“He wants five thousand US up front, when we agreed on three.”
“You have five thousand to pay?”
“Yes, but—”
“Don’ argue with him. Give him half now quick. Is a lot of money for him. Then you fly home for a week, if that’s what you wanna do, you know? Pay him the rest when you come back and he finished.”
“Wow. You make it sound so simple. But I can’t just leave my car. I just can’t. I can’t abandon the poor thing. Anyway, it should be finished in a week or so, and I’ll have gotten my period by then.” She ran her hand over her breast. “I’m telling you, I can feel it coming. It was just all that surfing that threw it off.”
Isabel looked at her carefully. “You love your car, no, Doña Mercedes?”
“I do. We’ve been through a lot together, she and I. You have no idea.”
“Her? In Spanish a car is him, Mercedes.”
Wendy laughed. “You and Clamato are the only ones who ever call me that. I think you guys made it up. So what happens if Marco won’t play along?”
Isabel put her chin in her hand, raised her eyebrows, and grinned ruefully. “Well, there’s always the policía.”
PART TWO
Fresh Start
It felt like a back-to-school day. Clear, crisp, and windless. Still warm, but not that lazy summer warmth. The school year would be unblemished, full of promise. Maybe this would be the year I’d get straight As and make the varsity hockey team. Why not? Anything seemed possible.
Eight thirty a.m. I’d taken a cup of coffee up on the roof to savor the day before going to work. Work was good, thanks to Kate, and there were other hopeful projects in the pipeline. A lunch date with golden boy loomed pleasantly in the near future. Even blocky, drab New York looked good: eastward, the solid line of incoming traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge inched along with stately, colorful purpose; farther south, the golden lady on top of the Municipal Building glowed numinously. The World Trade towers, less than a mile away, stood out with a blue intensity usually seen only in the high peaks. The sun was delicious on my face. I’d put in fifteen years to get here, and it felt like I’d only just arrived.
Across Broome Street, framed in a large loft window, I could see a young woman with dark hair and a white nightgown watering plants with a long-spouted copper can. She felt my eyes, looked up, hesitated, then lifted her hand in a little wave: too nice a day not to. I waved back, watched her finish watering and leave the room. It was a bare white room with an old maple floor and a few large pieces of art on the walls. She was single, I was sure of it. And so was I.
So yes. This could be the year for a new start. Romance, a real romance that would fill the hollowness, could be waiting just across the street. At the other end of the phone. A perfumed room. A sweet presence. The Big Apple! Even the sound of a big jet, swooping low over the city from the north where a building blocked my view, probably full of eager commuters from Boston, was part of it.
Half an hour later I was lying on the floor of my loft, holding my knees tight to my chest to ease my spasming back. Channel 7 News showed the two World Trade Center towers smoking scenically into the deep blue sky, backed up by speculation ranging from pilot error to all-out war. When I still had been on my feet the TV could be confirmed by the view out my window, but seeing the fireball of the second plane’s impact had sent red and blue currents of electric pain shooting from my head into my lower spine, and from then on I lay on the floor and watched only the TV screen. There was no footage of the first hit—maybe no one but I had seen the big jet disappear into the tower, leaving an unbelievably small hole.
I dragged myself to the window when the announcer screamed, but it was too late to witness the fall. The sight of a single smoking tower where there should have been two was the worst thing. Was I going insane? I knelt at the window, gripping the sill with both hands, not taking my eyes from the remaining tower for the next half hour until it too soundlessly disappeared in a seismic brown-textured cloud highlighted by a fluttering snow of Xerox paper.
Kate. Hadn’t I begged her, since the regular messenger service was booked, to pick up a crucial contract from an agent’s office down there in the Wall Street area before coming to work?
I levered myself gradually to a bent-over stand and shuffled to the phone. A machine answered her extension at the office. Nothing happened at all when I dialed her cell phone. Another machine answered for the switchboard operator. I called Kate’s machine again: “Kate, it’s me. I’m here at the loft. Call me immediately.” I couldn’t hang up, even when the machine beeped the end of the recording.
