How many times had she left home? Once to go to college. Again to set up a household with her husband. Each time had taken her further from the place of her childhood, where she had crawled, then walked, then run, and played hiding games with her friends, and learned how to cook, and how to make out, and how to get an A in virtually any course. But at the end of the day, and no matter where she might be living at the time, these particular rooms and hallways had always meant home, and Grace had always found them beautiful. She could not remember a time when she’d wanted more space or a better address or even a nicer view: This was her place, and it was more than good enough. They had been renting the unlovely postwar on First Avenue when her father met Eva, long ensconced in eight high-ceilinged rooms on 73rd that she had not the slightest wish to leave. The day he suggested transferring the title to Grace—rather nonchalantly, over lunch, she recalled—she had gone home and wept in relief. How else would she and Jonathan—without a Wall Street salary or hedge fund between them—ever have afforded to give Henry the New York childhood she had wanted for him? They’d have been in that white brick box, or one just like it, until Henry himself had left for college.
But now her home had an official NYPD notice affixed to the door, which itself was slightly ajar, and through the opening came the sound of talking and shoes on the parquet floor, and the flash of a white uniform, as if some very unpromising party were already in progress. For a moment, she actually fought the impulse to knock.
“You can’t come in here,” a woman said when she was barely inside.
“Oh no?” said Grace. She didn’t have much fight in her. But she didn’t really want to leave, either. Where was she supposed to go?
“Who are you?” the woman asked, rather obtusely, because wasn’t it obvious?
“I live here,” Grace told her.
“You have some ID?”
Grace found her driver’s license, and the woman—the officer, she supposed—took it. She was heavyset and very pale. Her hair had been badly dyed a color that could not have flattered anyone, and Grace was not remotely sympathetic. “Wait here,” the woman told her, and left her there on her own doorstep while she walked away down Grace’s hallway and into the corridor leading to Grace’s bedroom.
Two men in white jumpsuits came out of Henry’s room and stepped around her as they passed into the dining room. They said nothing, neither to her nor to each other. She leaned forward a little, trying to see past them, and she did see the corner of a table—a portable table—that did not belong to her. But she didn’t really want to move off the spot she’d been told to occupy. It had become a kind of challenge. And actually, the more she saw of what was happening here, the less she really wanted to know.
Mendoza arrived and handed her back her driver’s license. “We’re going to be awhile,” he told her shortly.
Grace nodded. “Can I see the paperwork?”
“Yes, you can.”
He sent the policewoman into the dining room, and she came back with a longer version of the document taped to her front door. “I’m going to read this,” she said quite stupidly, but Mendoza, kindly, did not smile.
“Of course,” he said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
And he gestured, bizarrely enough, in the direction of her own living room.
Grace walked down the corridor, holding her purse in one hand, the stapled-together papers in the other, and sat in one of the armchairs. It was not the same chair her father had always favored in this room, but it occupied the same position: between the two windows overlooking 81st Street, facing the hallway. He would sit here in an imposing but not very comfortable throne-like chair he had taken with him to Eva’s, one long leg flung over the other, usually with a Scotch in one of the heavy crystal tumblers still kept in the bar in the corner (he was not sentimental about them, apparently, the way he was about the chair). From this seat he held forth, rising occasionally to make drinks for the others or another for himself. They had been—her father and mother—in the style of their era, very fine entertainers, with the routines and division of labor between them established and smoothly attuned. Everyone drank more then, and none of them had (or else all of them had) “a problem,” and who was to say it wasn’t better that way? There had even been silver boxes full of cigarettes on some of the side tables, boxes she had sometimes opened and inhaled deeply, imagining herself Dorothy Parker, smoking away while making a comment of great wit and insight. The boxes, naturally, were long gone, but the bar remained—it had been fashioned out of a piece of furniture, something English that had probably been built to hold sheets or folded clothes—and was actually still full of bottles from her parents’ time: rye and crème de menthe and bitters, stuff nobody needed anymore. When she and Jonathan had had guests over for dinner, they served wine, or at the most a gin and tonic or a Scotch, which they went through at such a slow pace that the occasional holiday bottle from a patient’s family kept them more than well enough supplied. Though, actually, it now occurred to her, she couldn’t remember the last time they’d had guests over for dinner.
She turned to the search warrant in her hands and tried to make sense of it but quickly became entangled in the specific turgidity of legal documents. The Criminal Court of the City of New York. The Hon. Joseph V. DeVincent. You are authorized and directed to search the following premises.
And below that, her own address, the address of her entire life, from birth until today: 35 East 81st Street, Apartment 6B.
And below that:
You are hereby authorized and directed to search for and to seize …
Here the type got smaller, as if they were going to attempt to cram too many things in. Which made no sense, because there was only one item listed:
Cellular phone of unknown make and model.
But she would have given them that, or at the very least told them where to find it! They only had to ask. She was the one who’d confirmed the phone was here!
