The Laws of Gravity (10 page)

“I know,” she said, “but it might help us, anyway. Just to sit face-to-face and talk.”

“I don’t agree,” Ari said. He knew if he had to sit across a table and look into his cousin’s large brown eyes, flecked with gold, if he saw her mouth, her hair—her
wig
, he reminded himself, with a kind of horror—if he saw Nicole, his flesh, in the flesh, he would never be able to say no to her. He could not remember a time when he had ever refused his baby cousin anything.

“Please,” she said. “We’ll just talk.”

“All right,” he said, the words dragging themselves out of his mouth of their own accord.

They agreed she would come to his real estate office in Oyster Bay. Ari hoped the dull familiarity of the office, the formality of the posh surroundings, his own surroundings—his secretary, his waiting room, his face on the ads and business cards, the framed photos of him standing beside of his most famous clients, a gold-medal tennis player, a few TV stars—all of that would help strengthen him to keep to his word. He was not a villain. He was protecting his children, doing a father’s job.

Except as it turned out, Nicole came down with bronchitis on the autumn day they were to have met. A freak snowstorm, a letter that gets stuck in a grate, a case of food poisoning, a cough, and history begins marching off in a different direction, regardless of who or what was in the lead.

The chemotherapy had made Nicole more vulnerable to every bug, and whenever she got sick, the sickness seemed to hold on a little longer,
a little tighter, like a burr. She called to reschedule the meeting with Ari, but when her cousin heard Nicole’s scratchy voice on the phone, it was with a kind of deep-down relief that he seized the opportunity to refuse. She did not sound like herself, but like a stranger. You could say no to a stranger.

“Look,” he said. “There’s no point dragging ourselves through this again.” He pictured Julian, pale in the doctor’s office. It could happen again, to either of his children. His voice sounded harder, edgier than she’d ever heard it in person. In fact, one of his big clients had just backed out of a deal that morning. He was sick to death of the economy. He was sick of business, sick of autumn.

“I just want—”

“I know what you want,” Ari said. “Every sentence for you begins with ‘I want.’ But the answer is no. You had the same opportunity we did; the same technology is open to everyone. It’s not my fault that you didn’t take advantage of it.”

“That’s not fair,” Nicole said. “It was so new. You were the first person we knew who stored cord blood. And it was expensive—we were living on one salary.”

“Five thousand bucks,” Ari said. His voice sounded exactly like his father’s just then, even in his own ears, barking around the corner of his auto parts and repair store on the Lower East Side. “What’s a few thousand bucks? You’re saying that you and Jay never went on a vacation all those years? I told you it was a good idea, back when you were pregnant with Daisy. You never listen to me. You never
have
listened.”

“If I had to do it over,” Nicole said, “of course that’s what we would choose. But we don’t have that second chance. Ari, stop for a second
and listen. This is me, Nikki. My leukemia is resisting all the treatments. It’s some kind of genetic fluke. And I’ve tried every public source, every alternative.”

“It’s
genetic
?” She could hear the ring of fear in his voice. “So Julian and Arianna might have the same gene. What right have you got to steal from my children?” Ari was yelling now. He had gotten up from his chair and he was pacing, with the office phone in his sweaty hand. Normally he talked on the cell, through a Bluetooth headset. It felt weird to hold the phone in his hand, this appendage. “You’ve
had
your life. Why would you try to take away their safety net? What makes you so precious?”

“I’m—I’m not,” Nicole said. “Jesus, Ari, aren’t we all precious? I won’t let them use all of the cord blood.”

“You can’t guarantee that. What if it gets contaminated? What if some moron drops the tube or tosses it? I can’t risk my children’s future for you.”

“Ari, for God’s sake. No one is going to drop or toss anything.” Not just her voice, her whole body was shaking. She was looking out the west window in her living room. It seemed like the last bit of color or beauty left in the world lay in the branches of the Japanese maple whose brilliant quadrangles touched the glass, glittering with light, blood red and on fire. The branches scooped the air and flourished brilliant scarlet against gray-white arcs of sky in between like an ikebana flower arrangement. Fall was coming. Every tree would soon be bare, the piles of leaves swept up, carted away, burned, discarded.

“As for that goddamn letter,” Ari went on, his voice menacing. “You’d better tear it up and send me the pieces, or I swear I’ll come after you. I’ll take every measly dime you’ve got left. Do you hear me? Do you understand me now?”

“I have to go,” Nicole said. “I can’t listen anymore.” She hung up and tears burst from her eyes in a flood. Crying came as a relief, loosening the agony of holding on and listening. Surely he would change his mind. He was her cousin, she had known him forever. She felt closer to Ari in many ways than she did to her own sister. He was moody. He had a temper, granted. She was not going to give up hope. Her tears, like the leaves in the Japanese maple branches, seemed at least some form of life.

As for Ari, he felt a sick headache coming on as soon as he hung up the phone. His desk looked hazy, as if seen through fog. He punched a button and barked at his secretary, “No more calls today! No one. Nothing.”

