“The business. So, yeah, Chicopee too, but I just don’t want to be a private investigator. It’s too grim, you know? All I seem to do is disappoint people, even when I deliver what they paid me to find. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Rachel.”
It hollowed out something in her. Another departure. Another person in her life, however minor of impact, who would leave whether she wanted it to happen or not. She had no say.
“What’re you going to do?” she asked.
“I’m gonna go back to Canada, I think.” His voice sounded strong, as if he’d arrived someplace he’d been meaning to arrive his whole life.
“You’re Canadian?”
He chuckled softly. “Sure am.”
“What’s back there?”
“Family lumber business. How’s things with you?”
“Grad school is great. New York right now,” she said, “less so.”
It was late September 2001, less than three weeks after the towers fell.
“Of course,” he said gravely. “Of course. I hope things look up for you. I wish you good things, Rachel.”
She was surprised how intimate her name sounded when it fell from his tongue. She pictured his eyes, the tenderness there, and was mildly annoyed to realize she’d been attracted to him and had failed to acknowledge it when it could have mattered.
“Canada,” she said, “eh?”
That soft chuckle of his. “Canada.”
They said their good-byes.
In her basement apartment on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, easy walking distance to most of her classes at NYU, she sat in the soot and ash of lower Manhattan in the month after 9/11. The day of the attack, a thick dust grew woolen on her windowsills, the dust of hair and pieces of bone and cells piling up like a light snow. The air smelled burnt. In the afternoon, she wandered, ended up walking past St. Vincent’s ER, where gurneys were lined up for patients who never arrived. In the days that followed, pictures began to appear on the walls and fences of the hospital, most often with a simple message—“Have You Seen This Person?”
No, she hadn’t. They were gone.
She was surrounded by loss so much greater than any she’d experienced in her own life. Everywhere she turned she saw grief and unanswered prayers and a bedrock chaos that took so many forms—sexual, emotional, psychological, moral—that it quickly became the thread and thrum that united them all.
We are all lost, Rachel realized, and resolved to bandage her own wound as best she could and never pick at the scab again.
That autumn, she came across two sentences in one of her mother’s journals that she repeated to herself as a mantra every night for weeks before going to bed.
James, her mother wrote, was never meant for us.
And we were never meant for him.
2
LIGHTNING
She suffered her first panic attack in the fall of 2001, just after Thanksgiving. She was walking along Christopher Street and passed a woman her own age who sat on a black iron stoop under the arched entrance to an apartment co-op. The woman was weeping into her hands, a not uncommon occurrence back then in New York City. People wept in parks and bathrooms and on the A train, some silently, some with vigor and volume. It was everywhere. But you still had to ask, you still had to check.
“Are you okay?” Rachel reached out to touch the woman.
The woman recoiled. “What are you doing?”
“I’m seeing if you’re okay.”
“I’m fine.” The woman’s face was dry. She smoked a cigarette that Rachel hadn’t noticed before. “Are you okay?”
“Sure,” Rachel said. “I was just—”
The woman was handing her several tissues. “It’s all right. Let it out.”
The woman’s face was dry. Her eyes weren’t red. She hadn’t been covering her face. She’d been smoking a cigarette.
Rachel took the tissues. She dabbed her face, felt the stream there, felt the tears welling under her nose, dripping off the sides of her jaw and the point of her chin.
“It’s all right,” the woman repeated.
She looked at Rachel like it wasn’t all right, it wasn’t all right at all. She looked at Rachel and then past Rachel, as if hoping to be rescued.
Rachel mumbled several thank-yous and stumbled off. She reached the corner of Christopher and Weehawken. A red van idled at the light. The driver stared at Rachel with pale eyes. Smiled at her with teeth yellowed by nicotine. It wasn’t just tears streaming out of her now, it was sweat. Her throat closed. She knew she was choking even though she hadn’t eaten that morning. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t fucking breathe. Her throat would not open. Neither would her mouth. She needed to open her mouth.
The driver got out of the van. He approached her with his pale eyes and pale hawkish face and ginger hair cut tight to his scalp and when he reached her . . .
He was black. And a bit rotund. His teeth weren’t yellow. They were copy-paper white. He knelt by her (how had she ended up sitting on the sidewalk?), his brown eyes large and fearful. “You okay? You need me to call someone, miss? Can you stand? Here, here. Take my hand.”
She took his hand and he pulled her to her feet on the corner of Christopher and Weehawken. And it was no longer morning. The sun was dipping. The Hudson had turned a light amber.
The round kind man hugged her to him and she wept into his shoulder. She wept and made him promise to stay with her, to never leave her.
“Tell me your name,” she said. “Tell me your name.”
His name was Kenneth Waterman, and of course she never saw him again. He drove her back to her apartment in his red van, which wasn’t the big panel van that smelled of axle grease and soiled undergarments she’d imagined but was, instead, a minivan with child seats in the middle row and Cheerio crumbs on the floor mats. Kenneth Waterman had a wife and three children and lived in Fresh Meadows, Queens. He was a cabinetmaker. He dropped her home and offered to call someone on her behalf, but she assured him she was okay now, she was fine, it was just this city sometimes, you know?
He gave her a long, worried look, but cars were stacking up behind them and dusk was gathering. A horn blared. Then another. He handed her a business card—Kenny’s Cabinets—and told her to call him anytime. She thanked him and got out of the minivan. As he drove away, she realized the van wasn’t even red. It was bronze.
She deferred her next semester at NYU. Rarely left the apartment except to walk to her shrink in Tribeca. His name was Constantine Propkop and the only personal information he ever divulged was that his family and friends insisted on calling him Connie. Connie tried to convince her that the national tragedy she was using to shame herself out of recognizing the depths of her own trauma was doing her serious harm.
“There’s nothing tragic about my life,” Rachel said. “Was it sad sometimes? Sure. Whose wasn’t? But I was well cared for and well fed and grew up in a nice house. I mean, boohoo, right?”
Connie looked across the small office at her. “Your mother withheld one of your most basic rights—your paternity—from you. She subjected you to emotional tyranny in order to keep you close.”
“She was protecting me.”