times a month, she felt fine. It was all out of her control, anyway.
Now, though, it felt like there was something she could do, even something she should do. Her son needed a mother now, or someone who cared as much as a mother—though why, what for? She had no idea. Her eyes tracked back to the photograph of him in the firefighter’s hat, courtesy of the firehouse they’d visited in the Turtle Bay neighborhood not far from the United Nations. Jonas still had that round, glowing face of a preschooler. His eyes shone, probably with the excitement of the visit. He was smiling, too, but it was a serious smile, as if he already felt responsible for something. She reached out to touch his tiny image. “Hey, kid,” she said, “you don’t have to take it all on alone.” Then, by the light of day half-believing and half-doubting her own intuition, she shook her head and made for the front door, grabbing her coat as she left.
NEW YORK: 10:47 A.M. MECCA: 6:47 P.M.
Mara, listening outside the door. Ear pressed to it like a nosy parent checking a teenager’s room, except that Mara was eleven, and she was listening to her mom. Stifled, intense soundlessness emanated from the other side of the door, and Mara knew what created that.
Mara, listening to her mother weeping. It qualified as weeping because it was thicker, fuller, and more private than mere crying. Her mother tried to hide the noise, to trap it in her throat. And so Mara thought of the weeping as an object with physical form that clogged her mother’s windpipe, cutting off normal breath. Mara heard the repeated silence of her mother not breathing and then the sound of little gasping breaths. Mara feared her mother might eventually stop breathing altogether. That was one reason she listened—so that if the weeping halted and actual silence fell in its place, she could pound on the door. She imagined that she might even be able to break open the door—she’d heard of small people finding astonishing powers in extraordinary situations.
Mara listened, too, because she wanted to know certain things. She needed to know them, actually, here alone with her mother, and she didn’t know how to find out. Asking wouldn’t work because her mother wouldn’t answer. So she listened hard, as if the weeping might tell her. She wanted to know, primarily, how long this might go on and how it would end. Sometimes she tried to think it through as if it were a scientific experiment. Take, as the first ingredient, a mother who rarely goes to work as she used to because the office that used to belong to her and Daddy is somehow only Daddy’s office now, and who rarely goes to the grocery store as if that were too challenging, and who rarely bathes or brushes her hair, and who emerges from her room for no more than three hours a day. Combine that with a disconnected voice on the phone, at once authoritative and tentative, who is the father, living, apparently cheerfully, someplace without the mother. Then add a daughter who spends her Saturday hovering outside a bedroom door in an apartment eight floors above the city, listening to the mother weep. What was the end product? Mara had no immediate hypothesis. She had to take it step by step. Materials, procedures, observations. And then conclusion. Mara was good in science, very good, though her grades had recently begun to drop. For the moment, Mara was balancing homework with Mom-alert.
If Vic still lived at home instead of in her own place downtown, or if she even had more time between dance rehearsals, maybe Mara wouldn’t feel so responsible, so involved in her mother’s tears. There’d be two daughters to share in this. And of course, if her dad still lived here, Mara wouldn’t be responsible at all. The weeping had begun about six weeks ago and her dad had left a month ago and at that point the weeping had gotten worse. Her father and Vic had to know what was happening with Mara’s mother. But everyone in her family always called Mara “the little angel,” so maybe they thought she spread her wings and floated to some serene place while her mother cried. Maybe they thought Mara didn’t need help.
Since it was all up to her, Mara had been working to fine-tune her aural senses. That way she could better hear the sounds that had become primary in her life: doors opening and closing, and her mother’s muted tears. Mara’s method: she filled the bathtub just enough to cover her ears and then lay down. Listening through water made the unnecessary sounds go away—the cars passing on the street below, or an airplane overhead. Miraculously, it also magnified the small, necessary ones, the internal sounds. All she had to do was pay attention, and she could make out the hisses of the old couple next door arguing in Russian. She could hear the rumble of the subway that ran directly beneath their building and even, she believed, the voices of commuters talking. She could hear the walls breathe. She would lie there until her skin grew dimpled from moisture and the water began to cool and goose bumps rose on her body. Later she could hear from the other end of the apartment when her mother finally cracked open her bedroom door and quietly emerged, almost shamefacedly, as if she were tiptoeing in after curfew. Then Mara could run to join her for as long as she stayed outside the cave of her bedroom, as long as she could hold the tears at bay. Even when the door remained closed and Mara had to press herself against it for comfort, the listening exercise paid off. Sometimes, it was true, Mara couldn’t hear anything except sirens and traffic helicopters. But in general, the undertone of weeping appeared to grow louder and clearer as Mara’s hearing sharpened.
Today Mara’s mother had been shuttered in her room for the past four hours. With luck, she would come out of the bedroom, blinking as if she’d emerged from darkness, and say, “How about some scrambled eggs?” though it was way past breakfast time. Or she’d ask some question about school, though it was Sunday. Or she’d squeeze Mara’s shoulders and suggest an activity, though they wouldn’t end up actually doing it. She would smile and be cheerful, especially if the phone rang, and Mara would be grateful, but she would not be fooled. It would be a case of barely hanging on, like when Mara had to do chin-ups during gym, and before long her mother would scuttle back into the bedroom and the door would close.
She’d once overheard her dad’s racquetball partner say kids knew everything. The partner—a tall, mostly bald psychologist—often made silly pronouncements, but in this case she knew he was right. At least, partially right. Kids knew everything about their families—maybe because their families were everything for a while, the entire world squeezed into a few people and a small space. Kids had nothing else to pay attention to, so they soaked it all up. But one point the psychologist failed to make: knowing something was a long way from understanding it.
This latest weepisode, as Mara privately called them, had been touched off by a morning phone call from Mara’s father that had come as her mother was in the kitchen, putting on water to boil. Her mother gaily answered the phone and then slipped into the bedroom, pulling the door behind her slowly so it closed with a quiet but definite click, and her voice grew too low to catch, and Mara turned off the stove and then debated with herself for about two minutes before she went into the bathroom near the kitchen. An old-fashioned black candlestick phone stood on a small hand-painted table, a whimsical decorative item chosen during more cheerful times. It was the best phone, and the best location, for telephone eavesdropping. She lifted it up carefully, as she’d learned from Vic. Noiselessly, midconversation.
“Down the street, there’s this pool hall. Back Door Billiards.” Mara’s father’s voice nearly trembled with warmth and intimacy. “A restaurant at the corner sells Jamaican patties, hot and spicy.”
“For God’s sake,” Mara’s mother said, almost under her breath.
“It’s all so real, Lynne. Everything else in my life had stopped being authentic.”
“Everything?”
Mara’s father sighed. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to explain.”
“Shit,” she said.
“I’m forty-seven,” he said. “I have to look at this.” For a moment, all Mara heard was her mother strangling on her breath, and then her father spoke
