The Lake Shore Limited (21 page)

She went in the kitchen and looked at the clock on the stove. One-thirty.

When she was done in the bathroom, she went into the living room. Reuben was back in his crate--he'd gone there on his own. He was asleep, his head sticking out through the open doorway, resting on his paws. She didn't wake him until she'd cleaned up the piss. Then, bending over his crate, she spoke his name. He sprang to instant eager life, and she took him out for another walk. The streets were still silent--everyone, she assumed, indoors by the television, by the telephone. Except in New York, where everyone was panicked, on the move.

At two-thirty, Leslie called. Her flight had been canceled and Pierce had driven her back home. She was calling to ask whether Gus had actually left, to say that one of the planes was Gus's. She'd heard the number and recognized it--they'd conferred about flight times and she'd written it down.

When Billy said yes, there was a little moan on the line, and then silence.

"Leslie?" Billy said.

Leslie's voice was uneven when she spoke. She said, "He must be dead. I think there's no way he can't be dead." She breathed audibly, unsteadily. "Oh, Billy, I think it's true. I think it is," she said. She started to cry, and then tried to check herself.

Billy wasn't sure what she said back. She was sorry, she said that. "I can't believe it." She said that.

Leslie said she had kept hoping that he wasn't on it, that he somehow didn't make it, but she'd tried his cell and there was no response. And he would have called, surely, if he could. If he were alive.

"No, he called," Billy said.

"He called?"

The hope in her voice was painful for Billy to hear. "He called when he was getting on," she said quickly. "Just when he was getting on."

Leslie started to cry again. "Oh, what did he
say?"
It was hard to understand her.

"He said just that. That he was getting on. He said he'd talk to me tonight."

"Oh. Well." She was pulling herself together. She blew her nose. "I'm so glad you got to speak to him."

"Yes," Billy said, feeling already how false a position she was in.

"I know ... I know," Leslie said. "This is ... a terrible time. To talk. But we will ... I will call you, if I hear anything. I'll call. Anything."

Billy said yes. Yes, she'd call, too.

About half an hour later, the phone rang again. Billy almost jumped. It was Leslie. Her voice was stronger. She thought Billy should come up to Vermont. That she shouldn't be alone. "Alone with this," is what she said. If she didn't want to drive, Leslie would arrange for a car to bring her.

"We could help each other, don't you think?" she asked.

Billy couldn't imagine anything she wanted to do less, but she kept her voice calm as she said that she wanted to stay in the apartment--that's the way she put it. She had the puppy, she said. She just wanted to stay here with him.

When she got off the phone, she turned the television off. She went into the bedroom and lay down. The images from the towers played over and over in her mind, inescapably. She couldn't remember which was the South Tower, which was the North. Which was Gus's plane. She thought of Leslie's voice, breaking. She thought of him, the way it must have been--the disorder, the panic and the chaos in the airplane. The understanding you would have--how long before?--of what was going to happen. And then surely the instantaneous death. Surely.

Or perhaps not.

Her stomach gurgled. She hadn't eaten, she realized, since early in the morning. She got up. Standing in the kitchen, she ate a few bites of an apple. She set what was left carefully down on the counter, walked into the bathroom, and threw up. She stayed there, kneeling over the toilet, until her knees began to ache.

A while later, she walked the dog again. She fed him. Then she took him downstairs and walked him once more--she'd done things in the wrong order, she realized. She should have fed him before the first walk.

There were people out now, at the end of the day, moving around, standing in clusters on porches, on the sidewalk, talking to one another about it. An old woman walked toward her on the sidewalk. When their eyes met, she said, "Isn't it terrible." Her face was anguished.

"Yes," Billy said.

Back in the apartment, she went to Gus's desk. She sat down. She went through his things again. She picked up the smiling photograph of herself he'd set in a clear plastic stand and looked at it for a long time, then dropped it in the wastebasket. She turned over the Fra Angelico postcard. On the back, in scratchy black ink, it said, "The things we are seeing! I hope you will too one day. We are drinking it in, along with what we are actually drinking in. Theo and Nina."

