People Who Knew Me (36 page)

“Mom!” she says.

And I know that means she did.

*   *   *

From the Grand Canyon, we drive six hours to Albuquerque. We wander around Old Town and I buy Claire a turquoise ring. Our motel has a pool of questionable cleanliness, but we spend most of our time there because it's hot and there doesn't seem to be much to do in Albuquerque.

It's eight hours to Oklahoma City, but the drive feels longer because of the monotonous miles of farmland. Claire naps on and off. We stop for greasy food at a mom-and-pop diner.

“Paul says hi,” Claire says, alternating between holding her unwieldy hamburger and holding her phone. She starts texting.

“He does?” I say. I miss him, kind of. “Tell him I say hi.”

“You know, you can text him, too,” she says.

“I'm not much of a texter,” I say. The truth is that it scares me to have a person to share everything with. I haven't had that since New York, since Gabe and Drew.

“You need to get with the times, Mom,” she says, texting away.

“You're going to hurt your neck staring down at that thing all the time.”

She rolls her eyes in that way only teenagers can.

There isn't much to do in Oklahoma City, either. All I can think about is the bombing. Drew and I were glued to the news the day it happened in 1995. We couldn't make sense of what we were seeing—the large hole taken out of the building, all those people dead. We had no idea we'd be even more horrified just a few years later. Claire doesn't know anything about that bombing. It didn't make it into her history book, apparently. I'm curious to see the memorial, driven by a masochistic urge to pick that metaphorical scab and feel sad for a bit. Instead, we go to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. And the next day we go to the Frontier City amusement park to ride roller coasters and eat cotton candy. At one point I feel like I'm going to throw up. I don't.

After another eight-hour drive, we're in St. Louis. We take the 630-foot ride to the top of the Gateway Arch and visit the memorial where Lewis and Clark set out on their history-book-making expedition. We go to the St. Louis Zoo and have dinner at the Fountain on Locust. According to the back of the menu, it was built as a car showroom in 1916, part of Locust Street's historic Automotive Row. It has one of those black-and-white-checkered floors that make you dizzy if you stare long enough.

We get seats at a wooden booth against the wall, order vanilla milkshakes served in fountain glasses, with the extra milkshake leftover from the blending process in stainless steel tumblers.

I lean across the table and say, in a conspiring whisper, “Let's tell them it's your birthday.”

“Seriously?” There's disapproval in her tone. Suddenly she's the adult and I'm the teenager.

“Whatever, I'm doing it,” I say, sticking to my new role. She shakes her head.

We celebrated her birthday last month, in our usual way: pizza and ice cream cake. I want to celebrate again, though. If I only get a certain number of actual birthdays left with her, I want to celebrate them over and over and over again.

On my way to the restroom, I tell the waitress about the special occasion. I give Claire a thumbs-up on my way back. She just rolls her eyes like,
Grow up, Mom
.

“I still can't believe you're fourteen,” I say, biting my maraschino cherry off its stem.

I imagine the cancer festering in my lung. I figure I have a year, maybe two. According to the American Cancer Society website, people with stage four inflammatory breast cancer are given twenty-one months.
Given
, as if it's some kind of present:
Here you go, you have twenty-one months of life
.

“I'll be fifteen before you know it.” She finger-combs her hair behind her ears. It's getting longer, her hair. She says she wants to donate it to cancer patients when it gets long enough. She says that will be her “platform” when she runs for class president in high school. She starts high school in fall, a shock. “I'll call it Hairitable Donations,” she says. Clever girl.

“I'll be driving this time next year,” she says. It sounds like a threat. It is one, I guess.

“Driving!” I say. I attempt a smile, though the whole idea of this terrifies me. I hope I can be one of those cool mothers when it comes to teaching her to drive, not too anxious, not slamming my foot into the floor, pressing the imaginary brake.

“I should start saving for a car,” she says. “Babysitting's where it's at. Heather is making bank.”

“You'd be good with kids,” I say.

