The Dismantling (19 page)

“Well, she probably wouldn't either way, right?” DaSilva paused, the heavy-lidded eyes seeking council inward. “Okay,” he said finally. “If she wants to stay hidden, let's help her stay hidden. Keep checking in on her until we're absolutely sure she's not going to get sick or disappear again. At least a few more weeks. Does she trust you?”

Simon hesitated. “I think she's starting to.” He felt as though he was somehow betraying her by admitting this, as though simply answering DaSilva's question had converted his honest—if not yet fully understood—impulse to protect and help Maria into a plan, just another canny tactic.

“That's good. Keep it up, and maybe we'll find out what the hell she wanted to leave behind so badly.”

“What about Abraham?” Simon asked.

“They haven't called Cabrera again. Somebody's eventually going to chase her down for that bill, whether it's insurance or the hospital. I'm sure the people at Abraham think her story reeks of bullshit, but why would they want to get too involved?” He shook his head. “Still, I hate that she's in their records now. It's just another fucking thing for us to worry about, right?”

 • • • 

S
imon and Maria left the bank together and made plans to meet the following morning. She told him she wanted to sit in a restaurant and eat a long, lazy brunch. She was feeling stronger, and she wanted to be out in the world again, among people living their regular everyday lives. In just a few days, the range of her walks around the neighborhood had grown from two blocks to five to ten; she'd lowered her Percocet dosage and her appetite had begun to return. And so on Saturday morning, Simon took her to Park Slope, which he considered the cradle of a certain kind of benign normalcy, the neighborhood equivalent of upscale comfort food. He met her outside the Seventh Avenue subway station. She got out of a taxi, wearing her leather jacket and a pair of tight black jeans he hadn't seen before; apparently she was finally feeling well enough to start spending a little bit of her money. They walked slowly toward Prospect Park. It was the first of November. The sky was bright and pale and clear, with the high, thin light of a sunny day in late fall, the air crisp and chilly. The streets were crawling with people. A man in a caramel corduroy jacket and newsboy cap walked by, holding a coffee cup in one hand and the leash for a chocolate Labrador in the other. They passed stoops peopled by parents and children sharing breakfast sandwiches and glass-bottled sodas. Maria's eyes flicked from person to person, as though she were filing away for later use details of their dress and bearing, their attitudes, their modes of being—an anthropologist jotting field notes, an actor getting into character.

They turned onto Eighth Avenue and picked a café done up in the requisite French brasserie style: lacquered wicker chairs, black-and-white tiled floors, splotchy wall-sized mirrors, wood paneling, brass banisters. They sat near the front window, sunshine slashing across their table, dust motes dancing wildly in the air between them. On the other side of the window, a pair of French bulldogs were anchored to a wrought-iron bench. Simon and Maria sipped their coffee and read the menu, not speaking, and Simon wondered if he'd somehow erred in bringing her here, if this was not at all the kind of place she'd been talking about. The truth was that they were both outsiders here, pretenders really—a pair of infiltrators, neither of them truly comfortable in this sunlit social world.

“What are you having?” He looked up: Maria was smiling at him, backlit, haloed. He felt relief at the sight of her smile. “I think I want a spinach and cheddar omelet,” she said. “Or maybe the croque-madame. Or maybe I'll have both.”

“Your appetite's back.”

“That, and it's nice I can afford to order all this stuff. I'm used to being the one serving it.”

They put in their orders and then resumed the conversation about Simon's family. Maria had asked about his parents on their walk to the restaurant, and he'd said only that his mother had died when he was very young and his father was essentially a recluse whose relatives all lived in England. Now he elaborated, telling her that Michael was an only child whose own father was dead and whose mother was now a half-senile, sour old woman sequestered in a Bethnal Green nursing home. He explained Michael's philosophy, how his father believed that the reverent excavation and preservation of family history—which included any interest in genealogy or family lore—was a narcissistic waste of time, primitive, like burning offal for the ancestor spirits. Michael disparaged what he called the “tribalisms” of excessive national, religious, or ethnic identification, which was why he made a point of being an Englishman who didn't give a shit about drinking in an Irish bar—Derry Hills—with a “controversial” name. As he talked, Simon was aware that part of him hoped sharing pieces of himself like this would encourage Maria to do the same, but it was also true that he honestly wanted to open up to her. It had been so long since he'd spoken like this with anybody besides his father—Katherine Peel, he supposed, was the last other person with whom he'd shared anything even remotely personal—and he was surprised to find that he felt more engaged than anxious, more curious than insecure.

