Those That Wake

MOM

IN THE DARKEST HOURS of morning, Laura found the old flash drives under her mother’s quilts and loaded the home movies onto her cell. Images, years, flickered by on her cell as the process sped itself through: a first day of school, a trip to Disneyland, a birthday party in the park. She snatched the emergency credit card from the kitchen drawer, along with her parents’ hotel information and the roll of ten emergency twenty-dollar bills her parents always left her when they went away for a weekend. She used her cell to book herself a seat on the next train leaving Stony Brook for the city, left a full bowl of dog food in the kitchen, and marched into her room to change clothes, because a skirt was not something you wore on a mission. Jeans were something you wore on a mission, because you could run and jump and shout at people in them. She got into jeans, a sweater, sneakers; put the money, the credit card, and the pictures from the album into her wallet; stuffed the wallet in her back pocket and her cell in her front pocket; and pulled her father’s old Mets cap on her head.

Mookie raised his shaggy head in sleepy concern for the commotion. She approached, and he rested his chin back down and watched her with expectant eyes.

“Don’t…”she began and then lost her thought, or maybe didn’t have the strength to say it. So she got down and rested her head on his for a minute. She left him sleeping in the dark.


The train ride took an hour and a half, the landscape, lit by tired dawn light, becoming increasingly grayer, more crowded with decaying edifices and pallid people. She sat next to a creaking old man breathing out hot, wet air, who told her she was lucky.

“How’s that?” she nearly demanded of him.

“We’re coming in from underground,” he said, leaning closer. “If you come in from above, you can see the dome. You know what’s really under the dome?”

Everyone knew what was under the dome. That didn’t stop him. Apparently, he knew something no one else did.

“9/11 shook this city bad, but Big Black’s what tore it down. There’s no life left in it, no real life. So the corporations hide the damage. You know it was the corporations who caused it in the first place, right? So where the explosion went off, blew apart a chunk of the city, they put that big gray bubble over it, four blocks long. Looks like a giant insect with that wire framework inside, squatting over the ruins like they’re eggs or something. The corporations are trying to hide what they did and what’s left under there, but you see that giant bug every day, walking by it or when you come in on the bridges or fly over in a plane. They tried to hide it, but they made it worse.”

The man was becoming increasingly agitated, his rheumy eyes lighting up with paranoia. Laura held her face still.

“And you know what’s under the tent? Poison. Just like after 9/11, all the metal and concrete and chemicals disintegrated into the air, and they’re keeping it trapped in there. Everyone knows. They walk by it every day of their lives and they know that if that tent ever rips, or if anyone ever gets through the MCT and cuts it open—”

“Jesus Christ, would you please leave me alone!”

He started at the revulsion that had burst onto her face. He blinked twice, and the sick light went out of his eyes, and he remained silent—but for the heavy breath coming from his open mouth—for the rest of the trip.

Gray MCT officers wandered through Moynihan Station, moving slowly, further congesting the already hopelessly crowded train station, further infuriating already frustrated travelers. The officers’ heads swept back and forth, occasionally stopping and focusing the bulky goggles they wore attached to heavy battery packs at their belts. It simply wasn’t feasible to check every bag coming into the city, so this was what they did instead. Laura had once put on a pair of them during a civics demonstration at school. The boys wasted no time in training them on the girls, pretending at obscene revelations; but through the lenses, the world became gray and ghostly, superdense plastic showing a smear of dull blue, metal in dark blue and incendiary chemicals becoming burning lumps of bright red. The mechanism of the packs also became unbearably hot rather quickly, however. Her civics lesson at school was followed that night by an economy lesson from her father on tax money and inefficient, wasted resources.

Laura stormed from Moynihan Station at Thirty-Fourth Street and Eighth Avenue to the Grand Mariner Hotel at Fifty-First and Ninth, refusing to notice the city around her: the cracked sidewalks, the once-grand façades dwindling and dirty, the sky a gray block bearing down, disintegrating in a cold drizzle. The city for its part refused to acknowledge her. She may as well have been a lamppost or a mailbox to the people scurrying around her, conversing on their cells, plugged into a song they used to shut the world out, as far away from where they actually were as possible.