Chances are, I won't see Claire become a mother. She'll be a much better mother than me, I bet. I won't get to see who she chooses as a husband. Chances are, it won't be Tyler. She will have many loves and many heartbreaks and I won't get to be there. There's an it's-not-fair tantrum going on in my head. I would stomp my feet and scream if I could.

The waitress I tipped off and a group of four coworkers sing while presenting Claire with a giant sundae that looks to be composed of mostly whipped cream. Claire stares at the candle long and hard, as if contemplating something of great importance. Then she blows and they clap politely before going back to their ususal duties.

“Big wish, huh?” I say.

“That one,” she says, “was for you.”

*   *   *

We spend two days in Chicago. We take the bridge over the river and walk the Magnificent Mile, ending up at the edge of Lake Michigan. We see “the Bean” in Millennium Park, eat deep-dish pizza, take the L to Wrigley Field to walk around the neighborhood. Drew and I went to Chicago once—a spontaneous weekend adventure to see the Cubs play the Mets. Drew liked the Mets, hated the Yankees. He was always rooting for the underdogs. It was June. A thunderstorm passed through and we spent three hours waiting in the stands with the other diehards, drinking Old Style beer and eating peanuts. We were so drunk by the time the game started. I don't even remember who won.

Claire declares Cincinnati her favorite stop. She likes the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood. She reads from her phone: “It's believed to be the largest, most intact urban historic district in the United States.”

“Maybe you'll live here one day,” I muse.

“I can't imagine leaving California,” she says.

“I used to say that about New York.”

We're walking through the riverfront park. I never thought of Cincinnati as having a water feature. There's so much of the country, of the world, I don't know.

“Are you nervous?” Claire asks. “To go back?”

“Yes,” I say.

She sits on a bench and I sit next to her.

“I don't think he hates you, if that helps,” she says.

It does help, but this might be wishful thinking on her part.

“I mean, we don't talk about you all the time, but I was telling him how you let me plan the whole trip and he said, ‘Your mom sounds pretty cool,'” she says. “I don't think he would say that if he hated you.”

I hang on the words:
Your mom sounds pretty cool
.

“Maybe,” I say. “I would hate me.”

She gazes out at the river.

“
I
don't hate you,” she says. “And you always say I'm a good judge of character.”

It's true, I do say that.

“You're biased,” I say.

She taps her fingers on the bench like it's a piano.

“Did you have a different name in New York? Like, who were you there?”

Who was I? I was a little selfish, a little idealistic, a little sad.

“Emily,” I say, “that was my name.”

She scratches her head. “The lady, at that craft fair, when you bought me that bracelet?”

I can't believe she remembers.

“Yes, she recognized me,” I say. “She was my boss.”

“Were you a bartender there, too?”

I laugh.

“No, no. I was a writer at an ad agency, and then I was an administrative assistant at this big company,” I tell her.

This big company in the World Trade Center. Yes, the buildings that crashed down. I was supposed to be there. I faked my death.
It's obvious Drew hasn't told her these things about me yet. That restraint, that kindness, is what suggests that maybe she's right—he doesn't hate me.

“I can't see it,” Claire says. She knows me, and will only ever know me, as a bartender trying to make ends meet.

“I know,” I say. “Sometimes I can't, either.”

*   *   *

From Cincinnati, we drive to Washington, D.C. We arrive at night because of traffic. We've picked a nice hotel for this part of the trip because I've heard horror stories of being in “the wrong area” in D.C. Our room has a view of the Washington Monument, all lit up. And if we stick our heads out the window and turn them just so, we can see the White House, also lit up, in the distance.

By the end of the next day, after strolling through the National Mall and touring the Museum of American History and Museum of Natural History—Claire likes to read all the placards, mind you—I reach a level of exhaustion that only a bottle of wine can fix. I wait until Claire falls asleep watching a movie on TV and then I slip out and down to the hotel bar.

“Rough day?” the bartender says, filling my second glass. I don't do this very often at Al's Place, make conversation with the patrons. This guy is young, hopeful for tips.

