“Sorry to interrupt,” he said instead. “Doing your laundry?”
“Packing. I’m donating the sheets. Just wanted to wash them first.”
“I see,” he said, looking past her through the open door. “Wow. You’re really leaving.”
“I really am,” she said, growing impatient. It was taking a lot out of her to keep bracing herself.
“Can I come in for a minute?”
“Can you just tell me, please?” she said. “I assume you’re here to tell me something.”
O’Rourke nodded grimly. “I’m here to tell you that we’ve located your husband. My partner has gone to see about his extradition. Would you like to sit down?” he asked her, as if it weren’t her house.
Grace pushed back the door. She looked at her hand as she did it. The hand did not seem connected to her, but she tried to act as if it were.
“It’s a shock,” said O’Rourke, as if she didn’t already know that. “We should sit down.”
They went back to the kitchen. She put the sheet, badly folded, in the donation box. Then, obediently, she sat opposite him at the grimy kitchen table.
“Where you moving to?” O’Rourke asked.
“Connecticut.”
“Oh. Nice. Mystic. I’ve been there.”
“No, the other end. The northwest. Where we’ve been living since December.” She stopped. Of course he knew where she’d been since December. “Where is he? Where’s Jonathan? Is he in Canada?”
“No. Brazil.”
She looked at him. But it didn’t make what he’d said make any more sense. Brazil did not make sense.
“I don’t understand. That letter.”
“Oh, the letter was from him. And it was mailed from Minot, North Dakota. But we’re sure he didn’t mail it. Probably he paid someone. Or just found someone willing to do it. He was good at getting people to do what he wanted, as you know.”
“But …” She was shaking her head. Her fingers were spread out flat on the sticky tabletop. “Why would he do that? Why bother to say he was anywhere?”
“Well,” O’Rourke said mildly, “you know, Minot’s less than an hour’s drive from the border. And I mean, you got a thousand miles of unprotected border up there, and an Indian reservation. Chippewa. Can’t be too hard to get someone to guide you across. It’s exactly where you’d go if you were trying to leave the country without anybody knowing about it. It’s where I’d go,” he said, as if this conferred authority.
“Obviously, he didn’t, though. Brazil,” she marveled. She was holding up the idea of him, one final time: walking alongside the frozen river in the city of Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada, past a restored arctic riverboat called Klondike that was now a museum, waiting for her to materialize. She realized that she had dressed him specifically for this fiction, to her own taste, in a thick flannel shirt and a woolen hat pulled down over his now long hair, and set him off on the trail, head down, hands in pockets, longing for her and looking for her. She couldn’t get over it.
“Why did he write me that letter?”
“Maybe just to fuck with you a little bit more,” O’Rourke said simply. “Some people, they just never want to lose an opportunity to fuck with you, just for the sake of it. That’s their thing, that’s what gets them going. I used to try to figure it out. Like: really, what’s in it for them? Now I just think … forget it. I’m never going to understand it. I just clean up after them.” He shrugged luxuriantly, as if he had all the time in the world to ponder this and life’s other mysteries. “But what am I telling you for? You’re the shrink.”
Right, thought Grace.
“You wrote the book about it. Right?”
No, she thought. That was somebody else entirely.
“Plus he got to fuck with us, too. That’s a lot of birds for one stone. We sent people out to Minot, and Whitehorse, too. We got the Mounties involved. They watched all the trails up there, and around the boat he described, and they looked at every rental since December, but there just wasn’t anything to find. Then we got a call through INTERPOL. It’s him in Brazil, no question. Mendoza went down a couple days ago to file a formal extradition request. It might not be quick, but they’ll send him back at the end of the day. Usually they only give us trouble if it’s a Brazilian national. We do have a treaty.”
He stopped.
“How you doing?”
“Just …” But she couldn’t finish. She shook her head.
“We wanted you to hear it from us. I’d say you’ve got one or two days before someone gets hold of it. Of course it could happen sooner. We just wanted to tell you ourselves. We appreciate that you tried to help us.”
She nodded. “He probably thought Rio’s such a big city, he could get lost.”
