My Name Is Lucy Barton

52

There was a day late one summer when I was at their father’s place. He had gone to work and I was there to see Becka, who was staying, as she always did, with him. He was not yet married to the woman who had brought the girls to the hospital and who had no children of her own. I went to the corner store — it was early morning — and saw on the small television above the counter that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Quickly I returned to the apartment and turned on the television, and Becka sat watching, and I went into the kitchen to drop off whatever I had bought, and I heard Becka cry out, “Mommy!” The second plane had gone into the second tower, and when I ran to answer her cry, her look was so stricken: I think always of that moment. I think: This was the end of her childhood. The deaths, the smoke, the fear throughout the city and the country, the horrendous things that have happened in the world since then: Privately I think only of my daughter on that day. Never have I heard before or since that particular cry of her voice. Mommy.

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And I think sometimes of Sarah Payne, how she could barely say her name that day when I met her in the clothing store. I have no idea if she still lives in New York; she has not written any new books. I have no idea about her life at all. But I think how exhausted she became, teaching. And I think how she spoke of the fact that we all have only one story, and I think I don’t know what her story was or is. I like the books she wrote. But I can’t stop the sense that she stays away from something.