And that’s when I could’ve done it. Could have wandered down to the Vermeer and reminded myself of beauty. I could have gone down there and been normal. I could have lost myself in a joy I could still remember from that morning, because it was still so close, and I could remember everything before the world changed.
I could have done all that and would have, had I not picked up my phone instead and heard his voice and I started to shake when I heard his voice, and he was talking fast, and he sounded panicked but he was OK. He’d never gone to work that day, had got up late and couldn’t be fucked, and I was telling him about the reports here, stuff I’d heard, but he kept telling me to stop, and I didn’t hear him at first because I was so happy. But then he shouted at me and I heard.
‘I can’t find Joe,’ he said, and his voice broke.
I sat on the roof as the light faded. No more remnants of summer. The murmur of the television rose from below. I felt so cold. I wrapped an old picnic blanket around me; it was my parents’ and I’d never returned it because I never knew when I might need it. It smelt of grass and damp wool. It smelt of Cornwall. I remembered again the silence of the call with them, when the numbing possibility descended upon their thoughts, when I told them, Your son can’t be found.
I tried to get on a flight, but most were grounded or diverted to Canada. A couple of days and then back to normal, the operator said. That word again. I put my name down on the reservations list. I’d be first out, I’d be there to see for myself, because I couldn’t go back to my parents without something to shatter their silence at least. Either a scream or a smile.
I finished another glass of wine. Waited for the phone call he’d promised to make. I watched the trucks arrive and park, heard the soft drone of the engine feeding the refrigeration. I poured out more wine; emptied the bottle.
It had been hours, must have been. I looked at my watch. He’d said he was heading to Joe’s house, the police had cordoned off below 14th street, but he’d get there, he’d said, just to check. The smell, Elly; that was the last thing he’d said to me. The smell.
My phone rang. The battery was low. It was him at last.
‘Hey,’ he said, his voice thin and empty.
‘How are you?’
‘OK.’
‘What is it, Charlie?’
‘I found his diary,’ he said, his words barely audible. ‘It puts him there.’
Duke/Office/8.30.
The diary entry was brief. Written in turquoise ink, the turquoise ink from the pen he took from me last February. We called around, of course, but there were not many to call. Those who were there, the ones who got out, could barely remember him, still in shock. ‘Yeah, think he was there,’ they said, or, ‘No, didn’t see him.’ We were left none the wiser, left guessing.
Duke didn’t make it. Some said he was at the point of impact, others said he’d gone back up the staircase to look for a colleague. That would’ve been like Duke; gone back to help someone else. That’s why they called him The Duke.
By the time I got to New York, Nancy and Charlie still hadn’t touched anything in the house. They didn’t want to move anything in case I saw a clue, an overlooked clue to his missing. But all I saw was a full fridge and a half-drunk bottle of his favourite wine, both clues that said, I am coming home, going nowhere.
They’d checked hospitals, Nancy in Brooklyn, Charlie in Manhattan, took turns in New Jersey, took turns in the temporary morgues. She left his name, said it twice clearly, but was asked for it again as voices battled with phone lines. She leant against a wall outside and tried to cry, but tears, like comprehension, were stuck and of the past. She was comforted by no one. Everyone had a story of grief. Everyone else’s was worse than yours.
The smell was acrid: burning rubber and fuel, and the other unmentionable that sat in the nose and sent images of horror to the mind. Charlie had warned me about it, but I could still smell it every time I went out, even in the garden, because there was nothing in bloom to mask the stench, because ultimately it was the smell of shock that dosed this city, a sour smell as potent as week-old urine. I pulled out one of his old foldaway bistro chairs and wiped it down. It buckled as I sat on it. The left hinge was broken; he still hadn’t mended it.
We’d planned this small garden together, planned the perfumes, the colours, the pots of densely sown lavender, the larkspur, the lemon myrtle in the shade beneath the kitchen, the overflowing squares of voracious red peonies, and the rows of white stocks whose scent said, Forever England; and of course the blue-violet rose, a repeating pattern that coiled and draped around the iron staircase and crept along the wall like a seductive tom; the rose that had bloomed so abundantly all summer, the envy of every guest whose green fingers suddenly paled against my brother’s haphazard and uninformed passion. He could create oases in deserts with the sole fertiliser of belief. He’d created a home out of his wanderings.
A helicopter swooped overhead. The rhythmic chopping of the air. The sound of a police siren, or an ambulance racing through the city. The something found, the identifiable at last; and then the devastating phone call to follow, but still, something to bury.
He’d been too lazy to deadhead the plants – never understood the point. ‘Let nature be,’ he’d said. I picked up a small bucket and started to prise the dried brown trumpets away from their hold. I could let nothing be. Music played next door. Bruce Springsteen. It had been Frank Sinatra before. Only the New Jersey boys allowed to crest the patriotic airwaves.
‘Your mum said something strange the other night,’ said Nancy, as she opened takeaway cartons of food no one had any appetite for.
