You Should Have Known

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “It’s fabulous,” she said instead. “What a wonderful thing.”

  “And I hear you’re having a baby of your own.”

  She stared at him. She was so baffled, she hadn’t the first idea how to react, let alone respond.

  “Tracy told me she saw you wrote a book. In the Daily Beast, I think she said. ‘Hotly anticipated books for the winter’ or something. What kind of book is it? Is it a fiction novel?”

  No, I’m Truman Capote. It’s a nonfiction novel. She nearly said it out loud. But why take it out on him?

  “Not at all.” Grace smiled. “Nothing so clever. It’s just a book about some things I’ve learned in my practice, that I think can help someone who’s looking for a partner.”

  “Oh, like that Rules book? My sister read that a few years ago.”

  “Did it work?” Grace asked. She always wondered. She knew it shouldn’t work. But did it work anyway?

  “Nah. I mean, I don’t think she took it too seriously. Don’t call the guy back the first time? Break up with him if he doesn’t get you a present on Valentine’s Day? I said to her, most guys don’t even know when Valentine’s Day is. Our dad never got Mom a Valentine’s Day present, and they’ve been married, like, thirty years.”

  Grace nodded. Standing still in the rain, she was now freezing.

  “But seriously, that’s so great you wrote a book. I’ll get it when it’s in the store. It’ll be the first thing I’ve read that isn’t in a medical journal since…I don’t know, college?”

  “Oh no,” Grace said bravely, but she couldn’t think badly of him, really. Stu was a smart, compassionate man, exactly the kind of doctor you’d want by your side if your child was sick. He and Jonathan had covered each other’s practice for at least eight years, and Jonathan, at least, had never been critical of Stu’s handling of anything, which was frankly remarkable given the complexity of the treatments involved and the personal relationships surrounding a child with cancer. Of many of his other colleagues, Jonathan had sometimes spoken less warmly. Ross Waycaster, his direct supervisor, was an emotionally remote, overly cautious, and uncreative doctor, so incapable of explaining to parents in clear, uncomplicated language what was happening to their child that Jonathan sometimes found them distraught in the hallways, weeping in thoroughly unnecessary frustration. The fellow resident who had moved to Santa Fe or Sedona—what was her name? Rona? Rena?—the one who was into “parallel healing strategies,” she had been an airhead who probably never should have become a doctor in the first place. Why go to medical school if you’re just going to wave a smudge stick around and chant druidic incantations? And the nurses who sometimes pretended not to hear him when he asked them perfectly nicely for something, because they were so wrapped up in their eternal power struggle with the doctors as a whole, and the press relations office, which never even acknowledged his profile in the Best Doctors issue of New York magazine, something that had clearly brought attention and goodwill to the hospital. And then there was Robertson Sharp-the-Turd—the Turd himself—a punishing, withholding man and a myopic, shortsighted, rule-obsessed administrator.

  But not Stu Rosenfeld. He had a wide receding hairline and a broad nose, but a truly cherubic smile. She imagined his little boy: happy and likely very smart, with Tracy’s fleshy cheeks and that smile from his dad, riding on Stu’s not insubstantial shoulders. She was happy for him. For a tiny moment, she was happy in general. She was not outside in the rain, terrified of some unnamable thing tracing its fixed circle around her (biding its time, not drawing closer) and trying very hard not to hear the bad whisper that had somehow begun to accompany her. For this tiny moment there was almost no whisper, no circle, no bell jar slowly descending over her. She was just a woman standing on a sidewalk in the rain with her husband’s closest colleague, chatting away as if she were not rigid with dread. Chatting—not that it mattered—about books, and a baby who was going to be named Seth Chin-Ho Rosenfeld, and Valentine’s Day. Jonathan always brought her something on Valentine’s Day. Flowers—not roses. She had never liked roses. She liked ranunculus. They were so dense but so delicate at the same time. She could look at them forever. Stu Rosenfeld was grinning because his wife was with child and all was well, and Grace was happy because she was so close to believing him. She wanted it very badly. She was nearly there.

