The Woman Upstairs (13 page)

13

The second thing happened only three days after the first, at the beginning of the last week of school before vacation. I’d been anticipating it for so long by then that I’d forgotten to keep worrying, so was duly shocked, even frightened. It shows how long-lived anger is, the desire for vengeance: it has a nuclear half-life, and it teaches people patience in the most sinister way.

Reza was attacked again. This time more surreptitiously, more brutally. Under the lackadaisical eye of the after-school girls, Bethany, Margot and Sarah—feckless texters, busy planning dates on their cell phones—a massive snowball fight had been allowed to erupt among the children. There were two dozen kids or so in after-school, and all but the most timid were involved: they’d formed teams, and built a fort, and I, kept from my studio by an appointment with Chastity and Ebullience’s mother and Lisa, the reading specialist, to discuss strategies for dealing with Ebullience’s gloating about Chastity’s dyslexia, or rather, about her own ebullient lack thereof—anyway, I conducted my meeting with the shouts and laughter a joyful tympani through the windows, and it sounded like childhood should sound.

But in among them like an evil spore lurked Owen, the angry fifth grader who’d attacked Reza before, just smart enough and just dumb enough to think of packing his snowball with rocks; and the misfortune that he chose a sharp one, and the greater shame that his aim
was good (hard for it not to be: he was, it was later established, only a few feet from his target), and the greatest shame that Reza didn’t see it coming.

Reza, one girl said, fell at once to his knees, and she could see blood through his fingers—his fists over his eyes—before she knew what it was. And she said she heard the fat boy mutter “Oh, shit,” before he turned and ran away.

Inside, we registered the blow as silence falling, as if outside the world in chorus took a breath, as if a curtain fell upon the scene. Then Bethany started to blow the whistle, three sharp toots, the emergency kids-line-up-NOW whistle, and I had to say “Excuse me” to the twins’ mother and step to the window. I remember the sky glowed that dull illuminated gray of incipient snow, and when I placed my fingertips upon the glass, it was cold. And looking down I could see first Bethany’s panic, her flailing pseudomilitary gestures as she herded everyone toward the big double doors. Only then did I glimpse Margot bundling someone to the side entrance, someone hunched, who’d dripped blood in a magic trail upon the battered snow—even in the gray light, or perhaps the more because of it, the blood gleamed scarlet—and I had only to look and not to think to know I knew that coat. I knew that hat—black and white with a pom-pom on the top—I knew it.

“Excuse me,” I shouted, “an accident!”—more loudly than was necessary, and was out of the classroom to the bafflement of the mother and my colleague Lisa.

I reached Shauna’s office at the same time as Margot and Reza. Velma Snively, Shauna’s secretary (and a veteran of thirty-seven years at Appleton—some people called her Shauna’s boss), had emerged from behind her desk and called for compresses: “Don’t stand there,” she snapped at Margot, who was crying, even as she drew Reza to her significant bosom. “Get the gauze from the first-aid cupboard. Get the sterile water. Over there! Over
there
!”

“It’s Miss Eldridge, Reza,” I announced, in case he couldn’t see me. “You’re going to be fine.” I tried to reach him, but Velma’s arm interceded. “Was it
in
the eye? Is it in the
eye
?” I tried to wiggle around her, but there was no “around.” Her flowery top emitted a snakey sound when touched.

“Don’t you think we’d better have a look at it, Velma?”

“I’m
going
to, Nora, if you’ll stop crowding the poor boy.” She reached out for the wad of gauze that Margot had found, and waved it in the air. “Cold sterile water! Cold water here! We need to clean this boy
up
!”

The gauze was removed, moistened, returned to her palm; she gave no quarter in the meantime and held him to her with her other arm. He was very still, but for the shudder of his sobs, like a stunned animal.

When Velma had daubed the blood away—and there was a goodly flow of it, although it had begun blackly to coagulate around the edges of the wound—it was clear that Reza’s eyeball itself had been spared, but that the gash, an inch long, was so close to the corner of his eye that it looked as though, like a late fruit, it might split the skin there and open the socket.

“A Band-Aid’s not going to patch this up,” Velma observed grimly. “The boy needs stitches.”

At this point, Reza whimpered slightly, his first sound, and looked at me in terror.

