“It’s tiny,” she murmured.
“At least it’s not open,” Charlie said under his breath.
The chapel was more than half full; there were probably sixty people. When everyone was settled the minister talked about the senselessness of this kind of tragedy, but also about how God had a plan for each of us, and how it was not our place to question that plan. Other people, speaking in tear-choked voices, recalled Marco’s love of baseball, his collection of Matchbox cars, his uncanny ability to mimic advertising jingles from TV, the way he insisted on wearing his father’s leather tool belt around the house, even though it nearly tipped him over. They talked about how God would watch over Marco, and the angels would play with him, and how his grandfather, already in heaven, would teach him card tricks. Nobody mentioned the accident.
It would have been comforting, Charlie thought, to believe in fate now—that there was a reason for all this grief, that it was a test to soldier through, that the little boy’s death wasn’t simply a result of ill judgment and heedlessness but part of some kind of larger design, the details of which would become clear as the years unfolded. But it was impossible for him. A child was dead, and his wife was at least partially to blame. This child would never be four, or fourteen, or twenty-six; he would not graduate from high school or earn a driver’s license or have children of his own. He would not make his parents proud, or disappoint them. His career would be someone else’s career, his wife someone else’s wife. He would not take care of his parents in their old age, or continue the family name. His mother would spend the rest of her life wondering what he might have become.
It occurred to Charlie that the last time he had been to a funeral was when his own mother died. It was very different from this, of course; her struggle with cancer had been long and arduous, and though nobody wanted to believe it, they’d all known she was dying. She was cremated, and they scattered her ashes in the pond behind her home.
When the cancer had appeared the first time—she’d discovered a lump in her cervix, and underwent a year of chemo and radiation—Charlie’s mother had emerged from the ordeal physically diminished and emotionally transformed. Her thick blond hair, which she’d always worn in a conservative bob, fell out, and when it grew back, fine and gray, she cropped it short. She took trips with fellow cancer survivors to Tucson and Taos and became a devotee of Ashtanga yoga. She kept her food processor permanently on the kitchen counter and drank herbal potions in deep, earthy colors, green and rust and brown. And when the cancer came back, fifteen years later, in every lymph node and several of her bones, it was almost as if she was ready for it. In those years, as she confided to Charlie when he finally came to see her, she had done all the things she wanted to do—the things she’d spent the first forty-one years of her life wondering about: trying marijuana, having sex with a stranger, camping on a mountaintop, feeling the muscles and bones in her body move in ways she hadn’t known they could.
Near the end, lying in her hospital bed with tubes in her arms, her face scrubbed free of makeup, she’d grasped his hand and looked in his eyes. “Here’s what I have learned,” she said. “It’s not enough to hope that happiness will find you. You have to seek it. And another thing: no matter how complicated your life seems, you have the power to change it. Don’t make the mistake I did and waste precious decades because you’re too afraid to act.”
At the time the words had seemed to Charlie like New Age bullshit; he was living in New York and, he thought, doing pretty much exactly what he wanted. His mother’s middle-aged carpe diem conversion seemed both simplistic and a little unseemly—who was this woman with the short spiky hair and serious gaze, devoid of maternal softness, spouting slogans worthy of the posters for sale in the back of in-flight magazines? But these days her words haunted him. He had an image in his mind of his mother in that hospital bed, sitting up against stiff white pillows, her lips thin and bloodless, almost colorless, her eyes dark and bright. He thought of her like this at random times, when he was standing in line at the ATM machine or buying groceries, and his eyes would fill with tears. His mother had been right. She knew what lay ahead, and she warned him, and he—young, self-absorbed, ignorant of the myriad ways that life can beat you down—had humored, placated, and ultimately dismissed her. What fucking arrogance. If he had listened to her, might his life have been different? Would a courageous decision ten years ago have avoided a mess like this now?
As soon as the boy’s funeral was over, and “Wind Beneath My Wings” came on the audio system, Charlie nudged Alison, and they tiptoed out. She had wanted to go up and speak to the parents, but Charlie had convinced her that it would be inappropriate—it was the last thing he’d want, if he were the father of the boy. She lingered for a moment at the back, then followed him out the double doors to the parking lot.
