The Happiness Thief

by Nicole Bokat

  An idea percolated: Jeremy the reporter. She hunted for his credentials on the palm-sized screen. He’d graduated from journalism school and spent five years on staff at The New York Daily News before landing as a writer at the Globe. What would she be willing to discuss with him in exchange for his investigative services? What could she offer that wouldn’t be a betrayal, wouldn’t damage Isabel’s reputation? A prick of pain in her belly.

  She poured the coffee and drank it black, too soon, burning the roof of her mouth. “Shit,” she said. Safer to use a neutral party, which Jeremy was not.

  Natalie treaded past Hadley’s room, careful not to make any noise. She ate a bag of trail mix in the glow of her computer, not switching on a light, as if to hide it from herself, her search for detectives. “Infidelity, Adultery in Boston, Massachusetts,” read the first site. On the right side was a list with buttons to press for more information: “Spousal Surveillance,” “Online Infidelity,” “Traveling Cheater,” “Gay Spouse.”

  She clicked on a one-man operation, a craggy-faced guy, with a gap between his front teeth. He specialized in the “corporate, financial and business industries to mitigate unnecessary risks.” A third, purple and gray website boasted that Menotti and Associates specialized in “wrongful convictions,” “medical malpractice,” “employee/ vendor fraud” and “civil rights.”

  She sucked on her upper lip, tasting salt. She could approach Jeremy without disclosing she wanted him to verify a crime. She could dodge the truth to get what she needed.

  Natalie finished the nuts and raisins while composing an answer to JSonnenberg@globe.com. Thanks for checking in. I’d be “happy” to meet soon. She included her phone number.

  fourteen

  —

  NATALIE WAS IN THE STUDIO SHE SHARED WITH TWO OTHER photographers in central Boston. She’d set up a flash unit mounted with a medium sized soft-box. The tableware was elegant, and the texture of the ham was good, but the spiral slices were sloped over, giving the meat a tired look. “We need to drape them better,” she said to Jessa, the food stylist with whom she’d become friendlier since Marc’s desertion. “Lift them up. Also, the glaze works except for this glob of apricot. It looks too much like ointment spurting out.”

  “Gross. You ruined the effect for me,” Jessa joked.

  “Sorry.” Natalie’s phone rang. “Hold on.”

  She grabbed her cell from her back pocket for a quick peek at the number. It was understood between her and her colleague, the mother of a two-year-old girl, that work could be interrupted if your kid needed you. Jeremy was not her kid.

  “Go ahead,” Jessa said, not inquiring about the caller. She flipped her long hair over her shoulder so it wouldn’t stick to the gooey syrup or the Vaseline she’d used to patch up holes in the ham. “I’ll work on perking up our star.”

  Natalie dashed into the bathroom next to the entranceway. “Hi,” she whispered to Jeremy. “Can I call you back in a few hours?”

  “Sure thing. Working?”

  She thought of his round eyes, how he’d gotten stuck in pigeon pose, that he had a Retriever. “Trying. But my ham isn’t cooperating.”

  “Funny, my trout is rebelling.”

  Natalie leaned into the warmth of his voice. She liked the rich timbre, the joviality. “Trout are notorious agitators, not as bad as fried crabs. No matter how hard I try, the legs always make them look nasty.”

  “Okay, I’m out of my depth here. I’m guessing you’re a chef.”

  “Food photographer. I thought you knew, you being a spy and all.”

  “Nope, ‘cause I’m only a junior spy, got my kit at Toys ‘R’ Us. But I’m friends with Bob Garvey at Boston Magazine.”

  “I’ve worked for Bob!”

  A thrill ran up from her belly to her breastbone. No. He was only flirting and making this connection between them to get to Isabel. It was so hard to trust people, least of all, herself.

  “Small world,” he said. “I’ll let you get back to your ham. When is a better time to catch you?”

  “After work. I’m done by 2:30.”

  “I’ll call you this afternoon. Enjoy your meat.”

  “Thanks,” Natalie smiled, despite her apprehension. “I will.”

