Act of God (12 page)

She sat down at a dirty table—milky dregs in a coffee cup and an untouched scone. She ate the scone. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

At the next table, a slow game of solitaire played on an iPad. She asked the tablet’s owner, an unshaven young man masticating a blueberry muffin, if she could borrow it, just for a moment. He stared at her orange prison jumpsuit and then suspiciously handed it over.

The YouTube clip opened with scenes from her commercial—the lovely beach house, her character’s brittle responses to her playful husband, the doctor visit, the post-coitus close-up, intercut with handheld footage of her, practically naked. A rubber-suited, respirator-clad escort led her into a decontamination tent marked with biohazard, radioactive, and infectious disease symbols. Vida had never before seen herself on film when she hadn’t been acting—even in home movies, she acted. The real Vida looked very much like her childhood self—wide-eyed, gap-mouthed.

A male voiceover began: “Ziberax side effects may include radioactive urine, transmittable pustules on or near the labia, swelling and peeling of the tongue, bloody saliva, blistered nipples, toxic breath, glowing discharge, and vaginal fungus.”

There were now over a million hits.

Just like last time, Kat grabbed the irreplaceable letters and clutched them to her chest after the respirator-clad HAZMAT man gave her and Ashley five minutes to evacuate the penthouse. She would love to have saved Edith’s pantsuit as well, but Ashley had thrown it down the garbage chute last night. She could hear drawers and cupboards banging in the other rooms as Ashley stuffed her pillowcase with everything she could cram inside—the model apartment’s dinner plates, napkins, napkin rings, the tablecloth, the candleholder, a vase, and the faux laptop.

Yesterday evening, when Kat had finally emerged from the life-restoring hot bath, she’d found Ashley in the dark living room, transfixed by the window, unaware of her presence. The puzzling girl stood haloed in the city’s afterglow, tiny and vulnerable against the pulsing skyline. Kat had sensed that Ashley had taken her in as much for the company as the money. She had to be a lonely but very brave girl, thought Kat. She’d come all by herself to America to be enchanted by those lights. Kat couldn’t help but remember her own younger self, a girl hankering after glory. Then the city went abruptly black.

This morning, clutching the letters, she tried to get Ashley to evacuate, but the stubborn girl wouldn’t leave until her pillowcase was as lumpy and heavy as a sack of potatoes.

Just when she thought she might have to drag her out, Ashley jammed one last towel into her distended sack and followed Kat down the thirty flights of service stairs with the other fleeing residents. The elevator had been shut off. On the ground floor, Kat turned to join the lines of stunned evacuees waiting to be decontaminated, while Ashley continued down to the basement exit. Kat followed her for a few steps, pleading with her to reconsider. “Ashley, if Edith had been properly decontaminated, she might be alive today.”

“I be alive, but in Omsk.”

“I’ll tell them you’re my niece.”

“Who believe homeless woman. I keep stuff.”

“No possession is worth dying over.”

“You think Chernobyl cleanup guys let you keep old letters? No way. They burn Mama’s book, then push you in chemical shower. Even false teeth brushed with bleach.”

Kat handed Ashley the letters. “Don’t let anything happen to them, please,” she said, wondering if she’d ever see them again. “Where will we meet?”

“I find you.”

Outside the lobby, a pop-up containment zone with two orange double-garage-sized decontamination tents blocked the street, one for men and one for women. The number of HAZMAT trucks and teams had quadrupled since Mr. Syzmanski’s building was evacuated only three days ago. Kat got into the women’s line.

She was stripped and scrubbed down by a tired nurse. The nurse must have washed at least the four dozen women before her.

“I think you missed a spot on my back,” Kat said, reaching behind to direct her. “This is my second evacuation in two weeks. Last time, no one bothered to decontaminate me or my sister, and now she’s dead.”

“Where did you live before?”

“Sixty-Six Berry Street.”

“Your name?”

“Katherine Glasser.”

After she was sprayed, swabbed, and X-rayed, the nurse issued her an orange jumpsuit and told her to dress and wait there. Ten minutes passed before a man in a crumpled, sweat-soaked shirt and unknotted tie holding a crisp manila folder appeared, more than enough time to read a chest X-ray.

“Did you see anything on the X-ray?” Kat asked, assuming the film was in hand.

“Sorry, I’m a doctor of public health, not a radiologist,” he said.

