The Laws of Gravity Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2013 Liz Rosenberg

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Amazon Publishing

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611099546

  ISBN-10: 1611099544

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012922282

  AS PROMISED, TO MY MOTHER.

  What thou lovest well remains.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAY 1982 The Cousins

  OCTOBER 2010 Halloween: I Told You I Was Sick

  JANUARY 1, 2011 The Future

  JANUARY 2011 Waiting

  APRIL 2011 A Moment

  MAY 2011 Flying

  MIDSUMMER 2011 Your Sister Rose

  AUGUST 2011 A Change of Plan

  SEPTEMBER 2011 The Matriarch of the Family

  SEPTEMBER 2011 The Age of Mandatory Retirement

  OCTOBER 2011 They Tried to Kill Us, We Won, Let’s Eat

  OCTOBER 2011 Good News, Bad News

  NOVEMBER 2011 Like a Dog

  DECEMBER 2011 Let the Games Begin

  MID-DECEMBER 2011 In the Middle of the Longest Night

  LATE DECEMBER 2011 Doing the Job to the Best of Your Ability

  HANUKKAH 2011 Traditions

  WINTER 2012 The Price of Love

  FEBRUARY 2012 The Last and Only Chance

  FEBRUARY 2012 Julian Takes the Stand

  FEBRUARY 2012 The Decision

  SPRING 2012 The Hardest Thing

  LATE SPRING 2012 Flying High

  JUNE 2012 June Is the Start of Summer

  AUGUST 2012 The Last Time

  AUGUST 21–22, 2012 You Shall Not Boil a Kid in Its Mother’s Milk.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank my wonderful agent, Jenny Bent, for performing miracles every day. My brilliant and indefatigable editor, Kelli Martin, a cheerleader and wise advisor—every writer deserves an editor like her, but not everyone is so lucky. To the Dream Team at Amazon Publishing, working their magic. Deep gratitude to the late Justice John Flaherty of Pennsylvania, who took an early interest in this book, and whose support and generosity were unflagging. I quote from his legal opinions here, but any mistakes or missteps are my own. Thanks to the staff at the Supreme Courts of New York at Mineola and Riverhead for patiently answering so many questions. A long-overdue thanks to my late great friends and soul mates, the fiction writer Sheila Schwartz and the poet Jason Shinder. To Lucie Brock-Broido and Marie Howe, from whom I have here shamelessly borrowed stories about Jason. Thanks to Carrie Feron, for my start in adult fiction, and to Denise Silvestri, who believed in this book and promised to keep it by her bedside. Thanks to family and friends who stood by me and made all the difference. Long-standing thanks to Binghamton University, and the students who inspire me. To the Kates cousins, who are nothing like Ari. To my sister Ellen, always. Above all, above everything, I want to thank my children, Eli and Lily, and my beloved husband, David. You make getting up in the morning worthwhile; you make life whole. And finally, to all who struggle and lose and all who struggle and win—my heart is with you.

  MAY 1982

  The Cousins

  The two cousins sat in the sunlight of a May afternoon, overlooking the edge of a suburban backyard. Ari Wiesenthal was seven, a sturdy-looking boy who wore a distracted look and seemed to have a permanent frown line between his eyes. His hair was dark brown, but moppy—somewhere between wavy and curly. Nicole was only four. She was as slight and airy as he was solid, with a pair of long, thin dancer’s legs. For a child so young, she was eerily beautiful; red haired, her eyes deep brown and level. She was barefoot, wearing a sweatshirt over a pair of flowered shorts.

  Their two chairs were angled toward each other. They were child-size versions of Adirondack chairs, and the dew still gleamed on the forest-green wood. The chairs had broad curving arms, and on each arm sat a highball glass with a straw sticking out of it, so the children looked like adults having miniature cocktails. The two sisters, their mothers, joked about it, looking out the kitchen window. Salt and pepper. The Inseparables. Their children sat with their legs crossed, mirroring each other. They could sit like this and talk for an hour at least, calmly and quietly.

