The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

  She has learned to distinguish Astrasyne’s side effects—that spike of murder-energy, once or twice a day; the gnashing insomnia, once or twice a week; the snapping, neural fervor that’s not mania, but like it—from the feelings that are her own. Her excitement upon learning she is free is hers alone, though she feels a minor bout of murder-energy coming over her now, as she circles back around the lake. One of its features is a blazing impatience that makes her unpleasant company. For example! The blimp with the red bull’s-eye. She’d like to sail a dart over the treetops to pierce its side, watch it sag to the earth in flames. It’s better to be alone when she’s like this, to carve her erratic groove around the lake. To keep the burden of her moods. In her room, she risks tormenting a nurse. Once, scrambled with irritation, she kicked Esme under the table. She pretended it was a spasm.

  “I’m sorry!” she said, and sorry she felt.

  This side effect’s most seductive feature is how it imitates the wicked pleasure she used to take in discovering the weakest edge of a person, the pleasure of saying something truthful and unkind. A part of herself she’d meant to protect her children from. Only, had she? She’d pretended the pleasure of her invective didn’t have its price. She’d come to understand this after Dotty’s death. From Dotty, who never guessed when she was being insulted. Walter would have called CeCe’s feeling for Dotty fool-pity and been right. She makes her way up the grass. Walter, if you could see me here, what would you say? Walter, in the good early days, inviting this or that group to Booth Hill for a weekend, a week, whomever, anyone he met in the city, then disappearing to the barn to put a line on canvas, just the one line, often enough. They were all for it, the brilliant friends, following him to the barn to name it: Reindeer No. 17, Blue No. 12. She, sitting in his lap sideways, her legs crossed over the arm of the chair. How powerfully he made her laugh. The only man she’d known who was not afraid to scandalize her. He’d understand about the blimp.

  When she returns to the bench, a man holding a folder with Oak Park’s logo is sitting in her place, staring at the lake.

  “Yours?” He tips his head toward her stick. “I’m in your spot. I should be getting back, anyway.” He heads in the direction of the parking lot. She sits. The cherry tree she’d leaned against is now on the other side of the lake, pocket-size. Distance, restored with the muscles of her legs. The tree’s reflection oscillates in the water. Poor Iris! What does Iris think of George, now that she’s seen what kind of person he can be?

  And what, will CeCe block him forever? The last day at Oak Park is fast approaching. A piece of paper with a date. She doesn’t know if she can forgive George, but she will see him. Astrasyne has not yet been approved by the FDA, but it has passed some safety or efficacy marker and the trial is entering its third phase. Their eighty-three-person treatment group will expand to become two thousand people dispersed across the states. They will receive the drug, at home, and she will be one of them.

  “You’re doing well these days,” the doctor said. This doctor, using these days, as of now, so far, or some other temporal qualifier. “So far, your rate of degeneration has slowed. If you keep to it, you’ll live long enough to die of something else.”

  “Like old age?”

  “Like old age.”

  “Have you got a trial for that?”

  She’s kind, this doctor. She knew to laugh. She smiled at CeCe, a miraculous, charming doctor’s smile, her skin wrinkling at the eyes. Two days after, Pat called and they talked the longest they had since Pat was a girl. They planned a visit with Lotta and Douglas for the beginning of summer. Before she hung up, Pat put the phone to Douglas, and there was the wondrous gurgling of baby.

  From the bench, she watches Yasser and two new landscapers head toward the woods behind the lake, one with a ladder balanced on his shoulder, the other with a set of pruning shears hanging from his hands like talons. Gone is the little one with the flame-red hair and the lummox by his side. Last summer, looking so often as she had for Yasser, she’d come to recognize his help, even from far away—the set of their shoulders, the way they dragged their feet.

  “Hello!” she calls. “Hello!”

  Yasser nods to the boys to continue without him. He comes to stand beside the bench. Winter, she missed him. A few days after the first thaw, she looked out the window and saw the wheelbarrow by the lake.

  “You’re looking well,” he says.

  “Thank you! Have you seen me out walking?”

  They hear the saw rev and branches clatter through the canopy.

  “Walking and walking.” He draws a circle in the air around the lake with his finger. “Very nice. Very good. You’re so strong, you could get a job cutting trees.”

  “You’ve got new help.”

  “I had to.” Something in the way he looks at her she doesn’t understand. “My nephew is the young one.” He gestures toward the trees. “From Maryland.”

  “How’s the rest of the family? Your children?”

  “Everyone’s good. We’re having another.”

  “Well, congratulations! But—with you here, and them there?”

  “I visit winters.”

  “I’m happy for you. I have a grandson. Born this winter. Not—” She’s about to say conceived but becomes embarrassed. “Isn’t it nice when friends have good news. Yasser, thank you.” She’s scowls with fresh discomfort. “For making this beautiful walking stick. It means more than you know.”

