Days of Decisiveness

The river froze the first week of January.

I watched on the television, standing over the sink, eating Honey Nut Cheerios directly from the box.

I'd bought the box by accident—misled by packaging that did little to distinguish itself from the better, unsweetened kind. The two boxes were shelved adjacent to one another at the Gristedes, so that the only meaningful difference between the them was a thin yellow banner arching across the upper-right quadrant of the box I had chosen—a banner announcing, simply, the presence of honey. I had failed to register the banner.

I disliked honey in all its applications. I disliked the cloying sweetness of it—a sweetness that sugar delivered cleanly and then relinquished. I disliked the way honey moved, its viscosity. I disliked the way it furred the inside of the mouth, leaving a residue that coated the tongue and persisted through any number of glasses of water, indifferent to dilution. I disliked the associations—the bears, the hexagons, the people who kept it in ceramic pots shaped like beehives.

But the box mentioned benefits to the heart, which seemed, at the time, worth considering.

I held the box over my mouth and watched as, on screen, small boys tested the ice with their heels, stepping out onto the frozen river in their padded jackets. They moved with the careful confidence of the unobserved.

NY1 had been running the same chyron since six in the morning, cycling between HUDSON FREEZES OVER and a temperature that had not changed in several hours. The anchor wore a lavender turtleneck. She leaned toward the camera each time she said rare deep freeze event, which was often, as though she was a chronicler of history rather than an interpreter of graphics.

I wondered whether any parents were nearby, or if the boys had been sent out deliberately, as one might dispatch a dog to tire itself in the cold. The camera showed only the children and the pale, flat stretch of river, so the rest I had to imagine: adults just outside frame, doing the usual winter calculus of caution and impatience. Surely the city hadn't reached the point of letting children test the river's threshold unsupervised.

 

On the counter beside me, my cell phone lay with a thin fracture running across the screen, a consequence of its fall on the subway platform two weeks earlier. It was a Motorola, the silver flip kind, its clamshell casing scuffed at the hinge from four years of opening and closing, the keypad worn smooth at the numbers I pressed most often—two, five, the pound sign. I had owned it since 2005 and had no intention of replacing it, despite Rhodes' periodic suggestions that I consider one of the newer ones with a touchscreen. The fracture made the screen difficult to read in direct light and almost impossible at certain angles.

I picked it up and studied the screen, which woke, showed nothing, and dimmed again. I set it down. The gesture, repeated for weeks, had become automatic, though what I expected to find I could not say.

 

The calls began in June, though I would not notice for another month, and would not count back to the first one until much later than that.

In July, I was on the platform at Christopher Street when I felt the phone vibrate in my pocket. Unknown number. The express pulled in and the door opened and people moved past me in the synchronized indifference of commuters, and the phone kept ringing, five rings, six. I had never been in the habit of answering unknown numbers, and this one was no exception.

It rang twice in August, in the week the divorce was finalized. Pranay sent an email asking whether I wanted the Le Creuset or the pasta bowls, given that we'd never actually settled it, and I wrote back that I would take the pasta bowls. I did not want the pasta bowls, which were white and shallow, from Crate and Barrel, and had come in a set of eight, of which five remained intact, and one had a chip along the rim, and two were unaccounted for. I wanted the Le Creuset. It was the navy seven-quart, and the meals it had carried were few—a short rib braise for our first wedding anniversary, made from a recipe I had copied by hand onto an index card and then lost, so that when I tried to make it again I could not; a white bean chili for Pranay the winter he had the flu and ate it in three installments over two days, the pot moving from stove to refrigerator and back; a brisket I had attempted twice and ruined twice and told myself I would attempt again in the fall. The pot had spent the last several years on the back burner holding nothing, which I had always thought I would correct, and did not. I could not say why I had answered as I did, except that the phone was ringing and it felt like the correct response, and Pranay seemed to think as much.

