The Nest(34)
Still, this one idea persisted: that he would find something of hers, and as long as he was there digging through the carnage it was possible—it had happened, just not to him. Salvatore Martin, retired EMS, who worked the 5:30 A.M. shift seven days a week had drawn his rake through a tangled pile of cable and dirt one bitter, frozen winter day and staring up at him was a photo of his son Sal Jr. on a laminated corporate ID, slightly burned around the edges, picture intact. Sal had quit the following week and everyone thought seeing the plastic badge had been too much, had sent him over the edge. Tommy knew the truth. Sal had found what he’d been looking for—proof, a talisman—and so he was free to leave.
Tommy’s last afternoon on the pile. He decided to find his own souvenir to take that was of this place where Ronnie had last lived and breathed—something easily pocketed to sit on his desk or the windowsill above the kitchen sink, something he could bear to look at every day. As he raked through the rubble, considering his options (a piece of stone, a pebble—it couldn’t be anyone else’s personal effect, he wouldn’t do that), one of his coworkers hollered for him.
“Tommy!” It was his friend Will Peck. Most of Will’s engine company in Brooklyn had been lost when the towers went down; Will had stayed home that morning with the stomach flu. They’d both been there since day one, embracing and exorcising their particular demons. Will waved him over to where an excavator had just dumped a heaping pile of dirt and dust and mangled metal.
“We got something here, O’Toole. Might want to come over and take a look.”
WHEN TOMMY HAD BRUSHED THE DEBRIS AWAY from the sculpture and understood what he was looking at, he could barely contain his glee. Oh, she was feisty that one, waiting until practically the very last hour of his very last day, but she did it! The minute he saw the hulk of metal emerge from the dirt and dust, he knew it was from Ronnie. In spite of its damage, he could see the tenderness of the couple’s embrace. The woman in the sculpture had one of her legs draped over the man’s leg, exactly the way Ronnie used to sit when they were alone, when she’d move in close and swing her leg over his and put one of her arms around his shoulder and draw him close with her other arm.
Am I too heavy? she’d ask.
Never. Even when she was nine months pregnant, she was never too heavy in his lap. He loved the feel of her fleshy thigh on top of his, how she’d press against his chest. The posture was so intrinsically hers, so intimate and familiar that when Tommy saw the statue, even covered with grime and grit, it took all his restraint not to whoop and holler, to tell everyone what its appearance meant, whom it was from. But he couldn’t be that cruel, couldn’t flaunt his luck in front of the others. He closed his eyes for a minute, silently thanked his wife.
The Kiss sat there until Tommy’s shift was over and it was night. The statue was secured to a flatbed cart and he volunteered to wheel it over to the Port Authority’s temporary holding trailer, where the piece would be documented and photographed before being handed over to the authorities in charge of artifacts. In an exquisite piece of luck, the Port Authority worker doing documentation that day had gone home early. Standing at the trailer’s door, Tommy knew what he had to do. It had proved absurdly easy for him to wheel the sculpture up a plank and into the back of his pickup and drive it home. He knew it would be weeks or months, possibly never, before anyone noticed it was missing. Among the piles of scorched debris—all the personal possessions and pieces of buildings and tires and cars and fire trucks and airplanes, who would even remember this thing? Who would think to ask where it had gone?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Melody had been sitting in her car outside the small consignment store on Main Street for almost an hour. Her coffee in the cup holder was cold. She was wasting gas because it was too chilly to turn the car off and sit for more than a few minutes without running the heat, but she still hadn’t worked up the nerve to go inside and talk to Jen Malcolm who owned the store and whom Melody knew a little bit because Jen also had children at the high school, two sons, and because Melody had occasionally sold a piece of furniture to Jen in the past. Items she’d bought and refinished but didn’t quite work in her house and were too nice, she thought, to sell on Craigslist and too bulky for eBay. Jen always liked the pieces Melody brought. Most of them sold, and Melody would earn a little extra money doing something she genuinely loved to do. Today’s errand felt different.
Melody turned the key in the ignition, cutting the exhaust but leaving it in the position where the radio would still play. When she got too cold, she told herself, she’d go inside and show Jen the photos of all the furniture in her house, the many pieces she’d spent years hunting down at flea markets and estate sales, her favorite finds, the valuable items acquired for a song from sellers who didn’t know any better: a neglected Stickley table that someone had criminally sponge painted, now stripped and restored; a black leather Barcelona chair pocked with cigarette burns and other unsavory stains she’d reupholstered in a bright turquoise tweed; and her favorite, a beautiful oak drafting table that tilted. Nora and Louisa had used it for years to draw or do homework or just sit, side by side, reading a book. She would sell all of it to appease Walt and slow him down. She would sell anything. Almost.
MELODY KNEW NORA AND LOUISA called her the General behind her back, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care because she also knew what it was like to grow up in a state of anarchy, in a house with parents so hands-off they were nearly invisible. Melody knew what it was like to have teachers ask, hesitant and concerned, if her parents were going to come to a parent-teacher conference. She knew what it was like to search in vain for their faces in the school auditorium during a play or a concert. She’d vowed to be an entirely different type of mother, and having twins never set her off course. Some days she drove herself crazy, running from one daughter’s after-school activity to the other’s. She charted the time spent with each child, making sure to even it out as far as was humanly possible. She never missed a single concert, play, soccer game, track meet, Brownie meeting, choral performance. She packed a healthy lunch every day, including one indulgent sweet on Fridays. She wrote them encouraging notes and arrived fifteen minutes early for pickup, so they would never stand in a parking lot alone, wondering if anyone was going to show up to bring them home, wondering if anyone even realized they were gone.