Though I felt faint, and wanted to sit down, somehow I kept hobbling along with a hitch in my step like a partially broken toy. Cops gestured;
cops whistled and beckoned. Water dripped off the end of my nose. Over and over, blinking the rain from my eyes, the thought coursed through my mind: I had to get home to my mother as soon as I could. She would be waiting frantically for me at the apartment; she would be tearing her hair out with worry, cursing herself for having taken my phone. Everyone was having problems getting calls through and pedestrians were lined ten and twenty deep at the few pay phones on the street.
Mother,
I thought,
Mother,
trying to send her a psychic message that I was alive. I wanted her to know I was all right but at the same time I remember telling myself it was okay I was walking instead of running; I didn’t want to pass out on the way home. How lucky that she had walked away only a few moments before! She had sent me directly into the heart of the explosion; she was sure to think that I was dead.
And to think of the girl who’d saved my life made my eyes smart. Pippa! An odd, dry name for a rusty, wry little redhead: it suited her. Whenever I thought of her eyes on mine, I felt dizzy at the thought that she—a perfect stranger—had saved me from walking out of the exhibition and into the black flash in the postcard shop, nada, the end of everything. Would I ever get to tell her she’d saved my life? As for the old man: the firemen and rescue people had rushed the building only minutes after I got out, and I still had hopes that someone had made it back in to rescue him—the door was jacked, they knew he was in there. Would I ever see either of them again?
When I finally made it home, I was chilled to the bone, punch-drunk and stumbling. Water streamed from my sodden clothes and wound behind me in an uneven trail across the lobby floor.
After the crowds on the street, the air of desertion was unnerving. Though the portable television was going in the package room, and I heard walkie talkies spluttering somewhere in the building, there was no sign of Goldie or Carlos or Jose or any of the regular guys.
Farther back, the lighted cabinet of the elevator stood empty and waiting, like a stage cabinet in a magic act. The gears caught and shuddered; one by one, the pearly old deco numbers blinked past as I creaked up to the seventh floor. Stepping into my own, drab hallway, I was overwhelmed with relief—mouse-brown paint, stuffy carpet-cleaner smell and all.
The key turned noisily in the lock. “Hello?” I called, stepping into the dimness of the apartment: shades down, all quiet.
In the silence, the refrigerator hummed.
God,
I thought, with a terrible jolt,
isn’t she home yet?
“Mother?” I called again. With rapidly sinking heart, I walked fast through the foyer, and then stood confused in the middle of the living room.
Her keys weren’t on the peg by the door; her bag wasn’t on the table. Wet shoes squelching in the stillness, I walked through to the kitchen—which wasn’t much of a kitchen, only an alcove with a two-burner stove, facing an airshaft. There sat her coffee cup, green glass from the flea market, with a lipstick print on the rim.
I stood staring at the unwashed coffee cup with an inch of cold coffee at the bottom and wondered what to do. My ears were ringing and whooshing and my head hurt so badly I could scarcely think: waves of blackness on the edge of my vision. I’d been so fixed on how worried she would be, on making it home to tell her that I was okay, that it had never occurred to me that she might not be home herself.
Wincing with every step, I walked down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom: essentially unchanged since my father had left but more cluttered and feminine-looking now that it was hers alone. The answering machine, on the table by the tumbled and mussed-up bed, was dark: no messages.
Standing in the doorway, half-reeling with pain, I tried to concentrate. A jarring sensation of the day’s movement jolted through my body, as if I’d been riding in a car for far too long.
First things first: find my phone, check my messages. Only I didn’t know where my phone was. She had taken it away after I was suspended; the night before, when she was in the shower, I’d tried to find it by calling the number but apparently she’d turned it off.
I remember plunging my hands in the top drawer of her bureau and clawing through a bewilderment of scarves: silks and velvets, Indian embroideries.
Then, with immense effort (even though it wasn’t very heavy) I dragged over the bench at the end of her bed and climbed on it so I could look on the top shelf of her closet. Afterwards, I sat on the carpet in a semi-stupor, with my cheek leaning against the bench and an ugly white roar in my ears.
