The Year That Follows (3 page)

“Tell me about your son,” the rabbi says.

“A fascinating young man. Very smart and, what do they say nowadays, intense. He worked on Wall Street. On the morning of September eleventh he had a meeting in the north tower. He went in and was never heard from again.”

The rabbi takes off his glasses to rub his eyes, which are surprisingly blue.

“For a time I hoped against hope. There was no body. I sat no shivah, held no funeral, but after a time I had to face the truth.”

The rabbi nods, puts his glasses back on.

“Most of the people who are important to me are
dead,” Sam says. “And soon, I will be, too. Till then I want to remember the dead. I wish I’d done it all along; it’s as close as I can get to bringing them back. And I want to bring my daughter out to teach her how to do this. I’ve taught her nothing about death, but her mother is dead, her brother is dead. Soon, her father will be dead, and she will be alone. This may be the one thing left I can teach her that will do her some good.”

“Your children’s mother?”

“Dead, in
1975
.”

“She was Jewish?” asks the rabbi.

“No.”

“So your children are not really Jewish.”

“Do they have to be?”

“Not at all,” says Rabbi Gauss. “But you are. I will make you a deal. I will read your son’s name on the
yahrzeit
, a son who was not Jewish. You will attend High Holy Day services this year.”

“To feel less Jewish,” Sam says.

“Maybe you won’t.”

“You are a hopeful man, Rabbi.”

“Of course,” the rabbi says. “It’s my business.”

S
am drives home beneath the milky sky, happy with the outcome. He needs to call Cat, never an easy thing. If Sam were like everyone else, he’d have a cell phone, but he has resisted this convenience—if it is that. Always to be in contact seems more a curse than a blessing, and besides, the buttons on those phones are small and difficult to operate.

Every year things get a little more difficult, the indignities a little greater. He is eighty, with a replaced hip, a triple bypass, a system pumped so full of this and that medication that he can’t say anymore what they are all for, knows only that he’s still breathing. Sometimes he wants to stop people on the street and say, “I was a young man once, full of vim and vigor. I won a war, founded a family, made a small and unlikely fortune.
I know things.”
Of course, they’d think he was crazy.

Once home, settled into his reading chair—he has discovered large-print books, both a blessing and another indignity—he calls Cat. She answers on the first ring, and this makes him smile, to hear her voice, to picture her, his beautiful daughter.

“Making any money?” he asks.

“Not really,” she says, after a pause. They haven’t spoken for several months. Sam would call more if he didn’t always feel that he was bothering her.

“Why not?” he asks.

“I’m not much of a salesman, I think.”

“Maddening, isn’t it?” he says.

“What?”

“The salesmen always make the money. No geniuses, most of them. Goodman was like that. Not an exceptionally bright man, but he had the big house and the fleet of luxury cars and the vacations to Bermuda because he could put his arm around you and get you to buy something. He had that quality. For some reason, you never wanted to let him down.”

“Where is he now?” Cat asks.

“Dead.”

“Well,” Cat says. “There you go.”

“How’s Connor?” Sam asks.

“He growing up. But he still draws me pictures to show me how much he loves me.”

Sam remembers that Cat did the same thing for him. She would leave those pictures on his dresser, where every night he would dump his keys and money clip when he came home from work. He wishes he’d kept those drawings, but he was never good at saving. He decides now to get to the point, and mentions that Kyle’s
yahrzeit
will soon be here. “I’d like you to come visit,” he says. “I know you don’t want to. I promise, it’s the last thing I will ever ask of you. Please. When someone dies, you’re supposed to mourn for the year that follows, then you light a candle for the dead, say his name at services, and move on.”

“You want me to come two thousand miles to light a candle and hear Kyle’s name read in a church?” she asks.

“A temple. In a temple. It’s a Jewish ritual.”

“Kyle wasn’t Jewish,” Cat says. “Right? Technically?”

“I’ll handle the technicalities,” Sam says. “Can you bring Connor?”

“So, coming wasn’t the last thing you were going to ask.”

“Cat, I’m an old man. Can you bring him?”

A pause. “Michael is supposed to have Connor that weekend. I’ll have to work it out.”

“I’ll call that man,” Sam offers. He can’t say the name.

“You know,” Cat says, “Mom died in September.”

“She did, at the end of the month.” He remembers that day, how it changed things, how things spinning one way suddenly spun another.

