Late Air Read online

  “What do you think about the black and white of Boulevard du Montparnasse in the rain above the changing table?” she called.

  “It’s a little formal, isn’t it?” he called louder. She didn’t want to have a full conversation like this, so she went to watch him from the doorway again. He was standing tiptoed on the ladder. His ankles quivered.

  “I could paint a picture,” she said. “Maybe something neutral like a mouse or a lion. Are those neutral?” She imagined his nose scrunched, lips raised in a snarl, how he always looked when he worked.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You won’t listen. A mouse or lion? Which is better?”

  “Neither. Look, Nancy, I can’t pay attention to what I’m doing. How about a cheetah? Neutral enough, and fast.”

  “Perfect!” she said, laughing at the lemon-shaded streaks of paint over his gray T-shirt. His biceps squirmed as he stiffly held the paintbrush—his blue jeans were also stained, and when he turned to face the wall again, she wondered if their child would inherit his pancake bottom. There were only a few things she felt sure of: that Baby would have long, lean legs—something she and Murray shared in common—and narrow shoulders, light eyebrows, and dimples, though she only had one on her left side. She was 5′4″, Murray 5′9″. She often worried their child would inherit her lack of athletic ability, her crooked spine.

  “Let’s keep track of measurements on that part of the wall.” She pointed with her pencil. “I want to start as soon as our baby can stand. One year and up.”

  Sometimes she wondered if they were silly for wanting the gender to be a surprise, but she remained resolute she didn’t want skewed expectations—not just in the first moments, but as their child continued to grow.

  Murray nodded. “After we finish laying out everything.” He gestured toward the separate list Nancy had been keeping for the other things they still needed: a bassinet, crib mobile, baby monitor, high chair, bibs, bath towels and toys, extra blankets and pillows. Marjorie had wanted to throw her a shower, but Nancy had resisted because it was embarrassing having so few outside friends and family to invite. She had one close friend from college, Caroline, who’d just had her first child, too, and was full of all kinds of advice when Nancy had called with her own news. It would be too much to ask Caroline to travel to the city for a shower, and she figured it would be easier to buy the basic things they needed anyway, even if Murray was worried about the accruing costs, the receipts he insisted on saving in a jar.

  “We’ll have plenty of space,” she said, too quietly for him to hear, now that she’d returned to the living room. They used to keep an ongoing Scrabble game on the coffee table. A few weeks ago, Murray had gotten lucky with syzygy, at twenty-one points, and at first she’d assumed he’d used a reference text, but when she’d looked up the word and realized it was a term used to describe celestial bodies, she’d been impressed by his secret knowledge of astronomy.

  They’d moved the game to Murray’s desk, then to the bedroom to make space for Baby, and sometimes she couldn’t help but think of all the time he spent there, most often watching “form videos” of his girls. He claimed he was analyzing their gait and turnover speed, measures he felt in constant need of improvement. Nancy had been tempted to open the door, to pretend to ask him what he wanted for dinner, or double-check their Sunday plans—but the next weekend he was away, couldn’t she just watch the videos alone, without worrying he might catch her, accuse her of spying?

  She heard Murray’s footsteps in the room.

  “I’m glad you’re resting.” Some sweat had seeped through his T-shirt, more yellow paint on his cheek. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said.

  She closed her eyes, waiting for her stomach to settle.

  Before he reached their bedroom, she breathed deeply. “Thank you for painting the room.” She wanted to say something else, something about her gratitude for him, but what—what could she say?

  “Tomorrow I’ll add another coat.” He smiled, his way again: always focused on the next task.

  As the shower water ran, she felt the extent of her guilt, how easily her mind latched on to things to worry about: images of him with his girls. She’d never told anyone she was paranoid, not even Marjorie. She was ashamed of her insecurity, her need to assume the worst because it was easier than embracing the reality of their situation—this unknown thread she sometimes felt them teetering along, for no apparent reason.

  FIVE

  Tuesday

  5:22:01 a.m.