Who did pay her attention were the MCT officers, now a significant percentage of the city’s already enlarged law force. They scanned her as she passed, sensing somehow that she was out of place, that there was something wrong.

Something wrong.

Two years ago, at fifteen years old, Laura’s friend Rachel got a summer job in a pizza place. Friend Cheryl doubled up on her baby-sitting schedule. Laura volunteered in the children’s ward at the medical center. Cheryl ended up raking in the most cash, though Laura’s parents had supplemented an already generous allowance when she’d decided to carry out this heavily encouraged plan. Rachel came home every night with a fresh pizza pie, Cheryl with various bumps and bruises, frayed hair, and bleary eyes. Laura came home with unforgettable stories every night, some harrowing, few uplifting.

One of the stories was of a young boy, seven according to his chart, who was in psychiatric care. He swore from his down-turned mouth with two new teeth growing into it, beneath his tight, tense blue eyes, beneath his bright blond hair, that his parents were not his parents. There were no signs of abuse, physical or mental, and Laura had seen the parents many times, coming in for consultations, respectably dressed, showing convincing signs of secondary trauma, as she’d heard the doctors say. She watched from afar for the most part, her heart aching for the boy, but also scared of him in a most instinctive and primordial way. He was the embodiment of a nightmare dredged up from her own younger life, the product of a too-early showing of Invasion of the Body Snatchers by an overeager father who had caught hell for it from a sleepless mother for the rest of the week.

One evening, as Laura was departing, the boy was sitting on the old couch outside the therapist’s room by himself. His eyes wandered around, looking at the hospital hall as if it were an alien place, confusing and cold, even though it must by now seem as recognizable as the home he no longer lived in.

Laura stopped mid-stride, hypnotized by him at first, struck still by his wandering, helpless eyes. Those eyes found her, and she smiled back at him and walked over and sat down.

“Hi,” she said, putting on a bright smile for all she was worth. “I’m Laura.”

“Hi,” he said in a voice as timid as anyone would have imagined. “I don’t have a name anymore.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“My real parents have it. They took it. They took everything about me with them.”


The Grand Mariner Hotel was a tall brown building, its awning and windows once blue and sparkling silver, but now dulled with a patina of soot. A tired doorman in an incongruously grandiose overcoat let her into the lobby with a forced smile. Inside was also silver and blue, somewhat better preserved, with high ceilings and walls adorned with antique paintings of ships at sea. Laura walked around the tinkling, central fountain growing from the well-trodden tile, past the restaurant, and up to the desk.

“Good morning,” the man at the counter greeted her with a big blond smile. “Can I help you today?”

“Yes,” she said, managing a smile. “My parents checked us in this morning, and I’m supposed to meet them. Unfortunately, they’re not answering their cells and they didn’t tell me the room number.”

“I see.” He met the problem head on with his can-do smile. “If you tell me the name, I’ll ring the room and let them know you’re down here.”

“They’re actually out at some museums. I’m supposed to meet them there with some things that are up in the room.”

“All right. What was the name?”

“Westlake. Ron and Claire Westlake.”

His fingers brushed across the touchpads on his screen for a moment.

“May I see some ID?” His smile didn’t waver.

“Of course.” She fetched her cell, and when she looked back up he had the phone in his hand and had dialed the room. Little blond punk. If her parents answered and were told that a daughter they didn’t think they had was down in the lobby, that would get her thrown out of the hotel.

“Looks like you’re right.” The blond man put the receiver down after a moment and accepted her driver’s license. “This is in order, ma’am. I can give you the room number, but I can’t give you the key.”

“If you can’t give me the key, then I’m not going to be able to get the things they need.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” His smile made the subtle shift from genuine to fake. “It’s policy. I can only give the key to the guests registered in the room.”

She gave him the look designed to make him squirm. It worked on mall sales personnel, waiters, and some teachers. It didn’t work on DMV clerks or school administration—or hotel clerks, apparently.

“I really am sorry, young lady,” he said, the smile straining at the corners.

“What’s the room number?” She was done with him.

“Fifteen twelve, ma’am.”

