Visible City (30 page)

“You don’t see me,” she said. “You haven’t for a very long time.”

“I know,” he admitted, and held out one of her broken bottles which he’d rescued from the ledge. Was it a peace offering or an admission of all that was wrong between them?

“When did this happen? How did we become this way?” she asked.

“I haven’t been here, I know.”

“Why do you always want to be alone?”

“I haven’t wanted to be here,” he said, “at least not enough. Not like I should. But I’m tired of being unhappy. I’m tired of wanting to be alone.”

“What are you saying?” she asked.

“I can’t hide from it anymore. I don’t want what we are.”

She opened her mouth to protest but had nothing to say. It was so much easier to believe he had neither the desire nor the capacity for anything more. It was impossible this was what he was saying, impossible this was what he wanted. His words sank further in. After so many years together, it was unfathomable that a decision like this could be his alone to make. Her whole life, upended, and she had so little say. To be alone: not in the way she had been until now, but truly on her own. Until now, there at least had been someone to sit across from her at a table, there at least had been the warm body in bed next to her, even if she rarely found comfort in it.

She knew him well enough to understand that his mind wouldn’t change. Here, finally, was the bare truth, shearing away a part of her, but with that came a small measure of relief, because it was the truth nonetheless.

Nina came home into the night of her very own living room where it was quiet and still.

After Leon left her apartment, she’d walked up the path of Riverside Park, weaving around the dog walkers, through the flocks of strollers. She stared at everyone she passed. Why uphold the façade of strangers, why pretend to keep her distance? All those who would have you believe that you were the only one who searched for a way out of your own life; all those who smiled and said, “Not me, not here, not ever.” She was no longer fooled: there might be protestations of contentment, fronts of well-being, but scratch one surface, ask one question, and it would come tumbling out. If she spoke honestly of her own feelings, she would hear a chorus of others. If she were to name her treachery, confess her truths, the streets would be lined with people eager to do the same.

The question Leon had asked her spun around in her mind, each word growing larger and brighter, each word coming loose from the rest of the sentence, each word louder, sharper, unrelenting, each word encircling her, prodding her. Can she go back from this precipice? Can she go back, from this place where she had gone yet had stayed? Can she tuck away what she had done and felt, can she disclaim herself—not me, not anymore? Leon and all he had unleashed in her would be hidden safely inside. Her own urge for some deeper, darker more would bide its time, maybe forever, maybe until some unknown later date.

At 116th Street, she cut back to Broadway and went through the gates of Columbia, to the campus that was the reason she’d come to the city long ago, with infinite variations on how her life was going to be. How young the students looked; how much older she had become. How had she ended up inside a life where there was simultaneously too much and not enough? Until now, she had believed that the only open path of escape was inside her mind; only there could she come and go as she pleased. She had believed that it was sufficient to travel only on the rails of her imagination. But she hadn’t been able to live inside the one square of her mind. She hadn’t been able to remain inside the boxed life she’d crafted for herself.

She waited for Emma and the kids to return home; she waited for Jeremy. An hour passed, then another. Finally the door opened and Jeremy came in. Instead of looking exhausted, he was invigorated in a way she hadn’t seen in a long time. But it was hard to meet his eye. He’d been away for so long, and so had she. All she had come to see in him was the perpetual exhaustion that coated their lives.

“You might not believe this,” he said, “but I was at the Brooklyn Bridge.”

He sat down next to her on the couch. “I wasn’t working the night everyone got sick. I went with someone from my office to an abandoned subway station. It’s an empty, gorgeous space that no one ever gets to see. For weeks I read about it in the library, when I was supposed to be working. And then, when I was standing there, I felt like I’d stepped into a different city. I became a different person.

“There’s more,” he said. “I got fired. It wasn’t just that night. I haven’t been working very hard for a long time. And I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get another job as a lawyer, at least not right away. You probably don’t want to hear this but it’s possible I could get disbarred,” he said, and told her the rest of the story.

“Is it time to buy the RV?” he said, plaintively.

She knew what she was supposed to say. Move to the country, backpack through Europe. But she couldn’t do it. It was their familiar refrain, but her heart wasn’t in it. These fantasies had simply sustained them, enabling them to avoid what they didn’t want to see. So long as they could dream of doing something else, so long as they could assure themselves that one day it would be different, they hadn’t needed to look at what was before them. They hadn’t needed to go anywhere at all.

“No. Really. What are we going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“I don’t know either,” she said.

“There was this moment when I was in the station, and I realized that I could still decide. It’s not all fixed into place,” he said.

