Love Saves the Day (27 page)

One afternoon, when Laura was ten, Mrs. Mandelbaum had pressed a heavy brooch of silver and onyx into her hand. Laura had tried to give it back, thinking it would be bad manners to accept such a gift, but Mrs. Mandelbaum had said,
Max and I love you as if you were our own granddaughter. This is so you’ll always have something to remember us by
. Then she’d fixed the brooch onto Laura’s dress and combed her hair before the murky glass of the old mirror in their bedroom.
See how pretty it looks on you?
The two of them had walked hand in hand back into the living room where Mr. Mandelbaum waited with cake and tea things, Honey lying behind him on the back of the couch with one small paw resting on his shoulder.
Hoo-ha!
he’d said.
I had no idea two elegant ladies were joining me for tea
. Laura had blushed with shy pleasure at his praise. The brooch was long gone but Laura hadn’t needed it to remember the Mandelbaums, not even all these years later. Not even though she had failed them, in the end.

Of all the childhood places she had loved, the Mandelbaums’ apartment had been second only to her own bedroom downstairs from them. She’d loved its sheer lace curtains that Mrs. Mandelbaum had sewn when Laura was still too young to remember such things, and the lovely watercolor wallpaper in deep blues and creams and purples that Sarah had picked out—pretty but not cloying. Perfect for a young girl’s room. Laura had been far less tidy in those days than she was now. She’d let dolls and books and clothing accumulate in large heaps until, finally, Sarah would be provoked into one of her rare displays of impatience.
If you don’t clean this room soon, I’ll …
But Laura had liked to let the mess build until even she couldn’t stand it anymore, because then she
would have the intense joy of cleaning it up. Once she had everything perfectly arranged, the amber of late-afternoon sunlight slanting in through the delicate white curtains (it was important to time the cleaning so that it never started so early or so late as to miss this time of day), she’d walk around touching things and think,
How lucky I am! I’m the girl who gets to live here
.

On her way back downstairs, Laura passed the room she and Josh had intended for a nursery, now filled with Sarah’s boxes. Prudence, for reasons Laura couldn’t quite figure out aside from a general
Well that’s cats for you
, had recently developed the habit of throwing things from the boxes onto the floor. Last night, Prudence had unearthed part of the collection of funny little musical instruments—a harmonica, a Jew’s harp, a miniature drum on a stick with tiny wooden knobs attached to it by strings that would hit the drum if you spun the stick around—that Sarah had kept behind the counter of her record store for Laura’s amusement.

The harmonica had been Laura’s favorite, although she’d never really learned to play it. Sarah, discerning as her ear was, had smiled and never once winced whenever Laura had banged around the store blowing chaotic, discordant “music” through it. Laura had blown a few notes experimentally through the harmonica yesterday while Prudence observed her with grave attention. The noise had startled Prudence away at first, although moments later she’d returned to raise one paw up to it, as if to feel the air Laura blew through its holes or to push the noise back into the instrument.

Today Prudence had somehow uncovered Sarah’s old address book, the one Laura had told herself she’d never find among all Sarah’s odds and ends after Sarah had died and the question of how to contact Anise, currently touring in Asia, came up. She’d settled for sending a letter through Anise’s management agency. In truth, Laura had no desire to talk to Anise. It was Anise who’d first lured Sarah into her Lower East Side existence. And it was Anise who’d abandoned Sarah (and Laura) when that life fell apart.

Lately, though, looking through Sarah’s old things with Prudence, Laura had found herself recalling earlier days, when Sarah’s
owning a record store and living with her in an old tenement had seemed like its own kind of charmed life. Even knowing that Prudence didn’t really understand her, speaking aloud about Sarah while Prudence regarded her solemnly had given those memories a substance they hadn’t had in years.

Prudence had followed Laura up the stairs and now sat in the spare bedroom next to Sarah’s address book, waiting for Laura to put it back in a box so the game of throwing things out could begin again. But Laura’s newfound discovery of happy memories was a fragile thing, and thinking about Anise threatened to ruin it. “Not now,” Laura said, on her way past the room and back downstairs. Prudence continued to wait with an air of martyred patience that made Laura smile despite herself. “Come on,” she said in a softer tone. “Don’t you want your dinner?”

