Electric City: A Novel (32 page)

Martin kept this additional pain to himself, hoping Bear was tucked into the warmth of someone else’s world. When he did the math in his head, he realized it was probable Bear had already died. Would Martin have felt that death in his heart? Somehow the unanswered question convinced him there was no point in searching for Sophie. She was better off elsewhere anyway, better off in the arms of a living city.

Losses were the exact size of sorrows left unspoken. Martin was a ghost in a town already filled with them.

When finally he was given some moments to be alone with his grandmother, Annie could only keep her eyes squinting open for a few seconds at a time, just long enough to register his presence.

“You’re right not to waste your strength with words,” he said to her. “Just let me hold your hand.” Her child-sized body astonished him, as though already her soul needed less space.

“Her feet are growing cold,” Debora whispered, ominously. This was how a body began to depart: from the ground upward.

For the rest of the night he sat beside the bed, stroking Annie’s gnarled fingers, softly singing to her some phrases from his childhood. This chance to study her face while it still retained some trace of her was to be her parting gift.

“Akhso,” he whispered to her.
Grandmother
. “Konnorónhkwa.”
I love you
.

He saw her smile as he bent to kiss the hollow of her cheeks.

Before dawn glinted on the horizon, he suddenly considered dialing Midge’s number, with the thought of simply inviting her to sit with him and bear witness. Annie’s breathing had slowed almost to nothing.
We wouldn’t need to talk
, he thought.
Just listen to the wind
. He stood to wake Isaiah and Debora, to ask their opinion, but in that very instant he felt something shift inside the room, inside his bones.

He waited.

No more miniscule movements of her eyes beneath the lids, no more delicate rasp of inhaling and exhaling. This vessel, emptied of her spirit, was completely and finally still.

Smoke. Incense. The chanting of blessings for her soul’s great journey.

And for his own journey yet again. There was only enough time to get back across the border before anyone at work could question his absence. Midge would hear the news from Isaiah and Debora; they would be the ones to wash Annie’s body for the last time, to lower her into the earth.

So Martin headed north once more toward the place he now lived. Steinmetz had built himself a fully expanded existence in a new country more than once, and Martin thought he could retain the will to do that too. But so far Canada still felt like an accidental refuge, a borrowed place.

Crossing to the other side, Martin dreamed a silent song.

All in motion flickering on and off and on again, bursting fast in the darkness and then extinguishing, brief but insistent, flashing like stars against the infinite night sky. What if the sun chooses never to come up again? What if those lights are trying to tell you something you can’t understand? What if it’s Bear calling you from beyond, trying to make sure you know you are still loved, even now?

Maybe this is all anyone can ever understand about time or the future or electricity or being. Moonglow on moving water. Rivers, oceans, the passing of molecules back and forth, darkness into brilliance and then gone.

Like Steinmetz. Like Henry and Sophie and you.

G
RABBING AT THE
first medical internship she was offered in Manhattan, experimenting with a life beyond Electric City, Sophie monitored the stubborn layer of numbness inside, resulting in a performance of herself that was almost but not quite convincing. The relentlessness of New York City traffic blotted out most of her dreams. She studied her face in the mirror as always, except now she had the eye portrait Gloria had given to her, dangling on that slender gold chain. It was as if someone were gazing back at her who knew more about the future than she did.

She visited Electric City only once in her first year away, to spend the Jewish New Year with her parents. Observances still meant more to her father than to the rest of the family, but that was enough of an excuse to take the train ride alongside the Hudson River, watch the dance of leaves and water as she headed north. She sat on the left side of the train as it pulled out of Penn Station, saw the grays and browns of urban decay eventually give way to vivid blue-green nature. This time of year, the extra gift came wrapped in reds and golden yellows.

She gave herself permission to do nothing except stare out the window. Just a thermos with some tea, a sandwich purchased in the station, a solitude that soothed her completely. She pretended she didn’t even speak English, ignoring any conversation drifting too close.

Arriving at Rensselaer Station where her parents waited to meet her, she noted the unmistakable evidence of their aging—not just the silvering hair and weakening eyesight, but the way they walked a little more slowly, repeated certain questions, and seemed to have mislaid words. They mentioned moving to Florida or at least buying a small condominium there. Simon was living in Berkeley with a woman Sophie hadn’t yet met, but they were about to have a baby together, which was why he didn’t even consider coming “back east” for the High Holy Days.

In fact Simon had stayed mostly true to his word about not returning, at least for more than a few days’ visit. As for Jewish holidays, he told his sister he’d become an atheist, but their parents didn’t hear about this.

“Better leave them out of it,” he had said to her on the phone. “No need to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

The baby was due just after Rosh Hashana. In the car on the way back to the house, David told Sophie that Miriam jumped every time the phone rang. Excitement aside, her mother was clearly hurt about the idea of being a long-distance grandmother.

“Do you really think they’ll stay in California, even with a child?” she asked her daughter and her husband with undisguised sorrow. “Isn’t her family somewhere on this side of the country too, after all?”

“You’ll be able to visit them whenever you want,” Sophie said, though she doubted this was entirely true.

She spent the night in her old bedroom, in a twin bed with the same sheets she’d used as a teenager, pastel-flowered and extra soft from being laundered so many times. Even with the door closed she could hear both of her parents snoring. They had been married for nearly thirty-five
years, a stretch of lifetime that seemed unimaginable to Sophie, who had never spent more than ten months in an adult relationship with anyone. She was twenty-six. It had been nine years since she’d heard from Martin, nearly ten years since Henry’s death.

In the late spring of her graduation from medical school, when her father had been alarmed by shortness of breath, she and her mother had taken him to the emergency room at Ellis. The ER doctors sent David home with reassurances about the condition of his heart and lungs, prescriptions for blood pressure medication and encouraging words about exercising more. Sophie’s father had nodded soberly at the advice, as though giving it serious consideration.

“I walk to synagogue once a week,” he told Sophie when she asked now if he was taking up any regular physical activity. “Remember? I take the shortcut through the parking lot of the country club.”

“That’s a good start,” she replied.

Her parents had once upon a time known how to cross-country ski, or so they claimed. Yet she couldn’t recall anything athletic about them except what she’d glimpsed in rare photographs from their arrival in America. Before Simon was born, while they’d lived in Sheridan Village, an ice storm had stranded everyone for a week. “We got around without cars for the entire seven days,” David had proudly recalled.

Sophie wondered if he had ever seen the images Steinmetz had taken of skaters on the Erie Canal, yet another echo of her parents’ Dutch life superimposed on New Amsterdam. But now her father was talking about plans to retire from his research projects. The Company was still keeping its promise to light the world, but its headquarters had gone skeletal. Several manufacturing structures for the plant now stood empty, glaring evidence of the “neutron” approach of management. Wipe out the people but leave the buildings standing.

School enrollment was down by half, David told Sophie. The neighborhood surrounding once-glorious Proctor’s Theatre was seedy-looking and grim. When she stopped by to visit the library, Sophie found a diminished and weary-looking staff. No one knew what had become of her old boss, Mrs. Richardson.

While her father attended synagogue, Sophie invited her mother to drive out to the orchards across the river to buy apples. McIntosh, Cortland, and Golden Delicious. They would slice the fruit and dip it into honey for a sweet new year. She steered Miriam’s dark blue Chrysler along their favorite back roads, felt its smooth ride across the bridge and the newly repaved asphalt. The colors of leaves and sky splashed onto the water.