City on Fire (17 page)

“We could buy you guys dressers for Dad’s. You could keep clothes at each house.”

“It’s not that,” he said, and reached for her coffee again. For the moment, at least, he was mostly angry at her for having left them on their own for so long: sixteen, eighteen hours since she’d buzzed in Mrs. Santos and kissed them goodnight. She’d have to do better; the book her analyst had given her warned about the abandonment complexes kids could develop. But with a divorce, how could you avoid it? Even as they needed twice as much of your attention and care, you found yourself with half as much to give, because you had to work twice as hard, make twice as much money, and meet your own redoubled needs. “It doesn’t seem healthy to me. We’re only going for a night.”

“Well, I might need you to stay over this Sunday, too.”

“Why?”

The noontime news was coming on, and she worried, suddenly: What if she hadn’t imagined that scrap of the “Dr.” Zig show on the radio last night, but had been betrayed, again, by Amory? What if he had failed to delay the arraignment until Monday morning? What if her son were to look over and see his grandfather and namesake being led from a plane in handcuffs? She had to avoid the temptation, sometimes, to confide in him as if he were the adult he talked like. “Don’t ask me why. Just, when you get your stuff together, throw in an extra shirt and underwear. We’re meeting Dad in an hour.”

“I’m fast.”

“I know you are, but why don’t you go take care of it now, and then we can both worry about Cate.”

With him safely out of the room, Regan could give in to her curiosity. She turned the volume down and stood a few feet from the TV. Sure enough, the third news story featured a reporter in earmuffs, standing against a backdrop of Central Park, now sunny. Her heart was hammering; her headache was making a comeback on the strength of all that blood. She knelt to hear better. It turned out, though, that the reporter was talking about last night’s shooting. The victim, a freshman at an area college, was in critical condition. A minor. Possible robbery attempt. Police had several leads, but no comment beyond that. She hated herself for the gratitude she felt: it was as if the shooting had somehow made Daddy’s indictment never happen. Not releasing the name, due to her age, the guy was saying, when a voice from behind startled Regan. “Mom?”

“What happened to packing?”

“I told you I was fast.”

“Well, let me go throw some clothes on, and we can go down to the playground and run around a bit before your father comes.”

“I’m twelve years old, Mom. I don’t run around.”

“I’m thirty-six, and even I need to run around sometimes,” she said. What she needed, really, was to get away from reminders. “Come on, it’s getting warm out, the weather says. We may not see another day like this for ages.”

IT WAS LESS than a hundred steps from the front door of the new building to the wrought-iron gate of the Pierrepont Street playground—so the broker had said, and so Cate had verified the afternoon of the move, making her steps slightly larger than usual, “grown-up sized,” she’d explained to Regan as she scrupulously counted them off. It was a decent little park, too, slotted into a space where two or three rowhouses would have been, overlooking the harbor, and today, as most of the snow had already melted, the playground equipment was swarming with the kids Cate dashed off to join. Their little bodies pumped blood so much more efficiently; any minute now, Cate would be rushing back to ask if she could take off her coat. Regan settled on a bench near some women she thought she recognized from the grocery over on the main drag. Doing her best impression of a responsible, non-hung-over mother, she gave a nod, big enough to invite a response, but small enough to be played off as accidental. The nods that came back were too small to interpret as invitations, so she turned back to the kids. Cate, with a native’s sense of distances, had protested most vehemently about the move from East Sixty-Seventh, on the grounds that she would be far away from her friends. Now she was with two new ones. They’d peeled off from the throng in the secretive way of girls and were scrabbling with sticks around the base of a tree still footed in white drifts. They would have liked more snow, she thought; it had been the year’s first, and they were too young to know they should enjoy the thaw while it lasted. She resisted the urge to call to them to watch out for the birds in the branches above, whose droppings had turned the wet asphalt beneath a greeny gray-white, because whoever said youth was wasted on the young had been dead wrong. It was adulthood that was the waste.

