by Susan Isaacs
“I understand. I’ll tell your husband’s parents the truth, that you’re the legal next of kin, and that means, while I’ll speak with them, I deal only with you.”
“Thank you.” I didn’t cry again. I just started to shake, pretty violently.
Coleman decided his help was needed, so he practically flew over and stood between the couch and the coffee table, so he was right beside me. “If you give me your doctor’s name, ma’am,” he said, “I’ll be glad to call him or her. A sedative might—” He had sweat on his upper lip.
“Thank you, but no sedatives. I can’t take drugs with three little boys in the house.” He fell silent, though he didn’t move. He just stood next to me, his shins an inch from my knees, as if he had a front-row seat to some all-star nervous breakdown. I wanted Paston to tell him to get the hell away, but he didn’t.
After a few minutes, my shaking eased to mere trembling. My head cleared so I could remember Andrea’s number. I gave it to Coleman so he could call her and tell her to come over. Only then did he go back to his chair to get busy on his cell.
“I didn’t tell him the truth,” I murmured to Paston. “About drugs. I actually have enough Xanax to calm a herd of crazed elephants.”
“Good,” he said. “You’re going to need it.”
Chapter Ten
Andrea must have arrived soon after Detective Sergeant Coleman called her. I heard her voice at the front door, followed by the purr of small wheels. She’d brought the small Vuitton suitcase she always kept packed in case Fat Boy finished some hedging deal early and called her to join him in Shanghai or Dublin. I saw her as she stepped into the room, and I watched as she came over to pat the back of my hand—the Andrea equivalent of a regular person’s loving embrace. She said, “Oh, Susie, this is dreadful. I’m so sorry.” Maybe I nodded, and I think I retreated farther into the softness of the couch’s corner, where the overstuffed back met the fat arm. At some point the detectives left. For all I knew, they simply evaporated. I heard no goodbyes, no footsteps, no closing doors. “Tell me what you need me to do, Susie,” Andrea said.
“Calls.” I exhaled it more than I actually said it. “I need you to call . . . everybody. Not tonight. I think it’s too late.”
“Yes. It’s almost one in the morning.”
“Maybe you should go home, come back later. I don’t know. They told me I needed someone to be here. I can’t think clearly.” My arms were still crossed so tight over my chest that my shoulders ached, but I couldn’t seem to release them. “Do I have to call his parents now?”
“Yes, you do. Soon, I would think.”
“What?”
“They can’t hear this on the news.”
“They’re asleep at this hour.”
“But someone they know might hear of it and call them.”
“Oh God, I can’t believe I didn’t think about that.”
One of Andrea’s usual snotty retorts got to the tip of her tongue, but this time she stopped it before it came out. She didn’t even look like herself. She was wearing just lipstick. Without other makeup, her eyes were almost lost under puffy pink lids and uncurled blond lashes. Her face seemed magnified, a white oval with a glossy brick-red mouth that appeared glued on, as if she’d cut it out from a Chanel ad. “And you’ll have to call your parents. Unless you want me to do it.”
I shook my head. The movement loosened up some words. “No friendship could survive that kind of strain.”
“I can do it.”
“No, I’ll call them. Don’t worry. They won’t be able to cope with coming back out here. Most likely, they’ll wait till nine-thirty or ten in the morning. That way, they can get the car washed before they stop at GNC because they’re low on acidophilus. But then they’ll be on their way.”
“To offer their usual nonstop comfort,” Andrea added. We’d been partners and friends long enough that I knew, even before she did it, that she’d start to look up to heaven but quickly avert her gaze, knowing that when it came to my parents, even God couldn’t help.
“Well, when they do show up,” I said, “they’re bound to be wonderful with the boys.” I knew I sounded bitter.
That was when it hit me: I have children. It must have been too awful to think about the boys immediately after I heard the news. I just blocked them out. I wished I could do that again. The thought of Evan, Dash, and Mason missing Jonah while not truly comprehending what had happened was too sad to dwell on. And what about their growing up without a father? My head flopped down. I was defeated. “I can’t take this, Andrea.”
