Love Saves the Day

I watched their backs recede. When they’d gotten half a block away, Laura broke away from Noel and whirled around to face me. “I hate you!” she screamed. Hurling the words at me with all the force she had.

Laura’s hands rose to cover her face, and she turned to bury both face and hands in Noel’s shoulder. Noel’s arm went around her. The two of them kept walking until they disappeared from sight.

It took thirteen hours for the crane to tear our building apart, piece by piece, to level it all the way down to the ground floor. For thirteen hours, chunk by chunk, the metal jaws of the crane ate into it and ripped it open. The building never did collapse. Those of us left to watch who had lived here and knew it well weren’t surprised. That building had stood for a hundred years.

You could see inside people’s apartments as the walls were torn off. The first massive chunk ripped by the crane sent a large Bible flying into the air. That was the Verdes’ apartment. Laura had told me once about that Bible. On the flyleaf they’d written the names of everyone in their family going back four generations.

Furniture looked exposed and naked under the lights, like people caught in the act of changing clothes. Rugs slid into cracks that opened in the floor, dragging couches and tables along with them until everything tilted and teetered at crazy angles, like in a fun-house. Kitchen cabinets were squeezed in the machine’s jaws until they vomited up breakfast cereals and silverware, wedding china and plastic bowls for children. Occasionally the white lights would catch a piece of jewelry or a shard of broken glass and beam out to blind me unexpectedly. A tiny blue sweater became snarled in one of the crane’s teeth and hung there for an absurdly long time, as if someone were clinging fiercely to the thing, desperate to stop it. Not that the crane cared or even paused. It had all night to complete its work.

I stood there and watched numbly. It was only when the crane had eaten down to the third floor, where Mr. Mandelbaum had lived, that I had to leave. I told myself I was hungry, that I hadn’t eaten all day. I went to a diner on First Avenue and sat there with a sandwich and a mug of coffee in front of me for two hours. I took one bite of the sandwich, but the bite marks my teeth left looked too much like the holes gouged out of our building by the crane. My head pounded and my face felt hot, and I bent to rest my cheek against the cool surface of the table.

“You okay, miss?”

A busboy had approached and he hovered, looking worried. “I’m fine.” My voice sounded rough, and I cleared my throat. “Is there a pay phone I could use?”

“Around back. Next to the bathrooms.” He gestured in the direction of the kitchen. “You sure you’re okay?”

My hair fell forward as I bent over my wallet, looking for a few bills to leave on the table and some change for the phone. When I lifted my eyes, the busboy was still looking at me with concern. I smiled weakly. “Just not as hungry as I thought I was.”

Someone had etched WORSHIP GOD into the metal of the pay phone’s base. It ate two of my quarters before a third produced the sound of a phone ringing on the other end of the line. Noel answered in the middle of the first ring. “How is she?” I asked.

“Sleeping,” he answered. “She passed out as soon as she changed out of her wet clothes. I was going to try to wake her and make her eat something, but I figured she needs the sleep more right now.”

“Thank you, Noel.” No matter how much I cleared my throat, I couldn’t seem to erase the gritty texture from it. I didn’t sound grateful, although I was. I didn’t even sound like me. “I’ll come by for her in the morning.”

“Where will you sleep tonight?”

I laughed—a hoarse, barking sound. “Nowhere,” I told him.

There was nothing I could do there, but I walked back to Stanton Street anyway. The crane was still at work, and it had reached the second floor. I was there to see its jaws come through the wall of Laura’s bedroom, devouring the dolls and board games that had come to live permanently in her closet as she’d gotten too old for them. The curtains Mrs. Mandelbaum had sewn for her. The wallpaper we’d spent days choosing and hours hanging in that room that had once been papered in sheet music. The crane ate it all without pausing.

For years, I waited for Laura to ask me about that night. There were a lot of questions I waited for Laura to ask me, but she never did. I always thought, though, that if she were to ask about why I went back, why I stayed there through the night and into the next morning in the damp, crumpled clothing I’d worn all day, that it would be the one question for which I wouldn’t have an answer that would make sense to a practical girl like Laura. I couldn’t have explained to her why I stayed, why I had to see all of it—all of our life together—torn apart piece by piece. Why I felt like the destruction needed a witness. Not a witness in the sense that a lawyer uses the word. Not that, exactly.