Will, meanwhile, leaned brooding against an empty section of fence, his own overnight bag and his sister’s at his feet. It would have been terminally uncool to sit with his mother, an admission of his own difficulty making friends, though the only conceivable reason any kid wouldn’t have wanted to be friends with her brilliant and warm and spooky-sensitive child, now stretching his arms out cruciform and wrapping his hands around the bars, would have been jealousy. He looked like an advertisement for boredom. Behind him, the sky, New Jersey, and the water were a parfait of diminishing brightness. He’d been right. He was too old for playgrounds. But she didn’t want them making the long subway or cab ride uptown alone—it didn’t seem safe—and when Keith, after she’d refused to meet him halfway (why should she?) had agreed to come down here and pick them up, she’d found she couldn’t bear the idea of him in the new apartment, or even in the hallway outside it. That was the point of the move, after all, and was maybe why everything was still in boxes—because she couldn’t be sure what she (the other she, whoever that was) had touched. And so, Tuesdays and Saturdays from now until the kids were old enough, they would all come out here and wait for Keith … which was what, she realized, she was doing. She had chosen this bench for the view it offered, not of her kids, but of the park entrance. And what would the other women think when he arrived? She crossed her arms.

Then Cate was dragging her brother across to the tree, and the other little girls were screaming and laughing and fleeing before the giant interloper. Will stooped to examine the spot they’d been poking at. He glanced over at Regan, and his look made her understand the thing on the ground differently. “Honey—honeys—don’t touch that, please.” Some subfrequency of concern made the other women turn toward her, but she was already up and moving toward the mound of feathers they’d uncovered. “It’s probably crawling with germs.” And now, thrust by minor emergency back into her role as a mother, she knelt on the asphalt, ignoring the wet salt-pebbles digging into her knees, to look at the thing.

It wasn’t the kind of bird you ever saw in the city. It was too big by half, the size of a football or lapdog. And too gaudy to blend in with buildings and streets. Its plumage was the blue and orange of jungle flowers, flamestitched in black. She tried to recall anything she’d ever known about birds. A woodpecker, maybe, or some mutant jay? Its head must have been tucked underneath its body. There was a stick in her field of vision, too, its tremulous end only inches from the bird, and she assumed Will was the one holding it, but when she reached for it, she discovered it was attached to a new kid, or not a new kid—her kids were, she supposed, the new ones—but a kid that wasn’t hers. He was either Japanese or Korean, halfway between Cate’s age and Will’s, with hair like black straw sticking out from the back of his Yankees cap and a smooth little face that gave away nothing. In the seconds during which he held her gaze, she felt him to be older than Will. Than herself, really. This had to be a hangover thing, this roaring mysticism or racism or whatever. Then the boy shrugged and let go of the stick.

It shook a little in her hand. She wanted to stop when she felt the soft weight of the bird at the end of it, but (this was absurd) the Japanese kid, from the shadows beneath his brim, seemed to be evaluating her performance, and beyond, in the blurred middle distance, she was sure the mothers whose park this was were watching.

“What are you doing, Mommy?” Cate asked. Will shushed her but looked a little pale as Regan drove the stick farther into the space between the bottom wing and the asphalt. In truth, she didn’t know. Was the bird still breathing? Would she have to put it out of its misery? The give of it was nauseating, the sagging articulation of a wing that refused to come loose from the ground. And then, as though a frame of film were missing, the body flopped over and the head, previously hidden, came into light. One eye was missing, or stove in, it was impossible to tell amid the dried brown blood. The blood had matted the feathers—had been what was gluing them to the ground. But the other eye, intact, no larger than a pea, stared up toward the vacant heavens. It had a tiny lid, she noticed. She imagined the bird blowing off course during the snowstorm, breaking short its migration, straying into the wrong neighborhood, alone but assuming it would stay aloft, everything would continue just as before. She hadn’t cried last night, when she’d seen the stretcher, but now she almost—almost—let go. It was the stranger kid who stopped her.

“Are you all right, miss?”

She sniffed. She was fine. She had to be fine. “A cat must have got hold of it.”

“If it was a cat there’d be more blood,” the kid said, scientifically.

“Well, some predator, anyway. Will, can you find me a bag or box or something, please? We don’t want to just leave it here to get stepped on.”

