MRS. MONAGHAN SAYS “SOMETHING BAD,”
but I know she means slaughter. I know all about slaughters. My baba saw slaughters in Albania. That’s why he hits my nene and makes bad noises at night. I don’t know why it’s my nene’s fault, because she was just a girl when my baba saw those slaughters, but my nene says that Baba can’t forget anything. I was born in Albania, but I don’t remember it. Tirana was born here, so she is full American, but Baba and Nene and me, we are legal Americans. Nene says it’s very important to be legal, and we are lucky. It’s better to be legal Americans than born ones, I guess, because she never says Tirana is lucky.
My baba saw a slaughter right in the street in Albania, and he yelled at the policeman who did it, and he didn’t run away fast enough, so he got put in prison. He was in prison a long time, and when he came out, he was skinny like he is now, and his left arm didn’t work right anymore. Nene says he looked old. A lot older than plus-nineteen years in prison.
My baba met my nene when he got out of prison. She knew she was going to marry him right then, because their families had agreed, and also because Baba had lost a lot of time to have me and Tirana, and in Albania, every man has the right to a family. The women have to do it.
I wonder if they do it that way in Australia? Maybe that’s why Mrs. Monaghan is married to Mr. Monaghan.
4
Avis
JIM AND I ARRANGE
to go to the city council meeting together. Nate doesn’t know anything about Darcy, or about Jim having moved into a room at the casino. Nate has been focused on doing well at the police academy, on passing the exam, and we agree that it is better to wait until all of that is over to tell him.
Not that a twenty-seven-year-old son will be upset about his parents’ separation.
Jim stayed in the guest room the first couple of nights, but I finally told him he had to leave. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said, couldn’t stop imagining him and Darcy together, couldn’t stop wondering if he was having his regular Tuesday dinner meeting or screwing his director of community affairs. I tried not to do this, I tried not to torture myself in this way. I told myself that the affair was the symptom, not the problem, but it didn’t work. When push came to shove, this is where my mind stayed: on Jim’s naked body or on Darcy’s, on the image of Jim’s eyes crinkling up at something Darcy had said, on the sound Darcy might make in an intimate moment.
Those first days, I couldn’t get one single idea past these thoughts. I stumbled around our home, a place both our children had lived, and tried not to imagine my husband making love to another woman.
I USED TO RELISH THE
light in this house on a fall morning. It would slant in, bright and clear and cool, and the shadows of leaves would form charcoal lace on the walls. For years, I came back in the house about nine, after walking Nate to elementary school. I would walk home alone, the last mom to leave the playground. I would watch the children line up on the blacktop, and then wait—not rush off but instead stand halfway back from the children, always a little awkward at being one of the moms who stayed, who perhaps didn’t have any other life or loved this one more than she should. But I did love those five minutes before school started: when the children lined up, when the principal said good morning, when the loudspeakers crackled with instrumentation, and then, best of all, when seven hundred children, some wiggly, some tired, some born to perform, sang “This Land Is Your Land.” Day after day after day, and it always pleased me. It never felt old. I used to love to hear those voices and think—
If ever I am too sick to do anything but lie in a bed motionless, I hope I remember this, I hope I hear these sounds, see these faces, smell this schoolyard smell, before I die.
You see, it all mattered so much to me. Not even Jim realized how deeply I felt it. That was Emily, I suppose. To always know how quickly life could change, how quickly everything important could disappear, to always be trying to feel this unexpectedly beautiful life to its core.
JIM LOOKS GOOD WHEN HE
comes to the door to get me. This is not exactly helpful, but I am ready for it. He’s obviously in the better position here, and I learned enough from life with Sharlene not to convince myself that it might be otherwise. I am not pretending that he will miss me. Or that Darcy will have turned into a crone.
“Hi, Avis.”
I nod hello, suddenly unsure of how my voice will come out.
“That dress looks really good on you.”
I can’t help it. I appreciate that he is trying, I am glad my dress looks good, even while I want to hit him, want to scream, want to do something to change the path we are on. But I don’t reply. I pick up my bag and my sweater, and head for his car.
I WAS YOUNG WHEN EMILY
died. And in the dead center of grief, I discovered I was pregnant. Barely pregnant. It was just a question in my head—
Is it possible?
—but, of course, it wasn’t just a question. It was Nate, and before I knew it, before I could begin to let go of Emily, there was this new child, this little boy, this baby who gazed solemnly just as my brother Rodney had. And there I was again, right in the middle of life, whether I wanted to be or not.