  Murray drove ever so slowly with the window down. He listened for any sound: a car door opening or closing, the rumbling of a garage, footsteps creaking over a wooden deck, the jangling collar of a dog, any noise from a backyard. The crack of a golf ball would be impossible to miss in such silence.

  Minutes slipped in and out, approaching the time yesterday when he’d been at the course with Becky, then moving beyond, leveling at 5:40, then 5:46. By now, he would have sent her out. Eventually he completed eight laps, jotted a few notes down about early-morning walkers, a couple of slow joggers, a house where a woman stood before her kitchen window washing dishes, gazing out absently. He passed a house with a broken gate, listened as its iron latch banged against its hook, the weight of heavy wood driving forward and back. One woman entered her car carrying an infant in a car seat.

  He remembered: people woke at all hours of the morning, or night, to drive their infants to sleep. Babies were calmed by the thrum of an engine.

  Unconsciously Murray rubbed the tender indent of his temple with a calloused index finger. Around 6:00 a.m., he unbuckled his seat belt and limped toward Maltby Lakes Trail, where the winding dirt paths made for better backyard views.

  He stepped over tree roots and half-submerged stones. Amid some brambles, he found a long, knobby stick for steadying his balance as he glimpsed more lives. Brick or stone patios, some with picnic tables and benches, others with glass tables and wrung-up umbrella tops, black nylon hoods cloaking grills. Bill and Marjorie, that Labor Day barbecue they’d had . . . but he still couldn’t place it, the exact moment things had started to slip.

  He peered into a few other yards with swimming pools. The most luxurious was eight feet deep with gold leaves skimming its top.

  The morning wind had stilled itself to a breeze. He and Nancy had never succeeded in buying a house together. She had loved to swim, and he imagined the space she inhabited now came with certain comforts, the calm of a pool.

  There were no drivers lying about lawns, no suspicious golf bags, no unclaimed piles of balls.

  Titanium drivers covered the farthest distance at the lowest trajectory; titanium struck the hardest.

  Assuming he’d done all of the math correctly, Becky would have been unconscious for no more than thirty-five minutes before she reached the emergency room, well within the “golden hour” doctors used to predict survival.

  The news wouldn’t come until much later that night when Lisa called him, hysterical. She said Becky’s trauma was severe, that she’d undergone emergency surgery to remove several blood clots and was officially in a coma, had been for the past forty hours. No telling whether she’d wake up, or if she did, the extent of the damage.

  Why did you single out Becky for these practices? Lisa had cried through the phone. My baby, she’d wailed.

  He told himself to stay calm, stay in control. He would not let this woman crack his optimism—would assure her of his tradition, how carefully he plotted each and every workout, the steps he’d taken to communicate with the club beforehand, and now all the research he was doing to locate the source of the accident. There would be some justice here, he promised. She’d been quiet through the phone. She’d listened to him. He needed to see Becky, he said, and he wanted to help her and Doug, if there was anything he could do. Eventually she’d yielded. She and Doug were taking turns driving home to shower, to check on the house, and it was Doug’s turn now. He could come now, if he hurried, she’d said—s
he would be standing outside Becky’s room. He was on his way, but even so, he’d have no more than five minutes with her.

  Inside, the cervical collar still clasped Becky’s frail neck. A monitor tracked her heart rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure; another, her brain’s electrical activity. He knelt down beside her.

  A ventilator worked her lungs, her chest rising and falling to the rhythm of the machine’s hiss of oxygen into her windpipe. Intertwining tubes covered her chest. One, thin and yellow, fed nutrients in through her nose.

  “Becky,” he said, barely able to produce more than a whisper, the constriction in his throat, this sense of having been here before, though he wouldn’t let the thoughts seep in, not fully. He focused on Becky, here, in this bed.

  The right side of her head had been shaved, a half-moon of sutures. Both eyelids were bulbous and charcoal hued, the right one deeply raised, still rimmed.

  “Please,” he whispered, crouching close. A small part of her bloated thigh showed between her hospital gown and compression boots, her tan skin ashen.

