The Cellar

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

            It seems like there ought to be some kind of warning before something terrible happens, something that is going to change your life forever. But there isn’t. The most awful things can happen on the most beautiful days, like a plane crashing into Tower One of the World Trade Center where my uncle worked. On that sunny day, when the sky was a perfect blue, the world was watching a terrible, large-scale tragedy on their television screens. I was watching my uncle die.

            Some of my earliest memories are of my Uncle Denny—vivid swirls of color and sensation, like most early memories. I remember the green of the grass in Central Park where he’d take me in the summertime. I remember the soft, moist feel of the bread mashed in my hands that he’d give me to throw to the pigeons. I remember the deep-barreled boom of his laugh and the sudden tilt of earth and sky when he’d sweep me off the ground and onto his shoulders. I remember the sticky slurp of the ice-creams he would buy me, which ended up all over my face and shirt and hair. When we’d get home, my mother’s expression would start in a scold, but after just seconds of looking at Uncle Denny, something silent passing between them, she always ended up laughing instead.

            My father used to call my mother and Uncle Denny Yin and Yang. It wasn’t until I was in the third grade that I finally discovered he hadn’t made those names up himself and they actually meant something. We were learning about China at school, and I came home with a picture of a Yin and Yang symbol one day and asked my father which was which when it came to my mother and Uncle Denny. With a sly glance across the room at my mother, he pointed at the black half and said, “Your mother is the dark half and Denny is the light.”

            “What a thing to tell your daughter, John!” she exclaimed, swinging a pillow from the couch at his head. My father ducked sideways and laughed.

            “Well, it’s true.”

            My mother stilled. “I suppose it is,” she said after a moment. She’d explained the concept of twins to me the year before, and that combined with the symbol I now had made me visualize my mother and Uncle Denny as babies curled in their mother’s womb, nestled together toe to head like two commas, each one containing a speck of the other. Now one of the halves had been torn away, and eleven months later I found myself sitting in a car next to my mother somewhere in northern Virginia instead of our Brooklyn apartment where we belonged.

            “Here we are,” she said, turning off the engine. We listened to it tick and settle as we stared through the windshield at the house in front of us. It was a white, wooden structure with black shutters and a porch that ran around the front all the way down the left side, overlooking a wide field of grass bordered by a split rail fence and a thicket of trees. It looked like something out of a movie, only less polished. The white was dingy and peeling, and the grass was on the scraggly side.

            I waited for her to turn the car back on. To laugh and ask What was I thinking? But instead she said, “Let’s get this car unloaded,” and opened her door, admitting a wave of August heat. I let out a sigh and slowly opened my own door. Summer in Virginia didn’t seem to be any less hot and humid than it was in New York. In fact, it felt a lot worse as I climbed out of my seat, my body stiff from the day’s drive.

            My mother stopped at the edge of the porch and looked up at the house again. I could see her shoulder blades through her t-shirt. She’d lost so much weight in the past year, it seemed like bones were sticking out everywhere. They shifted as she squared her shoulders and headed up the steps. “Come on, Julia,” she called. “Grab a box.”