The Laws of Gravity (4 page)

A Moment

By spring of 2011, Nicole had been sick long enough that she barely remembered how it felt to be well. How to behave like a nonsick person, how to function in that world. It was like trying to stand on two land masses slowly drifting apart. Whoever had invented the phrase “in sickness and in health” had no idea how hard it was to keep the two together. The rules of each sphere, the measures, the people, the vocabulary—all were different. She could rattle off the names of every medication they had tried, but couldn’t conjure up the names of her daughter’s classmates. What was it like to wake in the morning with enough energy to meet the day—how to get through a night without pain, nausea, or panic—she no longer knew. The diagnosis of leukemia and lymphoma seemed to have come a century ago, falling like a hammer.

Jay and Daisy had learned to tiptoe around her. They planned morning expeditions on the weekends to Dunkin’ Donuts so that Nicole could sleep a little longer. They went to parent/child swim classes at the Huntington Y. For the first time since her daughter’s birth, Nikki was not the primary caregiver, not the center of her daughter’s universe. After a particularly
ghastly round of chemo, she’d missed one of Daisy’s dance recitals. She vowed never to let that happen again, not while there was a breath left in her body. She got angry, and the anger carried her. From that day forward, she would schedule her medical life around Daisy, not the other way around. But the energy came at a price. Every month, every week, she was losing ground.

Nikki was in her midthirties, but she looked older these days; cords stood out on either side of her neck. Her eyes, a dark brown, gleamed with unearthly intensity, and her skin, still porcelain and glowing under the faintest dusting of freckles, had the bluish-white translucence of a teacup’s rim. As a teenager she had been cast in a few bit parts in movies, and she had worked as a print model for Macy’s in her twenties. Now, ill as she was, she was still beautiful enough to turn heads on the street.

Her cousin Ari rested his cheek on one hand and considered this, without wanting to seem as if he were staring. When they were children, he was mesmerized by Nicole’s beauty, and often teased about it. He had learned how to sneak glances at his red-haired cousin, when to look away. It was not some silly romantic feeling that had moved him but something deeper. It was, he thought, the way some people felt about a sunset or a mountain view—the fascination you had with something so beautiful because of the sheer wonder of it. It was hard to believe they were related by blood. No one else in his family looked quite like her. His own parents were downright funny looking. Yet there Nikki was. She was the closest he came to having a baby sister. Ari had learned about loving by the way he practiced loving Nicole. And he hadn’t always been all that good at it. He remembered the feel of her sharp flannel-pajamaed ribs when they used to play Tickle Torture, a game he had enjoyed far more than she did, with an almost guilty
pleasure, and the thought that he may have actually tormented her still made him blush.

At the moment he appeared to be gazing just past Nicole into the depths of his long, sloping backyard. It was as smooth and green as a golf course, interrupted only by the turquoise cover of the pool. He could see his tennis court beyond a scrim of trees. Daisy and Julian were upstairs, playing a board game. Now and again he could hear shouts of laughter. The baby, Arianna, napped in her nursery on the third floor. The intercom to the nursery lay on the kitchen table, emitting nothing but steady, quiet static. His wife Mimi was still in the shower. The sound of rushing water overhead made a ringing background noise against the silence between the cousins. Here was a chance to talk. He never knew what to say. Once upon a time they had talked for hours, without awkwardness or reservation. When had that stopped? They were seldom alone together anymore, Nicole and Ari.

Nicole sat at her cousin’s kitchen table, leaning her face on her hand. It was an expensive table that matched the long countertops, with the sheen of mother of pearl, but deeper, the shimmering electric blue of a twilight sky. Ammonites, millions of years old, were embedded in it as well. The table and counters, custom-made, had cost thirty thousand dollars.

They sat like mirror images, Nicole and Ari, head in hand. But it was really Mimi that Nikki was great friends with now; everyone knew that. In college she had introduced Mimi to Ari Wiesenthal, and then—as it seemed to Ari—his cousin had forgotten all about him. She grew up, she moved on. Suddenly he no longer knew all her tastes, her secrets. He remembered how, when she was a newlywed, he had bought her an expensive angora sweater for her birthday. Nikki had looked with him almost in pity and said, “Oh, Ari.”

“What’s the matter?” he’d asked. “You don’t like it? Wrong color?”

“No, no, it’s beautiful,” she said, chuckling. “But I’m allergic to angora. If I wore this I’d stop breathing in an hour.”

It was Mimi she went out to lunch with, and shopping, and to the movies; Mimi she asked for when she phoned late at night. Mimi drove her to the chemo appointments when Jay was working, chauffeured her back home, tucked her in bed, comforted her, cheered her on. Ari tried not to resent any of it. But it was hard. He had been robbed of one of the few intimate friends he had ever had. Now he felt clumsy around her, blundering.

“Your hair looks nice,” he said. “Different hairstyle.” Actually, he thought her hair had lost some of its usual luster.

“Oh, this.” She rubbed the top of her head, and to his horror, the red hair moved at the scalp. “It’s a wig,” she said. She smiled ruefully. “How’s business?” she asked in her soft voice.

“Awesome,” Ari said automatically. Then, realizing he was speaking to his blood relative and not to a prospective customer, he said, “Slow as hell. Mortgages are tight right now—people keep waiting for the rates to go down, and the banks are acting crazy. Of course, I deal with commercial clients, so I’m protected from most of that. Can’t complain.”

“You still traveling a lot?”