On the way home in the car, she turned to Charlie and said tearfully, “I know you’re angry at me.”
“I’m not angry, Alison.”
“Yes you are. Say the worst things you’re thinking. That I’m irresponsible and stupid. A drunk. A murderer.” She almost spat the words at him, daring him to agree.
He looked over at her warily. In truth, he was angry at her—for the insecurities that he was certain had led her to drink too much at the party, for her poor judgment, even for the anguish she was expressing now.
He had both hands on the steering wheel, and he lifted one to rub his cheek. “You’re not a drunk. Or a murderer.”
She gasped a little, as if his words had caused her physical pain.
Charlie drove in silence, wondering at his own capacity for inflicting hurt. He felt a stab of regret. But he couldn’t shake this anger he felt toward her. And he knew that, really, her culpability wasn’t the issue—it was that he’d been on the brink of self-discovery, a quest that had nothing to do with her. It was separate from her, from the children, from their life in Rockwell. But this accident made it impossible for him to pursue it. He felt, now, at the edge of a feeling more powerful, more dangerous than he could ever remember having experienced—a bottomless despair.
Chapter Nine
October 2001
At dinner with Claire and Ben one evening in New York, Alison and Charlie made plans to go away with them for an October fall foliage bed-and-breakfast weekend upstate. Charlie made reservations at what turned out to be a dilapidated bed-and-breakfast he’d chosen from an out-of-date guidebook he’d found remaindered at the Strand—typical of him, as Claire said when they got there. “Charlie’s such a cheapskate,” she grumbled to Alison as they followed the ancient proprietor up the rickety stairs to their rooms. “We should never let him make the plans.” (Charlie was a cheapskate, but Alison knew that he felt acutely the difference between his nonprofit job and Ben’s salary as a corporate architect.)
Charlie had left work early and taken the subway to a bus to the least expensive car rental place he could find, near the river on Thirty-first Street. He secured a shiny white Ford Focus and drove up West End Avenue to pick up Alison. Meanwhile, she had packed their bag. He had left a sloppy pile of clothes on his dresser—khakis and a moss green sweater, boxer shorts and socks and a few white T-shirts, a leather utility case containing a frayed toothbrush, a flattened tube of toothpaste, and a sample-size yellow moisturizer from a makeup promotion. She scanned her closet for something, anything, that wasn’t black. They were going upstate. People wore colors there.
Alison was standing in the lobby, chatting with Frank, the part-time doorman, when Charlie pulled up in front of the building. It was a cold, windy day. Frank carried her bag despite her protests, and she rolled her eyes at Charlie as he watched them coming to let him know that she had no choice. Charlie was sensitive about treating their doorman like a serf.
“Frank,” he said, scrolling down the passenger’s window and leaning across the seat, “you didn’t have to—”
“It’s a pleasure to serve such a lovely young couple, sir, a pleasure. A good weekend t
o you.”
Frank was from the old school, and all you could do was nod. Even Charlie realized this, and he waved good-bye with a pained smile, which Frank returned with a brisk salute.
“I suppose when we have a baby we’ll actually need a doorman,” Alison said as Charlie pulled into traffic.
“Umm,” he said.
“But I like it now, too,” she said. “It makes me feel safe. And packages—it’s useful for packages.”
“Actually,” he said, slowing to a stop at a red light, “I was reading that people in doorman buildings get lulled into complacency. Anyone can talk their way in, or slip past when the doorman isn’t looking.”
“It’s green,” Alison said. They picked up speed over the next few blocks—Seventy-fourth, Seventy-third, Seventy-second, down into the Sixties, until they hit a snarl of traffic around Lincoln Center. “I don’t care if it’s an illusion,” she said as they sat stalled at an intersection. “I like to feel safe.”
He looked over at her with an amused smile. “Well, aren’t you conventional all of a sudden. Next you’ll be wanting a white picket fence in Connecticut.” This was a game they played, accusing each other of bourgeois aspirations. It was their way of dealing with the legitimate fear that their lives were becoming demographically predictable.
