Commuters (26 page)

And when the pause that followed grew and lengthened, she knew she had won. No doubt Annette would argue and chastise and bluff. No doubt there would be fuss and bother with the lawyers, but at its heart Winnie knew that the deal being struck was sound and true, and she guessed that even Annette could see it,
too. Several weeks ago, Ed Weller had described some paper victory claimed in that nonsense about Jerry’s mental competence, and told her that the suit was all but worthless; the house was hers. Hers and Jerry’s. In the throes of his decline, Winnie had hardly cared, but she did now. She would honor this house, the one they had lived in and loved in, and she would try her best to help Rachel, whose need and envy were real. They were real, these feelings of her daughter’s. Winnie had pushed them to the side, had discounted them in her haste to be with Jerry, but she wouldn’t do that anymore.

So she had won. She could hear it in Annette’s voice as they moved on to the tiresome discussion of when and where. Suddenly weak, Winnie ended the call as soon as she could.

But then she just sat there at the kitchen table, unable to move to the stove to make tea, unable to go find a more comfortable place to sit or lie down. She was paralyzed by a host of buzzing, needling thoughts, and she felt the roar of a distant panic bearing down on her, alone. The square-sided glass saltshaker in front of her was nearly empty, and she closed her hand around it simply to have something to hold.

It took Winnie a moment to recognize the sound pinging in the front hall—it was the doorbell. She made herself get up and walk slowly through the halls to answer, to receive whatever delivery might have come. Her legs trembled; her body ached in a way that was strange and new, and Winnie lightly touched the walls as she passed them, looking for steadiness.

Vi Greenberg stood there in the doorway, in an oversized cotton sweater with big baggy pockets. She was gripping a glass casserole dish, and her mouth was set firmly. Not once had they spoken
since that day last fall, before the tree was cut down. Every time Vi walked past or pulled in and out of her driveway, Winnie could tell that the other woman deliberately adjusted her gaze, pretending not to see her.

“Chicken a la king,” Vi said, holding out the dish. “Reheat it at three hundred fifty degrees for an hour. Little less, maybe.”

Winnie couldn’t help herself: the tears began to come fast. This one act of neighborly kindness was going to undo her. Vi’s pleasant but firm smile now wavered.

“I should have been over earlier,” she admitted. “We’ve wanted to, but…”

Winnie took the casserole and tried to wipe at her wet face with the back of her other hand. For a long time, she had wondered what she might say to Vi, if given the chance—to all those who stood by while she put that pool in the ground.

“Carbonfund dot org,” she said—it just came out. “I donate every month. You can offset your emissions—I looked up what the damage must be, the losses from that tree.”

Vi’s face was puzzled, but she waited for Winnie to continue.

“It doesn’t change things,” she said now to her neighbor, a woman near her own age, a grandmother so like herself. “I just wanted you to know—for a long time, I wanted to tell you—”

“Tell me what, Winifred?”

But now nothing came to mind. And the whole of it—Jerry upstairs, the sound of his breathing machine, and Annette’s voice on the phone, and Vi here now, after all the shamefulness between them—overwhelmed her, and Winnie could do nothing other than stand weeping in the open doorway with her neighbor, and hold the food she’d been given.

Vikram was going to be home—it was a Saturday, after all, this chilly first day of May—but he’d said he would stay out of the way. So the camera crew (one man, hardly a crew) followed Bob and the interviewer, a bobble-headed woman wearing more makeup than Hartfield usually saw on a weekend—Cherise was her name—around the driveway and into their open garage. Rachel trailed behind as Cherise pointed at where the car had been, that morning of the accident, and Bob nodded. Then they both bent down, hands on knees, to study the cement floor while the cameraman circled around them—as if pretending to be forensic experts on one of those TV shows, Rachel thought. Actually, she half hoped the two of them would spot a clue—a strand of Bob’s hair, a speck of his blood—that would solve everything, all at once.

Melissa and Gwen Torres, from two doors down, were in and out of the Brigham’s side entrance, walking past the camera activity many more times than was necessary, looking nonchalant. This Saturday was an off week for the diving team, but Lila had made such a horrified expression when Bob had explained what
the local news team wanted to film, for a “miracle recovery” segment, amplified by writing success—a few shots of him at home, describing the accident—that Rachel had quickly granted permission for her to go over to a friend’s house.

