“That’s bullshit.” She turned even more in his direction. The seat belt pulled taut against her shoulder. His face looked smooth and very young from this angle. She couldn’t see any sign of a beard on those white cheeks. He could be twelve years old. “I didn’t die in my mind. My baby died and I got hurt but I didn’t die, I didn’t think about dying, I just thought about my—” She stopped.
“You just thought about what? How your baby died?”
He had steered onto the West Side Highway extension heading uptown. “Where are you going?” Carla demanded. She wasn’t scared or nervous. But she thought he was crazy and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be alone with him in a car.
“The Sawmill.”
“The what? You mean out of the city?”
“Yes. The Sawmill is such a great winding road and so pretty. It was built to please the rich.” Irrationally he gestured at the river and the rotting dock structures. “Well, the middle class anyway. To be a pleasant road for a Sunday drive. The man who designed it—” Max chuckled, “his name was Moses — he imagined a world full of happy, prosperous self-satisfied people with good-natured servants and shiny cars that never broke down. And it didn’t bother him that his own brother died homeless. What an asshole. No, he wasn’t an asshole,” he seemed to be arguing with someone else, someone who wasn’t in the car. “He wanted to build his dreams and not just be a good man. A stupid, gullible good man whom everybody cheats and ignores.”
“You talking about yourself?” Carla asked. She had definitely decided he was crazy, but she no longer feared him.
“Yes.” He smiled at her. “You’re smart,” he said and he meant it. He looked sane enough: his pale eyes were friendly; his bush of gray and black hair was benign. “Is it all right if we take a drive and see some trees even if their leaves are dead?”
This was her chance to stop it. He was reasonable and he would let her go back. But she felt comfortable. She had forgotten her small throat and sweaty palms. The car was warm and quiet, her seat ample and soothing. Seeing the miserable, cold, and frightened world through the hard clear glass of the windows felt good. It gave her a kind of strength. He was crazy but he was right — she was safe with him.
Two days later Max returned without phoning ahead and stood in the tiny foyer, his hands folded, to ask if she wanted to see scenic Jersey City. He shuffled his feet like an awkward adolescent asking her out on a date. She said yes, sure that he was kidding about the Jersey City part, but he wasn’t, he wanted to see the Newport Center Mall and that’s what they did, driving all around it while he made comments on the architecture and the surrounding old buildings, many of them deserted, even burned out. Later, when she returned home her mother made a big joke out of his idea of sight-seeing and probably Manny would have too, if Carla were talking to him, which she wasn’t. That was why she tolerated her mother’s reappearance from California with the intention of staying through New Year’s. With her mother there it was easier to ignore Manny.
Carla enjoyed Max’s tour. After they went around and through the Newport Mall by car, he pulled into its huge multileveled parking lot and asked if she wanted to eat some lunch. She was hungry. The same sort of gnawing hunger that came on suddenly in the middle of the night, a hunger for comforting foods, a hunger she couldn’t satisfy no matter how much she ate and a hunger that so far she had felt only when alone.
She wanted to say yes but she was frightened at the idea of leaving the car. The mall was crowded with Christmas shoppers.
“Remember,” Max said. “We’re ghosts. They can’t do anything to us.”
“You’re crazy,” she said to him, scared by his idea. She felt comfortable telling him. “You’re really crazy, you know that?”
He smiled with his lips shut; the double curves at his mouth’s corners undulated. The sun came across his face through the windshield; his white skin seemed to glow whiter, as if he were made of packed snow.
“I should talk,” she said. “Okay.” She took a breath and opened the car door. He came around to her side. He put his arm through hers. He was wearing a navy-blue wool jacket, a thin jacket that hugged his upper torso and left the rest of him exposed. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked, shivering inside her goose down.
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe I should buy a coat in the mall.” They walked across a covered bridge from the parking lot and entered the mall.
It was beautiful, Carla thought. They had come in on the third floor and she could see down through the open central area to the two lower floors. Everywhere there were Christmas decorations and scenes. Sculptures of reindeer were paused beside plastic pine trees and brilliant poinsettias, all arranged on soft white cloth that looked like snow. There were lights strung along the glass panels at the ceilings and also along the railings of each level so that white, red and green lights blinked everywhere — pretty stars in a small universe.
And the people! Carla had forgotten what crowds of people look like. Haggard mothers shouted after their running children. Harassed fathers stood before store windows filled with goods, their heads bowed, defeated by choices. Giggling teenage girls flounced past, packed together, shoulder-to-shoulder, hair bouncing and trailing them like wedding trains. Solemn boastful teenage boys paraded after the girls; like sullen peacocks, their legs stretched ahead of their torsos with suspicious grace, eyes watching the girls with contempt and mastery.
Max guided Carla among them. She noticed a fat mother with pink beefy arms carrying a newborn. Every other second the mother kissed her baby’s bald head softly — a reflex while she studied the mall stores. She wasn’t even really in the throes of loving her baby; the constant kissing was routine. Carla didn’t hate her, didn’t pity her, didn’t envy her. She wondered about her life, if she had always been fat, what her husband was like, and if the baby was her first child. She stopped beside them and stared at the newborn’s head while the mother paused to look at the shoe store’s display window. Carla brought her face within inches of the baby and the mother; neither seemed to notice her. Maybe she was a ghost.
Max tugged at her to continue. She felt they were gliding soundlessly to the rhythm of the piped Christmas music, passing unseen by the mob of shoppers: gangs of men, women and children bustling with packages, eyes red and exhausted yet shining with appetite. They weren’t gangs, Carla reminded herself. They were families, spinning out and then back to each other, like planets in orbit, loose and yet never free.
“I don’t have a family anymore,” Carla said to Max. They were at the crossroads of the mall where it divided in four directions above a large central courtyard. She leaned against a railing that barred her from dropping two floors down to the big open area. Down there a man in a Santa suit in a mock sleigh was being photographed with babies and toddlers. She noticed the long line of children and parents waiting their turn with him. She looked up from that hurtful sight at Max. She felt faint. “I don’t have a family,” she repeated in a weak voice.
“What do you miss?” Max asked. Against the lights and bright decorations he was as pale as a ghost.
“I was going to buy him toys,” she said and sobbed. She tried to stop and then sobbed more. She was embarrassed; she was no longer invisible. She turned away from the startled faces of the mall shoppers and bent out over the banister, shutting her eyes and fighting the pain inside. But the happy music kept on wounding her; and even though she had her lids shut and her eyes were swimming with tears, she could still see the Santa below with awed children on his knee, watched by smiling, satisfied parents, and that hurt so much she wished she could scream herself to death — disintegrate in a single explosion of grief.