October 12 - A summer memory

I never liked going back home after that.

“When will you come?” Mom would ask, but I would invariably make up excuses. Work was this, Dave’s business kept him busy at that, the kids, while they… you understand. Kids were a great excuse, even though Janie and Matt’s lives were infinitely simpler than my own.

“When will you come?” Mom would pester, and I held the phone with disinterest away from my ear, letting out a rhythmic “um hmm” wherever appropriate, but not really listening to her stories of which neighbors had adopted a puppy and which had just seen their last child move off to college. (The horrors! her tone seemed to say. Empty nesters!)

It was a Sunday morning when I received a different kind of phone call. It was funny how I knew, even just listening to the ring. It was not that the phone rang any differently. It didn’t let out a siren’s blare or a shrill tea-kettle whistle, or a maniacal jackal’s laughter. It was still just an ordinary phone ring. But somehow, I knew before Dave’s hand found the receiver.

“Hello?” he mumbled, still half asleep. He thrust the receiver onto my pillow. “Babe, it’s your mom.” Dave had never taken to calling my parents Mom and Dad, even after eighteen years of marriage.

“Mom?” I asked, sitting up, understanding that the news meant sitting propped against my pillow, not lying languidly on it.

“Debra. We need you to come home.”

I yawned. “Mom, you know we can’t. I’m running this new case at work – big client – and the kids, the kids! You should see Janie and Matt’s schedules!” What an easy excuse it was, to be a parent.

“You don’t understand,” Mom said through the phone. “We need you to…”

“Mom, you heard what I said, we need…”

“Your father has cancer!”

The yell was brutal. It shattered a Sunday morning.

I packed a bag and booked the next flight to Phoenix. “You want me to come?” Dave asked for the tenth time, hovering over my shoulder like a thought bubble. I brushed him aside, said it by rote: “You need to stay here and look after the kids.” The truth was, I didn’t want anyone else to see what I was going to see. I knew, just like I knew when I heard that ring on the phone.

It felt strange to land in Phoenix, after ten years away. The dry heat scratched my skin, made my body thirst for the humidity of a New England summer. The house was still the same, white adobe with blue-trimmed window casings, but the yard looked different. Of course it was different, I scolded myself. Mom wouldn’t have kept it the same for ten years. The prickly cacti lined my walk to the front door. I knocked, a stranger at the stoop.

‘”Iced tea?” Mom asked, instead of saying hello, because hello felt too strange after ten years.

“Iced tea would be great,” I allowed.

Dad was sitting in the living room, his feet up on a sofa, and he started to rise when he saw me.

“Debra!” he called out in a voice that had once been a deep bass. This sounded like a wheeze, a sniffle, a sigh.

“Dad,” I said. I sat on the chair next to him, pressed his body back down against the leather expecting a fight, but his flesh gave no resistance, melted back into the cushions. “Dad how are you?” It was the wrong question.

“I am a step away from Death!” he chuckled as if it were some merry joke whose punch-line I had missed. “But He hasn’t tripped me over the threshold yet.” I laughed feebly alongside him. I turned at the tap on my shoulder, took the iced tea that Mom offered silently. The ice crackled as I lifted it to my mouth for a sip. When I turned back, Dad was asleep.

“He does that,” Mom explained, and I could tell it frightened her. “Falls asleep between one sentence and the next. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked, accusatory. Mom shook her head.

“Would you have come?” She left me there, watching Dad’s drooling, snoring face. He looked old, I realized. Wrinkled like a prune. I held his hand.

In the morning, Dad wasn’t in the house.

“We had to call for the ambulance first thing,” Mom explained. “His blood pressure… alarming…” She choked around her sentence and pushed herself back from the kitchen counter. “I’m going to the hospital, you’ll come?”

Of course I would come. I thought of phoning Dave and the kids, but then thought better of it.

Dad was in a room with beeping monitors. He looked lifeless, pale against the white sheets, and I thought wryly that Death had brought him right up to the doorstep this time.

“Daddy?” I said, using the affectionate term that hadn’t crossed my lips in over twenty years.

“Angel Cake,” he said right back.

We were silent for a long time.

“Do you remember that summer?” I asked, because it was the only thing that made sense to say in that moment. “When you taught me to swim?”