F*ck you, you rat-f*cking bastard, she thought and strode away. She found a seat at the restaurant breakfast counter and struggled back and forth with the idea of ordering liquor. She drank wine at dinner occasionally, had been known to get served a beer when in the company of the very mature-looking Cheryl, and had once thrown up a stomach full of bourbon on an ill-advised date with a college boy a few months ago. She didn’t want to throw up now, but she wouldn’t have minded the numb-headed feeling the bourbon had given her.

She had a Coke and watched the lobby. Every couple that walked by she followed with her eyes, feeling the calm in herself strain. If her parents could forget her, could she forget them? What if they came in and she didn’t recognize them? She fixated on things like clothing choices, strides, handholding, anything that resembled the choices her parents might have made.

Ron and Claire Westlake walked in around eleven o’clock, disturbingly unromantic for a couple on an anniversary vacation. They weren’t holding hands, a habit that Laura claimed to find tiresome but secretly thought was sweet. They went straight to the elevators without looking up.

Once in the lobby, she dreaded the elevator ride. Once in the elevator, she dreaded the walk through the hallway. Once in the hall, she dreaded standing in front of the door. Eventually, she stood before 1512, an anonymous length of wood with a handle and a pad for the magnetic key. She stood for so long that two different guests came out of their own rooms and walked by her curiously.

She poised her hand to knock hard, with forthrightness and command, then brought it back down and put her ear to the door. She could hear nothing; not a whisper, not a footstep. She pressed her ear harder to the door, compressing it painfully and still not a hint of anything living beyond it.

F*ck the door and f*ck the sound waves for not getting through it.

She pulled away, glared at the door, and knocked on it hard, three times.

Nothing happened, so she hit it again, pounding it, really, then pressed her ear back to the door. Nothing.

She futilely twisted at the handle, then kicked the door and almost yelled through it, but managed to hold that in. She went back to the elevator and down to the lobby and from the corner stared at the desk personnel. Besides the blond there were two others on duty, both women. She walked across the lobby, relatively close to the counter and glanced casually over as she passed them. One of them, thin-faced with big hair and trying to hide her age with too much makeup, may have been in her mid to late fifties.

Laura went up to her and leaned on the counter.

“Diana,” she said, reading the name on the little gold plaque Diana wore on her jacket, “I need your help.”

“What’s wrong?” Diana leaned toward her, looking worried. She had picked up on Laura’s manner, more sensitive than a man would be, and dispensed with the smile and the “ma’am.”

“My father is in room fifteen twelve. There was some trouble at home last night, and he won’t answer the door. I think he’s in bed with his cheap slut girlfriend. Could you please give me the key?” Laura was shocked to find herself able to say such a thing about her father and remain completely calm.

Diana did an admirable job of not looking shocked. Perhaps Diana had not had an easy life with men herself. Laura was gambling on it.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Westlake,” Laura said, producing the digital license on her cell as Diana checked on her screen.

Diana only glanced at the license, but did take another moment to look at Laura’s face. Laura tried to think of what she would need to look like for this woman to help her. Would Diana respond to someone who was scared, or someone who was—

“Give me your cell,” Diana said. Laura blinked and passed it across the counter. She scanned the code of the cellock into it and handed it back.

“Thank you, Diana. Thank you so much.”

“You do what you need to do, honey.”

Laura took the card and marched back to the elevators. She walked purposefully to 1512 and decided not to knock. She keyed the lock code in her cell and the cellock clicked and she pushed the door open.

Her parents were there, the two people that comprised her past, defined her present, and delineated her future. They sat at the small table by the window, staring out into space. She had expected a shocked response, anger, and action on her parents’ part before Laura could offer undeniable proof of who she was. But neither of them even turned. Only when the door slammed behind Laura did her father turn slowly around. His face was a mask of haggard indifference, a look Laura had seldom seen on him in her life. Once, perhaps, after being passed over for the same promotion the third time in a row. Once, when the Mets finally hauled ass out of the disintegrating city and relocated to Las Vegas.

“Claire,” he said, now showing a ghost of concern.