“Don’t be afraid, sweetie. I’ll take you.”

“
Maman
,” he said.

“I know. I’ll call her straight away. She can meet us at the hospital.” I could picture her, content in our studio in her not-knowing, carefully carving aspirin flowers with her hair falling in a net over her work; and I could picture her fumbling for the cell phone in her coat pocket with that faint click in her throat that she used, or I imagined she used, when she thought it might be Skandar.

“Have you got your stuff?” I asked, stupidly. “Margot, get his backpack for me? We’ll go in my car, right now.”

Velma stood back, releasing him, and cleared her throat. “I’m going to check the medical form, Nora. You can’t just take him anywhere.”

“Children’s. I’ll take him to Children’s: it’s the best, if they have to sew it up again. Let’s put a compress on for the trip. Do you think you can hold it, sweetie? Hold it there with your hand?”

Velma sighed, shook her head. “We should have the mother come here,” she said. “That’s the rule except in an emergency.”

“You don’t think this is an emergency? His mother is a friend of
mine,” I said (and do you know, even in that crazy moment I was proud to say this, like turning a trump card, and proud to think that it was actually true). “And I know she wouldn’t want us wasting any time. I’ll call her on the way and she’ll meet us in the emergency room. Come on, Velma, you know it’s the right thing.”

Velma shook her head again, just slightly. “I know it’s what’s going to happen, Nora; but I need you to call this boy’s mother right here before you go. I can’t have you take him without her say-so.”

So I called Sirena from Velma’s office. I cannot convey the strangeness of that. I was self-conscious so many times over: to be the one to tell Sirena the news, as though Reza had been stricken on my watch (Margot was still in the room, her face fixed in a rictus of anxiety); to have them all hear me speak to her, since I didn’t know how to modulate my voice when I spoke to her any more than I did when I spoke of her; afraid to sound either too intimate or too formal, too loud or too soft; and in front of Reza, too, who surely had no clear sense of the extent to which his school and home lives were, almost behind his back, intertwined. He knew that his mother and I made our art in the same studio, but he had no idea what, practically, that might mean, and surely didn’t understand that when he was at after-school, or shunted into Maria’s care, his mother was, more often than not, nibbling biscuits with me, chattering, as his father had said, like a schoolgirl. Or rather, like a childless artist, than which there could surely be no greater betrayal.

But I made the call, stiff and stern and fake in my voice, the teacher’s voice Sirena hadn’t heard since the beginning, and still I was sure that Velma looked at me oddly. I told Sirena what had happened, and that his eye was okay but would need stitches—at which point I heard a muffled sound on the line and said, my tone all wrong for Velma’s office but I couldn’t help it, “Don’t cry, Sirena, don’t cry; it’s okay,” and she said, “I’m not crying. I’m putting on my coat”—and I told her we were going to the ER at Children’s and we’d meet her there.

“I don’t know the way,” she said.

“Take a cab—call one. I’ll bring you home again.”

Which, eventually, I did. But not before we were seven hours in the emergency room. (“They always do that at Children’s,” Esther explained later. “It
is
the best care, but it means they’ve got a reputation to uphold. They can’t afford to make mistakes.”) He was seen by a nurse; and then by a resident; and then by the attending doctor, who summoned the ophthalmologist to be sure; and finally by the plastic surgeon, who happened by good fortune to be checking on a patient elsewhere, and who sewed him up in tiny, tidy stitches. Between visitors to our clammy curtained booth—vaguely reminiscent of a fortuneteller’s at the fair, but strewn with medical posters and lit by a ghastly gray light—where we grew hungrier and more glazed by the hour, stretched vast swathes of useless waiting time. At first I offered to read to Reza and then I suggested that I fetch everyone something to eat, but I could tell that Sirena, still anxious, didn’t want me to go. Skandar was out of town, and she didn’t want to be alone if something was really wrong, more wrong than it seemed. So I said I’d stay until the doctor pronounced; and by then it was almost the end, because the stitches themselves, four of them, so near to the edge of his eye, were a matter of minutes, a neat pull of needle and thread, rather like my mother repairing my downed skirt hem between breakfast and school, except that the sandy-haired doctor didn’t bite the thread with her teeth when she was done, she snipped niftily with gleaming little scissors and ruffled Reza’s hair—he was so bleary he was almost asleep—and said, “Don’t worry. Nothing’s changed. You’re still going to break hearts with those eyes,” and she knew and we knew that this was true; and then she said he could go home at last.