‘What did she say?’ I said, reaching for a fork instead of chopsticks.
Charlie looked at Nancy.
‘What is it?’ I said.
Silence.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Ell,’ she said.
‘What did she say?’
‘She said that maybe Joe went missing, just took off and disappeared, you know, like people do, when accidents happen. Because they’re presented with the chance to start again.’
I stared at her.
‘Why would he want to start again?’
‘I’m just telling you what she said.’
‘It’s bollocks. He wouldn’t do that to us.’
‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ said Charlie, breaking open a fortune cookie. ‘He wasn’t depressed, he was happy.’
He said happy the way a child would.
‘It’s fucking bollocks,’ I said angrily. ‘He would never put us through that. He just wouldn’t. She’s going mad.’
We watched Charlie read his fortune. He screwed it up and we never asked him what it was.
‘Why the fuck would she say it?’ I pleaded.
‘Because she’s a mother. She needs to keep him in the world, Ell.’
We had little to say after that. Ate in silence. Ate in anger. My stomach hurt, I couldn’t digest. I tried to concentrate on a flavour, any flavour, to pick it out from all the others and exercise my sense, but all I could smell and taste was burning. Nancy got up and went to the kitchen. She said, ‘More wine?’ We said, ‘OK.’ Charlie finished the remainder in his glass. She didn’t come back.
I went to find her. She was bent over the sink with the taps running, her face contorted, the bottle on its side, the cork still embedded. She was crying silently. Small muffled sobs, hidden in the sound of falling water. She was ashamed to cry, crying was grieving, grieving was for the lost and she felt she was letting him down. I lay with her that night. She on her side; her hair damp around her neckline, her cheeks moist. Too dark to see her eyes. My father’s little sister. Holding his pain.
‘You are not alone,’ I said.
I got up in the middle of the night and went to my bed. I hadn’t taken his room, Charlie had his room; I took the bird’s-nest room, the last room we renovated, the room with the working hearth and the front-facing windows flicked by tree branches, their tap tap ta
pping pleading for entry. This was the room always left for me, the bed always made, my clothes in the cupboards, the one of every two that I always bought and kept here. I thought about lighting a fire, but I couldn’t trust myself to get it right; the rogue rolling cinder that might hide under a drape and count to twenty before making itself known. And I wouldn’t notice it, wouldn’t find it, not that night. Restlessness wasn’t vigilance. It was distraction. I was everywhere with him, just not here.
I heard the front door open and close quietly. It was Charlie. His footsteps echoed in the silent space, the space that held its breath for news. Footsteps in the hallway. The muted sounds of the television. Then off. Down to the kitchen. The running of water. Filling a glass. And then the footsteps climbing the stairs, the creak of the door to his bathroom, the flush of a toilet, the heavy thump of an exhausted body on the bed. That was the routine. But it changed that night; a minuscule variation. He didn’t come back up the stairs; opened the back door instead and went out into the garden.
He was sitting at the table, smoking. A candle flickered in front of him. He didn’t often smoke.
‘I can leave you alone if you want,’ I said.
He pulled out a chair and threw me his sweater.
‘I loved him,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘And I keep listening to messages he left me. I just want to hear his voice. I feel like I’m going mad.’
I reached for a cigarette and lit it.
‘I told him a few days before all this happened,’ he said. ‘Simply told him what I wanted. What I wanted for us. Asked him why he couldn’t make that jump, why he couldn’t be with me. I knew he loved me. What was he so frightened of, Ell? Why couldn’t he do it? Why couldn’t he fucking say, Yes? Maybe all this would have been different then.’
I let his questions evaporate into the darkness, where they joined the million other unanswered questions that hung above Manhattan that night; burdensome, and irredeemable; ultimately cruel. No one had answers.
The breeze seemed cooler as it filtered through the shutters. I emptied the box of photographs onto the floor and we edited for two hours until we found the one we all agreed on, the one that looked most like him, as we all saw him: smiling, with the pool at the Raleigh shimmering behind. It was the trip when he stole my pen with turquoise ink. Just last February. When we met in Miami for some winter sun. The most expensive kind of sun.
We chose the words and I went down to the print shop and made some photocopies and the man looked on respectfully. He’d seen hundreds of these and I was just one more. When I finished he wouldn’t take my money. The gesture made me cry.
I needed to see it for myself, and by myself, give the other two a rest because they’d seen too much, and so I went alone. Just walked south, kept going to where they used to be, marking the skyline. There was no preparation. I hid behind dark glasses and separated myself from hell.
Have you seen my husband?
My daddy was a waiter
My sister’s called Erin
My wife and I just got married.
She’s missing . . .
The downtown walls were plastered with verse and words and pictures and prayers, and they stretched into the distance like a grotesque fable, one of unprepared despair. People moved along slowly reading, and when a fireman or rescue worker passed by there’d be a moment of applause, but they wouldn’t look up because they knew. They knew there’d be no survivors. Had known before everyone else. And they wouldn’t look up because they were so tired and hadn’t slept, and of course they couldn’t sleep, they were surrounded by photographs saying, Find me, find me. How could – how would – they ever sleep?
