Mary Costello - Academy Street

Monkey jumped onto her lap and settled down and began to purr. She stroked the little head, cupped the tiny face in her hand. Poor little creature, she said. The eyes looked into hers, clear, green, shining. Theo was right. She had been too afraid. She had always been waiting for something to take, for the veils of abstraction to lift and reveal the life that was meant for her. There was a time, when Theo was small, when she thought he had cured her. He had been enough.

She grew distraught. He would forget what had occurred in the room last night. There would be no breakthrough. He would be his usual self the next time, and she would wonder if she had dreamt it. It was impossible to know the truth. So many feelings between people were encoded in gesture and silence, because words fell short. A time might come when words would be extinct and all communication conducted in silence. The line between sound and silence might simply dissolve.

A time might come. A time might come. A feeling of foreboding began to rise. She had the clear lucid thought that something was wrong. She put a hand on her heart. She took her pulse. She touched each breast, pressing, searching, self-examining for lumps.

Willa came later. ‘It’s normal to feel this way, Tess,’ she told her, ‘after what you’ve been through, the attack. You’re not going to die! You’ve come through worse.’ She set down a cooked dinner before Tess.

‘How is Darius?’ She needed to remember others now.

Willa sighed. ‘We took a little walk this morning. The boys carried him downstairs in a chair.’

Tess thought of all that was before Willa. We could set up house, you and I, she thought, like two spinster sisters. Care for each other, call to each other when we’re frightened in the night.

∼

That night she barely slept. At dawn she dozed off. Later, she woke to the phone ringing by her head. A cheery male voice tried to sell her a multi-channel TV upgrade. She hung up and left the phone off the hook. The tone hummed on, then died. She got out and opened the window blind. A brilliant sky this morning, pure blue, without blemish. She hoped Theo would come again. She knew now there were only a few moments, ever, in one’s life, when one is understood. She remembered a novel she had read. Michael K, a silent disfigured man wheeling his sick mother out of the city on a makeshift wheelbarrow and, after her death, wandering the desert, surviving on almost nothing. His mind growing emptier by the day. She had worried for him, as if he were real and in her life. She would have liked to have him as a son, have him mind her, mourn her.

She was living too much among books and memories, and this room had become a sick room. She would go out later to the food store, the library. The day would herald a return. She would sit in her favourite café and eat a toasted English muffin with blackcurrant jelly. But first, she would sleep. She got back into bed. As soon as she lay down, yesterday’s pall returned. She felt herself floating close to hazard. A vague intimation, a premonition, that there was more to come, that the end was nigh, and she would soon die. She leaned out and opened a drawer and took two sleeping pills and a mouthful of orange juice. Then she lay back.

A medley of sounds mingled with her dreams. Distant traffic, banging doors, her name being called. She was standing on a corner downtown. A voice behind her said ‘Look!’ and she looked up and saw water — a circular shower amid the sun, with thick glistening drops enclosed in tiny membranes, and she was transfixed by their beauty. Then someone laughed and she turned, thinking they were laughing at her, frightened that she had lost her mind. Above it all she heard the sea.

She woke to a terrible gloom, and a knocking on the door. She was drunk with sleep. The air was dense and stale, the heat of the afternoon weighing down the room. Outside the sky was still blue. She felt someone in the apartment, footsteps in the hall, voices. Alarmed, she tried to rise.

Willa stood in the bedroom doorway, the super beside her. Her face was solemn.

‘Darius,’ Tess said. Willa shook her head, frowned, came and sat on the bed.

‘Willa. You’re frightening me. Please, what’s wrong?’ Her mind was slow, leaden. She looked at the super. She thought there was something she was missing.

Willa took her hands, looked into her eyes. ‘Have you seen the news, the TV?’ Vaguely she shook her head. A wave of nausea began to rise in her. ‘ Theo ,’ she whispered.

The worst thing had finally happened, the calamity she had always been waiting for. It was almost a relief when it arrived, and the waiting was over. She felt a strange surreal calm sitting in front of the TV all evening. Over and over she watched two planes with glinting wings fly into skyscrapers, from a sky so blue it did not look real. Then the skyscrapers buckling, collapsing, folding under. People on the streets, their hands on their mouths, looking up in disbelief. People fleeing, enveloped in ash, as rivers of smoke pursued them through the streets. Everyone running, the cameras running, crowds crossing bridges, getting off the island. She wanted to go out and search but they would not allow it. She could not take her eyes from the screen. She saw them all running. And over and over the planes flying, the towers tumbling, the ground giving.

If she could die herself, then, at that moment, it would be all right. It would, actually, be the most perfect thing. She had always felt temporary, provisional, as if waiting in a holding bay. Now the wait was over. This thought brought peace. She wanted to hold this thought, this peace, but people kept entering the room, bending, speaking, touching her. All evening long they came. Some of them cried. The phones were down. Willa’s sons came, then went out to join the search. She heard the elevator ping and her heart lifted and she turned her head and waited for him to enter. She got a towel, ready to wipe his face, wash his feet. She fetched her purse, urgent. What had she been thinking? Ludicrous, to think he would come here! He would go home to Academy Street, expecting to find her there. Gently, Willa led her back from the door. ‘Let’s wait, Tess. Let’s wait for some word. We have to be patient. We have to have hope.’

Jennifer arrived, pale and distraught, with her brother. She hugged Tess. Theo had called her — he had talked to her from the stairwell between the 77th and 76th floors. She was certain he was out there.

After midnight she sent them all home, Willa too. She switched off the TV and listened to the silence. She stood at the sink and looked out at the night. They have pierced my hands and my feet , she whispered, they have numbered all my bones.

DAWN WAS THE cruellest hour. The wind was sifting his bones, scattering his ash, leaving tiny pale shards in hidden corners. She wanted to roam the streets, scavenge in the sewers for his teeth. She sat at the table and tallied up his time: thirty-seven years, two months and twenty-one days. Monkey kept meowing. ‘Stop that racket,’ she snapped. Then the elevator pinged. She tilted her head. ‘Is that you, Theo?’

People came by. Jennifer brought the children, but in their presence, especially the boy’s, she felt inexplicably angry, and then when they were gone, more deeply alone.

She was better at night. In the quiet apartment she fell under the spell of memories, dreams, visions. He was lying on the floor at her feet, drawing stars, his head in his hand, his heart on the floor. Oh, to be that floor. Tell me their names, Theo, their constellations. Read me your favourite lines. She closed her eyes. She was waiting, with others, at a gate. She could see him inside, seated at the right hand of his father. She tried to break away, run across the threshold into his arms, but a hand held her back. She was running through smouldering streets then, gathering up his bones, placing them in a little casket, bringing them home.