The brown cloud out my window floated gently over the New York harbor southeast toward Brooklyn. With both towers gone, it was somehow less scary, less as if your mind were playing awful tricks. If you worked at it, you could almost think the towers never had been there in the first place. But the streets outside were screaming with sirens, and the first few survivors, covered with white dust, disheveled and bleeding, were beginning to straggle past, up Lafayette Street. The words rescue, emergency room, and body bags came from the TV.
“You sent her down there. You find her,” Kate’s aunt Mary sobbed at me when I called the West 86th Street apartment. Kate had left at eight thirty to be there when the agent’s office opened at nine. The first tower had fallen at about ten. The office was on Rector Street, but how far it was from the towers I had no idea. Yet another machine when I dialed the number. My own cell phone registered no service.
Find her? I could barely move. People were dying, it could be war, and my back had gone out. I started to laugh. There were only two people in the world who would be able to laugh with me, I knew that, and one was somewhere in Mexico and hadn’t talked to me in ten years.
I had some pills left over from the last time my back had gone out—Valium for relaxing the spasmed muscles and codeine for the pain—so I swallowed a big dose and lay back down on the floor in front of the TV, cradling the phone. A reporter interviewed a survivor who was raving about flying men. A transmission from one of the planes indicated it had been hijacked by Arabs. The towers fell over and over in instant replay, and people fleeing the billowing cloud couldn’t have been filmed better by Spielberg. None of the terrified, powdered, bleeding faces on the screen were Kate’s.
Gradually, as the Valium and codeine took hold, I began to think maybe staying here was for the best. I could never have found her out there in the screaming crowds shown on the TV screen. My home phone still seemed to work—I should be here when she called, and she was bound to call sooner or later. People were calling other people up and down Crosby Street. I could hear phones ringing in all different keys and volumes, but nobody seemed to be answering. The lack of connection made me think of my sister: she’d never call, never in a million years. But then she was in Mexico. She probably hadn’t heard yet.
As time passed (I checked my watch every once in a while—it was passing very quickly), the sound of traffic, sirens, and shouting grew less, but the ringing phones seemed louder. One of the TV reporters had come up with a story about a man trapped in the wreckage who was calling out on a cell phone (how did his happen to work?), begging for rescue while his air ran out and a steel girder slowly pressed down on him. Why didn’t anyone answer the phones? A cordon had been set up on 14th Street, sealing off lower Manhattan. Was I the only person left in the area?
I didn’t want to use my phone in case a crucial call might be on its way to me, but then I remembered I had call waiting. I couldn’t get to my address book, so I dialed information in Livingston, Montana, and asked for Claire Barstow. Miraculously, her number was listed.
And there she was, sounding breathless. “My God, Peter, I’ve been trying to call for hours, but the circuits have all been busy. Are you all right? Holy shit.”
“You won’t believe this. My back went out. I’m lying here on the floor stoned out of my mind on Valium and codeine.”
“You’re kidding. Your back’s
out? When did that happen?”
“When the second plane hit. I saw the first one, too. I can see everything from here, but I can’t stand up.”
Claire didn’t say anything.
“You still there? Claire? Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here. I’m just trying to picture you.”
“I’m flat on my fucking back. Meanwhile, the world is coming to an end.”
When she started to laugh, I was outraged. Then I remembered I’d been laughing myself. A phrase came into my head: gales of laughter. Claire’s laughter was like that. Fresh gales … Christ, I was stoned.
Finally, she calmed down. “God, I’m sorry, but it feels better when I laugh. Maybe I’m hysterical. Did you hear about the Pentagon?”
“Yeah.”
“And the one that went down in Pennsylvania?”
“Yeah.”
“Your sister called, you know. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been trying to reach you. She wanted to know how you were.”
I went into a shallow glide. “She did?”
“I wouldn’t lie to you, Peter. She called a couple of times, in fact.”
“Amazing.”
“Yes.”