I found a space next to a woman who had worked in the restaurant. She looked nice, she was a grandmother, and I put him next to her. I never expected people to find him, not really. I simply wanted people to look at him and say, He looks like a nice man, I wish I’d known him. Someone stood at my shoulder.
‘My brother,’ I said, smoothing the crease that crooked his smile.
It was late. Latter than I usually went out, and I sat at the bar and faced bottles and optics, and a distorted reflection of myself in between. Behind me were quiet stragglers; ones left thinking and drinking, no pause in between. In front of me, whiskey.
I didn’t know this part of town, could be anonymous in this part of town and moments before, I’d come back from the bathroom with an extra button undone. It felt crass, I felt awkward, but I hoped for a pick-up, a date or something, but I was out of practice, out of touch with a world like that. Cut off from a world that required behaviour like that. A man looked over. He smiled, I smiled, my standards were dropping. I paid the tab and headed out into the sobering air. My heart tore. I’d had no one for so long.
I walked the block, passing couples, a dog walker, a runner too. All had direction; me, aimless. I turned up a tree-lined street, its symmetry halted by the red and white lights of a neighbourhood bistro.
It was warm inside, and smelt of garlic and coffee. The owner was cheery. I was his only customer, he might have been waiting to go home, but he didn’t show it. He brought over my coffee, enquired about my evening, gave me a piece of Torta di Nonna. ‘You won’t be disappointed,’ he said. I wasn’t. He handed me the arts section of the weekend Times. Kind.
The soft bell above the door rang. I heard a brief conversation and the subsequent groan of the espresso machine. I looked up. A man. He looked at me. I think he smiled. I looked down, pretended to read. He pulled out a chair and sat down behind me. I wanted another coffee but I felt wired, didn’t want to get up, could feel him behind me. The man went to the counter and paid his bill. Don’t go. Look up. I listened for the sound of the bell. Nothing. Footsteps towards me.
‘You look how I feel,’ he said, his face tired, sad. He handed me another coffee, a baci perched on the saucer.
We barrelled through his front door, a heaving mass of peeling clothes and reaching hands, and we crawled from floor to sofa to bed, but slowed at bed. The startling intimacy of perfume and photos, this once-shared life, stemmed our need, and that’s when he said, ‘We can stop if you like.’ No stop. His mouth tasted of cinnamon and sugar. Coffee too.
I unbuttoned his shirt. His skin felt cool and pimpled as I ran my fingers across his chest and down the hairline of his stomach. I stopped at the elastic of his pants. He sat up awkward, shy even. His cock between us, hard and ready. I held it against the fabric. Outlined the shape with my fingers, grasped it. He didn’t move, no thrust, waiting to see what I would do. I lifted his hips and peeled off the white shorts. I bent down. He tasted of soap.
I buried my head in the pillows as my cunt clasped around his fingers, as they slid deep in me, wet and fast, thrusting fast until his cock took over, until he rolled me over and faced me. This sad face, this gentle, beautiful face that had no name. He bent down and kissed me, kissed her. I reached for his hair, lank and wet. I grabbed his mouth, sucked his tongue. He pushed me into the sheets, my knees tight around his ribs clinging to this shared moment, faster shunting as he moved deeper in me, expelling all that had been buried, all that had been hidden, faster fucking, until I felt the surge of energy and reached for him, this stranger, and bit hard on his shoulder as my sound – as his sound – filled the room, and brought back life to a bed, coated in ache.
Five o’clock. Life was beginning outside. I rolled over, exhausted; felt sore between my legs. I dressed quietly in the twilight and watched him sleep. I would leave no note. I made my way to the door.
‘This wasn’t nothing,’ he said.
‘I know.’ I went back and held him. This was breath.
The days spread out before me, interminable, senseless hours, and I went to a French café where I wasn’t known and where I didn’t have to deflect the ‘Any news?’ with polite ‘Not yet’s. I sat in the window and watched life pass, watched it head Uptown. I saw three young women walking arm in arm and they were laughing, and I realised t
hat I hadn’t seen that in days; it looked so strange.
I wrote there. Wrote the column and wrote about the Lost. I wrote about the flowers at every fire station, piled three, five high, and the candles that never went out; prayers burning through despair, because it was still early days and you never knew, but of course most people did. People knew as they lay alone at night, that this was the beginning, the raw beginning that was to be their Present, their Now, their Future, their Memory. I wrote about the sudden embraces in the middle of shops, and the funerals that appeared everyday for fire-fighters and cops, funerals that stopped the streetflow with a volley of salutes and tears. I wrote about the lost cityscape as I sat on our favourite bench along the promenade by Brooklyn Bridge; the place we went to to think and where we imagined what our lives would be three, five, ten years hence.