Due Preparations for the Plague (34 page)

Samantha’s taxi is stuck in traffic on Broadway between the Federal Plaza and City Hall Park. She is heading south toward the Staten Island ferry. Her cab has not moved for five minutes and the cacophony of car horns, so incessant, so futile, makes her think anxiously of camp cots that buckle in panic and give off screams, but all this desperate energy, all this noise, fails to distance them by so much as an inch from starkness that falls like ash. Sam begins to have a harrowing certainty that she will never move, never escape, she is gridlocked forever inside the gymnasium, in the rows upon rows of stalled cots.

She presses her damp forehead to the window of the cab and stares at a billboard, corner of Broadway and Reade. Her hands shake. The August heat comes off the black surface of lower Manhattan like an outbreak of plague: dampness leaks from her skin. The clamminess of the taxi’s fake-leather upholstery disgusts her. The seat belt prickles like a rash. The pavement burns. The billboard at the corner of Broadway and Reade is made of vertical shutters that rotate: now she sees paradise:
BORA BORA FOR
$1500
ROUND-TRIP, THREE NIGHTS, INCLUDES CRUISE ON LAGOON AND CORAL REEF
; blink; now she sees lacy nothings:
VICTORIA’S SECRET: LESS IS MORE IF YOU WANT TO DRIVE HIM WILD
; blink; now she sees sky, cloud, Icarus: a hang glider, free as a bird, drifting over Manhattan:
SPREAD YOUR WINGS, STRETCH YOUR LIMITS, SUMMER COURSES AT NYU
; blink; now she sees hell: a car wreckage, twisted metal, two stretchers, bodies covered in white sheets, distraught child in policeman’s arms:
WHEN TRAGEDY STRIKES, ARE YOUR LOVED ONES PROTECTED? CALL METROPOLITAN LIFE
. Flip, flip, flip, flip, paradise, sex, flight, hell; paradise, Jacob, Icarus, hell; boathouse, motel, Black Death, hell, and are her loved ones protected? Are they safe? The billboard is stuck at hell, Sam’s mind is stuck, her shirt is stuck to her wet skin.

The traffic comes unstuck for a minute or so. Sam’s cab crawls forward.

This is what it is like: She is in a taxi on an ordinary day in lower Manhattan, late in the summer of the year 2001. She has come direct from JFK Airport but has no luggage in the trunk of the cab. Her luggage is where? Who knows? She has filled in the necessary form. Her bag will be on the next flight, she is assured. Probably. Her suitcase will be delivered to her door.

“My aunt’s door,” she said.

Lou said: “Here’s the address. The phone number’s on my card.”

“We’ll call,” the attendant said, “if your bag can’t be traced.”

Sam feels like an astronaut undergoing reentry shock. She has that homecoming feeling and she feels alien. Both.

“Where you coming from?” the cabdriver asks. His name on the license displayed on the Plexiglas divider is Ibram Siddiqi.

“Paris,” Sam says.

“First time America?” he asks.

“I’m American,” Sam says.

The cabdriver raises his eyebrows. “Sound foreign,” he assures her in heavily accented English.

Lou tells him, “She’s been in France for the last seven months.”

It does feel like a lifetime, Sam thinks. She is somebody else in French.

Manhattan looks beautiful and strange.

The trees are in full leaf, flower vendors bloom gloriously on every corner, she smells pretzels, roasted hickory nuts, falafel, she sees poodles on leashes and the lovely half-clad bodies of the rollerblading young. The sun is shining, and the day, though humid, is otherwise perfect and flawless, but she cannot shut out the blink blink blink of the billboard and that is what it is like, she wants to explain.

Manhattan feels dangerous.

Blink, and paradise can flip you into hell, she knows this can happen any second, she knows this could happen when the traffic lights change. She has lapses. She has bouts of regression. When she has lapses, she is unable to believe in equilibrium as anything more than a balancing act on the tip of a steeple, the steeple of St. Paul’s Chapel, for instance, which looms just ahead on the right. The steeple is small and graceful, exquisitely proportioned, and this is what Sam’s life is like sometimes: one foot on the pinnacle of St. Paul’s, the other dangling over nothing. The city unfurls southward down Broadway like a carpet, but flipflipflip, at any moment the carpet could be yanked from beneath her, the road could subside, the whole of lower Manhattan could drop into a sinkhole, the tall canyons of real estate could roar into flames.

