Lightning People (29 page)

AMAZING WHAT A DAY CAN DO. Del had seen that toothpaste advertisement on the side of buses all summer, with bright white teeth flashing over its busy font. But only on her walk back to the apartment did that message register.
Amazing what a day can do.
She kept repeating the phrase as she walked east to Gramercy, as if her inner ear had suddenly transformed into an open echo chamber, receptive to any lyric or jingle that carried a perverse lesson she had somehow previously managed to deflect. “I owe you my life,” blasted a pop refrain from the speakers of the deli where she bought a pouch of tobacco. “Do you want change, miss?”
I owe you my life. Amazing what a day can do. Do you want change, miss?
It had been so much easier to deal with Madi's death locked in the studio with Raj. How much more agonizing it was to be alone with that fact. She put Raj in a taxi for the airport not fifteen minutes ago, and already she wanted him back. She wanted to remain in that studio with only their memories and each other's arms for support. Death pulled people together, at first, and then it left each person terribly alone.

As soon as Del returned to the apartment, she frantically began to clean, trying to tire her body down to match the dim wiring of
her mind. She poured a bucket of water and mopped the floors. She rubbed years of grime off the windows, killed spiders between her fingers, and wiped away their webs in the rafters. Through all of this manic cleaning, Joseph stood staring at her from the bedroom doorway. He placed a record on the stereo, but Del screamed before he engaged the needle. “I don't want to hear any music.” She scoured the toilet, swept dust into a pile the size of a sweater, and ignored Joseph as she carried the broom into the kitchen. He followed behind and grabbed her arm. Del yanked it away and then proceeded to slap his bare feet with the bristles of the broom. She didn't allow herself to look at his face.

“I'm here,” Joseph said, vulnerable in a pair of navy boxer shorts, which exaggerated his pale legs and rutted rib cage. “I'd like to talk about it, make sure you're okay.”

“There's nothing to say,” she grumbled, closing her eyes while adjusting the purple handkerchief across her forehead. “Can you get out of my way? I'm trying to clean this place.”

“Please,” Joseph said quietly. “I know that you're suffering. I know you loved Madi very much.”

You don't know anything about Madi
, she almost shot back. Del took a step backward to calm down. Without meaning to, she was blaming Joseph—not for Madi's death but for trying to help her recover from it.
Why are you blaming your husband, when he's only trying to be here for you?
She didn't know the answer. Maybe if Joseph had rushed to her side the instant she first heard the news, maybe if he had been the one to hold her for the last two days, she could fall against him now and let her muscles relax and the pain spill out. But he hadn't been there. Raj had been there, and Raj understood Madi better than anyone else. Joseph hadn't known Madi at all. Del would have drowned without Madi. She had been the one to comfort her through the loss of Dash. Madi had stayed with her until Del had been strong enough to gather her senses. It was only after she watched Raj drive away in a cab that she realized that Madi was the second person in her life to be killed in a car accident. Two people she loved so much and never expected to be taken from her died suddenly and senselessly in the ordinary rush of traffic. For all
the years she had been living in New York, Del hardly paid attention while crossing the street. But on that walk home, she felt like every person around her was a fragile piece of cargo managing by complete miracle to cross the avenues without breaking into a million pieces.

It occurred to her that when someone died they didn't vanish. They left a hole in the world so big that even time couldn't close it.
Time didn't heal wounds
, she thought.
It only made more of them
. First Dash, a hole blown so huge she fled to Greece to get away from it. And now, so much worse, so much later, so much the same. All that was left of the dead were holes, and those holes held even more dimensions than their bodies possessed in life.

Del didn't want to talk to Joseph about Madi. She didn't want to take those meaningless steps toward acceptance. It occurred to her that if she began the process of healing, Raj wouldn't have anyone to help him do the same when he returned from the funeral. She would do that for him, they would be strong for each other, they would remember Madi and lose her together. She couldn't leave him alone like that.

