CHAPTER NINE
WHO LISTENS?
On the end of the world came, now with a rumbling baseline of low-grade fear. She had closed the cabinet door against that mystifying cell phone, turning the latch on it as if it might try to escape, then all through the terrible night that followed she sat on the bed, thinking around but not through the quagmire that was opening at her feet, its parts still blessedly separate, though in themselves they were bad enough: something about Jonathan, something else about a near stranger who had been murdered, and something involving the police. Henry went to bed around ten, first coming in for a hug, which she gave with a very false cheer, hoping he would not feel her shake. Hours later, Grace was still awake.
There were some avenues open to her, of course. She could call Robertson Sharp III (but whom Jonathan for years had called Robertson Sharp-the-Turd or sometimes just “the Turd”), and explain that Jonathan—“Such a space cadet sometimes!”—had left his phone at home, and was there anyone else from Memorial at the conference she could get in touch with? Or she could call the conference itself, if she could first figure out exactly what it was called and exactly where it was—“pediatric oncology in Cleveland” being fairly nonspecific. She could call Stu Rosenfeld, who was covering the practice for him, but that would be akin to sending out an e-mail blast that Jonathan Sachs’s wife had no idea where he was and was freaking out.
She was not. Freaking. Out.
And yet.
She kept running the film back to Monday morning, their usual relay involving the coffee and the breakfast for Henry (the only one of them who ate breakfast) and the daily download, which—she barely recalled—featured, for her, patients straight through until four, and then Henry’s violin lesson, and a dentist appointment for Jonathan, to finally get a permanent crown on the bottom tooth he had broken the year before, tripping and falling against a staircase at the hospital. And hadn’t there been some quasi plan about dinner, with one of them picking something up on the way home? Cleveland, she thought now, going through it again and then again, had not figured into the plan for the day—unless, had he planned to leave later on? After dinner with the two of them? Perhaps, somewhere along the way, he had decided that this was a bad plan, that the rare enough dinner at home with them was not enough to offset a late flight before an early conference the following morning? Maybe he had decided this suddenly, checked the flight availability, and come home quickly to grab his stuff, opting to phone her later and update her on the change. And he had indeed called, on Monday afternoon, though she hadn’t picked up the message until she checked her messages in Vitaly Rosenbaum’s dim corridor during Henry’s lesson, which was why she and Henry had ended up eating dinner at the Cuban restaurant on Broadway. The message itself had been so unremarkable: “Heading to the airport for that conference. Can’t remember the name of the hotel—it’s in my bag. See you in a couple of days. I love you!” She hadn’t even kept it—what was there to keep? He had gone away for a couple of days. He often went to conferences, and they were often in Midwestern cities with important hospitals, like the Cleveland Clinic—that was Ohio—or the Mayo Clinic—that was … Minnesota? She didn’t always keep them straight, but why should she? It’s not as if New Yorkers had to go somewhere else for the best medical care. Besides, he would call her, or she would call him—whether you were in China or around the corner, you called the same phone number and the same person—your husband—answered the phone.
But then Jonathan had forgotten his phone.
Or no, he hadn’t forgotten exactly. One thing she saw now, with a kind of brutal clarity, was that Jonathan’s cell phone could not possibly have been forgotten in the place she had found it—wedged behind the leather binders in the bedside cabinet. One did not “forget” such a critical object as a cell phone in a place so inconvenient to access.
This was the oddity she kept coming back to.
Download of plans for the day: check.
Change of plans: also check.
Inadvertently left behind phone after hurried use to communicate change of plans: not a problem.
But placement of phone in the back of the bedside table, behind the leather binders?
None of it made sense. The fact was that Jonathan liked to check in. He told her once that the sound of her voice, even the professional version of her voice on the office line, made him feel safe and calm, and this had moved her. She knew—she had always known—that he had thought of her as his “real” family more or less since they’d met. She knew that she had brought him the very safety and sense of belonging that was so important for a child, but which he had never experienced in his family of origin. That he had come out the other end of such an unpromising beginning as a nuanced, loving, and eager person said everything she had ever needed to know about what he was made of.
But even as she thought this, she was remembering something else. Or someone else. A woman from years ago on her office couch—the same couch she still had, but in a different office, her first in Manhattan, over on York in the upper 80s. She had been a new therapist then, just done with her training, just out from under the overly claustrophobic wing of Mama Rose, and this woman, this patient … Grace couldn’t remember her name now, but she remembered her throat, which had been sinewy and long, rather enviable, actually. The woman had come alone, but not to talk about herself. She wanted only to talk about her husband, a Polish attorney working as a paralegal she’d met first at her neighborhood gym and then at her favorite coffee shop, where the man had, over their brief courtship, spilled out the story of his terrible childhood, a catalog of deprivation and abandonment that would have stirred the staunchest misanthrope. To get from a practically illiterate family to university, then to emigrate alone and arrive penniless with a law degree that was useless in the United States, and thus to be stuck working for attorneys who were younger and less gifted than himself, living in an awful shared flat, practically a dormitory, in Queens, and threatened constantly with deportation—well, it was a terrible story. Until, that is, she had rescued him with love and marriage and the navigational tools to secure his legal credentials. That woman had said something once, when Grace had suggested, rather gently, that perhaps she did not really know this man as well as she thought. Look at what he came from, and what he is, the woman said, the muscles of her beautiful neck tightening in resentment. That’s all I need to know.