“Well. Tell her I was thinking about her too. But don’t tell her about my back, okay?”
“Oh, Peter, I’m sorry I laughed. It must be awful to be lying there helpless in the middle of all this. It was just your tone of voice that set me off.” She giggled. Tone of voice. It was exactly how my sister would have said it.
“What about it? What about my tone of voice?”
“Don’t get mad, Peter. I wish you were here. I wish both Wendy and you were here. God, what’s going to happen next?”
While I wondered about that, I heard the call waiting beep. “Claire, I’ve got to go. That could be my assistant. I’ll get back to you. Sorry.” I pressed the flash button before she could answer.
A strange woman’s voice. “Is this Peter Davis?” The woman in the loft next door? But how? No, she was calling from Bellevue Psych Emergency. Were they coming for me?
Someone had been brought in. A girl. She’d given them my name.
The drugs had worked well enough for me to start hobbling toward Bellevue thirty blocks north. Many people assumed I’d been hurt in the crash and kept offering things like water and fruit. I declined them with a red face and a limp smile. Above 14th Street there was still some traffic, and finally a black taxi driver pulled alongside and in a Caribbean accent asked where I was trying to go. At the word “Bellevue,” the driver got out, helped me into the cab, and we were there in fifteen minutes through practically empty streets. No charge. The driver helped me out again and roared away.
The psych emergency waiting room, when I finally found it, featured a large TV in front of which were clustered two uniformed guards and a few people in street clothes. Patients? One of the guards turned to me. “Sir, this is psych,” he said gently. “I can take you over to shock-trauma. It’s not too far.”
Kate and a fireman had been brought in together, and so far they were the only crash casualties admitted to the ward. A lady doctor in green scrubs opened the locked door and led me down a long, pale green corridor—she didn’t crack a smile when I explained why I was bent over at a forty-five-degree angle. “They’re both in a state of pretty extreme disorientation,” she said of Kate and the fireman. “Apparently, they went through something terrible together, we’re not sure what. Are you family?”
“A family friend, she’s interning in my office. They can’t tell you?”
“Well, they’re not talking. Neither of them has said a word since they came in…. Well, Kate did give us your name. The rescue people said they were just wandering down there in a daze with their arms around each other when they were picked up.”
“Are they still together?”
“No, the fireman’s sitting in the common room, and Kate’s lying down in one of the, ah, rest areas.”
“Oh, she’s asleep?”
“No.”
The small room was lit by a single recessed bulb in the ceiling. Kate was a lump under the blanket on the farthest of the two cots, face up, eyes open, hair straggling on the pillow. I pulled one of the two straight-backed wooden chairs nearer her and sat with a sigh. “Jesus, Kate, I’m so sorry.”
I sat there for a long time, but she never moved. Air hissed in a vent, and there was a faint pulse of machinery. Everything was cottony from the drugs…. like warm fog. Thicker and thicker, deeper and deeper.
I was in my bed in the big old, sad Philadelphia house. Sweaty and scared after a nightmare, and for some reason my bedside light didn’t work. Ditto the wall switch. I might have been about seven. Or eight. I had no idea of the time.
I got out of bed and crept into the hall. My sister’s bathroom was the first door on the left, and it was open, the lights inside combusting through a thick, impenetrable cloud of steam. There was no sound, no voices.
I’d never in my life been into her bathroom, but sometimes the door would be open as I walked by and I could see an old claw-footed tub and a toilet (same as in mine) and a large white-painted wooden table. The table was waist high, as big as a sideboard, with a pull-out section in the top, and a vertical row of drawers halfway down one end. When my sister was still in diapers, whoever changed them must have used this table.
I stood for a long time at the open door, still half asleep. First I was outside the steam cloud, then I was part of it. Did it come out into the hall, or did I step through the doorway? The cloud muffled and swirled, warm and damp, and seemed very familiar: thoughts pushing their way to the surface, roiling, changing shape, receding and being replaced by others. Somewhere ahead of me was light, and I was making my way toward it. Light and two human shapes, one bending over the large white table, one lying on it.
