by Adam Mitzner
Even among this group, Wayne rose to the top, almost to the very top. He graduated second in his class, a distinction that his father had mocked, of course. Salutatorian—does that mean you’re the smartest of all the idiots? Wayne had his choice of colleges, and his heart was set on MIT, but Archibald Fiske once again intervened.
“You think I got the tuition money coming out of my ass?”
“I can get loans for most of it. It probably won’t cost that much more than a SUNY in the end.”
“Did you say it was the same cost of a SUNY?”
“Not the same, but maybe close.”
“Well, I’m not bankrupting this family for you to tell me that your shit don’t stink because you went to some fancy Ivy League college.”
Wayne likened his matriculation at SUNY Buffalo as a detour, determined that after four years he’d arrive in the same place as if he’d gone to MIT. Sure enough, it played out exactly that way, and Wayne was accepted at Harvard Medical School. This time, admission came with enough financial aid that Archibald Fiske couldn’t say boo about it.
Ole Archie still ended up with the last laugh, though. He died during the second semester of Wayne’s first year, leaving Wayne’s mother without even enough resources to cover the funeral expenses, much less keep her in her apartment and fed.
So instead of his second year in medical school, Wayne took a job teaching biology at Sheffield. He told his mother that it was only another detour. He’d teach for a year, maybe two, and then go back to medical school. Deep down, however, he knew that this time was different. Archibald Fiske had finally kept Wayne down. He had given up his life to do it, but Wayne imagined his father would have considered it a fair trade-off. Winning was winning, after all.
About ten years ago, Wayne’s students had started calling him Heisenberg, a reference to Bryan Cranston’s character in Breaking Bad. Jessica had thought it was disrespectful and told Wayne that he should put a stop to it, but Wayne rather enjoyed the comparison. It told him that even his students knew that, given the opportunity, he could be a man like Walter White. A man whom other men feared.
6
Dr. Goldman had a small office. It was crammed with textbooks that Jessica assumed he had not opened in years and suspected he might have kept from his medical school days. His diplomas hung on the wall, which she always thought was tacky, suggestive of some type of intellectual insecurity. But perhaps for doctors it was different.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Owen’s cancer has returned,” Dr. Goldman said without emotion. “The blood tests we did last week came back positive. We’re doing a new set today, but we expect the same result.”
Even though Jessica had known this was coming in the waiting room, she was still floored by the news.
At the beginning of Owen’s ordeal, she had steeled herself against the possibility that the chemo wasn’t going to work. Not completely, of course, because no one could truly mentally prepare for losing their child, but she at least considered the possibility of a bad outcome. Once Dr. Goldman declared the treatment a success, however, and then when he later used the term remission and ultimately proclaimed Owen cancer-free, she had cast away all negative thoughts.
Of course, Dr. Goldman always hedged Owen’s prognosis, telling her about recurrences and five-year survival rates, the obvious implication being that there were those who survived two, or three, or even four years, but not five. But that was more information than Jessica could absorb. To her way of thinking, you either had cancer or you did not. Owen had it. He might die. Then he didn’t. Which meant he would live. For Jessica, there was no in-between. There couldn’t be.
Dr. Goldman had stopped speaking, apparently expecting Jessica to say something. Or at least to respond to what he’d said by crying.
That was how she had responded the first time he had given her this same news. Even before he told her the type of leukemia, she was sobbing. Wayne had been sitting beside her. She buried her face in Wayne’s chest, wanting only for the doctor to stop talking. As if his words were the cancer eating away at her son.
This time, however, was different. Jessica sat there alone, and when she heard the diagnosis, she remained mute and still, as if in a catatonic trance. The words reverberated in her head. She understood their urgency, of course. Yet at the same time, she knew that the moment she acknowledged them, Owen would, once again, be dying.
“I know that this is not the news you were expecting,” Dr. Goldman continued, “but you shouldn’t lose hope that Owen can still go into remission again. There is an experimental treatment in Manhattan, at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and I think he’d be a very suitable candidate. They’ve been having great success over there.”
If hearing the word cancer made Jessica sick to her stomach, experimental treatment made her want to vomit. Still, this was some sliver of hope. She grasped it with all her might, like it was a branch overhanging a raging river, knowing it was the only thing preventing her from going over the falls.
“Okay,” Jessica said, surprised at the sound of her own voice, almost as if she were hovering above the office, watching the scene unfold. “When can that start?”
Dr. Goldman pursed his lips. Jessica could not imagine that there was still bad news to come, but she recognized this tell. Even the slim branch he had extended would not keep her from the plunge ahead.
“It’s a process, I’m afraid. First we’ll need to do some more tests to confirm that Owen is a viable candidate. I think he will be, but I can’t be sure without the lab results to back it up. But the greater hurdle, I’m sorry to say, will be the cost. Because it’s an experimental protocol, insurance won’t cover the treatment.”
“What’s the cost?”
“It’s significant. I don’t know precisely how much, but at a minimum, it will be in the low– to mid–six figures to complete the entire protocol.”
