Chapter 2 #12
The plane is far from full. Every passenger already seated watches the new passengers boarding warily.
When a man with a thick black beard and brown skin who looks vaguely Middle Eastern sits down next to me, my pulse jumps.
He takes out a small leather--bound book and buries his attention in it, lips moving in prayer, which only makes me even more anxious.
I steal a glance, realize that he’s reading the Bible, and am flooded with embarrassment.
Who am I to judge someone? And what does it say about me, after my upbringing, that I would deem a Bible a mark of trustworthiness?
He sees me looking at him and flashes me a fast, nervous smile. “Anxious flyer,” he says by way of apology—-for his reading material? His skin color?
“Me too,” I say. I turn my face toward the window, rehearsing my plea for forgiveness.
I was sick, I will say. But I’m better now.
I don’t blame you for not seeing how bad it was, because I couldn’t even recognize myself.
I know I cannot take back what I did. Please forgive me. Please let me step back into my real life.
I have run through all of Adam’s possible responses to this, from shock, to a tight embrace, to a furious Fuck you.
I’ve thought a lot about the words on the radio in the taxi the day I left the mental hospital: The world will always be divided into before and after.
And yet: September 12 still came. The next morning, someone made coffee and got a kid up for school.
Someone else put the finishing touches on a flyer she would post in Union Square, after keeping vigil all night for a husband who never arrived.
Someone else threw away the pin--striped suit, covered with dust, that he’d worn trudging home.
And I woke up in a hospital ER, despite my efforts not to.
Second chances are remarkable things, if you are brave enough to seize them.
When the plane lands with a jolt, I am surprised by how quickly the flight has passed. The man in the seat beside me pries his white--knuckled grip from the handrest and gives me a small smile. “Maybe not so bad,” he says.
“Maybe not so bad,” I echo.
It isn’t until I get out of the subway at Times Square that I realize the muted shock felt in Atlanta is leagues away from what it’s like in New York. The air still smells charred. Every surface is covered in flyers.
Outside the city, this tragedy was about the tallied number of the dead.
Here, it is about individuals—-specific stories, each with a premature ending.
There are so many faces and identifying characteristics.
Height, weight, hair color. Rosary around her neck.
Birthmark on left thigh. A tattoo of an angel on right bicep.
Wearing Dockers pants and a blue rain jacket.
I have to turn away, because guilt batters me. All these people didn’t come home . . . but I could have.
It is overcast and threatening to pour, the exact opposite of the day I left New York City. There’s electricity in the air, the static that precedes thunderstorms. Someone tries to sell me a tourist ride on a bus. A man bumps into me, talking on his cellphone.
Under my feet someone has graffitied the sidewalk: you are alive.
For that reason alone, I flag down a cab and head to Washington Heights.
The only visible difference on the street where I lived is a little shrine outside one of the bodegas—-a photograph of a young man, draped with black crepe and wreathed with wilted flowers.
I kneel down in front of it, reading the name: lukasz t.
milewski. I look at his dimples and dark eyes.
He could not have been much more than twenty.
I stay there longer than I need to, because the alternative is to cross the street and go into the apartment building where I used to live.
Finally, I get up and take a deep breath. My hands are shaking as I wait for the Walk signal.
What is the worst that could happen? I think.
That Adam is furious. That he tells me to leave. That he will not let me see Molly.
But none of those things are as bad as anything that has already happened to me.
I hesitate just before the steps to the building. It’s only three o’clock. Adam might not even be here.
I am seized by a wash of panic, and I grab onto the pole of a streetlight for support. My hand falls on a flyer taped to the metal.
On that flyer is my face.
memorial service for eloise ambrose, 11/11 4:00 pm, north woods.
all are welcome.
The air punches out of me.
What are the odds? About the same, I figure, as a plane striking the very spot I was meant to be.
I start to walk toward Central Park.
When I was pregnant, I fell in love with the North Woods, the part of Central Park closest to our apartment.
There were rocks and a river and the Ravine—-a forest with trees that burst into electric green leaves just after I started to show.
In a busy, loud city, it was a good place to escape.
