All the Time in the World (22 page)

“Hi, little boys,” I say, as Matt glances up and spots me. “What are you doing with those trucks, George? Trying to send someone flying?”

“Noooo Tahr-lette,” George says, like I am so silly. “We building a tower.” Every once in a while, I see Matt nudge the tower with his foot, trying to see if he can surreptitiously collapse it.

I squat down in front of Matt. I don't normally get in his face because he hates it. But I want to see what's in his eyes today. It's impossible to be well-dressed around little kids—too much squatting and kneeling for Isaac Mizrahi designs. “How are you doing?” I ask him, like he's an adult.

“I wish I could see Mommy,” he says, and his eyes tear up.

“I know, love. I'm so sorry,” I say, and he lets me hug him but not for long.

Neither of the grandparents says anything to me. “Hi, I'm Charlotte,” I say. “Are you Sc—Mr. and Mrs. McLean?”

“George,” says Scotty's father, in a voice that's disturbingly similar to Patrick's. He shakes my hand.

“Jeanne,” says Scotty's mother. She does not offer her hand. I feel like I should still call them Mr. and Mrs. McLean, even though they both said their first names. There isn't anyone else consistently in the room, which I take to mean that Scotty's parents are currently on grandkid duty, although they don't appear particularly engaged. Every once in a while, I see another little kid whose name I can't remember pass through, and I wonder how many kids Uncle Max has now. Normally, I would ask Matt, but he is so occupied with his stillness that I don't mind staying in the dark.

The way people are moving in and out of the room reminds me of chickens in a coop yard. I have yet to spot Scotty. Is he pulling a Howard Hughes back in his bedroom? I wish I couldn't picture it so clearly.

“Would you like something to eat before we go, Charlotte?” asks Mae, appearing from nowhere.

“No, thank you,” I say. “Except, do you have coffee?”

“Sure. How do you take it?”

“Intravenously,” I say. It takes her a minute to figure out that I'm joking. I'm such an inappropriate joker.

“How about with a little Irish in it?” Patrick suggests.

“Patrick.” This is his mother's voice, and a whole sentence is contained in the way she says his name. Patrick, don't you dare joke around on a day like today? Patrick, maintain the proper decorum? Patrick, don't speak to the help in familiar terms? Growing up in her house must have been character building, as my own grandmother would put it.

Mae brings my coffee, and I slip into the smaller kitchen and transfer it into a travel mug. I grab a few snacks for the boys and stuff them into a freezer bag, and I am back out in the living room in less than forty-five seconds. The time has come for us to be on our way. I strap George into the stroller, and we are off, waving good-bye to Mae and ignoring everyone else. When we are safely alone in the elevator, Matt lets out a sigh, and it sounds like relief.

Georgie chatters the whole six blocks. “We going to cool, Tahr-lette?”

“No, bug,” I say. “We're not going to school. We're going to a church.”

“When we going back to cool?”

“Maybe next week?”

“Why we going to a turch?”

“Well,” I say, “there's going to be a special service to say good-bye to your mommy.”

“Mommy going to be there?” he asks, like he would ask if we could play a game of
Go Fish
later.

“I don't think we'll be able to see her,” I say. “It's a time where people can get together and talk about how much they loved your mom, and all their favorite things about her.”

“Where Mommy going to be?”

“She—” I have no idea what to say. No idea, no idea, no idea. I want to cry.

“She died, Georgie,” Matt finally pipes in, and I wonder what he thinks that means. “A taxicab hit her, and she got broken, and she died. We can't see her anymore, ever again.”

Georgie looks down and starts playing with his fingers.

When we get to the church, the first thing we see in the aforementioned vestibule, sitting atop an easel, is a large picture of Gretchen. As soon as Matt spots it, he bursts into tears, great gulping sobs that sound like words but that I can't understand. I don't say anything, because what will comfort him? I unstrap George and point him through the church doors, and then I pick up Matt and sit down with him in the back pew. I rock him back and forth until the volume decreases a little bit, and I finally understand that he's saying, “I want Mommy, I want Mommy!” over and over.