  And then Stu Rosenfeld said those words, and the bell jar came crashing down, making its airtight seal around the toxic air inside. Seven words: She counted them later. She took them apart again and again, and rearranged them, and tried to make them not cataclysmic, not life-altering, not life-ending. And failed. The words were:

  “So. What’s Jonathan up to these days?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Everything That Rises Must Converge

  How she even got herself from there, that terrifying point on the sidewalk of East 69th and York, back up the long and wet and horrible East Side streets to Rearden, she was never entirely sure. What kept her legs moving? What prevented her from looking into shop windows and seeing the frozen woman who looked back? Her heavy brain ricocheted between racing and jolting to stillness, back and forth as each in its turn became intolerable. And there was shame, of course—for her, something unaccustomed. Grace had given up shame many years before, with the grown-up epiphany that she no longer needed everyone to like her, and moreover accepted that everyone probably wouldn’t, whether she needed them to or not. After that liberating insight, and with only herself and her nearest family members authorized to approve or disapprove her actions, there was little chance that she would ever need to be ashamed of anything, and indeed she never was.

  But the sight of him on that street corner. God, how he had stared at her, and she—she supposed—had stared back at him, both of them just dumbstruck by his simple, careless question. The expression on her face—in a blinding flash, Stu Rosenfeld must have known everything, or at least enough: that she, Grace Reinhart Sachs, had somehow missed something essential, that an episode had taken place, unknown to her. And now, the problem of only a moment earlier—that she wasn’t sure, wasn’t at all sure, couldn’t be completely sure where he was—had been abruptly displaced. But the new thing was so much worse.

  She stepped back, away from him on the pavement. It felt like tearing Velcro from Velcro, pain and painful sound, and the tilt of the sidewalk seeming to change its mind about where it wanted to be.

  “Grace?” she heard him say, but already his voice sounded as if it belonged to another dialect, just near enough to be decipherable, but only with effort. And she didn’t have the strength to do that and also get away. And she had to get away from him.

  “Grace?” he called after her as she took off. She ducked past him like a football player aiming for an elusive space between bodies. And she never looked at him as she passed. And she certainly never looked back.

  69th and First.

  71st and Second.

  76th and Third. Somehow, she was covering ground, but not in any conscious way. Not like walking and thinking at the same time, noticing things along the way. This was like waking up in the night and taking note of the numbers on the clock before sinking back into fitful blackness, as the night passes in spasms, without rest. The wildness in her brain was unbearable, but whenever she tried to shut it off she merely lost time.

  Then two more blocks had gone by.

  Then a jolt. And a blast of pain.

  Then two more blocks had gone by.

  It felt like sickness. She had never felt this sick.

  All she wanted was to find Henry, if that meant storming into his school and screaming his name down the corridors, blasting into his lab or homeroom and grabbing him by his thick dark hair, making a scene like the crazy person she had so unexpectedly become. Where is my son? she imagined herself screaming. And the weirdest thing of all was that, in her imagining, she didn’t mind how they—the others—were staring at her. And then she would drag him away, down the hallway and out into the
courtyard and back to their apartment.

  But then what?

  There was nothing after that; she simply could not progress a single step further. It was like rushing and rushing blindly until you found yourself at the foot of a cliff. And there you stopped: progress arrested, breath struck out of you, confronting the impossibility of a sheer face of rock.

  At Rearden, moreover, the street was full of outsiders. There were more of those trucks with the broadcast logos and the satellite dishes affixed to their roofs—at least three more—and a density of unknown people filling the sidewalks: scavengers, of course, for scraps of poor Malaga Alves, but Malaga Alves had been far from her thoughts for hours now. And when one sleek young woman with a patently disingenuous smile had attempted to pull her aside with, “Hi, can I talk to you for just a sec?” Grace had nearly swatted the girl away. In another life, she would concern herself with the death of a woman she had spoken to exactly once. Today was about the chasm at hand. What was happening to her now—and no, she could no longer deny that something was happening—had nothing to do with anyone but herself, her husband, and her child.

