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There was shock and horror and fear. In the future, the events of Tuesday would be labeled with a shorthand name summing up the crashing planes, the burning fuel, the people jumping from the tall buildings, the passengers wrangling with terrorists before dying in a Pennsylvania field, part of the Pentagon sheared away, all the deaths, the family traumas, the country’s trauma, the loss of innocence and invulnerability, the guilt eating away at survivors, the degrees of separation between those who had been spared and those who had not, the recollections of where everyone was when it all happened. There would be nonfiction accounts, political and religious analyses and screeds, wars begun as a result, fighting, supposedly, to regain balance, to right the wrongs, leaving behind more body counts of the dead, the dying, and the maimed. Fiction, too, would be written, novels and short stories that had at their bloody center that Tuesday morning and its aftermath. But right then, on that beautiful blue September morning, everything just halted. There was no school for the rest of the week. Martin’s surgeries were rescheduled, except for the emergencies, the hospital with all of its patients a soundless tomb. The streets of Rhome were empty, as if its population had also been incinerated in an instant. Everyone stayed inside, huddling and crying with their families, with their aging parents, with their young children, with their girlfriends or boyfriends, with their spouses they were considering divorcing, with their cats and their dogs and their birds and their hamsters. Televisions remained on permanently, the voices of newscasters and journalists around the globe settling into every corner of every house. At the end of that long and incomprehensible week, the mayor of Rhome, along with a priest, a minister, a rabbi, and a Buddhist monk—like the start of a bad joke—presided over a candlelight vigil on Strada di Felicità. Thousands of Rhome residents emerged from their homes for the first time in days and listened to their wise, empty words. For a long time, nothing would be as it was.
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The reverberations continued, but life resumed, and three weeks later, a letter came in the mail from the Rhome Elementary School principal stating that, unless the Mannings objected, Eric would be transferred from his second-grade class with Mr. John to the third-grade class presided over by Mr. Nevins. His score on the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence had been off the charts. The principal had written: Eric is supremely gifted and would benefit greatly by moving up a grade. We considered moving him up two grades, but the age gap would be too great. To hold him back from moving ahead, however, would be a travesty.
At the kitchen table, Eric’s head pinged back and forth, from mother to father and back again, as Joan and Martin debated whether such a move was a good thing for him or not.
“What do you think,” Joan said to Eric as Daniel stomped into the kitchen, dragged a chair out from the table, and sat down hard.
“I don’t know,” Eric said.
“I don’t understand. I bring home all A’s because I work hard, but no one’s moving me up a grade. And Eric, he never opens a book, doesn’t read a thing, barely does his stupid homework, unless you force him to. He only likes LEGOs and numbers and Dad’s office computer, and now supposedly he’s some kind of genius?”
“I’ll still hate school, even if they put me in third grade. Does that make you feel better, Daniel?” Eric asked.
It did not.
“So, Eric’s a genius, and Dad has a surgery named after him now, and you, Mom—” Daniel pushed his chair from the table and stormed away, slamming the door to his bedroom.
*
In mid-October, when the leaves on the trees were hinting at fall, pale reds, oranges, and golds shimmering among the green, the typewriter was humming, a fresh page rolled in, Joan’s fingers poised above the keyboard. This was her first day back. Since that Tuesday morning, in the harsh light of what had occurred, she had questioned writing about a blissful arcadia, about artists and their dreams, their desires to create eminent lives, filled up with as much virtuosity and brilliance as their talent and personalities permitted. But weren’t people ultimately and irrevocably lost if they abandoned those dreams, ceased trying to create a rich alternative world, for themselves and for others? Wasn’t the beauty of art found in the uncovering and discovering, in being taken, or led, to the line, the step, the curve, the color, the note, the word? Wasn’t the ability to start anew, again and again, the very definition of human endeavor? Words of New Beginnings was about all of that, and about what was good in the world, about collaboration, and collective creativity, about individuals striving for something grand, about finding ways to protect themselves and one another as they pursued what their souls commanded. She pressed down on the keys and saw the black words stamping into the white. She already knew what she was going to write.
Anton is all tender veins, fresh blood, a smacked and small beating heart, and she must help that little heart to grow, cannot do a thing that might break it in half, or into tiny pieces, or into any pieces at all. Lila feels how she holds his heart in her hands and must safeguard it, an obligation she understands she has taken on, has made herself responsible for him, and although he does not realize it, he is counting on her to shepherd him into the next stage of his life. He has taken the first steps, Anton is here after all, in this place they all now call home.
Joan leaned back and thought the act of writing had never felt as exquisitely important, so much like prayer.
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