The Lake Shore Limited (20 page)

Gus didn't see his growing up as sad. Or he wouldn't see it that way. He once called it "irregular" to Billy.

"Irregular, as in
ouch,"
Billy said.

It got worse after the graduation. Gus was on vacation. Billy wasn't. She needed to work, but Gus wanted her company, he didn't see why she had to be at her desk every single day. It was summer. Why wouldn't she come with him to the Vineyard? To Vermont? To western Massachusetts? To a play, for God's sake? To Williamstown, to see a play, the very thing she cared about most.

She came to feel that in some way he didn't think of what she was doing as work. Oh, he admired the plays--or said he did. But he didn't seem to make the connection between them and her need to be alone at her desk for four or five hours a day.

She started to go to her office at BU to write. It was kind of a dump. It looked out over an air shaft; it had unpleasantly bright fluorescent lighting. The paint was old, and there were water stains on the ceiling. But it was private. It was quiet. Very quiet now in the summer, when most of the faculty disappeared from the warren of offices around hers that housed them in the academic year.

Most of all, there was not Gus.

It was on the way there on her bike one morning that she realized she had to end it. It wasn't just that she needed to find her own place, to move out. She needed to tell him it wasn't going to work at all, ever. That it wasn't working now. It was early, around six-thirty. Traffic hadn't yet thickened, and there was hardly anyone out besides the joggers. She was pedaling along the river, watching someone in a scull moving smoothly upstream, watching the steady quiet lap of the water into the tall grasses on the riverbank. She stopped her bike. She looked up at the Boston skyline and the graceful cable ribs of the Zakim Bridge. This is what she loved, this, being alone, being sentient only for herself. She didn't want Gus noticing her noticing things, admiring her, ignoring all that was unpleasant about her, insisting on his version of who she was.

She would tell him. She would.

Not now, though. It would be better to wait until she had her own place--it would be too awkward living with him once he knew, too hard for both of them. But she would tell him.

The relief she felt at acknowledging this, at making a plan, was sharp and clear, as though some months-long fog she'd been living in had lifted. The gulls above the treetops wheeled and cawed, white against the blue sky, and Billy had a sense of almost-giddy happiness for a moment. When she got to her ugly office, she sat down eagerly and started to read through what she'd written the day before. She would have her life back.

As though he sensed this--and surely it must have made some difference in the way Billy behaved, she felt so much lighter--Gus seemed to want to draw closer. Only a few weeks after this, she arrived home one afternoon and opened the door to find him sitting on the living room floor playing with a puppy, a medium-sized black puppy, but one with enormous paws. It was for her, he said. A present.

He'd clearly been planning it for a while--he had a crate set up in a corner of the living room, and he said he'd hired a dog walker who would come each day mid-to-late morning. He would walk the puppy early, he said, before he left for school, and again when he got back--long walks. Billy would only have to come home around two or three, as she did every day anyway, and walk him then. Just a short walk.

As she sat down, silenced by surprise, he went on, nervously. He introduced the dog. He was a mutt, Gus said. His mother was a Newfoundland, owned by another teacher at school. She had no idea what the father was.

Billy looked at the puppy. He was chewing on a large rawhide toy Gus had bought for him. He was, of course, completely, heartbreakingly winning. Gus was smiling at him. She felt a pang of deep anger at Gus, and then pity, too. She wondered whether he was at all aware of what she had instantly felt were the complicated motivations behind this gift.

She knew she should tell him no, and she knew that saying no to the puppy was part of the larger no she needed to say to him. She looked at him. She could tell by his face that he was at least a little ashamed he'd given the dog to her. Ashamed, because it was such a terrible way to try to keep her attached to him, to try to make her stay.

The puppy stood, wobbling a bit, and frolicked unevenly over to her. She held out her hand, and he lowered his hind quarters and started licking it.

"What shall we call him?" Gus said, and she sighed and gave in.