  She did not want to talk to the mothers, either, and as she stood among them in Rearden’s inner courtyard (the school’s archway having served as a kind of velvet rope, admitting only the true insiders), she found to her vague relief that an air of sullen solidarity had begun to set in. Now, in contrast with that morning’s drop-off, there was little buzzing among the moms; they stood grimly, separately, together but alone, and beyond the most peripheral of nonverbal communication there was no interaction at all. It was almost, thought Grace, as if each of them had experienced some private, life-altering crisis since leaving this spot, only hours earlier, or perhaps the sober reality of the dead woman had asserted itself, overwhelming the perceived gradations of class and money that had seemed to keep Malaga Alves so far away from them. Or that the problem of her death would not, as they might first have assumed, be resolved so quickly—witness the fact that none of them knew anything now that they hadn’t known at drop-off—and that they might be in for a bit of a long haul with this thing, and so, as a result, some attempt at decorum was really going to be called for.

  Inside the courtyard, on the privileged side of the velvet rope, Grace saw that there were very few nannies in evidence. The concerned mothers of Rearden seemed to have decided, en masse, that some moments in a child’s life, like Max’s first school murder or Chloe’s first media circus, were just too sensitive to leave to a surrogate. So the mothers themselves had dropped everything and were here for their children, waiting for the kids to be released by Robert Conover’s grief counselors. They were indeed the parents they prided themselves on being, and this was an important moment in their children’s lives, a moment to be, quite possibly, long remembered. Years from now, perhaps, their daughters or sons would recall the day a schoolmate’s mother had died—no, been brutally murdered—and how confused and frightened they had been, confronting this first reality of inexplicable human cruelty, and how Mom herself had come to collect them at the end of the school day, and reassured them, and whisked them off for a special treat before heading home or to ballet or to the SSAT tutor. Quite uncharacteristically, no one seemed to be making eye contact.

  The kids came, looking not very traumatized at all. A few seemed stunned to see their mothers. Henry lagged near the end of the crowd, his book bag slung across his body and his coat shoved through the straps, dragging a bit on the floor. She was so happy to see him that she didn’t even tell him to pick it up. “Hi,” she said.

  He looked up at her from beneath his remarkable eyelashes. “You see the TV trucks outside?”

  “Yes.” She put her own coat back on.

  “They say anything to you?”

  “No. Well, they tried. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Like, what are you supposed to know?”

  Obviously, nothing, she thought. Maybe they had pegged her as someone who actually knew something.

  “Is Dad back?” said Henry.

  They were walking down the steps, into the courtyard. There were people there on the sidewalk, holding cameras. At least two were actively speaking to a camera, with the school as a background. Instinctively, she ducked her head.

  “What?” Grace said.

  “Is Dad back?”

  She shook her head. “No.” Then something occurred to her.

  “Did he tell you he was coming back today?”

  Henry seemed to consider. They passed through one of the two iron archways out onto the pavement and walked purposefully west to the avenue.

  “Not really,” he said. They were nearly at the corner.

  Grace caught her breath. For one awful moment, she thought that she was going to cry. Right here, on the sidewalk.

  “Henry,” she said, “can you please tell me what ‘Not really’ means? I’m very confused.”

  “Oh…” He seemed uncertain. “No. I mean, he didn’t say when he was coming back. He just said he was leaving.”

  “Leaving…what?” said Grace. The ground was doing that thing again. She couldn’t stand straight.

  He shrugged. He looked, for one nauseating moment, like any adolescent talking (or not talking) to any parent. That shrug. That universal Leave me out of your shit, please shrug. She had always made fun of it a little, because it had never happened to her. Please don’t let it be happening to her, not today.

  “I didn’t ask. He just called to say he was going away.”

  She reached over and gripped his shoulder. Her hand felt like a claw, even to herself.

  “Can you remember exactly what he said? And I mean, the exact words.”

  He looked at her directly, then he seemed to see something he didn’t like and looked away.