Dad laughed, wheezed, rather.

“Taught you to swim!” he cackled. “Threw you in was more like it.”

We were at our neighbor’s pool, one of those dry, dusty summer days that no amount of iced tea or air conditioning or ice cream could shake from your bones. The sun slammed onto our heads, and the ladies fanned themselves with the edges of their caftans, and the husbands drank ice cold beers one after the other until the bottles made a pattern around the rim of the swimming pool. The other kids were swimming blissfully, splashing in the seventy degree liquid while I sweltered in the one-hundred degree dry.

“Go on,” Mom scolded, but I stubbornly shook my head, as always. Ten years old and too afraid to swim. Mom threw up her hands, addressing the neighbors, or the empty beer bottles, or whoever would listen. “A coward, this girl! She’ll never learn.” I bit my lip and continued to sweat. Mom wouldn’t stop moaning about it. “Afraid of this, afraid of that…” the words floated to me, until Dad, always so silent, stood from his lounge chair with a loud, “God dammit already, Maria.” He strode to me across the patio, picked me up in his beefy arms, and heaved me into the deep end.

With a gurgling gasp, I rushed towards the surface for air, spitting and choking,

“Help!” I screamed, while the neighborhood kids watched in horror and the mothers froze with their caftans in mid-sweep.

Another father took a step forward, but Dad thrust out an arm, stopped him cold. “Don’t,” he said. “This way she’ll learn.” I floundered some more, sank, watched Dad grow into a shimmering figure through a layer five feet deep. On impulse, I heaved myself to the surface once more. This time, gasping for air, I stayed there, treading water.

Dad nodded smugly. “You see? You give her no choice, she’s not afraid anymore. She confronts her fear.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, then the neighbors around the pool broke into a round of tentative applause. I continued to cough, at which point someone else’s dad, thankfully, heaved me out.

“You remember, Dad?” I asked now, pressing his hand against the hospital bed, and I could tell from his soft chuckle that he remembered.

“You told me not to be afraid.”

“You weren’t afraid,” he said. “You just needed a push.”

I nodded. He looked at me, looked around for Mom, didn’t see her and sighed. “Don’t be afraid to push me now. I know when it’s time to dive in.”

October 11 - It was as far as I could go

Richard’s mouth moved, forming words as the dust floated past his lips, but I couldn’t hear over the roar of the jeep.

“What?” I shouted back, leaning forward.

“The village is just up ahead!” he said, louder this time, and I nodded my understanding and tried to settle back against the seat again, my bottom coming half off the cushion with each rotation of the wheels. The knuckles were white where my hand gripped one black bar of the jeep, afraid I might be flung onto the sand at any moment if I relaxed my hold. The landscape outside the car was alien to me, like nothing I had seen in real life, or pictures, or TV shows, or movies. It was brown, all brown – light brown, dark brown, ecru, sienna, chocolate; the browns bleeding into one another until I would have given anything for a flash of color, a red flower, a green leaf, a woman’s embroidered dress. Even the cast to the sky was hazy, brown leeching into the blue, and the white clouds stained with soot. And it was hot, more suited to baking cookies than to allowing human life forms to thrive.

But then, humanity was not thriving here in the Sudan.

“Have you been before?” asked James in his British accent next to me. James was a medic with Doctors Without Borders, but he didn’t look the part, his brown hair swept back at a jaunty angle from his forehead, his features open and young, with his small dainty nose and his pixie smile. James didn’t talk much about the kinds of patients he had treated in the region, but when he did, his ready grin faded and his bright blue eyes clouded over like a passing dust storm. “Sometimes, as a doctor, you don’t save life. You do the best you can to ease death.” I nodded solemnly because I had been reading the newspaper reports from back in the States, and I knew of the atrocities being committed in the name of religion or color, or in no name at all, here in Darfur.

“No,” I responded to James’ query now. “Never. This will be my first trip in the field.” He nodded solemnly, the impish impulse to jest gone from his face again. I had never seen James look this bleak back at headquarters. I resumed my study of the landscape and reassured myself that all would be fine. I had come a long way from home for this opportunity, working towards my anthropology dissertation. It had taken a long time to convince my thesis advisor that the trip to Darfur was necessary, to speak to the women who bore the brunt of conflict, whose bodies became the symbols of war and nature and country. It was one thing to analyze and sift through the material on war and gender-based violence in the cold, removed halls of a Morningside Heights’ campus, but I knew I needed these women’s voices to make things complete. I had come a long way for this, I reminded myself, and I wasn’t going to chicken out now.