“Have you met her?” Maria said. “Your grandmother?”

“Only once. My father took me and Amelia to London to see her. She's an awful woman.”

He told Maria how he and his sister had spent mornings at the home, sitting with their grandmother in the cafeteria. The old woman, a complete stranger to them, sat straight backed in her chair, engulfed by a maroon cardigan, her veiny hands folded primly in her lap, her entire being radiating dissatisfaction. Each party clearly baffled the other. Simon and Amelia understood little of what she said, her accent a thick, muffling blanket wrapped around her words, but they divined that she seemed to find it unutterably disappointing that they went to a Catholic school, that they lived in a largely Irish American neighborhood.

Amelia frowned. “But our mom was Catholic.” She turned to Michael. “Wasn't she?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said.

The old lady shook her head, pulled her sweater tight around her shoulders; Michael changed the subject.

Each morning they sat with the woman until noon, then went to eat lunch at a pub down the road, their father broodingly sipping from a pint of cask ale as Simon and Amelia picked at their coronation chicken sandwiches. Afternoons, they spent another two or three hours in the home, until their grandmother nodded off in her chair in the recreation room, under the blaring wall-mounted television. Michael seemed to experience the visit as an exercise in self-flagellation, excruciating but morally necessary, yet by the end of the week he'd realized that whatever he thought he was atoning for had nothing to do with his children, and so on the flight home he made it clear that Simon and Amelia would not be required to make the trip the following May.

“And that was the only time you met her?” Maria said.

“Yeah.”

“That's sad.”

“It's sad for her to be in a nursing home and to have a son who doesn't want to be around her very much. But it's not sad for me. I don't even know her.”

“But she's still your grandmother. She's part of your family.”

“So I should have deep feelings for an unpleasant old woman I've met once in my life? Just because we share some genes?”

Maria shook her head. “That's a fucked-up way of understanding how you fit into the world.”

“Maybe. But you can also look at it this way: the family you're born into matters because it still determines the material facts of your life, at least at first. Your social class, your education. But who you are inside, your private self—you don't owe that to anybody, certainly not to your grandparents or even your parents. You're free to create it on your own.”

“I wish that were true. But it's not so easy.”

“It
is
true.”

“You know what's funny?” Maria speared a piece of omelet on her fork and jabbed it at Simon. “That sounds a lot like your father's philosophy. Which seems to disprove the point.”

“Very clever.”

“Anyway, I think you're being naive.”

“So did my sister. It's something we always argued about.”

He told Maria how Amelia used to curl up with their father's old photo albums spread open across her lap. She turned the pages reverentially, as though they were illuminated texts, fragile and antique, while Simon couldn't be bothered to spend more than a few minutes with the things. There were Michael's parents standing in front of the old family cottage in Oxfordshire: gray people, gray house, gray sky. There was their father, no older than twenty, in a peacoat, with his hair falling across his eyes, leaning into the doorway of a pub. Later, in the basement of the Rockaway house, Amelia had found shoeboxes stuffed with more photographs, the boxes sagging, their cardboard damp and mildewy. She'd carried the boxes upstairs, displaying their contents to Michael as though they were evidence of a crime he'd deliberately concealed. Was he just planning on leaving them down there to rot? Didn't he care what happened to them? He shrugged, said she could do what she wanted with them. Didn't he want to look at them with her? He shook his head. “Do what you want with them,” he said again. “I'm not short on memories.”

