The Undoing

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Grace was trying to breathe, but everything seemed to be moving. The table was moving, and the chair. The kitchen was swirling in one great Harvest Gold blur, as if it had become detached. But … and this came to her as she watched it, spinning and blurring around her: That wasn’t right. It wasn’t the kitchen, it was her. She—Grace—had come unstuck from her own life at last, irreversibly unstuck. No more explanation. No more mitigation. No more attempting, just, to understand him, what had happened to him. There was simply nothing to go back to after this, after Aaron Sachs, the Caboose, who never made it to five. There was nothing to misunderstand: It was flatly obvious, and it was brutal, and it had nothing—not one thing—to do with her. This was Jonathan at fifteen: who had not wanted to go to the bat mitzvah or have a brother.

  “He never said he was sorry,” David told her. “Never. Not once. Even if it had happened exactly the way he said, he could still have said he was sorry. But he didn’t.”

  “Well, he wasn’t sorry,” said Naomi. She wiped at her face with the back of her hand. “Why should he say so? He never said a word about it again. He just lived here until the first chance he could go away, and then he never came back. He never called us, or talked to us about anything personal when we called him. He let us pay his tuition—that felt like an accomplishment that he let us pay his tuition. Then he started living with this woman, much older than him, and she paid his tuition. She bought him a car.”

  “BMW,” said David, shaking his head. “That killed me. No Jew should ever drive a BMW. I always said that.”

  “It doesn’t matter what kind of car,” said Naomi.

  He looked as if he were about to respond, but thought better of it and let it go.

  “You know,” Mitchell said, “when Jonathan went to medical school, I thought: Well, okay, this is how he’s going to express his feelings for what happened to Aaron. I thought, a little more time, at some point maybe he’ll give us another chance. Me in particular,” he said, smiling again. “’Cause I’d really looked up to him when we were both kids. So I held on a little while longer. I was the last one to give up. Dad gave up a long time ago, maybe a year or two after Aaron died. Mom went on for years.”

  He looked across the table at his mother. She turned her head away.

  “Then he became a pediatrician. I thought, All this time, he’s been consumed by guilt about it. That’s why he can’t look at us or be with us, it’s just too painful for him. But he can go off and save other children from dying and save other brothers and parents from losing a little boy. And I sort of really respected that, even if he was still out of our lives, and you and Henry were still out of our lives. But actually I don’t think that’s true anymore. I don’t understand him. I don’t think I ever understood him.”

  “No,” Grace said. She was stunned to hear herself offer an opinion. Then she decided that she must be speaking as a professional. “No, you couldn’t have. There’s a very different brain involved here. You’re not responsible for what this is,” she said, turning to Naomi. “You couldn’t have fixed it. Nobody understands how it comes into being.” What was truly amazing, she was thinking at the same time, even as she spoke so soothingly, so professorially, to Naomi, was not that he had emerged from some awful, inadequate family to become a healer of children, a professional, a citizen of the world. What was amazing was that he had held it together as long as he had. It must have been difficult. It must have been exhausting. But he must have gotten something out of it. She didn’t want to think about what he’d gotten out of it. “You know, the experts who study it don’t understand it,” she finished, running out of steam.

  Naomi, to her surprise, was nodding. “I know. I know that. I just can’t always hold on to it. I keep circling back to it must have been something I did, it must have been our life here, or what kind of mother I was. But I was a good mother. I was. I tried to be,” she said, and again her voice cracked open and she cried. Mitchell put his arm around her shoulder, but he didn’t interrupt. Finally, she stopped herself. “Thank you for saying it, though.”

  “My wife says the only thing you can do if a person like my brother comes into your life is just get out of the way,” Mitchell told Grace. “She’s done a lot of research into it. Of course, it’s not her field.”

  “Your wife?” Grace asked. “You’re married?”

  “I know!” David laughed. “It only took them twelve years. You think it was long enough for the two of them to make up their minds?”

  “But … I thought …” She went over, once again, what she’d thought, what she’d believed. Who was it who’d told her that Mitchell, the immature and indulged younger brother, still lived in the basement of his parents’ house and relied on them entirely? “Where do you live?” she asked him.

  Mitchell looked quizzically at her. “Not far. We’ve been over in Great Neck, but we’re about to move to a house in Hempstead. My wife is a physical therapist at St. Francis Hospital, that’s very close to here. You should meet her, Grace. I think the two of you would like each other. She’s an only child, too.” He smiled.

  Grace nodded. She was numb. “What do you … I’m sorry, Mitchell, but I don’t know what you do for a living.”

  He looked amused. “That’s all right. I’m the principal of an elementary school in Hempstead. I was in secondary education for most of my career, but last year I moved over to elementary. I’m very happy with the change. I do love being around kids. I think that’s something I got from what happened to us, if that makes sense. I didn’t notice Aaron very much when he was alive—it upset me terribly after he died. But afterwards I was very drawn to children, and how they learn.” He reached over and took Naomi’s mug and his own. “Would you like another cup?” he said, rising.

  She thanked him but shook her head.