Joseph reached for the broom and plied it from her grip. He rested it against the refrigerator and stared at her.

“I don't want to force you if you're not ready,” he said. “But I'm here for you. I just want you to know that.”

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, roping her arms over her stomach. “I don't feel like talking. I just want to keep busy. Please, let me have that. Okay?”

She cried in the bathroom with the shower running, taking long drags from a cigarette on the toilet seat. When she went to sleep that night, her head splitting, her hands reeking of ammonia and a shot of whiskey burning her throat, she stopped at the doorway to the bedroom. Joseph lay with the white sheet open on her side of the bed, his face slack against the pillow. She knew he was trying. But it felt wrong to lie next to him while two Singhs were lying somewhere in Florida, preparing for a funeral she wasn't allowed to attend. It felt too much like getting back to normal. Maybe the way to keep the dead with her was never to go back to normal. She curled up on the couch, listening to the billion isolated sounds that made up the night with her cell phone next to her ear in case Raj called.

TWO DAYS LATER, while dressing for work, Del received a call. It was Frank Warren. “Your meeting is set with the INS,” he yelped with the lawyer's pride of earning his salary by scheduling an appointment. “December 1. Write that down on your calendar and circle it in red. How's the photo album coming? I hope you're preparing like we said. It's essential to stay positive.”

For the first time in her life, Del preferred the dark staccato underworld of the subway to the gleaming, window-washer's glass of summer above ground. The bleak rhythm of the crowded platform prevented her from unnecessary distractions. Even when a gruff deliveryman bumped into her on the staircase carrying a chandelier by the hook, its crystals chiming like rain and throwing rainbows on the concrete, she turned away from its music and light. She sat on the steel bench of the car, picking her cuticles distractedly. She had been staring at a page of the
Post
for a good three minutes before its headline crystallized. A businessman held the folded newspaper in front of him, with its second page facing her. MEAN STREETS, ran the headline, and underneath it, a fuzzy pixilated photo showed a Manhattan street with a blue square in the distance and a small red oval lying against a curb. Del's eyes tried and failed to focus. That oval was Madi. That blue square was presumably the car that had killed her. Del bolted up, leaving her purse unattended on the bench. Her fingers reached for the pole, while her other hand lurched toward the page. Tears filled her eyes. The brakes squealed. The businessman threw the paper down next to him and got off. A group of teenagers toting a ghetto blaster entered the car and started doing a breakdance routine next to her. She grabbed the
Post
from the bench, collected her purse, and fled through the door into the connecting car. She ran through two more cars, until she could go no farther. She stopped at the window in the front of the train and watched the tracks disappear as the subway shot through the winding tunnels into the Bronx.

She held the newspaper against her stomach like it was a rare treasure, like there weren't 700,000 copies circulating on newsstands in the city that very morning.

JOSEPH KNOCKED ON the hotel room door. He could hear Aleksandra on the other side, pressing her eye against the peephole.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

Joseph had waited around the apartment for three days in hopes of consoling his wife, to no avail. Sudden loss turned even the strongest into a dazed survivor, unskilled and scared. Joseph had only met Madi a few times and remembered her mostly by her arrogant voice and lightning-quick jabs, but he saw how Del came loose and alive in her presence. She had already lost one person she loved to a car crash. That second blow would resurrect the first, sorrow always reconnecting to the pain of past tragedies. For a second, Joseph wondered if Del noticed the similarity, compared those two deaths until they fit a pattern, as if fate called and echoed through her years, ripping her one by one from the people she loved.

“It's just me,” he said against the door. “You can open it.”

The chain fumbled, and the bolt snapped.

