“Get your brats out of here before I bash their heads in,” he said, squeezing harder. “And don’t let me see you here again either. I told you not to come here. And don’t let me see you talking to Jared. I’ve told him not to go near you.” He pressed the nurse call button.
“Screw you,” said Erica, pushing his snaky arms away, but nonetheless gathered her kids and left, colliding with the orderly and his cleaning cart. Shaking and nursing a bruise on her arm, she continued on to Roosevelt Field, where she bought $500 worth of children’s jeans, corduroys, long-sleeved shirts, and sweaters.
She didn’t tell Ethan about the incident when he returned home from work. He was staying in New York more frequently these days, meeting with lawyers, meeting with government officials, meeting with higher-ups at Grant Fishel. Everyone seemed to be telling on everyone else, as far as Erica could discern. He didn’t talk about those meetings much. He didn’t really talk much at all, just watched TV, went running, dispensed with the clove cigarettes and bought real tobacco ones, and when prompted, played with the kids.
He and the boys horsed around in the backyard castle after dinner and then came in and built more castles with Legos. As Erica was folding laundry in the basement, the phone rang, and Ethan answered. “Hey, Erica, it’s someone named Anders for you,” he called out from the kitchen.
Dylan turned on the Yankees game. “Want to watch with me, Dad?” he asked, but Ethan remained stubbornly by the refrigerator, nibbling on dill pickles out of the jar.
“Hi,” Erica said softly into the phone.
“I hear you want to buy more T-shirts,” Anders said.
“Yeah, my closet is empty,” she said. “Tomorrow?”
“Who’s Anders?” Ethan asked, as soon as she hung up.
“A father from Dylan’s soccer league,” Erica said. She feigned interest in the baseball game. Rickey Henderson hit into a double play, sealing the Yankees loss to the Twins.
“Henderson is having the suckiest season, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never seen anyone named Anders at a game,” Ethan said. He placed a Lego knight in position at the top of a turret.
“He’s in the garment business. He imports T-shirts from India or something.”
“Is that why you mentioned your closet?”
“Yeah. And there’s practice tomorrow.”
“Who’s his kid?”
On television, a group of attractive young people drank beer on a boat. “I forget,” Erica said.
“Do you have a teammate with a dad named Anders, Dyl?” Ethan built a bridge over the castle moat.
“I don’t know.” Dylan shrugged.
The twins crashed dump trucks into each other’s knees.
“Bath time,” Erica said.
: : :
On a morning as crisp and cool as if it had been ordered from an autumn catalog, school started. Erica walked all three boys to West Meadow Elementary, their new backpacks filled with pencils, crayons, and notebooks. At school practically everyone, including women she barely recognized, expressed their concern about Debbie and asked if there was anything they could do to help. They noted that Erica looked tired and worn, albeit enviably skinny. “Must be the stress diet,” they sympathized. A few shared with her sad events from their own lives: a nineteen-year-old cousin run over by a truck, an aunt with melanoma. These tragedies, unlike her sister’s, struck Erica as truly random acts of fate.
Every day after aerobics, Erica visited Debbie in the hospital. The timing of her visits allowed her to avoid Ron, who came in the early afternoon, and Jared, who came after school, and her parents, who usually came at dinnertime. She didn’t deliberately try to avoid her parents, but their paths no longer coincided. Her mother never called. She never dropped over for coffee. She didn’t sell real estate. Sunday dinner seemed on permanent hold.
The smell of the hospital nauseated Erica, that blend of disinfectant and recirculated fear. It amazed her that she’d ever wanted to work in such an environment. When she visited Debbie, she sat in a chair with wooden armrests, the seat upholstered with an itchy polyester weave, and blabbed inanely about her kids, about her exercise classes, even about the weather. Most days, tiring of one-way conversation, she watched baseball. A new cable channel rebroadcast games at any time of day. The apparently invincible Mets coasted toward victory, clinching the division title in mid-September. Meanwhile, the Yankees struggled, never catching up to the odious Red Sox. Debbie watched the images flicker across the screen with attention, but it did not seem to matter to her whether Dave Winfield hit a grand slam or Mookie Wilson struck out, or an aging actress sang the praises of Metamucil. She sucked on her lips and sometimes drooled. Occasionally her eyes blurred with tears.