Prudence seemed to consider this for a few seconds. Then she stood and, after arching her back in a luxurious stretch (so as not to appear
too
eager, Laura supposed), she trotted into the hallway in front of Laura. The merry tinkling of the tag on her red collar grew fainter as she rounded the corner toward the staircase.

Josh had sounded apologetic a few weeks ago, when he’d moved some of his own things from his office to join Sarah’s boxes in their spare room. “I can’t even think anymore with all that clutter,” he’d said. “And we can always move this stuff into storage if …”

He hadn’t finished the sentence, and Laura hadn’t finished it for him. The last time he’d brought up trying to get pregnant again, Josh had told Laura that the history of the world was people having babies under less-than-perfect circumstances. As if Laura didn’t know this—as if that wasn’t how Sarah had gotten pregnant with her in the first place. But what was she saying? Laura wondered. That she and Sarah would both have been better off if she’d never been born?

When Laura was a little girl, she’d thought that the saddest thing in the world was a child without a mother. There was a girl in her class whose mother had died of AIDS, and Laura would lie
in her bed at night and cry for this girl who she wasn’t even really friends with, this poor girl who would now have to live the rest of her life without a mother. Sarah’s shadow would appear in the trapezoid of light from the hallway that fell onto the floor of Laura’s bedroom, and then Sarah herself would be sitting on Laura’s bed, holding her and saying,
Shhh … it’s all right, baby, it’s all right … you’ll never lose me … I’m not going anywhere
. Laura would bury her face in her mother’s neck and breathe in the flowery smell of her hair, hair so much prettier than that of any of the other mothers she knew, clinging to her kind, beautiful, loving mother who would never never ever let anything bad happen to either one of them. Only after this ritual of assurance could she fall asleep.

She’d never considered what it would feel like to be a mother without a child. She’d never thought about how many different ways there were to lose a person. She had resented Sarah for so long for not giving up the music and the life she’d loved so she could have given Laura a more secure childhood. And then she’d resented herself for having wanted Sarah to give up what she’d loved, for being angry she hadn’t given it up earlier, even after Laura had seen the happy light in Sarah’s eyes fade, year by year, as she trudged to and from that dreary desk where she’d typed endless documents for other people who had more important things to do.

And now that Laura was old enough to have children of her own, she was afraid of all the things she couldn’t even begin to foresee that might take her and her child away from each other. She was afraid of not having enough money to keep her own child safe, and afraid of the price that would be exacted (because everything had to be paid for in the end) in exchange for the money and the safety that money provided.

She looked at Sarah’s picture sometimes, the framed photo they’d taken from her apartment, and wondered how Sarah had felt when she’d first learned she was pregnant. Had she been happy? Had she foreseen a long future of laughter and sunny days
together with her husband and the child they were going to have? Would she have done things differently if she’d known everything that would happen?

But Sarah’s perpetually smiling face gave no answers. She’d clearly been happy at the moment the photo was taken, her eyebrows arched and her eyes holding a hint of laughter for whoever had held the camera. That was all Laura could tell.

Prudence greeted Laura at the foot of the stairs. Her tail twitched three times and then stood straight up, and Laura thought that she’d never seen a cat with a tail as expressive as Prudence’s. It could swish from side to side in annoyance, and puff up when she was scared of something, or puff just at the base and vibrate like a rattlesnake when she felt full of love (as Laura had seen it do in Sarah’s presence), or curl at the very tip when Prudence was feeling happy and complacent. This straight-up posture, combined with the series of urgent
meows
, meant,
Give me my dinner now!
Laura obliged her, carefully cleaning the bits of food that had spilled from the can off the otherwise spotless kitchen counter. Josh must have eaten his lunch out today.

