The Whole World Over (64 page)

"And what will you do once you get here?" he asked. "You're planning
to quit your job?"

"No," she said. "No, I'll go back. I just—"

Just what? Just want to have your motherly cake and eat it too?
he
thought, before recognizing how hilariously apt that would sound. "It's
okay, Greenie," he said. "We'll talk tomorrow morning. We'll be fine,
we really will."

After he hung up, Alan realized that he could not remember the last
difficult conversation in which he had been the one to reassure her.

In bed, in the dark, he listened a long time to the never-ending sirens.
It had become the sound of extreme mourning, but you had to see it as
hopeful, too.
Let each siren be a rescue,
he thought, as close to prayer as
he'd ever come,
someone pulled from the wreckage and restored to a
family.
He imagined an aerial view of the city, the city as river upon river
of throbbing red lights. Ironically, the only people up there to see it
would be fighter pilots, tucked tight in their armored cockpits. When
Alan listened hard enough, sometimes he heard them, too.

EVERYONE WANTED TO GIVE BLOOD
. Or clean socks. Or blankets.
Or musical entertainment. Or, as a last resort, money. In an epidemic of
survivor's guilt, people were haplessly desperate to give. On Seventh
Avenue, donors whose blood was not needed, and who knew it, lined
up anyway along the walls of the hospital. Cooks at the James Beard
House, across the street, piled tables with pastries and fruit to feed these
superfluous donors.

Alan saw the first newly flaunted flag on Thursday—safety-pinned to
the backpack of a roller-skating teenage boy with shredded jeans and
fuchsia hair. Graffiti became patriotic, public spaces religious. Bus shelters
were shrines, papered with pleas that reminded Alan, inescapably,
uncomfortably, of the missing-pet notices he posted for Saga. On Friday,
when the rain came down in torrents, when George's school resumed, the
candles guttered and collapsed, the ink on the notices ran, the photographs
of the lost people buckled and blurred.

The air had begun to smell not just foul but ominous. Alan believed
the smell was one of burning circuitry and building components, but
others believed it was flesh. Jerry said it smelled much worse in Brooklyn.
Even the wind is a capitalist, mindful of real-estate values. What a
world,
he e-mailed Alan. Alan had not been to Brooklyn since Monday;
he had been looking after George, talking to clients on the phone. When
he returned, said Jerry, there would be more work than ever. City officials
wanted to subsidize therapy for people traumatized by the attacks.

Alan dropped George off at school, where the halls echoed with
absence, and told the teacher he'd be back to pick up his son before
noon. He went home, packed their bags, and took Treehorn for a walk.
After stopping at the bank for cash, he found himself on the northwest
corner of Bank and Hudson, fighting the wind to keep his umbrella
intact as Treehorn strained against the leash, pulling him off balance. He
shouted the dog's name twice, wondering what could be so urgent,
when he heard "There's a good girl. That's my girl."

Saga came toward them from under a café awning, clasping a paper
coffee cup. It was obvious that she had not wanted them to see her.
She was wet, and her clothes looked filthy. If he had been wrong to
think she was homeless the day they met, he had doubts all over again.
To hide her face from Alan, she bent low, petting and murmuring to
Treehorn.

"I like the coffee here," she said to Alan, meekly, when she stood.
She motioned toward the café.

"Saga, you look terrible!" Alan exclaimed. "I'm sorry, but it's the
truth! Are you staying in the city—at Stan's? You don't look like you're
staying anywhere." He held the umbrella over her head, but the gesture
was pointless.

"He's back now," she said. "He got a ride."

Alan ignored the non sequitur. "Why aren't you home, in Connecticut?
Did you get stuck here? You should have come to me!"

She shook her head. "I think my cousin's dead. Well, he must be. I
don't think they're going to forgive me. Even if it isn't my fault."

"Oh Saga, stop talking in riddles, please! Where
are
you staying?"

"Around the corner."

"Let me walk you back there," said Alan. "You need dry clothes, you
need . . . Who are you staying with?"

She shook her head again. "It's just somewhere I stay." No longer
avoiding his eyes, she looked miserable yet defiant.

"Come home with me now," said Alan. "Please."

Saga let him take her arm, which he managed to do by giving up on
the umbrella, which he closed and forced into a pocket of his raincoat.
Almost immediately, it soaked through the lining and then his pants.

He could hear her teeth chattering as they walked along. Just before
they reached Alan's building, she said, "I can't believe he's dead, but I
know he must be."

"Let's talk when we get inside," he said.

"We've been here before, haven't we?" she said as they climbed the
stairs.

Alan stopped to look at her, alarmed. "Many times, Saga. You've
been to my place a few times now." Was she in shock?

She laughed weakly. "No, no. I'm not that bad. I mean, you've rescued
me in the rain before, only then we had the puppies. Including you,
little girl," she said to Treehorn.

"Yes," said Alan, relieved. "That's when we met."

"Oh I know that," said Saga.

THERE WAS INDEED A PECULIAR
déjà vu to that morning: Saga
freshly showered, hair in a towel, wearing clothes abandoned by
Greenie, sitting at Alan's table with a cup of tea, a view of rain pummeling
the neighbors' bushes and tiny plots of flowers. Yet this time, perhaps
because Alan was focused on other things (locking windows,
suspending the paper delivery, changing Sunny's water), she could not
stop talking.