One afternoon Erica made it to Babyland and bought Sophia a toddler bed. Having now achieved her goals of escaping both crib and playpen, Sophia set her attentions on escaping from her stroller. As Erica took her on long walks around the neighborhood, she pulled and bit at the nylon strap. But despite Sophia’s earnest efforts, the locking clip remained intact.
Out of habit or obsession, or both, Erica found herself always walking past Nick’s house. If he opened the door again, she told herself, she would say a distant and polite hello, maybe make a little innocuous conversation like she did, say, with Mrs. Kaiser next door. Every day as she approached his house, she practiced that conversation in her mind, but Nick never reappeared. Walking by one day she saw a For Sale sign out front. After that, she chose a different walking route and bought her iguana supplies at the PetMart in Roosevelt Field. She enrolled in an advanced step aerobics class, mastering routines requiring a complex series of steps, leaps, and arm motions. In class, this captured all of her attention, and walking back to the childcare room, she replayed the moves in her head.
Every two weeks she gave Anders a call and met up with him on Utopia Boulevard. She never got to know him any better. She kept telling herself she would cut down, she truly would, because it wasn’t fun anymore, and her nose bled, and her heart beat too fast. But then two weeks would roll around again, and she got scared of feeling worse than she already did. She kept telling herself she no longer desired cheap happiness, that she no longer believed in that illusory sense of power and clarity. But in reality she sucked up any kind of happiness that might be on offer, and she desperately needed power and clarity, if only she could find it again. She played Jared’s music constantly, and bought more of its like in the “alternative” section of Tower Records, next door to PetMart. She understood heavy metal now. Heavy metal wasn’t about melody or dreaminess or romance or anything else she’d ever associated music with. Heavy metal wasn’t really about music. You listened to it to drown out the chatter of your mind, to crush and obliterate.
Ethan gave testimony to the SEC with the intent of absolving himself of responsibility. The legal proceedings required his presence in New York, but Erica found she actually preferred the weeks he spent in Florida. She had pictured a trial, with judges and juries and witnesses, but all the proceedings actually took place behind closed doors, just Ethan and the lawyers talking. On those days, he came home late and said little, kissing the kids good night, eating dinner in front of the TV, and deflecting inquiries.
“Did they ask you about Stephan Langston?” she ventured.
“Oh yeah, Langston, Stanley, the whole crowd,” he sneered.
“You’d rat on those guys? You worked with them every day. We went to parties together.”
“What do you think this is, the Mafia?” Ethan fiddled with Dylan’s Rubik’s Cube. “Say, did Anders give you Dylan’s soccer schedule yet?”
“Oh yeah, he did,” replied Erica, flustered. She was still thinking about Shelley Stanley, her self-conscious couture and her nervous friendly chatter. Her balding, bellicose husband Stew with a propensity for belting out the University of Maryland fight song. Stephan Langst
on with his cracked horn-rim glasses, his fidgety fingers. She would not have sold out on these friends, these coworkers, these people no better than her. She would have let them be.
“Did you pick up my shirts at the cleaners?’“ Ethan placed the Rubik’s Cube, colors aligned, on top of the stack of records that still wobbled on the back of the TV.
In the beginning of October, the Nassau County Police finally called her in for an interview in a stale-smelling, institutional room in the Mineola courthouse. They began by asking her about her connection with Nick Stromboli; she told them they were old friends from their school days. They’d found her name in Nick’s infamous phone book, but apparently Nick, in exchange for immunity, had given them names of cocaine suppliers from Queens to Texas. That explained his quick disappearance and satisfied the police. That wasn’t why they were questioning her. There were bigger fish to fry in the Stromboli case. Instead, hers was one of those uncomfortable yet newly classified domestic violence cases. They didn’t care about any drugs she might have bought, except as it pertained to Jared. Jared had admitted to the pot smoking, but the prior officers hadn’t found any in her possession, and it wasn’t as if she was his teacher or guardian, so all that earned her was a lecture, and then they moved off the subject of drugs.
