The Book of Why (10 page)

“I'm really glad you stole the book,” I said.

“Don't be
too
happy,” she said. “For every moment I feel grateful, there are a dozen I still feel cursed.”

“You're doing the best you can,” I said.

“That's what I'm going to say to God when I die,” she said. “I did the best I could.”

She lit another cigarette, took a drag. “Not that that wouldn't be a lie,” she said.

She took another drag, and another. “Not that I believe in God,” she said.

IN FALL, IN
the day's first light, Cary would gather leaves to use as bookmarks. Just this morning, before I sat down to write this memory, I found a leaf in a book of poetry about garbage, a book my father might have liked had he liked poetry. I'm tempted to look for more, but I'd rather ration. I don't want to find that I've already found the last one. I prefer the possibility of surprise—a preference the man I'm writing about wouldn't have understood. Once dead, always dead, some might say, and so the leaf, and so the man who wrote the poem about garbage, and so my father. But some might say that the poet is alive through his words, and my father through my reading the poet's words, and my wife through the leaf, even though the leaf is dead.

Cary breathed beside me; the twins whispered in the next room; the dog twitched on the floor, chasing a dream squirrel she'd never catch.

I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply, and created my day: everything I could ever need, every person and experience to make my intentions manifest.

I had everything I wanted, so my intention was to keep: wife, children, career, faith.

I've heard it said that we keep nothing. I've heard it said that it's good to lose what we're most afraid to lose.

Peace and safety, I thought. Abundance and joy.

Sounds like prayer, but it's not. Prayer, at least the kind I practiced in my Catholic boyhood, felt more like begging. Felt more like
please
. Whereas this was a making, an act of creativity, of authorship. Prayer felt like turning the next page of a novel and hoping everything turned out all right. I preferred to be the author of my life.

Peace and safety, abundance and joy. A mantra during my run. My body grew stronger with each mile, an extra lap around the park, seven miles instead of five, the wind keeping me cool, fast up the final hill, I could have gone three more miles easy, could have run to my mother in Queens and back, and with this thought I remembered what day it was, why so few people were on the street. Thursday morning, but no one on their way to work.

After breakfast I took the children with me to the bakery. Most stores were closed, but not the bakery, not the butcher; in small ways the day revealed its identity. A Thursday that feels like Sunday except no church bells. Long line in the bakery, already out of pumpkin pie. A cheesecake, then. And a black-and-white cookie for the kids to share. They bickered over the vanilla side—Lucy complained that Vincent had taken too large a bite—and left me with chocolate, the consolation prize, if you ask me, of the black-and-white cookie.

It made sense that I might forget what day it was. After all, I woke
every
day giving thanks. For years Thanksgiving had been me and my mother, sometimes a widowed neighbor who was childless or whose children lived across the country. Every few years my mother would invite someone new (there was never a lack of people about whom my mother could say, “She has no one”), and at its peak, the year I started college, we had eight guests, none related to my mother by blood but by tragedy. A few men, but mostly women she knew from church or the supermarket or the bus, the youngest a divorcee in her early forties, the oldest a ninety-year-old man who, until his recent stroke, had taught piano to children in the neighborhood. After I moved out, when I was eighteen, my mother sent letters updating me on Mr. Keller's heart surgery or Mrs. Grimm's daughter's car accident, as if I remembered these people, some of whom had joined us only once. My mother's letters, which arrived every month or so, even though I saw her just as often, gave the impression that she was writing to a son who lived in Rome or Paris rather than a subway ride away in Manhattan. My mother has lived in New York City all her life but has never, as of this writing, taken the subway; I might as well have been across the ocean.

Now, with Cary and the twins, my mother had no need for others; plenty of tragedy at the table already. There was my father, of course, there was always him, and to keep him company was Cary's family (“Father, mother, sister, wiped out, just like that,” my mother told people, seeking their faces for sympathy she could pretend was for her) and the twins themselves (“Poor things, their mother has problems, you know,” and she'd leave it for others to complete the rest of the story), and so my mother no longer invited others, though she'd watch at the window to see which elderly neighbors had been “left all alone” and would make sure to visit them the next day.

