A Window Opens: A Novel (24 page)

I pictured my kids lined up in the
window, their little faces alight with pride as I headed off to the train.

The bells inside the steeple started ringing, and Genevieve paused to wait out the clanging. In the space of those ten tolls, her face fell. I glanced at a picture of her on the bulletin board—Genevieve and Lance and their two dogs, Jane and Austen, all four of them wearing shirts that said “Who Rescued Who?”—and realized, suddenly, how much older she looked now.

“Understood. I’ll get on MMO as soon as I’ve had a chance to complete my deep dive on literature— does that sound good?”

“Okay, but please bear in mind that we need to indicate to Cleveland that we’re on the bus.”

“Oh, of course. Yes. I am on the bus.”

“Good to know. And Alice? You’re doing a great job.”

This was such an unexpected revelation, I never thought to ask if the bus was going to an arcade.

•  •  •

On the train home that night, my phone started vibrating. I withdrew my hand from a greasy bag of Zaro’s popcorn and licked the salt off the fingers of one hand while I navigated from e-mail to texts with the other. By now, I was adept at balancing the phone on one thigh—a multitasking move I thought of as semi-hands-free.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

To recap our meeting that started at 9:30 and ended at 10:42, you will take ownership of the MMO push for the New York office. Going forward, half of your time will be dedicated to reimagining the Scroll experience to include video games, sturdy furniture, and child-friendly cuisine. [Note: Packaged snacks should be in biodegradable wrappers ONLY. No lollipops due to choking risk.] Please adjust your goals in GatheringPlace to reflect this change. Thanks.

To: [email protected] +11 others

From: [email protected]

DON’T FORGET TO DROP OFF YOUR CHECK FOR GIRL SCOUTS! WE HAVE LOTS OF FUN TRIPS PLANNED FOR OUR GIRLS, INCLUDING AN OVERNIGHT CAMPING TRIP, RIVER RAFTING ADVENTURE, SOUP KITCHEN VOLUNTEERING, SENDING LETTERS TO OUR TROOPS, LOCAL PARK CLEAN-UP, GARDEN BEAUTIFICATION AT SCHOOL, ASSISTANCE AT SPECIAL OLYMPICS AND KNITTING BLANKETS FOR CHILDREN AFFECTED BY THE LANDSLIDE IN CHINA. PLEASE LEAVE CHECKS IN MY MAILBOX BY FRIDAY 9AM SHARP!! XOXOXOX, KARA

The prospect of writing a check for $75, driving it across town, and dropping it in Kara’s mailbox filled me with ennui. I had a million excuses: We were out of checks. I couldn’t find my car keys. What was the amount, again? I deleted the message, blocking out the memory of Margot happily organizing boxes of Samoas, Thin Mints, and Trefoils in our living room. Wasn’t she too old for Girl Scouts anyway?

Jessie:
Just a reminder, Margot needs a bagged lunch for her trip to the Edison Museum tomorrow. No cutlery or containers—everything has to be disposable. No lunchboxes allowed.

Me:
You’re a godsend. Thanks for the reminder!

Was it weird that Jessie had this information and I didn’t? Or that she knew where to find Oliver’s shin guards and I didn’t?

•  •  •

“Daddy, do you know how small a butterfly is?” Georgie whispered into Nicholas’s ear in the middle of the night. Since I was awake anyway, I led her by one small, warm hand back to her room.

Then I nudged Nicholas. “Are you awake?”

“Now I am.”

“What happened at the Shannon Rose?”

“You’re seriously waking me up in the middle of the night to ask me about this?”

“Sorry, but I ran into Jim at the liquor store and he told me to ask you—”

“Alice, what is your
problem
? I’m
sleeping
. I have that meeting in Princeton tomorrow: I have to be
awake
. Can’t this wait?”

He had a point.

I waited until he was snoring quietly, went downstairs, and opened Facebook on my laptop. I clicked through pictures posted by a girl I grew up with and hadn’t seen in real life since fifth grade. Her family was at the Tennessee State Fair. There were her four snub-nosed kids, the exact ages now that their mom was when we’d both collected troll dolls. They were in the dunk tank, posed by a paddock of cows, painting gourds, and pouring layers of colored sand in jars.

Twenty-six pictures later, a flicker on the left side of the screen caught my eye. Who else would be joining the party so late at night except a friend in a distant time zone?