“No,” said O’Rourke. “Not Rio. He was in some place I never heard of, way up the Amazon, called Manaus. I might not be pronouncing it right. It’s Spanish, I guess.”
Or Portuguese, Grace thought, but she didn’t say that.
“Right in the middle of the rain forest. You can’t drive there. You got to fly in or take a ship. We think he was on a ship, but we’re not sure yet. Eventually we’ll put it all together. And how he got out of the States, obviously we’d like to know that. But right now we’re thinking ship. It’s a big port. Mendoza got there on Saturday. He called me this morning. He said there’s an opera house. Big pink opera house in the middle of the town, they shipped over from England in pieces like a hundred years ago. The guy’s beside himself.” He gave a small, vastly inappropriate laugh. “Mendoza loves the opera. It’s his big thing. Took me with him once, down to Lincoln Center when his wife wasn’t feeling well. Four of the most painful hours of my life.”
To her own amazement, Grace laughed, too.
“What was the opera?”
“God, I don’t remember. There was a horse on the stage. It didn’t help. But I have to say, you don’t expect an opera house in the middle of the Amazon.”
She sat back in her chair. Her head was so full. She thought almost longingly of the laundry and the packing, the comforting boxes waiting to be filled and sent away. She wished he would go.
“Fitzcarraldo,” Grace said. “It’s a movie about building an opera house in the Amazon jungle. I’ve heard this story before.”
“Fitz …?”
She spelled it for him, and he got out his pad and wrote it down. “I’ll tell him. He’ll want to see it.” He looked around the kitchen. “Looks like you’ve got a system.”
“Oh. Yes. Some boxes are going to Connecticut, but a lot of it’s going to Housing Works. I’m getting rid of pretty much everything. You have what you need, I assume?”
O’Rourke looked at her.
“Jonathan’s things? If there’s anything else you want, speak now.”
“No, we’re good. Of course, if anything turns up you think we should see …”
She nodded, but she had done enough. From now on, they were on their own.
“Well,” he said. He got to his feet. “I’ll go, then.”
She got up, too, relieved.
“Where’s your boy?” he said conversationally, walking back to the front door.
“With his grandparents. It’s his spring break from school.”
“Ah. I met your father. We talked to him back in December.”
“No,” said Grace. “His other grandparents. He’s out on Long Island with Jonathan’s parents.”
O’Rourke stopped and turned to her. “That’s … well, I’m surprised. When we talked to them, they said they never saw either of you.”
“We had dinner in New York last month. That seemed to go pretty well, so they invited him to stay for a couple of days. Henry wanted to go.”
He nodded. His neck, as always, was so erratically shaved that it looked patchy.
“That’s good. They’re good people. They went through a lot.”
We all went through a lot, she thought automatically. But what was the point of saying it?
She open
ed the door for him. He rang for the elevator.
Grace stood awkwardly in the half-opened door. It was a curious moment, for which she was unsure of the protocol. She had stood in this precise place on her own threshold ever since she could stand at all, waiting for the elevator to take her visitors away: playdates, babysitters, party guests. Long ago she had seen off her own boyfriends here, leaning into the vestibule to make out as long as possible before the elevator arrived. Ordinarily, you waited for your guest to be taken away and made small talk, but this was not ordinary, and she had no small talk to make with Detective O’Rourke. On the other hand, she couldn’t just close the door, either.
“Listen,” he said suddenly, “I’m going to kick myself tomorrow if I don’t say anything.”
She gripped the door frame, physically bracing herself. Like quicksilver, every possible permutation of “anything” raced through her, and none of it was welcome. Whatever he might kick himself tomorrow for not saying—be it accusation or thank-you or some sage wisdom about her circumstances—she didn’t want to hear it. But she didn’t want him coming back to say it, either.
“I know this family in Brownsville. Brooklyn?” He looked at her.
Grace frowned at him. “Okay.”
“Actually, I arrested one of the sons last year. But we realized he really was a good kid, just picked the wrong friends. And we misplaced the paperwork. Hey,” he said with a little laugh, “it happens.”