  He dropped his face to his hands and repeated her name. He wanted sound from her, coherent or not, to affirm that she heard him, that she was alive. He reached out toward her curled palms. To elicit something instinctive in her, like the desire to grasp.

  One of her monitors started to beep. He looked around, unclear which monitor was signaling. A voice rushed in, a nurse. “It’s her temperature!” she said.

  Lisa entered next, weeping, screaming questions at him, while the nurse prepared for cold water to be pumped through a blanket.

  “Get out!” Lisa yelled.

  “You need to put ice bags under her arms,” he said. “She shouldn’t have a blanket—”

  He wasn’t clear on the difference between minutes and seconds, just this blur of Lisa shouting again for him to leave. Out! echoed through his ears. What had he done but try to help, ensure her safety? Becky’s temperature could rise again if they didn’t change the protocol, didn’t adapt to Becky’s particular needs right now, the only moment they ever had—he almost rushed back inside the room, but a nurse brushed past him first, nearly pushed him away, bringing more ice for Becky. Murray closed his eyes. Anything but the image of Becky’s swollen arms, shivering and cyan blue.

  Just before Nancy’s due date, Murray had gone with her for a tour of the hospital. And as he passed through a series of halls to the elevator now, he thought of the neonatal care unit where there had been miniature drip meters and ventilators, a dialysis machine and a cart carrying forceps, scissors, bandages. He shuddered over the image of tiny spectral lungs, air sacs thin enough to explode.

  The Yale Art Gallery was on Chapel Street, just across from Atticus, where Murray and Nancy used to meet for lunch every Wednesday. His legs were weak as he ascended the gallery’s center staircase. It had been designed to create the sense of an abyss, a tour guide had described the first time he and Nancy visited together. Murray never looked down from the top; he always stopped at the second level, winding his way through a maze of periwinkle until he found the painting. There was no one here yet.

  Murray hadn’t dated much in high school or college, and the fact that he’d asked Nancy to go to a museum when they first met always felt like it was from a dream. Also the way she’d smiled at him, eyes like sunlit glass. Right now? she’d asked.

  He’d been ashamed by his wet clothes, his missing umbrella, but she must have sensed his discomfort, because she’d reached for one poking from her handbag. We’ll share, she’d said. And he’d felt this uncertain tug that made him forget his plans for the day. She’d guided him the few short blocks under her own umbrella to the metro, and then they’d transferred at Châtelet before getting off at Concorde.

  Orangerie. He didn’t understand naming a museum after oranges, but he’d been too afraid to ask Nancy to explain. She’d taken him to see the Water Lilies, and in the room enshrouded by water lilies, willow branches, and cloud reflections, she’d explained the water as a mirror for the sky. She’d said the light from the sun filled everything, this illusion of an endless whole. They’d sat there for a long time, drenched in silence, in grays and greens and blues, afternoon seeping into evening. Nancy told him how Monet woke every morning before dawn to paint the sun’s first glimmers from his canoe, how he spent a whole day tracing its shifting energies and undulations. Murray wanted to squeeze her hand then, but it had been too early for that, so he’d focused on remembering instead, on imprinting every fact and detail to his mind. He was good at this.

  Camille on the Beach in Trouville, a Monet in the Yale gallery—he and Nancy had first gone to see it together the weekend they found their New Haven apartment. Ed Swanson, the women’s head coach at the time, had connected him with a broker in the area. Murray saw their apartment, the one he still lived in, just as it had been that first day: the fresh yellow clapboard, the way they’d walked around to the private entrance, the broker going on about the size of the kitchen, the abundance of natural light, the in-unit washer and dryer.

  Murray pictured the dusty, empty look of it all after they’d stepped inside, speckles of light dancing over hardwood floors, the oily electric burners and rusting oven in the adjoining kitchen. He’d opened the oven, wiping his finger along the top rack, and then afterward he’d hoped Nancy hadn’t noticed the grime he’d had to wash off. He’d worried reality was setting in. They’d only been married six weeks, and these amenities should have been inexcusable, considering Nancy’s roots. But she hadn’t brought it up and he hadn’t apologized, because apologizing admitted a weakness. The worst kind.

