Family and Other Accidents

by Shari Goldhagen

  Having used all his change on coffee, Jack takes the elevator to the ground floor, whizzing past Maternity on the second, and follows exit signs to a parking lot. At half past five everything is shaded by the depressing sunset of a cold, gray place in winter, and he trembles in the January air as he looks at all the cars with old snow caked on their roofs, crusted salt on the tires.

  A second message on his phone is from the beautiful first-year associate working with him on the department-store case that may go to trial. In her message, Kathy says she’s drafting a memo about similar cases found on the legal databases, a nervous excitement in her voice. Since starting the project, Jack has been trying to gauge if Kathy has a crush on him or if she’s simply grateful he put her in charge of more than her first-year status warrants. He starts to dial Mona, but calls his office instead, punches in the digits of Kathy’s extension.

  “Hey, partner,” she says. “Everything okay?”

  Though he’s never brought his personal life to the office, there’s something knowing in Kathy’s voice that makes him want to tell her everything.

  “I’m in Boston,” he says instead. “Family emergency.”

  “Can I do anything to help?”

  Because she went to Penn for undergrad and law and he went to Penn for undergrad and law, he’d been assigned her partner-liaison when she was a summer associate two years ago. When she’d graduated and joined the firm in the fall, a plethora of partners had asked for her help, primarily because she has great tits, creamy pink skin, and legs that look sexy in conservative suits. Jack, on the other hand, likes her because everything she does is unnecessarily excellent, the way his work was when he was just starting out. Giving her the fax number at Laine and Connor’s house, he tells her to finish the memo if she finds time, knowing she will.

  “I’ll have it to you by the end of the day,” she says, and Jack pictures her behind the faux-cherry desk in her office, her blond hair brushed back, boxy black glasses on her nose like a prop—I’m not a hot twenty-five-year-old, but a serious attorney. For the first time in a long time, he feels himself smiling.

  “No rush, Kath,” he says.

  He forgets he was supposed to call Mona until he’s back in Connor’s room, where his brother sleeps again. Laine lies next to him, curled on her side, eyes closed. Both of them have gotten so thin since Connor got sick, as if they’re evaporating into clouds of Connor’s wet breath.

  A wall-mounted TV is tuned to CNN, where a pretty newscaster shivers in a light blue jacket and matching earmuffs. The volume muted, a logo at the bottom of the screen shouts, “Twenty Dead in Vail Chair-Lift Accident.” The screen switches to defeated people in parkas and hats looking over yellow tape at smashed lift chairs and twisted cable. One woman raises the back of her hand to wipe her eyes. So easy, then it’s done.

  His phone rings in his pocket, and Jack reaches to turn it off, but not before Laine and Connor squirm awake and the brunette in scrubs materializes in the doorway.

  “You can’t use that in—”

  “I know.” As he pushes the power button, he sees the call is from Mona. “I forgot to turn it off.”

  “There’s a pay phone down the hall.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “What time is it?” Connor asks, and they all look at the institutional metal wall clock. “Lainey, you need to pick up the girls.”

  “They’re with Dad.” Disoriented, Laine hops off the bed like a teenager caught snogging her boyfriend, not a Harvard MBA. “I want to stay.”

  “You need to let him rest,” says Scrubs.

  “I’ve rested enough for fifteen years.” Connor coughs up more sludge. “But you should get the girls out of your father’s hair. Are you okay to drive?”

  Everyone looks at Jack expectantly, as if he can fix things, because Jack always fixes things. He does the best he can—driving Laine home for a few hours with a promise to bring her back later.

  “They’ll call us if anything changes, right?” Laine chews a hangnail, fidgets in the passenger seat, as they pass huge stone houses in Boston’s wealthy suburbs.

  “Of course, and we’ll call the hospital anyway.” Trying to calm her, Jack asks about her childhood. “Conn says you used to live here when you were a kid?”

  “Yeah, for a few years before my parents split up. It’s a really good family neighborhood.” Laine points out the window to a house with turrets. “See that one?”

  Jack nods.