“Prepare yourself,” James sighed, and I wasn’t sure if he meant the words for me or for himself. “It will be horrific.”

I didn’t even realize what I was seeing at first, the cluster of low, humped objects looking like so many more sand dunes among the sand and the dirt we had been passing for four hours. I blinked and wiped grit from the corner of my eye and then gave a low cry.

“We’re there!” I shouted with relief. Richard looked back over his shoulder in concern. There was no relief on his expression to match my own.

“We’re there. It looks like they’ve been here before us.” He meant the janjaweed

I blinked again and more realities opened up. Not just a low cluster of tents, or wooden pens with a bleating, skeletal goat, but piles of soot still hot and steaming, more smoke rising from somewhere further back. The jeep had slowed so the engine let out only a gurgle now instead of a roar, and a group of women fanning back the last of what must have been a bonfire not long passed watched the vehicle pass with dead, uninterested eyes.

The jeep shuddered to a halt, and almost before the wheels stopped their motion, James was leaping over the open-sided door, his medical kit in one hand, and already shouting orders to his assistant, who had ridden squished in the front between the driver and Richard. Richard, an envoy from the Refugee Committee for Women and Children had exited already as well, more slowly. He knew this village and its people intimately, he had told me, returning to this spot constantly. They had been lucky so far, the last attack nearly five months in their past, some of the young boys from a few months ago nearly big enough to be deemed men now , and it was hard to find places with full-grown men these days. The women’s wounds were healing into puckered scars, and if the memories still terrified, well, they were memories, the women said to one another, and they would do as they had always done. Pick up and rebuild. The village had been lucky, Richard had said…

I looked around. Had been lucky. The attack couldn’t have been more than three hours in the past. Richard had his head bent low, talking to a young woman who looked no more than seventeen, balancing a baby at her breast. The woman glanced at me, lowered her head, nodded towards a tent. The baby was eerily silent as she ducked inside, where other babies in happier places normally wailed and howled.

“Go with Halima,” Richard told me. “I’ll help James out here. I’ve told her who you are and why you’re here. She wants you to see something.”

I nodded uncertainly, and ducked carefully within the low enclosure of the tent, one of the few structures to stand with no discernable damage. My eyes adjusted to the dim light and I saw that it had quickly become a refuge. Five women were spread out on the ground, while other women huddled over them, talking rapidly but quietly. All eyes looked at me when I entered, fear for a moment quickly flashing to relief and a return to the business at hand.

“She wants you to hear her story,” the girl – Halima – said to me. I nodded again, my Hausa just enough to make out the gist of what she said. I knelt by the side of another young girl – this one probably only fifteen. She looked at me and tried to wet cracked lips with her tongue, but the thin flecks of saliva she left behind had little result.

“Suad,” Halima told me.

“Hello, Suad,” I said gently.

Suad’s face was hideously burned, and a wave of nausea hit me at the sight; the flesh around her eyes and cheeks was mere tatters of black, but somehow her full pink lips had remained. She lifted a charred hand, only four fingers left – an old wound, I saw with relief, long since turned to a wrinkled stub – lifted the hand and gestured feebly. I rushed to her side and took hold of the maimed hand without thinking.

“They burned my husband, you understand?” Her words were soft, too soft for my rudimentary Hausa. Halima translated and I nodded my comprehension.

“When they rode over the hill, five hours ago, they said to my husband, ‘we want you to watch.’ They held a rifle to his chest while they raped me, each in his turn...” So coldly, she said it, so coldly, so I knew it was not the first time. The woman heaved a rasping sigh.

“And when they were done –“ Done. Like she was a meal that had been finished. “- they killed him anyway. Not with the rifle to his chest. With flames. I tried to smother the flames but I couldn’t. That is how…” She reached with her good hand, her five-fingered hand, up to her ruined cheeks. I nodded, salty tears scraping against the sunburn on my own.

