As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (30 page)

By the time I caught up and climbed the stairs, the others were on their feet, all of them surrounding Nina, holding her up, lifting her chin in their hands.

“Dear God,” Ada said. “Dear God.”

There was blood trickling down Nina’s forehead, then down her face, and finally splattering on the collar of the jacket and the front of her dress.

“Let me see,” Vivie called. Then she too said, “Dear God.”

Bec was the one to suggest they go immediately to the house four doors away where a doctor was renting for the week with his family.

One of them could have run and gotten the doctor to come to us, but in their haste and confusion they simply began to drag Nina along with them, Ada repeating, “Dear God,” and Vivie whispering in Nina’s ear, “Hold on, sweetheart. You’re going to be just fine. Just fine.” Bec raced ahead to tell the doctor they were coming.

As they helped Nina down the steps, my mother called to me, standing in shock on the porch, “Molly, watch your little brother.”

I nodded. I was sure she’d turn around as she headed off just to note my presence, as always. For once I wanted her to give me that stare. But she didn’t turn. She didn’t even call back to see if I’d heard. Instead, she held Nina by one arm while Vivie held her by the other, and they proceeded to guide her toward the doctor’s cottage.

Soon they were out of sight. Even so, I could still hear Nina’s horrifying scream, as if it hadn’t stopped yet, and I could still see her head smacking against the door’s edge, and the bruise on her forehead that had formed almost instantly, a large bump, and most of all the spill of blood trickling down her face, soiling the delicate flowers and pale yellow of her dress.

Though queasy, I managed to open the door, which had long since slammed shut, and stumbled into the living room. Something had happened to me too, it seemed: my head was spinning, my legs buckling.

I lay on the sofa a long time, alternating between closing my eyes and keeping them open. Either way, though, I kept seeing the blood, and the sickening spinning in my head and the roiling in my stomach didn’t cease.

It seemed like ages had passed when Davy wandered into the living room. He found me lying there and wormed his way onto the couch by lifting my feet and sliding under them.

“Hey,” I said weakly. My feet were in his lap and I tried to kick him, a friendly hello, but didn’t have the strength. “Where you been?”

“Out back,” he said, too calm to have been aware of what had happened. He was speaking in puppet talk, in the voice of Samson Bagel, whom he was wearing on one hand. “What’s wrong?” he asked when, after he jiggled my legs, I only lay there, unmoving.

“Nina got hurt,” I answered and then began to cry.

When I’d recovered some, Davy asked, still through the persona of Samson Bagel, “Is she dead?”

“Maybe.” At that my eyes welled again. “Maybe not,” I finally added. “I think she’s not, but maybe she is. She got really, really hurt.”

Davy didn’t say anything for a moment. “What do we do now?” he asked. This time he used his real voice.

“We’re supposed to stay here and wait,” I told him, and that’s what we did. For two hours, Davy and I stayed on the couch. The waning evening light grew gradually dimmer and finally we waited in silence and in the dark. I lay there the whole time, my head slowly regaining its equilibrium, my feet nicely raised by Davy when he’d slid under them. Davy sat patiently, moving only occasionally to lift his left hand and glance at Samson Bagel. Even when we sat in complete darkness, just the moonlight through the windows lending a touch of illumination, he didn’t squirm or ask me for anything.

At long last Nina returned, her head successfully stitched and bandaged. Vivie and Bec helped her out of her bloodstained dress and into her summer nightgown while Ada warmed a glass of milk, which Nina was urged to drink while lying in bed. All three of them sat on the edges of our sofa bed as Nina and I settled under the blanket. Both of us, but especially Nina, were blanketed as well by consoling touches from everyone surrounding us.

That’s when I sensed something I hadn’t before: that I needed them, that I couldn’t be me, the person only I spoke to, a quiet patter in my head, a near vision when in the dry upstairs tub—I couldn’t be me,
her,
without them. Just then, as I stared at all of them and then at Nina, that steady sense I had of myself disappeared, the voice I knew so well quieted, and I didn’t know anymore where I began or ended. For the moment it seemed I’d lost my boundaries, that I extended all the way into each of them, that Nina’s felling had been my felling and that Ada, Vivie, and Bec’s words and soothing pats were my words and pats.