She searched his face to find the meaning behind his words, wanting to set forth on the hope, if not the promise, contained inside them. For the first time in ages, he looked awake, alive. Could she go back, fold his words, and shape them into a small pointed roof under which they could live, fold them again into a boat in which they could set sail?

Jeremy was waiting for her to respond, and the words assembled at the edge of her mouth. She could confess all that she had felt and done. Or she could hide away the secret and live with the wisp of unease between them. The prospect of concealing scared her as much as revealing. Would she rather stay hidden or be found?

Nina stood up and went to the window. She couldn’t force the words from her mouth. It was dark out, and she expected to see Leon and Claudia in their usual spots. But there was nothing to see. The curtains to their apartment were closed. There was only this life, only her own.

Jeremy came up behind her, encircling her in his arms. Leon’s question asked itself again and again, like streaks of light in the sky, whizzing continuously past, dangerously close.

The crash was so loud it physically jolted them. It rang in their ears, pounded inside their chests. They both jumped up, looked out the window, ran down the stairs of the building, and went outside.

From up and down the block the neighbors came running. A stream of people as the sounds of sirens grew closer, fire trucks arriving, police officers rushing in, directing everyone back, back.

But there was no way not to look. “What happened, what happened?” everyone asked, their minds constructing scenarios that spanned the largest tragedies to the smallest mishaps. Except for the scared, hushed tones, it was like the block party that would never take place. Everyone stood together, looking up and at each other, waiting to see what seemingly solid structure would fall next.

It was the construction site on their block. One of the newly built columns had given way, falling backward onto the scaffolding and collapsing it, resulting in a shower of dust, a tangle of metal and wood on the sidewalk. They had built too high, too quickly, placed too much weight, unsupported, on too fragile a structure.

Recognition coasted over Nina and Jeremy at the same moment. Both kids in Emma’s arms, screaming but shockingly, achingly, fine. They grabbed hold of their children as Claudia and Leon came running, people crowding around Emma, all asking questions of her at once. Her face scratched, her hand cut, she recounted how, on their way home, she and the kids had stopped to look at the construction site. To their surprise, lingering in front had been the woman bedecked in an array of colors, whom both she and Max recognized.

“We know her but we don’t even know her name,” Max had said, unable to comprehend how this could be. Determined to rectify the situation, they’d gone up to her and introduced themselves, then asked her name.

She had looked shocked at the question. “Myra Vanderbilt,” she said, then ran from them, into the site. They had waited for her to come out, but then, the crash, the noise, the rainfall of dust. Emma had grabbed the kids and run, keeping them safe.

“The woman was definitely in there,” Emma was saying. “I think she still is.”

The firefighters rushed into the site as rescue trucks arrived and the media swarmed. Nina held Max, Jeremy hugged Lily; Claudia and Leon hugged Emma. They looked up at each other, Claudia at Jeremy, Nina at Leon, then went home, to their own families, into their own nights.

All those whispered bedtime promises that there was nothing to be afraid of. All those assurances that everything bad or frightening existed only in the realm of make-believe. And yet, the cordoned-off site across the street. The woman whose inert body was carried from it. Only tomorrow would they find out more about her, when it was too late. Only tomorrow would they pay attention to the signs protesting the ever-present construction.

But for this one moment, it was quiet. Nina and Jeremy slept with the kids curled between them. After a late dinner and quick baths, after books and songs, after futile efforts to soothe, to rock, they’d taken the kids with them into bed, not as adherents of Family Bed, but simply a family in bed.

Every time Max rotated, Nina shifted to accommodate his new position. Lily awoke for a moment, needing to be held or changed. Sensing the shift into wakefulness, Nina awoke as well and cradled her closer. Eventually they would all be awakened by the demands of the day. There would be newspaper articles about the building’s collapse and streams of phone calls once their friends heard how close they had come. There would be the questions Max would inevitably ask, the images from which neither he nor Lily could be shielded. But none of that would be for hours.

Nina got out of bed and stood in the doorway of their room, to capture an image of the peaceful faces immersed in their respective dreams. This close, the characters from those dreams mingled, crossing on strands invisible during waking hours. In Max’s dreams, Maurice settles happily into his quiet country life. Having experienced the momentary thrill of freedom, Hop finds a quiet spot to hide. Max lifts the lid of the toilet, and there he is, eyes bright and bulging. Next to him, Lily’s nightmare of a loud, terrifying boom gives way to dreams of the mouse running up the clock and a cow jumping over the moon, a very hungry caterpillar and a brown bear and all that he sees.