And so she spent much of that winter organizing the orphaned photographs. Simon would find her cross-legged on the rug, neat stacks of photos arranged in front of her, an unsorted pile to one side, a family album open on the other. She'd flip a photo around, ask what he thought of it, where it might fit into her elaborate system of categorization. Most of the pictures she asked him about were of their mother. There she was, in her early twenties, leaning her elbows on a railing overlooking the Thames, her glossy brown hair gathered with a red ribbon at the nape of her neck. There she was, standing with another woman at a cocktail party, her belly giant and tight against her red sweater as the woman reached out to touch it. Here was their mother lifting the infant Amelia up to a Christmas tree, a crocheted snowflake gripped in Amelia's tiny fist. Their mother's hair was shorter here, cut and shaped into a dark bob that might have been a wig, her face washed out by the flash, her bare arms bony and milk white. Simon wanted to help his sister, but he could never stick with the project for very long. He'd been less than three when his mother died, and so he'd experienced her early death primarily as a kind of echo contained and transmitted within the character of his father, more as a part of Michael than as the passing away of a separate, discrete human being. Looking at the photos seemed to give Amelia a fierce, weepy sort of happiness, but it was depressing for him, and not in a cathartic way.

“I'm sorry about what happened to her,” Maria said.

“I was very little. I barely knew her.”

“I meant Amelia.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“You were close with her.”

“That doesn't sound like a question.”

“It's what the newspaper articles said.”

“We spent a lot of time together. But then, so do most siblings.”

“Which doesn't make what you had worth anything less.”

“No.”

“And I'm sure it didn't make it any easier when she was gone.”

He closed his eyes, all the familiar, awful images pushing up against his lids. “Have you ever seen a dead body?”

“Yeah.” The answer was immediate.

“What about somebody who drowned?”

“No.”

“You'd think the skin would be pale. Bleached. At least that's what I thought.” He opened his eyes. “But it's not like that. After a few days in the water, the skin turns black. Dark purple. Like a bruise covering the entire body. The person becomes swollen and bloated.”

She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “I'm sorry you saw that.”

“I didn't have to go to the morgue. My father could've identified her by himself—they didn't need me. I chose to be there.”

“Why?”

“I knew it would be horrible,” he said. “Even if I didn't know exactly how she would look, I knew it would be horrible. So I went as penance. Because I was alive and she wasn't.” He'd never talked about these things with anybody before, not even his father, and it was strange to hear his private thoughts suddenly exposed, like flower bulbs or squint-eyed moles, pale and moist and unaccustomed to sunlight or scrutiny. He felt naked, vulnerable. He'd said enough for this morning; he didn't want to talk about Amelia anymore. “What about your family? Is what you told me before true?”

Maria looked down, frowning.

“About your parents, I mean.”

She sighed. “Part of it.”

“Which part?”

“I lied about my father. I have no idea where he is or what he does, I've never known him. But my mother is dead. Just like yours.”

He pictured the death certificate. “How old were you when it happened?” He hoped he sounded interested in the answer for its own sake, rather than as a test of her truthfulness.

“Thirteen.”

He could feel her withdrawing from him again, turning her attention inward. “How did she die?” he asked softly.

She turned away from him, squinting at the bright window. “Simon.”

“Yeah?”

“Don't push it.”

He chewed and swallowed a final bite of steak and eggs, then excused himself to go outside and smoke a cigarette. He sat on the bench in front of the restaurant, the French bulldogs sniffing his ankles. He got up, walked to the curb, turned around. Through the window's glare, he could see Maria in profile. She bent over one of her three plates, cutting into the croissant sandwich, raising the egg-dripping morsel to her mouth. She savored her bite with almost comical relish, as though she were starring in a commercial, an advertisement, not for a brand of food but for, perhaps, a national airline, a nation itself, a way of life. She put her fork down and sipped from her coffee in that pensive, theatrical way rare in actual life: the thumb and forefinger of her free hand bracing the rim of the cup as she brought it to her lips. She'd let the waiter clear Simon's plate, and if he didn't know better, he would think, from where he stood, that she was dining alone, and happy to be. In less than a week, she'd gone from being barely able to walk to this, the satiated woman in the window. It was a happy change, of course, but he couldn't help wondering what she would need him for now. He tried to suppress this sort of thinking, to not let it ruin the unexpected pleasure of sharing his past with her, but it seeped up into his thoughts anyway, like toxic groundwater. The old jealousy, the old possessiveness. He remembered suddenly that he was supposed to have dinner with his father in Rockaway Beach that night. What could he possibly tell Michael about his life right now that wasn't a complete lie? He sucked at the last of his cigarette, tossed it aside, and rejoined Maria at the table to find that she'd already paid for their meal with a few bills peeled from a thick wad in the back pocket of her jeans.