Lucy by the Sea (22)

“And then,” William looked over at me with a half-smile, “I told him that I knew a New York Times reporter who would love the story of a man coming back from Florida—a well-known lawyer, prominent—and infecting his asthmatic son because he just didn’t believe that he could. The Times would eat that right up. Make a great story right now. That’s what I told him.”

“Well,” I said, “it worked.” After a minute I asked him, “Do you know someone at The New York Times?”

“Of course not,” William said.



—

We drove into New Hampshire, and I said, “Oh! Chrissy’s pregnant.”

“Are you serious?” William looked at me. “She told you that and you’re only now telling me?”

“No, she didn’t tell me. I just now realized it.”

William said, “You mean you had a vision?”

And I thought about it, and I said, “No, it wasn’t a vision. But I think she’s pregnant, William, and that was one reason she looked different.”

“Why didn’t you ask her?”

I glanced over at him. “She would have told me if she wanted me to know. And she’s already had that one miscarriage, she may not want anyone to know until she’s more along.”

“I hope you’re right,” William said. Then he added, “But bringing a kid into this world, Jesus.”

We drove farther, we were in Maine now. And then I did have a vision; it had actually come to me the moment I saw Melvin step out of the car, it was as though he had—very briefly—an aura around him that was dark, and I have not had visions for a while, but that aura thing had come to me when I saw him, and it came again as we drove along, but now it was like a dark bird that flew across the windshield, so fast it was almost gone.

“Melvin’s got the virus,” I said.





That night there was a thunderstorm. It started just as we finally got back to Crosby, and it was magnificent. It was glorious to sit in that house and hear the rain coming down on the roof, and to see outside the lightning that lit up the ocean. The crack of thunder that came after each bolt of lightning across the water, it was just gorgeous, is all I want to say. We sat on the couch, holding hands—loosely—and for some reason the thunderstorm made me feel better. It might have made William feel better too, I am not sure, he sat and seemed far away. But he was exhausted. And so was I. I told him what Becka had said about Bloomingdale’s and the materialism of it and how the things in it were made overseas at cheap prices. “It surprised me,” I said.

He answered, “Ah, she’s just saying that because she’s young.”

“She’s not that young,” I said, and he said that he knew that.

Then he said, squinting toward the window, “But what she says is true.”





Four days after we got home, Melvin went into the hospital; he had the virus, and he stayed in the hospital for ten days. Barbara also had the virus, but she did not have to go to the hospital. Barbara’s mother got the virus as well in the assisted-living place she lived in, but it did not kill her. Melvin and Barbara went on living in her mother’s condo, and the same women who’d come to help Barbara’s mother came to help them. “Oh my God!” I said when Chrissy called to tell us, and I asked that she put Michael on, and he was subdued but he said, “It was good of William to have kept them out of the house, Lucy,” and I thought that was decent of him, because his father had just been very sick.

I kept walking around the house thinking, Melvin almost died! I could not believe it, although I knew it was true.

viii

On the news one night was a segment about Bangladesh and the shops where clothes were made, and it showed how the workers were not even given masks and also many of them had lost their jobs because no one was buying clothes right now, but the images of these very young girls, crowded into huge rooms, trying to cut pieces of fabric as quickly as they could—

It made me understand that Bloomingdale’s was exactly what Becka had said it was, a place where many bad things were manifested, and there we had been, the three of us so innocently, so stupidly, enjoying it, as though we could do that forever. Sauntering through the shoe section like that was all we had to do in the world.





That night I could not fall asleep, and my mind went to different places as it did on such nights, and I remembered this:

Years ago in New York City I had taught at a community college and there was a man who taught there as well, he was much older than I was, and he retired soon after I got there. He was a nice man, with thick eyebrows, and he was quiet, though he seemed to like me and we would sometimes talk in the hallways. He told me that his wife had Alzheimer’s, and that he could not remember the last word she had spoken to him, because she’d become gradually more and more silent and then she remained silent. And this man, her husband, could never remember the last thing she had said.



—

And thinking of this now made me think of something I had often thought before: that there had been a last time—when they were little—that I had picked up the girls. This had often broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say “Oh, honey, you’re getting too big to be picked up” or something like that. But then you never pick them up again.