His temple throbbed, as if someone was trying to pound a nail into the right side of his head, and his stomach burned. The usual red aura began to collect around objects in the room—the chair, cars parked out in the office parking lot. He shut off the lamp by his desk to make the room dimmer. He thought he was going to throw up. He drew the blinds. He felt older than he’d ever felt in his life. There was barely enough energy left in his hands to pull the cords on the window blinds.

“What in God’s name have I done,” he said to himself, in a voice low enough not to stir the angry hornets buzzing in his head, not to raise the demons. “What have I started?”

That night, Nicole dreamed she was back at her senior prom. The wooden floors of the gym gleamed golden brown; the basketball hoops were so festooned and heaped with paper flowers that they seemed like blossoming trees. Ari was there, too, looking as he had in high school—his hair longer,
his shoulders wider. He was dressed in some sort of elaborate purplish-red velvet jacket, edged with gold trim. But he didn’t look ridiculous. He appeared regal, a king. On his head he wore a spiky gold crown. It was glowing with rubies, emeralds, topaz. He came toward her smiling in the dream and, removing the crown from his own head, held it out to her. She didn’t want to accept it. She could imagine its weight, its spikiness, settling down on her. She hung back. But he smiled even more broadly—a beaming, mischievous grin that she hadn’t seen in years—and held it out again, insisting. “It’s yours,” he said. “You have to take what belongs to you.”

She woke up, and lay in the half-gloom of early morning, mulling it over. She felt calmer and saner. It had often been this way for her—whenever things were at their worst, at their darkest, she would have a supremely happy dream. Nicole wasn’t sure why this was the case, but she supposed it was a gift. It was as if her nighttime life carried on joyfully with or without her, and the momentum of that dream happiness swept into her waking hours. After her mother died, she’d had a series of happy dreams where they were out biking, mountain climbing, picnicking in deep woods together—things they had never done in real life. She woke up laughing from one of the dreams and asked herself, Am I losing my mind?

In fact, she remembered, she and Ari had gone to his senior prom together. Not as a couple, of course, but with their own dates, together. Ari had been going around with a girl named Denise since his junior year. She was a short, tough-looking young woman with high blonde hair who chewed gum, smoked cigarettes, and cut class more often than not. Nicole was in awe of her. She’d just assumed that Ari and Denise would get married, but then something happened—a pregnancy scare, she thought—and it all fell apart abruptly after high school.

Nikki, a few years younger, had just started dating one of Ari’s closest friends that spring of his senior year, a boy named—she fumbled for the name an instant. Darrell. A tall, skinny runner from upstate, shy and quiet. He wanted to be a veterinarian. He was crazy about animals. He’d worn a red tux to the prom, she remembered now, an orangey-red color that looked like a band uniform. He had been almost handsome enough to carry it off.

Nikki was just beginning to realize that things weren’t going to work out between her and Darrell after all. Darrell was a nice guy, a truly sweet guy, but after a few mumbled sentences they had nothing to say to each other. The silence between them was paralyzing. And she didn’t know any of the other kids at the prom—they went to different schools, and besides, they were all older than she was. In those days, three years felt like a century. Ari was her safety zone that night. As often as she could, Nikki crept over to him and stood in the comfort of his familiarity, nursing her punch in its plastic fake champagne glass. He seemed to realize that she felt out of place; he made a point of including her while he stood around talking to his friends. He’d asked her to dance a few times, and as long as she was at her cousin’s side she didn’t feel so hopelessly lost and awkward. Once, though, while they were dancing, Ari leaned his chin against the top of her head.

Nicole stiffened. “Are you smelling my hair?” she demanded.

“Sure,” Ari said easily. “Why shouldn’t I?” He moved her in a circle. “It smells nice,” he added. “Like your mother’s meatloaf.”

She laughed. Her mother had indeed made meatloaf for dinner that night. Relieved, she punched him lightly on the arm.

“Denise’s perfume is giving me a headache,” he confided. “That and the smell of cigarette smoke.”

“So hold your head farther away,” she advised him.

“Naw. Are you kidding? Did you see her in that dress? I want to get
closer
.—But I might end up with a migraine.”

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln,” she teased him, “how did you enjoy the play?”

How did we come so far, she wondered now, from so much closeness? All the hours they had spent together, she and Ari, all the days and nights—it must add up to months of their lives spent in each other’s company, playing cards, trying not to be sick in the back during long car rides, watching old movies, building intricate sand castles, just hanging around. Time that had seemed without end. She used to love wearing his outgrown sweaters because they smelled like him, and made her feel stronger, older, braver than she really was. And now this. They had come to this. Had some thread of their connection caught and held? she wondered. Wasn’t there something unbreakable behind it all? Perhaps only in her dreaming life. But even that was enough to keep her buoyant for an hour or two.

Every family has one living patriarch or matriarch, the final arbiter and repository of ancient family history, and Nicole’s aunt Patti was the last woman standing. It was to the formidable Patti that Nicole turned for help now. Her stage name was Patti Leeds, and she was best known to the world as Aunt Patti, a loudmouthed character she’d played seven years running on a TV sitcom.