As the car crossed the bridge to New Jersey, the southerly view of the evening lights of the metropolis glinted beckoningly, showing a path to the harbor and then the open sea. She was always somewhat fearful of the water, having never learned how to swim, yet now she imagined pulling herself through the black river, her limbs motoring in purposeful rhythm, every muscle singing with heat, her body once again bristling. She saw a young Nicholas swimming beside her, instinctively trusting her to lead them and staying close, keeping up when she pushed the pace, then tucking himself against her belly to rest. She placed her hand on her stomach now and it was as if she felt him there instead of the huge dense egg of the tumor that had taken her over and had spread itself in every part. When she was pregnant with him she was terribly sick, not just in the first weeks or in the morning but constantly and nearly right up to the birthing, a welling, tormenting nausea that reached high in her throat and kept her from eating much and nurtured the horrid idea that if she were to fall so ill as to have to terminate, then let it be. When the nurse placed him on her chest after she awoke from the emergency Caesarean (he wouldn’t come out, his head too large) she’d actually gagged through her tears of wonderment-she only found out later that sickness often came after anesthesia-and the first words she said to him were, I’m sorry.
She was sorry, was she not?
They sometimes took the ride over like this to Palisades Park when he was in elementary school; they lived in Morningside Heights then and it was easier to cross the bridge than go downtown to Thirty-second Street for an early-Sunday dinner at a Korean restaurant. They would take a taxi because she never learned how to drive, and on the rides home with a small bag of groceries between them Nicholas would fall asleep while half-holding his nose because of the sewer-smelling radish kimchee and dried cuttlefish beside him. They had gone only because he kept asking about where she was from and what other Korean people were like and she figured the ready setting of an eatery would do the trick. But once there her own spirit would gradually dampen and sour and Nicholas would hardly say anything and would pick at his quarter-eaten bowl of bibim bap. She’d harangue him to finish and maybe snap at a waitress and then they’d buy some foodstuffs she’d mostly let rot before getting around to preparing. Still, they went a half-dozen times, and then no more, June herself accepting that whatever nostalgia she was hoping to conjure for him had long been obliterated and that there was nothing she wished to latch on to. Nicholas didn’t complain, but on their last time going over he asked if he could stay in the taxi while she shopped and even ate. She told him of course he couldn’t and asked him why he would want to do such a thing and he replied, Because you get so angry when we’re there. As the taxi approached the restaurant where they usually ate, June instructed the driver to take them back to Morningside Heights. At home she made them peanut butter sandwiches and after they ate he went to his room to read, as if nothing at all had happened. He was a sensitive boy but every once in a while he could exercise a remarkable composure: that perfect distance he could keep, an exquisite self-balance and suspension.
Was the letter from the antiquities dealer in London evidence that during his years away he had moderated the extremes of his person? Or was it proof of a more frightening mastery? That he had decided to work in the antiques business, of all things, made her think she hadn’t damaged him. He certainly enjoyed the shop. After school Nicholas would contentedly spend the hours until dinner polishing up the inventory with an oiled rag, or else fix things, like replacing the drawer slides of a desk. He was naturally handy without really trying, merely needing to inspect the mechanism quickly to understand what was missing, or see how an operation was going wrong. Besides furniture he could also fix mantel clocks and music boxes and really anything that wasn’t too far gone or required a special tool or parts. He possessed a certain empathy for machines that in a different circumstance could have found him engineering bridges or as some gifted mechanic; but she never encouraged him and sometimes even playfully taunted him for his old jeweler’s posture as he crouched beneath the spotlight of a work lamp, saying a boy should take in the fresh air (even of New York City) and run and leap and stomp on things, live with his feet and legs more than his head and hands. That she could ever utter such a thing seemed monstrous to her now, but back then it was just the two of them in the world and her focus on him alternated between being unrelentingly sharp and then dialed so wide that the boy was but a ripple in the broad field of her vision, a mark of pale, this faint smudge of her blood.
He kept mostly to the back of the shop, and whenever a customer entered he would say hello with warmth but then discreetly vanish to the tiny back workroom or the basement. The customers would invariably comment on what an attractive, well-mannered boy he was, and June could then engage in a conversation about children or parenting that would elide nicely into a talk of objects for the home. She was not a natural saleswoman or a person given to charming others, but she could sense an opening instantly and couldn’t help but lodge herself in any breach. She was dogged and opportunistic, and commerce was mere play compared to what she could resolve herself to do. Perhaps it was pure coincidence that the shop did well on the days Nicholas chose to hang out, but she knew for certain that his presence helped her, that it was a necessary preface to a story she could never begin telling on her own, and for this reason she was always slightly cruel and tried to compel him to be elsewhere, not wanting to feel guilty about using him to good advantage, which she often did.
But Nicholas had not appeared to mind-he certainly never said so-though June now thought that through those early years of her shop on Lexington he must have learned something about the unhappy patterns a son and mother could fall into. When the last customer had departed and she shut off the lights of the display window, Nicholas would emerge from wherever he was working and she would say, “The mole-boy appears,” sweetly enough but with an edge more aptly directed at a peer or friend than a reticent boy of nine. He would answer her with his eyes closed and a wide, exaggerated smile, freeze in his position as if stricken with palsy, and then fitfully hop away. They played at it together, but it was a strained comedy. Back at the apartment he would do his homework or make drawings while she fixed dinner (always something simple, something basic enough that it was hardly real cooking, like rice and steamed fish, or elbow macaroni with jarred sauce) and nothing would be off, but sometimes in the middle of the night she awoke to the sounds of gasping coming from his room; the first time she nearly tripped while getting up too fast, afraid that he was choking, but it turned out, then and other times, that he was crying in his sleep. He wasn’t deeply distressed-it was the softest crying, self-muffled, if that was possible-and although it would have been the simplest thing to wake and comfort him, she inexplicably stood over him in the dark, staring at his racked mouth and the tight, quivering shrug of his shoulders, and it took everything in her to renounce the thought that here was a boy she would have to carry about forever.
How very different things had come to be.
“I must advise you again, Mrs. Singer,” Clines said to her now, not looking at her in the mirror. He had put on glasses for driving. “You should not be bothering anymore with this man Brennan.”