The Hours Count (16 page)

The night before David and I were supposed to take the train to the Catskills, I was so nervous I couldn’t fall sleep.

It was the end of August and the air was stifling in our apartment, the open windows failing to create much breeze. I lay in bed, sweating, dreaming up every possible thing that could go wrong, feeling something awful in my stomach, something like dread. Only, I realized it wasn’t dread at all. It was an excitement I hadn’t felt in so long that I’d completely forgotten the feeling. It was the way I’d felt back in high school when I’d admired a boy—Charles, his name was—a friend of Sam’s. We’d made a date to get ice cream once, me and Charles and Susan and Sam, and the entire day leading up to it my stomach felt exactly this way. Until the ice cream date, when Charles barely noticed me and spent most of the time staring at Susan, which was embarrassing all around, and then the feeling in my stomach actually did turn into an awful, sinking dread.

Ed remained in the living room, which surprised me because I
thought he would be in here trying one last desperate and futile time to make a child before I left. I was beginning to wonder,
How much longer?
How much longer would he wait before growing suspicious again, or angry, that it was taking so long? How much longer would David be safe? And that only made the urgency to follow Jake’s advice that much stronger, to do everything possible to get David to improve, before it was too late and Ed took away my options.

David was sleeping soundly on his mattress. I could hear his rhythmic breathing, so peaceful and easy sounding. He had made progress with Jake recently, I was sure of it. He would now show me his red blocks for hungry, his blue for tired—most of the time anyway—and overall this was resulting in fewer tantrums, fewer . . . misunderstandings. But he had hit a wall, both literally and figuratively, after we returned from Susan’s in June. On our first visit back, as Jake had urged David to repeat sounds, David had begun punching the wall. He was four now, and a big boy for four, with a strength that sometimes terrified me. Especially when I thought about the fact that his progress only went so far. He was
four
and he still wasn’t speaking. Susan was right to be worried. I was worried.

But Jake had remained calm when David punched his wall over and over again. I’d wanted to run to David, to pull him away from everything that made him frustrated and angry, but Jake put his arms around me and held me back. “Let him be frustrated,” Jake whispered, the feel of his breath against my neck warm and soothing. “We’re going to take him to a place where there aren’t any walls.” In the cool, fresh air of the mountains, with its open spaces and colors, and no distractions, he explained, David would be able
to feel in a new way without all the confines we had in the city. I wasn’t sure I understood, or believed, that the Catskills would be any different, but the thought of a few days in the mountains, away from here, away from Ed, with Jake, filled me with an undeniable sense of joy that I hadn’t felt in so long, if ever. And I knew I would find a way to make it happen.

The sound of Ed’s voice from the living room suddenly brought me back here, to my apartment. I smelled his cigar smoke, wafting into the bedroom. The dank smell of it sickened me, blanketed me, until I could smell or think of nothing else other than the discomfort I felt with him. The way he covered me, the way he always smelled of the cigar smoke even when he wasn’t smoking.

I wondered who he was talking to, and I tiptoed to the edge of the bedroom door to listen. I hoped it wasn’t Julius. Ethel was involved in my deception for the upcoming few days. Ed believed that David and I were going only up to Golden’s Bridge to visit with Ethel and the boys, which we were, on Wednesday. Ethel knew that I was taking David to Phoenicia for a few days first, to get him help, but she seemed to believe it was some kind of group pyschotherapy getaway, and I didn’t correct her and tell her it would be only me and David and Jake. I was worried if she knew the truth she’d say, “Millie, I’m worried about you. What are you really doing, heading up into the mountains with this
Dr.
Gold
?” Or maybe she wouldn’t have said that at all. Ethel understood the need to want something—just right there, underneath the surface. I had the feeling that if Dr. Miller told Ethel she needed do something to be cured, she would listen and do whatever she could to find inner peace.

Ethel had telephoned me earlier this morning. “Did you hear
about the riot in Peekskill last night?” I hadn’t. “Anti-communist, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic . . . The whole world is becoming anti-everything. Anti- all of us.” She sighed. “It seems no place is safe for us anymore. Not even up here in the mountains.” She paused. “I’m worried about you. Heading up here all by yourself.”

“I’m not going to Peekskill,” I said, though the truth was, I wasn’t exactly sure of the geography of the country towns once one got outside the city, toward the Hudson Valley and the mountains.

“If anything were to happen to you . . .” Ethel said.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “And I’ll see you later in the week.” I wondered if I might put her mind at ease if I told her that Jake was meeting us right at the train station tomorrow. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that, as if telling her would mean admitting something I wasn’t ready to admit even to myself.

Ed’s voice got louder in the living room now—he was angry. And I glanced at David to see if he was stirring, but, luckily, he wasn’t. I leaned closer to the door to listen, to try to find out if he was talking about me, if he was angry with me. Was Ethel worried enough that she had told Julie my real plan and now Julie was on the phone telling Ed? I didn’t think she would do that to me, but I felt very nervous as I pushed my ear to the door.

“What?” I heard him say. “You think everything we have done, it wasn’t worth it?” He lowered his voice and said something else I couldn’t make out, and then I heard him say, “You think our friends in Russia don’t appreciate what we have done for them?”

