Chapter 36
SHAY
Shay dropped out of Columbia to be here with us, they told anyone who came through their doors. Before she had even made the decision.
When Simon first said it, Shay pulled him aside after, explaining that she had not contacted the registrar’s office, that she only had a semester left.
But you know you don’t belong there, Cleo said later, Shay’s hesitation like a plank of wood they methodically sanded down in the following weeks, repeating the same words until there was only a handful of shavings remaining, sawdust they could disperse with one breath.
Fewer people were joining Synanon, frightened away by sensationalist headlines printed only to sell newspapers and magazines, or so they all said.
Devotion was doubted and tested, Columbia another way to show her commitment, and now she would not have to take the Bar.
She would not have to see any of her classmates again.
She would not graduate, but they told her there was value in having gone, and how that soothed her—to know it wasn’t for nothing.
It would bring more people to Riverside.
The first person she tried to recruit was a young woman who was blind in her left eye. She told Shay this right after murmuring hello, after Cleo had called Shay downstairs to join them in the foyer. A three-year-old boy was knotted to the woman’s hand.
“That’s why I part my hair this way,” the woman explained.
“It suits you,” Shay said, though it took her a moment to get used to the way the woman hid the eye with a sheet of light brown hair.
She had dropped in unannounced, as people often did, and Cleo led them to the living room, the woman not letting go of her son, even though he tugged at her arm like a dog on a leash.
She had rings on three of her fingers, glittering bands and one studded with a large diamond not dissimilar from Shay’s own.
Her coat was a gleaming cashmere, but beneath it, she wore blue cotton pajamas, damp at the cuffs from the city’s slush and sleet.
Shay wore a large oxford—just like Simon had, she realized, that first day on the train.
Cleo looked at Shay as they each took their seats on the couches, and Shay understood—she was to take the lead, something she hadn’t done in the two months she’d been visiting. Her nerves flared, but Cleo trusted her, and today, with this woman, it was time.
The woman stared at the Polaroids pinned to the wall: women sitting shoulder to shoulder on beach towels, men constructing the wooden frame of a house, children gathered around a tinsel tree, all different classes and races, all posed with the intimacy of family.
Shay recognized many faces, but others, she had actually never seen at Riverside.
“How was your morning?” Shay asked.
“Fine,” the woman said. Her son was trying to remove his shoes with his one free hand.
“Where in the city are you coming from?”
“We’re by St. Catherine’s Park.”
“I’m right near 70th and 3rd. We might be neighbors.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “So you don’t live here?”
“Cleo does, but I don’t.” The woman’s eyes flickered to Cleo, who was focused on the little boy, mirroring the way he scrunched his nose, which made him grin.
Cleo had a horde of nieces and nephews she desperately loved scattered across New Jersey, though it had been years since she’d been allowed to see them.
I don’t know if they’d even recognize me if I passed them on the street, she’d said during a session of the Game, and someone had snapped, Well, whose fault is that?
“Do you want to play in the kitchen?” Cleo asked him. “Davey’s back there taking every pot out of the cabinets.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think—” the woman began, but the boy was already twisting away from her, pattering behind Cleo in his sock feet. She slumped back, turning to Shay, and Shay could see it—the exhausted relief on the woman’s face, to have someone take him. “Is Davey her son?”
“No, but parenting is a bit different here,” Shay said. “Everyone looks after the children in their own way—it’s much more communal. It’s an impossible job to do on your own.”
The woman said nothing, moving one of her rings in circles, and Shay decided to meet her silence. Every conversation is an inquisition, her father said when he took her on assignment. Whether the other person knows it or not.
“I don’t really know why I’m here,” the woman said.
“I overheard some woman on the subway talking about you all living in this building, and then I had to get out of the house this morning, he was ricocheting off the walls, refusing every food I offered him, no to toast, no to eggs, no to an apple, just no to everything, even putting his shoes on, and all of a sudden, I was outside your front door.”
Shay nodded. “It’s okay not to know.”
“You look like someone who knows everything. Cleo said you went to Cornell and Columbia. I dropped out of Barnard after one year.”
“I’ve learned more here in a few months than I ever learned at those schools.”
The woman looked around the room again, and Shay could feel that she was tugging at the faint tether between them, deciding, just like with her son, whether to let go.
“What’s your son’s name?” Shay asked.
“Nicholas. I wanted to name him Gabriel, like the angel, but it’s tradition in my husband’s family. He’s Nicholas Howard IV, which sounds so wrong, for a baby. Do you have kids?”
“A little girl,” Shay said. “She’s asleep upstairs.”
She would explain this later, to Cleo. How in the moment it did not feel like a lie, or at least not like any lie she had told before.
This was not an evasion, the drop of a curtain to conceal a wound or a weakness.
It was an outstretched hand, an attempt to pull the woman closer, and it came so naturally, knowing what this woman needed to hear to trust Shay, so that she could get stronger in the way Shay had gotten stronger.
It was a lie of benevolence. A lie to get to a deeper truth.
Shay could see it—how the woman would brush her hair back from her blind eye, how she would remove the weight of each of her rings.
“How old?” the woman asked.
“Four.” The phantom child would be Joel’s then, Shay realized.
Dark eyes, that same deep ocean of thought.
It nearly made her stumble. “It’s been—so helpful, being here.
I can just go for a walk on my own, if I need it.
Go to the movies. And then, when I’m with her, I’m really with her.
We read book after book, and I’m not so exhausted and strained. ”
The woman’s face had stilled. Only her fingers moved, plucking at the pale blue cotton bunched above her knee.
“I used to get so frustrated,” Shay continued, “that I’d go into my room in the middle of the day and lock her out of it.” She saw her own small fists beating furiously against her mother’s door. Heard what she had told her mother the other week on the phone: I do not want to be angry anymore.
“I left him in a diner yesterday,” the woman said quietly.
“I said I was going to get him another straw at the counter, but then I just walked out the entrance. I watched him through the window, and—I went back, after a few minutes, but it seemed so easy, so absurdly easy to just keep walking. If I just hadn’t left my stupid purse in the booth. ”
A clang rang out from the kitchen, followed by peals of delight, the laughter of little boys. The woman did not appear to hear a sound.
“I understand,” Shay said.
This was not a lie. She knew what it meant to turn away from those she loved, to think that this was less of a risk than staying and letting them see her fray and fall apart. A tear slipped down the woman’s nose.
“So, what do you really do here?” she asked.
“This,” Shay said.
Before the woman left, she took Shay’s hand in her own, pressing something into her palm. Shay walked back to the kitchen, to where Cleo and Jim were sitting at the table, Davey wearing a black pot on his head, and placed the woman’s diamond band on the scratched wood.
“It was a gift,” she clarified.
“Well, look at that,” Jim said.