“I know,” I say, and George climbs up next to me and kneels down with his forehead on Matt's back. “I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.” And there we sit for the next fifteen minutes, until people start trickling in, and Matt no longer feels he has permission to live with his emotions.

Family members walk by, giving me looks ranging from concern to sympathy to thank-God-you're-dealing-with-this, and then I see Scotty. He walks in with a priest, presumably Father Gregory, and stops when he sees us sitting there in a pile. He is looking in our direction, seeing us without really catching the contact of our eyes, and I think of a prisoner, just out of solitary, being reintegrated to the general population, whether he likes it or not. Scotty is surrounded, trapped even, by people who care so deeply for him, and yet he has the look of a man who has been condemned to be alone forever. He closes his eyes, like he's blinded by the sight of us, and when he opens them again, he is walking forward, past us, without a word, without even a silent word.

I don't think it would be exaggerating to say that I watch somewhere between five hundred and a thousand people come and go in the next three hours. Some I recognize; most I don't. Father Gregory seems to be fielding much of it, and he doesn't seem to want to let anyone touch Scotty. He effectively body blocks anyone who seems to want to go in for a hug or handshake. I feel a bit of camaraderie with him; we are human shields.

No one seems to know what to say to the boys, so people pretty much leave us alone. I download a bunch of games onto my phone to keep Matt occupied, and George runs around in the back of the church with his cousins, Uncle Max's kids. It goes on like this until calling hours are over, and by the time the last few people are leaving, I am filled with a righteous assurance. The boys cannot sit through a long lunch and a funeral service. The graveside service later tonight will have to be enough. Making them suffer through this afternoon will be like a handful of gravel to a skinned knee.

I approach Scotty from behind so as not to be waylaid by Father Gregory. “Scotty.” I don't want to ask Mae about this. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

Like he's seeing me for the first time today, he zeroes in. “Of course,” he says. “Thank you for coming, Charlotte. Are you okay?”

“Well. Not really,” I say. “I know you must feel like you're in a nightmare. God, Scotty. I am so sorry.”

The muscles in his face twitch, and I have to move on because I cannot stand it. Scotty's face will suck me into his suffering if I let it collapse, so I have to move on.

“I don't—I don't know if they should go to the service,” I say, with no appropriate preamble. “Matt and George, I mean. Maybe I could take them home for lunch and a little rest time. And then we can meet you at the cemetery? They're really having a difficult time here. I mean, in this environment.”

Scotty looks up, appearing to study one of the many stained-glass windows. The light coming in through those windows casts a pattern on his skin, making it impossible for me to make any inferences from his expression. “Okay,” he says. “If you think so, then that's what you should do. I want them to … I want to do what's best for them. It's okay, Charlotte; it's probably the best idea anyone's had in days.”

“Thank you,” I say. “We'll get a cab to the memorial later.”

“Call a car service,” he says, pulling out his wallet and handing me a couple hundred dollars. “Do—do whatever they want this afternoon. Okay?”

Uncle Max comes now to give Scotty a gentle push in the direction he's supposed to go. I have met Uncle Max on one prior occasion, a family visit when his wife was pregnant with their fifth child. I was left with the impression that Scotty's mother must have had an affair with a lobster trapper or some other burly blue-collar worker up in Maine, where they live, and that's how Uncle Max came into being. He's massive, able to move furniture around the living room that I have never seen anyone else move, and he looks and sounds nothing like Scotty or Patrick or their father. When Scotty and Uncle Max had conversations, from the sounds of them, many cigars and slaps on the back and exclamations of “You don't say, old boy!” were involved. Now I feel grateful for his comforting density. I head back to collect the kids, keeping my eyes in a straight line, not allowing any Maes or Jeannes or Aunt Lilas or Uncle Patricks into my periphery.