  “Henry, please.”

  “No, I know. I’m trying to remember. He said: ‘I have to go away for a couple days.’ He called me on my phone.”

  “When?” Her head spun. She held on to her own purse as if it might save her.

  Again: that shrug. “He just said he was going away.”

  “Going…to Cleveland. For a medical conference.”

  “He didn’t say where. I guess I should have asked him.”

  Was it the beginning of guilt? Was this the place where some lifelong psychic wound was going to open, one tiny preoccupation that would ultimately flower into: I could have prevented my parents from…

  No. No. She felt insane.

  “Henry, that’s not your responsibility.” She said it carefully, too carefully. The way a drunk person speaks when trying to convince someone he’s not drunk. “I just wish he’d been clearer about his plans.”

  That came out beautifully! Grace thought, feeling a tiny bit smug. It sounded appropriately annoyed, but also sort of nonchalant. You know your father! “I mean, he told me about Cleveland, but then he forgot his phone at home, which is a huge drag. And you know who’s definitely not going to be amused. So just be prepared to be extra charming tonight.”

  Henry nodded, but now he didn’t seem able to look at her at all. He stood on the pavement, both thumbs hooked under the wide strap of his book bag, his gaze locked on some vague thing on the far side of Park Avenue. Grace considered for one brutal moment the possibility that Henry actually knew something critical about Jonathan, where he was or how long he was planning to remain there, something that she did not know herself, but the pain that came with this notion was so blinding that she couldn’t think. In the end she said nothing. They started south along the avenue together, and he said nothing either.

  Tonight, she was dreading. Her father, whose general remoteness could at least be a blessing at times (like right now), was sadly matched by his wife’s relentless intrusiveness, and the pattern was that once Eva unearthed some discrepancy or squishiness of decorum, Grace’s father felt compelled to request some sort of clarification, a sensation somewhat akin to a dentist prodding a soft spot in the enamel. Why on earth (Eva had asked, in one
classic example) was Grace taking Henry to preschool in the West Village every day—on the subway—when there was an excellent preschool—the city’s best!—on 70th and Park? Well, for one thing, she’d had to explain, because like virtually everyone else who’d applied to Episcopal, Henry had not been admitted. With anyone else, or at least anyone even remotely attuned to the absurd ways of New York preschools, this would have produced a simple shrug of the shoulders, but not with her stepmother, and not, as a result, with her father. But why had Henry been turned down? he had demanded in that particular case, and Eva, whose two supernatural children, weaned on opera and the essential understanding of their own superiority, had sallied forth through Ramaz and Yale and straight on to their respective promised lands (Jerusalem and Greenwich/Wall Street), had regarded Grace with an appalled glare, as if she had never heard of such a moronic thing.

  Henry was actually very attached to Eva and his grandfather, though he seemed to grasp their limited range of motion. The undeniable pleasures of dinner at the Reinharts’ (good food, very good chocolate, the praise and attention of two people who clearly appreciated him) came Superglued to formality and the need for superlative manners. To sit at the wide mahogany table in Eva’s dining room or perch uncomfortably on one of Eva’s long finely made couches required focus and effort—from Grace, let alone from her twelve-year-old son. But tonight, perhaps, all that discomfort, and the distraction that came with it, might be no bad thing.

  There were holiday lights on the trees in the Park Avenue medians, blinking yellow and blue in the now clear evening. She and Henry shuffled, only a few feet apart but still not speaking. Once or twice something occurred to her, but even as she opened her mouth to say it, she knew either that it wouldn’t help or that it wasn’t true, and she said nothing. She had no great qualm about lying at this particular moment, which did sound bad, but if it helped maintain the fiction she had already told him, then she could live with it. Unfortunately, Grace was having trouble remembering exactly what fiction that was, and where, exactly, it departed from reality. Unfortunately also, she was hopelessly unclear on the reality itself. She knew nothing, and the murkiness of that opening rift, the constant shifting of its shape and dimensions, was like a howling voice at her ear.