Her mother turned, and here Laura fixated on the twitch of every muscle, looking for a sign of recognition, even unconscious recognition, revealed unintentionally by eyes or lips. There was nothing but flat incomprehension.

Her father stood up and took a step forward.

“Who are you? What are you doing?” He wasn’t angry, exactly. There was a pass at it, like he knew he was supposed to be riled up, but the emotion just couldn’t make it past an uncharacteristic dullness in his eyes.

“Dad,” Laura said, her voice going weak. “Dad. I’m your daughter, Laura.”

He blinked at her stupidly.

“Are you on drugs?” he said. “Don’t you think I’d know if I had a daughter?”

Laura came up and threw her arms around him and he flinched, immediately pushing her away. She wanted him to be angry, to rage at her. That she knew how to handle, because she was the family’s emotional balance point. Laura was the composed one, who stilled her father’s temper and eased her mother’s occasional depressions, who nodded patiently and smiled when her day, her life, was eagerly planned out for her.

Dealing with indifference and apathy had never been in Laura’s job description, had never been in her parents’ repertoire. That’s not who her family was. And she could prove it.

She pulled out her cell, keyed the movie theater app, and beamed the moving images captured over the years onto the wall over the table.

Claire Westlake had submerged much of her own personal ambition within her role as a mother, and was consequently possessed of ferocious maternal instincts. One of the great family stories was of toddler Laura becoming lost at the public pool and, imagining her little girl tipping herself inadvertently into the water, Claire went tearing through the men’s locker room, her shortest path to the pool, shoving brawny, naked swimmers out of her way in search of her daughter. Laura’s father often recounted with great delight how it had not been five-year-old Laura who had refused to leave her mother on the first day of kindergarten, but Claire who had had her child pried from her own viselike hug.

Claire Westlake looked up mutely at the snatches of home movies bleeding across the wall.

“Mom,” Laura said. “Mom.” She took her mother’s chin and turned it up toward her own eyes. But rather than giving the soft smile that often met her gaze, her mother reached up and slapped her hand away. “Look, Mom,” Laura demanded. Angry, terrified tears were streaming down her face. “That’s you coming out of the hospital with me all bundled up in your arms.” She keyed to the next, and the images on the screen flickered and reconfigured. “This is when Dad was teaching me to ski.” Her fingers jabbed agan. “Our trip to Disneyland. My first day of kindergarten.”

Clare Westlake’s eyes were dumb and empty.

“I don’t know any of these people,” she said.

“What? Look!” Laura nearly screamed it. “That’s you, Mom!”

Her mother’s hand came out and interrupted the line of projection, swallowing their history in shadow.

“Please turn that off and leave.”

“Mom.” Laura’s face was soaked in tears and snot. She struggled to make herself understood from beneath her sobs. “You have an appendectomy scar, but you still have your appendix because they misdiagnosed a bad stomachache when you were twelve.”

Her mother looked thunderstruck at that.

“Dad.” Laura spun around. “This is your Mets hat. You bought it the first time you went to a game when you were ten, and you gave it to me for my tenth birthday.”

Her father was shaking his head.

“I don’t have a scar,” her mother said. “I don’t know who you are, but you need help. I’m going to call security.”

“No, no! Mom. One of your students made a pass at you once and started sending flowers to the house until Dad—”

“This is preposterous.” Her father’s dead voice belied the claim, but he took her by the arm and pulled her toward the door. With a burst of hysterical strength, she yanked free from his grasp and lunged at her mother. She got hold of her mother’s clothes and tore at her shirt and the waist of her pants, trying to reveal the scar she knew was there.

But her father had her by both arms now and pulled her kicking and screaming from the room and slammed the door in her face.

The key code forgotten, she attacked the door with her hands and feet, tears flying from her face.

“Mom! Mom!”

She didn’t stop shouting until hotel security, in suits and dead expressions, came down the hall and took her by the arms. By the time the elevator doors opened in the lobby, she had stopped the tears. She saw Diana, watching from behind the desk, her face sick with sorrow.

“Get the hell off me!” she screamed at the guards, pulling her arms away and walking out of the hotel and into the gray city beyond the doors.