“Tell my story,” Saud commanded. She closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought she had passed, then saw the even rise and fall of her chest. She would only sleep. I would call James in here in a moment to see to her burns.

I gently squeezed Suad’s hand, felt her fingers give a feeble pulse back. My eyes clouded over.

“Excuse me a moment,” I begged the women, who all looked up in more surprise at my exit than at my entrance.

I made it outside the tent, and around the corner. I saw James kneeling over the body of a burned, bloody woman, a pool of red at her feet. They would have cut her open, after they raped her; I understood this now too, in a way that I hadn’t when I only read the op-eds about it in the paper. I dashed to the other side of the tent, fell to my knees there and vomited.

It was as far as I could go.

October 10 - In those days...

In those days, they had gone to the same café on the corner of their street every Sunday for brunch. Inevitably, she would order the pecan-crusted French toast, and he would order the Eggs Benedict. They would bring along the thick stack of the Sunday Times, purchased at the deli next door, and dissect the innocuous sections until they were left only with those that mattered. Inevitably, he would begin with the Business section, she with Sports; she was always entering the various betting pools in her office, and depending upon the season, would avidly dissect the latest news on basketball, football, or hockey. In the summers, they sat outside on the patio, where the mosaic-tile tabletops matched smartly with the blue metal of the chairs, and the hot summer sunshine would soak into their backs while they sipped at iced coffees white with cream. When the seasons turned to colder climes, they retreated indoors behind the broad panes of glass, so they could still observe the world strolling by down the sidewalks, but were protected from the elements by the layer of glass. They wrapped their fingers about cups of hot cocoa and smiled up at one another every once in a while to indicate that a bit of whipped cream had attached itself to upper lip or tip of nose.

They would walk their dog together both before and after work, shivering but wrapping each other in scarves with laughter as though they were birthday packages, in the early hours before dawn stained the horizon, or – still laughing – during the hour just after work, strolling past the happy hour set. Bruno, their spunky black Labrador, loved to poke his head into the patio gates of the outdoor restaurants in the summertime, disturbing those Happy Hour-goers, whining as though he, too, wanted a sip of the merriment, but no one ever minded. They saw the smiling couple and the eagerly nuzzling dog, and they forgot annoyance for a moment and patted Bruno’s head, and the couple would move on.

They would cook almost every night, shopping once a week at the green market at Union Square, even in winter, eating seasonally; root vegetables for stews in December, tart apples just fallen from the tree in the fall, spears of white asparagus and plump, multi-colored tomatoes in August. They would handle the items, carefully selecting the best ones; they knew the farmers by name, weighed out the earthy-smelling produce in little brown paper bags and then walked home arm in arm imagining what they might cook that night with their bounty. Almost inevitably, the cooking process would grow messy, and a béchamel sauce or a whipped cream dessert or a drizzle of honey would put other things on their minds, and they would forget about cooking for a while.

This was the rhythm to their seasons, each melting or thawing or hardening into the next, but always greeted with the tingle of excitement that accompanies the new, and yet the open arms extended to an old friend.

It was winter in their very café, Bruno asleep at home, because it was too cold to tie him to the street meter outside, while they sipped at hot chocolate, when she hit him with. Or, he was sipping at hot chocolate, as was their habit. She had ordered a latte. A latte? he had asked. She looked at him as though his words were peculiar. A person can want new things, she explained. She seemed to stew over this idea as she wrapped her fingers around the blue ceramic mug, as if reading some sort of oracle in the way the steamed milk patterns swirled.

I am leaving, she announced suddenly, breaking ten years of hot cocoa sipping and laughter with that one sentence.

You are running errands, he asked desperately. Leaving only the café, only that. Leaving only for the moment, not for a life.

She shook her head. You don’t understand. I am leaving.

She put her unfinished latte down on the counter and he watched her walk out, waiting for her to trip, but she didn’t, muffled by her overcoat so he didn’t even recognize the body underneath.

She was packed and moved out by the next afternoon.

He still lived in the same neighborhood, but he never went to that café anymore. Never even walked past. Bruno had gone with her, and he had never bothered to get another pet, except one misguided attempt with a newt. When he found the green lizard belly up after leaving town for one weekend, he threw the terrarium into the garbage bin on the corner and washed his hands of the pet business.

