She smiled. It sounded like he was having fun. She was impressed that every word was spelled right, though she guessed the phone might have corrected bacchanalian for him. She shut it off for the night.
A few minutes later, while her daughter was still awake and contentedly watching a sitcom that had been off the air for nearly two decades, Kristin fell asleep first. She would be awakened by the old-fashioned telephone landline in the apartment just before three in the morning.
…
Kristin knew firsthand that even now—perhaps especially now—well into a digital world of tweets and texts and tones that are personalized, the staccato, reverberating ring of an old-fashioned telephone is jarring. It is particularly jarring in the small, shadowy hours of the night. As three a.m. nears, the odds that good news awaits at the other end grow slim. Not incalculably slim: babies are born after midnight and parents learn that the child they have been praying to adopt has landed. Soldiers call home because this is the one moment when, nine or ten time zones to the east (or west), they have a moment to speak. But Kristin knew the odds are far higher that a call to a landline—to any line—at three in the morning is the ring tone of calamity. Life-changing calamity. That call is the raven. It was how she had learned that her father had died.
Nevertheless, there was no telephone in Kristin’s mother’s guest room. And so although she heard the ring through her and her daughter’s half-open bedroom door, it was her mother who shook herself awake and reached awkwardly across the mattress—across the side on which her husband had slept until the moment when (quite literally) he died—and fumbled for the phone. Lifting it from its cradle and resting it against her ear. Not yet sitting up. Not yet. Kristin’s mother was sixty-eight, vibrant and lovely, a widow of three years who was never at a loss for a lunch date or a companion to join her for a movie or the Met or whatever drama was playing at the Barrow Street Theatre. She had a personal trainer named Sting—no connection to the musician—a third her age with whom she worked out twice a week at the gym in her building. She was known to walk to the Nederlander or the Eugene O’Neill before a show and then, afterward, take two subways home to her apartment on the Upper East Side. She allowed her white hair to fall unapologetically to her shoulders. She wore blouses unbuttoned to reveal a hint of collarbone.
And so even though it was her mother who was struggling up through the roiling currents of sleep and trying to make sense of what her son-in-law was saying, Kristin grew alert. She opened her eyes, listened to Melissa’s gentle breathing, even inhaled the vaguely fruity—strawberry, she thought—aroma of the child’s shampoo. And she waited. She watched the moonlight through the blinds. Somehow she knew that any moment she would hear the creak of her mother’s bedroom door and the way her mother shuffled like a little girl in her slippers along the corridor. She would hear her mother’s voice whispering through her own partially open door. She would hear the verbal balancing act: urgency mixed like gin amid the tonic of consideration. She would not want to awaken her granddaughter.
Outside, fourteen floors below her, Kristin heard what she guessed was a garbage truck, the engine growling as the vehicle started to accelerate after the traffic light had turned green. Farther away she heard a siren, unsure whether it was an ambulance or a police car.
Then, just as she expected, she heard the sound of the bedroom door down the hall. Her mother was coming for her, each step a harbinger. A tremor. A seismic shift wrought by the smallest of steps.
Alexandra
I was so happy to see New York City. I was so excited. In the crowds, the skyscrapers, and even in the men I saw my freedom. This was my future.
They brought three of us from Moscow: Sonja, Crystal, and me. The rules were clear and the money was clear. I knew they might change the rules because they had done that before, but you always hope. I mean, I do. This time, you hope, the deal won’t change. This time, you tell yourself, there won’t be any surprises.
Maybe that was naive. They always changed the rules. They always kept you on your back.
That’s just an expression I learned. Often I was not on my back. But you don’t need to hear gymnastics. No one does.