Exit Laughing (4 page)

Before Mark emerged from the bathroom, I was up and out the door again, off to retrieve the children at school. It seemed like the right thing to do. This time I ran, arriving at the front door of Friends Seminary just as they were locking everyone in. “Wait, I want my kids!” I cried to the woman who normally worked in the lower school office.

“We’re not letting anyone leave,” she explained. “We think the kids are safer at school.”

I didn’t argue. Nothing like this had ever happened, and if the school wanted to lock my children in during a national
emergency instead of give them back to me, I didn’t think to disagree with them. What to do? I wondered.

Then I remembered that we had no food in the house. One of my dearest friends had gotten married the weekend before in Southampton, and the whole family had been there. In fact, I’d shared Sunday brunch with a friend of the bride who at that very moment was trapped inside the Windows of the World restaurant on the 103rd floor of the north tower and would soon die, if he hadn’t already. I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that we were out of milk, and I should go shopping before everyone else got the same idea.

In the days that followed, my children did not cry, nor did they want to talk about what happened. We kept the TV off to spare them the horrific images, but they could not ignore what had taken place. Every night there were candlelight vigils across the street in Union Square for the lost or dead. Wherever you ventured, flyers containing photos of loved ones who had left for work that day and never returned home were posted with “MISSING” written beneath them. The children understood that something was very wrong in the world. “Why is everyone being so nice to each other?” Sam asked, unused to a kinder, gentler, wounded New York City.

Though they did not express their feelings, I recognized my children’s pain. Sam would tote his pillow and blanket into my room in the middle of the night and sleep on the floor; Schuyler would bring our cat, Kitty, into her bed for comfort.

Kitty was a Maine coon that our doorman, Richard, had
rescued a year earlier. He and the concierge had put her in a box from the A&P and shown her to each resident who walked by, hoping someone would take her in. The kids met her before I did, and it was desperation for a pet at first sight. “Please, Mom,” they begged. “We’ll take care of her. We love her
so
much.” I had my doubts. Cats had never appealed to me. Mark, who wanted no part of a dog, was willing to give her a try. “Cats are easier than dogs,” he reasoned. “No walking. No barking. Why not?”

Why not, indeed? She was such a beautiful cat that we were sure she must have escaped from another family that loved her. Though we put up signs all over the neighborhood reading “FOUND–CAT” with her picture, no one ever claimed her. It didn’t take long before she wiggled her way into our hearts.

We discovered that if you held catnip slightly behind her head, she would do as many as eight backward flips in a row until she “caught” it. Our humidifier became her nemesis. She would stalk it for hours, pouncing each time a bubble gurgled up through the water bottle. In the days following 9/11, Kitty was a source of comfort to the children. She would crawl into their laps and curl into a warm, purring ball they could hold and love and that reassured each of them in their own innocent way that everything would be okay again.

About a week after the disaster, Mark went on a business trip. I don’t remember where. He flew out on one of the first days the airports were open and told me he practically had the plane to himself. I didn’t want him to leave us, but life
had begun to move on. School was open again. I went back to work. Mark had meetings to attend.

The night he left town, the children and I were watching TV in the living room. The telephone rang. It was Richard, the doorman. “Karen, do you know where your cat is?” he said.

“Of course, I do,” I said, my stomach flipping the way stomachs do when you fear something terrible has happened. Did I really know where she was? Was she where she was supposed to be? “Why do you ask?”

“Well, we found a cat’s body down here and it might be Kitty …”

I dropped the phone and rushed to my office where I caught sight of the window, which was directly above my desk. Though I remembered leaving it open a few inches, it was now fully ajar. I knew instantly that Kitty had jumped onto my desk and nudged it open to go outside. She was always trying to escape. I could only guess that she had ventured out to the slim ledge and fallen to her death when she turned to come back inside.

As I ran through the living room to the front door, my kids looked up. “What’s going on?” they asked. “Nothing,” I said. “I have to go check on something.”

I felt nauseous riding the elevator down. How could we lose Kitty? Not when the kids needed her so. A thick lump formed in my throat as I held back tears. I loved Kitty as much as the children did. How could I have been so careless? It was unforgivable.

