When I came back inside the house William was on his phone; he was sitting at the dining room table. “Well, Trey,” he said, looking up at me, raising his eyebrows, “what was your plan? How long were you thinking of continuing to deceive Becka?”
He put the phone on the table and put it on speaker and I could hear Trey, who sounded frightened, saying, “I don’t have any answers for that, Will.” After a moment Trey added, “I understand you’re concerned for her, and so am I. But I think you should let us be the ones to work this out.”
“Is that right,” said William. “You think you should be left alone in an apartment with my daughter during a raging pandemic while you text love notes to some other woman?”
I heard my son-in-law’s voice; he became angry, and he said to William, “You did the same thing to your wife, from what Becka has told me. I don’t think you should be throwing stones in a glass house.”
William looked at me, his eyes widening. He leaned over the phone; I could see him hesitate, I could see his rage rush up, and he said, “Yeah. I did, Trey. And you know why I did? Because I was an asshole! That’s why I did it, you fucking numbnuts.” He sat back, then sat forward again. “Welcome to the asshole club. Asshole.” And our son-in-law hung up.
* * *
—
I remembered something then: When I had found out about William’s affairs, I had gone onto the roof of our building too one day to cry; the girls must have been home, or maybe I didn’t want the neighbors to hear me. But I went up on the roof and I cried and cried, and I remember saying out loud, “Mom, oh Mommy!” This was before I had made up the mother who is always nice to me, and so it was my real mother that I was calling out to that day. Crying for my mother—it was so primal, and that’s what Becka’s cries were to me.
That I could not be with her to hold her to me was anguish.
I felt almost out of my head with distress, is what I mean.
But William said, “She’s going to be okay, you know.” And that was hard for me, and I said, “Well, she isn’t okay right now!” And he stood up and said, “Take the long view, Lucy. You never liked him. She’s rid of him. She’s a great kid, she really is. Now she can find someone else.” He opened his hand and added, “Or not. Not everyone has to be married, you know.” Then he said, “She married him on the rebound, don’t forget.” And of course this thought had gone through my head: Becka had been seeing a young man she loved deeply and he had broken up with her, and then she had very quickly met Trey. But I could not stop the feeling that I had been gutted. That Becka had been gutted.
* * *
—
William did not talk much during this time. But once he stopped as he walked across the living room and he said, “That fucking numbnuts is a poet? And all he could come up with is a cliché about throwing stones in glass houses? Jesus!”
I thought William made a good point. But I did not say so.
* * *
—
Two days went by. Becka phoned me a few times each day and wept and was angry—furious—and I could hear at one point Trey shouting to her sarcastically, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!” And I hated him then with all my heart. I could almost not stand it, I felt a violence toward him. I felt I could have hit him again and again if I was in his presence. It has always been frightening for me when I feel that rage toward someone. I had felt it toward a few of the women that William had had affairs with years ago. One woman, I had pictured hitting her face repeatedly. And it scared me, because of the violence I had had done to me by my mother when I was a child.
* * *
—
Chrissy’s husband, Michael, called William and said he would be willing to drive into Brooklyn and get Becka; she could stay in the guesthouse on his parents’ property for two weeks of self-quarantine, and when William told me that Michael had called and suggested that—let me only say that I loved him fully, I loved him as much as I hated Trey. It was unbelievable to me that he would offer this, I will never forget it.
* * *
—
But William said no.
William said that he was not going to endanger three people. I was aghast.
William looked at me and said indignantly, “You think I’m not getting her out of there? I’m getting her out the safest way possible, Lucy!” He added, “Michael has asthma, Lucy. Have you forgotten that?”
* * *
—
So William made a phone call to the driver he had used for years, the fellow who would take him to the airport and pick him up whenever William went anywhere, to a conference or wherever it was that William had gone in the past. “Horik?” he said, and he took the phone out onto the porch. As he returned, he was still talking into the phone and he said, “Lysol spray, all over the car. Every crack of that car. Okay, thank you.”
And then he told me that Horik had had no business for a few weeks now, or very little business, and he said that he trusted the man completely, that he had told him his daughter’s life depended on the car being clean. Then William called Becka and told her to be ready at nine the next morning. “The guy is not going to open the door for you, you just take one suitcase that you can lift and get in the backseat. He will text you as he pulls up to the curb.” He added, “Wear a mask and gloves. Horik has to stay safe as well.”
* * *
—
And so that is how Becka got to Connecticut and into the guesthouse. Horik dropped her off and Chrissy and Michael were waiting in the driveway, though they stood a long way from her, and Chrissy yelled to her, “The place is all made up for you!” Chrissy brought Becka’s food to the door for two weeks, and Becka did not get the virus. They were—for me—a terrible two weeks and I spoke to Becka each day, and yet toward the end of the two weeks I could hear a change in her voice, she was more collected. She always said, “Can you put Dad on?” And I did. I was struck by this, and it made me feel more warmly toward William, that his daughter wanted to speak to him as much as she did to me, during this time of her enormous distress.
When Becka’s self-quarantine was up, she stayed in the little guesthouse. “I like it here, Mom, it’s so cozy,” she said. “And I can see Chrissy any time now, and we all eat together every night.” She was still able to work online as a social worker for the city of New York.
So there was that. Becka had survived, was surviving.
* * *
—
I have come now to think of this as The First Rescue Story.
The Second Rescue Story arrived a month later.
Though in the end, neither rescue was successful.
* * *
—
But somehow this made me care a great deal about Bridget; she suddenly seemed very vulnerable to me, and it had something to do with Becka. Once I even called Estelle myself to see how they were doing, and she said, “Oh Lucy, it’s so nice to hear your voice!” She said Bridget went up and down, and I said, Yes, so did I.
Five
i
It snowed on the first day of May. It snowed two inches, coming down in thick flakes and curling into the outside windowpanes, and I could not believe it. “I hate snow,” I said, and William said tiredly, “I know you do, Lucy.”
* * *
—
William came back from his afternoon walk—his shoulders were sopping wet from the snow that had fallen on him from the trees, his sneakers were soaked—and as he sat on the couch, unpeeling his wet socks, showing his white old feet, he said, “I walked over to that tower.” I did not know at first what he meant. But he told me that he had researched it, and it was a tower built during World War II to look for submarines, and there really had been German submarines that came up to this coastline. He said that just a little farther down the coast two German spies had gotten off a submarine and made their way all the way from Maine to New York City. It was huge national news and they were convicted of espionage and sentenced to death. But President Truman had commuted their sentences, and eventually they were freed. William said, “Nobody even remembers this now, but those towers are there because the threat was real.” I did not know what to say.
* * *