He would never come to a session, she recalled. As a Pole, the woman explained, he simply did not believe in therapy. Then the woman stopped coming, too. Years later, Grace had seen her at Eli’s on Third, at the cheese counter, and cautiously reintroduced herself. The woman was still living in the same small apartment but was now raising a daughter on her own. The Polish husband had left soon after the little girl’s birth, imported and then married some woman from his pre-emigration life, and hired an associate at his new law firm to represent him in the divorce. And yes, he had managed to secure a settlement for his pain and suffering.
Grace sat very still.
A siren blared down Park Avenue. She pulled a blanket around her shoulders. She had not been able to open her laptop again. She imagined typing the words “pediatric,” “Cleveland,” “oncology,” and “conference” but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Besides, this was all going to untwist itself somehow. She’d gotten herself into a kind of eddy of anxiety, that’s all it was. She’d seen it a hundred times in her own practice, and sure, sometimes it was something. Often it was something. But not always. It wasn’t always something.
And in fact, Grace thought with what felt almost like relief, this had sort of happened once before, with no terrible after effects. Years ago, back in the early days of their marriage, she recalled—and indeed, the experience came flooding back to her, that same jolt of dispersing panic, so pointless!—there had been an incident a tiny bit like this, when she had gone a day or so without quite knowing where Jonathan was. He had been a resident at the time, and yes, of
course residents, with their insane thirty-six-hour shifts, did disappear into the hospital for these total immersions, emerging at the other end exhausted and addled and typically uncommunicative. Those were also the days before ubiquitous cell phones, so when you went under you went under completely: no blips on the radar, no trail of crumbs into the woods. It was ironic, she thought, that it might have been better for everybody, back then, to be unable to make contact. She wouldn’t ever want Henry walking around without a cell phone—without, if she were being honest (and if such a thing were possible!), an implanted GPS locator—but it hadn’t felt this terrible fifteen years ago when Jonathan had disappeared for a couple of days, failing to return the messages she’d left for him at the hospital and later at his answering service. They were only a little bit married that year, and both working crazy hours, so it had taken some time to realize that she flat out didn’t know where he was. She’d thought she knew his rotation schedule, and when he could be expected to stumble through the door of their unlovely apartment on 65th and collapse on the double bed in their sleeping alcove, but when he failed to materialize, she spent the better part of a day second-guessing herself and then another few hours leaving messages. Had he filled in for somebody else, piggybacking another shift onto the one he’d just completed? Maybe he’d been too tired to make it home and had crashed in one of the rooms the hospital set up following the Libby Zion fiasco, in which a teenager’s death had been—rightly or wrongly—laid at the feet of a very sleep-deprived resident. Ironically, with fewer ways for them to contact each other, it had been much easier to persuade herself that everything was all right. It had been like a dull, insistent pulling sensation, redirecting her thoughts, whatever her thoughts back then had been. (What had she thought about in those days, before she’d had a child? Current events? What to cook for dinner?) That was unpleasant enough, but it wasn’t like now. Now was a building, blaring, tunneling infiltration of something she declined to name. But it felt very, very bad.
How long had it lasted, that other time? A day and night, and then another, and most of a third until he suddenly came home, looking—of all things—rather chipper. She had been so glad to see him. Where had he been? she demanded. Had he taken another shift?
Yes.
Had he stayed in one of the residents’ crash rooms?
Yes, he told her. He had.
Had he not received her messages?
Messages? He hadn’t, it turned out. The call desk at the hospital was notorious for not following through. True, it was technically their job, but so far down the totem pole of critical communication in a large cancer hospital that a certain amount of failure was expected. And yes, earlier in the day he’d picked up the automatic page from his service with her number, but by then he knew he’d be home in a few hours, and he hadn’t wanted to wake her.
But why hadn’t he called her, and long before that? Why hadn’t he let her know what had happened? Didn’t he realize she’d be worried?
Why on earth would she have been worried? Jonathan had wanted to know. He wasn’t the one with cancer. He wasn’t one of the kids at the hospital getting pumped with poison while their weeping parents looked on.
Of course, that had felt horrible. And of course, she was ashamed of how she had let herself become so hugely, disproportionately distressed. So he hadn’t called in every second, so what? He was busy. He had sick little kids in the hospital. His life was very full of very important things. She had chosen him for that, hadn’t she? And by the way, what exactly had she been so afraid of? If something terrible had happened—if, for example, he had collapsed with some sudden-onset horror (heart attack! stroke! brain tumor!)—then somebody, one of Jonathan’s colleagues, even one of those awfully busy operators at the call desk, would have made an effort to get in touch with her. They hadn’t, ergo, nothing awful had happened to her husband, ergo, she was acting irrationally.