That was in August. Billy was still looking at apartments when Gus was getting ready to start back to school. She had a lead on one in Cambridgeport, another sublet, but it wouldn't be available until January, when the family, academics, was taking a leave, so she was still scanning the housing lists at BU almost daily, checking the Sunday notices in the paper.

On September 11, Billy woke early. She'd waked once before, actually, when Gus got up to leave for the airport, but she'd pretended to be asleep that time. This time she couldn't do that. The puppy was crying. Reuben. She'd named him Reuben. She peed and brushed her teeth, she got quickly dressed and went into the living room. As soon as she saw Reuben, she gave over to him again, just as she had the day of his arrival. He was charming, even beyond the charm most puppies have. His winning awkwardness on account of his size, his sad brown eyes, his immense paws, the rounded shape of his head, his long pink tongue, the clean way he smelled--everything about him gave her pleasure. He was in his crate now, the crate he was already almost outgrowing. He was making a noise that sounded like an old woman keening.

Now he saw her and he yipped. He began scratching frantically at the floor of his crate. She picked up some plastic bags and the keys and the leash from the hall stand. She came and unlatched his door. He sprang out and ran to the front door of the apartment. When she opened it, he thundered downstairs and stood impatiently by the outer door. She heard a little anxious cry in his throat. "Good dog," she said, opening the last door.

He almost fell down the porch stairs in his haste. As soon as his feet touched the sidewalk, he squatted and peed.

She lavished the praise on him that was part of his training, patting him, scratching his long, floppy ears. Then she hooked the leash to his collar and they started out, around the three-block circuit that constituted the walk she took with him twice a day.

It was a perfect day--cloudless, mild. There were many fine things about having a dog, all of which she was reluctant to admit, but one of them was simply how much more frequently she got outside. She knew, of course, that this wouldn't be the pleasure it was today come January or February, but for now Billy liked it.

Especially today, when Gus was gone. Today, tomorrow, Thursday. He wouldn't be home until late Thursday night. He was flying out to Los Angeles this morning. His father had died--Leslie had called on Sunday with the news.

It was strange for both of them. Neither wanted to go. They hadn't seen him in years. There was the second wife to deal with, and she was also what Leslie called "a high-functioning drunk." But Gus had been named executor of his father's will and there was a service of some sort Wednesday, so they agreed they ought to be there. After the call, Billy and Gus had sat and talked about it with more affection and friendliness than they'd been able to muster in months. Than she'd been able to muster, anyway.

It couldn't have been worse timing for him--his school started this week. But he'd called the headmaster and the chair of the department right away. He'd spent all day yesterday--Monday, the first day of classes--at the school. He'd met with his kids and outlined the special projects he wanted them to work on over the three days he'd be gone.

And this morning he'd left the house at five-thirty to get to the airport on time while she pretended to sleep.

She felt his absence as an enormous relief. Three days of not acting as if she didn't know it was over. Three days of not having to sit through dinner with him. Three days of not feeling angry at him and then at herself for allowing the whole thing to happen, for ignoring all the ways it should have been clear from the start that it wasn't going to work. Three wonderful long mornings of work without having to bicycle over to BU.

And in the afternoons she would get herself organized to find an apartment. She had to. It might be too expensive, it might be in a crummy neighborhood, but she needed to do it. After she and Gus had gone to bed Sunday night, she'd lain there next to him as he slept, planning it--the lists she'd check, the neighborhoods she was interested in.

When she got back home from the walk with Reuben, she fed him, and then she made coffee for herself, coffee and toast, and went out onto the back porch to sit. Reuben padded behind her and lay down by her feet. She would take him with her when she left, she had decided this already. After all, he was hers. He'd been given to her. He'd been given to her to make it harder for her to leave, and harder it would be. But in an odd way, it had strengthened her conviction that she needed to do it.

