Anne Tyler - A Spool of Blue Thread

Red merely nodded and wandered off to another room.

More months passed. Years passed. Susan must be walking, then talking. That mesmerizing stage when language develops exponentially from one day to the next, when children are little sponges for language: the Whitshanks missed every bit of it. At this point they had two other grandchildren — Jeannie’s Deb was born shortly after Denny’s last visit — but that just made it harder, watching those two grow up and knowing Susan was doing the same without any of them there to witness it.

Then 9/11 came along, and Abby just about lost her mind with worry. Well, the whole family felt some concern, of course. But as far as they knew, Denny didn’t have any business inside the World Trade Center, so they told themselves he was fine. Yes, fine, Abby agreed. But you could see she wasn’t convinced. She watched TV obsessively for two days, long after the rest of them had grown sick of the very sight of those towers falling and falling. She began thinking up reasons that Denny could have been there. You couldn’t predict, with Denny; he’d held so many different kinds of jobs. Or maybe he’d just been walking by. She began to believe that she could sense he was in trouble. Something just felt wrong, she said. Maybe they should phone Lena.

“Who?” Red asked.

“Carla’s mother. What was her last name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to know,” Abby said. “Think.”

“I don’t believe we ever heard her last name, hon.”

Abby started pacing. They were in their bedroom, and she was treading her usual path up and down the Persian runner, her nightgown flapping around her knees. “Lena Abbott … Adams … Armstrong,” she said. “Lena Babcock … Bennett … Brown.” (Sometimes the alphabet worked for her.) “We were introduced,” she said. “Denny introduced us. He must have told us her last name.”

“Not if I know Denny,” Red said. “I’m surprised he introduced us at all, but if he did, he probably said, ‘Lena, meet my folks.’ ”

Abby couldn’t argue with that. She went on pacing.

Then she said, “The waitress. The other one.”

“Well, I have no idea what her name was.”

“No, me either, but she called Lena Mrs. Something, I remember that. I remember thinking she must be the shy type, if she wouldn’t use Lena’s first name even in this day and age.”

She gave up pacing and went around to her side of the bed. “Oh, well, it will come to me by and by,” she said. She prided herself on her phenomenal memory, but it sometimes operated on a delay. “It will float up in its own good time, if I just don’t force it.”

Then she lay down and smoothed her covers and ostentatiously closed her eyes, so Red got into bed himself and switched the lamp off.

In the middle of the night, though, she prodded his shoulder. “Carlucci,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I can hear the waitress saying it. ‘Mrs. Carlucci, can I get you a refill?’ How could I have forgotten? Carla Carlucci: alliteration. Or something more than alliteration, but I don’t know the term for it. It just now came to me when I got up to go pee.”

“Oh. Good,” Red said, turning onto his back.

“I’m going to try Information.”

“Now?” He squinted at the clock radio. “It’s two thirty a.m.! You can’t phone her now.”

“No, but I can get her number,” Abby said.

Red went back to sleep.

In the morning she announced that there were three L. Carluccis in Manhattan, and she was going to call each one of them in turn. She had decided to start at seven. It was just after six at the moment; the Whitshanks were early risers. “Some folks might still be asleep at seven,” Red said.

“Maybe so,” Abby said, “but technically, seven is morning.”

Red said, “Well, okay.” Then he went downstairs and made a pot of coffee, although as a rule he’d be leaving for work now with a stop-off at Dunkin’ Donuts.

At five till seven, Abby placed her first call. “Good morning, may I speak to Lena, please?” Then, “Oh, I’m sorry! I must have the wrong number.”

She placed the second call. “Hello, is this Lena?” The briefest pause. “Well, excuse me. Yes, I know it’s early, but—”

She winced. She dialed again. “Hello, Lena?”

She straightened. “Well, hi there! It’s Abby Whitshank, down in Baltimore. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

She listened a moment. “Oh, I know what you mean,” she said. “I keep telling Red, ‘Sometimes I wonder why I go to bed at all, the little bit of sleep I manage.’ Is it age, do you think? Is it the stress of modern times? Speaking of which, Lena, I was wondering. Are Carla and Susan and Denny okay? I mean, after last Tuesday?”

(“Last Tuesday” was how people were still referring to it. Not till the following week would they start saying “September eleventh.”)

“Oh, really,” Abby said. “I see. Well, that’s something, at least! That’s comforting. And so you don’t … Well, of course I can see that you wouldn’t … Well, thank you so much, Lena! And please give my love to Carla and Susan … Hmm?… Yes, everyone here is fine, thanks. Thank you, now! Bye!”

She hung up.

“Carla and Susan are all right,” she said. “Denny she assumes is all right, but she doesn’t know for sure because he’s moved to New Jersey.”

“New Jersey? Where in New Jersey?”

“She didn’t say. She said she doesn’t have his number.”

Red said, “Carla would, though. On account of Susan. You should have asked for Carla’s number.”

“Oh, what’s the point?” Abby said. “We know he was nowhere near the towers. Isn’t that enough? And I’m not willing to bet that even Carla has his number, if you want the honest truth.”

Then she started loading the dishwasher, while Red stood gaping at her.

So: New Jersey. Another broken relationship. Two broken relationships, unless Denny had stayed in touch with Susan. Red said of course he had stayed in touch; wasn’t he the most hands-on father they knew of? Abby said that didn’t necessarily follow. Maybe Susan had been just another passing fancy, she said, like that half-baked software project of his.

This was not characteristic of Abby. She believed devoutly in people’s capacity for change, sometimes to the exasperation of everyone else in the family. But now she seemed to have given up. When she phoned Jeannie and Amanda with the news, she spoke in a toneless, emotionless voice, and she told Red he could just let Stem know when he saw him at work. “I’ll get right on it,” Red said, falsely hearty. “He’ll be relieved.”

“I don’t know why,” Abby said. “There was never any real danger.”

The following morning, a Saturday, Amanda stopped by unannounced. Amanda was a lawyer, their hardest-nosed, most competent, most take-charge child. “Where’s the number for this Lena person?” she asked.

Abby pulled it off the fridge door and handed it to her. (Of course she’d kept it.) Amanda sat down at the kitchen table and reached for the phone and dialed.

“Hello, Lena?” she said. “Amanda calling. Denny’s sister. May I have Carla’s phone number, please?”

The burble at the other end must have been some kind of protest, because Amanda said, “I have no intention of upsetting her, believe me. I just need to get in touch with my rascal of a brother.”

That seemed to do the trick; she dipped her free hand in her purse and pulled out a memo pad with a tiny gold pen attached. “Yes,” she said, and she wrote down a number. “Thank you very much. Goodbye.”

She dialed again. “Busy,” she told her parents. Abby groaned, but Amanda said, “ Naturally it’s busy; her mother’s calling her with a heads-up.” She drummed her fingers on the table a moment. Then she dialed once more. “Hi, Carla,” she said. “It’s Amanda. How’ve you been?”