Allegra Goodman - The Cookbook Collector

From Boston? she asked herself, confused. But that wasn’t Jonathan’s flight. He’d left already.

All air travel has been grounded ….

She glanced at her flight bag by the front door. She couldn’t go to L.A., and Jonathan was stuck at Logan. Ironic. Typical. She called him, but he must have turned off his phone.

Her own phone began to vibrate in her hand. That would be Jonathan. But it was not Jonathan. It was Dave.

“Emily,” he said.

No one had ever spoken her name with such sadness or such dread.

“We’re in shock,” Dave said. “I am sitting here unable to …”

Today we’ve had a national tragedy , President Bush announced on the radio.

“Jonathan was on the first plane,” Dave said.

“What do you mean?” Emily challenged him, opening her laptop to check his itinerary. American Airlines …

“Flight Eleven,” said Dave.

She forced herself to swallow. That wasn’t really Jonathan’s flight. It couldn’t be.

American Airlines said that one of the aircraft that crashed into the Trade Center was American Airlines Flight Eleven, hijacked after takeoff from Boston en route to Los Angeles …

She was shaking. She was sick, vomiting cereal-banana-milk. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t listen. She felt her way into what looked like someone else’s kitchen, and she opened drawers, but she had no idea what she was looking for.

On the counter, her answering machine was pulsing, filling up with messages. Laura. Orion. Her own father.

“Emily?” Laura’s voice wavered, trailing upward, uncertain, childlike, and she seemed to be standing in a crowded room; she seemed to be speaking very quickly, asking questions.

“Are you there?” her father asked her, and his voice was furred with rust.

“Hey,” Orion began, and then he said nothing. She heard him standing there trying to think of something to say.

Shivering, she ran upstairs to her bedroom and huddled under blankets. She piled every blanket she owned onto her bed, burying herself, but she could not get warm. She closed her eyes. Sleep was the only respite from this dream.

The house was quiet when she woke. Her arms ached. Her body knew, but she lay in bed, tracing the woven leaves on her comforter, a pattern difficult to follow because the foliage was white on white. She traced each leaf and stem with her finger, and recalled the day before, the night before, the moment before she turned on the radio. She worked her way backward, from banana slicing to pouring milk, to taking out the cereal box. She was nothing if not disciplined, and she kept to her task, tracing white leaves with her finger, working her way backward through time, as though she could repair the breaking news.

She was patient, deliberate, rational. Therefore, she did not cry as she remembered her last conversation with Jonathan, when they’d fought on the phone, and he’d said, “Don’t say you miss me, when you won’t come to see me.”

“I do come. I just did!” she’d protested.

“You came in March. I’m the one dropping everything to fly out to L.A.”

“You don’t drop everything. You never drop anything,” she said. “You work me in. You schedule me in. I’m the one moving. I’m the one leaving my job to move in with you.”

“Just don’t say you miss me,” he told her, “when you won’t change your schedule for me.”

And those had been his last words. You won’t change your schedule for me . Words that would have faded, once they were together. An argument painful to remember for many reasons, but primarily because she wished their quarrel had been worse, that their bickering had escalated into a full-scale conflagration and his refusal to meet her in L.A.

Oh, but he had refused, he must have. In the end he had missed the flight on purpose. She could not let go of this idea. Jonathan had not stepped aboard that plane. In fact, she was almost convinced he’d been too angry. She would delete the messages on her machine, the panicked voices. One by one, she would erase them, because they were wrong. She knew the truth. She and Jonathan had fought. He’d skipped Tech World, and he was sulking. He wasn’t speaking to her. In fact, he had turned off his phone.

This was her delicate logic. Each idea and contingency fed the next, as in a Rube Goldberg machine. A furious little red ball collided with a green ball, which flew up on a miniature trampoline to land at the top of a chute, where it began traveling down again, gathering speed to push over the first domino in a vast array. The last of these black-and-white dominos tripped a switch, which blew a fan, which extinguished a candle. In this way, Emily put the fires out, and saved Jonathan, and the world as well.

To which end she hid in bed. She did not eat or drink or speak to anyone. Far below, she thought she heard someone at the door, but she did not venture down to answer it. She kept the faith all day, pretending nothing had happened, struggling to protect herself, building new facts by which to breathe and live, but she had competition. Working overtime, her imagination took a guilty turn, and reason followed, where it was afraid to lead.

If she had not delayed the wedding, if she had hurried east the year before to marry Jonathan, then he would not have flown out to L.A. to meet her. If she had not hesitated; if she had simply married him when he’d asked, then she would not be alone. If she had loved him as she should have loved him, without trepidation, without tests, then Jonathan would be alive.

Because he was right after all, in everything he said about her. If she had really missed him, if she’d really wanted him, then she would have come to him before. She’d have shown him, instead of talking and postponing all the time. She would have been with him.

What was wrong with her? Why had she held back? She should have left Veritech long ago. It seemed a paltry sacrifice in retrospect. She might have saved him, if she had been less ambitious.

What did waiting get you in the end? There was no perfect time to marry, no ideal moment to move or leave your job. The only perfect time was now, and now was what she had denied herself. Who said that patience was a virtue? And temperance? And practicality? Who said, “Look before you leap”? With all that wisdom she had murdered Jonathan. These were her thoughts, as the banging on the door below grew louder.

I killed him, she thought, as Jess called, “Emily, let me in!”

I never really loved him, she accused herself.

I’ve never loved anybody, she thought, and she hoped that was wrong. She hoped she had loved Jonathan—loved him still!

“Emily!” Jess screamed, and the banging came from the back of the house, a thumping so loud that even in her distracted state, Emily remembered that her neighbor worked nights and slept days, and she scrambled to open the kitchen door.

“Shh! Be quiet!” Emily pleaded, barefoot, wild-haired, blinking in the late-afternoon sun, balled-up tissues in the pocket of her plaid pajamas. And then her eyes teared up, and she began to laugh and cry at the same time. For there stood Jess, with her hair pulled back, wearing the Vivienne Tam suit Emily had given her a million years ago. Tweed jacket in brown and rust, caramel silk blouse, tailored skirt, and stockings, actual stockings, and a pair of brown pumps. “You’re wearing the suit now? You’re getting dressed up now? Why now?”

“You know why.” Jess took her sister’s hands in hers.

“What happened to your hands?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Jess tried to hug her sister.

No, Emily thought. Don’t. She would break into pieces at the slightest touch. She would shatter.

Jess sensed this and stepped back. She stood before Emily in that beautiful suit and said, “I got dressed up so that you’d see … so you’d know I’ve come to take care of you.”