It was an October evening, and he made his way to the bar one block away. He liked this particular bar because the lighting was dim, but still bright enough to read by, the clientele populous enough so he could blend in and disappear, but not so crowded as to disturb. He didn’t think of her every day anymore – it had been long enough that he was down to thinking of her once a month. Maybe twice if it was a change of season and the green market grocers hawked the season’s new fare. He was pleased to note that he had even lost track of how long it had been. Seven years? Eight years? But tonight, on his way out the door, he caught sight of himself in the big stand mirror, muffled in his overcoat as she had been muffled in hers the day she walked away. He shuddered, not for the early autumn air. He always brought along a book to read – he was working his way through the 100 Great Classics, at the moment, after which he intended to start reading obscure, contemporary authors, but he found himself looking up constantly from the pages, the words swimming before his eyes.

Am I drunk? he wondered. No, he knew that wasn’t the case, because he had only had one glass of Barbara d’Asti, and normally it took at least three.

She had fallen in love with another man; that was what burned. He had read the wedding announcement in the Sunday Times yesterday. He held his hand low over the candle on the bartop, lowering his palm as much as he could stand. The thought of her married to another man, in love with another man, made him burn inside, so he held his hand low over the candle so the flesh could feel what his heart couldn’t handle.

How did I end up at this bar alone? he wondered. He looked down at the page again, but the nonsensical words stared back up.

Another, sir? asked the bartender, who knew him well.

What? No. He pushed his stool back. I’m not feeling so well. Just the bill please. We’ll change things up tonight.

Very good, sir.

October 9 - Chocolates are my weakness

The well-heeled set of New York had arrived for the evening. The invitation said six to nine p.m., but everyone knew that no one was showing up before at least eight, and that the drinks would still be poured and the cuisine still served long past when the ninth bell tolled. It was a rainy evening, the first evening cool enough to merit the title of autumnal, but the society ladies didn’t let that stop them from wearing dresses that stopped at upper-thigh (better yet to say, stopped where their bikini waxes stopped), or their strapless ensembles, or their low-cut negligee numbers. The men were in suits of course; that was the generally accepted uniform. Button-down shirts, collars stiff and starched, ties eccentric and witty since this was the one place where men could display personality in their wardrobes. They all had the same trimmed haircut, the same clean-shaven face. No L train mustaches or soul patches here.

Jamie did not want to come to the party, because he hated this kind of scene. “The women want to fuck you for your money or use you for your money so they can eat foie gras at an It restaurant. It’s as simple as that,” he had told his friend, Jacob, at the gym on Monday. Jacob looked at him blankly.

“What’s wrong with that?”

Jamie was meant to go because his father was in the insurance business – high end insurance, Ronald Bollinger would explain. Lamborghinis, Harry Winston jewelry, casks of wine aged fifty years in a dusty cellar somewhere in the Burgundy region, watches the size of a postcard that adorned the wrist of a hedge fund manager. These were the things that Ronald Bollinger insured.

“Like J. Lo’s ass,” Jamie explained to a girl at a party once. “You know how they say it’s insured for ten million? That’s the kind of thing my dad insures.”

This party was meant to entice the rich, who already owned their riches, into buying more of the very same thing so they could claim to be even richer. Jamie would normally have passed up the scene, gone to the Village to listen to jazz at Small’s, or to hear a musician at Joe’s Pub, or soak up the scene while watching sports at one of countless sports bars where the bartenders knew his name and his drink (Jack and coke).

“Miranda will be there,” his mother had insinuated that morning, her winking eyes a nudge in the rib as she spooned scrambled eggs onto his plate. Jamie hated that he was driven to living back home, but he refused to take hand-outs from his parents while waiting for his music to be discovered – right now, he and three buddies played jazz one night a week at a small space on Prince Street, but that was it, and it wasn’t enough to pay the bills. Or rent. Somehow, it didn’t seem like a hand-out from his parents to stay at their home instead of accepting their cash for rent, given that he was sleeping in his childhood bedroom which still had posters of Madonna on the walls in her Like a Virgin years, and blue sheets with race cars around the border that must have been purchased when he was ten. He still purchased his own food (usually pizza from the joint on the corner that charged $2.50 for a slice of cheese plus a can of soda) and did his own laundry (three dollars for two loads in quarters, if he used the washroom on the second floor of the building; ten dollars if he sent it to the Laundromat a black away). So it wasn’t really a hand-out, but the downside was that, after four years of having escaped at college, Jamie was back under his parents’ purview and back in their lifestyle.