“You have to.”
“Take your stiff-upper-lip Wasp bullshit and shove it.”
“I’m not Anglo-Saxon, as you well know. I’m Dutch. And I don’t expect you to stiff-upper-lip it, Susie. You should know that. This is beyond horrible. I’m only saying that you’re eventually going to have to find a way to take it because . . .” She swallowed. “You’re all the boys have now.” Her eyes closed for what was either a very long blink or a prayer: Thank you, God, that it isn’t me. “The good news is, they won’t be up until their ungodly wake-up time. You don’t have to think about them this second. You have other fish to fry now: your in-laws, your parents. And what about Gilbert John? Layne? You do have to call them tonight, don’t you? Or can I call them and you call the others?”
I made all the calls. It was worse than I’d imagined because I had to live through everybody else’s shock. I don’t recall having even a milligram of compassion. I wished I could get away with “Listen, I hate to tell you this, but Jonah’s been murdered. I’ll know more tomorrow. Speak to you then,” and hang up. Take three Ambien. No, two, because of the boys. Three wouldn’t kill me, probably, but I couldn’t risk even a little soothing brain damage.
If I could have made the calls and heard “You poor thing!” over and over again, I might have dealt with giving them the news. But I had to listen to my father-in-law’s terrible groan, like that of a lion gone mad with pain, and Babs screeching in the background, “What? What? Tell me! For God’s sake, tell me!” So I had to go into the whole thing, repeating large parts of it because they put me on speaker and then couldn’t understand half of what I was saying.
And of course it wasn’t “Your son was stabbed to death in the midst of performing some noble act.” The answer to their wheres and hows was “In the apartment of a call girl named Dorinda Dillon, aka Cristal Rousseau, who’d had a couple of arrests for cocaine.” With a pair of those long-bladed scissors you see in barbershops. All this interrupted by moans and cries and me saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” too many times to count.
Gilbert John Noakes, MD, FACS, didn’t scream or groan. In fact, he was almost speechless except alternating in a shaky voice between “Good God!” and “I’m sorry, Susie” a few times. He didn’t ask questions, and after I’d told him Jonah had been stabbed, I heard what sounded like a sigh filled with pain. “I don’t know what to say. It’s brutal.” He sounded so wiped out that I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about the call girl. At the end of the conversation, he said he’d call Layne, but I told him I’d do it, since I figured they had to hear the Dorinda details that, barring some international tragedy or celebrity overdose, would be on the news.
I hadn’t realized Andrea had left the living room until I saw her coming back in. She handed me a mug and said, “You had some actual cocoa. This is true hot chocolate, not your diet shit. Drink it.”
“Thank you.” Andrea had to be thanked constantly, even at work, like when she was just handing you pieces of sphagnum moss every two seconds.
She said, “You’re welcome. I brought Xanax. Do you want any?”
I shook my head, then said, “No, thank you.” She gave me the raised-eyebrows, flared-nostrils look she gave to clients who were making a foolish decision, like wanting lollipops on ribbons in table arrangements for a First Communion luncheon. It worked 99 percent of the time. I added, “I don’t need anything. I’m numb.” I couldn’
t say “What I’d like is an overdose of something so I can die and not have to face the rest of my life.” Not that I’d have done that: I knew I had to be there, as whole as possible, for the boys. But it would have been nice to say it and hear a passionate “I know it’s terrible for you, but you can’t even think that way!” Except Andrea would have added, or at least thought, Don’t be a self-indulgent ass.