Something was wrong. I remember raising my head with a sudden
blaze of conviction that gas was seeping out of the kitchen stove, that I was being poisoned from a gas leak. Except I couldn’t smell any gas.
I might have gone into the little bathroom off her bedroom and looked in the medicine cabinet for an aspirin, something for my head, I don’t know. All I know for sure is that at some point I was in my room, not knowing how I got there, bracing myself with one hand against the wall by the bed and feeling like I was going to be sick. And then everything was so confused I can’t give a clear account of it at all until I sat up disoriented on the living room sofa at the sound of something like a door opening.
But it wasn’t the front door, only somebody else down the hall. The room was dark and I could hear afternoon traffic, rush-hour traffic, out on the street. In the dimness, I was still for a heartstopping moment or two as the noises sorted themselves out and the familiar lines of table lamp, lyre-shaped chair backs grew visible against the twilight window. “Mom?” I said, and the crackle of panic was plainly audible in my voice.
I had fallen asleep in my gritty wet clothes; the sofa was damp too, with a clammy, body-shaped depression where I’d been lying down on it. A chilly breeze rattled in the venetian blinds, through the window my mother had left partly open that morning.
The clock said 6:47 p.m. With growing fear, I walked stiffly around the apartment, turning on all the lights—even the overhead lights in the living room, which we generally didn’t use because they were so stark and bright.
Standing in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom, I saw a red light blinking in the dark. A delicious wave of relief washed over me: I darted around the bed, fumbled for the button on the answering machine, and it was several seconds before I realized that the voice was not my mother at all but a woman my mother worked with, sounding unaccountably cheerful. “Hi, Audrey, Pru here, just checking in. Crazy day, eh? Listen, the galley proofs are in for Pareja and we need to talk but the deadline’s been postponed so no worries, for now anyway. Hope you’re holding up, love, give a call when you’ve got a chance.”
I stood there for a long time, looking down at the machine after the message beeped off. Then I lifted up the edge of the blinds and peeked out at the traffic.
It was that hour: people coming home. Horns honked faintly down on
the street. I still had a splitting headache and the feeling (new to me then, but now unfortunately all too familiar) of waking up with a nasty hangover, of important things forgotten and left undone.
I went back to her bedroom, and with trembling hands, punched in the number of her cell phone, so fast that I got it wrong and had to dial again. But she didn’t answer; the service picked up. I left a message (
Mom, it’s me, I’m worried, where are you?
) and sat on the side of her bed with my head in my hands.
Cooking smells had begun to drift from the lower floors. Indistinct voices floated in from neighboring apartments: abstract thumps, somebody opening and shutting cabinets. It was late: people were coming home from work, dropping their briefcases, greeting their cats and dogs and children, turning on the news, getting ready to go out for dinner. Where was she? I tried to think of all the reasons why she might have been held up and couldn’t really come up with any—although, who knew, maybe a street somewhere had been closed off so she couldn’t get home. But wouldn’t she have called?
Maybe she dropped her phone? I thought. Maybe she broke it? Maybe she gave it to someone who needed it more?
The stillness of the apartment unnerved me. Water sang in the pipes, and the breeze clicked treacherously in the blinds. Because I was just sitting uselessly on the side of her bed, feeling like I needed to do something, I called back and left yet another message, this time unable to keep the quaver out of my voice.
Mom, forgot to say, I’m at home. Please call, the second you get a chance, okay?
Then I called and left a message on the voice mail at her office just in case.
With a deadly coldness spreading in the center of my chest, I walked back into the living room. After standing there for a few moments, I went to the bulletin board in the kitchen to see if she had left me a note, though I already knew very well she hadn’t. Back in the living room, I peered out the window at the busy street. Could she have run to the drugstore or the deli, not wanting to wake me? Part of me wanted to go out on the street and look for her, but it was crazy to think I would spot her in rush-hour crowds and besides if I left the apartment, I was scared I’d miss her call.
It was past time for the doormen to change shifts. When I phoned downstairs, I was hoping for Carlos (the most senior and dignified of the doormen) or even better Jose: a big happy Dominican guy, my favorite.
But nobody answered at all, for ages, until finally a thin, halting, foreign-sounding voice said: “Hello?”
“Is Jose there?”
