The Comedown

  “You could call it that,” she said, clearly uncomfortable. “Anyway, I didn’t make anything of it, because his roommate was kind of an asshole if I’m remembering this correctly, I figured he was just trying to mess with both of us. So I told him to take Leland out for some drinks or something and then send him my way. By the time it was eleven and Leland wasn’t there, I figured it was over. But then there was a knock on my door at four a.m. and there he was, stinking of grain liquor.” She paused, held her hand to her mouth, and Caleb helplessly remembered every moment he’d daydreamed about her, every surge of warmth he’d felt for her. “He really did stink. And he just sort of staggered into the room like Frankenstein’s monster, calling out for me, like, I don’t know, like he was getting little shocks of electricity. And he saw me and just started talking instantly, like he’d been telling me a story for hours, picked up in midsentence. It was about how his suicide ‘would close a logical loop.’ And then my roommate ran out screaming. I told him to be quiet but he wasn’t hearing me. He did that for an hour until I called the campus police.”

  “Close a logical loop?”

  “It was something about how his father was illogical, or invalid, like a math problem. And Leland not being alive closed that loop somehow? The one Leland Sr. opened up by being born.”

  “Okay? But who gave the diagnosis?”

  “The campus psychiatrist.”

  Caleb felt his muscles slacken. “A licensed psychiatrist? Did he have to pay to see him? Did he bill his insurance?”

  “No, um, back then every student received free counseling. We just had to pay for the meds.”

  And he hadn’t taken the meds. No paper trail. Absolutely no paper trail. As if to commemorate their sudden good luck, there flickered across Caleb’s mind an illustration from a magazine article, a pastel brain with a bundle of dynamite at its center. It was from a story he’d read in Time about how environmental factors could “activate” symptoms of mental illness. He’d read it bored in the dentist’s office, quietly congratulating himself on having his first root canal at thirty-eight. If he could get some doctor who could testify that drugs were one such environmental stressor—he already had a few ideas in mind—then he could use the bipolar to his advantage, build a case for Lee “awakening” a disease in Leland that would’ve remained dormant without his malicious interference. That was a great term: “malicious interference.” Maybe he could even argue that the disease had progressed in some way—schizophrenia was worse than bipolar, from what he understood. He would look up EDM, see how many people had died from taking it, or at the very least lost their minds. There had to be more than a few.

  Jocelyn was standing close to him now. His resolve thawed and he shuddered. The way she was basically pressed against him, the flurry of e-mails she’d sent him, the looks she’d given him in his rental car at the funeral all those years ago: he knew women well enough to know she had some kind of fantasy where he got debarred for having sex with her on the judge’s bench—he could tell she was the kind of woman who was obsessed with professionals, whose kinks probably involved the sacrifice of a six-figure salary for the chance to eat her out. The obviousness of her dewy e-mails had made him smile: “Just checking in to see how you’re doing” (right after the funeral), “Saw your photos on your mom’s blog—so handsome” (when he’d graduated from Berkeley), “We know we’d be in capable hands with you” (a little over a week ago). He wondered how much she was keeping track of. His juvenile justice work in Cleveland? All his unsuccessful lawsuits against those racist cops? The Good Samaritan cases he’d filed against slum landlords, the meager ten- to fifteen-thousand-dollar settlements—the stuff that was turning his hair gray? He was like Obama, barely in office a year and already showing some silver around the ears. How many hours had Caleb spent in the mirror, inspecting the errant sprigs of old-man hair interrupting his seamless fade? How many women had mewled for him to please come back to bed, asking if he’d “fallen in”—only for him to respond that he was fine, just last night’s Tanqueray. Because for some reason puking up Tanqueray was less embarrassing to him than the idea that he was getting older and had not yet accomplished the thing for which he would be remembered, had instead busied himself chipping away at the system brick by flinty brick, assuming he was comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, leaving instead an inches-deep concavity easily paved over after his death.

  She’d earmarked his face at that funeral ten years ago and now she’d finally found a safe reason to bring him into her world. Her husband needed help, had suffered a psychotic break, and had been in the hospital for nearly a month. The toxicology report implicated the punk half brother, the little eulogizer from Leland Sr.’s funeral. Yet it was a case riddled with conflicts of interest—if he were a perfect attorney, he wouldn’t allow himself to take it. But he knew that these were the kind of people who always thought their choice of legal defense was unquestionable. They were used to being right and would pay any amount to prove it. Case in point: he’d said something about having to factor in the cost of the commute and Jocelyn had offered to pay him double his hourly rate with a Pavlovian rapidity he’d rarely witnessed in clients.