Even Davy’s gestures seemed as much my own as his. With Samson Bagel raised high on his hand he had him doing a kind of dance, waving him back and forth, like a hypnotist’s pendulum, in front of Nina’s face. “All better now,” a comforting Samson Bagel chanted with each move. “All better now, you sleepyhead.”

I
n Middletown the next morning, Friday—the day of Davy’s accident—my father was up early, as usual. By seven thirty he was sipping his Nescafé and searching through the newspaper for the latest on Babe Ruth, just as he’d been doing all summer. Only now there was no living Ruth to read about. Rather the news was of the Babe’s death, just that past Monday, August 16. For the next two days he’d been lying in state at Yankee Stadium, where his fans, a whole world of them, filed past. His funeral had followed, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Mort sighed to read that even the weather, hot and rainy, had seemed mournful.

Five miles away, Leo Cohen was also sipping Nescafé, but he was not reading the newspaper. Instead he was reading an article that the librarian he knew best at Middletown’s Russell Library had pulled for him. A scientist named George Gamow had written the article, which explained that the universe, estimated at fourteen billion years old, was created in a gigantic explosion of the earliest atom, and that the chemical elements observed now, hydrogen and helium in particular, were produced within minutes after the Big Bang. The universe had been in continual expansion ever since. Leo wanted to pass on this astonishing news, what little he could take in of it, to Nina, if he could just figure out how to put it to her. Fourteen billion years, he said to himself, shaking his head, unable to wrap his mind around the number. He reached for a nearby notepad.
My dear Nina,
he wrote, but then, stumped, he pushed the pad aside.

When the two men met at the synagogue twenty minutes later they nodded at each other, signaling a silent hello. By the mourner’s Kaddish at the end of the service both men wore perplexed expressions and heavy hearts. During the service each man had made his own ruminative journey toward the truth of it: a human life’s sad insignificance. They said the Kaddish, though for both the prayer was rote.

Then Mort suggested they say it again, this time exclusively honoring the memory of Babe Ruth. Leo didn’t see the point—even as remarkable a life as Ruth’s was, in the grand scheme of things, a mere speck beyond nothing—but he wasn’t in the mood for objecting. It’s not that our lives don’t mean anything, he told himself, attempting to reconcile the chasm of time—fourteen billion years—between a single human life and that of the universe. Just that our lives are so small, so very, very small.

But looking to the group of men, he was heartened to see that it did matter—a single life, however small it was—for no one objected to Mort’s idea. In fact, all it took was the sound of Ruth’s name and the men dropped their heads and began chanting the prayer all over again.

In Woodmont the sisters also rose early, as usual, for their dunk. Nina and I slept in, extra late, and by the time we got up, after ten, the sisters had finished off the day’s first pot of coffee and had long ago had their morning toast. Davy, too, had risen and eaten. Howard, who hadn’t arrived home the night before until well after we’d gone to bed, was still asleep. This fact, his increasingly lax weekday sleeping schedule, which correlated precisely with his increasingly late nights out, was a secret my mother was willing to keep from my father, who still expected Howard up, at least some days, in time to join the daily minyan at the Woodmont synagogue. But only on weekends did Howard rise in time for services. As Nina and I entered the kitchen, Ada was discussing this very fact. “He’s eighteen,” she was explaining to Vivie and Bec. “He’s too old for me to be telling him what to do.” Shaking her head, she added, “I was
married
at eighteen, for God’s sake. You see what I’m saying?”

When the sisters noticed Nina and me at the kitchen entrance they instantly began fussing over Nina’s injury, which overnight had turned into an ominously protruding dark purple mass. The bandaging she wore could barely hide it.

“I’m glad you didn’t die,” Davy told her, sliding his glass of orange juice her way, offering it to her.

Bec, leaning on a counter, quickly veered toward Davy. “Of course she didn’t die,” she said. “Davy, where’d you get that idea?”

“I was never going to die,” Nina insisted. “Sometimes things look worse than they really are. That’s what the doctor said. I didn’t even need but four stitches.” She touched her forehead then quickly pulled her hand back. “Ouch,” she said.

“You’re going to take it easy today, is what I say,” Ada told her, pulling out a chair from the kitchen table and pointing to it. Nina dutifully dropped into it. My mother sat down beside her and threw her arm over Nina’s shoulder.

