After that, she often chose the “party days” as a chance to spend a night in Brooklyn with her father and Dani. She stayed in her teenage bedroom, where nothing had changed: same curtains and quilt, same gooseneck lamp, same stuffed animals slumped like drunks in their dusty chair. If she were to open the desk drawers, she knew she would find her English papers from high school and college—and, dutifully saved by her mother, all the letters Tommy had written home from Vermont.
Dad still picked at his guitar, quietly, absentmindedly, and he liked to play rummy and cribbage. If they attempted Scrabble, he would fall asleep halfway through the game, waiting for his turn. When Tommy asked about his friends, the ones who used to come over on weekends to share their songs, he told her that most of them had left the city long ago. “Your mom and I were the diehards,” he said. “We were so proud of our tenacity. Now look.”
“Hey, I would have hated the suburbs,” she said. “I was proud of you, too.”
He said nothing. He was lonely, plain and simple.
And where did she live now? In the suburbs.
Morty seemed relieved at this solution—relieved of guilt. Perhaps he didn’t want Tommy to see that in fact, against his original instincts, he had grown to enjoy the ribald gatherings of uninhibited, self-consciously attractive men and women. He admitted that the company often made him feel younger, even pampered, as if the best of city life were being exported to his house expressly for his provincial pleasure. “And it makes Soren happy,” he said, as if to remind himself.
One weekend in Brooklyn, after Dad went to bed early and Dani left to join friends at a bar, Tommy decided to go through the books in her room, most of them untouched since before she’d gone to college. Her mother had been a reader and, to keep books from clogging up the small house, made a habit of frequent donations to a local thrift shop, but she had been sentimental about her children’s favorite books.
Tommy sat on the floor with a dustcloth and pulled the books from the shelves, wiping them one by one. She smiled when it occurred to her that she now knew a few of these authors whose words and pictures she had imbibed over and over and over again without even thinking of Horton or Ping or the Moominvalley creatures as beings dreamed up by real live people. And then, pushed back between If I Ran the Zoo and a spineless copy of Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man, Tommy found the small book that Morty had passed to her, through a fence, more than two decades ago, in order to prove that he wasn’t a playground pedophile.
It should have brought her a surge of joy—made her eager to take it back home, show it to Morty and ask if he remembered that day—but instead she felt as if a cold salty wave were washing over her head. She paged slowly through the book, further chilled by its story: a child scared of so many things that he feared fear itself.
In other words, he was scared of life. Was she?
How Tommy had once pitied her parents for what she saw as the smallness of their existence, yet by the time they were her age, they had so much that she did not. Most of all, they had each other. They had married late, had children late—and, as a result, seemed to fully feel the pleasure in life that other people were constantly reminding themselves they ought to feel.
Was Tommy small-minded, even greedy, to yearn for a change? She sat on the aqua shag amoeba she had chosen as a rug at age thirteen and realized it was time to tell Morty how much she felt she owed him—and how it was time to think about what she owed herself. But there was no reason to be impatient. The kindest thing would be to wait until Morty’s mother died. Frieda Lear had folded in on herself by this point, all her appetites shriveled, her attention a void, and though no one wanted to give Morty a firm timeline, her caretakers believed that she was too frail to last more than another year. Tommy would see Morty through whatever rituals he needed to complete, and then she would give him generous notice. He could hardly disagree that it was time for her to move on, could he?
What would she do then? She laughed at the thought of going to work as the assistant to another genius; how about a scientist next time around? One change she decided she would welcome was a return to the city. She imagined herself living in the Village again (though it was probably unaffordable to lowly genius-assistants) or maybe, just for a time, sharing an apartment with Dani in Hell’s Kitchen or the increasingly unfashionable Upper East Side. Maybe they could find a responsible student to live with Dad in exchange for room and board.