I would sit on the rocks and watch squirrels dance up the trunks of black cherry trees and pin oaks.
Sometimes I brought a sketch pad, and it was there that I designed the mosaic I’d planned to install in our master bathroom, with the mother and baby bird.
When I get to the spot I loved the most, there is a group of people gathered. One of them shifts, and that’s when I see it: an easel, with a poster of my own face.
The photograph is from three years ago, the day of my wedding. I’m turned to the right, and smiling.
What you don’t see, what’s been cropped out, is Adam. He’s who I had been looking at.
My mouth goes dry, and I duck behind the thick trunk of an elm.
I’m far enough away that I cannot be seen, but close enough for snippets of sound to drift to me.
Our elderly neighbor is telling a story about how I made her banana bread when she was recovering from a hip replacement.
A girl I haven’t seen for years who went to RISD says, “I always thought her work would wind up in a museum one day.”
It is a strange thing, watching the memory of you being put to rest.
My eyes scan the small crowd for Adam’s golden hair, but I can’t find him. And then I see her.
Evie’s blazer hangs loosely on her frame, and there are circles beneath her eyes. She looks like she hasn’t slept in a month. Her fingers are curled around the handle of a stroller.
From this angle I can’t see my baby.
I wonder why Adam is not here. Then Evie says something I cannot hear and opens a bakery box. People gradually approach, take a cupcake to eat, exchange a few words before they wander away.
After twenty minutes, Evie is left alone with a big picture of me, a stack of unused napkins, and my daughter, asleep in a stroller.
From the tunnel in the little stone archway that leads to this spot, Adam emerges.
I don’t know if he’s been listening, or if he just arrived.
Evie and I both watch him approach the poster of me.
He brings his fingertips to the oversize image of my cheek, and my own hand snaps to my face, as if I can trap his touch.
He falls into Evie, crying. She wraps her arms around him as if she is responsible for keeping him from flying apart. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he keeps saying, and I don’t know who he is apologizing to.
Evie lifts Molly from the stroller, and oh! she has grown so big! I drink her in as Evie cradles her. Molly giggles—-an actual giggle—-and Adam and Evie catch each other’s eyes. “Has she done that before?” Adam asks.
“I don’t think so,” Evie replies.
They look and sound like a family.
Adam takes the poster of me off the easel and tucks it against his side. “God, Evie,” he says. “What would I do without you?” He presses a kiss to the crown of her head.
It may be a simple thank--you. It may be a gesture of affection, long--standing friendship. Or it might mean that he is moving on.
Be careful what you wish for, I think.
Molly is safe. She has people who love her. Adam has someone healthy who cares for him. They are already functioning better as a family than we ever did.
I back away, and begin to walk south.
I think of my mama telling me that the robin outside my window loved her babies so much, she let them go.
I think about the night I moved back into our dorm room, after the fight Evie and I had over Adam. How we fell asleep sobbing for a cartoon dinosaur that had lost its mother.
I think of Evie’s words, and I silently give them back to her: I’m glad it was you.
I return to the airport the same day and get on the first standby flight to Atlanta. Taking off over New York City, I stare at the skyline, at the smoky gaps like two missing teeth.
Instead of going to Ximena’s, I go to Shadyside. I pay Cletus for a room and borrow a pair of scissors from the maid’s closet.
I put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. Using the scissors, I hack off my platinum hair, first the long braid, and then the rest, making it stick up in uneven tufts. I throw my red ribbon in the trash. Then I crawl into bed and sleep.
I dream of exhaust pipes, of loaded guns, of endings. Of the faces of strangers on flyers. I cry even when I’m unconscious, and wake with my eyes swollen shut.
I have to turn on the television to see what day it is. I’ve slept so long that by now, Ximena is probably wondering where I am. I’m supposed to do something today . . . but what?
My mind feels furry, tender. Thoughts hurt like bruises.
Work. I’m supposed to work.
Fuck that. I can’t clean ten rooms any more than I can reinvent myself. I barely have the energy to move. Besides, what’s the point, when I’m not going to be around for long?
That’s when I hear him. (Oh Eloise,) he mocks. (Did you miss me?)