The cops asked her what she knew about Jared’s relationship with Ashley, about their sojourn in Philadelphia, about the Pritima Center and Jared’s escape from there. In answer to all these questions, Erica supplied half-truths and mild lies. Erica told them that Jared was terrified of Ron, that Ron had hit him since he was a little child. She told them that he beat Debbie also, that Jared had confirmed it, that she’d seen the bruises. They asked for concrete evidence, but Erica could provide none. All these years, she’d never reported anything to the authorities. Jared didn’t have any visible injuries, and as for Debbie, weren’t those bruises the result of her medical condition? Now, if maybe she could call them when the abuse was actually occurring, they could do something. Although, the police admitted, it was too late for that.
But the police could find no concrete evidence of Erica’s misdeeds either. They never produced witnesses from small Southern towns. They’d called Justine, and she’d given them the address of her time-share in Amagansett.
The officers shuffled their papers. One of them opened his knees unflatteringly and scratched the inside of his thigh. Erica looked out the smudged window; late-afternoon sun glinted off the cars in the parking lot. The days were getting shorter. By the time she got home, after picking up the twins from a playdate, Dylan from Hebrew, and Sophia from Lisa’s, it would be dark.
“Have you already spoken with my brother-in-law, Ron Lassler?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Officer Scratchy, who appeared to be in charge.
“And Jared Lassler?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What did they say?”
“We’re not at liberty to tell you that, ma’am.”
“You told me that domestic violence is a crime.” Emboldened enough that her anger outweighed her fear, Erica sat up super straight and heard her voice rise high and tight.
“Yes, ma’am, it’s a crime now,” said Officer Scratchy. “But as you said, it’s domestic. It takes place privately, and for any criminal prosecution, we need facts. We need witnesses. And we don’t have any.” The other policemen nodded in agreement.
They dismissed her with a handshake. Erica couldn’t determine from the policemen’s professional cool demeanor whether they believed a word she said or for that matter anything that Ron and Jared said, whether these official inquiries would land anywhere except a filing cabinet, whether it would ever matter. She doubted it. Vacancy enveloped her. All of this would come to nothing. Nothing as disastrous as she had feared, but nothing good—no more explosions but only a gray, sad fading away. She recalled her frenzied drive back and forth from South Carolina—the dark, empty mountain roads, the thick heat of the day, the speed, the fear, the absolute vivid intensity of it—with something bordering on nostalgia. Walking to the car, she passed the cops standing by a coffeepot, bantering about the upcoming Jets game.
: : :
At noon the next day she positioned herself by the cluster of trees at West Meadow High. Erica had not seen Jared in over a month, and the sight of him, sipping a milkshake, chatting with a petite girl in a tight orange T-shirt, jarred her. His Pritima Center buzz cut had totally grown out, and he’d gained some weight, but his jeans and shirt were stained and wrinkled.
“Not doing much laundry, huh?” was the first thing that popped out of her mouth.
“I just pick stuff up off the floor,” Jared shrugged. “Mom always did the wash. What are you doing here at school?”
“I needed to talk to you somewhere where your father wouldn’t find out.”
They walked over by the football field. “Dad’s sending me to military school,” he said. “Next week. They’ve got the contracts signed and everything.”
“Oh no!” Erica cried. “Can’t you do anything about it?”
Jared shrugged. “No,” he said flatly. “I can’t.”
“Have you seen Ashley, by the way? I haven’t seen her since Ocean City.” Out of the corner of her eye, Erica could still see the girl in the orange T-shirt staring at them.
“Her mom sent her away to school,” Jared said. “Some boarding school in Vermont where they shear sheep and spin the yarn or something.” Jared shifted his feet back and forth. He looked back at the girl.
Erica took a deep breath. “The police questioned me yesterday,” she said. “Did they speak to you?”
