Ashes of Fiery Weather (53 page)

Katie's bed was in the corner, beneath the slanted ceiling. She crawled under her blue quilt and simply lay there, fighting the strong arm that was clamped around her waist, pulling her into the past.

The first time, there had been a congratulatory feel, as if her mother had been wandering in circles around lower Manhattan and could, at last, sit down. The second time, what they'd found had been recently discovered in some bit of road that had been paved over.

Katie got out of bed, turned on her computer and opened her email. She typed “O” and clicked [email protected] when it popped up.

Owney, who had just turned twenty-one, was spending this winter break in East Hampton with his mother. They were living in an eight-bedroom house on the beach, caretaking for the owner, who would not put a big toe on Long Island until Memorial Day weekend.

As children, Katie and Owney used to see each other once a year at the Bentley & Sackett Christmas party. He and his parents had never been at any of the barbecues held up in Westchester at the enormous houses with backyard pools. Violet was a secretary. She'd been in the group of six whom her mother gave permission to leave after WTC 1 was hit, when they were merely witnesses to the catastrophic accident across the way. No one knew why Laurel didn't go with them.

Though she saved Owney's mother, Laurel could do nothing for his father, across the way in the North Tower, above the fire.

Owney's father, Gray (born Gary) Zinn, had been a painter and sculptor with a residency in unused office space in the North Tower, leased by an arts organization with a long name Katie could never recall. Violet, who was a poet, was the one who'd heard about the residency and suggested her husband apply.

Katie could still recall her surprise the day she and Owney ran into each other by chance in Sag Harbor. They'd both tagged along with their parents on errands as a way to get to BookMarks, the used-book store by the supermarket. It was only weeks after her father and Emma's October wedding. Autumn was slipping into winter. Those in town were there to stay. She'd been twelve, and Owney thirteen. They were both browsing Fiction, not Young Adult.

“Read this,” she heard.

Katie turned with her hand out and took the book,
The Quicken Tree.
She read the description on the jacket flap and then looked up.

“You too?” she said.

“There's a lot of us here,” he said.

And Katie imagined a whole network of half orphans on the East End, refugees from the city. Indeed, an entire community of families like hers who'd lived in spaces the size of attics, with Manhattan at large for compensation, and who, in the acrid, final months of 2001, fled to a place nobody would think of attacking, trading the city for houses where they could lose each other around corners, down hallways, up staircases, gaining through grief a measure of autonomy.

She'd once said to Owney that it was a pity the second identification had not come after college applications were safely in. But the call came only two weeks into Katie's junior year of high school, the year colleges judge you by. Katie had never paid much attention to this warning, which began the moment high school commenced and increased in pitch throughout her sophomore year.

The day after her mother's third funeral, Katie cut her afternoon classes for the first time. While walking away from the building, she saw, in the park across the street, a group of kids she'd barely ever noticed, except to roll her eyes when they gave joke answers to questions in class. The jokes were not even close to clever. That day, Katie went to the movies. The next time she cut class, she joined them.

The group of six existed in a kind of netherworld at the school, not popular, not jocks, neither brains nor delinquents. Misfits, Katie supposed, might be the best word.

At first they accepted Katie with amusement, for the tourist she was, but took her more seriously after she demonstrated an almost uncanny ability to buy beer without getting carded. Her height was an advantage, she explained. She wore jackets one size too big and kept them zipped. The bored clerks at delis and 7-Elevens assumed that no fourteen-year-old would be bold enough to put a six-pack on the counter without giggling. It didn't work all the time, but her success rate was impressive.

Even when they were ostensibly friends, Katie saw the group collectively, barely able to tell one from the other. Her teachers sounded like the grown-ups in Charlie Brown cartoons. She took the SATs with a hangover that made her feel like she was on a roller coaster every time she raised her head to ponder an answer. She ignored her curfew. When her father lectured her, she had to sit on her hands to keep from biting her nails, because even in the middle of rebellion, she felt the pull of pity.

He probably told Emma that things had changed after Laurel died. Maybe he really thought so. He had been the one to pick up Katie after school. He'd cooked dinner, enlisting her assistance with simple chopping and slicing, carefully explaining why they were changing up the recipe. At least a couple of nights a week, the two of them ate alone. As Katie got older, he was more likely to order in than cook, and when he did, he no longer asked her to help. She blamed herself, certain he'd figured out that cooking bored her. Katie recalled his unhappiness as an almost palpable thing. Its exact start she could not date, but surely long before that final summer.

After the boys were born, Katie began to understand that it had not been just the failing marriage but a more complete dissatisfaction. Her otherness did not distance him; her singularity did. A lone daughter was not the family he had imagined.

As a widower, her father had not merely started over. It was like he'd gone back to his twenties and corrected the mistakes he'd made in choosing his career, in choosing his wife. He reset his entire life.

All that work, and his peace was being disrupted terribly by the blue-eyed teenager who lived under the eaves of his beautiful home.

It was Owney who pulled Katie back from her ledge. He had been warning her for months that she needed to quit her new friends.

Still, he was the one she called at two a.m. one Saturday morning, late in June, a few weeks after the end of the school year. Panic was rapidly sobering her up. She was somewhere in Queens, she told him. In a strange house. She'd been at a party and this guy said he knew a better party. She'd left with him. Owney calmly told her to find a piece of mail and look at the address. She did, and read it to him over the phone. She stayed at the front window, casting nervous glances at the sleeping forms sprawled on the living room floor. It was more than an hour before a car came slowly up the block and stopped in front of the house. Katie practically dove into the passenger seat. Owney waited until she'd buckled her seat belt before driving away.

Now, from beneath the covers, Katie sent Owney an IM.

How do you have a funeral for a toe bone?

It took him ten minutes to respond.