“Let’s not rush things,” she said. “First the Jack Russell. Then the baby. Then the house.”
He glanced at the digital clock. “I can’t believe you told Claire we’d pick them up, Al. They could easily have met me at the lot. It’s adding an hour to our travel time.”
“So?” she said. “It gives us some quality time together, right?”
“Quantity time, maybe,” he said.
Charlie was right; it took twenty-five minutes just to get through Midtown traffic. There was much to talk about, but little was said. Sighs and mutterings, attention to traffic. As they passed through Times Square, neon rinsed the dashboard, splashed in their eyes.
When they got to the warehouse on Seventeenth Street, Charlie jumped out and rang the buzzer.
“Benjamin, sir,” he said with exaggerated formality, “the car and driver are downstairs.”
Charlie got back in the car. He and Alison sat in silence for a few minutes, waiting. She adjusted some knobs on the dashboard, turning down the heat. The street was quiet. Cars were double-parked on one side, sharking for a space; every time a truck came along, Charlie had to circle the block.
Alison put her hand on Charlie’s leg, just above the knee, a peace offering of sorts, though she wasn’t quite sure why she felt she needed to offer one. “What,” he said in a neutral voice, neither a question nor a demand.
She pulled her hand away.
“Did you pack my green sweater?”
She nodded.
“Good. It’s going to be cold.”
“I love you,” she said.
After a moment he said, “I know.” Then, as if realizing that wasn’t enough, he said, “Love you, too. Here they are.”
There was a hard rap on her window. “Hey, guys.” It was Claire, all sparkly hazel eyes and dangling earrings and big crimson mouth, wearing a black cashmere turtleneck and modishly faded jeans. Alison unlocked the doors, and Claire slid in. Ben rapped on the trunk, a thump that vibrated against Alison’s feet, and Charlie triggered the lock. Ben fiddled in the trunk for a moment, then slammed it shut. Alison looked back at Claire, and Claire smiled and squeezed her shoulder. “An adventure,” she said. “This is just what we need.”
Out of the city, trees were everywhere. The colors reminded Alison of New York magazine’s fall fashion color palette: sage green, burnt sugar, cinnamon, yellow apple, moss. The fact that she even saw it that way, she thought ruefully, meant that she’d probably been living in the city too long.
Later, Alison framed a snapshot from that weekend of the four of them sitting on the pebbled beach of a lake. It was a cold morning; they all wore mismatched scarves and mittens borrowed from the garrulous proprietor of the bed-and-breakfast. In the photo they’re all laughing, but it’s as if they’ve been laughing too long; their smiles are held in place like the afterimage of a bright light in a dark room. You can tell there’s been some self-conscious arrangement: Alison is leaning back against Charlie, who has his arm draped over her shoulder, and Claire and Ben are tilting their heads together. It was only when Alison examined the picture closely that she noticed Claire’s arm on Charlie’s knee, and his fingers touching hers. She might have seen it at the time, but if so it didn’t register.
Chapter Ten
Ben had, of course, been to New Jersey, but he’d never taken the train. Now, in the marble well of New Jersey Transit at Penn Station, he stood, like the other commuters (not many; it was 9 A.M. on Tuesday; almost everyone was going the opposite way) with chins tilted up expectantly, watching the big, black, surprisingly old-fashioned sign overhead to find out which track his train was on. Rockwell, on the Essex County line, was scheduled to leave in ten minutes.
Flip, flip flip—Track 2.
About half a dozen people in the large vestibule now turned, as one, in the same direction. Ben was reminded of how he’d felt traveling in Europe—the unfamiliar rituals, the secret language of commuters, the customs that appeared to be second nature to everyone else. So he did now what he’d always done abroad: he identified the person who seemed most at ease—in this case, a woman with a severe haircut talking into a wireless earpiece—and followed her surreptitiously.
