“Kim wants all her money back,” she said.
He lifted his hands in bewilderment.
DEAR KIM:
We are so sorry for your terrible experience. We are so glad you were not harmed. This is indeed a terrible time for the world. You did stay in our apartment for ten nights, and I have calculated this stay, at current hotel rates, at $150 a night. We are also deducting a fee for cleaning the apartment, as you did leave a window open, letting some contaminated dust inside. This leaves you with a refund of $1,000. The first installment, in $20, will arrive in a week. Peace be with you.
She took a deep breath and pressed “Send.”
SHE TOOK SAMMY TO HIS FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. SHE WALKED down the street, past the taped fliers. The local day spa was offering free massages for firemen and policemen. A neighborhood restaurant offered a $25 Prix Fixe, Macaroni and Roast Beef, Eat American. Donations to Ladder 8 for Missing Firemen accepted. Dozens of Xeroxed faces of the missing clung to lampposts, wrapped with tape; they stared into the street. Loving husband and father. Our dear daughter. Worked on the Eighty-seventh Floor. Worked at Windows on the World. Please call. She walked by them slowly, and she could not breathe. The missing people were on every corner. They were smiling and happy in the photos, and many were younger than her.
The preschool was a block north of the wooden police barricades that separated regular life from the crumbled heap of buildings, the endless black smoke. Her stroller rattled past them and through the doors of the preschool. The school staff floated around, greeting everyone with an unnerving intimacy, by their first names. Sammy darted into his classroom, and she stood with a cloud of mothers. They had walked to school under the smoky, foul skies, wearing leather coats in blue and orange. It seemed a paltry, mean decision, deciding what to wear, waking up and hearing the broken buildings falling into the boats. They had decided to dress up. Their hair was frosted golden and brown, and they were beautiful, and when they left, they cupped hands over their mouths.
“Have you gone out to dinner yet?” she heard one mother ask another. “You wouldn’t believe the good deals down here, plus you can get reservations. Prix fixe at Chanterelle, thirty-five bucks, incredible, plus you have money for a good bottle of wine.”
“The Independence has a special, Eat American,” said another. “The waitstaff is fast and gracious. They have the most exquisite apple pie.”
Clarissa closed her eyes and rubbed her face, wondering if she should admire these mothers’ resilience or be appalled.
“We were refugees at the Plaza,” she heard another mother say. “They had a special for everyone living below Canal. We had to go. Our place was covered in dust. We started throwing up, and I knew we had to get out. It cost a ton to get it cleaned. Should we stay or go? Can someone just tell me?” She whirled around, looking.
The teacher came by. “The children are doing well,” she said. “Do you want to say bye before you go?”
Now Clarissa swerved through the room like a drunken person. Your child was not in the world, and then he was, suddenly, part of it. She crouched and breathed his clean, heartbreaking smell. “I’m going bye,” she said.
Her child ignored her. Slowly, she stood up.
In the office off the main hallway, the in-house psychologist was holding a drop-in support session in which parents could talk about their feelings about sending their children to preschool three blocks from the site. Clarissa stood with the group clustered around the psychologist. One mother said, “My child screamed the whole way here, saying she was scared and didn’t want to go, and I dropped her off, but then, well, I wonder, is she right to be scared?”
“Why is she right?” asked the psychologist.
“Well, because,” called Clarissa, from the back.
“You have to believe it is safe,” said the psychologist. “You tell them a kid’s job is to go to school, and a parent’s job is to keep you safe.”
“But what if we don’t know if it’s safe?” Clarissa asked.
“Where is it safe?” the psychologist said. “Here? Brooklyn? Vermont? Milwaukee?”
The parents leaned toward her, awaiting an answer.
“You have to tell them a little lie,” the psychologist said.
LATER THAT DAY, SHE RECEIVED AN EMAIL WITH THE SUBJECT: STUNNED:
I don’t know how you decided on this number as a refund. It is very unfair. Who are you to decide how much money to refund me? You were lucky; I was the one who suffered. I was on my way there!
You did not tell me about the low water pressure or the scribbled crayon on the walls. Those facts would have made me not rent the apartment, and then I would NOT have been there. I thought you were my friend. Some friend. Do you even know what a friend is? Darla, my best friend, is kind to everyone, especially kittens. She once went to the animal shelter and brought her old Gucci towels to make the kittens more comfortable. I could see the attendants eyeing them! She told them to make sure the kittens took their towels with them to their new homes.
You left oily hairs in your hairbrush. I have your hairbrush. I have your Maybelline mascara. It is a horrid color. Who would put Maybelline on her eyelashes? Who would look good in navy blue? Are you trying to be younger than your age? You do not look so youthful in the snapshots on the refrigerator. You dress as though you think you are. You should not wear jeans when you are in your late thirties. I don’t care if it is a bohemian sort of thing, it is just sad.
I am requesting $3,000 plus $1,000 for every nightmare I have had since the attack, which currently totals twenty-four. You owe me U.S. $27,000, payable now.
JOSH FOUND A JOB AS AN ILLUSTRATOR AT AN ADVERTISING FIRM, and each morning he sprinted down their hallway toward the office that gave him a new life. Sammy would not say goodbye without giving his father one of his toys to keep during the day. “Take one toy,” Sammy said, thrusting a tiny plastic dinosaur or little truck into the pocket of his father’s suit. One morning, Sammy could not decide which toy he wanted his father to have to remember him, and when Josh finally had to leave, Sammy began to wail. He began to race after his father, and Clarissa had to grab him. “Daddy will be back later,” she said in a strained, cooing voice. “We’ll see him later. .”
He looked at her as though she were a fool.
One morning she tried to distract him by walking up to SoHo to see which artists had shows up. She peered at one gallery, where a member of the staff had expressed interest in her work, but had then vanished in an abrupt, unexplained departure. Another young woman, perhaps ten feet tall, wearing the monochrome dark outfits all the gallery staff wore, came over. Sammy was butting his head against the glass door like a small bull.
“I’m sorry, but he can’t come in,” she said.
Her face was perfectly blank, which Clarissa wanted to see as a personality deficiency, but which was instead an adaptive expression to New York and the desperate artists who banged on this gallery’s door. Sammy lurched forward. The girl blocked the door. “Sorry,” she said, sounding strained. “Ma’am—”
Clarissa grabbed Sammy. She bumped into an American flag that was hanging from the door.
“God bless America,” said the girl, quickly.
“Come on,” Clarissa said to Sammy. “I’ll get you a ball.”
She bought him a small red ball, and they passed the local park where they had spent much of their time before the attack. It had been beautiful, children playing under large green trees, honeyed patches of sunlight. Now the plants in the garden had been flattened after people raced, terrified, over them. The park had been closed briefly to clean up asbestos contamination. Sammy hurled his new ball into the park and darted in, chortling with joy. His ball was rolling to a garbage bin that said, NO PLAYING ON OR AROUND THIS CONTAINER. On the trees were flyers: EPA IS LYING. TOXIC DUST EVERYWHERE. UNITE!