“Can we do all this for her, too?” Cat asks.

Oy, Sam thinks, another trip to the Rabbi. “When the time comes,” he says.

“I’ll think about it,” she allows, which, right now, gives him reason for hope.

C
at settles into her office, kicks off her pumps, feels the cool of the carpet under her feet. It’s not much of an office, just a cubicle, six-foot high partitions of gray felt, thumbtacked pictures of Connor, also a poster, courtesy of American Dream, Inc., about the joys of home ownership, and a photo of Cat and Kyle when they were teenagers, found in Kyle’s drawer. Cat remembers this picture being taken by their mother with the Polaroid she used for her real estate listings. Cat logs on to her Dell, and then the
New York Times
Web site. She doesn’t read the headlines, doesn’t want to know the news; instead, she clicks on the link to “Portraits of Grief,” the compilation of little one-computer-page obits of those who died on September
n
. Her brother’s appeared about two months ago—a reporter had called her and done a nice job—but it’s not her brother she’s after. It’s Siobhan.

Under her keyboard Cat keeps two photos of this woman, taken from Kyle’s drawer, the same drawer that contained the Polaroid. Cat’s idea is that Siobhan might also appear in “Portraits of Grief.” Cat knows almost nothing about her, only her first name, her likeness, that she worked in the towers, and that she might have been—or maybe even is—the mother of Kyle’s child.

Today there is grief for two maintenance men, an insurance salesman, a dishwasher, a bond trader, and a hair stylist who happened to be visiting her brother, the bond trader (like Kyle, in the wrong place at the wrong time), but no Siobhan.

Eleven months. For eleven months Cat has been trying to find the boy. Many times she’s wanted to give up, told herself that she doesn’t even know if the child is Kyle’s, that she may be searching for the son of someone else. Still, she can’t stop. Part of it is normal human curiosity, a simple desire to find a lost child, but part of it is personal, her own unfinished business.

L
ater, much later, after a day of calling prospects who don’t want to borrow, or those who do but can’t qualify, after searching again for Siobhan and then using the Internet to look for an old boyfriend, after six calls and messages left to Michael to make sure he will pick up Connor from day camp—as Michael requested, though he has done so in the past and then forgotten to show up—Sherri appears at the opening of Cat’s cubicle.

“Hey, Cat,” she says. “Snap out of it.” Sherri is a top producer, does a couple of loans a week, a young and single woman who has nevertheless befriended Cat, either unable to see Cat’s failings or wanting to feel good about herself because of them. She’s standing now by Cat’s desk in navy slacks and a laundered white blouse that looks too crisp for so late in the afternoon. Cat tries to remember if she was wearing the same blouse this morning. “You want to get a drink after work?” Sherri asks. “Like now?”

“Gonna work out.”

“I’m talking a drink here. I’ll buy.”

“You closed the whale,” Cat says.

Sherri smiles, bouncing a little on her toes. Cat wonders who came up with the idea that Asians are reserved. Sherri has been working on a loan so large that Cat can only guess at its size: five million. She’s heard conjecture in the office as high as twenty, but she doubts this. What property in suburban Detroit would require so much money? “You’re buying dinner,” Cat says.

“I knew you’d come around.”

“After I work out.”

Cat works out every day now, either after work at her club when Michael has Connor, or in the early mornings, cell phone in her pocket as she runs laps around her apartment building, running up and sticking her head in the apartment every ten minutes to make sure the boy is still sleeping. Darkness, sleet, rain, the frigid predawn winter air of Michigan—nothing stops her.

She’s lost nine pounds since last September, and she likes how she feels, more like the girl she was, but this is just a fringe benefit of the regimen. What really matters is the discipline, the every-day-without-fail nature of the effort. For the first time since college, she feels she might get control of her life.

S
he finds a parking space behind the restaurant, stands and stretches her arms above her head. It’s a warm and humid night, but cooling, a hint of autumn in the air as the light fades. Here, in this parking lot, in one of Detroit’s more prosperous suburbs, there are Mercedes and Volvos, BMWs and Acuras sprinkled among the Lincolns and Fords, Cadillacs and Chrysler 300s. How different from what Cat knew growing up, when it was almost a crime, certainly an act of apostasy, to drive a foreign nameplate. Her father, who worked for Ford, considered even a Chevrolet a foreign car. Cat spots Sherri’s sedan, a Lexus of deep gold, knows it by its vanity plate:
RE-FI
.