Spending so much more time among Sarah’s things lately—among the music and picture frames and knickknacks—had made it almost painfully clear to Laura how empty her own home seemed by comparison with her mother’s. She had been reluctant to become too attached to the apartment and the things in it—not to
this
apartment and
these
things specifically, but to the idea of apartments and things in general. Looking at the sheer volume of everything Sarah had accumulated over the years, she’d marveled at the courage (for it had been a miracle of courage in its own way, hadn’t it?) it must have taken for Sarah to unearth and display old treasures, and even add new ones.

Perhaps it would make her feel more rooted if she and Josh were to finally unpack all their wedding gifts and do something with this apartment they’d spent weeks hunting for together
(“Someplace with room to grow,” Josh had said, eyes sparkling). Maybe, if they filled bookcases with well-worn paperbacks and the glossy hardcovers about music that Josh dearly loved, and decorated bare walls with paintings and prints, maybe after all that they could rest to admire their work and think,
How lucky we are to get to live here!

Except that now there was no telling how much longer they’d get to live here. Laura knew that if they did end up having to move, it wouldn’t be like that other time. This time they would be able to pack everything neatly into labeled boxes that would follow them to wherever their new home would be. Still, she had hoped never again to be forced to leave a home, and she raged inwardly against the cruelty of a world that could never allow you to consider anything in “forever” terms, no matter how much of yourself you were willing to sacrifice for the sake of permanence.

The apartment was stuffy, as it tended to get during the summer when nobody was home to turn on the central air. On sweltering summer nights like the one now overtaking the failing daylight, she and Sarah had sometimes slept outside on the fire escape, listening to the car alarms and music and laughter and angry shouts that drifted up from the street. It had been a glorious day when they’d finally been able to afford a small, secondhand air-conditioning unit, even though they’d had to wedge it into place with old magazines to make it fit the roughly cut hole in the wall.

Laura moved into the living room to unlock the clasp that would allow her to push open the top half of one of the tall windows and let fresh air in. She could see people in other apartment buildings watching television, many of them unknowingly watching the same show in different apartments on different floors. All the way down on the street was a cluster of teenagers dribbling a basketball up the block, and Laura remembered the boys who’d made basketball hoops out of milk crates in the neighborhood she’d grown up in, sloppily duct-taping them to lampposts and telephone poles. Across the way the amber-and-white pigeons rested peacefully, settling in for the evening. Their numbers had grown of late, and Laura wondered when the mating season was for pigeons,
if perhaps their little group had swelled to (she carefully counted) upwards of thirty because they’d had chicks she hadn’t seen, even though she looked at them every day.

As she watched, the black door that led to the roof where the pigeons slept opened. The head of a broom appeared, followed by a dark-haired man in a white T-shirt. The man began yelling something and waving his broom at the pigeons. The startled birds took flight in circles that grew in breadth and number as more pigeons from the roof joined their widening arcs of panic.

Laura didn’t know what came over her. There was a part of her mind that watched with a kind of bewildered detachment, even as she pushed her head through the open window and screamed,
“Leave them alone!”
The man must have heard her, even if he couldn’t tell what she was saying, because he looked directly at her (the crazy lady in the apartment across the way) as he kept shouting and flailing his broom. Laura waved her fists in the air and continued to scream,
“Leave them alone! Leave them alone!”
Over and over she shrieked,
“Leave them alone!”
until her throat was raw and the man grew tired of his work and disappeared again through the black door. The circles the pigeons made in the air began to tighten and shrink until, finally, a few brave souls were the first to alight. Soon all the pigeons had settled back onto the rooftop, as if nothing had happened to disturb their rest.

Laura pulled her head back through the window and closed it. She discovered small, red half-moons where her fingernails had dug into the flesh of her palms. Her hands were shaking, and she ran them through her hair and took a few deep breaths to steady herself. Prudence was sitting on her haunches in front of Laura, eyeing her steadfastly.

“What are
you
looking at?” she demanded hoarsely of Prudence, thinking that now she really must be losing her mind. “My mother never yelled in front of you?”