Lisa Unger - Die For You

“Any more insults for me today? Let’s just get them all out of the way now.”

“Not insults, Crowe. Just observations. Don’t be so sensitive.” She gave him a sly smile, knew that she was getting to him and enjoying the hell out of it. “I’m just trying to get you to keep your feet on the ground.”

“You don’t give me a chance,” he said, sounding a little peevish even to his own ears. “You’re all over this stuff. Anyway, you’re better at getting things like that done. People listen to you.”

“Hmm,” she said, moving back toward the apartment.

“Let’s get a photo of Marcus Raine the second and make a visit to Red Gravity, see if anyone there recognizes him.”

“If it survived the dot bomb. A lot of those little tech companies didn’t make it.”

“Worth a shot.”

“Another thing that’ll have to wait till morning.”

Grady looked at his watch; it was close to ten P.M. The morning seemed a long way off. He didn’t think they could wait around on banking and cell phone records, offices that might or might not still exist.

“What till then?” he asked.

She turned back to him. “We go door-to-door and let everyone tell us they didn’t see or hear anything. Then I say we take Erik Book in and talk to him a little more. I don’t think he’s telling us everything.”

“And when he lawyers up-if he hasn’t already-how ’bout we do a little clubbing?”

“You read my mind.”

I WAS FEARLESS once. I remember this. I remember being so sure of myself, of my opinions, passions, and goals. I remember raging and debating in my classes at NYU-politics, literature, history. Everything seemed clear. Everyone with a different opinion was simply wrong. There wasn’t one event that changed this, not that I remember.

But as I grew older, that passionate certainty faded. I became more reserved, more reticent. My righteousness was less assured. I avoided the kind of heated political debates that I once enjoyed. Existential, religious, moral arguments made me uncomfortable. There were so many opinions, so many convinced of their own righteousness. A slow dawning that the world was impossibly complicated, that differences were too often irreconcilable, made me less inclined to do battle.

I saw this mellowing in Linda, too. After our father’s suicide, she was so angry. And she stayed angry-angry at him, at our mother, at Fred, at anyone who crossed her or disrespected her. She was always embroiled in some argument with this one or that, fought with clerks in various shops, waitresses, massage therapists, over any little issue. Once I had to drag her, screaming over her shoulder, from a gay sing-along bar in the Village after she fought with a drag queen over I can’t even remember what. I was pretty sure it was about to come to blows.

But when Erik came into her life, something in her shifted and settled. “He removed the thorn from her paw,” Fred said in his usual quiet way. Emily’s arrival calmed her still more. By the time Trevor came on the scene, she seemed as serene as a monk. I’d arrive at the loft and find the place in chaos-dishes in the sink, the floor a gauntlet of baby gyms, cloth blocks, and teddy bears-and Linda peacefully lying on the living room carpet, holding up a set of keys in the light for Trevor, or reading to Emily from a towering stack of books.

“I just don’t have the energy, Isabel,” I remember her telling me one afternoon. I was at the loft, and she mentioned a bad review she’d received. The reviewer had called her work “common” and “maudlin.” No one likes a bad review. But Linda could be expected to go off the deep end, sulking for days, making complaining phone calls to editors, writing nasty “reviews” of her reviews and sending them to the critic. But that afternoon, she just seemed to shrug it off.

“I can’t afford my own temper tantrums anymore. You owe them something, you know. These kids, you bring them into the world. They didn’t ask for it; you did it for all your own reasons, good or bad. The least you can do is not be a bitch all the time, someone who’s always in a rage, or complaining, or depressive.”

I saw the simple wisdom in this.

“I mean, look at them,” she said, pointing to Trevor, who toddled about in his diaper, putting random large, colorful objects in his mouth. “We were all that. Every rude jackass on the street or maniac killer or corrupt politician was walking around in someone’s living room with a wet diaper, chewing on rubber keys or something. When you understand that, it’s so much easier to be forgiving than it is to be angry all the time.”

I wondered but didn’t say, When you lose that youthful assurance, that arrogance, what else goes with it? Your passion, your drive, that hunger to create? When motherhood seemed to demand so much time, energy, love-when an uninterrupted night’s sleep was something to celebrate-wouldn’t the artist be sacrificed?

But no. It was harder for her to work, certainly. I watched her struggle for time, for the mental space she needed to see . There was so much conflict in the artist mother; Linda was eloquent in her angst.

“I never knew that loving them, being a mother would occupy such a huge space in my heart. That there wouldn’t be much room for anything else.” But ultimately her work had more depth, more beauty than anything she’d ever done before Trevor and Emily.

I was comforted by this when I realized I was pregnant-something about which I’d been deeply ambivalent. I’d missed my period. The drugstore test confirmed my fears. I spent a full week buffeted by joy and abject terror, angst and excitement before I told Marcus.

The look on his face when I delivered the news was a low point in our marriage. A cool, half smile. Was I joking? Then, when he realized that I wasn’t, a strange blankness, a total withdrawal from me, from the scene. He crossed his arms across his chest and walked over to the window.

“It’s not a good idea, Isabel. It’s not…” He let the sentence trail with a bemused shake of his head.

“It’s not an idea , Marcus. It’s a person.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. More than any other moment, this was the moment that should have sent the alarms jangling. But, of course, I couldn’t have seen anything then through the veil of my anger and disappointment.

Now, as I sat on a rocking subway car hurtling uptown, I realized he wanted to tell me then. He wanted to confess. That was the pleading I saw on his face when he turned to look at me.

“Listen…,” he began. I lifted a hand, terrified of the words that were coming.

“Don’t. Don’t say something you won’t be able to take back.”

I thought he was going to tell me to end the pregnancy. And I couldn’t have those words written between us, alive and gnawing at our marriage like rats in the attic. You’d try to kill them, but they’d always be up there scampering, scratching, crawling in through any hole they found. But maybe he wasn’t going to say that at all; maybe he was going to tell me everything I was finding out now, the hard way.

I am a person lulled to calm by moving vehicles. The subway, even with all its filth and myriad threats, is no different. My memories and the present moment mingled in a semi-dream state. I wasn’t sleeping-I was way too wired for that; it was more a kind of restless doze. Though I was aware of the rumble of the train, the stops as they came and went, I was back there in our kitchen. I could smell the marinara that simmered on the stove, hear the music from the stereo in the living room, feel the cold granite of the countertop beneath my hands.

“Don’t make me hate you,” I said.