The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel (2 page)

*   *   *

That enormous night when
before
turned into
after,
a nurse had addressed John and said, “Say goodbye, Dad,” escorting him out of the operating room where Veronica had given birth by C-section. He’d pressed his lips to Veronica’s damp forehead. Despite her waxy pallor, she’d smiled at him bravely, as if nothing and no one would ever hurt or disappoint her; to that hopeful essence of his wife—whether real or imaginary—he said goodbye. The heavy door clicked behind him.

A baby, placid and trusting, had been placed in his arms. She felt too light at first, a hollow doll wrapped in flannel, but when he adjusted his wrist, her warm head fell back heavily. He gathered her together, her delicate, watery, animated weight. He couldn’t tell if she looked like Veronica. He searched the baby’s face for traces of his own, but there were none. Her face was a mobile rosebud, like any baby’s. “There’s a theory,” he told the nurse who was restocking the cabinet beside him, “that newborns look like their fathers so their fathers won’t eat them.”

“The cafeteria is on three. I can take baby to the nursery while you eat,” she said, continuing her work. He watched her uniformed back as she reached a high shelf on tiptoe.
Take baby?
If Veronica was going to be all right, she would have looked him in the eye.

“No,” he said, unaccountably angry. “It’s a
theory
 … of evolutionary biology.” He stared down at Clara as if she might get it. She opened her eyes briefly, then raised one eyebrow in exactly the way he did. With Clara’s raised brow, time raced forward and fell back in an instant, a vacuumed second in which he understood the
Universe.
He understood, in a threadbare yet distinct way, like a sighted person reading lips, that she was his daughter. A second later he saw no resemblance. The moment of recognition was not that clear: What he saw was not a small John but a resonance. He looked into Clara’s no-color eyes and she melted warmly into his arms. He smiled at her within their unified haze, amid a deep yet sure abstraction that he recognized, quite suddenly, was love.

*   *   *

In the bedroom six months later, Veronica turned her back to him and flicked off her lamp. He lay beside her, listening while her jagged breath deepened into sleep. He couldn’t rest. Light from unknown city sources shimmied on the walls. Exhaustion coated him, threatening to pull him under its sway several times, until a shimmering commenced, like pepper in his brain, shaking him awake. He stared at Veronica’s shoulder, so smooth it looked oiled, at her elegant long fingers and that girlish hair, wishing she’d wake up and return to him. The hours of sleep he’d anticipated diminished one by one as he listened for the baby’s cry; for once she was content.

When the sanitation trucks groaned over the cobblestone, he knew it was too late to sleep. Naked, he perched on the windowsill. The sun had not risen, but the sky was getting lighter. The apartment was silent. Clara had done it, had slept through the night. It was the end of an era. Chilly air outlined his body, sharpening his contours. Accidentally, his hand brushed a cactus.

He pricked his finger and squeezed it, waiting to see a drop of blood. Sucking the wound, he stared out the bedroom window. Lavender snow dusted the jumbled rooftops of Lafayette Street and in the distance, uptown, the gem-like facets of the Chrysler Building gleamed. New York was still impossibly beautiful. He wandered to the kitchen searching for some unknown object he’d misplaced, then without finding or even remembering it, moved to the living room’s western exposure. It was a true loft, without corner windows, and he faced the one-time factory across the street, where a dark shape, perhaps a cat, rested against a pane. Opening the window, he leaned out and looked south until he could see the blank space where the towers, almost four years later, were still gone.

It had turned into another futuristic year: 2005. An apocalyptic wind surrounded him. The cold and adrenaline made his chest a net of lit veins. The city was vigorously rebounding and he was part of it. At thirty-five, John could do as he pleased. A former journalist, he was now a well-paid researcher for a successful hedge fund. He was their anonymous know-it-all, gathering information about companies and CEOs and delivering it to the principals. He was a good student, writing research papers for jocks. At best he felt like a private detective. Yes, he had achieved a certain ease, more than he’d ever known as a writer, but almost missed—what was it? The ego, the meager reward of a byline? These days he had money and, by extension, unprecedented freedom. Pinballs zoomed and bounced within him. He was rich. The baby slept through the night. There was no such thing as fatigue. The world was starting anew. His muscles were wound tight as a spring, ready for release. In this glorious state, his body was persuasive; he was not falling asleep, he was waking up, he was soaring. Up, up, and away he’d fly.