“Miranda will be there,” Monica Bollinger stressed, as she scooped out those scrambled eggs (okay, Jamie hadn’t paid for those – his mother liked to buy free-range even though they were two dollars more expensive because it made her feel like she was an activist. “Global warming, darling. Global warming.”), and laid two strips of bacon alongside the yellow mass on his plate.

“Oh?” he had said casually in response.

“Yes,” gushed Monica, ignoring his lack of interest. “Miranda will be at this soiree tonight” – Monica liked using French terms, even when she was unaware of the root words behind them – “and I tell you. I saw that girl at the Met just last week, and my how she’s grown.”

Tits, Monica meant. Miranda had grown tits since the last time Jamie saw her in the twelfth grade. Which meant silicone ones.

The Bollinger’s arrived in a car – not a taxi, a car, hired for the night; the driver would wait somewhere around the block, napping while the rain tapped against the windshield, for the two hours that they were inside – at 8.05 p.m. The crowd had just begun to thicken, a watery sauce set to simmer over the stove that was just now congealing into a pudding. The color black predominated in choice of wardrobe. Ronald offered his arm to Monica and they promptly forgot the son they had dragged along.

Jamie stood with his hands in his pockets, staring with disinterest at the car that was the showpiece of the evening, a new specimen unveiled by Porsche. It was a shimmering, silver blue, black leather interior, price up on request written in small letters on the placard that boasted of its top-out speed (187 miles per hour) and other eccentric features.

No doubt Monica would forget all about her crusade against Global Warming when she saw the thing. For now, Jamie ascertained with a glimpse, his mother was too busy laughing like a bleating sheep while she pretended to enjoy the jokes of his father’s business partner. Mickey was there with his fourth trophy wife (the others had aged too much for their metal to shine, tarnished and rusted, and relegated to the top shelf labeled “Exes.”)

“Isn’t she beautiful?” asked a voice next to him.

For a moment, Jamie thought the newcomer meant his mother, or the fourth Trophy, then realized she was staring lovingly at the car as though it were a newborn kitten. She held a glass of champagne in one hand absently, so it leaned precariously like the Tower of Pisa and looked on the point of spilling onto the gleaming floor tiles.

“It’s a car,” Jamie shrugged, stressing the pronoun. The woman turned and glared at him as though what he had said was infinitely insensitive, and it took him a moment to recognize the face of the girl he had gone to grade school, high school with, because Monica was right; Miranda’s bosom had been augmented impressively, straining against a black top that looked suited for a boudoir, and detracting from the face that had once been pretty. He coughed and faced forward again, suddenly more interested in exactly what color silver the manufacturers had chosen for the Porsche.

“This party’s divine, isn’t it?” Miranda continued, ignoring his insensitivity. “Have you tried the samples? This champagne. Divine.”

She had used the word twice. He refrained from pointing out that ‘divine’ was normally reserved for Greek gods, manna, and intervention.

“They even have samples from that new chocolate boutique on Fifth Avenue. Chocolate truffles with honey inside.” Her eyes popped in ecstasy. “Chocolates are my weakness.”

Jamie’s eyebrows shot up. He could think of a dozen items to add to Miranda’s list of weaknesses. It was clear in that one moment how little Miranda had changed since their graduation, and how much he had.

As if on cue, an obsequious server came around with a silver tray proffered at waist level.

“Chocolate truffles?” he asked. Miranda gave a squeal like a piglet, snatching two. Jamie watched in horror as she popped both into her mouth at once, her cheeks puffed out like a chipmunks. Miranda smiled a chocolate-y smile in apology.

“I haven’t eaten all day,” she chimed, as though this was an accomplishment. “I’ve earned my truffles!”

The waiter held out his tray, but Jamie shook his head apologetically. The waiter frowned, moved off through the crowd.