When Will had returned with an old newspaper, she scooped the bird up in the sports section. It seemed undignified. She thought of asking the Japanese boy if he knew some special way to fold it, but thought better of it. Instead, she found a nearly full trashcan and laid the little bundle of newspaper inside. On the ground nearby were some dried-out branches with leaves still attached. She reached for one and laid it gently over the top of the newspaper. “Does anyone want to say a few words?” When no one did, she said, “Goodbye, bird.”

“Bye, bird,” Cate repeated, laying on another branch. Will and the other kid were too old or too male to be this sentimental, but each added a branch, and when they were done, the lines of newsprint carrying tidings of another Knicks defeat were barely visible through the winter-brown pyre of leaves. For a moment, Regan relaxed.

Then something made her turn. Keith was watching all four of them from the park entrance. But mostly, she couldn’t help noticing, watching her. From his stubble and a certain squinty quality around his eyes, her guess was that he’d spent his night as she had, drunk—maybe with the other woman, despite his protestations, or with someone else. It hardly seemed fair, the way dissolution made him look even better, the steel-blue shadow tracing the strong line of the jaw, the blue eyes wounded, the off-center cleft on his brow that used to appear only when he was deep in thought. And it hardly seemed fair that he could watch her openly and without rancor, when the separation was his fault. To stop herself from moving toward him, she touched her kids’ shoulders. Their rites over the bird had brought them into keen attunement; they looked up from the trashcan in unison, like grazing antelope at a distant sound. Neither ran to their dad, she was relieved to note, and also pained. Nor did Keith come to them. He seemed to recognize the invisible line drawn on the asphalt. This was Regan’s place, not his. Will gathered up the bags he’d left along the fence, and together they crossed the melting park.

“Happy New Year,” was the first thing Keith said, after Cate had clamped herself around his leg. “I sent the check for spring tuition.”

“Already deposited.” Regan wasn’t sure if they were supposed to shake hands or embrace. She let him kiss her cheek. “I don’t know if happy’s the right word.”

“Or lucky, maybe. Double sevens. It’ll be better than last year, anyway.”

Having been smart enough to stay away from the party, it occurred to her, he wouldn’t have heard about the indictment, or the shooting in the Park, or any of it. She longed, irrationally, to confide in him, but the kids were standing right there, Will already closer to him than to her. “Keith, I need a favor. Something’s come up at work, and I may need to go in early Monday morning. Would you mind keeping them until then?”

Behind her almost-ex-husband, brownstone Brooklyn was a blur: ladies with shopping trolleys, people walking dogs, mottles of ice in front of buildings whose owners hadn’t sprinkled salt, and all the way up the hill trees dripping in the rare air. He seemed to be trying to read her. “Sure, Regan. No problem.”

“I’d really appreciate it. I know it’s not your day.”

“Don’t. Don’t do that,” he said. “This is hard enough as it is.” And then he peeled Cate from his leg and lifted her, and her face was botched with tears. Regan reached for Cate’s back.

“Honey, what’s the matter?”

“What do you think’s the matter?” Will said.

It took Cate a few seconds to steady her breathing enough to speak for herself. “Who will take care of Mommy?” she wailed, and then she buried her face back in the front of Keith’s coat.

Keith asked what she was talking about.

Regan blushed. “It’s nothing. I was a little under the weather this morning, and Cate was a good helper.” But was it really nothing? Because she’d be on her own for the next thirty-six hours, in the empty apartment. She’d managed all right in the old place uptown, when Keith had been sleeping on his friend Greg Tadelis’s couch and would come to take the kids ice-skating or to the movies. That apartment understood her. That mirror was the one she’d looked into all fall to remind herself that, no matter how bad things got, she would not stick her finger down her throat. But last night she had thrown up again, and once the kids were gone there was nothing to stop her from going into the bathroom and repeating, and repeating. Nothing but herself.

“I’ll be fine, sweetie,” she said, and she had to draw closer to Keith to squeeze her daughter’s shoulder. She could smell his aftershave. She could feel his eyes on her.

“We should talk some time,” he said.

She ignored this. “You can usually find a cab up on Clinton. Make sure these two wash their hands as soon as they get back.” She squeezed Cate again. “Give Mommy a kiss, sweetie. I’m going to be fine. You’re going to be fine.” Cate sniffed and nodded. “Take care of each other,” Regan whispered in Will’s ear.