“But I thought that couldn’t be right, because American children, I know, are off the breast before a year, usually. But he was just kind of grabbing—” She pressed her lips into a polite little smile.
“I know, I know,” said Sadie again. “It’s fine, really. He needs to drink milk. He’s not wanted to. It’s good.”
“Oh, good,” said Meera. “He actually didn’t know what to do with it when I first gave it to him. But I think he likes it.” Jack nodded, the bottle still in his mouth. “I know he’s too old for a bottle, but we don’t have any sippy cups yet.”
“It’s fine. Really, it’s fine,” Sadie told her. “He’d never take it from me. A bottle. Or milk, either. I actually lied to the doctor at his last checkup, said he drank it. So it’s good, really. He’s growing up.” She knelt beside him and gave him a kiss on the cheek—and he threw his free hand around her neck. “Good,” he said. “Good.”
“Yes, it’s good, right?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “Good.”
And so it was.
fifteen
Sadie stopped visiting the new playground after that day. Instead, she took Jack to the play area in her own building’s courtyard, which was older and smaller, but closer and, she discovered, friendlier. As such, it was more than a year before she saw Caitlin again. By that time Lil was dead and the world had, slowly and irrevocably, become a darker place than any of them could have imagined.
Each day some fresh horror arose: The train bombings in Madrid. The endless car bombings and suicide bombings in Iraq and Pakistan and Israel and Afghanistan, with their roster of civilian victims (children; always children). The Vietnam-style rapes and massacres of Iraqi families—and the accompanying photos of the sweet-faced Virginia boys who’d perpetrated them. The kidnappings, all over the Middle East and North Africa, of journalists and contractors and translators. The beheadings—videotaped, aired on television—in Iraq. Everywhere, everything was wrong, wrong, wrong.
And then the prison scandals broke, in the spring, as Sadie waddled uneasily around Grand Street, waiting for her water to break, Jack impatient with her slow gait. In the hospital—her wide window overlooking the Hudson, Mina asleep in a clear bassinet beside the bed—she flipped open The New Yorker and found a photo that made her breath stop: a man, barely recognizable as such, balanced precariously on a brown carton, his head covered with a black, conelike hood, his body draped in a black blanket, his arms spread wide, wires sprouting from his fingers. “Oh my God,” she said aloud, and slammed the magazine shut, her heart racing. But she read the article—after a bracing cup of coffee—and all those that followed, forcing herself (why? why?) not to skip over the details of the acts of torture (“sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light”) or the leering, abhorrent faces of the officers, their thumbs jubilantly raised, like frat boys after a beer run.
Back home, in their still-unrenovated apartment, lead paint chipping off the cabinets, ancient stove chugging ever on, Mina sleeping with her and Ed, Jack waking at five and crawling in with them, too, Sadie found herself unable to sleep past dawn. Each day she rose and shuffled wearily to the kitchen, put on the water for her coffee, and snapped on the news. She needed, now, to know, just as, in those first years of Jack’s life, she’d needed not to know, left the paper to yellow on the coffee table. “The world is a dark, horrifying place,” Ed told her. “You’re totally right. But you’ve got to try to filter a little. Or you’re going to go crazy.”
“I know,” she said. She had been thinking the same thing herself. “I just feel like it’s only a matter of time before something else happens.” Something big, something bad, something close. “And I just feel like I have to pay attention.”
Come August, the Republican convention arrived—and the security-alert level for the city was raised to “orange.” Ed’s offices, in Chelsea, were dangerously close to the Garden, where the convention was being held. “Stay home,” she said, the first day of the convention, trying not to let her tone belie the extent to which she truly needed him to heed her.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m swamped.” He was once again going to Toronto—with a little DV thing he’d produced, sort of postapocalyptic—and frantically making final cuts to the Bosnia film in order to make the Sundance deadline. There were a million other projects, too, so many she could no longer keep track.
“I know,” she said, wrapping her arms around him. He was no longer the skinny guy she’d met—strange to think—six years ago at Lil’s wedding. She’d thought him so old then—thirty. Younger than she was now. After they’d moved in together, she’d discovered that he primarily subsisted on breakfast cereal. “I’m sorry. I’m crazy.”
And perhaps she was: by lunchtime, the pundits had issued an all-clear. October, they said, was the time to worry about, the month when everything Sadie feared might start up: suicide bombings (why hadn’t they happened here yet, she often wondered), train and bus and car bombings, September eleventh–style attacks, the scope of which would be impossible to envision or foresee or stop.
“Why October?” she asked, the next day, as she and Ed sat on the couch, trying to wake up, Mina nursing, Jack dropping his blocks, one by one, into Sadie’s chipped Dutch oven. From the kitchen, their old radio, one of Aunt Minnie’s relics, droned. “It seems so random.”
“The elections,” said Ed. “It’s right before the elections.”
“But we’re not going to cancel the elections. And why would they care who wins? We’re all imperialist scum to them, right?”
“Yep,” said Ed, scanning the Metro section. “Godless pornographers.”
“Do you think it’s still okay for Jack to go to school?” asked Sadie. They had decided, in light of Mina’s arrival, to send him to a new preschool on Avenue A two mornings per week. Ed would drop him off on his way to the office.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” His tone annoyed her. He knew why. Of course he did.
“I don’t know. In case something happens.” She knew she sounded foolish. “Remember on September eleventh, how difficult it was for families to find each other.” She still, she suspected, harbored a bit of unfair resentment that she’d been alone on that day, alone with Jack, her friends across the river in Brooklyn, her parents uptown, all of them unreachable, that she’d been reduced to knocking on Vicky’s door and collapsing, shocked, into one of her dining room chairs, Jack in her arms.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” said Ed, smoothing the hair off her forehead.
But something had happened, she discovered when she put Mina in her crib and went back to the kitchen. In Russia, Chechen separatists—with possible links to al-Qaeda, but then they said that about shoplifters these days—had taken hold of a school. Hundreds of parents and children had been herded into a gym, tripwired with homemade bombs. Already, they’d killed twenty men—the strongest, the youngest—and thrown their bodies out the windows. It was hot and the terrorists refused to allow the hostages any water. Children, Russian authorities worried, might be dying of dehydration.
“There are babies in there,” she told Ed, her voice cracking. “Babies Mina’s age.”
“Okay, we’re going to turn off the radio now,” he said, striding into the kitchen and doing exactly that. “I’m staying home today.” He came back into the living room and took Sadie in his arms.
“No, you—”