“Yeah, of course,” Jared said. “They asked me about you, and I told them you were my favorite aunt and my good friend and that you’d helped me out a lot with problems with my parents and stuff. That you weren’t a dork like every other adult I seem to encounter. But I told them I ran away from the Pritima Center of my own accord. That I saw that agricultural extension lady leave, and when the garbage truck came in, I followed her out. Apparently they’d checked with the agriculture bureau down there, and they said they hadn’t sent anyone, but I said, so what, maybe she was some crazy lady who snuck in to steal food or whatever—there’s all sorts of strange people in South Carolina, believe me. Then I told them I hitched a ride to Ocean City where I met Ashley. That’s what we’d planned to say—what Ashley suggested—if things didn’t work out. I mean, don’t worry about Ashley giving you up to the police. She’s crazy about you.”
Their plans. They’d planned ahead. They’d considered that things might not work out. At no point had such contingencies remotely crossed Erica’s mind. Her breath felt sharp in her chest.
“I told them I hated the Pritima Center,” Jared was saying, “And those religious nuts and the whole stupid South. I told them how they made me landscape, like, six hours a day, and it made my asthma go out of control.”
“Did you tell them about your dad, how he hits you?” Erica asked. “And did you tell them how he hit your mom?”
“No,” Jared said. “What’s the point anymore?”
“There’s still a point,” Erica insisted. “The point is that it’s very wrong. Domestic violence is an official crime now. Your dad shouldn’t get away with it, and your mom can’t defend herself anymore, not that she ever did. I told them everything I knew, but it’s not going to mean a damn thing unless you corroborate what I said.”
“I’m going away to military school,” Jared said, slurping the dregs of his milkshake. “Next time I see Dad, I can bash his head in if I want to.”
“What about your mother?”
“Like he can hurt her more than she’s already hurt? Plus, I told you, he hit her only that once. If he hit her at all. Last time he was aiming at you.” Jared threw the paper cup into a trash can across the path; it missed and rolled onto the grass.
“It’s not fair,
” Erica said, her voice rising. “We can’t just let it go after all this.”
The lunch bell rang.
“I gotta go to Spanish,” Jared said.
“Can I see you before you leave? Come by with a CD,” Erica said.
“I better not,” he said. “I feel like my father’s watching me all the time, even when I know he’s at work.”
She reached her arms out toward Jared. He smelled like pastrami sandwich and hair gel. She felt the brush of downy beard against her forehead.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“I saved your ass, Aunt Rikki,” Jared said softly. “What more do you want from me?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Erica and Ethan put their house on the market. The meetings with the lawyers had ended, but so had Ethan’s welcome at Grant Fishel’s Manhattan office. Erica tore through the rooms of their house, discarding broken, boring, and duplicate toys; pants with ugly stitching; goods she’d ordered from catalogs and never gotten around to unpacking. She no longer remembered why she had bought these items, and she supposed she should hold a garage sale or give them to charity, but that required too much effort. She threw them all in the trash. Sometimes, struck by a compulsion to replace what she was discarding, she drove to the supermarket. The rows of food looked colorful and beautiful, such an abundance there for the eating. She bought way too much: zucchinis, tomatoes, the last of the summer peaches, a giant watermelon, a ten-dollar jar of Spanish capers, a coconut cake from the in-store bakery. She found herself eating even though she wasn’t hungry, just because the food looked so pretty and tasted good on her tongue. Such a reliable companion, food. Of course, excess consumption necessitated an extra call to Anders.
Out in the standard world, October proceeded as scheduled, bleaching the stickiness out of the air and granting West Meadow a brief moment of glory. Even the fumes from the expressway evaporated into the crisp air. The leaves turned scarlet. Erica sent out invitations to Sophia’s first birthday party and bought her a doll with long yellow hair and a set of stuffed calico cows. Dylan’s soccer schedule kicked into high gear. One Sunday in mid-October they escaped the parade of families inspecting their house and drove to a tournament fifty miles out in Riverhead. Dylan scored a winning goal. The sun sparkled off the trees. On the way home, they stopped at a farm stand and bought a freshly baked raspberry pie.
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