Sam’s heart is pounding, her taxi is gridlocked again at Broadway and Vesey, a shower of small black meteors is blurring her eyes, the road undulates, the buildings sway, she cannot breathe. She recognizes the warning signs of a full-scale panic attack.

Ibram Siddiqi is watching her in the rearview mirror. Is he putting the doors on central locking? The cab feels like a sealed bunker.

“Lou,” she gasps, choking. “I’m sorry, I can’t—I have to get out—”

She wrenches open the door and hurls herself free. She is in a jungle and she finds herself sobbing. Drivers shout, drivers give her the finger, she hears a jazz medley of horns, brakes screech, she is dodging, weaving, running, breathless, she has reached the sidewalk, she collides with pedestrians, she ricochets, she is making for a small green park with a sycamore tree.

She collapses onto a bench in the tranquil little space behind St. Paul’s and waits for the shaking to stop. Her bench is a grave. She is sitting under the spreading boughs of a massive tree and she leans her head gratefully against the angel’s stone rivers of hair.
MARY ELIZABETH SHARROD
, 1762–1770. She closes her eyes and listens to her heart prepare for landing, wing flaps down, engines in reverse, fierce wind-rush, speed dropping, slowing, brakes, stillness, calm.

When she opens her eyes, her aunt is sitting on the neighboring tomb.

“Sorry, Lou,” she says, embarrassed. “I haven’t had one of those since Jacob—not since Lowell and I first saw the tape.”

“It’s okay, Sam. It happens. Take your time.”

“I don’t know what set it off. I suppose it’s being back in New York. Back in the country.”

“Let’s just sit here for a while,” Lou says. “It’s so peaceful. We don’t have to go anywhere.”

“Always gets worse near anniversary time.” Sam rubs her hands in the grass to get rid of the jangled self that she is smeared with. She takes deep breaths. “I actually thought I’d be okay this year.”

“Because the tapes are safe.”

“Because we’ve let jack out of the box. I thought everything would be different.”

“The indifference upsets you.”

“Yes. No. I mean, I knew it would be discounted. Anything coming out of France can be ignored here, but it
is
out there now, it’s on the Web.”

“Articles in
Libération
and
Le Monde
,” Lou reminds.

“And the British Press too. The
Guardian
. The
Independent
. It’s
something
. I knew there wasn’t going to be an announcement on national television.
We apologize for the terrible suffering …
”

“But you still hoped.”

“I thought at least
Harper’s
and the
New York Times
. I suppose I thought at least there’d be serious questions raised in Congress.”

“And instead, it’s just another crackpot conspiracy thing like the ‘hostage hoax’.”

“I thought I was braced for it. I was much more afraid the website would be blocked.”

“Ignoring it’s more effective. There’s such an overload of information on the Web. No one knows what matters and what doesn’t.”

“But the lies and the cover-up … why isn’t there outrage? And those horrible deaths …”

“Horror doesn’t reach people anymore. Horror’s TV. Horror’s special effects.”

“Well, at least we’ve kept evidence alive. That’s something,” Sam says. “I should feel great about it. I do feel great about it. I do.”

“Let it go, Sam.” Lou moves over to sit beside her niece on Mary Elizabeth’s grave. “You’re alive. Lowell’s alive. You’ve got years to make up for.”

Sam smiles. “You should have seen Amy and Jason feeding the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens. Jason’d talk to them in French like the other little kids. Aren’t children amazing?”

“You like being with them.”

“I do. I miss them. For some stupid reason, I don’t fly up to Boston till next week.”

“I have a surprise for you,” Lou says. “I’m not supposed to tell, but I can’t resist. Lowell and the children will be here tomorrow.”

Sam closes her eyes and smiles. “We’re like war vets,” she says. “Lowell and me. We’ve been through the trenches together.” Her hands clench into fists. “We’ve visited hell. Even though no one believes in it.”

“Let it go, Sam. The past leaves indelible traces. Trust them.”

“Trust,” Sam says. “We have a big problem with trust.”

“The past leaves its own mark. Do you know that we’re sitting on landfill? This used to be the bed of the harbor. Feel that vibration?”

“Subway.”

“Right. When they laid this line, somewhere around 1900, construction workers found pieces of a Dutch ship that sank in 1613. You can see bits of the ship in the city museum, that’s how I know. But you see what I mean? The past leaves traces that eventually come to light. No one can stop them.”

“Oh, that’s a great comfort. So one of these years, when they find the bones in a bunker somewhere in Iraq and do DNA tests, our great-great-grandchildren—”

“Does it help to torment yourself?”