Her own job, as Rachel saw it, was to stand nearby and look appropriately grave as Bob described that day, and then warm and supportive in turn, when the discussion moved to his recovery. Cherise had said to dress “normally”—“like you would on any other Saturday at home.” So Rachel was wearing jeans, but also a rust-colored jacket and shiny black flats. She hoped the jacket was echoing the fading red in her own hair, but it was too dressy, and even too warm, for the day. Melissa had finagled makeup from somewhere—she and Gwen were plastered with lip gloss and a heavy black eyeliner; Rachel shot her daughter a look when she noticed this, but Mel just shrugged and grinned, knowing she’d gotten away with it.

Rachel was still shaken by the conversation earlier today, when Cherise had arrived. Rachel had started to point out the difference between where Vikram lived and her family’s side apartment, and that this was obviously just one of the setbacks they’d suffered since Bob had to take the year off from the firm. The cameraman was snapping digital images of the front of the house and squinting at them; Cherise was clipping a microphone to the front of her blouse, frowning.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “We just need a few shots here, and we’ll be outside for all of it, probably.”

“Right,” Rachel said. “But…won’t that be explained? By us, or you, I mean?” She had envisioned some kind of voice-over, sober and sympathetic.

“Not necessarily. The story is your husband and his recovery and his book. Local man has near-death experience, makes good.”

“Well, I know. But—you’ll be shooting us here,” Rachel said, flustered, gesturing to the front of their home, Vikram’s home. “Where it happened. And we don’t live here anymore.”

Cherise nodded affably. This was all beside the point. “The whole segment is ninety seconds,” she said, fluttering her fingers. “We don’t have time to get into all the details.”

Now Bob was pointing to the back corner of the house where he had presumably used the ladder to clean the blocked gutter. Cherise followed with an intent expression, one she dropped instantly when the shot was over.

“I think we’ve got enough of the exteriors,” she said, and the cameraman lowered his equipment.

Bob was still talking and gesturing. “Usually there are other witnesses, when someone has an accident like that. But if I hadn’t known how badly I was hurt, if I was just walking around for several more minutes after it happened—putting the ladder away, or moving around in the yard—any one of our neighbors could have seen me, could have even stopped to talk to me, before I went inside and collapsed.”

Cherise smiled, but her eyes were elsewhere.

“I don’t know; that kind of bothers me,” he went on. Bob was in khakis and a polo shirt; Rachel restrained the urge to fix his collar. “That someone could be so…” He trailed off, searching for the words, not noticing that Cherise and the cameraman had walked away. As Rachel watched him, the thought finished itself in her own head:
that someone could be so messed up on the inside and still look perfectly normal.

Exactly. It was how she felt sometimes. Were they actually in sync? Rachel had gotten used to their being so at odds. But coming at it from opposite directions, maybe she and Bob would somehow arrive at the same place.

Cherise and the cameraman were conferring, close by the front door. Rachel saw Vikram’s dark head pass by one of the upstairs windows. She thought of Winnie, wished she was here. Winnie would have promptly washed Melissa’s face and found a better top for Rachel to change into. Maybe she would have sweet-talked her way into the interview, delighted by the attention. Maybe the minor excitement of this local news team—Rachel had seen passersby on Locust slow with curiosity when they saw the white W-NEF van in the driveway—would have lifted her mother’s spirits, for just a few minutes, away from the slow unending sadness of Jerry and Greenham Avenue. He couldn’t have much longer, Rachel thought, and maybe that was a blessing. Though certainly her mother couldn’t admit that, wasn’t able to face any part of it.

Cherise motioned them up the front steps. “We’ll just do a few shots inside, maybe have you two moving around the kitchen.”

Rachel was swept with outrage. “That’s just—there’s no—”

Bob shoved his hands into his pockets. “It’s still our house, Ray.”

“Everyone will see,” she sputtered. “Everyone who watches this, will see us in our old house, and they’ll say something about it.”

“Say something to whom?”

“To each other! It’ll look like a joke, the way we’re just merrily pretending to cook an omelet or something, in our old kitchen!”

“You won’t need to interview,” Cherise called. “We’ll do some
silent shots of the two of you, so I can put some voice-over in later.”

“No,” Rachel said in a low voice. She and Bob stood together, set apart from the others, at the front door. Out on the front sidewalk, Melissa was watching them.

A sudden nausea trickled through Rachel. It hit her that it wasn’t just their old wonderful kitchen that she was refusing, the idea of being there again, not for real, but to playact a happy home while Cherise eyed the furnishings and Vikram kept tactfully out of the way. It was having to enact her marriage in front of the camera, when she wasn’t sure how to play her role anymore. Rachel watched herself and Bob in her head, as she knew it would appear on television—the shock of Bob’s bald head and his white scar, his tentative smile, her own frozen, fake responses. No. She couldn’t pretend, with him, in that kitchen, that nothing had changed since they had lived together in this part of the house.