Jessica found it pretentious to talk about money this way, like dropping foreign words into a conversation. Everyone in the real estate world did it, though, and even James sprinkled his art talk with the same lingo. It always forced Jessica to translate the amount in her head. If six figures meant it cost at least $100,000, then low– to mid–six figures meant anything between $100,000 and . . . what? Half a million?
Jessica understood why Dr. Goldman was using such imprecise language. He was saying that no matter what the final tally ended up being, it was beyond her means.
Haley was late for her 10:00 a.m. appointment with Dr. Rubenstein. She had no excuse for her tardiness, of course. She had no job and no other place she had to be.
As always, when she arrived after ten, Haley immediately apologized. And as was his custom, Dr. Rubenstein told her that she should seek not his forgiveness, but her own.
“I get paid for the full session whether you use it or not. You’re only hurting yourself by being late.”
Dr. Rubenstein was a hard-core Freudian. He insisted that these sessions take place with Haley supine on the couch. Insisted was strong, as he said it was her choice, but he made it clear that he thought his approach was better. “To block out anything that might interfere with our work,” he’d explained.
So that morning, Haley did what she did each Monday at 10:00 a.m. (or a few minutes after). She removed her shoes, lay on his sofa, and stared up at the ceiling tiles.
She had been under Dr. Rubenstein’s care for almost a year. Oddly enough, it wasn’t James’s leaving her that sent her to therapy, but a work crisis.
Shortly after her marriage ended, Haley was assigned to a deal in which Maeve Grant was advising the acquirer in a huge merger between two aerospace conglomerates. The transaction involved the usual complex structure of share swaps, leverage, and cash. It was the largest deal in Maeve Grant history, and no fewer than seventy people had spent time on it during its various phases.
The closing was scheduled for year-end, tax considerations requiring that it be finalized before January 1. Haley worked thr
ough the Thanksgiving holiday—which suited her fine, given that she had no one to spend it with now that James was with Jessica. Afterward, however, she often thought that if James hadn’t dumped her for Jessica, she would have been eating turkey with him instead of discovering the problem that would ultimately end with her being unemployed and unemployable.
Amid the millions of pages of due diligence documents that she had pored over, Haley saw that some of the target’s defense contracts would be invalidated after the merger for some arcane regulatory reasons having to do with joint ownership. The loss would be in the $300 million range, which even on a deal this size was meaningful for Maeve Grant’s client.
Haley brought the problem to the attention of her direct supervisor, Lawrence Chittik. He told her that she was wrong, that she didn’t understand the regulations like he did. That he’d actually worked on the Senate subcommittee that had drafted them.
But she knew she was right. So she put her analysis down on paper and sent it to Chittik, copying the partner in charge of their team, Sean Keener, and pretending that this was the first time she’d raised the issue so as to not make Chittik look bad with his boss. She even claimed that Chittik had asked her to look at the question, so he could share credit in her discovery.
Keener called Haley and Chittik into his office a minute after the email hit his in-box. “What the fuck?” was literally how he started the meeting.
“I didn’t know she was sending it to you,” Chittik said, immediately throwing Haley under the bus.
“I’m sorry,” Haley said, unsure why she was apologizing for doing her job well.
“Get out,” Keener said to Chittik.
Chittik didn’t need to be asked twice and scurried away like a frightened bunny. Once they were alone, Keener asked Haley, “Who else have you told?”
“No one.”
“If you’re lying to me, I’m going to fire you and make sure that no one ever hires you. Understand?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I did wrong. The analysis is right. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t fucking care. What I do fucking care about is the $100 million fee Maeve Grant gets at closing. Every penny of that vanishes if this deal craters. Do you have any idea what that would mean to our bonus pool?”
The deal closed on time, without the client ever becoming the wiser of the land mine that awaited them with the regulators. At the closing dinner, the client’s CEO toasted Maeve Grant’s dedication to the cause and thanked them profusely for their hard work. Champagne flowed. Caviar was consumed. In February, bonuses were paid. Instead of a bonus, Haley was fired. “Restructuring,” they told her. But if she signed a release promising never to sue, they’d pay her a bonus.
After her sacking, Haley dutifully did all the things the recently unemployed are supposed to do. She reached out to her contacts, asking for leads. When that ran dry, she sent out résumés. First to the blue-chip firms, then broadening her circle, until there was hardly a financial institution she hadn’t contacted. She made it to the final interview stage twice, but in each instance, after contacting Haley’s references, the head of HR called back to say that they couldn’t extend an offer. When Haley asked why, she was told both times that they were not at liberty to say. Haley knew that was corporate-speak meaning that Maeve Grant was blackballing her.
Within twelve months, she’d lost her husband and her career. That’s when she started seeing Dr. Rubenstein. She’d been having self-harm fantasies, she admitted to the shrink straightaway, and worse.
“I think about how happy I’d be if someone flew a plane into the Maeve Grant tower and killed them all,” she told him once. “Or I construct these elaborate scenarios to kill James or Jessica. Sometimes I even fantasize about killing Jessica’s ex-husband, which makes absolutely no sense because he’s a victim like me in all this.”