  Murray thought of that dinner when he was thirteen, just two years before his father died, when his mother had gone on about their day at the library. His mother had loved the library, and if he and Patrick finished their chores quickly after school, she’d take them to pick out one new book each. The library was an old brick building with a copper bell in front, and he and his brother used to hurry up to the second floor, where all the science books were. Murray usually picked one on astronomy.

  That dinner, Murray’s mother had wanted to share all the details about a travel guidebook she’d found on South America, her hopes of flying there. His father had asked her to be quiet. Murray had watched his mother’s lips straighten, had watched her slowly rise from her chair and set her plate in the sink. Then she’d turned. She’d pointed her finger at his father and said, voice raised, something else about speaking her mind, about having her own dreams. Then his father stood up, grabbing her wrist. There had been a glass jug of milk on the kitchen counter from when Patrick had poured himself a cup, and he must have forgotten to put the jug back in the refrigerator—their mother didn’t notice him forgetting—because their father had reached for the jug and thrown it at the wall. The glass had shattered, and milk had beaded along the edge of the counter and started trickling down, and Murray had clambered to pick up the shards while his mother blotted the counter with a towel. Sobbing, she’d crouched down next to Murray to help. It wasn’t long before she cut her finger, sucking the blood and crying, and his father walked outside into the cold. It had been February, and sometimes his father drove to the nearest bar where everyone from Blaschak went.

  Murray was glad Nancy never met his father, but he wished his mother might have been more recognizable, like the one he’d grown up with, when they’d first visited her in Luzerne. At the home, they’d talked about books, since his mother’s long-term memory was still intact. She loved The Secret Garden, and Nancy knew it well, as she did most books, and they’d exchanged thoughts about characters. He’d been proud to marry Nancy, someone so well versed in literature, as his mother would have been if she’d gone to college. It had made him happy to show off his new bride before his mother passed, because just before he’d left for Paris for the marathon, when her health had started its decline, she’d told him that was her greatest wish for him—that he might find his match one day in a wife. Even if they had come b
ack to the States to marry, she would have been too weak to attend, but they’d shown her photographs, and he’d watched his mother trace her finger over the light and shadow around Nancy’s short veil, smiling crookedly at him. Then she’d said beautiful and reached for Nancy’s hand.

  Nancy’s parents’ reaction couldn’t have been more opposing. Nancy’s mother had arrived to meet them in Paris in pearls and shiny heels, her father a suit of pressed linen. They had been quick to total the sum of Murray’s parts, his jeans and T-shirt, his sideburns. He still wished she’d properly warned him. That had been their first real argument. He’d wanted a clearer sense of the kind of people they were, the wealth she’d come from, but he often wondered if her parents’ disapproval of him was more than a matter of class. If it was the idea of an athlete—of making a career out of unknowns—that they couldn’t stand. Most people were too afraid to test themselves that way, he thought. You risked failure every time you stepped on the line. Risked injury the minute your laces were tied.

  They’d eloped in September. The wedding took place in a small public garden in Cernay-la-Ville, just outside of the city. A local priest Nancy had befriended during her arts fellowship officiated because they’d wanted to avoid their disparate religious backgrounds: he Catholic, she Protestant. He remembered the smell of rhododendron, Nancy’s simple ivory blazer and skirt, her shoes studded with tiny beads. He’d given her a plain gold band, using up what had been left of his race earnings.

  Then, as if by fate, Ed Swanson’s offer had come to Murray two weeks later by mail. Murray had given his Olympic coach, Phil Friedman, his hotel address in Paris, in case of an emergency, since his mother had been in poor health, and by the time Phil forwarded Ed’s query to him, Murray had feared it was already too late. He’d hurried to the nearest newsstand and bought a phone card. He’d connected with Ed in a phone booth, and Ed had offered to fly Murray back for an interview. Somehow, in just a matter of weeks, it had all worked out for Nancy to return officially with him.