  “Grace?” she heard Naomi say. “We would like, very much, to know our grandson. Do you think, now, that that would be possible?” She spoke very slowly, very deliberately. She did not want to do this wrong or be misunderstood.

  “Of course,” Grace said. “Of course. I’ll … we’ll set something up. I’ll bring him out. Or … we can meet in New York sometime. I’m so sorry. I feel so terrible not to have known any of this. I never knew.”

  David was shaking his head. “You don’t need to say that. He didn’t want us in your life and Henry’s life. It was difficult to accept that, especially when Henry was born. I didn’t want to come in to the hospital the way we did, but it was something Naomi just had to do. I think it was the last time she thought Jonathan might turn into somebody else. You know, because now he had a baby of his own. She thought there was just a little chance he might let us back in.”

  Grace closed her eyes. She was imagining herself in those same unbearable circumstances. She would have clung to the same slender possibility.

  “I made him take me,” Naomi said. She was smiling, or attempting to smile, for the first time since Grace’s arrival. “I forced him. I said: ‘This is our grandchild, we’re going to see him, and that’s that.’ And I wanted to give him the quilt, remember? The quilt we brought Henry?”

  Grace, with a sick feeling, nodded. “Was that something you made?”

  “Oh no. My mother made it for me. I used it for all of the boys. Jonathan, too, of course. I wanted Henry to have that from us, even if it was the only thing I got to give him. Do you still have it?” she asked with excruciating eagerness.

  “I’m not sure,” Grace managed to say. “I have to be honest, I haven’t seen it in a very long time.”

  Naomi’s face fell, but she recovered. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. Seeing Henry is much more important than keeping an old quilt. I’m making another one now, anyway.”

  And then, from a corner of the kitchen, there came a small, almost electronic bleep. Grace looked around. Plugged into an outlet was a white plastic monitor, the kind she had used when Henry was a baby.

  “Speaking of the devil,” Naomi said, and her voice was s
uddenly bright. She leapt to her feet.

  “I’ll go,” said Mitchell.

  “No, I will.” Then she stopped herself. “You’d better explain this to Grace,” she said. And then she leaned down and kissed the cheek of her daughter-in-law, who was too stunned to speak. They all watched Naomi leave the room. She went back to the hallway and started to climb the stairs.

  “Grace?” said Mitchell.

  “So, I take it you and your wife have a baby? Congratulations.”

  “Thank you. Actually, we are having a baby. Laurie is due in June. But we do have a baby. At the moment we all have a baby, bizarre as that may seem. And maybe, now that you understand about what happened in our family, it will be easier for you to understand why we’ve done what we’ve done. What we’re doing.”

  “Oy!” David said. He got stiffly to his feet. “I can’t stand it! It’s like the Gettysburg Address.”

  “Dad, I just want Grace to understand that for us, it was different than it might have been for another family, where they hadn’t lost a child.”

  “Would you like any more coffee cake?” said David. Grace, who’d managed only a polite half of the cake she already had, shook her head.

  “We were—we are—very devastated by what Jonathan did. Allegedly did. What we believe he did. And of course we were also aware that the woman who died had two children. And we assumed, I guess most people assumed, that the woman’s husband was going to take his children back to Colombia. It never occurred to us to involve ourselves in anything to do with this, more than we had to be involved, talking to the police about Jonathan and promising to contact them if he contacted us, which I told them straight out was the last thing he was going to do. But then one of them called just before New Year’s to check in with us, and he said the little boy had gone back to Colombia with his father but the father declined to take the baby girl.”

  “Not his daughter,” David said. He had slapped the Entenmann’s box back into the fridge and removed a bottle of formula, already made up. This he began to shake vigorously. Then he took it to the tap, turned on the hot water, and started to run it back and forth underneath the stream.

  “They said she was going into foster care, in Manhattan, but first they had to contact any blood relatives and eliminate them as caregivers. And we talked about it.”

  “Not for long!” David said with a little laugh.

  “No, not for long.”

  “Oh, my God,” Grace said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m sure this is a horrible thing for you to have to deal with.”

  No more horrible than finding out your husband murdered his mistress or caused the death of his younger brother, she thought. That hardly helped.

  “But … none of this is her fault. That’s what we kept coming back to. She’s a beautiful little girl who had an incredibly unlucky start. She’s going to have a lot to contend with when she gets older. I’m sure there’s a lot of unhappiness in store for Abigail. And she happens to be my niece.”

  “My granddaughter,” David corrected good-naturedly.

  “Can I have a glass of water?” Grace said. She held out her hands for it. Both hands. David opened up a cabinet to find a glass. He turned off the hot water, turned on the cold water, and held his palm underneath it, waiting for it to cool. No one said another word until she had gulped it down.

  Then Grace said: “Abigail?”

  “After Aaron. Actually, Laurie and I chose the name Abigail. We’re keeping Elena as the middle name.”

  “I love the name Abigail,” said David. He had returned the bottle to the hot water. “King David’s wife in the Bible. Not that anyone asked me,” he went on.

  “But …” Grace kept trying to form the question. “You’re going to … or … you and your wife?”