I didn’t want to be pregnant when I was pregnant with Nate, and then for years afterward, when I wanted another child—four more children, I wanted to drown in new children—I could not get pregnant at all. No reason for it. Nothing the doctors ever found. Just a woman meant for two children, one who lived and one who did not.
WE MEET LAUREN OUTSIDE THE
council room, as we have planned, and make our way to the seats reserved for visitors. We can see Nate sitting on the left with the other officers who will be sworn in this evening: three men and one woman. Lauren seems uncharacteristically anxious: it might be that her fair skin looks wan under the fluorescent lighting, but I wonder if she has heard something about Jim moving out of the house, if she and Nate somehow already know what has happened, and my heart beats faster. I realize how unprepared I am to tell my son and his wife about Jim.
“Did you get to see Nate today?”
“No,” she says without looking at me. “He already started training, and he came straight here from there.”
“It’s a big day,” says Jim. “Nate did really well with this.”
“Yes,” says Lauren. I am beginning to wonder what is going on. If Lauren weren’t so straightlaced, I would think she had taken something.
“Lauren, we really appreciate all the support you’ve given Nate. Avis and I know that it hasn’t been easy. Since he came home this last time. Since he got out.”
Lauren looks as if she might jump up and run, and normally I would catch Jim’s eye, try to figure out what he is thinking, but of course, I don’t catch Jim’s eye tonight. We are only pretending to be here together.
“NATE, PLEASE. WHAT ARE YOU
and Luke doing?”
“We’re fighting, Mom. It’s fun.”
It sounds painful. It sounds angry. They lunge at each other like mad dogs every time they meet. My friend Cheryl tells me that I am lucky my son has a good friend.
But, oh, Nate was sweet too. Square faced, square jawed. He loved to hook his “beltseat” by himself, and to eat at “Boowga King,” and to play “sowca” in the “pawk.” If I had known how long he would carry around that dirty one-armed rabbit, I would have put more care into making it. Jim’s dad taught Nate to kick rocks when he could barely walk, and for years, he kicked a rock “fo Bompa” everywhere he went.
SOMEONE ASKS US TO RISE
for the pledge, and the city council meeting begins. The swearing in of the newest police officers is the third item on the agenda, after the approval of last week’s minutes and someone’s report about a parking lot. I am relieved that we will not have to wait through the seventeen-point agenda. I recognize two of the citizens in the area reserved for people who want to speak: they are always speaking on Channel 4, exercising their right to comment on city affairs. Seeing them makes me feel uneasy. I wonder where they live, wonder if either one knows my brother, Rodney, wonder if Rodney has ever sat here and commented with them. How could taking a stand on a traffic sign change or an equipment purchase possibly seem worthwhile to them? Are they here because the room is cool in the summer and warm in the winter? Does one hear voices, telling him to do this? Is this the only place where anyone ever pretends to listen?
I move over one seat from Jim so that I can get a better view of Nate. My son is tall and fair haired and well built. Every tour in Iraq left him a little more muscular, a little more tanned. Sitting in this public room, in his starched, new uniform, he looks like a movie version of a young police officer.
I smile. Nate needed those good looks when he was a kid. Needed something to offset the tipped-over chairs, the too-loud whisper, the overzealous romping, the forgotten homework. Oh, he was a boisterous child, a child given to moving too fast, hitting too hard, whirling around right when someone was passing by with a fragile school project. I always imagined people wondering where we had gotten him: I, who am dark and quiet, and Jim, who is dark and thoughtful.
Thoughtful
. Well, I am not sure that is the right word for him anymore.
EDNA NEAL ELEMENTARY
opened the year Nate started kindergarten, and we were there for the first day of the first new school built in Las Vegas in a decade. It was exciting. I had just given up a job at Jim’s hotel, just realized that I might not have another child and had better make the most of this experience before Nate got any older, and so I didn’t really know the other mothers in the neighborhood. But we were all there, walking out our doors at eight thirty, headed to the school. Some of the women pushing strollers. New backpacks, new shoes, little girls with ponytails and red ribbons, little boys with scalped haircuts. I fell in next to Cheryl and Julie, who would become such dear friends, all of us kindergarten moms—Julie, like me, taking her first to school, and Cheryl taking her last.
I am not sure what we were expecting. Streamers and a band, I suppose. There were news trucks. I remember that. Seeing the news trucks, and saying to one another, “Oh, this is fun,” and then walking around the back, to the kindergarten doors, and seeing hundreds of parents and their children. Fifty-seven five-year-olds waiting for one startled teacher to open up one brand-new classroom.