Big toe is Methodist. Keep a stiff upper lip. Second toe Jewish. Do it right away. Next, Catholic. Get a priest to bless it. Next Hare Krishna. Airport joke too obvious & in bad taste. Little toe, hippie. Hire girl singer-songwriter.

No really?

Ashes. Scatter.

By eleven o'clock, the house had settled. Emma and her father were morning people, as her mother had been. Katie, though, had always been a night person, even as a toddler, which had frustrated her parents greatly. They told stories of her at age two, wide awake and calling to them as late as ten o'clock at night.

She was on her computer, Googling the colleges in Mrs. O'Dea's email, browsing their websites. Admissions. Academics. Photo Gallery. Campus Map. Ask an Alum.

Owney was a night person too, so Katie was not surprised when her phone buzzed and she saw a text from him saying he was in front of the house.

Katie crept downstairs to let him in. Owney took off his sneakers and followed Katie up the steps, carefully placing his feet exactly where she put hers, which impressed her, since he never had any call for slyness, given his mother.

In her room, Owney settled on her bed and crossed his arms loosely over his stomach.

Katie leaned against the door. “Remember that time I was in love with you?”

He laughed.

“I should have slept with you,” she said.

They had been a couple only briefly, in the time after Queens.

In the crackdown, only he was allowed to visit, because her father liked him. They started dating, in a way, since she was not allowed out on weekends. After more than a month of house arrest, which she found oddly restful, her father eventually let her go to Owney's, which at that time was a three-story house in Montauk, minutes from the beach. The owner, burned once by partiers, let Violet stay at a winter rent.

His mother was seeing someone then and she was gone a lot. Katie and Owney wandered the house, choosing whichever bedroom struck them. Lighting. The view. A queen-size bed. A balcony.

But again and again, Katie pushed his hand away when he reached for the button on her jeans. Finally, he asked, “Do you think you inherited some gene that short-circuits birth control?”

“You don't give away a baby you were trying to conceive.”

He pointed out that her birth parents had probably not used anything.

After two months, near the end of the summer, Katie said they should break it off. He was going away to college; he should start out at school unencumbered. She had not meant it, but Owney agreed they should split. It had been a mistake for him to think she was ready, so recently returned from her wild months.

Now Owney laughed from his place on her bed. “Maybe we give it another shot when you're old enough to drink and I can take you out for real.”

“Great. It's a date for a year and seven months from now.” Katie moved to sit on the edge of her bed. “I told Dad and Emma that we'll cremate and that I'd take care of the ashes myself.”

Her father and Emma had nodded somberly, barely able to mask their relief. Very few of her mother's friends would have come to another service. Laurel Rourke-McKenna had not been lonely in life, and Katie was not sure how she had ended up so in death. She supposed it was simply going on too long.

“Okay,” Owney said, “next is to get yourself listed as next of kin. Then tell them you don't want to be notified anymore.”

His mother had done just this. Violet preferred to imagine that her husband had simply vanished into the day's beautiful sky.

Owney was certain that he had jumped. Gray's work in the last year of his life had been about fire and flight. Premonition, Owney believed. Only he had seen the pieces that were meant for an exhibit set for spring 2002, and he was now working to re-create them from memory. Last year, he had begun sketching from notes he took a long time ago. Owney wanted proof.

When he was younger, he'd resembled Violet, with his dark hair and the kind of slenderness that made him seem almost fragile, like the survivor of a childhood illness. But it seemed that with each year out from September 11 he looked more and more like Gray, gaining inches of height and a new solidity. Katie imagined it happening the more confident Owney grew in reviving what had been destroyed, as if his father wanted to bequeath to his son the kind of hands that could manage the work. His eyes were the same light blue as his father's, but Gray's vision had been perfect. Katie would not be surprised if Owney suddenly tossed off his glasses one day and, from across the room, began counting the freckles on her nose.

“And while you're at it,” Owney said hesitantly, “I think it's time to ask for your birth mother's information.”

Katie touched her hair and then let her hand flutter to her lap. “Some stranger can't replace my mother. It's not getting her back. You're living vicariously.”

“Maybe,” he said, surprising her. She'd thought he would laugh.

“You're not getting Laurel back. But, something.”

“A woman who wants nothing to do with me, or a woman who tries to act like she
is
my mother.”

“Something. Better than a blank,” Owney said. “At least find out from the lawyer if she even wants to be in touch with you,” he said. “And I'm tired of the Bartleby answer.”

This time she did laugh through her tightening throat.
I would prefer not to.

Katie had spent her eighteenth birthday turning away from her father's expectant gaze and small encouraging smiles. It was evening before Katie realized that he wanted her to ask for the paperwork so he could be rid of the burden of knowing.

Katie looked down at her folded hands.

The thought of arranging a meeting, either over the phone or by email, left her shaking. She could not imagine walking into a room knowing that she was about to see the woman whose body she'd once shared. The nervousness was so intense, Katie wasn't sure if it was like the thought of coming face-to-face with a monster or somebody terribly famous.

“You chase after your own reflection,” Owney said. “I don't think you know you're doing it. We pass store windows and you turn and look every time.”

Katie felt her face flush. “I'm a raging narcissist, that's all. Now you know.”

He laughed. “Hell, we can probably guess her first name. Maureen? Mary? Tara?”

“Margaret.”

“Right, Margaret,” Owney said. “Deirdre. Shannon.”

Katie stood up and went to her bookshelves. Like most photography books, it was broad and did not align with the neighboring novels. It was in plain sight on the third shelf from the top, the last one she could reach without a chair.

Katie ran a finger down the spine. In orange type,
Brooklyn Firefighters:
Photographs by Amred Lehane.
She slid it off the shelf and went to stand beside the bed. She held it up for Owney to see.