IN THE DOCTOR’S WAITING AREA, Anya sits on the floor and plays with the toys. It is just us and an Orthodox Jewish family, a man with two daughters who both appear to have Down syndrome. One comes up to Anya and asks her name. At first it is hard to understand her. Do you want to tell her? I ask. Anya moves toward me and shakes her head. Can I tell her? She nods. This is Anya, I say. I’m Rucha, says the girl. Rucha and her older sister lie on the floor. The older girl lifts up Rucha’s dress and tries to pull down her tights and underwear. When their father, a little, red-bearded dumpling of a man, sees what they are doing, he spanks them both, hard. Anya starts crying. I take her over to the seats beneath the television, where CNN is playing reports of a school shooting at low volume. Anya buries her face in my chest. I hug her tightly, catch snippets of the report: many heroes, too early to say, just the kind of person who loved teaching, loved the kids. The two girls are called into the examination room. How is it for the Orthodox? The whole world laid out by God, everything given and taken by God, I imagine. I don’t want to see Dr. Goldman, Anya says. You can do it, I say. You’re strong. I’m not strong, she says. You’re four now, I say. I might have to cry, she says. That’s okay. You can cry. I can feel her heart beating against my chest. Is your heart going fast? I ask. She nods. I know what you feel, I say. Is he going to look in my nose with the buzzing thing? Yes, but it will be very quick. It’s like five seconds for each nostril. Before we know it, we’ll be back in the car. But I don’t want to see Dr. Goldman, she says. I can hear the fear in her voice, the tears about to come. It’s okay, baby. You’re strong. You can do it. I don’t want you to say that anymore, Daddy. But I mean it. You can do it, sweetie. Daddy, I don’t want you to say that. Okay, baby, I’m sorry. Then we’re called into the office, and I hold her tightly in my lap, one arm around both her arms so she can’t move them, one hand on her forehead to keep her head still, and she screams and screams as I grip her tightly and Dr. Goldman puts his buzzing metal instrument in her nose, first one nostril, then the other. Afterward, we drive over to Brighton Beach, which isn’t far, park under the elevated subway tracks, walk through quickly alternating blades of sun and shadow. Outside the stores, at tables along the sidewalk, women are selling pastries on trays and imported food in packages. There is a two-liter plastic bottle of Russian beer. Then we’re at the beach. It’s so easy in New York to forget about the ocean. We sit on a bench that faces the Russian restaurants across the boardwalk. Why does this bench have no back? Anya asks. Maybe so you can face either way, out toward the ocean or this way, I say. I don’t think so, Daddy. What do you think then? I ask. She shrugs her shoulders. I’m hungry, she says. Do you want a banana? Okay. As I peel it for her, some people start shouting, and I turn toward the commotion. A man with a hooded sweatshirt and a thin beard is stumbling away from another man, who is lying on his side in the middle of the boardwalk. Anya eats her banana, swinging her legs back and forth. A woman stops to shout something in Russian at the man in the hooded sweatshirt. He ignores her and makes it back to the picnic benches beneath the pavilion, where his friends are drinking. Then another woman starts shouting, What’s wrong with you people? You’re just watching it happen. My God. Why aren’t you calling the police? Call the police for God’s sake. Why are you just standing there? Why is she shouting? Anya asks. I don’t know, I say. What happened to that man? she asks. He’s just taking a nap. I toss her banana peel in the garbage, and we take off our shoes and go down the stairs, out onto the sand, which is full of footprints. I keep an eye out for broken glass. I have the plastic bag with her snacks in it, and she wants me to hold it open so she can fill it with the shells she finds. In the distance, I can see the rides at Coney Island and the brown brick tenements behind them. Anya points to the jungle gym, which looks as if it has been dropped on the sand by mistake. Let’s go there, she says. All right, I say. We walk over, our feet sinking in the cold sand, and she climbs the ladder and goes down the slide. It is steep and fast. A little boy starts talking Russian to us. Then an older girl approaches. That’s my sister, the boy says. He has black hair. Hers is very blond. She asks me Anya’s name. I tell her. Is she Russian? she asks. No, we just liked the name, I say. Anya helps them put sand on the slide. I stand a little way off, and the thoughts begin to come: Mike’s wedding years earlier, the same ocean, a beach in Massachusetts. As he came down the aisle of sand, I could feel only fear and sickness inside myself, so much darkness in the face of so much beauty, and that night at the party and afterward on the dark beach, I drank and drank, couldn’t stop, slept only a couple hours, a ball of dread the next day in the car on the way back to New York. Sara pulled off the highway and I vomited in a parking lot. Anya tugs at my hand. Daddy, I want to go, she says. Okay, baby, let’s go, I say, and we walk down the beach to where the sand is wet and packed tight. I remember her first cries, high-pitched and alien, as if coming from another world into this one, into all this mystery and peril. Sara was calm and reaching for her. Oh my God, oh my God, I heard myself crying in that hospital room, laughing and crying at the same time, and then the feeling of holding her in my arms for the first time, unfathomable in her aliveness. Now I take some pictures of her with her back to the ocean. The sunlight comes down through holes in the clouds in visible columns, striking the gray water in a bright circle far from the shore. Check that out, I say, pointing at the sky, but she couldn’t care less about the cloud formations. She finds a stick and holds it high above her head as she balances on one foot. You’re a tree, I say. No, I’m a bird.
Gabriel Heller’s writing has appeared in Agni Online, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Crazyhorse, Electric Literature, The Stranger, The Sun, Witness, and other publications. He teaches writing at NYU and is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Brooklyn.