For a brief heady moment, she imagined a move to San Francisco, her favorite stop on Morty’s touring circuit. It was a city with dozens of bookstores, and they both enjoyed lingering there. They were spoiled, of course, chauffeured from Berkeley to Danville, from Laurel Village to Corte Madera, then back to the hotel Morty loved on Russian Hill. On her own, she wouldn’t have such privileges—but the weather was humane, the culture more permissive toward daydreamers, gardeners, anyone who believed in the virtue of time to spare. This fantasy lasted as long as it took her to hear her father issue an exclamatory snore on the other side of her bedroom wall. New York was fine, she consoled herself, always holding the possibility of something unexpected.
When she entered Morty’s house that Sunday evening, she felt much calmer than she had in months. She greeted Soren with genuine cheer, and she made the three of them a supper of Italian wedding soup and spinach salad. Morty and Soren told her about the latest party. “Do not, repeat do not,” said Soren, “count the bottles in the recycling bin! And don’t ask who went home with whom.”
Then he told her who, as well as whom.
“Did you visit Frieda today?” she asked Morty after clearing the table.
“Same as ever,” he said. “It’s agony. For both of us, I suspect. Except for her, it’s a permanent state of being.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“It can’t be long,” he said.
“I suppose not.”
“Your father?” he remembered to ask.
“Same as ever,” she said. “But he’ll go on for a long time, I think. I just wish he knew what to do with himself.”
Maybe, she thought, her father would be game to go with her to San Francisco. He would love all the open-air music.
—
Two years later, Frieda was still alive—if respiration was the defining characteristic of living—and Tommy found herself frosting a three-layer devil’s food cake in the kitchen while Morty sulked in his studio and Soren stood in the driveway, smoking and pacing and ranting to someone on his cell phone. Rapunzel’s long tresses dangled from the back of a kitchen chair.
Tommy was thirty-five. When she read the alumni notes in her college magazine, she now saw pictures of classmates with children as old as ten. That, it seemed to her, was the one matter of urgency: whether she wanted to be a mother. Never mind that she was nine years younger than her mother had been when Dani was born. One of Morty’s friends, another picture-book author he had known when he lived in the city, had decided, on her thirty-ninth birthday, that she was done with looking for Mr. Right and would adopt a child before it was too late. Now she lived in Milwaukee with a baby girl from India. Her breakout book was called When I’m Big Enough to Be a Mom.
Out back, through the door left open to the cool September air, she heard the studio door close and, through the window, glimpsed Morty heading toward the driveway, where Soren paced. She tried not to listen. She knew how it would go: Morty would apologize, Soren would shower him with affection, and later that night they would have profligate sex.
At dinner, the earlier outburst no longer in the air, Morty told them about the story he’d begun to tease out in the studio that week, more words than pictures. In fact, he wondered if pictures would be superfluous. At the very least, they would be marginal, perhaps occurring only at the chapter breaks—or not at all. Perhaps, for the first time, no pictures whatsoever.
Having finished his lobster, he placed his elbows to either side of his plate, folded his hands, and rested his chin on his knuckles. He looked content
.
“Three children,” he said.
“The magic number!” Soren exclaimed (now the cheerleader, having won his apology).
“Lifelong friends. Neighbors in a nice but square, cookie-cutterish town. Yards, swing sets, the whole bourgeois package.”
“Orne, bien sûr.”
“No, not at all. More middle class, a place where neighbors like having neighbors. They’re in high school—maybe sixteen—when they are all, simultaneously, diagnosed with cancer.”
“What? Oh my God, that is too grim,” said Soren. “Who’s going to read that? What are you thinking, sweetie?”
“Wait.” Morty gave Soren a sharp paternal look. “Their camaraderie gives them strength. They insist on going into treatment together.”
After a pause, Soren asked quietly, “What kind of cancer?”
Morty sat back, folded his arms, and shook his head. “Not even sure I’ll specify. Doesn’t matter. Maybe I won’t call it cancer. It’s a…tale. It’s not realistic.”
“Sounds too realistic if you ask me.” Soren’s voice was nearly a whisper.
