lived in southwestern Florida, had competing ill-timed

  emergencies. For Shelley it was something to do with

  her mother-in-law. For her parents it was something to

  do with her uncle. She wasn’t sure of the details because

  after she heard the important part, they weren’t coming,

  she’d stopped listening. Their absence was not really a

  surprise.

  There was another group of mourners she could tell

  she was supposed to know by how their faces brightened

  when she met their eyes. Nothing was required of her—

  the grief everyone assumed she felt gave her a temporary

  pass—but she didn’t want to appear unkind to people

  whom she’d met and then forgotten, so she returned nod

  with nod, hug with hug, sigh with sigh.

  As for the army of Aaron’s grief-stricken friends whom

  she’d never met, the ones now shooting curious, furtive

  glances in her direction, she averted her eyes, tightened

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  her grip on Henry’s hand, stared into the hole in the

  ground and waited for the next instruction.

  When it was time, the rabbi, whom she’d been intro-

  duced to half an hour before the service, guided her to

  the pile of freshly dug earth beside the grave and gestured for her to pick up the shovel that stuck out straight up.

  Like a vampire’s stake, was what she thought.

  The shovel resisted at first and then came out so quickly

  her body swerved and the mourners gasped. As she shoved

  the scoop back in the dirt, she reminded herself what the

  rabbi had told her during their brief meeting. The rituals she performed today were to honor her husband in front

  of those who loved him. Lane hadn’t said anything to the

  rabbi about how she felt toward Aaron—Henry had been

  sitt
ing right beside her—but she suspected he had seen

  something flicker across her face because when he said

  that, about honoring Aaron in front of those who loved

  him, his eyes drilled into hers as if with a secret message.

  Now he touched her arm. She stopped midscoop.

  “Tradition tells us,” he explained as he guided her

  hand so that she rotated the handle, flat end of the scoop now on top, “to lift the dirt on the back of the shovel.

  This shows our reluctance.”

  Lane nodded and did her best to lift the earth that

  smelled like worms on to the back side of the shovel. She

  walked gingerly—shovel, earth, herself—to the grave. It

  seemed to her that she’d hardly gotten any dirt to stay

  on the back of the shovel, but when the loamy earth hit

  the coffin, the thud was loud enough to make her recoil.

  The rabbi pointed her toward where the shovel had

  been. “We do not pass the shovel from one to the next,”

  he explained, not just to her. “We return it instead to the mound.” He waited while Lane jammed the shovel back

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  into the wormy earth. “Thus allowing each mourner a

  chance to have their own moment of anguish.”

  Lane went through the motions of sticking the shovel

  where the rabbi indicated it belonged, but she didn’t hear the rest of what he said. Her focus was now on scanning

  the crowd for Henry. She found him standing in front

  of Jem, her friend from work, whose hands were gently

  resting on his shoulders. She swiftly moved beside him

  and took his hand.

  The rabbi continued to explain customs to those who

  were, and those who were not, still listening. Lane didn’t realize the service had ended until she saw a line had

  formed, Aaron’s bolder friends snaking their way toward

  her. They stopped, in turn, to clasp her hand in theirs, or to kiss her cheek, sometimes on one side, sometimes on

  the other, sometimes on both, whichever it was, she got it wrong. It was during this dance of kisses, hugs and mur-mured condolences that the full weight of Lane’s dilemma

  hit her. How was she supposed to act toward people eager

  to help her in her time of grief, when these same people

  would have treated her with disdain if Aaron had lived

  long enough for her to leave him. There was no way she

  was going to share the details of her failed marriage with strangers, or confide to acquaintances how exhausting it

  had been to live with a man whom everyone else adored.