And then she realized: That wasn’t the point. The point was to find Jonathan or possibly even to connect him to Malaga—her life or her death. Anything they came across while looking for the phone that might help them do either one of those things would be fair game. She closed her eyes and listened. The older buildings didn’t leak sound the way the newer ones did, but she had lived in this apartment too many years not to recognize where people were moving around. There was quiet talking in the dining room and rustling in the hall closet. She heard Henry’s closet door shutting and the thwap of the Sub-Zero in the kitchen. How many in all?
She got up and walked back to the edge of the living room and peered down the corridor to her bedroom. The door, which she was certain had been left open this morning, was shut. They knew the phone was in there, Grace realized. They had looked in, seen it, and closed the door to prevent themselves from “finding it” too soon, so that they could keep looking for it everywhere else. For a moment, she felt so routed by anger that she couldn’t move. When that passed, she went back and sat down again.
Two officers went past and turned down the foyer. One was carrying the desktop computer from Jonathan’s room. The other had a box of files.
Well, she’d expected that.
And the drawers in that same room, full of old checkbooks? His date books? She knew he kept them somewhere. They would find those, she supposed, because unlike herself, they would have the wherewithal to look.
The first of the officers, the one who’d carried the computer, passed her again, returning to the same room. This time he brought out the box of files she hadn’t looked through the night before.
The other officer came back again and turned into the corridor. This time she could hear Mendoza. He was speaking. He was standing at her bedroom door. Grace could hear the door opening. She wondered which of the two of them had opened it.
In her own dining room, a woman laughed.
Grace sat back, letting the deep couch catch her. She was imagining the two of them going in, l
ooking around, perhaps “noticing,” perhaps “not noticing,” the cell phone she had placed on the bedside cupboard. How long would they be able to legitimately “not notice” it? And what else could they see while they were “looking”?
There were items of clothing on the floor. They shouldn’t be on the floor, but Mendoza wasn’t going to know that, was he? He wouldn’t know that the ugly shirt marked “Sachs” was anything but an ugly shirt. Perhaps he would not even note that it was ugly. He wouldn’t understand what a rip through her life that single condom had made. Mendoza wasn’t going to care where a scarf had been purchased or what had happened to a strand of gray pearls. He wouldn’t know about the pearls in the first place, or the sapphire necklace that had been her mother’s, or the leather gym bag. But he might know about other things. He was looking for answers to questions she had never asked. Grace took a breath, forcing the air far down into her lungs, where it nearly hurt. For the first time in years, she wished she had a cigarette.
Mendoza walked down the corridor and turned toward the front door. He seemed to have forgotten her existence. Grace, in disbelief, saw that he was carrying a plastic bag containing Jonathan’s hairbrush.
Unmistakably Jonathan’s hairbrush: the expensive wooden kind from that fantastic, barely reconstructed pharmacy on Lexington and 81st, with the bristles from some animal, she couldn’t remember what. It was supposed to last forever. The mere fact of it was like a syringe of purest adrenaline. No New Yorker who had lived through 9/11 and its aftermath could ignore a hairbrush in a plastic bag. It was one of those objects that had been ripped away from normalcy and thrust into a museum of the iconography of torment: the falling body, the airplane, the “Missing” poster, the tall building, the hairbrush in a plastic bag. It meant … well, it could mean a couple of things, but they were all terrible.
She had forgotten, for a brief moment, that it was already terrible.
“Hey,” she shouted, surprising no one more than herself. “Wait a minute.”
She was already up and across the room. She ran out into the foyer and stopped him. She was pointing at the hairbrush.
“Is he dead?” She had to choke it out.
Mendoza looked at her.
“Is. My husband. Dead,” Grace said again.
He was frowning. He looked convincingly perplexed.
“Do you think he’s dead?” he finally said.
“Don’t give me that Freudian shit,” she hissed at him.
It was exactly—but exactly—what her patient Lisa had said to her, only … when? The day before?
He seemed much calmer than her. She didn’t even think she had upset him.
“Mrs. Sachs, I have no idea. Why do you ask me that?”
“Because!” she said, intensely frustrated. “Why are you taking his hairbrush?”
Mendoza looked down at the bag. He seemed to be thinking deeply about it. “We’re taking a number of things that might help our investigation. Are you concerned with the legality of the search warrant? Because I can have someone explain it to you.”
“No, no.” She shook her head. “Just … explain to me why his hairbrush is relevant to this.”
He seemed to consider this. Then he asked her to go sit down in the living room again. He would be with her in a couple of minutes. He would explain it all then.
And just like that, she did what he asked. She felt so docile, so pliable. If there had ever been fight in her, she couldn’t remember when. She went back to the chair in the living room and crossed her legs, and folded her arms, and waited. He didn’t make her wait very long.
“Mrs. Sachs,” said Mendoza, when he came and sat beside her on her own couch, “I think you want to help us.”
“Why on earth would you think that?” she snapped, but even as she said it, she knew that he was not completely wrong. Not anymore. Something had altered—some deep, rusted place inside her had been forced into a new position. When, exactly?
He shrugged. He was holding his head a little at an angle, the way he did. She had known him only a couple of days, but she already knew his angles. She knew the way his neck overflowed his collar. She did not know him well enough to suggest that he invest in larger collars, and she hoped she never would.
