LITMIR.BIZ

       13

      We heard the siren, but there were always sirens in the city, police zooming this way and that, weaving through traffic in their cruisers, more sirens every year—so my mom said—as if something was going wrong with the country just when so many things had been going right. The worst thing to do when you hear a siren is to go see what it’s about, because the next thing you know, part of what it’s about might be you.

      It was Monday evening, eight days after the talk I had with Grandpa Teddy. My mom didn’t work Monday nights, and we were playing checkers at the kitchen table when the siren swelled loud and then wound down somewhere in our block. We stayed at the game, talking about just everything, so I don’t know how long it was until the knock came at our door, maybe twenty minutes. We had forgotten the siren by then. There was a bell, but this caller rapped so lightly we wouldn’t have heard it if our apartment hadn’t been so small. We went into the living room, and the rapping came again, hesitant and timid, and Mom looked through the fish-eye lens and said, “It’s Donata.”

      Mrs. Lorenzo stood at our threshold, as pretty as Anna Maria Alberghetti and as pale as Wonder Bread, her hair disarranged, face glistening even though the evening was mild for late June. Body rigid, hands fisted and arms crossed over her breasts, she stood as though she had turned to stone the moment she’d finished knocking. Her face, her eyes were those of a woman lost, struck senseless and uncomprehending by some shock. She spoke as though bewildered, “I don’t know where to go.”

      “What’s wrong, Donata, what’s happened?”

      “I don’t know where to go. There’s nowhere for me to go.”

      My mother took her by one arm and said, “Honey, you’re like ice.” The glaze on the woman was sweat, but cold sweat.

      Mom drew her into the apartment, and in a voice colored less by grief than by bewilderment, Mrs. Lorenzo said, “Tony is dead, he stood up from dinner, stood up and got this terrible look and fell down, fell dead in the kitchen.” When my mother put her arms around Mrs. Lorenzo, the woman sagged against her, but her voice remained as before. “They’re taking him now, they say, taking him for an autopsy, I don’t know where. He was only thirty-six, so they have to … they have to … they have to cut him open and find was it a heart attack or what. There’s nowhere I can go, he was all I had, and I don’t know where to go.”

      Maybe she hadn’t cried until then, maybe the shock and terror had numbed her, but now the tears came in great wrenching sobs, pent up but released in a flood. She was racked by the kind of grief that is part horror, when the mourner suddenly knows death to be not just a profound loss but also an abomination, and the wretched sounds that came from her made me tremble and raised in me a feeling of absolute helplessness and uselessness unlike anything I’d felt before.

      As usual, my mother coped. She brought Mrs. Lorenzo into our kitchen and settled her in a chair at the table and pushed aside the checkerboard. She insisted that Mrs. Lorenzo had to drink something warm, and she set about making tea, all the while commiserating not in a phony way but with the right words that I could never have found and with tears of her own.

      Mrs. Lorenzo was gentle and kind, and I couldn’t stand watching her coming apart like that or the thought of her widowed so young. I went to a living-room window and looked out and saw the ambulance still at the curb in the crimson twilight.

      I had to get out of the apartment. I don’t entirely know why, but I felt that, were I to stay there, I’d start crying, too, and not just for Mrs. Lorenzo or Mr. Lorenzo, but for my father, of all people, because he had that awful emptiness inside himself, and for myself, too, because my father couldn’t ever be a father. Grandma Anita was still alive, and I’d never known anyone who died. Mr. Lorenzo had been a waiter; he often got home late, and he sometimes carried me up to our apartment when I was asleep and my mom returned from work at the club, and now he was dead. I was glad my father moved out, but this was like two deaths close to each other, one the death of a neighbor, the other the death of my father-son dream, which I would have denied having, if you’d asked me, but to which just then I realized I’d still been clinging. I ran out of the apartment and down six flights of stairs to the foyer and outside to the stoop and down more stairs to the sidewalk.

      The paramedics were loading the body into the back of the van ambulance. A sheet covered Mr. Lorenzo or maybe he was in a body bag, but I couldn’t see him, only the shape of him. Across the street, a crowd of twenty or thirty had gathered, probably people who lived in the apartment houses over there, and they were watching Mr. Lorenzo being taken away. Some kids were over there, too, my age and younger. They chased around and danced and acted silly, as if the flashing beacons of the ambulance were holiday fireworks. Maybe if the death had occurred on the other side of the street, I’d be watching from here with different kids, acting as foolish. Maybe the difference between horror and holiday was just the width of an ordinary street.

      At nine I knew about death, of course, but not as an intimate truth, rather as something that happened out there in the world, in other families, nothing for me to worry about for a long time yet. But now people I knew were going away forever. If two could go in just two weeks, three others could go in just three more—Grandpa, Grandma, and my mother—and I would be like Mrs. Lorenzo, alone and with nowhere that I belonged anymore. It was crazy, a little-kid panic, but it grew out of the undeniable realization that we’re all so fragile.

      I thought that I should do something for

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