by Marian Thurm
You’re a fucking coward, he tells himself disgustedly. And he really needs to clean up all those gleaming shell casings that litter the carpet beside the bed where Stacy lies so still.
S
He’s taken a bunch of Xanax already today, but now he goes into the kitchen cabinet to get more, a generous helping of those cantaloupe-colored pills—ten, to be exact—that he swallows down with a few swigs of Diet Coke, Stacy’s favorite drink. The American Champagne, he recalls a waiter in Italy teasing her on their honeymoon.
He’s hoping to die now, hoping that all that Xanax will quickly and painlessly do him in. Because now that Stacy is gone and his children most certainly will be taken from him, why on earth would he want to live?
He dials 911 and tells the bland voice at the other end what he’s done. He’s suddenly eager to turn himself in, though the truth is, he’s hoping to die before the cops arrive.
He’s ready to die this instant, in fact, but no such luck: the cops are already at his doorstep, along with a couple of neighbors, who are told by the cops—a rookie and a middle-aged guy, both strawberry blonds—to go home and mind their own business. The rookie’s badge says “McDonough,” the older guy’s “Rosenfeld.” Roger explains to them, apologetically, that he’d meant to clean up, because he knows that his wife, though not what he would call a particularly zealous housekeeper, would, nonetheless, be more than a little humiliated at the thought of strangers coming through here and seeing the god-awful mess. The blood-soaked linens, the bloody fingerprints on everything he’s so carelessly touched: the refrigerator, and the countertops, faucets, and cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom. And please don’t forget, he tells the officers, his voice softening, falling to a whisper, there’s all that blood that has already congealed in the dark hair of his beloved wife. Though not in the pale hair of his children, whom he’d meant to kill, but, in the end, simply could not. Could not.
Jesus fucking Christ, one of them says when Roger shows the cops what he means, shows them the bed where Stacy, no longer alive, still lies.
He apologizes tearfully to the cops for the mess he hasn’t yet managed to clean up.
The rookie slugs him, hard, and Roger falls to the floor, surprised at how much it hurts.
It hurts, too, God knows, to see the way Olivia and Will are whisked out the front door half-asleep and still in their pj’s, out of the apartment and out of his life, denied the chance to offer even a simple good-bye from their plump, rosy lips.
In a day or two, after the news of what he’s done—and what he’d planned to do—hits the local TV stations, readers will begin leaving messages on a popular crime story website.
ROTT IN HELL, YOU SICK BASTARD!!!!
FORGET DEATH ROW AND FRY THIS
FUCKER TONIGHT!
The cops, though, can barely bring themselves to even speak to him.
~ 49 ~
Later, after his stomach has been pumped at the hospital, and the arresting officers who take his statement that night go home to their wives and families, both cops will note how polite Roger Goldenhar had been, gentlemanly, almost. And how at first he’d been mistaken for a victim, with all that blood spattered and smeared across his cheekbones and into and above his brow and under his nose like a small blot of vividly red marinara sauce from a veal parmigiana and angel hair dinner that might have been prepared for him by what their former neighbors on Park Avenue in Manhattan will describe to the media as his smart and funny and loving wife. But this Roger Goldenhar—vacationing for the week with his wife and young children at the condo on South Ocean Drive still owned by his elderly mother—kept insisting, again and again, in a voice dulled by pain and bewilderment, that he was no victim, that the blood was not his own, and that some might say what he had done was, hands down, the worst possible thing a husband could do.
~ 50 ~
Lauren is calling from her cell phone to let her grandmother know that she is in Brooklyn, downstairs in the lobby, as a matter of fact.
“All the way from Connecticut? Well, that’s a nice surprise!”
But then Juliette says she doesn’t like the sound of Lauren’s voice, and asks if she has a cold.
No, she doesn’t have a cold, and will be upstairs in a minute.
There’s an elevator in the building, but it’s not working today, and Lauren is surprisingly breathless after climbing only a single flight of stairs. And she is somewhat disheveled; her hair is in a careless ponytail, her lipstick has worn off, and her eyes, which have been burning all day, are dimmed and watery-looking.
She opens the door with the key Juliette made copies of several years ago for both her granddaughters.