By the time I reached the front desk, Richard had gone on his dinner break. No one could find anyone who knew
anything about finding a cat’s body. Finally, someone paged the custodian. “Oh, yes,” he confirmed. “We found a dead cat. I wrapped it in a Hefty bag and threw it away.”

“You threw it away?”
I cried. “You couldn’t wait to find her family? Where is she?”

The custodian walked me outside and pointed to a mountain of stuffed black Hefty bags on the corner, waiting to be picked up the next day. “It’s in there,” he said. “You can look for it if you want, but I’m not digging through that.”

Somewhere in that mound of trash was Kitty. Did I want to break open each bag searching for her corpse? No. But would I do it for my children who were about to be crushed with this terrible news, my children who needed some closure? Would I dig through mounds of waste until I found our cat’s remains, the way firefighters at Ground Zero were still searching for the fallen? No, I decided. I could not bear to do that.

Defeated, I retreated upstairs to tell my children the news.

“Where is her body?” Schuyler asked. “We have to have a funeral.”

“That’s the good news,” I lied. “They took her upstate for burial in a wonderful cat cemetery.”

My kids actually believed I had made funeral arrangements that quickly, but that didn’t satisfy them. “Cat murderer!” Schuyler accused, when I admitted that it had been my office window from which she had leapt. “You have Kitty’s blood on your hands.”

“I hate you!” my son cried.

Both children wept and let their emotions loose in a way that had eluded them in the days after 9/11. “Our cat is gone!”
Schuyler cried, tears streaming down her cheeks. “What are we going to do? How are we going to live? How could you let her die? You’re the grown-up. You’re supposed to know better.” Schuyler sobbed in tremendous heaves until she threw up.

“We will never forgive you,” Sam said, shaking his head sadly. That night, he whimpered like a kitten in his sleep as he crashed at the foot of my bed.

I tried to call Mark’s hotel, to let him know what had happened. It had been an accident. I wanted him to hear about it from me and not from Richard when he returned home. Each time I called, however, I missed him. Neither of us had a cell phone back then. He’d return the call, and I wouldn’t be home. I’d call the hotel, and he would be out. For three days this went on. I was living with my children’s grief and their anger at me, trying to get through to my husband, but not connecting with the one person who would offer me comfort and forgiveness. First the World Trade Center, then Kitty. It had been a devastating two weeks.

On Friday night, the phone rang. It was Mark calling from the airport. He had just arrived and was waiting for his luggage.

“Oh, thank God,” I said at the sound of his voice. “I’ve been trying to reach you for days. Something terrible has happened.”

I could feel Mark tense through the phone. “What happened?” he said. “Who died?”

“Kitty,” I said, bursting with the news.
“Kitty died.”

Mark was surprisingly calm. “Well, that’s expected,” he said. “At least she lived a good life.”

Although I did not know it then, when I told Mark that
Kitty died, what he heard was, “Mimi died.” Mimi was my ninety-nine-year-old grandmother. She was living on the ground floor of an old folks’ home in San Antonio, Texas. For the past two years, she had suffered from dementia. To Mark, her death was a blessing.

“How can you say her death is expected?” I cried. “It’s a shock.”

“Not really. What happened?” Mark asked.

“She jumped out the window and died!” I explained.

As I spoke these words, Mark imagined Mimi jumping out the first floor window of her retirement home and dying. “So it was suicide,” he said. “She must have been awfully fragile to die from a fall like that.”

“Suicide?” I said. “No, it was an accident. And of course, she died. Who wouldn’t die from a fall like that?”

From the first floor? he was thinking. “When is the funeral?” he asked.

I erupted into tears. “That’s the terrible part,” I wailed. “The maintenance man wrapped her body in a Hefty bag and threw it in the trash for the trashmen to pick up.”

“What?” Mark cried. “Is that how they do things in Texas?”

“Texas?” I said. “What are you talking about? This happened in Manhattan.”

“Mimi came to Manhattan?” Mark asked. “I thought she couldn’t travel. And then she fell from a window?”