When I called Layne, she was on the other phone with Gilbert John, but she was back to me within seconds. She talked for too long, but it was bearable because she spoke the way decent people are supposed to, the way you see in the older movies when you’re surfing channels. “What a horror for something like this to happen to such a fine, honorable man. A good man! My heart . . . my heart goes out to you.” She either swallowed a lot or cried for a few seconds. “And your wonderful boys. Susie, I don’t have to tell you how much he loved all of you. You know those office watercooler chats? Every single time Jonah and I would talk, a light would come into his eyes. I always knew the next sentence out of his mouth would be about one of the triplets. Or all of the triplets. He’d get this gleam—”
“Layne, thank you so much, but I have to tell you—”
“Jonah wasn’t just a partner and mentor to me. He was a great friend. When he was senior resident—”
“Layne.” Not that I would actually tell her to save it for the funeral home and the shiva, but one of the reasons everyone said “Oh, Dr. Jiménez is such a fine, fine person” was that Layne didn’t stint on kindness. She was never too busy for a good word—or, more to the point, words linked into paragraphs. “Gilbert John sounded so shaken up that I didn’t want to go into detail,” I began.
“And if you can’t handle it, you don’t have to with me, Susie. Whenever you’re ready . . .”
“You both need to know something now, before you hear it on the news or anywhere else.”
“What is it?” she asked cautiously.
“Jonah was killed in a call girl’s apartment.”
“No!” Her “no” came out so spontaneously that a huge sigh of relief escaped me. Thank God for that reaction. Clearly, I’d been dreading the overlong silence I’d be forced to translate into “Oh, you found out about his whore habit.” Maybe I was misinterpreting. The “no” could have been pure reflex on Layne’s part. But I grabbed on to it as if she were saying “He was too much in love with you to even consider any other woman, much less a call girl.”
That was all the reassurance I was going to get, although I didn’t realize it for another twelve hours. Andrea got a little pushy—in a good way, I guess, urging me to go up and get a couple of hours’ sleep, or at least rest, before the boys woke up. If she hadn’t been there, I probably would have spent the night on the couch.
I didn’t want to go upstairs. I was afraid. Climbing the steps (right foot, left, right, as if I were on a Level 4 hike instead of walking up to the next floor) was too much effort. I was terrified. Spooked. I stood before the black rectangle of the door frame, staring into the unlit bedroom. I was sure I’d take one step onto the carpet, reach for the light switch, and suddenly—a gut-ripping noise, half howl, half shriek—and the enraged ghost of Jonah would boil the air an inch from my face. I didn’t know why I was so crazy, or why, even if I didn’t believe in ghosts, which I didn’t, except maybe the week after I saw The Sixth Sense, Jonah’s spirit would be anything but benevolent toward me.
Yet I had to force myself to lie down in our bed. My heart fluttered, then slammed against my chest in panic at the sudden, jarring silence when the heating system turned off. A second later, a current of warm air puffed across my ear and blew a strand of my hair onto my cheek. I suppressed a scream. Maybe that strand had been there all along. Yet the air above the bed felt agitated by invisible goings-on in some parallel sphere.
At times during the night, the fear vanished. I was in the bedroom I had once shared with my husband, although now I was a widow. I censored that line of thought not because of what it represented but because I’d always hated the word. It conjured up old ladies in shapeless black dresses gray with lint. Or those black spiders with gross hairy legs.
But I forced myself to stay where I was. I mumbled aloud what I knew of the Twenty-third Psalm—not much—again and again. If I couldn’t whip it up for the Lord being my shepherd in the Valley of Death and getting me through this night of grief and hysteria, it would be the start of big-time bedroom phobia, a truly embarrassing fear. Because truthfully, how could I tell my therapist, Francine Twersky, that my dead husband’s vengeful soul was whirling around the Regency bergère chair and that the very air of the bedroom stank of sulfurous fury? I could tell her—and doom myself to session after boring session of her getting me to understand that what was haunting the bedroom was coming from my head.
Speaking of heads, I covered mine with the duvet, then started worrying that if I suffocated, the boys would go to Theo, Jonah’s brother. Jonah once said, “Even though my folks are hip enough to appreciate one sciencey kid and one arty one, they know I’m the winner and Theo is . . . They always try to act like he’s my equal or a close second with the silver medal. But deep down? All four of us know he’s the loser.”
