“I’m having those contractions,” I said to Evan one day as we sat on either side of the bed, during one of those rare times when Meghan had left the hospital.
“You are? Are you sure? Should I call the nurse?”
“Not the real contractions, the fake kind.” A nurse came in to adjust the IV and smiled reflexively at us both. “They’re some sort of practice contractions. They have a strange name. Like Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound contractions.”
“Ezra Pound?”
“Braxton Hicks,” murmured the nurse.
“That’s it. I’m having Braxton Hicks contractions.”
“Absolutely normal at this stage,” said the nurse. “And that’s from someone who spent eleven years in labor and delivery.” She patted my shoulder on her way out.
“Ezra Pound,” Evan said. “Bridge, I miss the wackiness you brought into my life.”
“Yeah? I miss stuff, too, Ev.”
“Like what? Or should I even ask?”
“I don’t know. I miss my illusions, mainly. It turns out I had a lot of them. Which is strange when you think about it. I mean, of all of us I probably have the most real-world job. Well, maybe not as much as Irving, but close. You’d think I’d be more realistic than the rest of you put together.”
“That’s false logic. If you were really realistic, you’d be a partner at some law firm with two kids in private school and hot-and-cold running nannies.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” And we both laughed a little. I hoped Leo could hear us; it was the kind of interchange that he loved, the kind of remark he so often made. Maybe I was trying to speak for him as well as to him. I noticed the light playing on the sheen of coppery stubble on his head. I remembered how terrified I had been of the soft spot on his skull when he was an infant. “Can’t he wear a helmet?” I’d asked once.
“You seeing somebody, Ev?” I said in a quiet companionable sort of voice.
He stared down at his hands, then nodded without looking at me. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know where it will wind up. I don’t know.” His eyes slewed sideways to Leo, and for a moment his mouth twisted.
“I saw you,” I said. “I saw you at dinner. At Française.”
“I know. I saw you, too. There was a mirror on the wall and I could see you and Irving.” Both of us smiled.
“Like an O. Henry story,” I said. “I saw you and you saw me and neither of us said anything to one another.”
“I thought about it, but you and Irving looked like you were fighting.”
“He asked me to marry him.”
“Oh, that explains it.”
I laughed again. “I miss you, too, Ev. Maybe someday…” I shrugged as my voice trailed off. I was having another contraction. Braxton Hicks.
“Maybe.”
I slept, and then I dreamed. Leo and I were skydiving. He was young, perhaps seven or eight. We were both nervous and happy, unconcerned with the fact that Meghan had been kept in the dark about our plans. We leapt, and our chutes didn’t open, and the spires of the city rose to meet us, and I woke to the sound of a sharp click as Evan turned the television on.
Ever since the start of the pregnancy, I had found it difficult to move from sleep to consciousness. Sometimes I thought a part of my mind was deep inside with the pair of them, lulled by the motion, listening to the heartbeats, dreaming the dreams of those poised between two worlds. So it took me a minute or two to realize that I was looking at a shot on the TV screen of the front door of a building in the Tubman projects, police officers in flak jackets on either side. The camera pulled back and showed the broad quadrangle of dirt at its center; it was empty of everything except police and police cars.
“What?” I said.
Evan turned up the sound. A local reporter was stumbling over her words, caught in midsentence “…will be exiting the building in just a few minutes, we’re told. It’s unclear whether this was a hostage situation or a surrender. What we do know is that for at least an hour a resident of the projects has been inside one of the apartments there with a young woman and another person who has been identified by police as Meghan Fitzmaurice.” The local reporter seemed flustered, working live without a script, but she was smart enough to know that she didn’t have to identify Meghan further.
One of the nurses stood in the doorway, too, as Evan switched from channel to channel, finally settling on the network for which Meghan had so famously been the public face. They interviewed a woman with a toddler in her arms, who said the police refused to let her back into her apartment. “This baby is getting hungry, too,” she said peevishly, and as if on cue her little girl keened, “I wanna sandwich.” They interviewed a young man, who said it wasn’t fair that a clutch of cops showed up for “some TV lady” and paid scant attention when items were taken from people’s apartments, which had apparently happened to his girlfriend recently.