“Am I going to die? This is my second exposure to the mold. Did my sister die of mushroom poisoning, and is it just taking longer to kill me?”

“Your sister was Edith Glasser? You lived at 66 Berry Street?”

“I already told the nurse where we lived. When do I get my questions answered?”

“Your sister died of an ischemic stroke from a pulmonary embolism most likely caused by fungal pneumonia.”

“But she didn’t have any symptoms.”

“Sometimes people don’t.”

Kat involuntarily clutched her chest in anguish over Edith’s suffering, and in terror that her brain might flood any minute, too. The man assured Kat that if the radiologist had seen any sign of fungal pneumonia, let alone an embolism, she’d already be in an ambulance on her way to the hospital.

“Thank you,” she said.

He angled his smartphone so that Kat could see the picture
on his screen, a gray heap of mildew, a fistful of mushrooms punching a hole out.

“Is the pantsuit yours?”

“Yes. No. It might be my sister’s.”

“Where are the rest of her belongings now?”

“The Metropolitan Hotel is holding her suitcase for me.”

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but the Metropolitan and everything in it is scheduled to be burned tomorrow. Do you know how your sister’s pantsuit wound up in this building’s basement?”

“My niece threw it down the trash chute.”

“Are your belongings still in your niece’s apartment?”

“What belongings? I’ve lost everything.”

Kat sat on a bench by the river. She no longer owned a watch, but she knew she’d been waiting more than two hours for Ashley to find her. The sun was now a pillar of flame between two distant skyscrapers. Just as she started to panic that Ashley had disappeared with the letters, she heard a thick Russian accent say, “Orange for sure not your color.”

Clad in a new stolen dress, Ashley stood by the railing, the letters safe in her hands. “Surprised see me?”

“Just happy you found me. Oh, Ashley, you were so right. The letters would have been confiscated and destroyed.” With gratitude, she opened her hands for Ashley to give her the binder, but Ashley threatened to drop the letters into the racing current.

“I swap for Red Cross gift card.”

“You think I wasn’t going to share the money with you?”

“Yeah, for sure.”

“Yes, I would have,” Kat said, and she meant it.

“You think two live on hundred dollars? How long?”

“We could help each other.”

“BlackBerry, too.”

“Why are you doing this? I thought we were friends.”

Ashley jiggled the letters over the railing until Kat gave her the card. To prove to Ashley that she no longer had Edith’s phone, she turned her jumpsuit pockets inside out.

“I have nothing left of Edith’s but that book.” She held out her empty hands again. She couldn’t accept that Ashley didn’t possess a penny’s worth of compassion. “Please.”

The heaviness of those letters as Ashley dropped them into her grasp, a weight the editor had found too much, was the most comforting burden Kat had ever held.

After Ashley left without so much as a good-bye, Kat watched the last spokes of daylight roll behind the skyline. She had only wanted to take the lost girl with her to the emergency shelter. One had been opened in a nearby school gymnasium for the growing number of evacuees. But now that she had the letters, she worried they’d be taken from her. No one was allowed to bring any personal items to the shelter—not clothes, not photographs, not even a toothbrush.

She knocked on Gladys’s van window, hoping to leave the letters with her. The noise startled the poor woman and she abruptly sat up, once again trying to comprehend where in the world she was. Kat glanced over at the vinyl console. A lipstick tube and a can of aerosol deodorant shared the cup holder. The floor was thick with cats.

“Gladys, they’ve finally opened an emergency shelter. That’s where I’m headed now. Come with me. We’ll have showers and a hot meal and clean sheets. Maybe we’ll finally find out what the city has planned for us. There must be
hundreds of us mold refugees by now. The mayor must have a strategy. You can’t stay here.”

“I already asked. It’s a no-pet shelter. I can’t just leave my cats. They’ll be scared at night without me.”

“Why don’t I keep you company until the cats fall asleep and maybe you’ll change your mind,” Kat said, climbing into the passenger seat.

“My babies are good company but it’s nice to talk to a person for a change. Can I get you something to drink? I have Diet Coke,” Gladys said, opening an ice chest behind her in the van’s rear.

Kat thirstily drank the saccharine brown effervescence while Gladys fixed her a lunch meat sandwich, with a swipe of mustard. While Kat ate, Gladys picked up the binder and leafed through the pages.