“No, not Mimi,” I said, “KITTY. Kitty fell from the window. She’s dead. They threw her away.”

“Kitty? Not Mimi? Oh, dear God, no,” he said, his voice thick with shock. “I can’t believe it.”

At that moment, I realized what Mark had been thinking all along, and I started to laugh. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! You thought … you actually thought …” The laughter was such a relief after so many days of mourning and sadness. The image of ninety-nine-year-old Mimi jumping out the first-floor window of her retirement home and the maintenance man wrapping her little body in a Hefty bag and tossing it in the trash was all it took to put me over the edge.

For a moment, I forgot about Kitty. I forgot about the World Trade Center. I laughed and laughed—big, deep belly laughs that made all the pain disappear, at least for a short time.

Even Mark, who was devastated by Kitty’s death, couldn’t help but laugh about our “Who’s on First” conversation. For a few minutes, we both escaped the pain and grief of two heartbreaking events—one in the life of the world, the other in the life of our family. I knew then that everything would be okay again. Different, but okay.

A few years later, Mimi passed in her sleep. When I heard my aunt on the other end of the phone say “Mimi died,” I smiled, remembering a moment that had illuminated the darkest and most difficult of days.

I’m looking down on him now. His face has just a trace of a smile, somehow. How do they do that? I wonder.

Now I’m looking at his jacket collar. It bears the Royal Canadian Air Force pin he’s always been so proud to wear.

He is a man of modest means, so the suit reflects a man dressed up, but not one who is wealthy.

At this first sighting of my father in his coffin, I’m filled with grief, not judgment. That will come later, in arguments with my siblings about
who
was to blame for what we endured.

But for now, my heart is breaking, and the tears are flowing.

Why?

How could he have been out dancing Saturday night with his girlfriend—the love of his life, he has told me—and then gone home to prepare a birthday party for my mother the next day and, instead, be found dead in his bed that morning by my very frightened younger brother, Mikey?

When my father doesn’t answer the buzzer at his condo, Michael, his wife, and young children, who’ve arrived first for my mother’s party, go up to his apartment. No answer at their knock. Worried my father has taken ill, Michael tries his key, but for the first time ever, it won’t let him in. They finally
give up and leave, but on the way home, his wife Kim says she thinks something is wrong. They turn back. This time the kids stay in the car with her, and he heads up alone.

The key turns magically and effortlessly in the lock—in the immediate aftermath, we ask ourselves if it’s possible that Dad’s spirit stopped the key from turning when Michael’s kids were at the door—and Michael heads toward our dad’s bedroom. He knows that he’s not going to like what he sees. One glance and he explodes out of the building to get his wife. She goes up with him, warning their frightened children to stay in the car, doors locked.

“That’s dead, that’s dead, isn’t it!?” Michael asks, hysterically running from one side of the bed to the other. Our father has died in his sleep, his hands folded prayerlike, with his face resting on them, as if they are his pillow, as he always did when he was snoozing. (This image of my sweet younger brother leaping around the room saying “That’s dead, that’s dead, isn’t it!?” will become part of the black humor my older brother and I engage throughout the long goodbye services to break our heartache.)

But for now I’m not laughing.

“How could you leave without saying goodbye?” I choke out to him in the funeral parlor, where my siblings have left me for a private moment with him, minutes after I’ve arrived from Ottawa, driving for hours through a relentless, pouring rain.

He was so vibrant, so engaged by life, books, people, humor.

He was so alive—so much more so than my mother, who has been dying from a million paper cuts her entire life and
now resides in a nursing home—that when my brother-in-law calls me the day before to tell me my father is dead, I respond, “You mean my mother.”

“No, your father.”

“No, you mean my mother.”

He repeats the news again, insistently.

It’s unbelievable.

We always thought she of frail health, she of bitterness instead of joy—a woman you could find in her nightclothes any time of day, she’d so given up on living, never mind going out—would die first.

It was our belief that when she died, my father could truly come alive, live without her hitting him over the head with guilt because she, a war bride, was only in Canada to please
him
, as if he’d kidnapped her, rather than married her.