October 8 - Losing Control

The headline was gruesome. Man commits suicide; jumps off thirty-two story building.

May shuddered, the newspaper trembling in her hand as she sat at her kitchen table sipping tea. The setting felt too serene for such a dreadful headline; the yellow painted walls, the floral curtains, the canary that John had gotten her as a birthday gift who let out a peep from his cage in the corner every once in a while, usually when she turned Coltrane music on the stereo, as though the canary liked to sing along. It was herbal tea that she drank, a blend of jasmine and eucalyptus that was said to calm the nerves (and perhaps boost the female libido), and she was glad now that it settled her stomach as her breakfast heaved in protest against the story.

Matt Dresden had been 33 years old, a father of two and twice divorced. Wall Street broker, recently involved with a merger that fell through. Suspicion that anguish over the case was behind his reckless last flight.

May ruminated on how, in the moment, falling and flying were the same thing. You’d never really know, until the moment you hit the ground.

Of course, by then it was too late.

“What a dramatic way to do such a thing,” she mused aloud. After all, if suicide was the rejection of life, why the need to end it with drama? He would never know the aftermath of his actions (this thought, of course, precluded the assumption of an afterlife or ghosts), so why the theatrics? If one was to commit suicide, didn’t it make more sense to do so subtly and obscurely; it felt like it was meant to be a dreadfully private thing, done by overdosing on aspirin, quickly swallowing three bottles-full so that the only evidence were plastic bins in a wicker trash can, or slitting ones wrist in a bathtub, so the blood washed down the drain. Then the clean up would be easier.

May shuddered again. These were not the thoughts she meant to be having over tea, yet somehow these kinds of stories always crept into her morning newspaper, overriding the tales of scholastic achievements or homegrown efforts for the World Wildlife Fund. Her friend, Anna, had just begun volunteering at the home for the aging – that was the new, politically correct term. Home for the aging, we say now, not nursing home, Anna stressed with a tsk tsk clicking of her tongue; surely Anna’s selfless efforts merited an article as much as a man who wouldn’t be awake the next morning to read of his antics. Could it be that the man had hungered for fame, even in death? In which case, he had still possessed at least this one appetite, and shouldn’t that have spurred his desire to live a little longer?

“There are better ways to find fame,” she chided Matt Dresden’s black-and-white photo. It was a picture of him dated three years ago, smiling into the camera on a fishing outing with what looked like a brother, a giant fish of some sort held between them. She wondered if he hadn’t smiled since then, which was why they had to dig three years into the archives to find something printable. When was the last decent picture taken of her and John?

She glanced at the fridge. The one of her and her husband at her cousin Sabine’s wedding; they looked smiley and happy that night, her in a red cocktail dress, him with a matching red bowtie. That was – gosh – from four years ago. May stood abruptly before she could think about photographs further, shoving aside the thought while she mashed her uneaten oatmeal down the disposal, and for awhile her hands were busy washing out the tea mug, and toweling dry John’s breakfast dishes. He always made himself toast with jelly on Mondays and Thursdays, an English muffin burnt to a crisp the other days of the week, but he never bothered to put his dish in the sink, a way, perhaps, to remind May of his presence when she found her way downstairs hours later – too many hours later, and sometimes the only evidence she had all day that her husband was still alive.

May giggled when Anna suggested perhaps she should wake earlier.

“There are so few points to my day, it’s easier when it’s shorter.”

Fewer hours until John came home.

Would the body have made a dent in the pavement when it landed?

“Stop!” May yelled at herself, mad that the article still crowded out the other thoughts in her brain. Soapy water and toweling dry with the new ivory handtowels she had bought. These were normal, comforting things. May and John lived a normal existence, and they were content to live a normal existence, right? She always announced to anyone who would listen – her eccentric sister who worked as a photographer in Madrid, John’s coworkers at the investment firm, friends living down the street who lived out the exact same ho-hum – she announced this fact to anyone and everyone who would listen.

Repeat something often enough…

It was a normal existence in a normal town where people did normal things and didn’t launch themselves like rockets off of thirty-two story buildings. They didn’t commit murders or rob banks, or stay awake past midnight. They watched the opening monologue of the Late Show before bed and tittered over the slightly naughty jokes. They certainly didn’t stray far from home except on organized vacation trips, and they never forgot to send field trip money into school with their children on the day of grand outings, or cupcakes on the occasion of a birthday. Or half-birthday. This was the kind of town that celebrated half-birthdays. Not the kind of town where people stumbled in late because they had gone out drinking for hours after work.