Lauren stands in the minuscule foyer and stares and stares at her grandmother, who is seated in a straight-backed wooden chair in the modest kitchen that hasn’t been updated since the fifties.
“What is it, babydoll?” her grandmother says.
Go ahead, you’re perfectly capable of doing this, Lauren imagines Stacy urging her, as if her sister were a ghostly presence by her side, nudging her on.
Lauren opens her mouth, but all she can manage is the single word, “Gram?”
~ 51 ~
Dr. Avalon, having just returned with his wife from a trip both entertaining and educational to Portugal, Spain, France, and the Netherlands, stammers into the phone when Buster Ostrofsky, Roger’s attorney, reports that Roger would like to schedule a call from his jail cell, where he is awaiting arraignment.
“What? What the hell is he doing in jail?”
Fingering a small Royal Delft vase imprinted with windmills that he picked up in Amsterdam, Dr. Avalon allows the vase to fall from his grasp onto the kitchen floor and break into three pieces when he hears what Roger is being charged with.
“Fuck!” he says.
In the nearly four decades he has been in practice as a psychiatrist, not a single patient of his has ever done what Roger apparently did, though a number of them have fantasized aloud about doing so.
As he bends down to pick up the blue-and-white pieces of the vase, distracted by the horrific news about Roger, Dr. Avalon lacerates his index finger so badly, he and his wife have to take a cab to the ER at Roosevelt hospital, where he is forced to wait around for nearly an hour before his finger is finally stitched up.
Should have seen it coming, he muses aloud. And later that night suffers what he understands to be a full-blown migraine, his first ever.
~ 52 ~
When Rebecca, his office manager, comes into his operatory to inform him that there’s an urgent call from his son, Marshall is with a patient, a pretty twenty-five-year-old whose teeth have shifted back despite the three years she wore metal braces as a teenager. Marshall is enthusiastically recommending clear plastic aligners that are a popular alternative to braces, but Rebecca won’t allow him to finish his pitch, and, instead, interrupts him, saying, “I really don’t think this can wait even a minute, Dr. Tuckman.”
“Back in a jiffy,” Marshall promises his patient, but, in fact, he will have to close down the office for the rest of the day and go home to comfort Nathaniel. Who got the news from Stacy’s best friend, Jefrie Miller, after she left a weepy, hysteria-tinged message on the digital answering machine in Marshall’s den just before Nathaniel arrived home from school this afternoon.
Nathaniel tells him, over the phone, in his adolescent, grief-cracked voice, that he had to play the message over and over again until, at last, he finally understood what he was hearing.
Stuck in midday traffic on his way home in a cab now, Marshall thinks of Clare, and how devastated she would be knowing the unforgivable thing her brother had done. But would she have forgiven him?
Will he himself think of her every day for the rest of his life? He believes at this moment that he will. And now Stacy. Marshall remembers her leaning forward to offer his wife a kiss as Clare lay, just a few months ago, on a gurney in Sloan Kettering, waiting to be wheeled into her final surgery. Stacy had bent to
ward Clare, and the curtain of her hair swung forward, grazing Clare’s pale cheek before Stacy could flip it out of the way. Good luck, sweetie, he can hear Stacy saying. Good luck! With all the cheery hopefulness of someone seeing a beloved friend off on a cruise ship and calling out bon voyage!
~ 53 ~
Dave is shopping for a Big Wheels tricycle in Toys R Us for his nephew’s birthday when the call comes from someone named Jefrie Miller on his cell phone.
“Professor Sarno?” she begins. “Dave?” she says, and gets right down to it.
For the very first time in his life, Dave feels as if he is going to faint; right there in the tricycle aisle, he sits down on the floor, and puts his head between his knees for a while. When, a few minutes later, he pushes his head upward so that blood can flow to his brain, he overhears a guy his own age saying to his companion, “Hey, I feel bad for the jerk because he’s got two stupid parents. Not one, but two. She’s an idiot, and so’s he.”
He thinks of Stacy, and her blond kids, whose pictures he’s sneaked looks at on Facebook. And that husband of hers who will probably be in the slammer for the rest of his miserable life. Fucking psycho dude.