She had no idea who Theo and Nina were.

There was so much of Gus's life she didn't know. Who would take care of all this? Who would it belong to? Who would dispose of it? Who was in charge of Gus now?

Leslie, surely.

Not me, Billy thought. And she started to cry for the first time.

She walked the puppy once more after dark, and then she brought him into bed with her. It was about ten. He hadn't been allowed to sleep with her--with her and Gus--ever before, and he was confused. He stood up several times and came and planted himself by her head, panting his hot breath on her, his tail wagging.

She spoke sharply to him each time, and finally he lay down, his bulk curled against her rump. She could hear his breathing change when he went to sleep. She lay awake a long time. Twice she got up to pee. Once she cried, silently but long enough that, when she stopped, her face felt swollen and thick, she couldn't breathe through her nose. The last time she looked at the red digits of the clock, they said 1:10.

Reuben woke her a little after three, mewling, scratching the pillow close to her face.

Gus had done the nighttime walks until now. Nighttime, early morning, the one before dinner, the last one before bed, all to show Billy how easy a puppy would be, how easy it would be if she just stayed with him.

She pulled on her jeans and a sweater, slid into some sandals, and they went out into the hallway and down the stairs. The moment she heard the outer door click behind her, she knew she'd screwed up. She'd locked herself out. In her mind she could see the key on the table. On the table where it should have been but wasn't, next to the leash and plastic pickup bags. Where it wasn't, because she'd been careless today. She hadn't followed Gus's orderly patterns, she hadn't put things back where they belonged. Here, here was the price.

Reuben peed. She sat on the porch steps for a while. The dog watched her attentively for clues as to what was happening. Finally she got up and started to walk with him. A big walk. Might as well. One or the other of her neighbors in the house would let her in, but it would be hours before she could decently ring either bell.

She walked through the dark, dead streets. Everything was quiet, except for here and there the bluish flickering light in a bedroom or a living room--someone awake, someone unable to stop watching the events again and again, someone finding consolation, perhaps, in the theorizing, the expert opinions.

She walked south and west, over into the streets of Cambridge, toward Harvard Square, thinking she would go to the river, she'd sit in the grass there until the sky was light. As she walked, she thought reasonlessly, uselessly, swinging between a deep disbelief--the sense she had that nothing like what had happened could possibly have happened--and the horrified imagining, over and over, of how it would have been for Gus, slicing into the building, crushing it and being crushed.

In flight from any of that, she made herself think of the most practical issues. She wondered if the rent was paid up, where Gus had left the car, what she would do with all his belongings. She would move out, she knew that. She couldn't possibly stay. It was Gus's place. She didn't belong there.

It occurred to her with something like relief that she hadn't talked to anyone about splitting up with Gus--anyone except the one old friend in Chicago whom she e-mailed and called regularly. It would make it easier for her to get through it, to go through the motions of grief, which is what she'd have to do.

No!
It would be more than that, more than
motions
. Of course it would. She did mourn Gus. Her throat ached with sorrow for him. It was awful, truly awful. That he'd died. That he
wasn't
, anymore. The way he'd died. The cruelty of it, the enormity of it, the randomness of it. The wrongness of it--for how could it be Gus's end? Gus, who was so sunny, so blameless.

She'd gone about a mile and a half--she was approaching Harvard Square on Ware Street--when she realized that the puppy was flagging, that, unconscious of him as she was, she'd more or less been pulling him for the last couple of blocks. She hadn't ever exhausted the dog before, she specialized in such short walks. It was Gus who did the walks that really exercised him, that wore him out.

As soon as she stopped, he sat down. He sat down in a way that suggested he would never get up, a kind of grateful and rubbery collapse. After a moment, when she didn't pull him up, he lay down on the sidewalk and put his head on his enormous paws.

She squatted by him and patted his head, stroked the softly curling fur of his body. His tail slapped the sidewalk. He turned on his side and grabbed at her hand with his mouth, licking, chewing.