  “There’s a story that the woman who lived there during the twenties had an ongoing affair with the man next door. Supposedly they built a tunnel connecting the houses. When we were kids we were always coming up with stupid plans to sneak in and see it.”

  “Really.” Jack looks at the two houses, maybe half an acre apart, thinks about how much easier and cheaper it would have been to just walk. “Didn’t their spouses get suspicious during the digging?”

  “They knew,” Laine says. “It was that old-money deal where protecting your reputation was the most important thing. I guess they were okay with it.”

  “Yeah.” Jack isn’t sure what he’s saying or why. “Maybe you take what you can get, and sometimes the best you’re going to do is a tunnel under your house.”

  Mona’s puking again sometime before dawn, her palms pressed against the porcelain toilet. Jack holds her hair away, feels the spasms of her back muscles, and tries, for the nine billionth time, to decide if he can forgive her. His hand is on her bare arm, but his fingers seem to pass through her. It’s been a week since he left his brother, fever broken, lungs still gooey, and Jack has yet to tell Mona that he told Connor she was pregnant. He tells her nothing anymore. When she asks about work or his brother, he offers useless packets of information. He doesn’t tell her about the trial date in early July or about Laine’s father asking him how to set up trust funds for Connor’s daughters.

  Helping Mona sit on the edge of the Jacuzzi, Jack rinses his hands and fills her a glass of water.

  “You don’t have to get up with me,” she says. “You must be exhausted.”

  “It’s fine.” Jack wonders if she really means he doesn’t have to help her or if she only says it because she knows he will continue drawing her hair from her face night after night. “I was working anyway. Do you need anything? Saltines or something?”

  “No, thank you.” She takes a tentative sip of water and chews her lower lip. “I think I told you about it before, but I have the appointment for the sonogram tomorrow, and they should be able to tell the sex. I made it late, so you could come, if you want.”

  “There’s a huge mess at work,” he says, feeling the familiar pain in his chest. “I’ll come if I can. Just make sure you give me the address and everything before I leave.”

  She nods, and he helps her back to their giant bed, where he gets in beside her but doesn’t hold her. Instead he picks up the xeroxed documents he brought home from his office, shuffles through for anything he may have missed the first time. In the sixteen years he has practiced law, Jack has seen the inside of a courtroom all of three times. Those times were exciting, but this case, a giant Midwestern department store chain that breached hundreds of purchasing contracts, he knows he’ll lose.

  Reaching over Mona for the roll of Tums on her nightstand, he notices the light freckles peppered across her nose and the delicate creases of her eyelids, decides he will go with her to the appointment, if he can.

  But he can’t go to the doctor with Mona, because Kathy, three other young associates, and a handful of paralegals are trapped in a dark-wood conference room, sinking under thousands and thousands of forms, carbon copies, and slips of paper the department store accumulated over three decades. For the past two nights Kathy hasn’t left, trying to organize it all in a way Jack can use. But the other associates are careless, counting the days until they leave Kirkland to go in-house somewhere cushy and unimportant. The paralegals are worse, all of them twenty-two or twenty-three, working at the firm only
so their own law school applications look better. They hurry through so they can meet friends at the bars on Rush and Division. It’s the kind of work Jack hasn’t done in years, but all the documents for the trial have to be filed by Monday night, so he takes off his suit jacket, rolls up his sleeves, and sifts with the others, even though they’re going to lose and it’s all as useless as panning for gold in the bathtub.

  Around eight the gouging pain in his chest resurges and Jack realizes he hasn’t eaten anything since a glazed Krispy Kreme at a morning meeting.

  “Let’s order in,” he says.

  One of the associates suggests that they try the sushi place that opened on the corner, and the horrible associates and paralegals come alive as they pencil mark the menu checklist with an obscene amount of food because they know that the client is paying for their dinner as well as their time.

  The order arrives, and they spin in leather office chairs, talking about places they’ve been where the sushi is really good and about those places that are “overrated.” Jack and Kathy take absent bites and continue reading, marking, piling. His sinuses explode when he puts too much wasabi on a piece of toro. Eyes dripping, throat melting, he coughs, gropes for bottled water.

