Close Your Eyes

4

After taking a taxi from the airport to the hotel Gerry had chosen for me, I showered and tried to lie down. Too distraught to sleep, I called the Holt police station and made an appointment to take the train out and go through my mother’s files in the morning. Brendan Crosby was saddened to hear about the explosion in Baghdad. “I’d wondered why Alex wasn’t calling me every week,” said the detective. “Jesus Christ, I’m sorry,” he added.

“It’s possible he’s not dead,” I said.

“Oh,” said Brendan Crosby. “Right, of course.”

“They haven’t found him,” I said. “They’ve found plenty of bodies, but not Alex’s.”

“That’s great,” said Brendan Crosby. “That’s certainly good news.”

I got dressed and went for a walk. I had no idea where I was in the city, and it was very cold. Things were smoky again without the benefit of Jane Stafford’s soothing voice. I felt woozy as I stumbled along, my sneakers slapping the pavement. A vendor on the corner was selling handbags and scarves, and I stopped to buy a red scarf with matching mittens.

As the man counted my bills, I saw a beautiful building over his shoulder. I jaywalked across the street and went inside. It was the Park East Synagogue.

Round lights on brass poles surrounded an elaborate blue altar. When I sat down, I began to feel calmer, and the smoke dissipated. I wondered if my mother had been inside this synagogue. It was possible, wasn’t it? I closed my eyes, trying to feel her.

Trying to feel anything.

After my mother’s stone setting, I had been told to stop mourning. So I did stop—I was a good girl. But if you don’t let yourself feel sadness, you don’t feel any other emotions, either: hunger, happiness, love. Sitting in a synagogue pew, I missed the softness of my mother’s hair, her quick, sweet kisses. I missed Alex, and I missed being someone’s sister. And for the first time, I yearned for my father. But perhaps I had wanted him all along.

Without thinking hard about what I was doing, I walked back outside and looked for a bookstore. Before too long, I saw one. It was a dim shop located down a small stairway. The awning read: USED, RARE, COLLECTIBLE. A man with a cat in his lap looked up as I came inside, but he did not smile.

I found the poetry section and scanned the titles, my pulse fast. I made myself breathe deeply, as Jane Stafford had advised. You’re all right, Lauren, I told myself in my head, with her voice, you’re fine.

Then I said it aloud, “You’re fine, Lauren, you’re fine,” as I saw my father’s name. I took the book, one of his poetry collections, called Incarceration, from the shelf. It was a hardcover published in 1996, when I had been eighteen years old, a freshman at the University of Texas. In a neat hand, someone had written in pencil, First edition, $75.

I turned the pages, which felt fragile and were a bit yellowed. The book’s dedication page read, In memory of my beloved wife, Jordan Wegman Mahdian. I touched my mother’s name, and everything went smoky again. I sank to the floor. I wasn’t scared. My mother’s name in black type was clear on the page, but everything else was blurred. I stared at the words: my beloved wife.

I thought about the night in the tree house. I remembered going to sleep next to Alex, but then there had always been a blank space, as if what happened next had been blacked out, wiped away with an inky marker. But now, as if I were remembering the day I’d met Gerry or the plane ride to New York, the memory of the night my mother died was there:

I had awakened and climbed down the ladder. It was raining—the slats of the ladder were slippery and wet. Inside the house, it was dry. I went upstairs to snuggle in between my parents, where it would be warm. I heard strange sounds and stopped at the doorway to their room. There was motion in the bed, a cry from my mother that made me think my father was hurting her. He moved above her in the dark, and his face scared me. His naked body, her cries—it seemed violent and wrong. Then they stopped what they were doing, and it was still raining, and the light from the streetlamp made it look like my mother was crying. Why was she crying? Had he hurt her? They were so still.

Then my mother murmured something, maybe “My love.”

“Mmmm,” said my father, and I watched them, and they were complete without me. I was terrified, alone. My mother stirred and looked toward the doorway. She said, “Lauren?” but I was gone, running back outside into the rain. In the tree house, deep in my sleeping bag, I closed my eyes tightly. What had I seen? It was smoky, so scary I lay awake, and when I heard another cry, I did not move.

I did not help her. And so she died.

“Miss?” I looked up, the smoke clearing. The man—the cat in his arms now—stood above me. “I have his novel, too,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Please buy the book before reading it,” said the man, scolding me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

At the register, I bought my father’s poems. “Do you want the novel?” said the man, and I said, “Okay.”

I signed the credit card slip. Back in my hotel room, I opened my father’s giant tome, The Noose, and turned to the dedication page. The Noose had been published two years before. My father had written:

To Lauren and Alex,

In the hopes of holding you again.

Tabib el-jarayeh goum el-hagg

W’hatly el-dawa elli yowafig

Feih nas kateer bata’raf el-hagg

W’lagl el-daroora towafig

Doctor who treats wounds, help, hurry:

Get me the medicine that works.

There are many people who know the truth,

But who go along out of necessity.

—The Sira