At home, where it's blessedly quiet, we have lunch. We take a nap. (Two of us do—one of us watches three consecutive episodes of the
Berenstain Bears
.) We change our clothes and then walk through the park, looking for Pale Male on the edge of Fifth Avenue. Eventually, we make our way to the Museum of Natural History, where we spend the majority of our time in the early-man exhibit. (“Tahr-lette, where their wee-wees are?” asks George, repeatedly pointing to the wee-wee-less female models.) By the time we are done, I make the executive decision not to change them back into their suits. They are wearing matching plaid flannel shirts that Gretchen loved, and they will fare better in a cemetery wearing sneakers. I call the car to pick us up on the Columbus Avenue side of the museum, and while we are waiting, I catch Matt eyeing a flower vendor.

“Mommy said it was crazy that those daisies were orange and red,” Matt says. “She only liked white.”

“Daddy got the purple ones,” says George. “Remember? And Mommy say, not the crazy daisy!”

“Would you like to bring her a funny color?” I say. “You can pick out the craziest one, if you want.”

“And we give the flower to Mommy, Tahr-lette? She see what colors we pick?” I nod because it's the easiest thing to do.

Matt gets a red one, and George picks purple, and our car pulls up then to take us out to the cemetery. I feel irrationally afraid that the sun will set early, and it will be too dark to see when we get there, that we'll have a hard time finding our way through to the right site, that Father Gregory will have trouble reading from his prayer book, that we won't be able to see the return of dust to dust. That Gretchen won't be able to see what color daisies her boys picked out to make her laugh.

But the sun stays up. We find our way. Father Gregory knows the prayers by heart, and we can all see clearly as Gretchen's casket is lowered into the ground. And I'm pretty sure that when George throws his daisy in after Matt's that he understands that he is giving the flower to his mom.

April, eight weeks after

Jess is living in a huge loft-style penthouse on the top floor of a glorified warehouse in one of the most up-and-coming sections of Brooklyn. The elevator I take opens into her kitchen, and to my left, past all of the appliances, a huge window is part of a clock face. To my right is a wall made of windows overlooking the East River. Train tracks, buildings, people the size of pinheads, sidewalks laid out in a grid, taxis, and bridges are bisected by extreme angles of light in every direction. The view from her living room window could be a painting, could sell for millions, could be studied in modern art classes.

The light comes through the clock in a way that casts long shadows of Roman numerals on Jess's kitchen table. The table is made of reclaimed wood, and she seems to regard it as some kind of postmodern conference area. She gestures to it while smiling and setting out mugs.

“I'm so glad to have you here, finally,” she says, as if she's been chasing me down all these years. “Would you like coffee or tea?”

“Sure. Coffee, please.”

She pours it, without offering cream or sugar. I guess they take it black in this part of town. I am keyed up, trying to concentrate, to take it all in with a shred of perspective. I remind myself that the more important meeting—the meeting with the boys' psychologist—comes after this one. I don't want to let her do what I always let her do, swing me along in the dreamy logic of her ambitions. I grip my too-hot mug with both hands, to let the burning sensation on my palms keep me on point. On the way back into Manhattan, I can try to document things about Matt's behavior for Dr. O'Neill, all the little patterns I can see developing. I want to make sure the doctor hears it all. I should have made the list last night.

“What part of the city do you live in now?” Jess asks, like she had known the answer at one time.

“The Upper East Side,” I say.

“What, Park Avenue?”

“Far east, by the river.” I notice the shadow of a Roman numeral seven on my chest. Who is she, to judge Park Avenue?

“You're out of school for a few years now, yes?”

I sit back in my chair and then worry it might fall apart. It looks like it's made of tree branches, strung together with twine. “Yes.”

“Why New York, by the way?”

I ordinarily have a great answer to the why New York question, involving a successful avoidance of the career-goal discussion, by using generic phrases like “so much to learn” and “stretching my wings in the professional world” and “listening to the advice of mentors who are further along.” I've given it to everyone in my life, from my mother, to Gretchen when she first hired me, to other musicians I've met along the way. I can't summon it today, though.

“This is where people go to be composers,” I say. “Writing music is kind of an elusive career. I'm sure you understand that, even though you've had some great successes and you live in a clock tower.”