  The cousins had been this close from the time they were toddlers: Ari and Nikki. One brown head; one dark red with threads of strawberry blonde and gold and blood red running through it. Ari’s toy poodles, the older dog, London, and Florence the puppy, lay sleeping at their feet.

  Ari’s mother was telling her younger sister a funny story. She was short, stocky, dark-haired, and dramatic. Suburbia bored her. Telling outrageous stories—at least half of them lies—was how she kept herself sane.

  “It was a dinky little diner,” she said. “And they were already asking people to make their early reservations for Thanksgiving. In May, for Pete’s sake! They had up a little sign by the cash register. So on my way out I announced, I would like to make a reservation for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “You didn’t,” said her sister, shaking her head disapprovingly. She was as fair and thin as her sister was dark and voluptuous.

  “Yes, I did. The cashier asked, How large is your party?—Oh, I said. Just one. Party of one. But I like to plan ahead!”

  The two sisters burst out laughing.

  As if on cue, a large brown-and-black mongrel charged around the corner, growling and snapping his jaws. Forever after Ari, the boy cousin, would associate the sound of women laughing together with danger.

  The strange dog lunged straight for the toy poodles, as if he’d heard them trash-talking him down the hill, and had come to kill both. His eyes were a bright yellowish color, closer to a bird of prey’s than a dog’s. He sprang at them, snarling, jaw flecked with foam. He lowered his head, fur bristling like a military crew cut. The poodles woke, hysterically yapping. The strange dog floated forward, sank his teeth into the smaller one’s neck, then her foreleg, and there was a sudden flurry, a terrifying storm of sharp pained yelps and flying blood and leaping fur.

  Nikki looked to Ari for direction, as she always did. Ari was paralyzed. He could not move, his hands frozen to the sides of the wooden chair. Nicole jumped to her feet, screaming shrilly, but she dashed straight for the strange dog, hauling him off the two barking poodles. Ari stared at Nicole’s thin bare feet, planted apart on the wood deck. Her red hair was glowing, her mouth was trembling; he had never seen anyone look so alive. The mongrel abruptly changed his objective and sank his teeth into Nicole’s wrist. The dog’s tail went as rigid as if it had been made of stone. Nikki was shrieking but stood guard over the two smaller dogs.

  At the same instant three things happened. The sliding door from the kitchen to the deck rolled open like thunder; Nikki’s mother yanked a dish towel from the kitchen drawer and ran out to wrap up her sobbing daughter’s hand. The mongrel changed direction again and began to gallop back down the hill, his tail flat. And Ari scooped Nikki into his arms and carried her into the house, her blood running in a line down his arm, like a wavy red ribbon heading toward an uncertain future. His face was as white as paper.

  Later that night Ari’s father, Charlie Wiesenthal, drove up and down the streets of Little Neck in his old Chevy hunting for the dog. If he saw it, he told anyone who would listen, he would kill it on sight. He would run it
over with his car. His intentions were murderous. But no one ever saw the strange animal again. Florence, the puppy, walked with a limp after that, though she long outlived the other poodle, London, and never ceased to mourn him—not even after they brought home a cat to keep her company. And four-year-old Nicole was left with a scar shining on her right wrist like a thin white zipper, small and elegant.

  OCTOBER 2010

  Halloween: I Told You I Was Sick

  The Huntington School District had decided to hold its registration in the fall, instead of spring—so Nicole found herself registering her daughter, Daisy, for kindergarten on Halloween. As she signed the form, her coat sleeve slid back and the childhood scar on the inside of her wrist revealed itself.

  The neighborhood was a riot of witches, goblins, and ghosts hanging from doorways. Front yards were converted to graveyards with cardboard headstones that read “Now I’ll finally have some peace and quiet,” “I told you I was sick.”

  “I want our pumpkin to look friendly,” Daisy had said. “I want people to come to our door.” Not many trick-or-treaters would show up, although Nicole had strung orange lanterns over the house and put out a smiling jack-o’-lantern and would keep the porch lights burning till nine. Potter’s Lane was a narrow street up a small steep hill from town, and most kids would skip the incline.