  There is another crackling of branches falling through the trees. It’s followed by a harder sound. Yasser is already up and striding the lawn when they hear the shout, the older boy running to meet him. They dash into the trees, out of her vision. She rises, her hand on the bench, but before she’s thought what to do—stupid, she’s in front of a hospital, stupid, go get someone!—Yasser and the boys reappear, walking slowly along the curve of the lake and past her toward Oak Park. She hasn’t moved. The nephew from Maryland has one arm draped over the other boy. Yasser’s arm loops his nephew’s waist.

  “He’s okay,” Yasser calls over his shoulder. “Cut himself out of the tree.”

  The boy turns and stares at her. He’s tucked his left arm against his ribs. From the crooked angle of his elbow she sees the arm is broken. His eyes go wide. He had not realized his injury until he read it in her face. She’ll follow them inside and be useful and meddlesome, make sure they know Cecilia Somner is invested in his care. She lurches after with the wide step of her disorder. She hopes the boy is not in too much pain. But even as she worries for him, her worry excites in her the certainty that she won’t be at Oak Park to see him come out of his cast or to see the lake turn blue, to see the lake’s ring of trees bloom, unbroken in the fullness of their prime.

  33

  The real estate agency has given Iris some freelance administrative work at the decent rate of $23 an hour while she waits to land or be granted a new client. No one mentions George or The Burning Papers, but they know. She can tell. Those two times she found him muttering his way along the main street in town, looking right enough from far away but not quite right up close—she can’t be the only one who saw. Her coworkers are kinder to her than before, with a careful reserve—stopping to make small talk, including her in lunch runs. It takes her a while to realize that no one in Stockport who’s aware of George’s mistake—the mistake is mostly what she thinks of it as—will want her as an agent. Giving her the administrative work is an act of charity. Maybe this will change once time wears some of the gossip away. She’s grateful for the income and for how dull and soothing the work is. One morning, she organizes the mailing of five hundred glossy cards advertising the agency’s services; the next, after claiming to know Excel, she teaches herself Excel and reorganizes a list of past clients by buyer and seller and sale price, confirming who still lives at the houses that had been sold to them, or, if they’d moved and used a different Realtor, which one. She photocopies the many-paged contracts that Nellie and the other agents leave on her
desk; she reads the new listings written by the active agents and says, Looks good. She uploads photos to the website: exterior a, exterior b. Largest interior downstairs room. Kitchen, bath, and so on. She doesn’t have to think about George when she’s working, and she doesn’t have to think about money. She looks at listing prices all day, but these numbers are none of her business, abstract in their calm march down the page, unaware of her. (Unlike the bills at home, where the numbers are tiny hammers of doom or bad grades or angry eyebrows, depending.) At work, they are decorative and inscrutable as hieroglyphs, jaunty with their K: 750K, 500K, 275K.

  She waited a long, terrible month for Bob to call her with news of their investment. Not that he didn’t call; he’s made a habit of calling her several times a day. At first, if George wasn’t in earshot, she answered the phone as fast as she could. Had the money come through? But then Bob would say, “Hello, sunshine,” and wouldn’t mention the investment at all. When she asked directly, he’d say it was in the works and stay on the line to share stories she didn’t care to hear. In a kind of reverie, he’d tell her how he’d wanted to be a baseball player, or what he thought about debt ceilings, or how much his father’s death still shreds him, and that he never felt so comfortable talking to another person. Once he asked her to authorize a trade and she did, but nothing seemed to come of it. He talked about what he hoped for his sons, and how Martha wants another child but he does not. Once he left her a message that was three and a half minutes of the song “Let Go” by the Pist. He wanted to take her to this particular Korean restaurant, whenever she could get away. She murmured noncommittally, thinking, What a jackwad, but she was sorry for him too, once she recognized it was loneliness, as much as arrogance, that kept him talking. He took an excessive pleasure in what little she responded. He said they were really getting to know each other. She gave up believing there was any investment at all. She answered his calls less frequently and with more dread. When she didn’t answer frequently enough, his messages grew long and hurt.

  All she can do is get up and go to work and photocopy contracts. She’ll ignore what she can’t fix, which is everything else, until it falls down over her head. At least then she might be able to climb out and be free. For now, she’s bound to try to make things better. She’s not the kind of person who leaves her husband because the tides have turned. She won’t prove CeCe right. Maybe George will recover and they’ll start again. Maybe she can hold off the creditors. Maybe she’ll stay in the house with the glass wall, grow old behind the wall, stay a Somner.

  Still, it takes all her energy to be warm and ordinary with George as he saunters through the house, his eyes crossing and training on some distant phantom. To overlook how their life has changed. Prescription-pill bottles with the labels ripped off are in the sock drawer. George’s skin hums beneath the surface when she can’t avoid his petulant, eager embrace. Nights, he swishes and stalks from room to room in the Yale tracksuit he unearthed who knows where, littering handfuls of index cards and scribbled pages across their house like confetti. He says he’s writing something new. Lately, he’s begun listening to his opera, again and again. Often, he forgets to take off the puffy headphones and paces back and forth with the curl of the unplugged cord slapping along as he moves, a pen stuck in jaunty menace behind his ear. He’s listening, he’d explained with guarded hostility, to the various earlier drafts of Vijay’s scoring to root out the point they’d turned on him. What leaks out of the headphones, what at first had only puzzled her, now makes her shudder. She’s given up trying to find out why CeCe will not speak to George or to her. She can guess. She’s no longer curious to discover if, in her own heart, George’s opera is as bad as they say. She no longer wonders about anything—the price she must pay for temporary peace of mind. She collates and that is all. She must order more flyers, without the laminate.