His eyes met hers. They were warm, open. Was it only two weeks since that odd, lovely, embarrassing hour in 50 Greenham?

“Okay,” Bob said so that only she could hear. “Okay.”

What had he written in one of the last chapters?
Harder than the recovery, harder than the memory loss, is what it means to not know the answers to every question: how? And why?

“We’re never going to know,” she said to him. “Are we? How it happened. We’ll never get closer to it, and we’ll never be able to find out.”

He waited, but she said nothing more. “Are you okay with that?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Do I have to be?” They were almost whispering.

After a moment, Bob called “Let’s do something else,” to Cherise, keeping his eyes on Rachel.

Cherise began some kind of protest, some argument, but Bob just shook his head. “We’re not up for the kitchen today. Got another idea?” His tone was mild but final. As they walked back down the stairs to the interviewer and cameraman, to their daughter and her friend, Rachel felt Bob put a hand on the back of her neck.

Time passed.

He’d read that phrase before and been annoyed—time
passed
? well, no shit, Sherlock—but now Avery got it. In the spring of Nona’s leaving, in the twenty days since she had been gone, not much had happened at all. Time passed. He was back at the pita restaurant, no hard feelings with the manager, who just wanted someone who could fry falafel and prep the eighteen different toppings with no questions asked. He was back living with the friend-of-a-friend roommate, sleeping on a futon, in a one-bedroom on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue. Grandad got worse and then better and then worse, in increments so small they hardly mattered, and when he was flown back to Chicago, Avery hadn’t even gone out to Hartfield to say good-bye or watch it happen. He hadn’t done it not because he couldn’t manage the good-bye but because there was no need for a good-bye, not yet, anyway.

Avery was headed home, too.

There were two pork tenderloins baking away, sweating in their sage and applesauce. He had crusty rolls from Zabar’s on
the counter to slice, and a mustard-apple-horseradish sauce going on the stove. Avery checked the dial on the internal thermometer (his own)—yep, 350 on the dot—and marveled, once again, at the power and precision of this oven.

“God, I’m going to miss this kitchen,” he muttered.

“It’ll miss you too, no doubt.”

Avery whirled around to see Winnie there behind him. Fuck. What was it about little old women, always so quiet and tiptoey? “Quit sneaking up on me. Jesus.”

“Did you want any of these?” Winnie had a crazy-looking handkerchief tied on her head like Little Red Riding Hood, and she held out a bunch of ties. “I found them in a drawer. Whoops. Thought I’d packed up everything.”

“Um—do you want me to take them?” Avery felt a little bad about that
I’ll-miss-the-kitchen
comment. “Take them back to Chicago?”

“Would you wear them?”

“Probably not.” Ties were not exactly his look. Jerry’s wide old seventies-era ties especially.

Winnie stuffed them all into a plastic bag, and her lack of ceremony took Avery back. “He won’t need them” is all she said.

He turned back to the bubbling applesauce and lowered the heat a touch. So, she was organizing and he was cooking. Standard modes of operation for both. But did Winnie feel as dead and empty inside? Avery wasn’t going to ask anything about it. When that message had come from Rich, saying that Grandad was going home, his first thought was that some crazy legal victory had finally given his mom her way. But piece by piece, the story came out: how Winnie had arranged it, how she’d decided to let him die
there, instead of here.
An incredible act of generosity,
Rich had called it. (No word yet from his mom.) Avery’s point of view was mixed: Had Winnie really come to believe she should share Grandad? Had she discussed this with the old man, before he stopped understanding everything? What would he have thought—what would he have wanted? Although maybe, Avery saw, these last didn’t matter anymore.

It’s true that part of him wished Winnie had put up more of a fight—where was that old lady who took on the town over a tree in her yard?—but…whatever. Who was he to talk? Avery could barely muster the energy to get on the train to come out here, and he was hardly doltish enough to compare his loss to hers. In any case, he just couldn’t go there. This was lunch and lunch only. He certainly wasn’t going to do some big emotional recap, their glory days out here in Hartfield, that kind of thing.

Besides, she looked okay. Tired, and she wouldn’t sit down, but okay. At least her friends were coming around now; a couple other little old ladies had been here earlier, but they hustled out as soon as he arrived from the train—he walked, carrying the groceries—smiling twinkly smiles and patting him on the arm.
God, I need some guy friends
is what he had thought, doing the chat thing with these short, wrinkled women.

“I have enough food for everyone,” he’d protested to Winnie after they left. “Did I scare them off?”

She sorted mail, reading each piece of junk. “They want us to bond,” she said absently.