He lets himself smile now, thinking of the first time he and Stacy helped themselves to one another in the walk-in closet at the back of his classroom, and how he’d kept the light on.
To see how beautiful you are, he’d told her.
In a way, Dave thinks, after two and a half years, they’d just recently been getting to know one another.
Reaching for the phone in the rear pocket of his jeans, he calls Elisabeth, his ex-wife, because he needs to talk to someone right now, even if it’s someone who no longer likes him very much.
“Hey,” he says into the phone, but Elisabeth tells him she’s been trying for more than an hour to get her step-daughter to bed and can’t talk about anything right now.
“Please just listen,” Dave says, but what’s the use, she’s already hung up on him.
Call her back, Stacy would probably like him to say. Call her back and make her listen.
~ 54 ~
Smiling, Roger’s mother, Beverly, listens as a young kid and a gray-haired man talk about someone named Stacy. She thinks she may know a person by that name, someone who used to come and visit her and bring her music in a very thin box the size of a candy bar. It had wires attached to it and little plastic things that this someone-named-Stacy put into Beverly’s ears so that she could hear the music. Music from My Fair Lady, which Beverly saw in 1956 on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre; don’t ask her why she remembers this—she just does.
A very lovely person, this Stacy, Beverly remarks.
Then she will say to someone they tell her is named Nathaniel, a handsome, dark-haired kid she thinks she may have seen before, “Do I know this Stacy? Is she coming to visit today? Or maybe tomorrow?”
No one bothers to answer her.
So be it, she hears herself say. Don’t ask her why—she just likes the sound of the words, that’s all.
~ 55 ~
Jefrie Miller is wearing a borrowed pair of sunglasses today when she takes her seat, along with her partner, Honey, in the front row of the funeral chapel on the Upper West Side, just across the aisle from Stacy’s sister and brother-in-law. (Who, she bets, are probably both insulted and relieved that Stacy’s will has named her the legal guardian of their niece and nephew.) Jefrie’s eyes are so swollen, they’re no more than the narrowest of slits, really. Because that’s what happens when you begin to weep and find that you just can’t stop, no matter how many times your partner takes your hand and says, “Look, you’ve got to get hold of yourself, okay, kiddo?”
Jefrie ignores Honey each time she says this to her, and ignores, as well, the hundred or so mourners who have filled the chapel to pay tribute to Stacy, slaughtered by the man who is still insisting, according to a couple of nightly news broadcasts, that he loved her more than anything on earth.
She closes her swollen eyes at the sight of the glossy coffin resting on its gurney, barely ten feet in front of her—thanks to Stacy’s deranged, deluded, narcissistic, pathetic psycho of a husband, who, in truth, Jefrie had never really warmed to. Not completely, anyway. She’d always found Roger a little too self-absorbed, a little too intense, and, in retrospect, way too concerned with keeping a firm hold on what he considered the good life.
Though a fervent opponent of the death penalty, Jefrie finds herself secretly hoping that the state of Florida will treat Roger to one of their lethal cocktails, the sooner the better.
This is what she’s thinking as the rabbi, dressed in a dark suit and surprisingly bright blue tie, ascends to the podium and murmurs something in Hebrew that Jefrie can make neither head nor tail of; it might as well be Farsi or Tagalog or Romanian or Mandarin, for all she knows or cares.
Because her dearest friend is gone, and she’s gone for good. Let Jefrie cry all she wants, there’s no getting her back. And how the hell is she ever going to figure out the right way to explain that to those two little pip-squeaks she and Honey will be raising as their own?
~ 56 ~
Here he is in his cell in a Broward County jail, awaiting arraignment.
He’s heard through his lawyer that a couple of experts have diagnosed him—after a quick look at his suicide note— as severely and lethally depressed, not to mention pathologically narcissistic. They think he fits the mold of a certain kind of killer they’ve seen time and again, the sort who is so intensely narcissistic, he couldn’t even turn the gun on himself even though he wrote the damn suicide note.
Fine, let Dr. So-and-So and his colleagues say whatever insulting things they want to about him.