She wished she could fall back on the same logic just now.
Just now, she was so focused on the idea that it had happened before and signified nothing that she utterly failed to note the significance of it having happened before at all. Which, had a patient performed this sleight of hand in her presence, she would certainly have pointed out.
It had never occurred to Grace that Jonathan might leave her. Never. Not all those years ago, during her self-inflicted three-day (and -night) ordeal. Not now. In fact, not once since their first moment, with her own sigh of recognition, lust, and relief in the basement of the Harvard Medical School dormitory. A long-ago patient had once described her thoughts on first meeting her future husband as: “Oh good. Now I can stop dating.” And that, too, had been a part of her own moment. Finis! she had thought at the time, though that small voice of practicality had nearly been drowned out by her instantaneous, accompanying hunger for him. All that speculation about which man she was supposed to love, marry, procreate with, and grow old alongside—she had not been immune to such things, of course. But as far as her own story went, her story with Jonathan, from the moment she first encountered him it was no longer a question of which man, only of whether she’d be allowed to be with this one for the rest of her life. Jonathan Gabriel Sachs: aged twenty-four years, dimpled, wiry, tousled, brilliant, adoring, and alive. And look at what he’d come from.
Her night passed that way, in some physical discomfort and far greater psychic agony, with perhaps a few spells of brief and unrefreshing sleep, each of them ending with a new twitch of reentry. At seven, she forced herself upright and got Henry ready for school, making his toast and her own coffee as if it were a normal morning. She was uncharacteristically impatient, waiting for him to finish collecting his things, which made no sense to her because she was already dreading the moment she had to watch him walk away up the Rearden steps and turn to these repetitive thoughts once again.
The differentness of the school could be gleaned the moment she and Henry turned the corner off Lexington, with the addition of a news van (NY1) and a few clear media types on the pavement beside it. Certainly, there were parents—lots of parents, or, more accurately, lots of mothers—because who would let the nanny bring the children to school on such a momentous occasion as this? The mothers wore yoga gear and sweats, and held dogs by leather leashes, and were locked everywhere in intense communication, all over the sidewalk and in the courtyard. There were so many of these women that the sight of them pulled Grace back from her private distress and reminded her what was happening in the real world—a dead mother, injured children, psychic overflow for their own kids and the school as a whole—and she felt, for a moment, almost a little better. This situation with her husband would work itself out, of course, but there would be no restoration for Malaga Alves and her son and daughter. She gave Henry’s shoulders a discreet squeeze and sent him off, then allowed herself to be enveloped by Sally Morrison-Golden’s group.
“Oh, my God,” said Sally as Grace approached. “This is so awful.”
She was holding an oversize cup from Starbucks, alternately shaking her head and blowing over the surface.
“Anyone met the husband?” said a woman Grace didn’t know.
“I saw him once,” said Linsey of the Birkin bags, who looked even younger and fresher today than the day she’d dispatched Grace from her son’s birthday party with the helpful information that the doorman could hail her a cab. “I didn’t realize he was a parent at first. I thought he, you know, worked for the school. I think I told him they were out of paper towels in the ladies’ room.”
Remarkably, this was said with no self-consciousness whatsoever. Grace, notwithstanding the fact that this missing Mr. Alves had apparently bludgeoned his wife to death, was offended on his behalf.
“Parents’ Night?” someone asked.
“Yes. And then he came in the classroom and sat down and I thought: ‘Oh! The janitor’s kid is in Willie’s class!’”
Evidently, this was still amusing to her, because she rolled her eyes.
“Y
’know, I’m from the South. It’s just how it is down there.”
“It” meaning … what? Grace thought. She decided it really wasn’t worth pursuing. Instead, she thought she might as well ask if anyone had any real information.
“Where are the kids?” she said, and they all turned to her.
“What kids?” said a preschooler’s mom.
“Malaga Alves’ kids. Miguel and the baby.”
They looked at her blankly.
“No idea,” somebody said.
“Foster care?” someone else said.
“Maybe they’ll get sent back to Mexico,” said a woman Grace didn’t know, one of Sally’s regular crowd.
“They’re having a counselor come in this afternoon,” Amanda said. “For the fourth grade. To talk to them about Miguel. I don’t know, shouldn’t they have asked us first?”
“They did ask,” said the woman whose name Grace didn’t know. “Didn’t you get the e-mail? They said if anyone had an objection, they should call the headmaster’s office.”
“Oh.” Amanda shrugged. “I hardly ever look at e-mail anymore. It’s Facebook for everything.”
“Did they bring in counselors for all the kids?” asked Linsey. “I don’t think Redmond mentioned it.”
Redmond, Linsey’s older son, had become the seventh grade’s reigning Internet tormentor and generally a vile young man. Which was hardly surprising.
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