She paused, took a breath. It had been hard enough to get that much out.
“He and I are going to have a lot to talk about. And it’s going to be pretty awful, but it’s going to be private. So why are we talking about it at a police station?”
O’Rourke reached down the table and took the folder now. He looked through some pages, and then, with a little sigh, he closed it, drumming his fingers on the gray cover. “You know what confuses me,” he said finally, “is why you haven’t asked what he did, to get fired. Don’t you want to know?”
Grace considered this. The real answer was: No, she did not. She really, really did not want to know. Of course she would have to know eventually. The two of them had never gotten along, obviously, her husband and his boss. You don’t get along with someone and nickname him the Turd just for the hell of it. From what Jonathan had told her over the years, Robertson Sharp represented the worst of the old school in terms of patient care. Obsessed only with clinical results, he refrained from any but the most perfunctory contact with patients and their families. And with the rise of various social support systems within the hospital structure, he had withdrawn even more. The patient advocates and family consultants and supportive therapists in all their rainbow permutations could do the touchy-feely stuff; Dr. Sharp would examine and evaluate and order the tests and prescribe the drugs. It was how they had been trained, that generation, in the medical schools of the 1960s—you couldn’t really fault them for that. And his personality … well, some people are just not that interested in being liked.
“Mrs. Sachs?”
She shrugged.
“We obtained the records yesterday from Memorial.”
She sat up. “You obtained. His confidential records.”
“Yes. By court order.”
“His employment records?” she said in disbelief.
“Yes. His confidential employment records. As a result of a court order filed yesterday morning. I have them here. You truly don’t know about any of this?”
She shook her head. She was trying—really trying—to breathe.
“All right. From 2007 through 2012, multiple citations for harassment involving staff. Two citations pertaining to cash gifts received from patients’ families. Two citations for inappropriate contact with patients’ families.”
“Oh wait,” said Grace. “Now we’re … This is bullshit, obviously.”
“In January of this year,” O’Rourke went on, “a formal warning after a physical confrontation with a doctor on staff, resulting in injuries. The other doctor declined to press charges.”
“Right.” She actually laughed. Jonathan causing injuries. Had they seen Jonathan? It was hysterical. “Of course. Injuries.”
“Two broken fingers and a laceration requiring two stitches. For the other person involved.”
Snap, snap, snap. She reached out and held on to the table. Oh no, she thought. Someone has custom written a horror story for my life. Like those people who take your family memories and turn them into a song for the golden anniversary celebration. But not like that at all. This horror story, for example, would somehow have to explain the tooth he had chipped when he fell in the stairwell.
“That’s not how he broke his tooth,” she said.
“I’m sorry?” It was Mendoza.
“That’s not how he broke it. He fell in the stairwell. He tripped.” They’re lucky he didn’t sue the hospital!
“The other doctor was treated in the emergency room at Memorial. The aftermath of the event was witnessed by a number of people, and the victim gave a statement for the disciplinary hearing.”
The event. The victim. The disciplinary hearing. There seemed to be a lot of “The’s.” Just as if this were really happening. But of course it was all, just, crazy.
“He fell in the stairwell. He had to get a false tooth. They couldn’t save the tooth!”
Feel sorry for me, she thought wildly.
“It’s still a different color, if you look closely.”
“And finally, in February of this year, a full disciplinary hearing alleging inappropriate contact with another family member of a patient.”
“Listen to me!” She could barely connect the shriek she was hearing with herself. “It’s cancer! It’s children, with cancer! He’s a warm person. He’s not some asshole who comes in and pronounces your child is going to die. He cares about people. I mean, maybe there are doctors who do everything by the rule book, and they just give you the worst news of your life and turn around and walk out the door, but Jonathan isn’t like that. Of course … he might hug someone or touch someone, but it doesn’t mean …” She stopped, trying to catch her breath. “It’s a horrible thing to accuse someone of.”
Mendoza was shaking his head, and the neck, the fat of the neck, pooled on one side and then the other. She hated his neck and she hated him.
“The patient’s name—”
“It’s private!” Grace yelled at them. “Don’t tell me the patient’s name. It’s none of my business.”
And I don’t want to know, she thought, because she did know, she already did, and it was too wrong, and there was only this one rope left, this one tiny filament of silk holding her up over the edge of the cliff, and down there, so far down she could not see the bottom, was a place she had never been before, not even in the darkest days after her mother died, or when the children she longed for with her husband had declined to come, or else come and left too early. Even that had been bearable, but not this.
“Your husband’s patient was Miguel Alves. Diagnosed with a Will’s …” He squinted at the page. Then he looked up at his partner.
“Wilms’,” his partner said, sounding very nearly bored.
“Wilms’ tumor, September 2012. Miguel’s mother … well, obviously, Malaga Alves.”
Obviously. Everything that rises must converge.