That was the beginning. The beginning of decades of that sort of madcap growth. They couldn’t build schools fast enough, they couldn’t hire teachers fast enough, for all those families moving to Las Vegas from all over the world. We complained about it, and laughed about it, and juggled zone changes and schedule swaps and double sessions and year-round calendars, for all the years our children were growing up. There were kids who changed schools nearly as often as Rodney and I had, yet they lived in the same house the whole time. This was part of having a child here, just like endless sunny days, and belly flops in backyard pools, and kids who didn’t even notice when the women on the billboards were naked.
TO MY RIGHT, LAUREN FIDDLES
with her bra strap, and I notice that she has a dark bruise on her shoulder. I see a bit of it when she pulls on the fabric of her blouse, and after I have seen it, I recognize the full mark under the light-colored cotton. It’s a deep, fresh purple, no green. I try not to think the next thought, the one that wonders how she got it, the one that thinks of Nate, of how Nate has been these last months. I don’t want to think this thought right now, at the very moment when Nate is about to achieve a dream he has had since he was eleven years old. I don’t want to think this thought at all.
I have spent eight years with the constant fear that something will happen to Nate. Eight years trembling when the phone rang too late at night, eight years waiting for the one-line email, the five-minute phone call, the message that said my son was not hurt, he was still alive, he had survived another week in Iraq. I am deep-marrow tired of this fear. Is that fear why Jim is leaving me? Did I pay enough attention to us?
ON THAT FIRST DAY OF
kindergarten, Mrs. Linfelter blew her whistle and addressed the “Edna Neal kindergartner class of nineteen ninety-four.”
“Nineteen ninety-four?” we all whispered. “What’s in nineteen ninety-four?” Someone figured it out, “Fifth-grade graduation.” And we all smiled. Fifth graders!
“Edna Neal kindergartners, it is time to line up. Get in line right behind me, one by one, single file.”
There was a confused rush toward the teacher. A few children held back. Julie’s daughter Ella buried her head in Julie’s thigh. Nate raced off, pushing to be the first in line.
Mrs. Linfelter ignored the scuffle of bodies banging into one another.
“One by one,” she said very sweetly, like a cartoon caricature of a kindergarten teacher.
“No holding hands. Single file.”
She kept at it, with her sweet voice, her clear instructions, nothing but business. And when all fifty-seven of them were ready, in a snaking line that filled up most of the dusty kindergarten play area, Mrs. Linfelter gave her first full-class instruction.
“Children,” she said. “Stand up straight. Look at your moms and dads. And wave bye-bye. Good-bye, Moms and Dads!”
Then Mrs. Linfelter turned and walked in the room with fifty-seven five-year-olds in single step behind her.
Most of us were stunned. It was Cheryl who hooted. “Brilliant!” she said. “This Mrs. Linfelter is brilliant! Let’s get some coffee.”
THE MAYOR HAS ASKED THE
cadets to stand, and he is reading off their names one by one.
“Staff Sergeant Nathan James Gisselberg.”
He has used Nate’s Army rank.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Cadet Gisselberg served three tours of duty in Iraq. He was awarded a bronze medal for service. We are particularly proud to welcome him to the Las Vegas Police Department today.”
Nate stands still, like a soldier, and his face does not reveal what he is thinking. Jim and I and Lauren look at each other. Our shared pride is like a rod between us. I wonder if Lauren or Jim also feels the kind of melting gratitude that I feel. When you have sent a child to war, when you have seen what being in a war is like for that child, every single acknowledgment matters. Nate had so damn much courage. It matters to me that the mayor knows it, that he says it.
The cadets raise their right hands. The mayor asks them to repeat the words of the oath. He swears them in. And then, only then, does Nate smile. I know that smile so well. The smile of a little boy who has just caught the long fly in his mitt, who has just wobbled the bicycle down the street by himself, who has just asked a girl to a dance. When I see that smile, I think that everything is going to be all right. I look at Lauren, and I see it in her eyes too: we both believe that things will be okay.
MY SECOND LIFE STARTED ON
that first day of kindergarten. Not when Jim asked me to marry him, not when we moved into a house where the master bedroom was larger than the apartments I had grown up in, not when Emily or Nate was born, but on the day that Edna Neal Elementary School opened, and Nate followed Mrs. Linfelter into kindergarten.
That’s the day when my old life seemed to slip completely off me, when a group of women assumed I was one of them, a suburban mom with a sweet-faced child headed off to school. That was the first time I ever went to have a cup of coffee with women who had been to college, the first time nobody seemed to notice that my memories were not the same as theirs.