  Trying not to think about what was happening, he squeezed her hand once and let go. Self-conscious now, she backed away from him and sat down in a chair below the room’s single window, worrying her little bird-hands in her lap. A nurse appeared, indicating that Leland had just finished group therapy and was now receiving visitors. Caleb turned to Jocelyn.

  “Go in without me,” she said.

  He took a seat at a centrally located plastic table. Of course Leland Jr. would find himself in this country club after having a psychotic break, the walls painted orange and yellow, the nurses musing pleasantly about the warmer-than-usual spring. No state-hospital screaming, nobody held in six-point restraints, no women begging for someone (him) to believe them that they were being raped. He suffered a tight bolt of anger down his throat, then relaxed into his exhaustion.

  If his mom was here, she’d harp on the fact that white folks went to this place and everyone else went to prisonlike psychiatric hospitals. She’d harp on the wealth disparity and how one of the side-effects of oppression is mental illness. She’d be right, of course, but she wasn’t a lawyer and now she’d lived in a country with socialized health care for quite some time.

  Leland Jr. was being led by two orderlies, looking far more state hospital than country club, pilling his fingers, licking his lips. He was too thin, his cheeks sharp and almost dimpled from it, and his hair was a fuzzy, silvering nest that Caleb realized, with more pity than awe, made him look young by comparison. Leland Jr. had clearly been working hard, or drinking hard, or something in the years since Caleb last saw him at Leland Sr.’s funeral. The nurse deposited him at the table across from Caleb and left.

  “I know why you’re here,” Leland Jr. said as he shifted his eyes from the table to meet Caleb’s, his words uninflected.

  “I never doubted that,” Caleb said.

  Leland Jr. then pressed the heels of his hands into his temples and shouted, “NO! NO ALREADY!” Caleb jumped, then felt guilty for jumping even though no one else had seemed to notice. Leland Jr. raised his eyes and said, “You ever get ringing in your ears and you’re terrified it’ll never go away?”

  “When I’m sleep deprived, yeah.”

  “Imagine it being a small voice,” Leland Jr. said. “Like a child’s voice.”

  Unsure where this was going, Caleb diverted the conversation. “I’m here to talk with you about your brother.”

  Leland Jr. laughed. “My brother? The victim? What is there to talk about?”

  “He may have given you something.”

  “Of course he did! He absolutely did—that’s what I’ve been arguing more or less all along.” He threw up his hands, a long-suffering defendant finally exonerated. “But I don’t hate him for it, and I’m not suing. Do you understand? I don’t hate him anymore.”<
br />
  “That’s all well and—”

  “Hating him the way I did made me sick. It made me a nastier shade of the person I really am. I don’t hate him because there’s nothing left in me to hate him. There’s no hate left in me. Look at me and tell me that you see a vengeful man who wants to sue an eighteen-year-old kid.”

  Caleb sighed. This was news. “Your wife has power of attorney,” he said. “And she’s suing.”

  “Well, tell her to stop. They have nothing. My brother wasn’t as lucky as I’ve been. He didn’t grow up with my comforts.”

  “He wasn’t as lucky?”

  “Right—he hates me, but he doesn’t mean to hate me, he just hates the circumstances of the world that make him hate me. The things that put him in his place, which is a place he didn’t ask to be in.” He made a spinning gesture with his index finger that seemed to encompass the entire room. “That’s what I’ve learned here.”

  “Leland, I’m going to ask you to remember whatever you can about your visit to Southgate.”

  Leland Jr. closed his eyes and whispered, “Stop it.” Caleb could now smell a waxy, unshowered scent coming off him. “I went to Southgate with my wife, at the urging of her, to make up with my brother. She had offered him a job at Lefébvre because she felt bad for him. She has a very big heart.” He shot a heavy-lidded look across the table that seemed to suggest Caleb, too, was a beneficiary of her very big heart.

  “Do you remember Lee acting suspicious in any way? Do you remember the dinner you had—Jocelyn said it was at an Italian restaurant?”

  “Of course he was acting suspicious!” he said, but more over his shoulder than to Caleb. “Yes, he was stoned out of his mind, he’s a kid, he’s poor, his father was poor, his whole family’s poor, okay?”