They interviewed Charisse as a group of kids jumped up and down behind her, until she turned and waved them off with her fierce bottom lip thrust out over her chin. “Meghan’s boy, he got shot here and she’s upstairs talking to the person who did it, and she’s going to bring him out before there’s any more trouble,” she said. “He showed up here, he’s sorry, he came to apologize to a girl here who is a friend of Meghan’s boy, and things got a little out of hand and the girl’s mother called Meghan and told her to come over. You can’t get the cops to come right over here and have things stay calm, you know what I mean? You don’t know what would happen with that boy in there if the cops come, breaking down the door. So she called Meghan and she came in and she’s talking to him now. She’ll take care of business with this boy. You know she will.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“What the hell is she talking about?” Evan said.
“She’s taking a terrible chance,” said the nurse.
“Oh, come on. That’s a preposterous story,” Evan said.
“No, it’s not,” I said.
Evan didn’t have the advantage of knowing Tequila, of knowing how strategy forms in a mind sharpened by years of mistreatment at the hands of mindless authority. If she found a criminal in her home with Princess Margaret, even a remorseful criminal, she would ask herself how best to turn him over to the authorities without getting her children hurt, or her daughter’s name sullied, or the child welfare bureaucracy interested in her family again. How lucky she was, to have on her desk pad the number of a person so well-known that instead she herself would become the center of attention, a person so powerful that she would surely be able to make things right.
We sat and watched for what seemed like a long time, although when I looked at the grandfather clock out in the hallway I saw that only fifteen minutes had passed. The local stations were all afraid to cut away, and even CNN had gone live to a shot of the doors of the Tubman projects. The traffic helicopters hovered overhead, and I wondered what it sounded like in Tequila’s apartment, where the windows would have been open. The soundless New York exists only for the wealthy. For the poor there is always sound: the cars whooshing past on the highway on their way to someplace else, the subway clanking along the elevated line, the screaming fights in the courtyard, the sound of gunshots at night. Their lives are so noisy that maybe the guy who had shot Leo didn’t even notice the sound of rotors. Maybe he slept in every morning, stayed out every night drinking a forty-ounce and blowing a bone with the boys, so that he thought the freckled woman sitting on Tequila’s velour couch was just some white lady Princess Margaret had gotten to know at that fancy school she went to.
Meghan Meghan Meghan, all the reporters said, as though she had never gone away. There’s never much happening in a hostage story until the very end, so most channels took the opportunity to reprise the Ben Greenstreet episode, and one of the cable shows, the right-wing one, even reran the footage with the obligatory dead air over the offending words. But Meghan’s own network did not. I thought that it was self-protection, but afterward I
wondered whether even then the big guys could see what was coming and were hedging their bets.
Then suddenly the local reporter interrupted the monologue she was doing to fill airtime, about the size of the projects and the crime rate there, which was even worse than I’d always suspected. She got a vacant look on her face, the look my sister had once told me meant you were listening to something in your earphone and therefore were never going to be good enough for network, and then she said, “Excuse me, Dan, but we’ve just been told that the suspect is going to be exiting the building in just a moment and that Meghan Fitzmaurice will be with him.” The camera took in the front door of the building, and sure enough, there was movement at the end of the long hallway, a blur of blue and white that materialized as though a Polaroid was developing behind the smeared glass, resolving itself into a clear picture as the doors swung open, the police still holding back.
Ah, how lucky she has always been in even the small things, our Meghan. That morning she had put on a plain white linen dress, so that she shone in the weak sunlight falling between the brick towers. She looked like a saint in a stained glass window, whittled away from body to simply soul, all eyes. Next to her was Armand’s friend Marvin, his head down. He was wearing a baseball cap, which made him look as though he was hiding his face. His hands hung limply at his sides, and I was certain he had been told that if they went into his pockets the guns would be raised and maybe even used. Meghan put one hand on his shoulder, and he appeared to flinch. She raised her chin slightly and looked out into the quadrangle as though she was there to talk to the residents grouped in small knots on the packed earth, not the phalanx of old electronic friends, the television cameras set up in a half circle.