In September, the phone rang while I lay in bed next to Rhodes, and again after he had fallen asleep, and again the next morning as I listened to his shower carry faintly through the wall. I took to moving the phone into the other room while I slept, leaving it face-down on the roll-top desk, citing a technological detox, the way one might abstain from sugar or the news. That's healthy, Zainab said, over a drink the exact, unnatural orange of a hazard sign. Naomi looked at me for a long time over the rim of her equally orange glass, and said nothing.

The first October call came while I was editing a financial memoir that had been languishing in the considered-and-passed pile until Lehman Brothers rendered it newly relevant. Daniel came to tell me, with some enthusiasm, that the author was now a very timely get. The manuscript was four hundred and seventy pages and the author was a former vice president at Bear Stearns who had cashed out eighteen months before the implosion and now lived, according to his bio, on a horse farm in Litchfield County. I told Daniel I would have notes by Friday.

There was never a voicemail. I do not know what I would have done if there had been one.

 

On screen, I followed the smallest boy—the one in the red jacket several sizes too large, its sleeves extending well beyond his hands. He ran after the others but remained several steps behind, his breath coming in visible puffs that the camera caught and lost and caught again. I brought another handful of cereal to my mouth without looking away. The cereal shellacked the roof of my mouth, and I worked it loose with my tongue, and swallowed, and the boy was still running. At that moment, the landline rang.

The woman on the line spoke with practiced softness. Her sentences rose and fell in predictable patterns. In the background, someone stapled a stack of papers—one clean, metallic click—followed by the sound of pages being squared against a desk. She said, I'm very sorry to tell you your sister passed away earlier this morning.

I asked her to repeat herself, though in truth I had heard her perfectly well. She did, and said several other things that never reached me. A hospital somewhere whose name I did not register. A procedure that had been attempted and a procedure that had not. She left short pauses between her sentences in the places where a response might go, so I filled one of them by saying I understood. She thanked me, which seemed an odd thing to say.

I hadn't spoken to my sister in eleven years, I told her, though she had not asked. Or there was a chance I had not said it aloud.

The counter bore a faint tackiness where I had wiped up the morning's orange juice with a single dry paper towel. The cabinet to the left of the sink swung quietly on its loose hinge, which had detached from the upper mounting sometime in the fall. Rhodes wanted to fix it, and I'd told him not to. I'd grown accustomed to, if not slightly fond of, the minor inconvenience it posed.

Are you still there? the woman asked.

Yes, I said.

She asked whether there was a next of kin besides me. I said I did not know, though instinctively I recited my parents' number, which I hadn't dialed since I was eighteen and had done so only from rotary phones. I heard her writing it down—the small fast scratch of a ballpoint pen—and then she asked me to repeat the area code, which I did.

She mentioned a number I could call, papers that would need signatures, a window of time in which decisions about the body would have to be made by someone with the legal standing to make them, which I was not certain was me.

The faucet released a single drip before the water ran, cold enough that the glass fogged immediately. The honey from the cereal still clung to the back of my teeth. I drank standing up. I thanked the woman. I hung up.

 

One afternoon in November, I had flipped through the White Pages, the unknown number long ingrained from the months of repetition. The number was listed under a surname I did not recognize and an address in Queens, on a street I had never been to but was two blocks from the bakery where Pranay and I had gone once for a cake tasting and left without ordering anything at all, citing, in the cab home, an issue with the frosting that neither of us had actually identified. I felt a fleeting relief at finding it there.

I did not call. Or perhaps I did once, letting it ring twice before pressing the phone shut. The following Tuesday, over takeout from Empire Szechuan, the number was blocked at last.

 

The television was still on, its volume low enough that the words blurred into a steady murmur, the anchor's voice reduced to pure cadence. The camera had pulled back from the boys on the river, leaving a wide shot—ice stretched out beneath two small figures, now indistinguishable. I turned the television off, and the apartment went suddenly still. Only then did I notice my hands were shaking, and I pressed them flat to the counter. The cell phone remained next to me, its screen entirely black.