I drove them down the alley off the riverbank to their town house. Reza had fallen asleep in the car.

“Do you want some help? I can carry him in.”

Sirena’s eyes were sunken hollows in the gloom. “Nora,” she said, “you are so very kind.”

“It’s not kindness,” I said. I picked him up in my arms as she worried the front door key, and I followed her into the darkened house bearing my warm burden (his breath tickled my neck), and I climbed the stairs behind her and laid him on his bed. Shoes off, coat off, trousers unbuttoned and off, covers up, and in all this he barely stirred, so
deep was his exhaustion. I stood looking at him while she went to put on the kettle, the lights. He lay on his back with his arms on top of the blanket, his head upon the pillow, his cheeks flushed pink, and when he breathed out his lips pursed, slightly, in a little “o.” My God, he was beautiful, all perfect promise. And before I left him, I stroked his hair and bent to kiss his brow. He smelled of the hospital. He shivered a bit in his sleep.

Skandar wasn’t there, but in some way he was, and I felt a vague, lingering guilt at my dream, as though I’d done something wrong, had tried to steal Sirena’s child and husband both, as though she might look at me and know it.

So I found myself near midnight at Sirena’s dining table, drinking mint tea and eating toast with butter and plum jam. The place was oddly soulless—renovated in the eighties, rented furnished, with ugly, solid, institutional chairs and a tinted, speckled glass globe hanging from the ceiling. The walls were stuccoed, the floors beige wall-to-wall. The kitchen cabinets—visible behind the vintage pass-through from the dining area—reminded me of an old man’s Cadillac: antique but carefully preserved, at once touching and hideous. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the Shahids lived in such a place—they were passing through, after all—but it did. They were so special, and this place so nondescript.

Sirena and I hardly spoke, for a long stretch. I could hear her, and myself, chewing toast. She looked exhausted.

“He’s going to be fine, you know,” I offered at length. “The surgeon wasn’t kidding. Nothing’s changed.”

Sirena’s eyes were wet. “Nothing’s changed. You say this, but we know it isn’t true. Not about his face—his face will heal. But what have we done, to bring him here to this? What has Skandar done? Nobody wanted to come but him—but who can be the wife who says ‘No, we cannot go’?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that she disliked it here, disliked the very idea of here. “I thought Reza was liking it—school and everything?”

“What’s the point of not liking it? I tell him at bedtime stories about his friends at home. He knows we’ll go back, so it was okay. But now this?”

“The boy who did it will be properly punished this time. He might even be expelled.”

“And for Reza, does this make a difference? Not at all. Now Reza knows he lives in a world where people can throw rocks at you just because of who you are, just because they don’t like your name or your skin.”

“You do know it isn’t normal, right? That’s one unhinged kid, who’s got real problems. It has nothing to do with Reza personally; I think he can understand that.”

“When you’re an Arab or you have a Middle Eastern name, it’s never personal, but it’s always
there
. I was anxious about America, but then I thought, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of all places …” She trailed off, then began again: “Do you know what it’s like?” A tear had come out of her eye and was finding its way down her cheek. “Most of the time you don’t think about it, not consciously. But sooner or later, someone will make a comment that has to be explained away. You know, Skandar had cousins in refugee camps. His brother was killed in a bombing in Beirut—at twenty-three. Vanished into dust. Skandar grew up lucky, but he knows all too well what it’s like. I know it’s important for Reza to take all this in, to know about it—but later. I want—I wanted—for Reza to have a childhood like I did, where all you have to know is how to be a child. No rage, no hatred, no cry for vengeance. No stone-throwing. There’s time enough for all that—for history—later; and I thought with luck and enough time we could make him whole, round, not warped by this legacy. Of all my worries about coming here—not this. And now, this. You see? Everything’s changed because he can no longer be free of it. Because this, now, is the beginning.” She wasn’t really crying, but she put her head in her hands, and her hair fell over her face. When she looked up again, she was smiling. “You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about.”