The world narrowed by a degree.The clock on the wall read 11:12.Outside, Queens groaned.Kate’s hands were suddenly cold in the middle and hot at the ends.
“What is it, Vee?”
“Something about the other two,” Kate replied, distractedly.“Ninety-six and Jeanette.I don’t know why, but I just thought of my mom.It’s probably nothing.”
Despite saying that, she was already on her feet, the Bureau phone in her hand before she’d told her hand to take it.
Marcus rose too.“Whatever this is—”
“I need to call her,” Kate said.“I’ll be right here.”He nodded, pivoted toward the glass, elbows on the sill, giving her a measure of privacy in a room where there was none.
Her mother answered on the second ring, voice raw, as if she’d already been speaking to someone and only just stopped.“Kitty?”
“Hi.”Kate pitched her voice into calm, an internal metronome set to steady.“I’m at work.I need to ask you something, and I’m sorry for how it’s going to sound.Does the name Jeanette mean anything to you?”
Silence like a breath held for too long; then a small sound that wasn’t a word so much as a break in one.When her mother spoke, her voice was wet on the edges.“Oh,” she said.“Oh, Kate.”
“Mum?”
“Where did you hear it?”
“It came up in a case,” Kate said, truth-shaped, not detail-shaped.She was careful with specifics, because specificity made people into targets.“That’s all I can say.Does it mean something?”
“Yes,” her mother whispered.The sound of a chair.The faint scrape of a curtain ring on a rod.“It’s today.I mean, it was… it was a long time ago.Today’s the anniversary.”
The old instinct to fill a silence with assistance rose and she held it down.“Tell me,” Kate said, and the way she said it—clean, precise—was the way she asked victims’ families to relive their worst day.
“It was before you were born.We were newly-weds, in New York,” her mother said.“Your father had been invited to join a research team at Bart’s.We took the tiniest sublet in a building with cockroaches the size of kittens, and I pretended it was all charming because I was twenty-two and just married and high on romance.I was pregnant.We’d decided—Gene if a boy, Jeanette if a girl.”
“Why?”Kate asked.
“A record we found in a thrift store on our first date,” she said, and Kate could tell she was smiling through tears as she spoke.“Terrible schmalzy old thing.Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy.”
Kate braced the heel of her hand against the table.The room went very still except for the hum of old fluorescents.
"February 24th," her mother said."I woke up… wrong.You know the way your body can tell you something before you know it.I called your father, and he said—oh, darling, he said not now, he was presenting, he'd change the world at eleven-thirty, could I be brave until lunch?He was like that, then.Starstruck to be on the team, convinced he would change the course of Western medicine… He learned better, later.But that morning…” She paused, and when she continued the tone had changed, anger softened by time into something you could handle.“Rosa from downstairs—Puerto Rican lady with six boys and a mouth like a railroad—took one look at me on the stairs and marched me to her doctor.Not the big hospital.Small practice on Second Avenue with Genghis Khan on reception.They couldn’t stop it.We lost her.We lost Jeanette.”
The name rung like something struck.
“I remember you being sad,” Kate said, hearing herself from somewhere above her own head.“One cold day.I brought you tea and you cried into it and told me it was silly to cry on a silly day.”
“It wasn’t silly,” her mother said.“But… after that, and until you left home, I used to go away on the anniversary.I’d go to see Claire, or Izzie, you know?Your Dad, well… when he grew up a little, he blamed himself for the way he’d behaved that day.And I didn’t want him doing that, and I didn’t want you to see the stupid danged grief of it every time I touched a calendar.But it doesn’t sting so bad these days.I just buy some pretty fuchsias, and put them in a vase.I’m looking at them now.”
Two twenty-four, Kate thought, and the number stopped being a number, became a door swung open to a room with a great hole in the floor.Today.She glanced without meaning to at the clock again.11:16.
“Mom.”Her voice came out too fast, a skipped stone.She forced it flat.“There’s another number attached to this.A ninety-six.Does that mean anything?”
“Oh, sweetheart,” her mother said, and this time she almost laughed, the ridiculousness of it like a bubble in grief.“The 96 is my bus.To campus.I always take it.The parking situation is apocalyptic and besides, I see my students that way.What’s going on, Kitty?Why are you asking me all these questions?”
Marcus heard that and turned his head, catching her eye.She didn’t need to tell him; the words were all over her face.We are live.
"Listen, Mom,” she said, and she was surprised at how calm she sounded, given that her heart was a bell trying to ring out of her."I can’t explain, but I will.Can you listen very carefully to me?”
“I will.”
“Do not take the 96 today.Don’t go to work.Lock your door.Don’t answer it for anyone who isn’t the police.I’m going to—”
“Kate,” her mother said, the smallest protest.“I have office hours at one.Henry Buchwalter is coming at one-twenty with a draft, and if I cancel he’ll spiral.”
