The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer Page A

policeman. Today he was almost febrilely excited as he spoke to the various female residents who stood by him. The working women from the elevator glanced over only briefly but kept walking.
    “…and by the time the paramedics got here he had already passed,” Hector was saying.
    “It’s so shocking,” said a young mother whom Amy had frequently seen in the elevator, her young daughters twining around her legs. “He was what, late thirties?”
    “Thirty-eight. Worked in equities,” said a mother from the ninth floor.
    Amy was drawn to the counter too, wanting to feed herself with the awful information she already understood. A young husband on the fourteenth floor in the H line had died of a heart attack in the night. Amy heard in detail about the paramedics and the gurney, the oxygen mask, the repeated, violent attempts at CPR, the wife and children who in the end could do nothing for the dying man except cry. “Daddy, Daddy, take my good-luck owl-pellet key chain!” the five-year-old son had shouted, hysterical.
    But it seemed that there was a postscript to the story. One of the women was saying something about the new widow in 14H and how she wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in the apartment now. “She hasn’t held a job in years,” the woman said. “There’s no way she could carry this rent herself. I predict that pretty soon they’ll have to move out.”
    “Poor thing,” said one of the other women. “And those little kids too.”
    “I was right there when it happened,” said Hector, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “I saw it all. His lips ,” he whispered, as if revealing inside information, “were the color of blueberries.”
    Amy had only an indistinct idea of the identity of the dead young husband in 14H. She thought she could envision a round late-thirties face with thin, fair hair, and a slight slope of paunch beneath a white banker’s shirt, but families came and went in this building, revolving through the door. Here, in this monolith, you usually got to see other tenants’ apartments only on Halloween, when you stood hovering behind your child, peering with prurient interest through an open door into dim rooms with unfamiliar smells and the dancing light of a too-big plasma-screen TV, trying to formulate a sense of how other people lived.
    Now the husband in his white shirt and loosened tie, who had maybe stood in his doorway last Halloween and held out a ceramic bowl, letting Yoda-masked Mason grab Kit Kats in both fists, was dead. His wife and two young children would have to move soon, and their life would change its shape and shade as if it were another ephemeral image on a plasma screen. The apartment would be repainted and given a new dishwasher and a new obsidian slab for a kitchen counter, then rented to some other young family who thought they could probably afford it, and whose life would begin here, and continue here at least for a while.
    “We’ll be late,” Mason said now, lightly pulling Amy from the brace of doomy women around the doorman’s station, where she was poised, her eyes suddenly sprung with tears. She thought of that husband, whom she didn’t know, and then she thought, self-indulgently, of Leo and herself, and she imagined everything ruined, lost.
    “Sorry,” Amy said. “I’m coming.”
    Mason looked at her with curiosity. “Mom. Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “So what happened?” he asked as they pushed through the revolving door.
    “Oh, someone died, honey.”
    They stood on the sidewalk and Mason grew serious. “Did you know that someone always dies? Every second? There. Somewhere in the world, someone else just died.”
    “Yes, but this was right here,” said Amy. “Last night, a man died on the fourteenth floor. It’s very sad.”
    “What was wrong with him?”
    Amy paused. “He was old,” she finally said.
    Outside now, the morning was startling in its clarity and temperament, a relief from the lobby, with its