She sat with her coffee, her feet propped up on the porch rail, and looked out through the trees at the other rooftops in the neighborhood. Gus lived on the middle floor of a triple-decker just over the line into Somerville from North Cambridge, near the commuter line he caught every day to go out to teach. The houses here were only a few feet apart, sometimes just the width of a narrow driveway. Most had aluminum siding. In front they all had little yards, scraps of lawn or gravel or dirt, many of them protected by chain-link fences. But the backyards were deep and lush with trees. You could almost forget you were in a city. Looking out now, she thought how she would miss this. As though he understood what she was feeling, the puppy heaved a great sigh.

She finished her coffee and went inside. Reuben followed. She put him in his crate and looked at the clock in the kitchen. Seven-thirty. He should go out again in a couple of hours. She went into her study and turned on the computer.

At about quarter to eight, her cell phone rang. She opened it and looked at the number. It was Gus. She felt a quick tug of the irritation she had been trying to stay in control of, and closed it without answering.

She worked well. She was trying to shape up the play about Ray and Elena and his big con, fussing with the beginning of the second act, which had seemed expository to her. By the time she stopped to walk the puppy again, she'd made what she thought was good progress--she'd put into dialogue about a third of what had existed as stage directions or notes to herself.

Reuben was asleep. He woke as soon as she touched the door of the crate. She took him quickly outside. Again, he peed as soon as he reached the sidewalk, and she gave him a treat.

The streets were quiet. The kids must all be back in school, she thought. As she rounded the corner by the Ell-Stan Spa, the little convenience store that marked the beginning of the tiny local commercial strip--a Laundromat, a pizza place--she noted that there were six or seven people clustered inside, all standing, all watching the wall-mounted TV. On it she could see a talking face, and then the screen filled with roiling, tumbling smoke. She thought immediately of Waco, those terrible images of the fire. It must be something like that, something awful that had happened somewhere out in the wide world.

She turned Reuben around and walked quickly back to Gus's. Inside, she went immediately to the second bedroom, Gus's office, where the tiny TV was. She turned it on just in time to see a replay of the collapse of the South Tower, the billowing dust and debris, the strange tribe of ghostlike people coated with white emerging from the thick rolling cloud--running, looking behind them, terrified.

She watched for a long time in stunned horror as the events unfolded and unfolded, and then were played over and over again. At some point maybe several hours later, she paid attention for the first time to where the planes were coming from, where they were going. It occurred to her then that Gus might have been on one or the other of them.

It couldn't be, she thought. It was too unlikely.

She found her cell phone and played his message. "Hi, sweetie. We're getting on the plane, so I just wanted to hear your voice for a second. You must be walking Rube. I'm thinking of you. I'll talk to you tonight."

She played it again. Then she hit RETURN CALL. There was no sound on the other end of the line. Nothing.

Frantic now, she went through the papers on his desk, looking for a note, something he might have jotted down about the airline, about the flight number. She couldn't find anything.

She was going too fast, that was it. She made herself stop, she went through everything more slowly. Here were his papers, his innocent papers. Plans for the semester. Notes, quickly scribbled about what the students could do while he was away. Bills. A postcard from a friend traveling in Europe over the summer, with a detail from a fresco by Fra Angelico reproduced on the front.

There was nothing about the trip, the reservation, the airline.

She tried to call Leslie at home. The phone rang and rang, and then a message came on in Leslie's calm, modulated voice. After the beep, she couldn't think what to say, so she hung up. And then remembered abruptly that Leslie would be on her way west, too. She had been planning to fly out from the little airport in New Hampshire. Manchester, that was it. Manchester on a connecting flight to some hub probably, and then the final leg from there to Los Angeles.

She tried calling a few airlines--American, United, Delta--but she couldn't get through. Everything was busy. What would she have asked anyway? She wasn't certain what time he was leaving, she didn't know whether it was a direct flight, or even what the airline was. There must be thousands of people in exactly her situation, trying to learn something.

She tried Gus's school. Maybe someone there knew something.

That line was busy, too.

She played his message again.

On her way to the bathroom, she saw that Reuben had left a puddle in the hall. How long since she'd walked him? She couldn't remember. Where was he, anyway? What time was it?