What these shrinks don’t understand is that at least he’s saved his beloved wife—if not his treasured children—from the sad and difficult life they were all facing in that modest apartment on Third Avenue. A far cry from their luxury three-bedroom on Park, where he and Stacy spent the best years of their life together, wanting for nothing.
He’s been here in his cell for several days now, missing his family every moment of every day.
How could it be otherwise?
If only, he thinks, the powers that be would take pity on him and let him kill his worthless self. Right here in his cell, with twice as much Xanax as he took the last time around, but this time washed down with a nice fruity Cabernet. The perfect combination for a guy like him, someone who’s more than ready to say adiós, au revoir, auf Wiedersehen. Till we meet again.
~ 57 ~
Eventually he will be arraigned on a charge of first-degree murder; even though his attorney, Buster Ostrofsky, originally thought he might be able to get him off with an insanity defense, Roger will wind up pleading guilty and later be handed a life sentence by an angry judge who will use the words “diabolical” and “hellhound” when referring to him. Yet after the sentencing, when the local media shows up, Mrs. Feinsilver will make sure to note that the night of the shooting, Roger very kindly lent her a couple of dollars so she could do her laundry.
“A generous young man,” she will add, and Roger will predict, mournfully, that this just might be the last compliment ever to come his way.
~ 58 ~
In his cell, he’s finishing up the insipid bologna sandwich that is today’s lunch, and finds himself thinking of Olivia, his firstborn. A five-year-old who adores bologna on Pepperidge Farm oatmeal bread and would have had it for lunch every day of the week if only Stacy had allowed it. He thinks of Olivia not as she was one of the last times he saw her, sleeping so serenely against her Tinkerbell sheets, but years earlier, when she was just eighteen months old. The family had gathered in their old apartment on West End to celebrate his mother’s birthday, and Olivia—who was standing on a chair for a better look at the festivities—was clearly enthralled, her face lit with pleasure at the sight of the cake and all those blazing candles, which she must have mistakenly assumed were for her. Because an instant later, hearing the lyrics
Happy birthday, dear Grandma Be-ee, his daughter’s face fell in confusion and then defeat in that moment of recognition as it hit her that the song and the cake and the candles weren’t for her after all. Roger saw, perhaps for the very first time, as he swooped Olivia up from the chair and into his arms, just how much he wanted to spare this child of his even the slightest pinprick of pain or disappointment.
Don’t let them say you weren’t a good father, he tells himself. Or husband.
He is entirely bereft, and overcome now with the taste of fresh grief at the corners of his mouth, the underside of his lips, and all the way down the back of his throat; it’s a bitter taste that’s never going away. And that will, he predicts, stay with him until the very last moment of his life here on earth.
EPILOGUE
On a particularly humid late-August afternoon, years from now, Jefrie and Honey will move Olivia into her dorm room in Matthews Hall in Harvard Yard, into a suite with two other freshman girls. Will, sixteen years old, quieter and less rambunctious than he’d been as a child, will decline to join them, more than happy to spend the weekend back home in Brooklyn with a couple of his high school buds.
As it happens, Matthews is the dorm where, in the last century, Jefrie and Stacy first met, and entering Olivia’s suite, Jefrie will instantly remember Stacy seated at her sturdy oak desk in their fourth-floor freshman digs, already homesick on their very first day in Cambridge. She will remember Stacy with her head bowed forlornly over a loaf of homemade chocolate pound cake in its flimsy, throwaway aluminum pan. Believe it or not, she was already pining for her parents, Stacy had confided—with, Jefrie saw, just a whiff of embarrassment. As she talked, she was eating the cake with her fingertips, though at first in a delicate, ladylike way. Stacy’s fingers were long and thin, her unpolished nails dipped in dark chocolate. She offered the pan to Jefrie, who thanked her and pinched off some cake, awkwardly feeding herself with one hand and then the other until, eventually, she and Stacy had polished off the entire pound cake together. Jefrie had to smile, had to lead her brand-new roommate to the full-length mirror at the back of the closet door. Where the two of them, their mouths rimmed in chocolate, their teeth coated with it, their nails painted with it, took a gander at their ridiculous-looking, freshman selves and cracked up. What a mess they’d made of themselves, eating with their hands like babies! Like chimpanzees! Like squirrels!