Hope and Other Punch Lines(13)

Yes, I’m fully aware my parents are different from most teenagers’ parents and also that they are wasted on virgin me. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that they know that it will be wasted on me, that they are well aware I’ll be lucky if I lose my virginity before my senior year of college, which is why they’re comfortable being so liberal in the first place.

“Nope, not preoccupied. I love camp so far,” I say.

“You making some new friends?”

I take a deep breath. I can feel the tiniest whisper of a wheeze rev up in my lungs. So slight, it’s almost like a lisp. The slightest of crackles. A match against the grainy side of a box.

A few months ago, when it became obvious that Cat and I were no longer friends, my father asked me outright: Did you stop being her friend, or did she stop being yours? It was a cruel question, though I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t realize that would be like me asking him Did you leave Mom, or did Mom leave you?

My dad still works for the same company he was working for on September 11. Back then, he was a bond trader, but through the years, he’s moved steadily and swiftly up the ranks, his ascent no doubt helped by his being one of only a handful of survivors in his office. He commutes into the city each day and takes an elevator to the thirty-fourth floor of a shiny new building in Midtown and goes to meeting after meeting, and I don’t know if he thinks about all the people he used to work with who are now gone. Each person has his or her own plaque in the lobby, like they do in Oakdale, though the installation is, by necessity, bigger.

My dad’s company lost close to three hundred people. That’s the size of my entire senior class.

I wonder if he ever stops to look at the plaques.

I imagine not.

“I really like my senior counselor.” I hate when my parents worry about me. On my first birthday, it took forty-eight hours for them to confirm that I was safe and alive. Forty-eight hours for them to track me down in that broken city full of robot guts. I used up an entire life’s quota of worry in two days.

“Why do I feel like you’re not telling me something?” he asks.

“Dad, come on. Mom has enough on her plate with Grandma. Report back that I’m totally fine,” I say, and trace my finger along one of the laminated placemats I made in preschool a million years ago, which my father still insists we use. On them, our prebreakup family is drawn in stick figures. All of us hold hands and stand within the confines of a single square house under a single triangle roof.

Childish geometric perfection.

“Also, you know you two chat way too much for divorced people, right? It’s getting a little weird,” I say.



* * *



—

A few hours later, when I’m back in my room and my lungs decide it would be a good time to put on a show, I don’t overreact. It’s not so scary anymore. I think of it as a small bodily betrayal, like a gluten allergy or a sprained ankle. No big deal, just something to be accommodated or worked around.

While I cough, I flick on some music so my dad can’t hear me.



* * *



—

I receive my first text from Noah. I have no idea how he got my number, since I purposely didn’t give it to him.


Noah: Where should we start? Who do you know best? Connie Kramer?



I could tell Noah that Kramer is Connie’s maiden name. That she got married a decade ago, and that if he Googles Connie Greene, he’ll get her obituary from a small regional paper. At least there, finally, they focused on her, not me. The headline read Local Hero Who Saved Baby Hope Dies at Forty-Six. In it, I learned all sorts of things I hadn’t known: she had two children (a boy and a girl, eight and four), she’d spent the last decade working as a first-grade teacher for kids with special needs, she was fluent in French.

Sometimes, for fun, I write my own obituary in my head: Abbi spent the last few years of her life alternating between the houses of her dysfunctional but loving parents, was an awkward conversationalist, and had anonymous social media accounts since people are creepy and also anti-Semitic.


Me: It’s not like there’s a Baby Hope photo club. I don’t really know any of them

Noah: Oh

Me: Did you think I was going to do all the hard work for you?

Noah: Let’s start with Chuck Rigalotti, right behind you

Me: You don’t need me for this

Noah: I do! You make me legit. If I contact them out of the blue, they’ll ignore it. Listen, I realize I’m being a big jerk in this one small instance. I’m sorry

Me: You should be

Noah: I’ll call Chuck. Set up an interview

Me: K

Noah: And, Abbi, I am really sorry





* * *



—

Before bed, I Google “Noah Stern.” And there it is, the very first result. Exactly what I didn’t realize I was looking for. An article from the New Jersey Courier, dated October 10, 2001.

    …Mrs. Stern, an Oakdale resident, says she held out hope her husband was still alive for an entire week after the attacks, since she hadn’t known he had plans to go to Manhattan that day. Still, records tracing his MetroCard put him within a one-mile radius of the World Trade Center early in the morning on September 11. At the time, Mrs. Stern’s infant son, Noah, born September 3, was in the neonatal intensive care unit of Garden State Community Hospital fighting his own battle for survival. On September 13, he underwent emergency heart surgery to fix an abnormality. Today, after looking at all available evidence, including credit card records, a county court judge officially declared Jason Stern dead in absentia. He will be added to the tally of victims of the September 11 attacks, taking that number to 2,604, though this figure continues to fluctuate and is expected to increase as similar claims are verified. Oakdale has sustained the highest number of deaths of any town outside of New York City. On a happier note, Noah came home from the hospital one week ago and is expected to make a full recovery.