He went to the bathroom—as tightly decked with veined gray marble as a small Italian bank—and turned on the faucet, letting the water steam in the basin. Although he hadn’t slept, he moved with slow precision. Each stroke of the razor scraped away a layer of skin cells until he was peeled and pristine, a shaved man in a cartoon dream. He was sure of one thing: He would not go in to Miller Equities today. He arrived there every day and did his research in situ, providing the information when the principals needed it—
scenarios,
they called them—reported from the virtual ether of the Web. Yes, Lloyd Miller routinely nodded at him at the morning meeting or in the hall, but John’s physical presence seemed irrelevant, and he’d often wondered why he couldn’t work at home. The idea took hold and bloomed; he would play hooky. He thought of coffee steaming in a thick china mug. First he’d take Clara for a walk to celebrate her success. Quickly, he got dressed.

It was still dark in the nursery. The air purifier stood sentinel in its corner, emitting small clouds of steam. He picked up Clara’s floppy lamb—in sleep she had released it—and tucked its legs into his pants pocket. He put on the baby carrier, making sure the X was in the center of his back for proper weight distribution, then scooped up the baby and slipped her warm body into the pouch on his chest, where she remained asleep. He was embarrassed by the novelty of her weight, how solid and round she now felt. He wondered how long it had been since he’d carried her this way, as he put on his down jacket and zipped it around them both so he was huge.

He filled a backpack with a few bottles of the special homemade goat-milk formula Veronica had learned to make from an expensive herbalist on lower Fifth Avenue. He took diapers and wipes and a few extra onesies. In the hallway he put a hat on Clara and took some cash from a drawer in the console; Veronica said it reminded her of
The Godfather
, keeping cash in a drawer. But he liked the drawer and took much more than he needed, a little stack of crisp twenties and even a few fifties. He grabbed a long-neglected pile of mail and put it in the bag to peruse at breakfast. Then he dashed off a note—a small good thing they still did for each other—leaving it on the kitchen island.

Outside, the January air was bracing; ice and salt cracked beneath his boots. A distance away he heard the click of a woman’s heels but when he turned saw no one. He would get the poached eggs, and Clara would play with the toast points. They’d sit in the red leather booth. He jiggled her up the block, racing to get out of the cold. When he got to the corner, he cupped his hands to peer through the dark glass of the restaurant. The diner was closed. A wind of desolation whipped at his neck. All around him, old garbage and dirty snow banked the sidewalks like small mountain ranges that would never melt. He turned south toward the hole in the skyline, past the stores. There were so few galleries in Soho now; they’d been replaced by fancy shops. Veronica, with her master’s in modern art, said she minded this, but she didn’t. Who was he to talk? He stacked cash in a drawer
just in case
. They lived a material life, yet an edge of possibility breathed within it: His reflection in a store window showed the impossible silhouette of a pregnant man. He laughed, his breath steaming in staccato clouds in front of him, then hurried toward Broome Street, looking for someplace that was open.

By the time he reached Canal, the cold was inescapable. Clara burrowed into his chest and he wrapped his arms around her, both daunted and emboldened by her helplessness. The wet wind and intermittent hail bit at his face. An empty cab ambled by. He flagged it down and jumped in. The car was perfectly warm, nicely sealed, and smelled of mint. Sitar music began as a thin sheet of freezing rain glazed the windows. “Where are you headed?” a voice asked.

“Uptown.”

But uptown, Arthur would be asleep, and Ines would be angry if John showed up before breakfast. The Museum of Natural History was closed, the butterflies still. He kissed the baby’s fat, chilly hand, trying to remember the last time he’d been alone with her. He steamed her cold ear with his breath to warm her up, craving an inversion, the opposite of winter. “Actually, go west here,” he said near Carmine Street, thinking of a diner he and Veronica used to go to after late nights in the Meatpacking District. “Little West Twelfth Street.”