Cat loves going to restaurants after exercising, her hair still damp underneath, the feeling of fatigue in her legs, yet with the muscles somehow refreshed. The bar is dark, its walls English racing green, dotted by small prints of successful racehorses, long-dead animals that won, say, the Irish Sweepstakes of
1913
. There is the smell of meat and the tinkling din of a place where drinkers go. It is a bar for men, and for women like Sherri, who want to be successful in business.

Sherri sits at the end of the bar, beneath a flat-screen
TV playing the Tiger game, chatting up two guys. Cat thinks they were both once handsome, especially the one to the left, with his wide, symmetrical face and high cheekbones, but years of drinking and smoking—that’s what he’s doing now—have softened him around the edges. Men are supposed to age better than women, but Cat supposes this depends on the man. They are silly creatures, men, in their own ways as driven by vanity as women, but with that odd flavor of male ego. Still, they can be appealing. Perhaps it is just their size. Michael is a big man. Even now, when she sees him, she sometimes forgets what she knows and for an instant finds herself attracted.

Sherri sees Cat, and motions her over. Cat wishes the men weren’t there, but she catches herself. She thinks of her friend Tonya’s rule: always make an effort. Always. Smile, stand up straight, shoulders back like a cadet, wear makeup, put your best foot forward. You never know, Tonya says. Cat thinks you often do know—and Tonya is no paragon of relationship health—but sometimes Cat suspects Tonya is right. She is a bit like the volleyball coach Cat had in junior high. Mr. Benson. A great coach, not that he could play the game himself.

Cat draws up the corners of her mouth into what she hopes is an impish smile, squeezes together her shoulder blades, and approaches the bar, eyes on Sherri. Everything about Sherri, her posture, the thin arm on the bar, suggests she is totally at home. Like Cat, she grew up a couple of miles from here, but her father is Japanese, retired now from one of the car companies.

Toyota, Cat thinks. Sherri’s mother is American. The story, according to Sherri, is that the father wanted to retire back in Japan, and so the mother sent him off; she now lives in Miami. Cat can feel the eyes of the men on her, and she is careful not to look at them, worried it might unnerve her.

“Catwoman!” Sherri shouts. No one calls her this. “You all buffed and puffed?”

“Can’t you tell?” Cat says.

Sherri introduces the men, Bruce and David. They are older than Cat thought, perhaps as old as Cat. David is the handsome one. Up close Cat can see that his hair, thick and dark, is flecked with gray. Bruce, who is balding, has cut it very short. Cat is impressed that Sherri knows their names, but then, Sherri knows everyone’s name. Never forgets one, and so her customers keep coming back. Cat wonders, Is it really that simple? Do we just want to be remembered?

F
ifteen minutes later they are at the table, having left the men at the bar, which Sherri handled so deftly that Cat wonders if they’ve realized yet that Sherri isn’t coming back. Sherri collapses into her chair, makes a show of putting her napkin on her lap, and looks at Cat. “Ah, Cat. Life’s good, eh?”

“Sure,” Cat says, hearing in Sherri’s voice that life perhaps is not so good. This is the night of Sherri’s biggest deal, and only Cat is at the table. Of course, if the roles were reversed, it would still be a small crowd. Tonya. Maybe her friend Elise, whom she hasn’t seen in
close to a year. Maybe Sherri. Maybe Cat wouldn’t even bother. She’d just go home, wish she could call her brother. God, she thinks, I need a different career.

“You know, Cat, you should be doing deals like this.”

“I should.”

“The thing is,” Sherri says, “now what do I do?”

“How ’bout another one?”

“What for?”

“The money?”

“It’s not about the money,” Sherri says.

“What is it about?”

“I have no idea.”

They order salmon, Sherri a bottle of white wine, an expensive one, Cat guesses, judging from the way the waiter nervously presents it. Cat decides that tonight she will allow herself a second drink, in Sherri’s honor. She remembers coming here with her father and Kyle the year her mother died, their old fallback. This was how the old man adapted, buying dinner in restaurants, hiring a woman, Carmen, to do the laundry and clean the house. He got Cat up in the morning—never an easy thing then—and made sure she was out the door with Kyle on time. It was the year Cat learned to cook, write a check, eat peas off a fork, all of it learned from her father. It took years, she realized, to understand what you got from your parents, and what you didn’t.