The escalator to the trains wasn’t working, so everyone walked down the ribbed steps, strangely unfamiliar in stasis. Trains on both sides. Which one? There was no conductor in sight. Ben followed the wireless woman to the right and up to the front of the train.
Earlier, he had packed his leather satchel with the Times, a current New Yorker, a bottle of water, an apple. The toy store on his route to the subway was closed, so he’d ducked into Rite Aid and bought shamelessly crowd-pleasing presents for Annie and Noah: Day-Glo lollipops as big as saucers, a Dora the Explorer coloring book for Annie (a wild stab—what did little girls want? He had no idea), a froglike stuffed animal for Noah that apparently came with a code for access to some no-doubt addictive Web site. Charlie and Alison would almost certainly disapprove. Then again, Ben supposed, they had bigger things on their minds.
On the phone, when Ben had asked what he could do and Charlie said, “Really—nothing,” Ben realized that he would have to answer that question himself. What he could do was come to them. Claire had left for her book tour yesterday afternoon, as planned—of course she had to go; it would have been unreasonable not to—and Ben had gone into work, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t belong there. That he should somehow do more.
There was no clear etiquette for this. After all, he didn’t know (thank God) the child who had died. And it truly appeared that it wasn’t Alison’s fault. It was a terrible tragedy, but it wasn’t his tragedy—it wasn’t even their tragedy, exactly. So why did he feel compelled to take a day off work and come to Rockwell? How could it possibly help? He thought of Claire’s justifications: there’s nothing we can do. It’s a horrible situation, but really it’s no one’s fault; nobody should be taking this on themselves. Yes, yes, she was right. Rationally, this was none of his business. But instinctively he felt that coming to see Alison was the right thing to do.
The train was a bit dingy, and altogether too fluorescent—a poor relation to Metro North, the Westchester line that Ben occasionally took to see a client, filled with prosperous mortgage brokers and lawyers talking on cell phones and reading the Wall Street Journal. The people around him now seemed comparatively down-market: secretary types, men with shiny, buzzed hair in cheap inky suits; beleaguered mothers with unwieldy strollers. Was it the time of day? It was, to be honest, a little depressing.
The train lurched slightly as it left the station. Ben looked at his watch: 9:37. As he settled into his hard maroon vinyl seat, he was reminded of the many ti
mes, as a boy, he had gone with his mother to visit her father in a rest home in upstate New York, an hour from their home. He’d liked those trips—his mother, faced with nothing to do for an hour, relaxed and even seemed to enjoy it, chatting above the steady hum with an intimacy that was rare when they were home. They played card games and read books and talked. Ben liked looking out the window and watching the world glide by. He liked knowing that it might be this easy to leave one place for another. You got on a train, and then you were somewhere else. He particularly liked reading novels on the train; it felt doubly transporting.
For a long time, while Ben was growing up, the world outside his head held little interest. Outside his head, his mother was bustling around in the kitchen, fixing a family dinner his father wouldn’t show up for. The dinner would get cold as they sat there, Ben and his mother and his younger brother, Justin, and then his mother would say, in a strained, careful voice, “Well, you two go ahead,” and push her own plate away. Ben would struggle to eat the chicken and peas that tasted like dog food in his mouth. His mother would watch them silently for a few minutes, then rise abruptly and start clearing up around them, an angry clatter of dishes reverberating in the still room.
Ben could read anywhere. He read waiting for the bus, sitting on the bus, walking into school. He read at recess and before orchestra. He read at night in the room he shared with his brother after his mother had turned off the overhead light, squinting to see the words by the eerie glow of the night-light in the socket beside his bed. In his world the wizard Merlin was as real as Jim Townsend and Tyler Green, two boys who lived on his block and threw gravel at him when he walked by, hiding in the stairwells of their split-levels. Ben rode the trains with the Boxcar Children; he stepped through a wardrobe into a land where a great lion saved children from an evil witch. He was three inches tall, navigating the perilous terrain behind his house, where sparrows were airplanes and rain puddles lakes. At home Ben often felt helpless, at school he was invisible, but in his head he was a fearless traveler, a brilliant inventor, a hero.