"Not allowed, buddy," she said. She clamped his muzzle shut with one hand and, with the other, scratched his belly, stroked him for a long time, talking to him, sometimes crying for a minute or two. She had to use the edge of her sweater--why not?--to wipe her eyes, her runny nose. She crouched there until her legs started to feel numb. When she stopped and stood up, he sat up too, watching her face, his tail swinging in wild swoops, wanting more.

She started back north, toward home, and he pranced beside her for a few blocks, then slowed, then wanted to stop again.

She let him. She stood by him while he rested for a few minutes, and then she squatted and patted him again. In this way, Billy crying and petting him, Reuben resting, they retraced their steps slowly back to the house, Gus's house.

The sky was lightening when they sat on the top step of the porch. Reuben lay down and instantly slept. Billy was exhausted, too, she realized. She leaned against the post at the top of the stairs. It was cool against her skin. The flesh of her arms under her hands felt chilly. She thought of Gus in the plane again. She stopped herself. Somewhere a rooster crowed. Across the street, she could make out the big pink plastic flowers stuck into the earth of the front yard by the old woman who lived on the ground floor. So much for the bother of gardening.

She thought of her downstairs neighbor, how he might come out and find her. What would she say? She would tell him about Gus. She would have to. They'd known each other a long time. He owned the building and two others on the block. He knew all his tenants, but he especially liked Gus. He would be shocked and horrified. She would be, too, all over again. She would be, because she
was
, shocked and horrified.

But a part of it--a part of her, a part of everything from now on--would be false. Would be a lie.

Leslie drove down, by herself, on Saturday. Billy had held her off until then, but couldn't any longer--she was insistent. She wouldn't stay overnight, she said. She didn't want to impose, but she wanted to see Billy, she wanted to be in Gus's place, to look at his things.

Billy was shocked at the way she looked. The open, warm quality she had always conveyed was gone, as if erased, though she said the same words, the same
Leslie
kind of things. But she seemed, Billy would have said, smaller. Exhausted.

The worst moments, of course, were the very first, when she embraced Billy as though Billy needed comforting more than she did. "My dear," she said. "Oh, my dear." She held on, almost rocking Billy for a long moment. Billy could hear, she could feel, Leslie's ragged intake of breath. When they stepped away from each other, she saw that Leslie was fighting tears.

But Billy was tearful, too, because it was awful that Gus was dead. That so many were dead. That Leslie was so visibly in pain. Leslie's gaze, resting on her, was soft, full of sympathy and affection.

That shamed Billy, and she turned away. She went to make some tea, and they sat in the kitchen and talked. Mostly just going over, as everyone did in those days--even those who weren't directly involved--how it had happened for them. How it was for Leslie at the airport, hearing about it and checking what she'd written down about Gus's plane. The terrible ride back home, listening to the radio. Pierce finally turned it off, she said, and that somehow made it worse, made it final.

Billy was aware of herself, of her responses, as she listened to Leslie's account, as she told Leslie about her day, about how slowly she came to realize that one of the planes might have been Gus's. She was conscious of trying to calibrate her grief, trying to hold on to a shred of honesty by not letting Leslie think she was overcome, or had been overcome. As soon as she could, she excused herself to walk the dog.

Over the next days and weeks, Leslie misunderstood almost every gesture, every word, Billy said. The more Billy tried to back away from being the grief-stricken lover--the more she deferred to Leslie--the more Leslie insisted she had prior rights.
She
should have the final say on whether the Boston service should be at the school. She would know better than Leslie the list of friends to be invited. She should go through Gus's things and choose what she wanted to keep. She should read at the service.

Her
no
to most of these things seemed only to confirm Leslie's sense of Billy's lostness in grief. Again and again Billy told herself that she would be as honest as she decently could. She would try not to lie, not to pretend what she didn't feel. But in the end it seemed to her that there wasn't a truthful gesture she could make. She felt cottoned in falsity. Her dry eyes were understood by Leslie as shock. Her finding the too-expensive apartment in the South End was a sign of her need to flee the place where she and Gus had been happy together.