  THE CAR WAS idling outside Hadley’s school when Natalie’s cell beeped. She fumbled inside her pocketbook before noticing that the phone was upright in the cup holder. The text message from Jeremy read: Is now a good time?

  Natalie typed: Sure. She gazed out the window at the American Flag waving from the gabled roof of the building’s facade. She wanted to have faith in his good intentions.

  A second later, he called.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Thanks for answering me. I should have told you what I was doing at the workshop upfront. Guess I didn’t want you to blow my cover.” He laughed, that hardy sound. He was a generous laugher, she decided. “Now I do sound like 007.”

  Her anger from their last meeting dissipated. She felt the stirring of attraction and thought of Simon. Attraction was dangerous. “Not sure I approve of your tactics.”

  “But you emailed anyway. Would you like to meet for coffee?”

  “Only if you don’t grill me too much about Isabel.”

  “Ah, a food verb! I like it. I promise not to grill or sear. I’ll … ugh, what’s the opposite of grilling? Tartaring?” he asked. “I don’t think that can be made into a verb. It sounds like tar and feathering.”

  She let loose a giggle. “We can stick to a discussion of your book. No interviewing me.”

  “Excellent. I’ll come to your neighborhood. What evening is good?”

  “That’s a schlep from your job.”

  “Hey, you’re doing me a favor.”

  “Right,” Natalie said. Above the flag was a cloud-filled expanse, sodden with the next snow. Don’t misunderstand like with Simon. “I have a favor to ask of you as well.”

  “A cliffhanger,” he said. “I love a good cliffhanger.”

  SHE HAD GIVEN Jeremy directions to Mindy’s Corner and was waiting for him, two evenings later, the only patron in the diner.

  He opened the front door with a puzzled expression on his face. He was wearing a down parka and chukka boots this time. He hadn’t shaved, giving him a scruffy look, which she liked.

  “Classy joint,” he said, sliding into the booth across from her.

  “I thought it was fitting, you being a newspaper man.”

  He smiled and she noticed a pencil-mark scar on the right side of his mouth. “You’ve seen too many forties movies. Today, we newspaper men eat at hipster, vegan, gluten-free cafés where you aren’t allowed to smoke.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Natalie said. “Mindy’s specializes in heavy, fattening food. But with real ingredients, like in times of yore.”

  “Yore! Best era ever.” He tugged off his gloves, one, then the other.

  The waitress with the puffy eyelids approached them with menus, this time, wearing a shiny fuchsia lipstick. The blond dye was fading from her hair, the roots spreading like an oil spill. She wore a name tag that Natalie hadn’t noticed before: “Jean.”

  “Hi, Jean,” Jeremy said. “What’s good here for an after-dinner snack?”

  “Pie,” Natalie and the server said at the same time.

  Jeremy grinned boyishly. “Pie it is. What are my choices?”

  Once they’d ordered and were alone with their glasses of tepid water, she said, “Tell me more about your book.”

  He slammed one fist on top of the other. “My goal is to debunk the positive psychology movement, expose it for what it’s been since the nineteenth century.”

  “Which is?”

  “Junk, plain and simple. Neoliberal claptrap, now, this idea that we are responsible for our own fate. Mindfulness and finding your bliss and all that garbage isn’t a substitute for health insurance or a living wage or the grief of losing someone to gun violence.”

  Natalie felt the thickness of hi
s indignation, saw how it made his spine straighter, his eyes brighter. His obsession with Isabel wasn’t like Simon’s, seedy and submerged, but it was an obsession all the same. “Isabel isn’t dealing with those political issues.”

  “Of course not. Happiness, as a commodity, is a luxury of the well-off.”

  The waitress balanced their two decafs, a small pitcher of milk, and Jeremy’s cherry pie on a tray. “Here you go. Enjoy.”

  Natalie watched her walk back to the counter, her rounded ankles with no delineation from her calves, her tight black pants and white sneakers. She wondered if Jean was happy.

  “There are other … things,” she said, thinking of those brain scans with their ruinous black splotches, “psychological factors, mistakes that linger, that make people miserable—no matter their social class.”

