Dennis Lehane: Since We Fell

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.”

“From what?”

“Okay,” Rachel corrected herself, “she believed she was protecting me from myself, from what I might do with the knowledge.”

“Is that really why?”

“Why else?” Rachel suddenly wanted to dive out the window behind Connie.

“If someone has something you not only want but truly need, what will you never do to that person?”

“Don’t say hate them because I hated her plenty.”

“Leave them,” he said. “You’ll never leave that person.”

“My mother was the most independent person I’ve ever met.”

“As long as she had you clinging to her, she could appear to be. What happened once you were gone, though? Once she could feel you pulling away?”

She knew what he was driving at. She was the daughter of a psychologist, after all. “Fuck you, Connie. Don’t go there.”

“Go where?”

“It was an accident.”

“A woman you’ve described as hyperalert, hyperaware, uber-competent? Who had no drugs or alcohol in her system the day of her death? That woman drives through a stop sign on a dry road in broad daylight?”

“So now I killed my mother.”

“That’s the exact opposite of what I’m suggesting.”

Rachel gathered her coat and bag. “The reason my mother never practiced was because she didn’t want to be associated with half-assed quacks like you.” She shot the degrees on his wall a look. “Rutgers,” she scoffed and walked out.

Her next shrink, Tess Porter, had a softer touch, and the commute to her office was much shorter. She told Rachel they’d get to the truths of her relationship with her mother on Rachel’s schedule, not her doctor’s. Rachel felt safe with Tess. With Connie, she’d always felt he was poised to strike. So she, in turn, always felt poised to parry.

“What would you say to him, you think, if you found him?” Tess asked one afternoon.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Of him?”

“What? No.” She thought about it. “No. Not of him. Just of the situation. I mean, where do you start? ‘Hey, Dad. Fuck you’ve been for my whole life?’”

Tess chuckled but then said, “There was some hesitation there. When I asked if you were afraid of him.”

“Really?” Rachel gazed at the ceiling for a bit. “It’s, like, she could contradict herself about him sometimes.”

“How?”

“Most times, she described him in effeminate terms. ‘Poor sweet James,’ she’d say. Or ‘Dear sensitive James.’ Lots of eye rolls. She was too outwardly progressive to admit he wasn’t masculine enough for her. I remember a couple of times she said, ‘You’ve got your father’s mean streak, Rachel.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got my mother’s mean streak, bitch.’” She gazed up at the ceiling again. “‘Look for yourself in his eyes.’”

“What’s that?” Tess leaned forward in her chair.

“It’s something she said to me a couple times. ‘Look for yourself in his eyes. Tell me what you find.’”

“What was the context?”

“Alcohol.”

Tess gave that a thin smile. “But what do you think she meant?”

“Both times she was pissed at me. I remember that much. I always took it to mean he... If he ever saw me, he’d...” She shook her head.

“What?” Tess’s voice was soft. “If he ever saw you, he’d what?”

It took her a minute to compose herself. “He’d be disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

Rachel held her gaze for a bit. “Repulsed.”

Outside, the streets grew enshrouded, as if something huge and otherworldly blotted out the sun and cast its shadow across the breadth of the city. The rain fell suddenly. The thunder sounded like the tire slaps of heavy trucks crossing an old bridge. The lightning was a distant crack.

“Why are you smiling?” Tess asked.

“Was I?”

She nodded.

“Something else my mother would say, particularly on days like today.” Rachel tucked her legs under her. “She’d say she missed his smell. The first time I ever asked her what she meant, what he’d smelled like, she closed her eyes, sniffed the air, and said, ‘Lightning.’”