Love Saves the Day

More hours ticked by. Rain-fed puddles deepened and joined to form small rivers that rushed over feet and carried bobbing, twirling dead leaves toward drains. My stomach churned in time with the movements of the crowd, its anxious circles, the growing sense that something wasn’t right. It had been hours since the toast and cereal I’d eaten that morning. Somebody pressed a paper cup of hot coffee into my hand. But my stomach recoiled at the thought of it, so I carefully set the cup down on the asphalt beside me.

Nothing happened to indicate any repairs being made to our building. Why were we kept waiting in the rain? Why, when the building had remained standing for so many hours, couldn’t we go in and at least collect a few of our things?

A leg would grow uncomfortable from my standing on it too long, and I’d shift my weight to the other leg. I halfheartedly swung my umbrella around whenever the wind changed direction. Still, I was soaked through. I tried to re-button my lopsided shirt one-handed and succeeded only in making it more lopsided. My purse began to feel too heavy hanging from my right shoulder, so I switched it to the left. It occurred to me that I was long overdue at the store, that Noel would be worried about me. But I didn’t want to leave to find a pay phone. The thought faded. Sometimes I decided to count how many people in the crowd had blond hair, how many red, how many brown. It was easy when you could see the tops of everybody’s head. I remained within the crowd, so I could hear what was going on, and kept one eye on Laura, who stood with Mr. Mandelbaum across the street.

Laura never left Mr. Mandelbaum’s side. He sat on an overturned orange crate, and Laura held her umbrella over his head so he wouldn’t get wet. For hours she stood protectively over him, the tallest woman in the crowd aside from me. Laura’s smooth, pale hand against the black plastic of the umbrella handle. Mr. Mandelbaum’s knotted hands twisting and untwisting the plastic bag he still gripped. Occasionally Maria Elena went over to talk to her. Once, I think, she tried to convince Laura to go someplace with her. I could tell by the gestures her hands were making. But Laura smiled wanly and shook her head no, motioning toward Mr. Mandelbaum. Maria Elena disappeared back into the crowd.

I hovered as close to the barricades as I could without being completely swallowed up by the crowd. People from our building kept approaching the yellow line and the cops standing on the other side of it. They pleaded, raged, argued, wept. Those who didn’t speak English, or didn’t speak it well, brought their children as interpreters. I tried, too, to reason with the cops. Tension had become a living pain in my chest, but I forced myself to be calm. Years of working retail had taught me to speak calmly, smilingly, to unreasonable people. I had a child, I told them. My child needed clothing. She needed her schoolbooks. So many people had gone into the building all day and come out unharmed. If we could have a few minutes, only a few minutes to …

“We’ll let you back in,” the cops told us again and again. “Once the building has been deemed safe for reentry, we’ll let you back in. You have nothing to worry about.”

Every half hour or so, I helped Mr. Mandelbaum through the crowd and up to the barricades. I took him from Laura as if we were two parents exchanging custody. I held my umbrella over his head with one hand as we walked. I encircled him with the other, to protect him from being pushed by the crowd. He couldn’t be allowed to slip and fall. I had to remind myself to walk slowly, to pace my longer steps to his shuffling ones.

Mr. Mandelbaum’s whole face beseeched the unyielding cops on the other side of the barricades. Their eyes never so much as flickered in his direction.

“Please,” Mr. Mandelbaum kept saying. “Please let me get my cat out. She’s in there all alone. Please let me get her.”

More than a few times, I tried to argue on Mr. Mandelbaum’s behalf. I circled the barricades looking for different faces, cops I hadn’t already spoken to. “He’s an old man,” I said. “He has prescription medication in there that he needs to take.”

Nothing. No response at all.

“Look,” I said, lowering my voice to a confidential tone. As if we were allies, partners on the same side of a negotiation. “The man’s wife just died. He lived here with her for fifty years. That cat means the world to him. Just let him get his cat out. She’s a living thing, too.” I repeated this sentence often, as if it contained magic words. An unanswerable argument. A living thing. “Couldn’t somebody at least get her for him? I could get his keys. I keep seeing people going in and out and—”

Finally, one of the cops rolled his eyes. “Lady,” he said in an exasperated tone, “we got more important things to worry about right now than some old guy’s cat.”