  “Don’t drink that.” Kathy reaches for his arm. “It will only make it hotter. Have some ginger.”

  Maybe she does have a crush on him or maybe she simply likes that he’s most likely going to be named assigning partner of corporate when the current partner retires, but when her fingers graze his wrist, he feels a current of something all the way to his ears and toes. He looks at her, and she smiles as though they share a secret. It will happen. Maybe in a week or a month, maybe a day, but it will. He’s not sure if he wants it or not, knows only that he can’t stop it. His life is no longer up to him. He’s at the mercy of others—his wife, doctors in Boston, this lovely young woman.

  “Thank you,” he says, ginger grinding between his molars. “You were right.”

  One of the paralegals says the yellowtail smells funny, but everyone eats everything anyway. An hour later they all feel sick. The associates and paralegals complain so much that Jack finally suggests they go home, even though there’s no time for going home. An hour after that he feels awful enough to join them. Kathy remains cross-legged on the floor, pen tucked behind her ear.

  “All this crap will still be here in the morning,” he says, packing a laptop and the most useful stack of the useless papers. “You should go; we’re all sick.”

  “I must not have had much yellowtail.” She smiles the secret smile again and pats his ankle. “I’ll go home when I get tired.”

  In the cavernous concrete garage under the office building, Jack reaches into his pants pocket for his phone to call Mona. If their life worked the way their life used to work, he would meet her at the condo and they’d watch Seinfeld reruns until he fell asleep on her shoulder. At eleven she would nudge him awake and make toast and the one can of soup they’d had in their pantry for years. But things don’t operate that way anymore.

  Seeing she left a message, he remembers the sonogram.

  “Hey, um, you didn’t make it today.” Mona’s recorded voice is wet with tears. “But I thought I’d let you know, it’s a boy. My sister came, so I wasn’t alone or anything. Um, oh well, I guess I’ll see you at home.”

  At the end of the message her words are rushed, as if she’s fighting back a sob. A lead foot squashes his chest; he’s never been able to listen to her cry. And the part of him that’s used to fixing things wants to sweep her into his arms and fix this. But he can’t because he doesn’t know how to fix this, isn’t sure it’s fixable at all, and misleading her seems worse. He can’t, because he hasn’t slept well in months, is sick from bad sushi, and needs to work more on a case he can’t win. So he puts his phone back in his pocket and takes the elevator back up. He stops at the men’s room, where he runs a paper towel under the faucet and wipes it across his forehead. His reflection shows skin the color and texture of a grade school gymnasium and giant purple bruises under his eyes. With his clean jawline and broad shoulders, he used to command a certain attention, but there are only faint traces of that now.

  “You’re back.” Kathy stands when he appears in the conference room.

  Stacks of documents are in each of the chairs, leaving nowhere to sit. He rests his ass against the edge of the table and gestures to the mess with open palms.

  “We’re going to lose,” he says. “I want you to know that before you pull another all nighter.”

  “There’s nowhere I have to be.” She shrugs and smiles and looks at him with blue eyes like the ones described in novels from a time before when he used to read novels.

  Folding his arms, he bows his head, rubs his eyebrows.

  “Jack?”

  “My brother’s sick,” he says.

  “I know. The first- and second-years talk a lot.” Putting her hand on his shoulder, she’s close enough that he feels her breath on his neck. “I can’t imagine how hard that must be.”

  “And my wife is pregnant.”

  “I know that, too.”

  When he lifts his head, she’s still looking at him. Everything is suddenly quiet and tense. More vague memories of a life prior to Mona make him realize that Kathy will kiss him. She doesn’t. She touches his cheek, his lower lip, his chin, then sinks to her knees. In quick, easy movements, she has his belt and pants undone, has him hard in her palm. His fingers gravitate to her blond head.

  It’s been years since Mona has gone down on him. It always made her so uncomfortable, Jack found it hard to enjoy. Kathy, however, seems to like what she’s doing.

  “I’m married,” Jack says, but not until he’s at the point where he knows he can’t not come, where his voice catches in his throat, comes out a moan. “And I’m sort of your boss.”