Last night Avery had walked downtown to NYU and wandered in and out of dorms and class buildings that lined Washington Square Park until he found the right lecture hall. There he sat in the
back and listened to speaker after speaker read in a monotone from pages they barely looked up from. He would have been hard-pressed to say what they were discussing, since the topics were obscured by sentences so thick and dense they might as well have been in German, for all Avery could understand. Or Chinese. Man, if this was the kind of shit college led to, he had to pat himself on the back for passing it up. Although the fact that everyone around him seemed to be paying attention, listening carefully to this nonsense put him on edge; he hated feeling that his lack of an education marked him out.

Thomas’s presentation was just as garbled and boring as the others, though Avery tried, once or twice, to nod at what he imagined were especially good points. He felt a surge of goodwill for this thin middle-aged man who could be such a pisser. Thomas finished his paper with a flourish, and got slightly red-faced when the polite, scattered applause came. He smoothed his sparse hair down in a self-conscious gesture Avery had seen him perform a hundred times.

At the little wine-and-cheese social afterward, Avery waited until Thomas was free and then came up to him and stuck his hand out.

“Oh my God in heaven,” Thomas said, with a bit more shocked surprise than Avery felt was really necessary. “What are
you
doing here?”

“I’m a regular at these things. Can’t pass them up. Especially when the subject is—” He glanced at the brochure and read aloud. “‘Image Theory, Image Culture: Re(Con)Textualizing the Image.’”

“Is that so.”

“That’s good shit. And yours was the best of the bunch. You wiped the stage with them, Tom.”

“Don’t call me Tom.”

“Sorry. Dr. Friedelson.”

Thomas scanned the crowd, and then popped a cherry tomato in his mouth. “You’ve heard from our fine Italian lady friend, then,” he asked, nonchalant, looking down. The older gay man’s carefully casual tone nearly broke Avery’s heart. “We’ve been e-mailing. Apparently there’s been quite a bit of rain, but that’s to be expected, this time of the season.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh, it can be torrential. Hi! One second!” Thomas straightened up, his face bright again, ready to go on with his doctorly schmoozing.

“Listen, I just came by because…actually, I’m heading back to Chicago, next week sometime.”

“You are?” Thomas scanned his face. “Just for a visit or—”

“No, for real.”

“Because of—Nona? Does she know?”

Avery held his smile steady, with effort. “And so I just wanted to say—well. You know. Thanks, and everything. And take care,” he added, but as an afterthought because, to his great amazement, Thomas put his arms around him and gave him a real and sudden hug. Avery felt himself hugging him back, and it wasn’t nearly as weird as he would have thought it would be—this whole-body embrace of another dude (a
gay
dude, nonetheless)—right there in public, in the stuffy ground-floor conference room by the cheese-and-grapes table.

“This sucks,” Thomas said, finally releasing him. He wiped his eyes with the tip of a napkin.

Avery agreed, not even sure what Thomas was referring to. “Yeah, it does,” he said, his throat aching.

While the pork was resting on a cutting board, he cooked the apples down until they were a quivering gold mush. He took a couple of containers out of the fridge—peppery jicama slaw and a plain butter-lettuce salad—and set the table. On the counter, where she was ignoring it, was an envelope with three uncashed checks that Winnie had sent him, the last of the funds Jerry had meant for the restaurant. Avery pretended that her disapproval didn’t bother him, and all in all, what did it matter, anyway. He was Zen, he was letting go, he was moving on; they both were.

The Blue Apple was now a diner again. Avery had sublet to a guy named Rashid who ran two other identical outfits in Brooklyn—one just under the Brooklyn Bridge and one in Carroll Gardens. They were each called Deli to Go, and when Avery watched that sign being nailed above the door, he thought about arguing the point—
there was nothing
deli
about hamburgers and french fries
—but didn’t.

So what if when he told her about giving up on the Blue Apple, Winnie first argued and eventually just shook her head? So what if Rashid’s egg sandwiches were rubbery and tasted like old grease? So what if no one back home—not his mother, not Rich, none of his no-longer friends that he wouldn’t be calling, anyway—knew how close he had come to running his own restaurant? Out there, Jerry was the only one who cared, who knew, and by now he’d forgotten it all.

Avery stared at the kitchen table, now full of food. Somehow
he had sliced the rolls and the tenderloins, topped the sandwiches with the apples, and plated the salads.

“I wish you hadn’t gone to the trouble,” Winnie said, at his shoulder. “Look at all this food.”

“Trouble’s my middle name. Ready to eat?”

They sat facing each other, neither hungry, each pretending to be interested in a huge pork sandwich on a hot summer day.

“Do you want me to, you know—call you with updates? About him?”