I wondered what friends in Russia Ed was talking about. He never talked to me about friends—or the life—he’d left behind there. In fact, he had never talked to me about Russia at all. When we were first married, I would sometimes ask him, and he would
say that was a life he had finished, that he wanted to forget. So it seemed odd to hear him talking about it now on the phone, and I wondered if he had a secret life, too, if he was an entirely different man when he wasn’t here with me.

“So, what?” Ed said. “So they destroy us?”

I tiptoed away from the door, relieved that he didn’t seem to be talking about me or about David. Then I got back into bed and attempted to go to sleep. But even long after Ed’s talking quieted down and all I heard was the gentle humming of the radio from the next room, I couldn’t get his words out of my head:
So they destroy us?
He’d just tossed off the words carelessly. Destruction seemed to mean so little to Ed, as if it were nothing, that the thought of it gave me a chill even in the heat of the bedroom.

THE NEXT MORNING
, David and I took the subway to Grand Central Terminal to board the Hudson River Line. I kept looking behind us the whole way, worried Ed might be following us, watching. Which he wasn’t, of course, since he’d left for work before we even left the apartment. And, anyway, if I really was going straight to visit Ethel, as I’d told him, I’d also be taking the train.

I was surprised by the ease of my deception, the way David and I boarded the railroad car without anyone giving us so much as a second glance, the way we disembarked at Kingston and then got on the Catskill Mountain Railroad to Phoenicia just as Jake had told us to.

I scanned the platform when we pulled into the station in Phoenicia, and there were only a few casually dressed people outside. Life appeared to be vastly calmer and slower here, and I was
relieved to see no signs of any kind of riot like the one Ethel had spoken of.

Jake stood there, just as he said he would, on the platform, and from the other side of the train window he already looked different here than he had in the city a few weeks ago. His shoulders appeared broader, more relaxed, and he was smoking a cigarette instead of his pipe. He had one hand on the cigarette, the other resting easily in the pocket of his brown jacket, as if this were something he did every day: waited at the train station. Though I felt certain he didn’t for his other patients, that he didn’t invite them up here. Just the way he didn’t invite his other patients to stay for lunch at his apartment either. What did he say to me?
Every case is different. You’re different, Millie.
I felt a rush of tenderness for him and I wanted to be off the train, standing next to him.

“Come on,” I said to David, holding on to him with one hand, our suitcase with the other. “Dr. Jake is waiting for us outside.” At the mention of Jake’s name, David’s eyes seemed to light up. I wasn’t imagining it—at least, I didn’t think I was. I hadn’t told him before this moment who we were going to see when we got to the mountains. Not that he could tell Ed even if he wanted to, but, still, I’d been afraid to utter the truth out loud. David loved the train, the sway of the cars on the tracks, the blur of trees and towns on the other side of the window. Even on the short ride to Susan’s house, the train was one place where he always seemed content, so he hadn’t protested getting on this morning. But now I imagined the thought behind his new, wide smile—that the wonderful train could take him to Jake, too.

He yanked on my hand, and I stumbled a bit as we descended
the stairs to the platform. The moment we were off the train I noticed the smell of flowers and the sudden chill in the air that hadn’t been there in the city. I smiled. I had pulled this off! I had actually gotten David here, away from Ed, to a place of quiet and beauty, to a place with no walls. To Jake.

Jake seemed to notice David first and he quickly dropped his cigarette and crushed it beneath his brown leather shoe. He walked toward us and patted David on the head. “Good to see you up here in the fresh air, son.” He looked past David to me, and our eyes met as if we both understood the gravity of this moment. The choice I had made by coming here, with David, with a suitcase.

“How was the ride?” Jake asked as he took the suitcase from my hand. Our fingertips brushed for a moment in the exchange, and I pulled back and felt myself blushing.

“The ride was fine,” I said. “David enjoyed it.”

“No problems, then?” Instinctively, I knew he meant with Ed, not with David. I thought of Ed’s anger on the phone last night and how angry he would be if he knew where we were right now. But I simply shook my head and offered Jake a smile. “Good,” Jake said. “Come on, let’s get in the car. It’s a little bit of a ride to the cabin.”

“You have a car?” I asked.

“My friend’s car,” Jake said.

“Your friend who owns the cabin?” I asked.

Jake hesitated and then he nodded as if I’d caught him in a lie, though I didn’t care whose car it was, whose cabin it was. Only that David and I were here. That we had escaped our life in the city with Ed, if only for a few days.

THE SQUARE WOODEN CABIN
sat at the end of an unmarked dirt road. It was far in the woods, at the edge of an expanse of water so clear and so blue that I felt as if I were dreaming even as I got out of the car and stood on its banks. I dipped my hand in the water just to feel if it was real, and it was colder than I’d expected. “Esopus Creek,” Jake said as David clutched my hand and stared, too. His eyes followed the ducks that waltzed on the muddy shores and hopped into the water. It appeared much too big to be a creek, more like how I would imagine a lake to be, and much more blue and clear than the Hudson.