KEVIN TRAGESER, “WASHINGTON STREET” (2001)

When he appeared at the door, it was not possible, a man come out of an ash storm, all blood and slag, reeking of burned matter, with pinpoint glints of slivered glass in his face. He looked immense, in the doorway, with a gaze that had no distance in it. He carried a briefcase and stood slowly nodding. She thought he might be in shock but didn’t know what this meant in precise terms, medical terms. He walked past her toward the kitchen and she tried calling her doctor, then 911, then the nearest hospital, but all she heard was the drone of overloaded lines. She turned off the TV set, not sure why, protecting him from the news he’d just walked out of, that’s why, and then went into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table, and she poured him a glass of water and told him that Justin was with his grandmother, released early from school and also being protected from the news, at least as it concerned his father.

He said, “Everybody’s giving me water.”

She thought he could not have travelled all this distance or even climbed the stairs if he’d suffered serious injury, grievous blood loss.

Then he said something else. His briefcase sat beside the table like something yanked out of a landfill. He said there was a shirt coming down out of the sky.

She poured water on a dishcloth and wiped dust and ash from his hands, face, and head, careful not to disturb the glass fragments. There was more blood than she’d realized at first, and then she began to realize something else—that his cuts and abrasions were not severe or numerous enough to account for all this blood. It was not his blood. Most of it came from somebody else.

She said to her mother, “There he was in the doorway, up from the dead. It’s so lucky Justin was here with you. Because it would have been awful for him to see his father like that. Like gray soot head to toe, I don’t know, like smoke, standing there, with blood on his face and clothes.”

“We did a puzzle, an animal puzzle, horses in a field.”

Her mother’s apartment was not far from Fifth Avenue, with art on the walls, painstakingly spaced, and small bronze pieces on tables and bookshelves. Today the living room was in a state of happy disarray. Justin’s toys and games were scattered across the floor, subverting the timeless quality of the room, and this was nice, Lianne thought, because it was otherwise hard not to whisper in such a setting.

“I didn’t know what to do. I mean, with the phones out. Finally, we walked to the hospital. Walked, step by step, like walking a child.”

“Why was he there in the first place, in your apartment?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t he go straight to a hospital? Down there, downtown. Why didn’t he go to a friend’s place?”

Friend meant girlfriend, an unavoidable jab. She had to do it, couldn’t help herself.

“I don’t know.”

“You haven’t discussed this. Where is he now?”

“He’s all right.”

“What have you discussed?”

“No major problems, physical.”

“What have you discussed?” she said.

Her mother, Nina, had taught at universities in California and New York before retiring two years earlier, the So-and-So Professor of Such-and-Such, as Keith once called her. She was pale and thin, her mother, following knee-replacement surgery. She was finally and resolutely old. This is what she wanted, it seemed: to be old and tired, to embrace old age, take up old age, surround herself with it. There were the canes, there were the medications, there were the afternoon naps, the dietary restrictions, the doctor’s appointments.

“There’s nothing to discuss right now. He needs to stay away from things, including discussions.”

“Reticent.”

“You know Keith.”

“I’ve always admired that about him. He gives the impression there’s something deeper to him than hiking and skiing, or playing cards. But what?”

“Rock climbing. Don’t forget.”

“And you went with him. I did forget.”

Her mother stirred in the chair, feet propped on the matching stool, late morning, still in her robe, dying for a cigarette.

“I like his reticence, or whatever it is,” she said. “But be careful.”

“He’s reticent around you, or was, the few times there was actual communication.”

“Be careful. He was in grave danger, I know. He had friends in there. I know that, too,” her mother said. “But if you let your sympathy and good will affect your judgment. And Justin. Having a father around the house again.”

“The kid is fine. Who knows how the kid is? He’s fine, he’s back in school,” she said. “It reopened.”

“But you worry. I know this. You like to nourish your fear.”

“What’s next? Don’t you ask yourself? Not only next month. Years to come.”

“Nothing is next. There is no next. This was next. Eight years ago, they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what’s next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there’s no reason to be afraid. Too late now.”

Lianne stood by the window.

“But when the towers fell.”

“I know.”

“When this happened.”

“I know.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“So did I,” Nina said. “So many watching.”

“Thinking, He’s dead, she’s dead.”

“I know.”

“Watching those buildings fall.”

“First one, then the other. I know,” her mother said.

They were silent for a time.

Nina said, “Of course the child is a blessing, but otherwise, you know better than I, marrying the man was a huge mistake, and you willed it, you went looking for it. You wanted to live a certain way, never mind the consequences. You wanted a certain thing and you thought Keith.”

“What did I want?”

“You thought Keith would get you there.”

“What did I want?”

“To feel dangerously alive. This was a quality you associated with your father. But that wasn’t the case. Your father was at heart a careful man. And your son is a beautiful and sensitive child,” she said. “But otherwise.”

In truth, she loved this room, Lianne did, in its most composed form, without the games and the scattered toys. Her mother had been living here for a few years only, and Lianne tended to see it as a visitor might, a space that was serenely self-possessed, and so what if it was a little intimidating. What she loved most was the two still-lifes on the north wall, by Giorgio Morandi, a painter her mother had studied and written about. They were groupings of bottles, jugs, biscuit tins, that was all, but there was something in the brushstrokes that held a mystery for her, or in the irregular edges of the vases and jars, some reconnoiter inward, human and obscure, away from the very light and color of the paintings. Natura morta. The Italian term for still-life seemed stronger than it had to be, ominous, even, but these were matters she hadn’t talked about with her mother. Let the latent meanings turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment.

“You liked asking questions as a child. Insistently digging. But you were curious about the wrong things.”