Winnie took a sip of water. She made a motion with her head, somewhere between a nod and a shake.

“Or I could put you guys on speakerphone. And leave the room, I mean. If you wanted.”

Avery didn’t know why she wasn’t responding to any of this. He thought it was a nice idea.

“It’s not about what I want anymore,” Winnie said. “This is about your mother. And you,” she said, although it seemed like an afterthought.

“But—you’re going to come out for the—” He stopped himself, just in time. And took a big bite of his sandwich, to cover the word
funeral
.

“I don’t know if I will or not,” Winnie said evenly. “I don’t think I’d be such a welcome presence. And anyway…”

“Okay.”

“I don’t expect you to understand. You’re a young person, and—” She put her hand on the crook of Avery’s arm. “Never mind. I hate to hear myself start to explain
what it’s really like
to be old, as if I’m some sage elder, dispensing wisdom to all the grateful youngsters.”

“That’s me: grateful youngster.”

“I’m not afraid of it, by the way,” Winnie said. She looked more cheerful now, though she still wasn’t eating. “Death. That’s one thing I will say, one thing I wish my own grandparents had told me. The closer you get to it, the more natural it seems.”

“Uh—okay. That’s good, I guess?”

“I had a dream once, about dying. I dreamed I was burrowing into the warm dirt, like some kind of animal who lives underground. And my eyes were shut, and I was pushing deeper and deeper into the earth, wiggling myself into a place that was comfortable. It got darker and darker, and I knew that when I stopped, once I was wedged into the most comfortable position I could be in, everything would just…stop.”

Avery put down his fork. “That’s—kind of messed up.”

“It was reassuring. I took it to mean that death was like sleep—which makes sense, of course. Anyway, I can’t explain it, but it was natural; it seemed like the most natural thing you could do.”

“Did you ever tell Grandad about that? What did he say?”

“No, I never did. I had that dream long before I met him. And it just never came up.” Winnie smiled to herself. “We had other things to discuss.”

Avery had other questions, but he kept them to himself. Did she think that Jerry’s death would be like that, the warm earth, the falling asleep? Had she been afraid to watch him die? Is that why she gave him up to Annette? (He guessed this is what his mother thought—
Winnie couldn’t hack it, when the chips were down
—but Avery knew enough about his mother to know that she had to think this way, because feeling grateful wasn’t in her nature.) Or maybe it was just easier to contemplate your own death—more polite, in a way—than your failing husband’s?

“What does Rachel think?” He took a mouthful of pork—a little on the dry side, but it couldn’t be helped. No one sold fatty pork anymore.

“About—this? I don’t know.”

“You didn’t tell her about that dream? How come?”

“Well, I guess it never came up. Rachel’s hardly one to think deeply about these things. She’d laugh it off, most likely. Say I was being morbid.”

“Yeah,” Avery said, who thought that thinking or dreaming about death was the definition of morbid. “You guys aren’t that close anyway, right?”

“What do you mean?” Winnie said. “We’re closer than close! We live in the same one-square-mile town, don’t we?”

“Well, yeah, but…never mind. It’s cool.” Now he wolfed down another half of the sandwich, wishing he had just stuck to the weather.

“Avery. What are you talking about?”

“Nothing! I don’t know! I just said it. Forget it. It’s just that—you know, the way everything got so weird with my mom, when you and Grandad got married…it just seemed like maybe that’s what happened with you and Rachel, too. Or not.” Christ. “Don’t listen to me.”

“That was completely different, your mother and—” Winnie twisted her napkin around and around a finger. “Rachel has gone through an incredible, difficult time, with Bob’s accident and having to raise her daughters. She works hard, she has to manage a thousand things—”

“Sure, sure.”

“And we talk all the time! We talk four times a day! She’s prob
ably on her way over here as we speak. Really, Avery,” Winnie said, pushing her plate an inch away from her. “You’re mistaken.”

“Got it.” It figured that without Nona around, every relationship would turn sour. It felt like trying to play the piano with oven mitts on. He’d rarely seen Winnie look this displeased, this upset. “So, listen to this. The other night I went out to a bar.” A funny story. That’s what they needed.

“What? You shouldn’t be doing that.”

“True, but a bar is the only place where this game is played. Trust me. Anyway, I figure, with my girlfriend run out on me”—he said this as quickly as possible, as if it were a necessary part of the joke setup—“I better get back in the action quick, before I lose practice. Anyway, I sat there, drinking flat ginger ale, on a Tuesday night, checking out all the girls.” Winnie looked nonplussed—and why on earth had he started this story, which, Avery quickly realized, was as depressing in the telling as it had been in the bar.