  “We all struggle with that,” he said, peering.

  Every word he’d uttered was true and noble and confirmed Natalie’s lack of confidence that she could be mended. Perhaps self-forgiveness could only come through good acts, “mitzvahs” as her mother called them. “You don’t believe in meditation or yoga, any of those things that are supposed to help you?”

  “I believe in anything that gets you through the day. But the notion that it’s your own fault if you’re suffering is an insidious American concept.”

  She stared at Jeremy’s slice as he cut it so that the crust cracked and the filling oozed out of the top. Food was so safe and quiet, sitting as it did without protest, making no demands. “So, your book is about our pathetic social system?”

  “It’s about how our American philosophy emphasizes the world of the mind, our obsession with individuality and attitude and cando spirit, exonerating the role of government and corporations. Even the most die-hard liberals have been convinced that if they follow their passions, success will follow. We should all be able to shape our lives in our own selfie images.”

  “That’s not what Isabel’s doing.” Natalie looked down at the chip on the rim of her cup. “She’s just giving us techniques to help us … cope, to stave off despair.”

  He ran his fingers from the top of his head through his hair so that his curls sprouted up like a stream in a water fountain. In a gentler voice, he suggested, “Maybe that’s what you need to get from her promises.”

  An opening she was not ready to take. “Why not just write a book on social policy?”

  He fiddled with his fork, scraped it against the gooey cherry that had run onto his plate. “My twin sister, Alex, died of cancer two years ago. The last few months of her life were unbearable.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. She felt an urge to caress his stricken face.

  “Thanks. When it metastasized, Alex saw these alternative healers who told her it could be controlled through positive thoughts, chanting, talking to the universe, eating kale, all kinds of shit.” Jeremy shook his head. “Alex was a smart woman, but when she got sick, she got into all these insane things.”

  “Poor thing! She was probably grabbing hope wherever she could.”

  “She parroted back that she wasn’t working hard enough at healing, that her suffering was trying to teach her something.” Jeremy chopped up his dessert into pieces as he spoke. “Alex wasted a lot of money on people who prey on the vulnerable. My family tried to get her to stop, especially my dad. Five weeks after she died, Dad had a fatal heart attack.”

  “Jesus,” Natalie whispered. She reached for him, touched his rolled-up sweater sleeve above his wrist. He didn’t draw away. He stopped butchering his dessert.

  “Yeah. So now you know my way of staving off despair—illuminating how these disreputable gurus operate.”

  “That’s not Isabel. She would never say cancer was someone’s fault or that her program could cure it.”

  Jeremy pushed his plate forward and leaned back. “Are you willing to talk to me about what she does believe? And what you think about it? I’m interviewing people who are drawn to this movement to see how it works out for them. Look, I’ll make sure you get privacy. I have plenty of experts who love to be quoted. I’d use your first name or not mention it at all, if that helps.”

  A swat of disappointing sadness. They were back to business, the exchange of goods and services, the bartering arrangement. Never mind that Natalie liked this man. He had a request, and so did she. “All right. But here’s the favor part. What are your investigative skills like? I need someone to get some information for me.”

  He smiled quizzically. “I’m not a PI. I don’t do stakeouts or follow guys around with my camera and catch them in the act. What-taya need?”

  “Someone with better research skills than I have, and resources available to them, to find out something that occurred recently in another country.”

  “International espionage! Like a coup?” he joked.

  “A bit more personal, not about Marc. That’s my ex.”

  “Yeah, I gathered.”

  Natalie looked directly at him, something she rarely did with people out of shyness. She felt emboldened by his open expression, the shock of intimacy. “There was a car accident in the Cayman Islands last November. The people who witnessed it said a dog was hit, that it ran away. I just want to put my mind at rest. Nothing turned up online. There may be no record of what happened—that’s okay. You must have better ways to find out,” she stumbled, “if anyone knows anything about it.”

  Natalie had wondered if Jeremy might be able to trace the car to Isabel through the rental company. But since it had been a hit and run, and there was no evidence that their vehicle was involved, she couldn’t see how. Still, she needed to protect Isabel just in case.