“French toast?” Vivie asked. She stood by the stove, apron wrapped at her waist, spatula clutched in her hand.

“French toast?” Nina answered, excited. We loved French toast, but the sisters, even Vivie, rarely mustered the energy for it on a weekday.

“Me too,” Davy called, and I joined in as well.

“We’re going to have a nice breakfast this morning,” Vivie declared, stirring her egg batter, “and then we’re going to get the house ready for Shabbos. A little morning cleaning before anyone goes to the beach. Let’s get it done early today, for a change. Your fathers are coming, don’t forget, and we’ve been cutting it close. Except, Nina, you can just sit outside, honey, and read if you like.” She made reading sound as if it might be a rare pleasure for Nina.

“It isn’t that big a deal,” Nina said, as if she really preferred to clean and was being left out. She touched her forehead again. “Ouch,” she squealed.

“Honey, don’t touch,” Ada warned, pulling her arm. “You’ve got to keep your hands away.”

“Can I touch?” Davy asked.

“Dear God,” Bec answered, dropping into a chair and pulling Davy onto her lap. “You may not touch. Don’t even think about it.” She wrapped her arms around Davy and kissed his cheek.

“I’ll have some French toast,” I repeated, in case no one had heard before.

“Of course you will, Molly,” Vivie answered from her station at the stove. “It’s not just for Nina. It’s for everybody,” she added, though she directed a wide smile exclusively Nina’s way. At that, Nina broke into a warm smile of her own.

But then Howard walked in, a bit earlier than usual, pajama-clad, hair tousled from bed, and Nina’s joy vanished.

“Hey,” he said, taking notice of her bump and bandage. He leaned over her with his hand extended as if he were about to feel it. “Got beaten up again?” he teased.

“Don’t touch me!” Nina said.

It was Ada who came to Nina’s rescue. “What is it with you boys and touching?” she said, slapping Howard’s arm down. She looked woefully at Nina then scornfully at Howard. “Can’t you see she’s hurting?”

“Sorry,” he said, lifting his hand. “I was only pointing, not touching. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Oh, hell, honey,” Ada offered, relaxing. “Have some French toast.”

From a plate that Vivie had just placed on a counter Howard grabbed several of the first slices of French toast, not noticing that no one else had been served yet, and then he joined us at the kitchen table. He landed in between Nina and me, which caused Nina to readjust her chair away from him, almost backing into Ada.

Nina and I had just bitten into our first slices when Ada started divvying up the morning’s chores: Davy and I would go to the Jewish bakery for challah, then next door to the kosher butcher’s for two whole chickens. Before he set off for Treat’s, Howard was to clean his and Davy’s room then vacuum the downstairs. At the mention of vacuuming Howard threw his head back and groaned, but with a tired “Come on, you always do this” from Vivie and Bec, he assented soon enough. Bec would dust the house then iron the tablecloth for the evening dinner. She was also going to wash the blood from Nina’s dress, she noted, assuring Nina she could get it back to new in no time. Vivie would mop the kitchen floor and wipe the counters. My mother had the honor, as she put it, of cleaning the bathrooms. And if everyone did as they were told, Ada, the sudden organizer, urged, we’d be done in no time and could head to the beach.

“Then again,” Nina added, “we could head to the hills. The
Irish
hills.” She lifted her head and glanced at Howard. He smirked and filled his mouth with more French toast.

“So what’s in the Irish hills?” Ada asked, turning to Howard, a worried edge to her words. Immediately we all sighed in resignation and sorrow, readying for one of my mother’s rants. She’d start with the Irish of Woodmont, then quickly move on to the Italians of nearby Bayview Beach, and then she might even get going on the tiny pockets of Greeks and Poles scattered here and there along the shore. Inevitably she’d arrive at the Negroes, utterly absent from the Milford coastline, people she hadn’t had one direct thing to do with in her entire life.

“Oh, God,” Bec muttered.

“Let’s take it easy, Ada,” Vivie urged. “This is supposed to be a
nice
breakfast.” She hurried to bring the remaining slices of French toast to the table, a kind a peace offering.

“Nice!” Ada exclaimed. Her expression was already tense. I glanced at Nina, who understood as much as anyone the nature of this button she’d so willingly pushed to get back at Howard.

But Howard sabotaged Nina’s attack with kindness.