  It took him a moment, but he figured out what she was asking.

  “Laurie and I are in the process of adopting her. Right now the arrangement is a little more ad hoc, because we haven’t moved into the new house yet, and Laurie’s had a rough first trimester, so Abigail’s spending a lot of quality time with Grandma and Grandpa. Not that they’re complaining.”

  “We love her,” David said plainly.

  Grace, who was still trying to control herself, gave him her best therapeutic nod. “Of course. This is your grandchild.”

  “My grandchild. The daughter of my son. Who I also loved, by the way. Hard as that might be to believe.”

  “No, it isn’t.” She shook her head. “I loved him, too.” Or at least, it occurred to her, I loved the person I thought he was. That was a small but critical discrepancy.

  Now Naomi could be heard descending the carpeted stairs in the hallway. Grace’s chest grew tighter with every step. She knew that she was never going to be ready for this. For the first time since coming through the door, she thought seriously about bolting, but the idea of herself as a grown woman shamed by a baby girl made her feel horrible. She grabbed the seat of her chair and turned her grim and ready face to the kitchen doorway.

  The woman who appeared, holding the child, was a transformation. Her dark hair swung loose around her face, and her way of moving was quicker and more supple, in spite of the fact that she carried the baby—Elena—Abigail—in the time-honored way of mothers, straddled across her hip. Even Naomi Sachs’s skin seemed a different color: bright and hale. She had become a woman who looked capable of happiness.

  She said: “You told her, I hope?”

  Grace got to her feet. No one had asked her to do this. No one would ever ask, and that was perfectly understandable. But she reached out for the little girl. She hadn’t planned to. She wasn’t sure she wanted to. But she did it anyway.

  “Can I?” she asked Naomi.

  Naomi didn’t answer, but then she lifted the baby off her hip and held her up, and Grace reached out and took her. Elena was no longer the dusky infant who had so discomfited the women at a benefit committee meeting by nursing at Malaga Alves’s breast—both breasts. Now she was a sturdy baby with a halo of thin brown hair and a pair of bottomless dimples, muscular little legs, and an enthusiastic interest in Grace’s ear. She was also a once and always child of tragedy, whose father had killed her mother, whose other father had rejected her, and whose brother had disappeared from her life, forever. And she was only six months old. She still, Grace saw, had the long, beautiful eyelashes she remembered from the time they’d met before.

  Like Henry’s eyelashes: also beautiful, also long.

  “I’d better go,” said Grace.

  Naomi stayed inside with the baby. David and Mitchell walked her back to the car, and both insisted on hugging her again.

  “You’re not getting rid of us,” David said. “Now you’re going to be stuck with all of us. And Henry is, too.”

  “Dad …” Mitchell laughed. “Grace, don’t listen to him. We’re going to wait to hear from you. And if we don’t hear from you, we’re going to stalk you mercilessly. No, that’s not funny. I didn’t mean that.”

  “I thought it was funny,” David said.

  She reassured them both and got in the car and turned it on. It felt as if she had not sat here for many hours. It occurred to her that she had no idea what time it was.

  When she got back on the LIE, she took out her phone and called her father’s cell. He picked up at once, sounding anxious.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Did you get my message?”

  “No, I’m sorry. Are you having dinner?”

  “We are. Well, some of us are. We’re at Pig Heaven.”

  Grace couldn’t help laughing. “How did you persuade Eva to go to Pig Heaven?”

  “Henry told her that ‘Pig’ was just a metaphor. He used the word ‘metaphor.’”

  “Impressive,” said Grace.

  “And when we got here and she saw the menu, I ordered her a mai tai. Now she’s fine. And your son is eating something called suckling pig. And he is indeed in Pig Heaven.”

  “Can I talk to him?
” said Grace. She asked her father to bring home an order of the duck salad.

  Henry came on sounding delighted, as only a twelve-year-old reunited with his favorite restaurant can be. “Where are you?” Henry asked.

  “We’re getting a dog,” said Grace.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE FIRST THING THEY’LL SAY ABOUT ME WHEN I LEAVE THE ROOM

  Henry wanted a smart dog. He wanted a border collie, the smartest dog of all according to his eager research, but there were no border collies in the animal shelters of western Connecticut. In fact, there weren’t many dogs who weren’t pit bulls or pit bull mixes. The dog they ended up choosing turned out to be a hound of some description, from the municipal pound in Danbury, the only non–pit bull in residence on the day she and Henry drove down Route 7, ready (in Grace’s case, ready as she would ever be) to become dog owners. As luck would have it, he was a bright and affectionate one-year-old of medium size, with black and brown spots and a curious mirror image of curlicue patches on his hindquarters, like a doggie Rorschach test. On the ride home, he deposited himself directly in Henry’s lap, gave a great sigh that seemed to involve every bit of his body, and went to sleep. Henry, now that the dog’s hoped-for brilliance was apparently confirmed, decided that he would be called “Sherlock.”

  “Are you sure?” Grace said from the front seat. “That’s a pretty big burden for a little dog.”

  “He can handle it,” Henry said. “This dog is a genius.”