An ambulance pulls up at an angle against the curb. A policewoman stands in the street waiting to direct traffic that isn't coming. A bank clock has nothing to add, frozen in neither morning nor light.
"Jesus," Errol says, and stops.
Two police cars pull up. In this light everything is fluid, including the time; everything an apparition of itself, full of shadowy possibilities and illusory goodness. Like the man standing on the ledge of the apartment house in the middle of the next block. There are fifteen or twenty stories between him and the street. The balconies are filled up and down with spectators, as if they are lining the route of a vertical race. The jumper is in a parka, arms straight out, measuring his dive.
Claire bites down a chill. "He wouldn't dare," she mutters, still in her feisty mood. As if it would be something to admire.
Nathan seems wrapped in a preternatural calm. It's that apathy again, that waiting as if for a cue. Something is missing.
The police, meanwhile, seem bothered, milling around helplessly with no one to arrest. There are no psychologists or experts and there is no giant trampoline. Just the wide river of street and a few parked cars and the crowd on the corner looking upward expectantly.
In the corner of her eye Claire can see Nathan peering upward.
"Jump," she whispers, half because she wants to prick him, spark him, maybe to impress him with her morbid sense of humor; half because she knows the jumper never will.
But Errol is gripping her elbow. "Don't say that."
And he is right, Claire sees, because she looks up and feels the jumper already dead; he is still up there, but he has nothing left to give. He is no faker, he is not screwing around, just gathering the courage, aligning his powers with gravity's.
"What did he do?" Nathan wonders aloud.
"What didn't he, more likely," Errol replies.
"He needs a lawyer."
Something up the block catches Claire's eye. Another police cruiser is making its way over, lights off, in no hurry, trailed by a dark ambulance. Something is already done. They're coming-but who for? By the time Claire turns back someone is already screaming, someone near. The shriek trills off all that glass, the concrete barriers and orange barrier tape of a nearby construction zone, off the parked cars and uplifted faces. Then a loud explosion, a crisp report, like a rifle shot, and for a second Claire thinks the police car hit something, maybe the ambulance. Nervously, she lifts her eyes: the roof ledge is empty. Everyone is peering off the balconies, following the route down. In the street lies a level mound of clothes and shoes. In the middle of it something is heaving. A fist clenches and unclenches then freezes in a claw. There is no blood, a clean harmless bundle too compact and flat to be an actual human being. We're small in death, Claire thinks, but then sees the jumper has sprung a leak. Steaming, it begins to spread beneath, black and thick as oil, as though he is melting into the frozen asphalt.
No one approaches the corpse. The police turn their backs, focusing on crowd control now, on something they can do. Claire's hand crawls into Nathan's and begins to probe. She hears herself crying softly. "Oh God," she says-
And she says it now, again, "Oh God," seeing ten or so years too late, the curious familiar glare in Nathan's eyes, the blank stare that terrified her to the end, a kind of inward-facing dread, that eventually swung outward and swept over everything, denying everything, that swept over, turned on, and denied her.
And there, as Claire lies on her bed, in the pit of her mind is the image of a woman-not a man, not the jumper-a woman very like herself twitching like a marionette, throwing her fists again and again at the ground.
"Why," she says aloud, "did you do it, did you do it, did you do it?"
Quickly, to steady herself with other news, she scans her Times. Spotting something absurd she brings it closer. In parts of the Bronx and Spanish Harlem, she reads, South and Central American women with unbaptized children are hurrying in droves to their neighborhood churches and storefront chapels and lining up their babies for emergency baptism. Word has spread that the Antichrist s coming this Christmas and will murder the unanointed. Those women merely pregnant, in a panic, are having their bellies blessed. No one knows where the rumor originated, or why. Outside, the icy rain still falls. The day is silent, but it is not calm. She hears distant foghorns and sees the windows flicker as the lightning flies, and waits, in vain it seems, for the thunder. The storm seems to come and go at will.
She notices the time and runs to her closet. She runs through her apartment, through the door, through the sleet.
8 A. M.
Will this work, this jangling? Nathan shakes the keys at the door like a shaman with his amulet. Eventually spotting the downtown ring he tries one key from that, then remembers that he is uptown and picks still another. Finally, less with luck than with random interest, he finds a key that fits. But the door is already open, the lock half-cocked. The red sedan comes to mind. He looks behind him and through the window in the lobby door finds only a square of empty street. He lurches in, calling, "Benny?"
In the half-dark of the living room the old woman sits upright on the couch, her hands rooted deep in a heavy, coarse overcoat. Simple black dress beneath the coat's hem. A pair of orthopedic shoes. The room around her is tidied, books reshelved, CDs stacked, his clothes folded and piled on the kitchen table.
"Mrs. Rosa. I'm sorry. Maria-"
The sink is empty, the dishes done and put away. Nathan looks over his shoulder. "Where's Benny?" he asks, and pokes his head into the small side room. The boy there is sprawled across the bed, the blankets bunched and kicked aside, his head twisted violently away from his shoulder, as if fallen from a roof, left randomly on the sidewalk.
Nathan sees his own bed is made. Maria's clothes, once everywhere, are nowhere. Her drawers, her side of the closet, empty. Boxes, suitcases, plastic bags-there is nothing left. The sink has been scrubbed. Also the floor, and that ring in the bathtub. Maria's mother came every day so that Benny did not return from school to an empty house, but she never once cleaned; didn't bother, Nathan always assumed. Now, everything after all these years gleams. As though with Maria's last exhalation all signs of her and her belongings all over town vaporized, accompanying her to the steamy other side.
He squints at the clock. "Benny has to get to school."
She addresses her hands: "He isn't going to school today."
“Did you tell him?"
"Maria's brothers are waiting at my apartment. I will take him there. He will be with his family when he learns."
"Of course, you all want to be there." Nathan glances at his watch. "What time do you want me?"
"No-" Up comes her hand, her face, insistent. "No."
"I thought I'd be the one to break it to him."
She folds her arms across her chest and turns her head to the window.
"We've been living together, I should be the one," he says, trying to keep up with his own logic. After a long pause, he floats the idea, like a trial balloon: "I'd like to keep the boy."
Her eyes widening in fear, she slips forward on the couch, ready to stand, or spring. "I am taking him away from here," she says.
His nod is less an affirmation than a failure to deny the truth of it. Of course it is a ridiculous idea. "I have to go to the hospital now."
"Go look at my girl," she says.
Across town the traffic in the St. Luke's lobby is already heavy. No one asks his name or offers a direction. On the sixth floor an unmanned cart bristling with brooms and mops and clean linens Sits stalled outside a room near Maria's. A male nurse at INFORMATION sends Nathan to the basement.
The gurneys are lined up end to end along the stainless-steel cabinets, the mounds blanketed in baby-blue paper. Here and there a manila tag tied to a leached and shriven toe.