“Constantly,” Ari said. “I’m exhausted. I feel like I live in my car.” Upstairs, the shower water abruptly shut off. “How are
you
feeling?” The words sounded too loud, as if he had shouted the question at her, but Nicole smiled.

“Exhausted. The latest chemo makes me sick as a dog. I feel like I live at the doctor’s office.”

“I’ll bet,” he said. “If there’s anything I can ever do—”

“I’ll let you know,” she said. “Thank you.”

“I mean it,” he persisted. “I already saved your life once when we were kids, you know. I’d do it again.”

“So you say,” she answered, but the smile lingered at the corners of her lips. Her lips were full, almost pouty. She wore lipstick the color of cranberries.

“I did save you,” he said. “You were drowning.”

“Why don’t I remember it?” she said. “Was this Cape Cod or Montauk?”

“Montauk Point,” he said. “The Atlantic Ocean.”

“Figures.”

“What does that mean?” Ari said.

“Nothing, just—didn’t I always get sick when we went to Montauk?”

“You got sick wherever we went. You were always getting stomach bugs. This time you almost drowned. You swam out too far. I dragged you all the way back to shore.”

“Funny how I don’t remember. I must have blocked it out.” She moved her glass of lemonade around on the kitchen table. One wet ring blurred into another. The ammonites glimmered bluish black, with flashes of rainbow coloration like an opal. Nearly everything in the house was extraordinary in some way, and custom-made. It struck Nikki as funny because her cousin had always been such an ordinary kid. Not anymore. Even his suits and shirts were bespoke. Ari was a wine aficionado with a temperature-controlled wine cellar. He cooked large, lavish meals. He redecorated the house every few years, each time more extravagantly than the last.

He doesn’t know what to do with his money, so he spends it, Mimi had told her. I think we should just stuff a few pillows with thousand-dollar bills and be done with it.

“I do remember you hanging my doll,” Nicole said to Ari now.

“Oh, my God. One time. One bad thing.”

“It’s a vivid memory,” she said, teasing him. “You made a noose and everything.”

“Al put me up to it,” Ari protested. Big Al, the eldest cousin, Ari’s older brother, had been rough and sometimes mean. He’d been killed in a boating accident ten years earlier.

“Easy to blame everything on Big Al now,” she said. “Better not let that happen when I’m gone.” The scar on the inside of her wrist glimmered like a streak of light.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Ari said. “The doctors say the leukemia and lymphoma are chronic, not terminal. Remember?”

“I’m not responding to any of the treatments,” she said. “That’s why they switched from Tasigna to the chemo.”

“I never found you unresponsive,” he said. It sounded suggestive. He flushed and backpedaled. “I mean—you will,” he said. “I’m sure you will.” He heard his wife open the closet door, rolling it in its long track, then slide it closed again. Soon he would hear her light footsteps on the stairs, her easy laughter. He both longed for and dreaded her interruption of this rare moment of conversation alone.

“Listen, Nikki,” he said, leaning forward. He was looking straight at Nicole now, directly into her dark brown eyes, which were as wide open as a child’s, and seemed almost frightened, certainly startled. She reminded him of a deer, he realized. Any second she might unfreeze, change direction, and bound away.

He put his hand over her hand, pinning it down. “If there’s anything I can ever do to help, I want you to tell me,” he said. “I’m serious. We’re family. Nothing will ever change that.”

His hand was brown and square and muscular. It made her uneasy, the way he was holding her, staring intensely into her eyes. She stood it as long as she could—just a couple of seconds—then slid her own thin hand away.

The expression on his face shifted. He seemed at that moment actually ugly, his face heavy and resentful. Ari was not yet forty, but his hair, she suddenly noticed, was strongly threaded with silver. His chin sagged, he was starting to get jowls. “Right,” he said. He looked exactly like his father, her uncle Charlie, a squat bullfrog’s look on his normally handsome face. He squinted, as if he were in the throes of one of his headaches. Nicole would look back at this moment in Ari’s kitchen and replay it again and again, as the seed of so much that would follow.

“Thank you, Ari,” she added quickly. She reached out to touch him. He sat back and folded his arms. “You’ve always been so generous.” It was true. Ari had bought Daisy an elaborate swing set for her fifth birthday, with swings and slides and fancy red cedar climbing equipment, something far nicer than they could have afforded on Jay’s salary. Ari had picked up more restaurant tabs than Nikki could count, treated them to plays and concerts, pretending a client had given him the tickets, pretending they’d cost nothing.

But Ari was already looking out the back window again, picking at his upper lip, the spitting image of his father. Silence dropped down between them like a curtain. It was not the comfortable silence of old friends and relations, but a dull wordlessness. The thing held suspended between them, delicate as a spider’s web, whatever it was, in that moment, whatever assurance he had wanted, whatever he had hoped for—now hung broken, too tiny to detect or mend.

Flying

Daisy and Julian were playing at Daisy’s house, which was always less fun than his own house. There was no swimming pool, for one thing. No video games, no large-screen TV, no basement movie theater, no rec room, and Daisy always wanted to play Barbies. If any of Julian’s friends had known he sometimes still played Barbies with his little girl cousin, he might as well have packed up and moved to a new school. Luckily he went to Glen Cove, Daisy lived in Huntington.

Julian was turning eleven that June. He was one of the tallest kids in the fifth grade. He had a face that looked at one instant like an grown-up’s, and the next like he was still a little kid—there was an openness about his features, a purity of expression, and he still dressed like an elementary school kid in elastic-banded sweat pants and Velcro shoes: “to save time,” he said.