Saga had not returned to Connecticut because, in the trauma of Tuesday,
she'd had a series of phone conversations with her family—mostly
with a spiteful-sounding cousin named Pansy (her name a real-life red
herring if ever there was one). "After everything she accused me of, it's
like suddenly I had nothing to lose," Saga told Alan as they left the
apartment to pick up George and get the car. "I wasn't so afraid of them
anymore."

As a therapist, you were both privileged and condemned to hear the
stories of every conceivable family arrangement under the sun. Saga's
was not so terribly eccentric—a group of highly functional siblings with
a rational parent—yet Alan marveled at the strange symbiosis of the
relationship Saga described with this uncle of hers (the older, imperious
voice on the phone).

For all that he had once impatiently wondered about her, suddenly
Alan knew more than he might wish to know. He worried that she had
begun to see him as a savior, a role he felt unsuited to play for anyone,
even someone he liked as much as he did Saga. But as Jerry used
to say years before, during Alan's training, "Don't worry so damn far
into the future. The future does its own thing without a lot of help
from you."

Alan was glad he'd provided so many toys and other distractions for
George, who sat in the backseat amid books, trucks, stuffed animals,
and half a dozen tapes. Poor Treehorn had squeezed herself down on the
floor. Alan had decided, in part because the aura and the odors of the
city had begun to dig into his soul, that he would comply with Greenie's
wishes and meet her in Maine. He had no intention of staying there for
more than a few days, but perhaps George needed a break from the air
of disaster as well. In the sandbox, Alan had seen some of George's playmates
reenacting the attack itself. And now, after the strangely serendipitous
meeting with Saga, he was glad that he could insist, so logically,
on making sure she got home.

Leaving the city was even more difficult than on the average Friday.
They inched along the West Side Highway, north toward the George
Washington Bridge, for half an hour. George, oblivious to the delay, listened
to
The Lion King
on Alan's Walkman. "Oh I just can't wait to
be king!" he sang along, off-key. In the past few days, whenever George
caught his father with a brooding expression on his face, he would say,
"Hakuna matata, Dad." It made Alan smile every time.

Saga had been quiet for a while, and Alan thought she might be falling
asleep. For the first time in hours, he became preoccupied again with his
fears about what might happen when Greenie finally arrived. So he was
completely unprepared when Saga, there in the traffic jam—and thank
God for once that George's ears were blocked by Disney—confided yet
something else.

"I found out I was pregnant," she said without emotion.

Alan had contemplated changing to a lane that appeared less sluggish.
He stayed where he was. He had to look at Saga. "Saga, you're
pregnant?"

"No. Was. I was pregnant before the accident, when it happened.
Frida told me."

"And you forgot? Is that it? Oh Saga."

"I forgot, but then no one told me. Uncle Marsden and my mother
made everybody promise not to tell me. Maybe my mother would have
told me, but then she died." Saga delivered this news as if it had very
little to do with her.

Alan had a hard time containing his anger. He was about to ask how
the hell anyone could keep this from her—what about her doctors, for
God's sake!—when he realized that the answer was obvious. You didn't
even have to have met this uncle to guess that he'd needed Saga to
remain, or return to being, a little girl.

"You know," Saga said quietly, "maybe that's why David left me.
Maybe not just because he thought I'd be a cripple. Okay, like that
wouldn't be enough!"

"Don't try to make this funny," said Alan. "It isn't funny at all."

She told him then that for a long time she'd felt as if the people
around her were withholding something from her, a particular thing
about her life before. She'd thought it might be that she and her
boyfriend were going to break up anyway. Her voice became barely
audible. "But maybe the opposite was true. Maybe we were going to get
married."

"Saga, this is so hurtful," said Alan. "It's outrageous. No one had the
right to keep any of your life a secret from you."

"I guess they wanted to keep me from being too upset."

Alan could not see her face; she was looking out the window. She
might have been crying, trying to find a moment of privacy. He let her
be. In the backseat, George was doing his best to sound like the evil Scar,
singing along with Jeremy Irons.

One thing was certain: Alan did not relish the thought of meeting
Saga's relatives, which he was likely to do in about an hour—or four,
if the roads did not open up. They sounded like a bunch of narcissistic
jerks, but there was no way Alan would have dropped Saga off at
her doorstep and driven away—not after what she had just told him.

The cars in front of them picked up speed after the toll bridge to the
Bronx. What little conversation he and Saga shared after that was idle
talk about the countryside and responses to jokes that George was now
reading to them from a book called the
Jokelopedia.
("Why
did
Mrs.
Crow have such a huge phone bill?") In less than two hours, they pulled
up in front of Saga's uncle's house. It was a huge shingle house, stark
and gray as the weather. "I'm coming in with you," said Alan. "That's a
den of lions in there."

"I'm no antelope. They can't devour me."

"Well, there's devouring and there's mauling."

Saga looked mournfully at Alan. "They're my family."

"They are, and they aren't," said Alan. "Right now, Saga, they are
Michael's family." What Alan knew, but did not say, was that when she
walked in the door, they would grieve that the one returning was
not
Michael.