Nadine had been apprised of the Jacob situation just that morning, by Patsy. Pru remembered how it wasn’t so long ago that her mother, too, had been taken by “that” Jacob, but she didn’t say anything.
“Call it what you will,” Nadine said, turning from the window. “It was no accident that Jimmy Roy showed up right when he did.” She sighed and sat down with her knitting. “Your father would have liked that. Oh, it’s so sad he never got to know Annali. He would have been so smitten with her.” She shook her head, sadly.
“I miss Daddy,” Pru said.
“Of course you do,” she returned. “He was your father.”
Fifteen
Nadine cried at airports. Usually she began on the ride over. It was wordless crying, almost soundless, something that happened incidentally, like breathing. Pru would look over and there would be two rivulets working down each side of her nose.
Nadine held Annali and talked to her quietly. “You’ll see Grandma soon,” she said, holding Annali’s face in her soft hands. Pru saw how tall and erect her mother still stood, her broad face split by a smile, as she turned to wave from beyond the security gate. But when Pru glanced again, Nadine was bent low over her suitcase, with a hand to her chest, as if she couldn’t catch her breath. It scared Pru, and she almost reached for Patsy’s hand; but then Jimmy Roy lifted the heavy bag from Nadine’s shoulder and transferred it to his own. Nadine straightened up then, wiped her face, and they moved on, down the concourse.
DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT STILL HOUSED TWO WOMEN, a child, and two animals, the apartment seemed quiet and empty without Nadine and Jimmy Roy. Pru realized that it was the absence of her mother’s sounds, with which she was intimately familiar. She knew the exact rhythm of her mother’s footsteps, how her heels brushed the floor slightly as she walked. She knew the intonation and duration of her inhale, that very slight whistle as breath moved through her nose and past her vocal chords. If she couldn’t see Nadine, she could always find her just by listening for her to clear her throat. She wondered if she would ever be on such familiar terms with any human again.
Patsy went back to her moping, but it didn’t seem to display the same vigor she brought to it before. For one thing, Pru made a new rule forbidding the TV to be turned on while she was trying to work, and Patsy got bored pretty quickly without it. For another, Annali had started preschool.
One of Nadine’s big accomplishments of the week had been to get Annali enrolled in a school up the street, where Fiona sent her little boy, Sean. It meant that, at least twice a day, Patsy had to leave the apartment to escort her daughter to school.
This foray into the preschool world brought with it new demands of play dates and school-related activities. Fiona and Sean welcomed Patsy and Annali into their circle of mom-preschooler couples. It also seemed to cement Patsy and Annali’s stay in the neighborhood. Pru wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but she didn’t say anything. Patsy never spoke of returning to Rehoboth, and the truth was, Pru liked having them around, even though, more and more often, Pru found herself alone in the apartment.
One day in early December, it began snowing. Pru looked up from her computer to see white flakes swirling against a gray sky. It took her a minute to figure out what they were. When Patsy and Annali came home that afternoon, they reported that the schools were closing early.
Storms always took D.C. by surprise. Back in Ohio, the traffic kept moving in the worst snow. But here in the mid-Atlantic states, at the first sign of snowfall people pulled their cars off to the sides of roads and left them there. By nightfall, Columbia Road was filled up and down on either side with abandoned cars, even in the no-parking zones.
Patsy turned on the local news channel and they watched the storm come in on the radar. There were warnings not to leave the house unless it was absolutely necessary. News footage showed people buying out all the available milk and batteries from a grocery store, where the shelves were already almost bare. Pru went out to scrounge what food was left at the Safeway, where she waited in the checkout line for forty-five minutes. She stopped at the video store on the way home, and Phan helped her choose what seemed like enough movies to entertain Annali for weeks. As the snow swirled around outside, they baked cookies and watched TV. Annali sat in the bay window, watching the snow as if it were the first time she’d ever seen it.
It snowed while they slept, and all the next day. They stayed indoors and kept watching the snow from the bay window. By the following morning, the snowfall had finally wound down to a gentle flurry. They were dying to get out, so they bundled up and trudged outside. Where two days ago there were dirty streets, now white, brilliant snow sparkled. There were huge drifts and giant hills where the snow had buried the abandoned cars. Columbia Road looked like a long white cake edged with gloppy white marshmallows.
Regular life was suspended. There was a festive, magical air. Nothing moved. All the shops and restaurants were closed. There were no buses rattling by, no airplanes overhead. The massive, noise-absorbing snowbanks had turned the city into a giant sound studio. Pru had never heard it so quiet. They could hear people talking a block away. Were it not