  Until, one day, she supposes she’s pregnant.

  She has to wait. Two weeks. She is. At the doctor’s office, she feels thrill and despair in equal measure. Too much of each, colliding out to nothing. How the door on her life might close if she has George’s child—she still has time.

  At lunch one day, she gets a decaf at the Starbucks on her way back to the office. A beautiful spring afternoon—the concrete walkway to the green umbrellas is lined with bobbing, sherbet tulips, just bloomed. She stands by her car in the parking lot, the one with the bank and the dry cleaner’s and the deli. She balances her coffee on the hood of the car and works a scratch-off with a quarter. As she chucks the spent ticket into her bag, she hears a deep, urgent voice calling her name. For a moment she’s afraid it’s Bob, come all this way to press his face to hers, to maul her like a disoriented bear right in the lot. But it isn’t Bob, it’s Bill. Dear Bill! What a relief.

  “Bill,” she cries, “hello!”

  His long frame seems to take the small parking lot in three strides. He’s got a coffee in his hand. “Iris. I saw you inside. How are you?”

  “I’m all right. It’s good to see you. How’s everything? How’s Victor? I miss Victor.”

  “You can’t guess? We’re not so good.”

  “Oh, no, what’s happened?”

  “We’ll be okay somehow, but right now it’s tough.” He speaks in the same soft, low calm she remembers from—could it be already? Last summer. The few times after the closing she’d suggested to Victor that Bill join them for a hike or a meal, Victor rolled his eyes and said, “Work, work, working.”

  “But what’s wrong?”

  “No idea?” he says. “No?”

  She can think of nothing. “I’m sorry, I must be missing—”

  “Been to Kingsgate lately?”

  “I haven’t. I’m mostly in the office.”

  “Any idea what you sold us?”

  “What do you mean? Of course I do. Is there something wrong with the house? Victor said you painted. That you love it.”

  “It’s not that we don’t like the house, Iris. Liking the house is no longer the point. Did you look at the terms of the mortgage you urged us to get?”

  “I did, absolutely.”

  “Half the apartments in the towers are in pre-foreclosure. Do you know anything about that?”

  She doesn’t remember hearing anything at the office. They don’t talk about Kingsgate anymore. That’s the cycle, she presumed. They made their sales and moved on. And she’s been preoccupied.

  “Where’s the developer? Have you heard from them lately?”

  “No,” she says. “That was before I came on. I didn’t really deal with them.”

  “They’re not to be found. They’re back under whatever rock they crawled out from, is where they are.”

  “But your house isn’t like the apartments.”

  “Yes, our house is different. Our house is beautiful. But now our house is worthless because everything around it is worthless.”

  “I don’t understand. It was a great deal.”

  “It was an unethical deal. Taking advantage of us like that—when you don’t even have any need. What was that commission for you? Shoe money? Victor calls you a friend. You know how many people he considers friends? Not so many. It’s our fault for trusting you. I’m not throwing away my own responsibility here. I didn’t listen to my gut. Victor wanted it so badly.”

  “Bill, the towers are nice renovations! The office, they’re professionals. I don’t think they’d set up a bad deal. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

  “It was an okay loan, if it hadn’t been on a misrepresented property. You’re not the mortgage company, I know that. But you were the liaison. How could you not know? Stated income. What a fool I was. I should’ve known. The scandal of those loans. All over the news for years, but I assume we’re different. I feel like a cliché and Kingsgate’s a dump. You had no idea? You’re on the sign, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I didn’t, I don’t.” Coffee flys out of her cup. “This is the first I’m hearing—I’d just started. I was new!”
<
br />   A momentary confusion crosses his face. “You know, I almost believe you.”

  “The whole market’s down. Everywhere, everything’s down.”

  “Yeah, that doesn’t help. But the market was already down. And the market’s down because of deals people like you make for people like us. We were doing okay.” He stops, and when he resumes, his voice is calm again. Iris feels as if he is looking down at her from a great height. “We were doing okay even when the payments jumped. Tricky fine print, there. Our fault, yes, our fault. Buyer beware. We were just able to handle it. We were scared, but what we didn’t see coming! You know what doesn’t do well in a recession?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of things?”

  “Yes, a lot of things. One being nonessential luxury retail. Like, say, handmade artisan jewelry. I’m down sixty percent. I love what I do. I’ll keep doing it. It’ll come back, maybe.”

  “Your beautiful jewelry!”

  “At least we had Victor’s income. And then we didn’t.”

  “What’s happened? Has something happened to Victor?”