“I actually had a great day,” I say.

My head is starting to feel totally detached from my body, my thoughts and worries floating in the ether.

“Tomorrow, though,” I say, “tomorrow may be a doozy.”

Tomorrow, we go to New York.

“Well,” he says, “no use thinking about it right now.”

He sounds like Paul.

I pay my bill and leave an extra twenty as a tip.

 

THIRTY-TWO

We are on the New Jersey Turnpike, approaching Newark Airport, the last place I was Emily Morris. I feel like I'm going to puke again. I've puked once already, when I pulled over in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania. I told Claire I had to pee. I wish I could blame the nausea on last night's bottle of wine, but I know it's not that.

My palms are sweaty on the steering wheel. Drew is expecting us around four o'clock. That's in two hours. We're going to his house—an Upper West Side address between Riverside Park and Central Park, estimated at one million dollars according to the Internet. Either his restaurant is extremely successful or he married very well. I can't resent him either way.

“I'm nervous, too,” Claire says. I didn't say I was nervous. She just knows.

She rubs her palms on her thighs.

Of course, the one time I wouldn't mind traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, there isn't any. We pass Newark, memories of Drew's mother flooding my head. We're so close to Irvington, where I grew up, where my mother may still live. I won't find out. I've thought about it, and I just can't.

“We're early,” I say to Claire, whose face is an inch from the window, taking in the approaching city. She'll never know the World Trade Center as part of that skyline. What is there now—the Freedom Tower? As if any of us could be truly free from that day.

Cars back up on the George Washington Bridge, as predicted. I tell Claire we're crossing the state line between New Jersey and New York. She's been obsessed with that on this trip—state lines, how you can be in one place one second and another place the next.

Before I know it, I'm on the Henry Hudson Parkway, remembering my cab ride out of the city with Angel Rivera like it was yesterday. I take the exit for Ninety-fifth Street.

“Is that Central Park?” Claire says, pointing down Ninety-sixth at the seemingly out-of-place, confounding cluster of green amid all the smog and concrete.

“Sure is,” I say. “We have an hour before we have to be there. You want to walk around?”

The park hasn't changed a bit—a fact that both comforts and astounds me. I'm right back to the last time I was here, with Gabe, on that day we had the picnic beneath the castle, the day before I was going to tell him about the baby, the day before I was going to leave Drew, the day before he died. Claire and I pass the Great Lawn. Two kids are playing Frisbee among the ghosts of Gabe Walters and Emily Morris. Of course, Claire says she wants to see the castle, so we do. There's a line because there is a line for everything in New York, and by the time we make our way back into the daylight, it's time to go.

The last time Drew and I saw each other was right after I found out I was pregnant, when he came over to pick up Bruce because he thought I was too sick to walk him. Drew, ever dutiful, always doing the “right thing.” It's baffling to me now, the way I resented him. I miss Emily Morris in some ways, but I see her as so naïve, so trapped by her own illusions. I guess that's the perspective that comes with age. I shiver and wonder how much more perspective I'll be allowed. How many years. Will I get the chance to prove that Connie is different, better? Maybe Drew will realize that. Maybe there is hope.

According to the all-knowing Internet, Drew's one-million-dollar apartment is in a 1929 prewar building. There's a doorman, which my mother used to say was “only for rich assholes.” My heart pounds in my chest as we take the creaky old elevator to the second floor, my sweaty palm clutching the brass railing. I asked Claire if she wanted me to come up with her and she said yes. I'm surprised Drew didn't instruct her to have me drop her off and come back, like this is some kind of playdate. Does that mean he wants to see me? What is he going to think when our eyes meet? What will I think? In this moment, I'm not sure I'll recognize him. His face is blurry in my mind.

“Do I look okay?” I feel stupid the millisecond the question leaves my mouth.

Claire doesn't hesitate: “Beautiful,” she says. Whether it's a lie or an exaggeration, I don't know and I don't care. It's what I need to hear.