Surely not…

May set another pot to boil, hoping the ordinary act would drive Matt Dresden and his last great leap from her mind. The canary gave a peep, a car swished by down the street. She could hear children’s laughter, probably the Arkin family next door. They had just had a fourth, but Amanda Arkin still found time to play in the driveway with the other three – all under six years old. No day-time schooling yet to free up Amanda’s hands, not until Nate began kindergarten in the fall.

The tea kettle was hissing now, the water making that sizzling noise that presaged its imminent readiness. Or maybe it was the burner that made that noise, or perhaps the way the bubbles careened into the metal sides of the kettle. May’s skin began to itch. She had an image that she was a bubbling cauldron, that each of her thoughts was another popping bubble, bursting like a puss-filled wound to the surface, exploding open only to be replaced by dozens of others, shimmering up, swimming rapidly to the surface, crowding one another, pushing each other. What did it feel like, in there in the pot? She leaned in close so the steam caressed her cheeks, leaned further until it stung. She imagined herself submerged in boiling water, the bubbles scalding her flesh, turning soft white to angry pink. Maybe that was how Matt Dresden felt when he hit the pavement.

“Stop, stop!” she screamed. A lawn mower started up in the yard across the street.

It was eleven. She had eight hours until John got home.

Except John wasn’t home eight hours later. Not that she had expected it, not really. She heard the cars of the other working parents coming down the street, the headlights flitting across her window panes before leaving them dull and dark again. She heard the front doors open and close. She smelled the pot roasts, the veal cutlets, the stews. Caleb Arkin came home and swooped his children into a hug that managed to capture the three walking ones all in one go, before he turned to bestow a kiss on the forehead of the fourth, the gurgling newborn. And pinch Amanda’s ass. There might soon be a fifth.

Amanda grimaced, and May let the curtain fall so they wouldn’t see her watching through the window.

“You are not surprised,” she told herself. Because she wasn’t. John’s dishes – his toast on Mondays and Thursdays, his black English muffins on the other days of the week – this was the most she felt she knew of her husband in the past… four years? Four years, since Sabine’s wedding. They needed to take a new picture together.

May pulled out the wine bottle she had bought yesterday. She went in to the liquor store on Mondays, and bought seven bottles. Every Monday. She hoped the store keeper thought she entertained a good deal.

She would confront him when he got home, this time.

“You’ve been out drinking,” she would say, when he stumbled in at four in the morning.

No leg to stand on; she’d been drinking, too.

“You’re having an affair,” she would say. Ridiculous; she had no proof, and didn’t believe it anyway.

“I miss you,” she wanted to say. Not a chance she’d be so weak.

There were slower ways to kill oneself than with one jump.

May had her third glass of the night. The lights were winking out in the other houses, and the red wine made her warmer than she’d been all day.

Carefully, she stood up from the kitchen table and walked up the stairs to the second floor landing. The canary watched her go.

She pulled down the ladder to the attic, a process involving a few heavy grunts and a scratch along her left forearm.

She scrambled up the ladder, giggling, excited now, slowed only by the wine glass in one hand. She took another gulp before setting it on the wooden planking of the attic floor and unlatching the window that led to the roof.

The neighborhood looked so different from the rooftop! She could see the backyards, laid out like a patchwork quilt of green squares. She could see chimney s with birds nests tucked into the bricks, see the leaves cluttering the eaves of neighbors who didn’t bother with upkeep as diligently as she and John did. Had? She giggled again, and walked closer to the edge.

“Flying and falling are really the same thing,” she told the neighborhood. She inched closer, so the toes of her feet met the air on the other side of the roof. She dipped her toes like a teenager testing the water of a chlorinated swimming pool.

May frowned.

“I’m losing control,” she said. And began to weep.

The canary watched a twenty-something woman come back down the stairs, and pour herself a fourth glass, a fifth, watched her safely fall asleep with her arms crossed before her on the tabletop for a pillow.