“This man came here today to turn himself in to police. He is wanted in connection with the shooting here two weeks ago of my son, Leo Grater. Before he gave up, he wanted to speak to me and turn over the weapon used in that shooting. He is a person of faith who felt that God wanted him to do this before he spoke to the police. I knew that the New York City Police Department was looking for him, and it was important to me that no harm come to him before he could give himself up.”
“No harm come to him,” Evan said. “No harm. Let them shoot the scumbag right now.”
“Shhhhhh.”
“The police department was extremely cooperative in accommodating my desire to speak to him. I thank them.” She took her hand from Marvin’s shoulder, and he looked up, plainly terrified, as though Meghan’s touch was all that stood between him and a couple of good body shots from an automatic weapon. “I am not the only mother who has had a child shot in these projects,” she said. “They all deserve justice.” Then she nodded at the police officer nearest her as though by prearranged signal, and he and several others stepped forward and cuffed the kid. Even at a distance the news cameras picked up the sound of Meghan saying, “Don’t hurt him.” The police put Marvin in the back of one car, and Meghan got in the back of another, and suddenly Irving was standing in her place, in front of the door of the Tubman building where Tequila lived.
“At approximately twelve forty-five P.M. a suspect surrendered himself in the shooting of Leo Grater at the Tubman projects,” he said. “The suspect expressed the wish to surrender peacefully to Mr. Grater’s mother at the apartment of a mutual friend. Mr. Grater’s mother came from his hospital bed, where he is being treated for his injuries, to the Tubman projects and met with the suspect, who is identified as Marvin White, nineteen, a lifelong resident of the projects. Mr. White had with him the firearm he used in the shooting, which he turned over to Mr. Grater’s mother. He expressed to her his remorse about his actions and his hope that her son would recover fully from his injuries. He is now on his way to central booking. That’s all for now.”
“Commissioner,” one of the reporters cried, “does the suspect know who the victim’s mother is?”
Irving sighed. You could hear and see it: shoulders up, chin down. “I have no idea,” he said.
“Jesus Christ,” Evan said. I couldn’t speak. Another nurse came to the door of the room. “Someone from the police department called to say that Mrs. Grater will be back in about an hour,” she said.
“Mrs. Grater,” Evan said with contempt. “Mrs. Grater. Jesus.”
I was exhausted. “She’s right, you know,” I said wearily. “That could have been a bloodbath, with that guy holed up in Tequila’s apartment. Meghan probably kept the whole thing from blowing up.”
“Oh, was that the point of that exercise? The police could have gone in there and gotten him. That’s their job.”
“They could have shot up the apartment.”
“You believe that was what she was thinking? You’re amazing, Bridget. Do you stay up nights inventing excuses for her?”
“It is what it is, Ev,” I said with a shrug.
“Oh, can everyone stop saying that. Nothing is what it is. What is this—a hospital room or a fancy hotel? What is she, a martyr or a mother? What are you, a sister or an assistant? Do you live in this city? Nothing is what it is. No one looks their age. No one screws their spouse. No one likes their job. It is what it is? Where? What? When?” He stood up and walked out, then turned on his heel and shot back into the room, his fists clenched. “Let me tell you how a guy feels when someone shoots his son. He feels powerless. He wants to find the guy who did it and rip him apart with his bare hands. And instead he has to sit here and do nothing except wonder whether his son will be able to speak, and read, and feed himself, and walk again.”