  “That’s you,” he said, and pointed to her ringing phone.

  Natalie glanced at the name on the screen. “It’s my daughter. Excuse me a second.”

  “Hey, everything okay?” she asked, as she hurried to the back of the restaurant. She ducked into the bathroom with the image of a skirted figure on the door. It was a tiny cabinet of a room, with a dried-out bar of soap on the sink, and a chipped toilet seat.

  “Can you talk to Dad for me?” Hadley asked. “I wanna skip my visit this weekend.”

  A bubble of satisfaction. “Why honey?”

  “Cara is having a party Saturday night. Dad said it’s his only time to see me. Yeah, well, weekends are my only time to go to parties.”

  “That is a problem.”

  Should have thought of that when you walked out, Marc.

  “I want to see my friends, not watch Pride and Prejudice with Dad and his girlfriend.”

  “Pride and Prejudice?”

  “Elizabeth’s, like, in love with it, her ‘namesake’ is badass she says. Uh, sorry. Didn’t mean to bring her up.”

  “Hads, it’s okay. You don’t have to avoid talking about her.”

  “It’s just … I told her I’ve already seen the whole ten hours with you.”

  “Elizabeth wants to watch the long version with Dad?”

  Natalie tried to visualize Marc viewing this Jane Austen marathon, his computer perched on his lap, his foot a maraca. If you asked him about Mr. Darcy or Bingley, he’d stare and ask, “Are they friends of Hadley’s?”

  “I know. Right?” Her daughter laughed.

  “I’ll talk to Dad about you skipping this visit.”

  “Thanks. It’s awkward being forced to go to his house every weekend. My friends act as if I’m being locked up in a psych ward.”

  Natalie hit her elbow against the sink and startled from the pain as a forgotten exchange popped out of its grungy burrow.

  In the car, she’d read Jane Eyre asking about Lowood, “And why do they call it Institution? Is it in any way different from other schools?” and turned to her mother, her shadowy profile. “This is what happened to Isabel’s mother; she was locked away, too.”

  Her mother’s hands clawed the wheel. Her voice rose. “Where did you hear that?”

  “What does it matter if it’s true?”

/>   “Sigrid was in the hospital for a little while, not a school.”

  “Mom, I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this.”

  “I know, honey. I know you’re upset. But I need to do what’s best for you.”

  Natalie had imagined it, being imprisoned like Sigrid: grim, dank walls and cold showers, liquid-y cereal or eggs for breakfast and canned beans with fatty meat for dinner, served on tin trays with medications that a nurse ensured wasn’t tucked under the tongue, daily lectures on behavior, always being watched, isolation the punishment for misbehaving.

  The memory ended there. Maybe stopping her mother from reaching Dr. Strout’s office was an act of survival. Maybe she’d been so desperate that she’d thought her own death would be better than the alternative. Or maybe she hadn’t thought anything at all. Wrung out from arguing, blood throbbing in her ears, her arm simply might have jerked up, the flashlight flung out like a sword.

  Hadley said, “Mom, you still there?”

  Natalie rubbed her elbow. “Yes. I’m here.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you about Dad and Elizabeth.”

  “You didn’t, honey. I’ll be home soon.”

  Back at the table, she blurted out, “Do you think you can get records from the 1970s on someone?”

  “What happened to the Cayman Islands?” Jeremy’s voice flickered with humor.

  “That’s the priority. This second favor is only if you have time.” What was the triangular relationship between her mother, Sigrid, and herself? Half a pill to help me sleep! Don’t confuse me with Sigrid. Laura and Dr. Strout thought it was a good idea to send you to a boarding school for troubled teens.

  “You may be in need of a professional sleuth here, not a cowboy newspaperman.”

  Natalie bent forward as if the waitress with the overly optimistic lipstick color was listening. “I don’t know for sure if this woman was ever in a residential treatment program or an outpatient one.”

  “Context?”

  Natalie said, “She was Isabel’s mother. I don’t want to go into too much more about her, if that’s okay. Obviously, this has nothing to do with your book.”