Morty reached over and put a hand on Soren’s arm. “Actually, and don’t take this personally, I am not asking you. I’m working it out.”
Even after four years, Soren had not learned to do nothing but listen, to hold perfectly still, when Morty chose to talk about his work. Tommy remembered that a week before, over breakfast, Morty had commented on an article in the Times about the “cancer clusters” on Long Island and in a bleak middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts town.
“So they go through surgery together, and then they are scheduled for radiation together. Their parents take turns driving them to the hospital. In school, they take the same classes, so their days are now completely in sync. They get a dog they share from house to house….They begin to sleep in the same room, rotating families….I don’t know the little stuff yet. The home part, the parents—if they’ll even register as full, distinct characters—I haven’t figured out.”
Tommy could have reminded him that parents were always beside the point in his stories, but she said nothing.
Morty looked down at his plate, fiddled with his fork and knife, realigned them.
“There is an atmospheric flash,” he said suddenly.
“A what?” said Soren.
“Shh,” said Tommy.
After a long pause, Morty said, “They’re in their hospital johnnies, in the waiting room in the deepest recesses of the hospital, about to go in for their radiation, when it happens.”
Soren looked antsy. He frowned.
Morty sighed. “I have to do some scientific digging here, but you know how radiation units are always sealed with lead? So those inside are also protected from forces on the outside. I’m thinking there is some kind of countereffect whereby our three heroes are empowered against the sinister force causing havoc outside those walls—whatever it is. They venture out and, when they are unable to find their families, go on a quest, to purify the corruption, the toxicity. Or whatever trauma’s been inflicted on the world around them. Maybe it’s something local, not global. Maybe it’s New York they have to rescue.”
“But isn’t everyone dead after this…flash thing? Is it the Chinese?” asked Soren. “It’s got to be the Chinese. I’ve read they have these überhackers who—”
“I don’t want to wade into politics. I’m not sure it’s terrorism. It might be something cosmic—something that happens on the sun. But hacking…that’s food for thought. Thanks, Soren.”
Another long pause. This time, Soren held his tongue.
“That’s all I have right now,” said Morty. “But I see them clearly. Two boys and a girl. And the dog, he’s a kind of wolfhound mutt. I see him perfectly. Skinny, wirehaired, affectionate but clingy. The kind of dog who jumps up, who begs at the table, who eats the furniture when left alone. A needy mooch of a dog. Maybe that’s his name. Mooch. Moocho. They adopt him, together, when they start treatment. The parents can’t say no. Or he arrives, he just arrives. On their way to school, he emerges from behind a bush and follows them. Waits for them. There’s no saying no to this guy.”
Tommy smiled. This was Morty at his best, letting a subplot unwind the way a ball of yarn unspools as it rolls across the floor. So it surprised her that he had reacted badly to Soren’s gift earlier that evening. When he felt the spell of a story descending, he became magnanimous, even calm.
“It sounds amazing,” said Tommy.
“But creepy,” said Soren.
“That’s why,” said Morty, “it’s for older children. Children who aren’t really children anymore. Who understand what they’re seeing in the news. And in case you don’t remember, teenagers have innately dark thoughts they tend to keep to themselves—among themselves. They feast on fictional disasters. There’s a kind of comfort to watching the world burn inside a book. A book, like a furnace, can be closed, the fire contained.”
“Well, I’d say this calls for more champagne,” said Soren, and off he went to retrieve a bottle from the pantry.
Alone with Morty, Tommy said, “Can I ask you something?”
“You will anyway.”
“Isn’t this Colorquake in a different guise? Not that you shouldn’t go there again.”
“Yes,” he said, “and no. But what’s different is that I feel like it’s time to really write. Let the words matter more than the pictures. Tell a real yarn, with twists and turns. Knots and tangles. With fully complicated characters who speak their minds.”
“Can I ask if any of them die?” Immediately, she wished she hadn’t been so intrusive, but Morty looked pleased.
“Not in the first book,” he said.
“The first book?”