Rubenstein said that type of misplaced rage was perfectly normal, although he was quick to point out that it was important for her not to act on the feelings but instead to rechannel them.
“They’re telling you something important, Haley,” he said.
“And what’s that?” Haley asked.
“The anger you feel to the people who wronged you—your bosses, James, even Jessica—that’s straightforward enough and understandable at face value. You want to hurt them the way that they hurt you. It’s your rage toward Jessica’s ex-husband, however, that, as you acknowledge, doesn’t fit that pattern. What do you think that means?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I come here,” Haley said.
Of course, she did know. On some level, at least, she knew. Still, she waited for Dr. Rubenstein to say it aloud.
“It suggests that you think that Jessica’s ex-husband also bears some blame in all of this. That if he had been a better husband, perhaps Jessica wouldn’t have started an affair with your husband. So what it’s really telling you is that you think you bear some blame for James being unfaithful to you too.”
She wondered if that was true. How much of her anger at James was fueled by her own self-loathing? Then again, she hadn’t broken her marriage vows. James had. It wasn’t her fault. Neither was what had happened at Maeve Grant. She had done everything right—in both instances—only to be the one devastated by people with zero concern for honesty or integrity.
And yet, she was still the one seeing a shrink once a week. She was certain that neither James nor Jessica, nor even Lawrence Chittik or Sean Keener for that matter, had lost a moment’s sleep about what they’d done. Still, she couldn’t deny that she was in a downward spiral, with self-destruction seemingly at the top of her daily routine.
“How has your week been?” Dr. Rubenstein asked, once Haley had assumed her position on the sofa.
“Well, let’s see now,” she said. “Pretty uneventful. No job leads. Stayed inside. Drank a lot.” She paused. “And, oh yeah, I offered some guy sex in exchange for him accompanying me to James and Jessica’s anniversary party, and once I was there, I screamed profanity at them during the toasts in front of all their friends and family.” Another pause. “So, pretty much just a regular week in the life of Haley Sommers.”
Owen knew almost immediately something was wrong. During the subway ride home from the doctor’s office, his mother looked like she might faint at any moment, white as a ghost and holding on to the pole for dear life.
All of which made Owen sick to his stomach too. There are a limited number of options for what constitutes bad news when you’re visiting a pediatric oncologist, after all.
A few minutes after they returned home, his mother knocked on his door. He heard the knock through his headphones but didn’t turn around.
When his mother found him in this position, she sometimes shouted his name or touched him on the shoulder to get his attention. But other times, when the point wasn’t to engage him but to ascertain whether he was occupied, she’d quietly retreat from his bedroom, as if she wanted her entry to go unnoticed.
Which was why Owen’s most prized possession was not his computer, despite what his mother thought. It was his Beats noise-canceling headphones. He liked the way they enhanced the audio when he was playing Call of Duty, but what made them so dear to his heart was that whenever he wore them, his mother assumed that he was hearing impaired.
Which made them almost akin to an invisibility cloak. When he wore them with the sound off, they weren’t canceling outside speech but amplifying it.
This was apparently one of those times when his mother didn’t want to engage him. Her visit was to ascertain that he was busy. She did that when she wanted some privacy of her own.
After retreating from his room, his mother entered her own bedroom, and the door shut behind her. He gave her a few minutes to settle into whatever she was doing, then left his bedroom to do some eavesdropping.
He pressed his ear against her closed door. At first, he couldn’t hear words. Only sobs.
When the words came, they were halting.
> “I know. I know. I’m trying. It’s just . . . I thought this was all over.” More crying. “Yeah . . . I know. They said that there’s some experimental treatment . . . No. Not covered by insurance . . . ‘Low– to mid–six figures,’ is what the doctor said . . . I’m not sure. I think we should wait until they confirm it. So next week, I guess . . . I don’t know . . .”
Owen had heard enough. He went back into his room, shut the door behind him, and put the headphones back on, turning the volume up high.
But instead of losing itself in his game, his mind ran through what his mother’s side of the conversation meant. The cancer had returned. That was obvious, and he had surmised as much by his mother’s behavior on the subway. While they were poking him with needles, someone must have told her about the recurrence.
The other part was about money. Owen didn’t know how much the chemo had cost the first time around, but his parents were always going on about drugs that cost $100 a pill, and he’d taken seven of them a day. He remembered his father saying that getting treated for acute myeloid leukemia was more expensive than four years at Harvard.
If it weren’t for health insurance, Owen knew he would have died that first year. And from what he could piece together from his mother’s call, insurance wasn’t going to help this time around.
His father was always going on about how the important things in life couldn’t be bought. But like so many things his old man said, it was wrong. The most important things always came with a price tag.
Wayne’s lunch break was between noon and 12:50 p.m. One of the perks of his seniority was that he got to eat at a normal time. The newbies found themselves having lunch as early as 10:30 a.m. or as late as 2:00 p.m.
The faculty lounge was a windowless space, furnished with the same type of Formica picnic tables that the students used. But whereas the main cafeteria must have had thirty tables lined up in rows, the teachers had two, side by side. As the joke went: one for the cool teachers and one for the losers, although which was which was also a point of dispute.