My dad, that’s who. A little bubble popped up on my screen. “Can’t sleep?”

“No,” I wrote back.

“Why?”

“Oh, the usual. Work, money, kids. You.”

“You know me, I’m always up.”

“I mean, I’m up late worrying about you.”

No response.

“Dad, are you still there? . . . Hello?”

I didn’t need to look again at the left side of the screen to know that he was gone. I was relieved; the last thing I wanted to do was have a gooey heart-to-heart, especially over Facebook. What was there to say, really? I wondered if he was scared, but I didn’t really want to know and I knew he didn’t want to be asked. From the day of my dad’s first diagnosis, he had insisted on forging ahead, living his life: ordering mysteries from the Book of the Month Club, mapping out the next season’s perennials on graph paper, collecting spare nickels and pennies in Maxwell House coffee cans until he had enough to wow his grandchildren at the change machine at the bank. What was it like, having nowhere left to forge? I felt like my back was against a brick wall; I couldn’t imagine how cornered my dad must have felt.

Back in bed, I heard the Chartwells truck back into the school parking lot, getting ready to drop off a week’s supply of milk cartons and square slices of pizza. I heard the earliest train idling in our station, its shrill whistle silenced thanks to a petition circulated by a neighborhood woman who called herself a peace activist.

I fell asleep as the sun came up.

•  •  •

“Alice, here is the password for downloading Joystick games to your laptop: SimPlayParabola. Thanks, Chica!”

I found this written on an unsigned Post-it stuck to the center of my computer monitor one morning. I’d never seen Genevieve’s handwriting before.

Late one afternoon, David came into my office and closed the door behind him. He sat down quietly in the chair behind mine and held up his hand in the universal “stop” gesture when I swiveled around to hear the reason for his visit.

“It’s nothing. I just need to take a minute.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I had a one-to-one with Genevieve and . . .”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I glanced at the clock on my computer and made a split-second decision to miss the 6:09 train; I could catch the 6:42 and still be home in time for baths.

“What happened?”

“Genevieve says I fiddle with my glasses in meetings. She told me to stop.”

I stifled the urge to laugh.
This
was useful feedback? I thought of the executive editor at
You
, who taught me how to edit when I was around David’s age. She’d call me into her office and gesture for me to take a seat while she made her way through an article, making careful marks with a mechanical pencil. At the time, the process seemed excruciating, but now I felt grateful to have had a crackerjack mentor.

“David. You need to take that advice and file it away. It’s only as significant as you allow it to be. So fine, you occasionally fiddle with your glasses. Does that negate all the ways you’re doing a great job? Half the time I have to remind myself that you haven’t been at this as long as I have.”

David kept his eyes closed. I imagined Oliver, fifteen years in the future, sitting in that chair, on his way home to split Thai takeout with three roommates in Bed-Stuy. Yes, it was annoying to me to be patronized by a youngster like Genevieve, but for someone at David’s stage, the scrutiny and criticism could take a serious toll.

“And
none
of us really know what we’re doing here, that’s the thing you need to keep in mind. We’re all making it up as we go. Not one person in the world has more experience setting up a bookstore-slash-gaming lounge than we do.”

David laughed, reluctantly. “I know. I’m just trying so hard and she only ever points out . . . the bad stuff.”

“Bad stuff? If the worst thing she can think of is this crap with your glasses? I’d say you’re in good shape.”

“I guess.”

“Genevieve is like the man behind the curtain. Don’t let her scare you.”

When David left, I looked over at Matthew, who took off his noise-canceling headphones. He no longer stood at his tall desk; now he had a tall chair to match.

“Did you catch any of that?”

“Enough.”

He rolled his eyes at me, pantomiming holding a gun to his head.

W
hen he had his first surgery, my dad had no idea that he was going to wake up without a voice. He knew he had a tumor in his throat, and he went into the hospital to have it removed before starting chemo. But the tumor turned out to be much bigger than expected, and it was wrapped around his larynx in such a way that everything around it had to come out. Immediately.

As Dr. Davis put it, “We found ourselves a little surprise, so we had to get a smidge more aggressive than we anticipated.”