Always a walk to the cemetery, never together. My mother would leave the house first thing in the morning, without me. Ten minutes later, from my bedroom window, I'd see her laying flowers at my father's grave. Those first few years, when the loss of my father was new, when my guilt was most unbearable, this was the worst, most subtle form of cruelty.

Too many thoughts in the shower, memories I didn't want. I stepped out and began towel-drying my hair, and only then did I realize that I hadn't rinsed out the shampoo, so I had to turn on the water and find the right temperature and rinse my hair, and when I stepped out of the shower again, I remembered that the towel had shampoo on it, but there were no more clean towels in the bathroom, so I called Cary, but she couldn't hear me, and I walked wet down the hallway and found a clean towel in a pile of unfolded laundry, and on the way back to the bathroom I slipped.

It was Lucy who found me on the floor. She pointed at me and laughed. I wrapped the towel around me.

She walked over to me; she wanted to know why I was crying.

“I'm not,” I told her. “My face is wet.”

“That's crying.”

“Not always,” I said.

“Laugh big,” she said. This was a game Cary had taught her, a game Cary had played as a girl with her father.

“Okay,” I said. “Do something funny.”

“Just laugh big.”

“Make me.”

“Laugh big!” she said, and stomped on the floor.

I closed my eyes, held my stomach, and pretended to laugh really hard.

She looked pleased. “Now laugh small.”

I chuckled quietly, and this satisfied her.

“Cry small,” she said, and I made a sad face and sniffled and gasped a little, and she said, “It's okay,” and I stopped pretending, and then she said, “Now cry big!” I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands and shook and made the sounds of crying—sounds anyone but a child would know were fake—and Lucy pulled my hands away from my face and said, “No! It's okay! Stop crying! Please stop!” and I smiled to let her know that I was all right.

“Open sesame,” I said, and the kids knew what that meant; we'd played this game before.

We were in the center lane, eastbound on the BQE; we hadn't moved much in ten minutes. Below, in Calvary, the dead slept, whispering reminders where we were going. Any cemetery, not just the one behind my mother's house, felt like home.

“Any second now,” I said. “Like the parting of the Red Sea.”

“What's the parting of the Red Sea?” Vincent said.

“A miracle,” I said, and traffic in the center lane, and only that lane, moved.

Vincent kicked the back of my seat. “Again!” he said.

“No need to,” I said. We were going forty, fifty, sixty, and the other two lanes hadn't moved.

Vincent's laugh sounded like choking. He was so loud we didn't notice at first that Lucy was crying.

“Honey,” Cary said, “what's wrong?”

“I don't know,” she sobbed.

“Are we moving too fast?”

Lucy managed to catch her breath. She said, “I don't like miracles.”

“You seem really upset, sweetie,” Cary said.

“Yes,” Lucy said.

Cary reached back and held Lucy's hand, but said nothing. She believed in allowing children—adults, too—to feel whatever they were feeling. Crying was good. Tantrums were allowed, even encouraged. Difficult emotions were not to be fixed; they were to be witnessed. Our most important job as parents, she believed, was to listen.

We pulled off the expressway and drove through Queens. Lucy was trying to catch her breath.

The lights. A game that soothed me. Red to green, one after another, timed to my thoughts, timed so that the car would never have to stop. I imagined the car had no brakes. Green light, green, green, just in time. Then yellow—extra gas, through. “Slow down,” Cary said, but I raced toward the next light, already yellow—a moment of doubt, then gas, through the red light. “Eric, please slow down.” Cary touched my arm, and I turned to her. Then she yelled, “Watch out!” and without looking I pressed the brake and the car skidded to a stop.

A girl, maybe twelve years old, had pushed a stroller into the street. Now she stood frozen in front of our car, gripping the stroller's handle; she was so close she could have reached out and touched the bumper. Blond hair, braces, red high-top sneakers. A young woman, short and thin enough to pass as a girl herself, probably the girl's mother, ran into the street, pulled the girl and the stroller onto the sidewalk. She glared at me.