  Of course she swallows, and Jack wonders briefly if she exists at all or if he isn’t delirious. If he’s so sleep deprived that he’s hallucinating this girl who does great research and sucks cock like it’s a second vocation.

  “This doesn’t have to mean anything,” she says. “I like you, and you needed that more than any guy I’ve ever met.”

  Unsure what he’s supposed to do, Jack zips his pants, kneels next to her, and hesitantly kisses her forehead. He wants to believe her, that it doesn’t have to mean anything, but the guilt he feels isn’t over Mona, it’s over Kathy, who’s young and pretty and should be blowing someone young and pretty.

  “May I return the favor?” he asks.

  “Someday, if you want. You should go home and sleep now.”

  “You’re the one who should go home,” he says.

  “In a little while.”

  But he knows she won’t. She’ll stay in this conference room all night and the night after that. He thinks of warning her that in a decade and change she may be contemplating the end of the world in various ways. He says nothing, however, because he isn’t sure he’d change anything in his own life knowing what he knows now.

  “Leave soon,” he says again. He doesn’t follow his own advice, instead goes up a floor to his office.

  Unlike the other partners, Jack doesn’t have his desk facing Lake Michigan. Heights make him nervous, so his desk faces the Robert Longo painting on the wall. But tonight he stands with his nose against the full-length window, his breath leaving circles on the cold glass. He wonders about people who jump to their deaths, what it feels like in those minutes before you hit the ground, if some primal instinct kicks in and you fight against it, if that’s why your arms kick and flail. He thinks about those people in the ski lift, about plane crashes. Then he remembers his brother, sick and swinging blindly against the thing that’s trying to kill him. Recalling Connor’s ridiculous happiness over Mona’s pregnancy, he picks up the phone.

  “Hey, Laine and I were reading to the girls, and we fell asleep.” Connor sounds groggy, like he has every time Jack has talked to him since he started treatment. “Things you
can look forward to. You calling to check up on me?”

  “A little bit.” Jack closes his eyes against the burn in his chest. “And I wanted to tell you that we found out the baby is a boy.”

  “Really? Jack, that’s great,” Connor says. “You’ll do much better with a boy. I wasn’t going to say anything, but I thought a little girl would confuse you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack fakes a laugh.

  “You’re just gonna get to do so much cool stuff. Seriously, I’m jealous. I totally want a boy next time.”

  “What next time?” Laine is on the line, groggy herself, and then sound explodes in the Boston suburbs. Connor’s dog, his daughters, everyone is making noise. “Jack, it’s one in the morning here.”

  “I forgot about the time difference.”

  “Jack’s just excited cuz he and Mo are having a boy,” Connor says. “I want a boy next kid.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Laine says. “Congratulations, Jack, but it’s a school night.”

  “We’re going to have to take all of the kids to Cleveland one day,” Connor says. “Go to an Indians game, show everyone where we grew up.”

  “Conn,” Laine again. “Come on, it’s late.”

  “Sure, kid, we’ll all go,” Jack says, wondering if Connor has more summers for visits to Cleveland and Indians games.

  “Sure, kid,” he says to no one as he’s waiting for the elevator to the parking garage an hour later.

  As it descends, there’s a snapping of something mechanical, and he imagines the unhinged car racing down the shaft to unforgiving concrete, everything over in under twenty seconds. But the doors part, and he gets in his sleek, black car. LSD is nearly empty so late at night, but Jack drives uncharacteristically slow, watching the waves crash against the sand, everything sinister in the darkness.

  Their building, with its cold doormen and cold marble and mirror hallways, never lost the feel of a hotel—And you may ask yourself, what is this beautiful house? Then he’s speeding up in another elevator that doesn’t crash, to his front door with the heavy silver knocker. Keys in hand, he stares at his distorted reflection in the metal for nearly ten minutes before finally going in. In the master suite, face smeared with tears and faded makeup, Mona sleeps on top of the bedspread. Jack slides her shoes from her flattened feet and tucks her under the covers.