The Submission - Amy Waldman [41]
William nodded and repeated the explanation to Penelope. “Animals don’t like stones,” he said. “They don’t taste good.”
Penelope put one in her mouth.
“No school today!” Claire announced. “We’re going to make a trail for Daddy.”
The idea was pure Cal—impulsive, creative. Before they set out, the word for the piles came to her, and she double-checked the dictionary. “Cairn: a heap of stones piled up as a memorial or as a landmark.” The memorial part she didn’t tell William. Let him pretend he was bringing his father home, just as she was pretending the whole city wasn’t consumed with another, more consequential memorial.
She checked the news briefly before they left. On NY1 a reporter was interviewing, yet again, Sean Gallagher, founder of the Memorial Support Committee. His chin jutted out like an Indian arrowhead. “It’s like being stabbed in the heart to hear that a Muslim could build this, stabbed in the heart,” he said. “We want that message to go out to the jury loud and clear.”
He thought he should have been on that jury, Claire knew—he had argued so to the governor herself. But he was volatile, even aggressive, and so it had been constituted without him. The families stood behind him because he promised to yell on their behalf. Yet for the same reason he would never reach the precincts of real power, whose denizens knew to whisper. They hadn’t spoken since the news of the Muslim winning. This made her nervous, but Paul had told her to hold off calling family members, Sean or others, until he came up with a plan.
She and the children drove into the city and had the nanny wait nearby with the car. Their first stop was near the attack site but not within sight of it. The children she took there only on the anniversary, when people and pomp camouflaged the barrenness. Now, especially, William’s vividly imagined garden needed safeguarding.
They placed three stones at the base of a lamppost and stepped back. William began to cry. Without knowing why, Penelope joined him.
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Claire stooped to their level.
“It’s too small,” William wept. “He won’t see it.”
The hapless pile did look meager—disappointing—against the city’s vertical thrust. So did the three of them, for that matter.
“Well then, we’ll make the pile bigger,” she said, balancing three more stones on top.
She hustled them north: SoHo, Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, Madison Square Park, Times Square (William inexplicably insisted on the military recruiting station), Central Park (the Turtle Pond, the Sheep Meadow, Strawberry Fields). There was something enjoyably illicit in making these tiny, easily missed interventions in the city. The few people who slowed enough to notice them smiled at the children, thinking it a game. When William and Penelope began squabbling over which stones to use where, Claire started to say “It won’t work if you fight,” then caught herself.
At lunch, William and Penelope giggled as they stacked their fries into cairns. Claire was, to her shame, bored of the game, and anxious. The nonstop calls on her phone had gone to voice mail like ballots into a box. The tally, she knew from checking her messages, was almost unanimous: the families were opposed to the Muslim, as they called him. When the phone rang again, on impulse she answered.
“Claire, I just want to tell you, it’s like a stab to the heart,” a man’s voice said. They were all using Gallagher’s language; it was tiresome. She couldn’t quite place the caller’s name, but it didn’t matter. “Are you hearing us, Claire? Tell me you’re hearing us.”
“I hear you,” she murmured; the children were in earshot. “I hear you.”
Eager to get home, Claire spaced their stops farther apart to hurry the end. They arrived back in Chappaqua amid the long shadows and leaf glow of late afternoon, and began, with improvised ceremony, to place the last pile of stones beneath the gnarled copper beech by the house. At William’s dark look, Claire turned off her phone and knelt to bear witness. The children rearranged