  Daisy would be one of the older kindergartners next fall. Nicole and her husband, Jay, had debated about whether it was best to push her forward or hold her back. She was a September baby—typical Virgo, the eternal caretaker, order-loving, neat as a pin.

  “Think about it this way,” Nicole’s best friend, Mimi, said. “Do you want Daisy going off to college when she’s only seventeen?”

  “No,” Nicole said. “I don’t want her going off to college ever.”

  “You’ll change your mind when she’s fifteen and steals all your makeup,” Mimi said. Mimi was the wife of Nicole’s cousin, Ari, which made the two friends feel related. “Blood is thicker than water, but I never understood why that was a good thing,” Mimi would say. They spoke on the phone every day, sometimes more. It might be just Mimi testing out a new joke, but Nicole was a bad test audience, she said—she always laughed. Mimi was a comedy writer. Occasionally she performed stand-up, though she suffered from stage fright. She taught comedy writing at Nassau Community College; she lectured about it at elder hostels; she ghostwrote for famous comics; she took being funny seriously.

  Nicole stood alone in the main corridor in her wool coat among a gaggle of other women, most of them ten years younger than she. All of these young women seemed to know each other and stood chatting in a close knot of five or six. Nicole wished Mimi were there to keep her company, crack some jokes. A few of the younger mothers rocked baby carriages back and forth, perpetual motion machines. Nicole felt lonely, like an outsider. She hoped this didn’t mean that Daisy would be, too. The parents—nearly all of them mothers, with one or two fathers skulking around—lined up and filled out the kindergarten registration forms. They listened to a woman trying to enlist them in future PTA fund-raising events. Finally they were all congratulated, then dismissed like schoolchildren themselves.

  Nicole clutched her registration form as she made her way blindly down the hall. She was shocked by the desolation she felt at the prospect of leaving her daughter in public school all day. The tiled walls were painted a pale institutional blue that no sprucing-up or Halloween decorations could disguise. Daisy now went to a Montessori preschool program three mornings a week. What would it be like dropping her off at eight every morning, not getting her back till almost three in the afternoon? The hours apart seemed to stretch ahead endlessly. They had begun a long, steady process of separation from which there was no return.

  A large boy came racing by, probably a fifth-grader. His hair fell over his eyes, his belly bounced as he ran. He was as tall as a grown man. Nicole felt tempted to holler at him, Pay attention! Daisy was still petite, almost Lilliputian, the lower fifth percentile in both height and weight.

  The first-graders had crayoned huge-eyed owls for Halloween. They were taped in rows to the walls. The owls all looked alike, with large cylindrical bodies and immense glowing yellow eyes the size of platters. Nicole couldn’t see them clearly; her own eyes were filled with tears. She spotted another woman about her age, one of the few black women she’d seen on line, also studying the owls. When the woman finally turned her head toward Nicole, tears glittered on her chocolate-colored skin and ran toward her jawline.

  “Look at me,” the strange woman said. “I’m acting like a damned fool. Darnell is my baby. He’s my last one home.”

  Nicole dug a clean tissue out of her purse and offered it to the woman. “Daisy is our only,” she said. “We’ve been trying to have another, but it hasn’t happened yet.” She didn’t normally confide in strangers like this.

  “I’m Ruby,” the woman said, accepting the tissue and blowing her nose. “Aren’t we a pair?”

  Nicole gestured toward the other parents gliding out of the building, chatting and laughing. “I don’t know how they do it.”

  “Hard-hearted,” the woman named Ruby said. She half smiled through her tears. “You’d be surprised how many women get pregnant once they got a child in kindergarten. I seen it happen time and again. Could happen for you.”

  “That would be nice,” said Nicole.

  “We should count ourselves lucky,” Ruby said. “I know one woman, she registered her daughter for kindergarten last year. Same afternoon, she finds out she has a brain tumor. Incurable cancer. Dead before that child hit the third grade.”

  “Oh, God. That’s awful.” Nicole shivered, though she was sweating inside her wool coat. She suddenly felt sick. The story filled her with dread—as if some fortune-teller had wandered over, read her palm, and foreseen something terrible. Halloween was getting to her, all those fake ghouls and gravestones.

