Free The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt Page B

people back.
    I caught hold of a fireman’s coat—a young, gum-chewing, friendly-looking guy. “Somebody’s still in there!” I screamed.
    “Yeah, yeah, we know,” shouted the fireman without looking at me. “They ordered us out. They’re telling us five minutes, they’re letting us back in.”
    A swift push in the back. “Move, move!” I heard somebody scream.
    A rough voice, heavily accented: “Get your hands off me!”
    “NOW! Everybody get moving!”
    Somebody else pushed me in the back. Firemen leaned off the ladder trucks, looking up towards the Temple of Dendur; cops stood tensely shoulder to shoulder, impassive in the rain. Stumbling past them, swept along by the current, I saw glazed eyes, heads nodding, feet unconsciously tapping out the countdown.
    By the time I heard the crack of the disrupted bomb, and the hoarse football-stadium cheer rising from Fifth Avenue, I had already been swept well along towards Madison. Cops—traffic cops—were windmilling their arms, pushing the stream of stunned people back. “Come on people, move it, move it.” They plowed through the crowd, clapping their hands. “Everybody east. Everybody east.” One cop—a big guy with a goatee and an earring, like a professional wrestler—reached out and shoved a delivery guy in a hoodie who was trying to take a picture on his cell phone, so that he stumbled into me and nearly knocked me over.
    “Watch it!” screamed the delivery man, in a high, ugly voice; and the cop shoved him again, this time so hard he fell on his back in the gutter.
    “Are you deaf or what, buddy?” he yelled. “Get going!”
    “Don’t touch me!”
    “How ’bout I bust your head open?”
    Between Fifth and Madison, it was a madhouse. Whap of helicopter rotors overhead; indistinct talking on a bullhorn. Though Seventy-Ninth Street was closed to traffic, it was packed with cop cars, fire trucks, cementbarricades, and throngs of screaming, panicky, dripping-wet people. Some of them were running from Fifth Avenue; some were trying to muscle and press their way back toward the museum; many people held cell phones aloft, attempting to snap pictures; others stood motionless with their jaws dropped as the crowds surged around them, staring up at the black smoke in the rainy skies over Fifth Avenue as if the Martians were coming down.
    Sirens; white smoke billowing from the subway vents. A homeless man wrapped in a dirty blanket wandered back and forth, looking eager and confused. I looked around hopefully for my mother in the crowd, fully expecting to see her; for a short time I tried to swim upstream against the cop-driven current (standing on my toes, craning to see) until I realized it was hopeless to push back up and try to look for her in that torrential rain, that mob.
I’ll just see her at home,
I thought. Home was where we were supposed to meet; home was the emergency arrangement; she must have realized how useless it would be, trying to find me in all that crush. But still I felt a petty, irrational pang of disappointment—and, as I walked home (skull-cracking headache, practically seeing double) I kept looking for her, scanning the anonymous, preoccupied faces around me. She’d gotten out; that was the important thing. She’d been rooms away from the worst part of the explosion. None of the bodies was her. But no matter what we had agreed upon beforehand, no matter how much sense it made, somehow I still couldn’t quite believe she had walked away from the museum without me.

W HEN I WAS LITTLE , four or five, my greatest fear was that some day my mother might not come home from work. Addition and subtraction were useful mainly insofar as they helped me track her movements (how many minutes till she left the office? how many minutes to walk from office to subway?) and even before I’d learned to count I’d been obsessed with learning to read a clock face: desperately studying the occult circle crayoned on the paper plate that, once