“No one’s going to the Irish hills,” Howard told Ada gently. He squeezed our mother’s arm and stared into her eyes, forcing her to focus not on the idea of the Irish but on the idea of him, her beloved firstborn, a boy no less, and one as charming and good-looking as she was. “No one’s going anywhere,” he assured her. In what I considered a brilliant move, he leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Except Molly and Davy, who are going to get the challah and chickens, just like you said.”

“Yeah, okay,” she answered, a little flustered, as if she didn’t know anymore what had overcome her, as if with Howard’s kiss she’d been released from a bad spell.

I watched Nina shoot Howard an angry look; in freeing Ada he’d freed himself.

“That’s right,” Vivie added. “No one’s going anywhere.” She too was angry, though not with Howard, having no idea he had affronted Nina the night before. She was irked at Nina for being so foolish as to get Ada on that malicious track. “Nina,” she continued, “I think you’re well enough to sweep the porch.” She stood behind Nina and pulled her chair back so Nina couldn’t help but stand. “Up, up,” she said.

Though sweeping the porch was hardly hard labor, Vivie’s stripping Nina of her special status as the injured party cut her. She rose from the table and stormed out, by way of stomping and slamming the door, to the front porch. For the next hour she did not sweep. She read.

Davy and I set off with a basket for the chickens. After that was done we went to the bakery, and just inside the door was Mark Fishbaum, standing beside his father. Though Judge Fishbaum waved to us, Mark offered no greeting, which made me wonder if, like me, he was still grappling with uncomfortable thoughts about the events that had taken place the evening before. After a minute, though, Mark leaned toward me, stretching to hand me a numbered ticket from the dispenser I still couldn’t reach, and as I took the ticket I offered him a bit of a smile.

Davy busied himself by watching the bakers kneading and slicing and wrapping, as carefully as he would juggling clowns. I focused on the smells: the baking bread, the sweet pastries. But then I saw Mark fascinated by something happening outside, and when I looked there was Howard, with Megan, rushing past the bakery. When they were beyond our view I turned back to Mark. Catching my eye, he raised his finger to his lips as if shushing me. Then he gave me the same bit of a smile I’d given him, a look of pensive acceptance, a look that, so many years later, during our marriage, and especially close to its end, I’d come to know all too well.

“Challah, please,” I finally ordered. “Two loaves.”

“And two of those,” I heard Mark say. He was pointing at a platter of large cookies frosted in chocolate and vanilla. “Add those to her order.”

Their generosity had Mark and his father beaming. “Friday’s a good day for a treat,” Judge Fishbaum announced, pulling out a quarter to pay for the cookies. With some more change he paid for our bread, too.

Davy and I might as well have witnessed a miracle. I looked at Mark, surprised, as if I’d never seen him before. His hair was its usual curly mess and his face was the same, but away from Howard he was different, I remember thinking, which was the first time I’d ever considered Mark Fishbaum as someone to know just for himself, separate from his connection to Howard.

Davy and I didn’t go straight home. Instead, we walked to Anchor Beach, where we sat on a wooden bench while we ate the cookies. We nibbled in silence, entranced by the gray-blue mass of water before us, and by the movement of a sailboat in the distance, its open sails a series of tiny triangles that looked no bigger than the wings of the gulls flying some distance above. When we finally returned to the cottage Bec was taking off, the Friday claustrophobia having hit her once again. She walked, and then, out of our sight, approaching a certain corner of New Haven Avenue, she ran.

She and Tyler weren’t in a rush to get to Bec’s apartment in New Haven. After all, they had their entire lives ahead of them now that they’d decided to take a stand for their love, to be in the world together, a couple for all to see. And so they took the time to stop for hot dogs in West Haven at Jimmies at Savin Rock. Seated at a picnic table, they stared at each other, which every so often caused them to erupt into laughter. To calm themselves they turned toward the ocean, or sometimes toward the Savin Rock roller coaster, its intricate trestle a sight, its curvy tracks rising high into the blue of the day, its chain of cars climbing those tracks slowly, creeping upward toward the peak. As they ate they could hear shrieks in the distance, of gulls and of the people on the roller coaster, past the peak, accelerating forward and heading straight down.

“I could never do that,” Bec said, turning from the roller coaster to Tyler. Just watching had taken her breath away. “Looks like they’re falling to their deaths.”