As the cab driver wound his way through the tangle of the West Village, John sorted the mail. He found a thick envelope from the passport agency; he’d commandeered the whole family to the downtown office one morning for passports and then dim sum, arguing that they’d go away eventually. He looked for his renewal first. His eyes were clear amber, deadpan, almost criminally expressionless. Veronica looked suspiciously happy in hers, her smile too white above the blue scarf at her throat. In Clara’s photo he admired the single pale tuft of sparse hair (it had since fallen out), the peachy globe of her cheek, her bright dark-blue eyes vaguely crossed as she lay on a white sheet; the same photo she would use for five years.

The driver turned down the music to concentrate, crept around Jane Street, and funneled onto Eighth Avenue. Large flakes of snow began to cluster in the sky and swirl around the car as it moved cautiously. The car grew chilly. John fiddled with the air vent, trying to get more heat. As he leaned forward to tell the driver how to get to the restaurant, he saw that the windshield had whitened completely. The wipers squeaked into motion.

Somewhere in the world the sky was blue, the air was warm. Far away, the sun poured down like gold, melting knots in shoulders, warming hair, making things grow.

“If you could go back,” he said, “to Crosby Street—” The car inched through the gray, clotted streets then sped down Varick. But as they drove east on Canal, past the first fleet of commuters emerging from the Holland Tunnel, the early trucks with Chinese letters creaking under their own weight, as they rolled quietly over the cushion of snow, he marveled at the speed of transportation, the remarkable will of all these travelers: To deliver star fruit to Canal Street, to deliver bread to Mott, to leave a quiet New Jersey lawn and jump into the fray, and at the end of the day to jump
out
of the fray. To jump out of the fray. This frozen season could vanish, revealing the brightness of the next. He was not ready to go home, and the driver, as if in accord, was lost. They slipped onto Bowery and then to the faded grandeur of Delancey. Up ahead there was the Williamsburg Bridge, a magical leap over the water, and before John had told himself what he was doing, he told the driver the way he liked to get to Kennedy.

“Foreign or domestic?” The driver’s eyes waited like two dark gems in the rearview mirror. To the right of the mirror, he’d taped a photo of a child in pink footie pajamas. There were certain universal joys. For a beat the street beneath them was seamless, an inimical gray dream, dotted as far as John could see with green lights.

“Foreign.”

2

Friday Morning

Veronica

Veronica stretched her arms with relief. She swept her legs, straight as the shadow on a sundial, across the empty bed. John had left and Clara was still asleep. Eyes closed, she felt the incision with her fingers. The scar was insensate, as if it belonged to someone else. She needed to get up and check on Clara, to change her diaper and make her bottle, but the pillow and the pale blue sheets were so comfortable, and having the bed to herself was rare. Even as Veronica lay there, luxuriating in a few minutes of rest, she longed to see Clara. She strained to hear her new early-morning babble, but the air was still, silent.

The quiet felt full, a rest in music, and she turned to the clock.
Eight?
The baby must have slept through the night. But
eight
? Eight was hilarious. Impossible. The clock must have stopped the night before, while she was pretending to read about obesity. Clara always cried before six. John always left for work before the baby woke up for the day. The mornings,
all
the early mornings, were hers. She rushed into the nursery, squinting amid the sunny yellow walls. The white crib, a Swedish thing, bare and unadorned, sat lower to the ground than most, over the sheepskin rug, in case, Veronica had reasoned, Clara fell out. She peered inside it. The baby was gone. Even the beloved lamb was gone. Fully awake, Veronica darted out of the room and into the kitchen, the buffed concrete floor chilly on her feet. She found a mint-green sticky note on the marble counter:

Dear V,

I know you said you could use a break.

Feel better.

It’s good to watch you finally sleep.

Love,
J
ohn (and C)

He’d signed his name with a flourish, a huge looping
J,
like a fifth-grader with dreams of fame. She smiled. It was gallant, unusually generous, but he had scared the hell out of her. Had she said she needed a break? She did need one, but it felt like stating the obvious to say this directly.
Watch you sleep
sounded vaguely romantic. She had slept well; the night had been dreamless and sound, a pure, unconscious spell that was long enough to restore a baseline, an absence of symptoms; joints that did not ache, eyes that were not sore, a mind that was opening like a dry sponge dropped in water. She picked up the sticky note. Her sinuses had cleared. She could appreciate romance now, having slept long and well.