Aleksandra opened the door with two eyes streaked red. She allowed just enough space for him to enter before slamming it shut. Her hands quickly reengaged the lock. In her frantic movement, her
white bathroom robe fell to reveal two skeletal breasts and a stomach sagging with folds of skin in a testament to healthier days. Joseph looked away to prevent her any embarrassment, but Aleksandra was past such concerns. A far greater anxiety sent her sprinting across the room to a pile of clothes and papers scattered on the floor. The curtains were bundled. Gray afternoon light flooded across the carpet, reflecting every metal surface and shrinking the room to its sterile proportions. Joseph realized that he had only talked to Aleksandra in darkness. She looked much smaller, older, and more desperate with the daylight shining in. The gray overtook the blonde at the roots, and her upper lip was a fissure of wrinkles. He wanted to draw the curtains shut.

Aleksandra kneeled before three suitcases and began packing up the papers, then froze, dropping her hands to her thighs in fatigue: packing meant carrying, carrying meant walking, walking meant running, finding a new place to hide, and then unpacking to sit in a room not so unlike this one—its only benefit being somewhere else.

“What's wrong?” he asked, stung by the evidence that she had decided to move out in his absence. He didn't want her to leave. He didn't know if he'd ever find her again. It occurred to him that no matter what impossible circumstances had been discussed between these walls, the hotel room had become a refuge, a quiet place resistant to the city just outside the windows. He suddenly understood how quickly Aleksandra and the silent drone of the air-conditioning could be taken away.

“Yesterday I went to check my post-office box,” she said, reaching toward the empty rosewood desk that had once held her typewriter. Her hand slid blindly across the top, her fingers searching for an object. “I use the box to keep in touch with old friends. I've only given the address out to a few people, the ones I could trust. Yesterday, inside, I found this.”

She grabbed an envelope off the desk. Joseph took it and unfolded the thin, white paper stored inside. A series of black letters cut from newspapers and magazines were glued crookedly into an ominous, almost infantile formation: LET THE DEAD STAY DEAD.

Joseph flipped the envelope. No return address. It had been postmarked in New York
.
“Is this real?” he asked.

“How else can they get in touch? E-mails, text messages, phone calls. Those can be traced.”

He stepped toward her and stopped out of instinct. He stared in doubt at the letter with its convenient threat arriving in his absence of five days. Aleksandra crouched on the floor below him. Her hands yanked at the zipper to seal the suitcase. The muscles of her neck contracted as she jerked her arm. He couldn't help but wonder if she were telling him the truth.

“You don't believe me,” she said flatly, not even accusatively, as she tilted her head up to catch his eyes. “You don't have to. I'm sure whoever sent it knew no one would.”

“It just doesn't make any sense,” he replied. “Why now? Why after all of these years when you've been so quiet?”

“I don't know,” she replied wearily as if she had been asking herself those very same questions for an entire day. The lids of her eyes twitched, swollen and sore with the work of keeping them open. “When you came into the picture, when we finally started talking and I felt the words return in my head, I called a few people I know back in Los Angeles. I told them I was continuing with the script, that I would see it through this time. Maybe they caught wind of it.”

Joseph couldn't shake the sense that Aleksandra was testing him, determining how much he trusted her story of a gunman creeping through Pacific scrub brush to shoot a hole in her husband's head and then trying to do the same to her. Before, all of her fears could be written off as symptoms of excessive grief, but this letter was either solid evidence that everything she imagined was true or a desperate act by a woman who had lost her mind. Joseph studied the letter more closely. The words had been cut and glued with meticulous precision. Perhaps he had misjudged the childishness of the threat—or rather the childishness
was
the threat. Aleksandra was right. Intimidation didn't work by e-mail. Terror needed a personal touch. Aleksandra turned back to the clutter on the floor and began shoving the pages in another suitcase. She wiped her nose with her forearm and closed the lid. He didn't want her to go. He didn't want this doubt to be the last memory she had of him. He knew some stories
were impossible to get your hands around; they slipped when you tried to hold them steady.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said. “I feel like I need to get out of here but I don't know where to go. I tried to sleep last night, and all I could do was stare at the door like every sound in the hallway was headed straight toward me.”