If something happened to me and Theo got the boys? Within weeks, one of his friends would convince him to coproduce a reality show—giving him the excuse it would be a public service. TV Guide would write, Sparks fly in SINGLE WITH TRIPLETS when a young Maserati-driving Manhattan casting director gets surprise custody of his four-year-old nephews. I rearranged the duvet so my nose and mouth were out in the air.
At five-thirty, the boys startled me awake, so I must have gotten a little sleep. “Come up on the bed,” I said, patting the mattress. My chest ached from holding back sobs, though I didn’t completely rule out a heart attack. “I want to talk with you.” I had to wait while Dashiell used the bathroom. I made the mistake of telling him to use ours. Within a second, the other two were demanding the privilege. I got all choked up, so I nodded. They ran in, and even before the giggling became wild laughter, I could visualize the puddles of pee I’d have to wipe up. Jonah wouldn’t be calling on his cell, bored in bridge traffic, and my “They’re the Jackson Pollocks of urine” would forever stay unsaid.
When they returned, they were so high from the excitement of a triple toilet experience that I had to get up and grab them as they raced around the room. I plopped them hard onto the bed. By the time I finally caught Mason, I was screeching like the Wicked Witch of the West, “Shut up! For God’s sake, shut up and listen to me!” over and over again. Naturally, I spent the next few minutes weeping and apologizing—“I’m so, so sorry, sweeties. Oh God, I’m so sorry”—and calming them down, especially Evan. His bony shoulders jerked with each of his sobs. Mason’s eyes were still wide with fright at my rage while Dash stared at me with concern mixed with contempt.
I pulled them close, for the thousandth time envying mothers of twins, who had an arm for each kid. It was only then, as I was kissing one of their heads and trying to banish non-mournful thoughts like He needs a shampoo that I realized I had no idea what to tell them. During the days of waiting, imagining every terrible outcome except the one that had happened, why hadn’t I turned on the computer and Googled “explain child death parent”? My eyes grew heavy. I so longed to go back to sleep with them, bony shoulders and smelly heads snuggling against me, even though their wakefulness and squiggliness were proof of what an idiot fantasy that was.
“I have something very sad to tell you,” I said. All three of them looked downcast, but it struck me that they didn’t understand that “very sad” had to do with Jonah’s not being around. Their “sad” was more “Carvel has run out of rainbow sprinkles.” “You know Daddy hasn’t been home for a couple of days.” I guess I expected children-as-seen-on-TV behavior: nodding, gazing up at me curiously. But all three of them talked at once.
“Where is he?”
“When’s he coming home?”
“Wher
e’s Daddy?”
“Is he bringing us presents?”
“Can I—”
I said, “Shhh!” loud enough to drown them out. “Evan, Dash, Mason! Let Mommy finish. Okay? This is very important.” I took a deep breath. I knew I had to say something fast, before they started babbling again. “Daddy . . . Something very sad happened to Daddy. He got hurt, really hurt. He died. You know what that means, don’t you? It means—”
“He’s dead!” Mason said, triumphant at having beaten out his brothers. “When somebody dies, he gets dead!”
“Yes. Very good. That’s right. But it’s also very sad because it means he’s not coming back anymore.”
“Jake’s grandpa isn’t coming back,” Evan said. “He died. He got too old.” Then he added hopefully, “Daddy’s not too old.”
“Daddy can go to the hospital,” Dash said. “They’ll get him all fixed. Then he can come home.”
“I wish more than anything that could happen. But Daddy didn’t die because he was old or sick. He got hurt so bad that . . .” I started to cry, which maybe wasn’t so terrible; all the articles say that kids feel the passions that are swirling around them, even if they don’t comprehend. So if they remembered this, at least they’d know I was talking from my heart. I did try to calm down a little, so I could keep talking. “When someone dies, it means their body got hurt—or sick—so bad that nobody could fix it. Not even the best doctors.”