“So you’ll forgive me for asking, Mrs. Sachs, because I am going to be seriously pissed off at you if you keep telling me I’m wrong, I’m mistaken, your husband’s at a fucking medical conference for fucking kids with cancer, he forgot his phone—whatever you think you’re going to do next. I told you already: Don’t protect him. It’s not a—what do you shrinks like to call it?—a healthy decision. And I don’t know how good you are at your job, but I am very good at mine, and wherever Jonathan is, I’m going to find him. So if you know something, this would be the time to tell me what it is.”
But Grace said nothing, because her mouth was full of wind, because nothing was left to hold her up and she had fallen, was falling, was going to fall forever.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SPACES IN BETWEEN THE HOUSES
Probably, there was more. There had to have been more, she was there another two hours. Or three. Or … well, it was late, anyway, when she left, walking out onto the East Harlem street at a time of night that would, on any other day of her life, have at least concerned her but today carried no impact of its own. Today … tonight … all she could feel was the sweet numbing cold of December and the dream of hypothermia. Not the most terrible way to die, it turned out. Jonathan had told her that, actually. He was a connoisseur of cold places, polar places. He had been reading a book about the Klondike the night they had met and had read many more since then. On the wall of his dormitory room upstairs, which she had visited later that very night, there was a postcard of the iconic image: the long line of Gold Rush pilgrims hiking slowly up the Golden Stairs of the Chilkoot Pass, single file, bent low in pursuit of their fortunes, walking straight into the storm and the freezing cold. The Jack London story her husband loved, about the man and the dog and the elusive fire on an arctic night—that had ended in hypothermia. If she stopped right here, on the pavement, she might end in hypothermia, too.
There had been no offer of a ride home, and she probably would not have accepted it if there had been. She could not wait to get away from them and from the grimy, horrible precinct house with its waiting area full of unha
ppy people: exhausted women and men, whole families, sometimes, like a hospital emergency room. (What were they doing here? she wondered, shooting past them and making for the front door like someone fleeing a smoke-filled house. What did the officers of the 23rd Precinct have to offer anyone at this time of night?) They barely looked at her as she fled, but still she could not shake the ugly, penetrating idea that they saw something in her—on her—that she did not quite see herself. The thought of it made her ill. When she got outside, she took off at a full run, west on 102nd toward Lexington, and then kept going. Nothing was open but a single bodega on the corner with Pampers and Mexican sodas in the window and a door plastered with lottery ads. Halfway up the block she ran out of breath, but only because she was sobbing.
When she got to the corner of Park Avenue, she understood that she was not going to have access to the ordinary things of her ordinary life. Park Avenue didn’t mean here what it meant just six blocks away. When she came to the elevated subway tracks, they seemed to stretch on for eternity without an obvious place to ascend. There were no buses, of course. Park Avenue did not have a bus line. (Why, it occurred to her for the first time in a life lived on and off Park Avenue, should Park Avenue alone be exempt from a bus line?) In the end, she just turned south and walked briskly beside the tracks, while the cold wind ripped at her cheeks and a black devastation bayed at her heels.
Henry would still be at Dad and Eva’s house, of course—they would hardly have taken him home, not that she’d had the wherewithal to make any arrangements for him. When the call came, she had told them all that a patient was in crisis and that she had to go to the hospital, an untruth that had come to her so quickly and so fully formed, and been communicated so naturally, that she had marveled at her own powers of deceit. How long, it occurred to her now, walking across 99th Street, the vision of Park and 96th, with its canopied apartment buildings, just tantalizingly in sight, have I been such an accomplished liar?
When she saw Jonathan again, she thought furiously, she would ask him to explain to her how this metamorphosis had taken place, how they had each become so seamlessly capable of quick-return falsehood. It was a skill she had always inwardly marveled at when she discovered it in one of her patients, the smooth transitions and fancy footwork with which someone took a nugget of non-negotiable fact, modified it on the spot, and handed it back, an altogether new and tangible animal. Thus does a quarrel with a colleague become a fall down the stairs. Thus does a pair of detectives waiting down in the lobby become a suicidal patient in need of her therapist.
But it wasn’t the same, what she had done. For herself, it didn’t matter what she told Eva or her father. She could have off-loaded her woes to relieve this horrible, private burden, but her instinct—and misleading them had been thoroughly instinctive—had been to keep the poison of it all to herself.
Then she thought: But how do I know Jonathan isn’t doing precisely that? How do I know there isn’t … something … he has been protecting us from? Some threat, some information that has been making his life intolerable? Hope leapt from this murky insight, blossoming out of insubstantial soil. It could be. It was possible. Something so dreadfully sad or frightening that he had protected them, herself and Henry, as she had protected Henry and her father. He was protecting them now, wherever he was, leading this awful thing away from the ones he loved.
Stop, she told herself. She was shocked to note that she had said it out loud.
As if in response, a car—old, dark, she was no good at cars—slowed down beside her. She raced across 98th. He had to wait at the light.
Grace sprinted up the hill, passing the opening through which the trains emerged from underground. As if by preordained arrangement, a cab materialized the instant she reached the corner of 96th and Park. She hurled herself inside.
“Eighty-First and Park, please.”