More lost than before, she just waited.
“Anyway, they’ve been in a shelter out there, but they got an apartment a few weeks ago. City apartment. You know, subsidized. Which is great. But they don’t have anything. They’re sleeping on the floor. I got to know the family, like I said. It’s a good family.”
Faintly, Grace could hear the elevator setting off from the lobby.
“I mean, you’re giving it all to Housing Works, and that’s great. I just thought, you know, if you wanted …”
“Oh.” At last, it got through. “Oh, right. Of course. Happy to. Whatever they want to take, it’s fine. There are beds, sheets, and towels. There are pots and pans.”
His face relaxed into an almost childlike happiness. He was transformed. He looked suddenly like a young man: young Officer O’Rourke. Just like that.
“It would be such a great thing for them. You can’t imagine.”
They quickly arranged for him to come back the day after next, with the father and two of the sons and a borrowed truck.
“They’re a good family,” O’Rourke said again. “Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of crappy families. This is a good family.”
“I’m sure,” said Grace. She no longer had any idea what a good family was, but she supposed he might. “You don’t misplace the paperwork for just anyone.”
“No.” He looked a little sheepish. “Hey. I wanted to tell you. We knew you didn’t know anything. After that first conversation, we were pretty sure. We felt bad for what we put you through. We knew you weren’t a bad person.”
Grace felt the heat flood into her cheeks. She nodded, but she didn’t look at him. “Just … picked the wrong friends, right?”
“Picked the wrong guy. It happens all the time.”
Don’t I know it, Grace thought. The elevator was close now.
Behind him, the gate creaked open and O’Rourke stepped back with a wave. Grace waited at the half-opened door until he was gone, but she didn’t go back inside right away. Instead she stood there, listening for the utterly familiar sequence of groans and clicks as the elevator made its descent, until at last she heard the far below scrape of the gate, releasing him to the lobby, and the rainy and dark midafternoon, and the street where she used to live.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Phil Oraby and Ann Korelitz for their insights into matters therapeutical, and in particular into that sadly ubiquitous creature: homo sociopathicus. Their expertise, so generously shared, was invaluable. Thanks to Nina Korelitz Matza for her acute observations about New York private schools. I am grateful to Tim Muldoon for helping me with the modus operandi of New York detectives. Thank you, James Fenton, for allowing me to use your beautiful poem, “A German Requiem.” Deborah Michel, as always, is the best reader imaginable. I can’t adequately thank Suzanne Gluck, Deb Futter, Dianne Choie, Sonya Cheuse, Elizabeth Sheinkman, and Sarah Savitt for their belief in this novel.
More general appreciation goes to my family and friends, the shipboard community of Semester at Sea’s Spring 2012 voyage (on which much of this novel was written); and to Karen Kroner, Paul Weitz, Kerry Kohansky Roberts, Anna DeRoy, and Tina Fey, for reminding me that creative work is a conversation, even when you do it alone.
About the Author
Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York City and educated at Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of six novels: The Devil and Webster, You Should Have Known (adapted as the 2020 HBO series The Undoing), Admission (adapted as the 2013 film of the same name, starring Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin and Paul Rudd), The White Rose, The Sabbathday River and A Jury of Her Peers, as well as a middle-grade reader, Interference Powder, and a collection of poetry, The Properties of Breath. With Paul Muldoon she adapted James Joyce’s The Dead as an immersive theatrical event, The Dead 1904. She and her husband, poet Paul Muldoon, are the parents of two children and live in New York City
By the Same Author
Admission
The White Rose
The Sabbathday River
A Jury of Her Peers
Copyright
The Undoing was previously published under the title You Should Have Known
First published in the UK in 2014
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House,
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
First published in the USA in 2014
by Grand Central Publishing
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York NY 10017
This ebook edition first published in 2020
All rights reserved
© Jean Hanff Korelitz, 2014
The right of Jean Hanff Korelitz to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Cover art © 2020 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved. HBO® is a service mark of Home Box Office, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–36557–9
The Undoing Page 44