This was the understatement of the century. My dad was never able to make noise again—no talking, laughing, whispering, humming, singing, or whistling. He had never been able to carry a tune, but he’d always been a big whistler. In what the hospital social worker cleverly referred to as the “new normal,” he also had to breathe through a hole in his neck.

I don’t remember who broke the news to him. I remember shiny yellow cinder-block walls in the recovery room. I remember aluminum
chairs padded in turquoise and little packages of Keebler graham crackers stacked in a plastic basket on the windowsill.

When the weight of the news descended on my dad, he was ferociously angry in a red-faced way that would have been almost comical if it hadn’t been so scary and wildly out of character. This was our mild parent—the one who, when he’d had a voice, never raised it.

After the surgery, my dad threw his meal tray of clear liquids across the room and the little sealed cup of Jell-O exploded loudly against the wall. He gave a nurse the finger, and when the surgeon came into the room, he refused to open his eyes. We handed him a legal pad to write on—because, of course, he’d come to the hospital prepared to get some work done while recovering—and he scribbled one word with such conviction, it left an imprint on every sheet all the way to the back of the pad: “LIVID.”

I escaped to the hospital parking lot, where I leaned against a concrete construction barrier and cried so violently, I thought I might never stop. I was pregnant with Oliver, and this was the first time I felt him move.

The social worker said, “Your children will help your dad get through. When a door closes, a window opens.”

But I knew better. My dad wanted to make noise. He was a talker, an analyzer, a debater, both a collector and dispenser of knowledge. Babies weren’t his bag. Even as his daughter, I knew that I’d become more interesting to him as I’d gotten older and had more to talk about. At that moment, I would have traded the little butterfly of my own baby for one more conversation with my dad.

•  •  •

A few days after the laryngectomy, my dad handed the legal pad to my mom. (Dry erase was a relatively new invention and tricky for a left-hander to maneuver.) This time, the message said, “I need help and you can’t give it to me.” So my mom turned to the yellow pages— on par with
the Bible in her faith system—and located the Voiceovers. They were a support group for people who’d had laryngectomies.

“They call themselves larys,” she explained, after she’d talked to the leader of the pack, Tony Capossela, a butcher who spoke with the help of an electrolarynx. My dad would have to wait six weeks before he could use one, too. Given the margins of his tumor, we knew he wouldn’t be able to learn to speak through his esophagus—the other alternative for laryngectomees, where you produce sound by sucking in air and expelling it again, almost like burping.

A week later, the Voiceovers welcomed us to their annual Harvest Banquet at Mambo’s Grille and Chill on Route 46. It was not the kind of establishment my parents normally frequented, but they soldiered across the parking lot, arm in arm in their L. L. Bean jackets, while I struggled to tie the big grosgrain ribbon on my maternity coat. We were greeted at the door by a man with acne scars all over his face and a stoma cover crocheted in navy.

“Hello, sir,” he buzzed at my dad. “We’re sorry for you that you’re here, but awfully glad to meet you.”

He moved his electrolarynx away from his neck and held it like a microphone, pressing the button on the bottom to make it buzz. Then he brought it back to his neck. “That’s me laughing. You’ll get the hang of it.”

Imagine attending a party where more than half the people can’t talk normally. It was surreal, with men and women of all ages buzzing around the place or burping out their words while piling on croutons and pimento-stuffed olives at the salad bar. My dad worked the room with his legal pad, jotting down bits of advice gleaned from the larys: how to stand in the shower so your stoma isn’t flooded with water; where to order backup batteries for an electrolarynx and summer-weight covers for your stoma; a reminder to register with the local police department—because if you ever need to call 911, they won’t be able to hear you.

My parents took it all in, their faces serious. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

•  •  •

We went back to the Harvest Banquet every October. This year, Tony did a double take when he saw my dad slowly shuffle into the dining room at Mambo’s.

“Ed, what the hell, she got you on some kinda diet?” He planted a kiss on my mom’s cheek and pulled her into a tight hug.

My dad pursed his lips and shook his head. No need to fuss with Buzz. Everyone in the room knew the signs of a recurrence, and weight loss was chief among them. Plus, my dad had fresh burns on his neck from radiation, and his color, as my mom had long feared, was now off—more of a mottled yellow than his usual ruddy pink. Otherwise, my dad’s appearance was meticulous: shiny penny loafers, blue blazer, striped shirt, comb marks in his hair.