The driver, if there was one, barely looked around. The video screen affixed to the divider chirped to life with some baffling story about weekend stoop sales in Park Slope, and she wasted a pointless minute trying to figure out how to mute it. When she failed, she nearly covered her ears in petulance.
Stoop sales. She wanted to kill everybody. She wanted to kill every single person who flew into her head.
They caught the red light at 86th, and Grace watched the driver tap his finger against the wheel. He still had not looked back or—it occurred to her—into the rearview mirror. He made her think of the spectral cabdriver in Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover,” in which a terrified woman is spirited away through a “hinterland of deserted streets,” and she duly noted that Park Avenue, the central thoroughfare of most of her life, now felt like something altogether new and worrisome, a road not traveled, a road of no return.
The light turned green.
She paid him in cash and stepped out at the corner, making her way down the silent street, walking the half block she had walked only twenty thousand times or so since arriving as a newborn. It was no different, she instructed herself, noting the now mature trees her mother had organized the block association to request from the city, and the spot by the fire hydrant where she had tripped as a six-year-old and broken her elbow in two places, and the cardiologist’s office she had stood in front of, watching Henry wobble upright on his bicycle and pedal in triumph. Vita had once called 81st between Madison and Park an “under the radar” street, meaning that it boasted no building of particular prestige, no landmark like a church or hospital or private school. And although most side streets on the Upper East Side at least had a few town houses to entice a genuine tycoon or a nouveau climber, her street had none. Instead there were only four apartment buildings (all but one a comforting prewar of limestone, the last a postwar of unfortunate but at least unobtrusive white brick) and doctors’ offices between them or lodged within their lobbies. Just a little backwater for families like the one she’d come from and the one she had.
And yes, she told her appalled self firmly: The one I do have.
The doorman met her at the door and let her in with his customary “Good evening.” He walked her to the elevator, and she felt herself avert her gaze from the couch and armchair in the lobby. Already it was hard to imagine a time before the advent of O’Rourke and Mendoza, before she had known intimately the whiskered neck overflowing its collar or O’Rourke’s spatter of reddish moles. Only yesterday, it occurred to her, or—given the fact that it was now past midnight—the day before yesterday, and now those two were so burned into her, she felt them superimpose on anything else she tried to think about. After a painful attempt or two, she stopped trying.
Rather pointlessly, the doorman held back the elevator door for her as she went inside and stood as it closed between them.
As soon as she got through her own apartment door, the weight of it all seemed to find her, and she stumbled her way across the foyer to a little slipper chair just inside, sinking onto it in a moment of overwhelming nausea. She put her head between her knees, as she sometimes instructed patients to do when they seemed on the point of losing control, but it just pounded and pounded and pounded, and the only thing that stopped her from vomiting was the absolute knowledge that there was nothing in her stomach to be vomited. She hadn’t eaten since … she thought back now, nearly relieved to have some concrete problem to solve … since morning. That morning. No wonder she felt so ill. Perhaps, she thought, she should eat something now. And then—this felt entirely logical—she would be able to throw it up and feel better.
The apartment was dark. Grace got up and turned on a light, then, as if it were any other evening, home from a day of seeing patients or planning a benefit for her son’s school, she walked through the dining room and into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. There wasn’t much. She hadn’t shopped in … it was hard to remember. Wait: the lamb chops and the cauliflower. Those she had bought at Gristedes, before the men in the lobby. How long ago was that? And the usual half-full cartons of mi
lk and juice and the generic condiments and an open box of English muffins and a takeout container of leftover empanadas from the Cuban restaurant where she and Henry had had dinner on Monday evening, the evening of the day her husband had departed. She didn’t want to eat them. She hated them. Incensed, she pulled out the cabinet containing the kitchen trash bin and threw them away. And that was it except for the cheese.
There was always cheese, large blocks of it in shiny, greasy cellophane wrap, taking up a good half of one of the shelves. Jonathan had bought the cheese. It was the only thing he ever bought in the way of food, unless she made a point of asking or actually gave him a list. He bought it in great chunks and wheels, as if he were concerned about running out, but he didn’t have much interest in moving beyond the generic Wisconsin and Vermont varieties. Once she had had the idea of giving him a “cheese of the month” subscription for Christmas, and each month exotic and artisanal offerings would arrive from their far-flung origins around the American culinary diaspora. He ate them dutifully and with appropriate recognition, but when they were gone he went straight back to the pale and undistinguished wedges of low-rent cheese. As a medical student, this was what he had lived on, installing it in his kneehigh fridge alongside the common tools of the sleepless, like iced coffee, and the nutritionally deprived, like edamame (very exotic back then). Medical students are very basic creatures, he had told her around that time; they rushed so fast and worked so hard, there never was time to do more than fulfill the basic commands of ingest protein, empty bladder, and above all: sleep.
Grace had never much liked cheese, and cheddar in particular. But these circumstances were beyond special. Now I am a basic creature, she thought. Ingest protein. Empty bladder. Save son. Save self. She reached into the fridge and broke off a thumb-sized block of the stuff and force-fed it to herself. Immediately, she fought another wave of nausea.
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