“It’s not as though I want to. It’s not something I work at. It’s something that eats at me.”

“I’ve found it’s possible to live with grief and still tap into …”—Lou casts about for a word—“not happiness; I wouldn’t call it that; but I suppose I’d call it a state of acceptance. A state of being at peace.”

“I didn’t freak out like this the whole time in France,” Sam tells her. “Not even at Charles de Gaulle Airport. I’ve been calm all summer. Well, I mean, relatively calm. For me, calm.”

She traces the coils of the angel’s hair with an index finger.

“The dead never leave us, Sam,” her aunt says quietly. Lou’s voice is different, Sam thinks, since she saw the tape. Something has changed.
Serenity
, that is the quality. “That’s what I’ve found,” Lou says. “The dead are close to us. I suppose that’s why I’ve come to love graveyards.”

“Our dead aren’t in graveyards,” Sam says.

“They are close,” her aunt insists. “The dead are gentle with us. It’s the living who cause us pain.”

“You mean Grandpa and Grandma Hamilton?”

Lou does not answer, and Sam lets the silence go on in the damp August air. Light comes down through the sycamore leaves like an unreliable blessing, flickering and on the slant. Police sirens bounce off the tombstones. A fire truck hurtles north.

“Lou?” Sam prods. “Do you mean your own parents? Or the Raleighs?”

“I didn’t mean anyone in particular,” Lou says.

“Françoise says the Raleighs treated you disgracefully. She says you felt about them the way she felt about Sirocco.”

Lou dismisses this. “Oh, back then. We were both young and miserable back then, me and Françoise.”

“We’re so lucky she has good media contacts.”

“Good political ones too,” Lou says. “Ironic that she owes those to her father.”

“Ironic that she met some of them in a psychiatric ward.”

Lou sighs. “She’s been through a long bad patch.”

“Haven’t we all?”

“But she’s reborn now. Her father’s tapes are a mission.”

“Did you get the feeling she’s been approached by French Intelligence?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“She’s got intimate knowledge of Sirocco. She could play the spider and lure him.”

“I hope she won’t try anything that dangerous,” Lou says.

“I think she wants to. I think she wants to revenge her father’s ghost.”

“For
murder most foul
,” Lou murmurs. “But it’s curious what can happen to revenge fantasies.”

“What can happen?”

“They can dissolve. They can cease to matter.”

“Did you have them about Grandpa and Grandma Raleigh?”

“Oh, I had them about plenty of people. I was a walking anguish-grenade for years.”

“What a smarmy hypocrite that old man is. Have you told him you know about Arabella and Penny Lukins?”

“Good heavens, no.”

“Were you shocked?”

“I wasn’t shocked and I wasn’t surprised, but I stopped caring about what they thought of me years ago. It doesn’t matter much to Penny Lukins either. She hopes you’ll make contact, by the way.”

“I will,” Sam says. “I will. It’s just—I have trouble, Lou … I’m jealous of people who knew my parents better than I did. I’m drawn to them, I’m jealous of them, and I stay away from them. I get too upset.”

“Funny thing, jealousy.” Lou traces the dates on Mary Sharrod’s grave. “People died so young back then,” she murmurs.

“Did you realize that’s what made me so furious with you all the time? Not that I realized it myself.”

Lou smiles. “I thought it might be because we’re too much alike,” she says. “A bit on the wild side.”

Sam laughs. “Remember that time—I guess I was twelve—and a policeman brought me home at two in the morning?”

“I remember it vividly,” Lou says.

“I was such a pain in the ass,” Sam says. “I don’t know why you put up with me.”

“I was pretty tempestuous myself at that age.”

“Lou?”

“Hmm?”

“There’s something I want to know, but I’m afraid to ask.”

The sun slants down through the sycamore and touches
MARY ELIZABETH SHARROD
, dead at the age of eight. Did she know she was dying? Sam wonders.
Let sleeping dogs lie
, Jacob warns. Sam’s heartbeat skips and falters and beats double and misses a stroke and revs for takeoff. She is having breathing trouble again. “Lou? Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m afraid to ask?”

“You’ll ask when you’re ready, Sam.”

“What did my father mean? What did he do? He said he was a jerk and a coward. What did he mean?” Sam turns away from Lou and looks Mary Elizabeth’s angel in the eye. The eyes of the angel are untroubled. Sam takes hold of the top of the tombstone with both hands. Her hands are trembling. “Tell me quick,” she says. “I don’t want him to have done something bad.”