“I guess, because I think at this point you’re more angry at him than you are at us. And just between us, you’re right to be.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she said tersely, but again, even before it came out, she knew he was only trying to be kind.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I’ve dealt with this kind of situation many times. Well, not precisely this. I’ve dealt with husbands who have kept their wives in the dark about a lot of things, and by the time I’m in the picture there’s some fraud or a robbery, or maybe an assault. This is pretty extreme, the exact circumstances, but I’ve met a lot of very smart women who’ve had to go through some of what you’re going through now. And I want to say I’m sorry it’s happening. And sorry it’s me making it happen.”
And don’t manipulate me, she wanted to add, because that was precisely what he was doing. But now there was no fight left at all.
“We need the hairbrush for DNA,” Mendoza said. “We need DNA for … well, a couple of reasons.”
Why didn’t he just come out and say it? Did he think she was going to fall apart?
“You mean, for the crime scene,” she finally informed him, but he didn’t seem that impressed.
“Yes, but also for paternity. There’s an issue with paternity. You probably know that Mrs. Alves was pregnant at the time of her death. That was in the Post, thanks very much. Pathology department is like a goddamn sieve. Doesn’t matter how much we yell about it. I’m sorry you had to find out in a rag like the Post.”
Grace could feel herself gaping. She could feel her own mouth open, but nothing came out, and nothing else went in, not even breath.
“Mrs. Sachs?” Mendoza said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Her head had come loose from her body and was galloping around the room. When it returned, if it ever returned, she would laugh and laugh and laugh. It was crazy, the idea of it, and not just inappropriate crazy, but logic crazy. And Mendoza could take his “Now we’re friends” delusion and go fuck himself if he thought she was going to swallow this. How ridiculously stupid did they think she was?
Again, down the hall, in her own dining room, she heard the unmistakable sound of laughter. The woman from the door, she supposed. The man with the computer. How many people were in her house?
“Well, it’s moot,” he told her, “because we would have had to run a panel anyway. Mr. Alves … it’s understandable he wants to take his wife back to Colombia as soon as possible. There’s going to be a funeral there, and he wants to finish up his affairs. He doesn’t want to return after that, apparently. And the body’s been released, but he’s refusing to take the baby, the little girl. You know what I mean.”
Grace, who did not, who truly, truly did not know what he meant, found the wherewithal to shake her head.
“He’s demanding a paternity test. He insists he isn’t the father. And of course we can’t force him to take her. But it has to be settled. His attorney is insisting. Social Services is insisting. We just need to fast-track this.” He peered at her. He was beginning to see something, and she watched him doing it. That was how she came to see it herself.
Grace had started to cry. She didn’t realize it until he handed her a handkerchief. An actual handkerchief. Not even a tissue. Then she felt her own face, which had lost all its surfaces.
“I’m sorry,” Mendoza said. He was sort of patting her shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I just … I really thought you knew.”
PART III
AFTER
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE FOUNDRESS OF THE FEAST
In 1936, when very few of his neighbors were going to work anywhere to do anything, Grace’s maternal grandfather, Thomas Pierce, got up every morning at about five a.m. and took t
he Stamford train into New York. He had a job in advertising, which had not been the dream of his youth, but the firm was solvent and its president had given him to understand that his work was valued, and frankly, when you had to step over bodies to get out of Grand Central and there was a breadline across the avenue from the office and your wife, back in Connecticut, was greatly pregnant, you just counted yourself lucky and tried not to think about what could happen.
They already had a little boy, Arthur, and privately he hoped the new baby would be another boy, but Gracie was sure it was going to be a girl and wanted to call her Marjorie Wells. Wells had been her maiden name.
Typically, Thomas Pierce got home around six thirty, to the curious stone house (it had a round sort of turret with a design of faux timbers at the top) in the Turn of River neighborhood of Stamford, and he had a drink while his wife finished up with the baby and then made dinner for the two of them. Gracie, considering that she had grown up with servants and nobody’d ever shown her a thing, was fairly capable with a meal. She cooked out of something called Mrs. Wilson’s Cook Book, which had just the kinds of dishes he had grown up with, but also a few pretty daring concoctions like “Chop Suey,” an Oriental delicacy involving pork, cabbage, onions, and a thick brown sauce. Lately she had also discovered The Settlement Cook Book, and the arrival of Bundt cakes and “matzo pancakes” gave him a sort of thrilled but guilty feeling. He had never told his wife that his own mother was Jewish.
One night, he found himself leaving work alongside a new colleague, a man named George whom the firm had taken on to write radio scripts. George, it turned out, was living with his sister’s family in Darien while he got settled, not the nicest of circumstances, apparently, and by the time their train reached Greenwich, Thomas Pierce had invited his colleague home for dinner. There wasn’t an opportunity to let Gracie know about it. The phone at the station wasn’t working, and by the time they drove to the drugstore there were already two people waiting for the single booth, so in the end he just drove them home, arriving as the sun set.
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