“Are these the letters Edith always talked about? She told me they were off to the Smithsonian. Edith was so smart and accomplished, just like your mother. You could always count on her for good advice.” She looked beseechingly at Kat as if Kat might miraculously transfigure into her sister. “Things are getting very tense back there. George can’t bear the sight of Mona anymore. They don’t stop fighting. I don’t know what to do?”

It took Kat a second to realize that Gladys was asking about her cats.

“Maybe you could blindfold them?”

“I could try. I could use those cones cats wear after surgery. At least they wouldn’t have to look at each other all the time.”

Kat tilted her head back against the pillowed headrest and struggled to stay awake to listen to the rest of Gladys’s feline soap opera. She must have momentarily dozed off, because when she next opened her eyes, infinitesimal diamonds
of light, Las Vegas as seen through an airplane window on a cloudless night, scintillated on the console where Gladys had put the letters before falling asleep herself. The binder was sparkling, as if a schoolgirl had adorned it with glitter. She opened the cover. The paper was alive with spores. She almost flung open the door to hurl the book into the night, but all that would have accomplished would be to spread more spores and set loose the cats. Gladys would wake up alone. She knew what had to be done.

Taking Gladys’s lighter and the manuscript, she quietly slipped outside and walked until she found an ash-blackened oil drum under the expressway.

After three or four tries with the lighter, the archival plastic sleeves began to melt while the acrid smoke crept and curled underneath the bubbling transparencies, blackening the half-century-old lunch counter placemat and the Plaza stationery, the brown bag and the length of toilet paper. Sparks popped and sizzled until the binder finally exploded into a bluish flame. The flame answered all the questions.
Will I find love again? Why did she lie to me? How could my husband sleep with my sister? Am I lovable?

She could stand to think that life’s experiences, good and bad, died with the body, but she couldn’t bear to believe that dreams vanished too, those exquisite flights of reverie that never actually happened. All those experiences you can have for free. How could they burn and turn to ash? She would disappear one day, too, both her flesh and the woman she dreamed herself to be.

Without Edith, she had to accept the strangeness and solitude of existence.

Kat returned to the van to make sure that Gladys didn’t wake up alone and disoriented. She gently stirred the befuddled woman awake. “It’s time to go to the Red Cross shelter, Gladys.”

“What about my cats?”

“They’ll be thrilled to have the van all to themselves for a change. You need some human company.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

It’s not every day that you’re needed.

She and Gladys had to pass by their old block, bad enough with the blighted row houses, but now the trees were winter-bare, the sidewalk ankle deep in leaves though fall was still two weeks away. Looking up at the normally verdant elm that had shaded her stoop for a century, Gladys said, “I guess a tree can no longer grow in Brooklyn.”

A guard let them into the school while a volunteer, wielding a flashlight, guided them through a basketball court lined with cots. Her beam landed on two empty ones. Gladys, who hadn’t slept in a bed for days, immediately sank into snoring, but not Kat. She looked around the encampment. Blanketed bodies tossed and twisted in the reddish glow of exit lights. She recognized many of her neighbors sleeping in donated pajamas—the Syzmanskis, Marty the plumber from next door, but not Frank. What could they be dreaming about? Over the snores, she heard someone, Marty she thought, keening in his sleep. His mother had died shortly after Edith.

That night, for the first time since Edith died, she was waiting for Kat in sleep’s foyer.

“I have so much to tell you,” Kat said.

After not having so much as a kopeck in her pocket ever since she came to this country, the hundred-dollar card and the bulging pillowcase seemed like a fortune to Anushka Sokolov, but Ashley knew better. Without the names and addresses from hen’s Rolodex—long gone—she had no idea where to go. Even in her panic, she was tempted to buy something pretty in one of the shop windows, or if she couldn’t afford pretty, sugary. In cafés, rich young Americans dressed up in pretend rags and slurped frothy iced coffees. She noticed bowls of ice water set out for the dogs. She was thirsty. Was she supposed to get down on her hands and knees and lick from a bowl? She passed a window display of petrified noodles and fish, a shop that only sold lamps made from pop bottles and hangers, a juice bar that served liquid wheat, a store that sold hundred-year-old peasant furniture for thousands of dollars, an organic ice cream truck serving scoops the size of winter cabbages. A bicyclist, juggling a cell phone and a triple scoop, nearly pedaled into Ashley. His three chocolate balls splattered on the sidewalk. Good! Why does he get ice cream and not her?