“I think I’m in for the trilogy thing. It’s all the rage.” He laughed. “Maybe we can buy a house in the South of France. Or on an Italian lake.”
“Italian lake gets my vote,” said Tommy, though she felt a pang of betrayal. By then, she would be somewhere else. She would be reading his trilogy-volume-one on the subway, going back and forth, like a normal working person, between home and job, separate places with separate concerns.
A month later, Frieda died in her sleep. The call from the center woke them all at seven on a Saturday morning. Tommy made breakfast. Soren went back to bed, saying he’d be more useful later if he could get a few extra hours of sleep.
Morty ate silently, wiping tears off his cheeks every few minutes.
When Tommy joined him, she said, “Don’t be upset you weren’t with her.”
“I’m not. I’m just sad that the old her—I mean the younger her—had to die without…”
“Without your getting to say goodbye.”
Morty nodded. “I just never really believed…”
She waited.
“That I’d never see that her, her old self, again. Ever.” Almost angrily, he wiped his eyes with a kind of finality. “But that’s it. It’s done! If I didn’t feel so damn guilty, I’d feel free. I should, shouldn’t I?”
Tommy put the dishes in the dishwasher. “Do you want me to drive you over?”
“No. I’d rather do this part alone.”
“Did you have plans today that need canceling?”
“No. Soren and I were going to drive to New Haven, see the Constable show. That’s all. Did you?”
She shook her head. She had planned to start putting the garden to bed. Any night now, there could be a frost. She might as well buy the hay. And then she thought, But wait. She had reached the moment she believed she’d been aiming toward throughout the past two years.
Morty’s mother no longer had significant belongings. Her few pieces of jewelry, none of great value, Morty kept in a box that Tommy knew he had stashed in his bureau. He did bring home, that afternoon, a framed photograph: young mother next to school-age son, behind them a nondescript building. He laid this artifact on the kitchen table.
“What happens now?” asked Tommy. Soren had volunteered to go
to the grocery store and cook dinner that night.
“An inhumane amount of paperwork. Cremation. Then…” He shrugged. “There’s no family plot. No favorite body of water where she wants her ashes scattered. I suppose I’ll simply have to bring her here.”
Tommy picked up the photo. “Where was this taken?”
“Brooklyn, I’m not sure where. I must be at least eight or nine.”
Tommy put the picture back on the table. The two of them stared at it, as if it might speak for itself.
“What can I do right now?” she asked.
When Morty met her eyes, she could have sworn there was a flash of anxiety, as if he could read her mind. “Just what you always do,” he said. “Or please delete that just. The everyday miracles you perform.”
“Soren’s making us dinner,” she said, not knowing how to answer his praise.
Morty was still wearing his coat. He stood. “I’m going out to the studio for a couple of hours. I want to write a few notes, make some calls.”
Tommy should have returned to the computer; instead, she went to her room. She sat in the armchair and picked up the novel she was reading. But she didn’t open it. She looked out the windows, watched the fiery leaves falling from the trees, prodigiously now, in the strong afternoon gusts. At the height of summer, the boughs were so dense with greenery that she could hardly see the sky; now, as they went through their annual molting, the sun’s descent became more and more apparent. In January, from this room, brilliant sunsets pressed through the filigree of branches.
She heard Soren drive in, heard him clatter through the back door, cursing as he dropped a grocery bag. Would he call for her to help him? He didn’t.
Would Soren take over some of Tommy’s habitual tasks, after she left? He did cook on occasion. His repertoire was limited, but he was good enough. He made an excellent pot roast. Certainly Morty would never consider giving Soren responsibility for the complex web of relationships in his work life. Would he? She did not know what Morty really thought of Soren’s capabilities, and she wouldn’t dream of asking. Soren was a reader—he loved good stories, whether they came in the form of a classic Greek tragedy or a real-life scandal detailed in a Vanity Fair feature—and he liked mixing with Morty’s writer friends, but…Where was she going with this train of thought?