“No,” said the voice. “No. You cah back.”
It was, I realized, the frightened-looking Asian guy in safety goggles and rubber gloves who ran the floor waxer and managed the trash and did other odd jobs around the building. The doormen (who didn’t appear to know his name any more than I did) called him “the new guy,” and griped about management bringing in a houseman who spoke neither English nor Spanish. Everything that went wrong in the building, they blamed on him: the new guy didn’t shovel the walks right, the new guy didn’t put the mail where it was supposed to go or keep the courtyard clean like he should.
“You cah back later,” the new guy was saying, hopefully.
“No, wait!” I said, as he was about to hang up. “I need to talk to somebody.”
Confused pause.
“Please, is anybody else there?” I said. “It’s an emergency.”
“Okay,” said the voice warily, in an open-ended tone that gave me hope. I could hear him breathing hard in the silence.
“This is Theo Decker,” I said. “In 7C? I see you downstairs a lot? My mother hasn’t come home and I don’t know what to do.”
Long, bewildered pause. “Seven,” he repeated, as if it were the only part of the sentence he understood.
“My mother,” I repeated. “Where’s Carlos? Isn’t anybody there?”
“Sorry, thank you,” he said, in a panicky tone, and hung up.
I hung up the phone myself, in a state of high agitation, and after a few moments standing frozen in the middle of the living room went and switched on the television. The city was a mess; the bridges to the outer boroughs were closed, which explained why Carlos and Jose hadn’t been able to get in to work, but I saw nothing at all that made me understand what might be holding my mother up. There was a number to call, I saw, if someone was missing. I copied it down on a scrap of newspaper and made a deal with myself that if she wasn’t home in exactly one half hour, I would call.
Writing the number down made me feel better. For some reason I felt sure that the act of writing it down was going to magically make her walk
through the door. But after forty-five minutes passed, and then an hour, and still she hadn’t turned up, I finally broke down and called it (pacing back and forth, keeping a nervous eye on the television the whole time I was waiting for somebody to pick up, the whole time I was on hold, commercials for mattresses, commercials for stereos, fast free delivery and no credit required). Finally a brisk woman came on, all business. She took my mother’s name, took my phone number, said my mother wasn’t “on her list” but I would get a call back if her name turned up. Not until after I hung up the phone did it occur to me to ask what sort of list she was talking about; and after an indefinite period of misgiving, walking in a tormented circuit through all four rooms, opening drawers, picking up books and putting them down, turning on my mother’s computer and seeing what I could figure out from a Google search (nothing), I called back again to ask.
“She’s not listed among the dead,” said the second woman I spoke to, sounding oddly casual. “Or the injured.”
My heart lifted. “She’s okay, then?”
“I’m saying we’ve got no information at all. Did you leave your number earlier so we can give you a call back?”
Yes, I said, they had told me I would get a call back.
“Free delivery and set up,” the television was saying. “Be sure and ask about our six months’ free financing.”
“Good luck then,” said the woman, and hung up.
The stillness in the apartment was unnatural; even the loud talking on the television didn’t drive it away. Twenty-one people were dead, with “dozens more” injured. In vain, I tried to reassure myself with this number: twenty-one people wasn’t so bad, was it? Twenty-one was a thin crowd in a movie theatre or even on a bus. It was three people less than my English class. But soon fresh doubts and fears began to crowd around me and it was all I could do not to run out of the apartment yelling her name.
As much as I wanted to go out on the street and look for her, I knew I was supposed to stay put. We were supposed to meet at the apartment; that was the deal, the ironclad agreement ever since elementary school, when I’d been sent home from school with a Disaster Preparedness Activity Book, featuring cartoon ants in dust masks gathering supplies and preparing for some unnamed emergency. I’d completed the crosswords and dim questionnaires (“What is the best clothing to pack in a Disaster
Supply Kit? A. Bathing suit B. Layers C. Hula Skirt D. Aluminum foil”) and—with my mother—devised a Family Disaster Plan. Ours was simple: we would meet at home. And if one of us couldn’t get home, we would call. But as time crawled by, and the phone did not ring, and the death toll on the news rose to twenty-two and then twenty-five, I phoned the city’s emergency number again.