I got out and said, “I'm sorry, it was my fault,” but the woman seemed not to understand.

“It wasn't her fault,” I said.

The woman reached into the stroller and pulled out a baby; it wasn't moving. Then I saw that the baby was a doll. The drivers behind me were beeping their horns. The woman yelled something at me in Russian. I got back in the car and drove the final few blocks.

My mother was waiting by the window. She wanted to know what had happened, what was wrong; she had a radar for such things.

“Why does something always have to be wrong?”

“I can tell,” she said.

“It's like you
want
something to be wrong.”

“Don't start,” she said. “It's too early to start.”

She kissed Cary, then the twins. “Lucy's been crying—her face is all red.”

“She's fine now,” I said.

“So she
was
crying.”

“I don't like miracles,” Lucy said.

“Did you see one?” my mother asked.

She pointed to me. “He made one.”

“Is that what he told you?” my mother said.

“No,” Lucy said. “I seen it.”

“I seen it, too!” Vincent said. He stomped around the dining room. My mother's wedding china, used only on Thanksgiving and Christmas, rattled on the table. “I seen it, too! I seen it, too!” he yelled. “And then we almost ran over a baby!”

“What did you do?” my mother said to me.

“A girl ran into the street,” Cary said. “No one was hurt.”

“Was he driving too fast?”

“Everyone's fine, Ma.”

This word, from Cary, softened my mother. Cary had taken it upon herself years earlier to call my mother
Ma
. My mother referred to Cary as her daughter. But when they hugged, it was the opposite: she was a girl and Cary was her mother. They swayed as if slow-dancing; my mother's eyes were closed. I put the cheesecake in the refrigerator, and when I came back they were still hugging. Cary's hands kneaded my mother's back, and they were both somewhere else, hugging someone else. I didn't feel jealous. If anything, I felt relieved that someone could give my mother that kind of love.

My mother busied herself stuffing the turkey. She brought out cheese and crackers, and juice for the kids. While we snacked she folded laundry, then went outside to sweep. I tried to help, but she said no, so I stood in the yard and watched her. Just the two of us, she became the mother I knew—nervously sweeping where she'd already swept, bending to dislodge a leaf pressed wet into the ground. Every leaf and twig had to be accounted for. A new leaf fell; she went to get it. She'd been getting pains, she told me.

“Where?”

“I don't know—everywhere.”

“Sounds serious.”

“Are you making fun?”

“No, but if you have pains everywhere.”

“I have arthritis—you know that.”

I grabbed the broom, stopped her from sweeping. She pulled the broom away from me. “I can do it,” she said. “Go inside and eat.”

“Where's your pain?”

“It's nothing.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“They don't know what it is.”

“So you
have
seen a doctor?”

“No, but they don't know.”

“At least let me hold the bag,” I said.

“I have it,” she said.

I reached for the bag; she looked up at me from where she was kneeling. “I said I have it,” she said.

I went back inside and put a cracker into my mouth. Cary read to the kids on the floor. On the muted television behind them Tokyo burned in an old monster movie.

I went upstairs to use the bathroom. My father's razor was twenty-five years old; his facial hair was still caught in the blade. Hanging from the showerhead was a waterproof transistor radio; a man was talking about the plane that had crashed in Queens a few weeks earlier. He was scared, he said. Everyone had been scared since September. Anything could happen at any moment. If you waited long enough, eventually the sky would fall.

In my father's dresser were old bottles of cologne shaped like ships, the black comb he used, a pack of cigarettes he never opened. I opened the pack and smelled. His underwear and undershirts, his black socks rolled into balls. No surprises. I'd seen it all before, in the weeks after his death.

From my room I could see the stone; it looked farther away and smaller than I'd remembered. Until I moved out, I looked out my window every night before sunset. I was afraid to look, but I did. I remember expecting to see him seated atop the stone, smoking cigarettes or shuffling a deck of cards.

“Are you looking for the man?”

It was Lucy in the doorway, Vincent behind her. He laughed. “You were scared,” he said.