I’ve lived this scene over and over, but it never comes clear.
The voice whispering my name was Kate’s. I could see now that she’d turned her head toward me on the pillow. She was saying something too softly to hear. I got off my chair and knelt down close to the bed, but still I couldn’t make it out. My hand reached out and lightly stroked her forehead. “Don’t worry,” I heard myself say. “Nothing more is going to happen. It’s all over. I’m here now.” When her own hand came up and clutched my forearm, I realized I was really speaking to someone else.
Acrid yellow smoke had been choking lower Manhattan for three days before the publisher’s PR maven was able to wangle seats on a San Francisco flight out of Newark for Kate and myself. After taking her from Bellevue to her aunt’s, I’d hobbled down to the nearest blood donor station, but the lines were around the block and I couldn’t stand up that long. (Hospital emergency rooms, geared up for a flood of survivors, were almost empty. A Saudi terrorist named Osama bin Laden was reported to have been the organizer. Mayor Giuliani waded impressively through the smoke and debris and abandoned political rhetoric for halting simple words.) I’d wheeled the TV nearer to my bed and waited for intermittent phone service so I could talk to Kate’s father, her aunt, and Claire Barstow. Kate herself still was not talking. The fireman she’d come in with had checked himself out and disappeared. The phone listed under his name rang without answering; a Bellevue shrink theorized he might have returned to Ground Zero. Meanwhile, all my meals were takeout Chinese delivered by smiling bicyclists. The attack hadn’t slowed them down at all.
Kate, in dark glasses, jeans, and a navy pea jacket, was waiting for me on the sidewalk in front of her aunt’s apartment building in the late afternoon; the smoke up here was much less intense, almost unnoticeable. She put her duffel in the trunk of the taxi and climbed in without a word.
“Your dad’s going to meet us at the airport,” I said. “He says he’s got rooms at the Mark Hopkins.”
“For you too?” Her voice sounded creaky.
“I’ve got a flight to Bozeman at six ayem.”
“What are you going to do until then?”
“I guess I’ll just lie on the floor. It’s actually better for my back than being in bed. It’s only about four hours anyway.”
“Bozeman, Montana? Why Bozeman?”
“My sister’s best friend lives near there.”
“Your sister’s best friend? Why aren’t you seeing your sister?”
“I plan to. This is the first step.”
“What are you talking about?” The dark glasses swiveled toward me.
“My sister and I have been kind of estranged. We, uh, haven’t spoken for the last ten years.”
“Jesus. Why not?”
“Well … she blames me for something I didn’t do. Among other things.”
“Wow. Must have been something pretty bad.”
“It was. Please don’t ask me about it.”
“So why don’t you tell her the truth?”
“Wouldn’t do any good. She believes what she believes.”
“So it’s her fault, hunh?”
“I didn’t say that at all.”
“What if she doesn’t want to see you?”
“I hope to Christ she will.”
The glasses swiveled frontward. “Well, I hope so too.” Her tone was bitter and ironic: a whole new way of talking. “What about your precious job?”
“Golden boy’s letting me have two weeks paid leave, after we signed that woman in Maine.” I nudged her gently. “You’ll be getting a fat bonus yourself. Your dad will be very proud.”
Silence.
***
The airplane had rows of two seats on one side of the aisle, three on the other. We got the two-seated side, close to the galley in the rear: a good place to be, I thought, if hijackers took over the cockpit. Also, you’d be more likely to survive a crash there. Kate kept her dark glasses on. It was a five-hour nonstop flight. The plane was full, and many people seemed to have noisy babies.
“So,” Kate said finally, “you’re going to see your sister because of Osama bin Laden?”
Jesus! Was she right? I had to think a minute. “Let’s put it this way: because of him I decided to take matters into my own hands instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself. Kind of a now-or-never deal.” A hollow chuckle. “Plus I heard she’s in Mexico, and I’ve always wanted to go there. I hope her friend tells me she’s near a beach.”