He pointed up at the television. “And then she goes out and takes over. And she doesn’t even tell me. She doesn’t think, Well, maybe his father would want to be part of this. Maybe he could help me. Maybe he would at least want to know who the animal is who did this to his boy. Because it’s always been about her. You couldn’t figure out why I left, Bridge? I was never really there. I was an incidental character in the Meghan Fitzmaurice show. And, honest to God, you know as well as I do that you are, too.” Evan shook his head, his mouth working. “I want to see my son when she’s not here. Tell her that. We’ll have to divide up the time. I won’t be in the room with her.”
The set stayed on, telling me everything I already knew about my sister. Over and over again they replayed the clip of Meghan with her hand on Marvin’s shoulder. “Don’t hurt him,” she said. “Don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt him.” Then they returned to regularly scheduled programming, which was a soap opera, which seemed just right.
It was at least three hours before she came back into the room. The set was still on but with the sound muted. I was eating a tuna sandwich and reclining again, my swollen ankles elevated. Meghan’s dress was creased at the hips as though she had been sitting for a long time. She still shone as though she’d soaked up the light from the sun and the cameras and stored it deep inside.
“Anything?” she said, standing over Leo and looking down at his pale freckled face.
“Anything?” I said, the ubiquitous echo. “That’s all you’re going to say? Anything? Anything up with you? Want to give me a report on your day, on what the hell you were doing and what that was all about?”
She looked up at the set. A beautiful blonde was emoting soundlessly to a silver-haired man. I often wondered how Meghan felt when she looked at a TV set. Was it the way a cicada felt looking at its shed skin, its transparent shadow?
“Did they interrupt scheduled programming?” she said.
“Oh, come off it. Of course they did. Look, Meghan’s back. Oh, look, Bob, Meghan Fitzmaurice is back, and now she’s the star of her own personal drama. Well, actually, it’s her son’s drama, but let’s not quibble. She’s the hostage! Rise and shine!”
“Shut up, Bridget. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“I don’t think there was a whole lot of mystery to that performance, Meghan.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she repeated. “Your friend Tequila called me. Her
daughter called her and said this guy was in the apartment with a gun, crying, yelling, waving it around. It wasn’t a hostage situation. He spent an hour emoting, gave up the gun, talked about finding Jesus, blah blah blah. Tequila figured I could get him out of there and away from her daughter. And that’s what I did. I went over there and I pretended to listen to the guy and then I called Irving and I took care of business. I don’t know who called the TV people, but it wasn’t me. I just did what Tequila asked me to do.”
“Oh, come off it. ‘They all deserve justice.’ ‘Don’t hurt him.’ Compassionate Meghan, forgiving Meghan.”
“I don’t know why you’re so angry. You know how things work up there. You know what a mess that could have turned into. You know I’m right.”
And that, of course, was exactly why I was so angry. “You try to run everything!” I cried.
“Somebody has to,” my sister replied.
“Oh, now we’ve moved on to take-charge Meghan, who gets to have her career back and feel so good about herself at the same time. Not to mention that she gets to do it all for the benefit of the folks watching at home.”
“Don’t be stupid. You know what the cameras were good for? For insurance. It’s all too public now. No judge will give this guy a slap on the wrist. They will all know the whole world is watching. And they won’t be able to deal it down, lowball him or give him a pass. That son of a bitch will pay. He will pay for what he did to my boy. He will pay and pay and pay and pay.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Meghan sat down in the chair Evan had left. Her face was flat; the light was gone. “You’re right. You want to know what I was really doing? I was cleaning up your goddamn mess. Leo wouldn’t have even known these people if it wasn’t for you. He wouldn’t have even been in that shit-hole if it wasn’t for you. What you saw there? That was me cleaning up Bridget’s mess. Of course, because that’s what I do, don’t I? That’s what I’ve always done. My whole life.”
“You know, Meghan, there might have been a time when I would have swallowed that. But no more. Here’s what I believe: I believe you just bought your own rehabilitation on Leo’s back. I believe I’m going to spend the next ten years watching spots about urban violence and spinal cord injuries and the rights of the disabled so that you can be a star again. And if I figure out that’s true, I will never speak to you again as long as I live. Never.”