I had the sensation of lying on a cold slab, split down the middle, organs taking turns on the pathologist’s stainless-steel worktable. So this was what it felt like to be autopsied alive.
“I hated the idea of you being back there, but the place had this viselike grip on you. You would not be dissuaded.” My mother had made woo-woo remarks like that in the past, but I’d always written it off as part of her shtick. The universe and its mysterious ways made for a convenient scapegoat for a woman like Marion Young, a woman who was always talking about going with the flow, as though her actions and choices did not impart a tidal force of consequence.
I could think of nothing to say. A part of me wanted to deny it. No one person was destined to suffer this much misfortune! But how could I deny something that rang this true? I don’t know you well enough to know what happened to you young, Tina had said to me, so sure something had happened, and I realized in a spangled explosion of awareness that she and I shared something few people could understand. The particular trace pain of the unknowing, like an undercurrent that swept us through life, stronger at times than our own free will. I may never know exactly what I endured those four days my mother thought I was dead, but I knew I had suffered, and that wasn’t for nothing. It returned a modicum of control, a sense of agency over my choices in life, and it committed me to giving that to Tina too. My unknowing featured impassable borders, but hers did not. The answer to what happened to Ruth was sitting in a jail cell in Leon County.
For the time being, there was only one thing I could say to my mother. The truth is something people will go to great lengths to keep for themselves. It shouldn’t feel like a gift when you get it, but it is. I looked her in the eyes, and I thanked her for giving it to me.
* * *
The next morning, I found Doreen in the kitchen, preparing the tray that came out only when someone in the family was sick.
“It’s that head cold going around,” Doreen told me. “Your dad is still expecting you and Brian for lunch.” She saw my face and moved fast to give me a distraction. “Slice up that lemon, won’t you?” I reached for the cutting board, crestfallen. I had been nervous to see my mother that morning too. A shuttered line of connection had opened between us, and it was bound to be nebulous and uncomfortable for a bit. But still I’d showered and dressed and come down to the kitchen to put the clumsy morning after behind us, to move forward honestly. I hacked at the lemon, feeling more motherless than ever.
When I’d looked out the window that morning, it was overcast in a way that made me think it was cold. But an hour later, walking the Penn Station train platform between the fountains of engine exhaust, I felt slick and grimy in my winter coat.
“New York really is such an ugly city,” Brian remarked as we waited in the taxi line on Seventh Avenue. He scowled at the spartan hub built upon the rubble of the magnificent old terminal. No one had realized how beautiful it was until it was gone.
“Tallahassee’s new Capitol Building isn’t any better,” I reminded him. Though, in fairness, the community down there had banded together to save the original structure, a sprawling white mansion with candy-striped awnings, an acre of marble for flooring.
Brian turned his scowl up to the sky. “At least you can see the sun. And pretty soon we’ll be smelling the ocean on the way to class.” Shorebird College of Law was located on the Gulf Coast, some inlet that supposedly drew more bull sharks than anywhere else in the state. Those are the docile kind, right? I’d asked Brian. But that was the lemon shark. Bull sharks were responsible for over eighty percent of fatal attacks on humans.
“The weather isn’t cooperating today,” I quibbled.
Brian laughed. “Does it ever here?”
You should see the Fifth Avenue tulips on Easter Sunday, I would have said if the bellman hadn’t been whistling irritably for us to get into the taxi. I loved that they still wore the old uniforms that the Vanderbilts had designed, with the spiffy waistcoat and the red-and-black brimless cap.
In the taxi on the way to meet my dad, Brian continued to lodge complaints. It smelled like trash, didn’t it? Could I roll up my window? “This traffic!” he cried when we sat at the same Lexington light for three cycles.
I peeled off my coat and concentrated on breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. When we finally made it to Third Avenue, I took out my wallet and thrust a ten-dollar bill at the driver. We had only six blocks to go, but I needed air.
Dad was the in-house counsel for a big bank, boisterous and brilliant; he wore a rotation of pretty paisley-printed bow ties and dark suits. I’m serious only if you make me—but you don’t wanna make me seemed to be his legal strategy. Once, when my nephew was a baby, I’d overheard him when he thought no one was listening, cooing something about how he was rich and one day my nephew would be rich too. My nephew had giggled and shrieked in delight.
Thankfully, the air-conditioning was on at Manny Wolf’s. Dad was already sitting at his regular booth, the one beneath the autographed picture of Dean Martin smoking in the basement meat locker, surrounded by hanging carcasses brindled with fat.
“Here she is,” Dad sang out as he stood. He clasped me by the shoulders and made a show of looking me over, as though to confirm for himself that I was intact and all right. I was almost positive it was to hide the fact that there were tears in his eyes, and I felt an immediate sense of grounding. Like I belonged to someone, somewhere. My father and I had never been particularly close, but something had shifted after he found out I’d gotten into Columbia Law. He started to talk to me like a peer then. In the latter half of my life, he would become my best friend.
“Nice to see you, sir.” Brian was nearly a foot taller than my father, but next to him he always appeared diminished and nervous. Like an elephant afraid of a spider.
“Monsieur Armstrong,” Dad replied archly. My father was a first-generation Irish immigrant from Woodside who spoke with long o’s and w’s, just like Ed Koch. Southern niceties sparked suspicion.
We sat and I sipped my ice water. It tasted like home, pure and clean. Brian asked for a Budweiser, which they did not have, so he settled for a whiskey and soda.
“Sorry to hear your mother isn’t feeling well,” Dad said.
“You two were up late,” Brian said. “Gabbing away in the kitchen.”
Alarm coursed through me. “You heard us?”
“A word here and there,” Brian said. I stared at him, wanting to ask which words, but then the waiter came over with menus and a recommendation for the oysters, arrived on ice from Montauk that morning.
“So,” my father said after we’d decided on a dozen for the table, “I’m hearing Farmer is on board.”
Millard Farmer was a hotshot civil rights attorney from Atlanta who spent much of his career representing Black people in high-profile capital punishment cases and making sure everyone knew he represented Black people in high-profile capital punishment cases. The Defendant had written to him, asking if he would join his team of defenders in Leon County. Farmer had readily agreed.
“What I don’t understand,” Brian said, “is how come he even needs Farmer if he’s planning on representing himself again?”
“It’s a complex litigation,” I answered.
“I’d love to hear your thinking on it, sir,” Brian said, straight across the table, as though I hadn’t spoken at all.