  She wanted to cry to this woman, Take it back! Untell me that story! She wondered if the dead woman had lived there in Huntington, but didn’t ask. Besides, what difference could it possibly make?

  “Trust me, this is a nice school,” Ruby said. “Your little girl gonna love it here.”

  “I’m sure your son will, too.”

  Ruby’s face relaxed into a split grin. All trace of tears was gone, except the crumpled tissue still held in one large fist. She was a tall woman, athletic. “Darnell loves everything,” she said. “He’s a big kidder. Class clown type—I just hope he gets a teacher with some sense of humor.”

  All the way back home Nicole brooded about the woman who’d died. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. That daughter left motherless—dead before that child hit the third grade, the grade she would soon be teaching again. She knew what little girls were like at that age; she remembered one motherless child in her class who had shown up at school still wearing her pajamas, egg smeared on her face. All that Halloween morning, the woman’s words swooped in and settled crowlike in the back of her mind.

  And there was that lump at the side of her neck—a swollen gland, her doctor said. But it would not go away, like the thought of this dying woman. When she’d mentioned it to Jay months earlier, he’d told her to go to a specialist, adding, “I’m sure it’s nothing,” his eyes bright blue. There was something about his confidence that irked her. Did he think people couldn’t die? Did he think he could bat it all away, like an easy home run? She found her fingers returning to the swollen place on her neck again and again. Yet she refused to speak about it, as if ignoring it would help it disappear. And here it was Halloween, a holiday. Soon would come Thanksgiving, then the winter holidays. Time enough to deal with it in the new year.

  Nicole and Mimi had arranged for their children Daisy and Julian to go trick-or-treating in Mimi’s posh Glen Cove neighborhood. Later they’d come back to Huntington and answer Nikki’s doorbell in their costumes. Julian’s neighborhood was richer, safer, and gave out better candy. Whole candy bars, free movie tickets,
packs instead of sticks of gum. Nicole’s cousin Ari had bought individually wrapped Lindt dark chocolate truffles and organic dried fruit rolls. He insisted on giving each trick-or-treater one of each.

  “Chocolate is high in antioxidants, and organic is organic,” he said. “There’s no excuse for giving kids junk.”

  Nicole decided not to mention that they had Snickers bars and red Twizzlers back at her house. In the old days, he would have known exactly what was in her cupboard. In the old days, as children, they would have had the same junk food and they’d have eaten it in secret together, up in the attic, playing board games.

  Daisy and Julian dressed up as vampires that year. Second cousins, three years apart, they looked nothing alike, and were an unlikely pair. Yet they’d been inseparable almost from the moment of Daisy’s birth, closer even than Nikki and Ari had been decades earlier. Each child seemed to feel safer in the other’s company. Perhaps it was because they were each, in their own way, a little bit odd. For Halloween Daisy wore a long black silky dress with tiers of uneven layers and a hooded cloak trimmed in velvet, from a secondhand store. Julian kept drawing his vampire cloak partway across his face, showing off his plastic fangs, gargling “Nyah! Ha! Ha!” and pretending to bite Daisy.

  Nicole took out the baby blanket she was knitting for Mimi’s baby-on-the-way. The work was almost halfway done. Ari and Mimi already knew it was going to be a girl, so the blanket was yellow cable stitching with a new pink stripe. Mimi had taken every prenatal test available, under orders from the ever-vigilant Ari.

  “The only test this baby hasn’t taken yet is the SAT,” Mimi said. “But Ari’s already got her enrolled at Kaplan’s.” The mothers sent the children upstairs to nap for half an hour or so before the trick-or-treating began.

  Mimi sank into a chair with a groan. She had just gotten past the first rough trimester a few weeks earlier. Till then she had been existing on crackers and peppermints. “Julian won’t sleep, but Daisy might. We should let them rest, or they’ll be basket cases by tonight,” Mimi said. “You’ll see next year, when Daisy goes to school all day. Hundred Book Challenge. Learning her colors and shapes. She’ll come home with bags under her eyes, looking like death on a cracker.”