  Caleb had long learned to tune out clients who acted like Leland Jr. Instead he studied Leland Jr.’s face for traces of his father’s. They had the same incipient widow’s peak, the same beaked nose and converging eyes. Even their voices were similar—Caleb couldn’t believe he remembered this after all these years—the same reedy baritone that always sounded a little like it was about to crack. Leland Sr. had called him monthly during his first semester at Berkeley, wanting to just shoot the shit at the time, hear about Caleb’s classes and friends and girlfriend prospects. He’d always wanted to ask point-blank what role his mother had played in all this, but didn’t for fear she’d done nothing, that his going to college was a bizarre, one-time arrangement between himself and a cokehead who used to cop from his dad in the seventies. He didn’t want to think why he had been chosen instead of Aaron. Still, when he got notice that he’d been accepted to stay on and get his JD, he’d gone directly outside to the sticky pay phone on Hearst Avenue and called Leland, whose reaction was a breathed sigh and the words “Phenomenal. Just phenomenal.”

  Caleb was within inches of waving over a nurse, was already thinking about how he’d handle Jocelyn in the car, but Leland Jr.’s eyes betrayed what seemed like superior knowledge, and he stopped.

  “I should’ve let them have the briefcase,” Leland Jr. said. “The briefcase at least. I shouldn’t have robbed Diedre and the boy, I see that now.”

  “You didn’t rob anyone. If anything, you’ve been robbed—”

  “Shut up,” Leland Jr. said. “You’ve got to shut up, man. Please.”

  Caleb made accidental eye contact with a nurse.

  “What briefcase?” he asked.

  “TAKE IT BACK!” Leland Jr. yelled, and shoved himself from the table, nearly tipping over in his chair. “TAKE EVERYTHING BACK I TOOK, PLEASE, GOD!”

  The nurse glided toward them, smiling apologetically at Caleb. She put her hand on Leland Jr.’s back, asked him if he wanted to go to his room. Leland Jr. swatted her away and a larger male nurse sidled up behind him and held his hands at his sides. They both whispered things to Leland Jr. in either ear, things that, judging by the sudden slackening in his posture, Leland Jr. was actually hearing. He looked over his shoulder at Caleb and hissed, “Take it all back, or else my blood’s on your hands.”

  Caleb emerged from the ward to a pert and optimistic-seeming Jocelyn. They walked to the parking garage and she told him the whole story: the haymaker to her jaw, the Milwaukee hospital, the discharge and transfer to Rush, where she’d persuaded Leland Jr. to “voluntarily” commit himself for as long as it took to quiet his psychosis, the unknown whereabouts of Lee and some other kid, an accomplice.

  “They got kicked out of the school, as far as I know,” she said. “They’re probably at Lee’s mom’s place in Cleveland.”

  “No warrant out for their arrest?”

  She shrugged. “Well, no. And I think they managed to take a lot of their paraphernalia, so it’s clearly their drugs—”

  Caleb smiled. “Not the restaurant’s?”

  She smiled back, looked down, pulled her massive sweater tighter around her hips. He thought what he should’ve been thinking as he replied to that first e-mail she’d sent asking him to take on the case: Should I be doing this?

  “Not the restaurant’s,” she repeated.

  In her Prius, Caleb was reminded of his shitty rental at the funeral—either an ancient Civic or a Yugo, he knew only that it was cramped. A strange thing about the human brain was its homing instinct, as reliable as a roosting bird’s: he could be with her now and feel the same catch in his throat he’d felt ten years ago, could anticipate that catch happening again ten years down the line. He placed his hand on her thigh—the first time they’d touched this way—and she fidgeted with pleasure. She asked him how things had been in Cleveland all this time, and he said they’d been fine.

  She drove him directly to their River Forest McMansion, unbolted the door, and walked in ahead of him. Their winter coats were by the door—Leland Jr.’s and hers, hung on adjacent pegs—their laptops on the kitchen table, their laundry in a wicker basket abandoned halfway up the front steps. She didn’t apologize for the place being a mess, just kept two or three steps ahead of him, kicking aside shoes, shirts, cardboard boxes, bubble wrap. She opened a pizza box sitting on the kitchen island and shoved a piece in her mouth, then offered him one. He declined and set his briefcase on the counter behind her, watching her. What did he know about her? From Googling, that she was the daughter of the former lieutenant governor of Connecticut (current Woodward Foods CEO), that she was a marketing executive at a French ad agency who’d sung in a female a cappella group at Northwestern University. He knew that she came up to his shoulder, that her scalp was pink at her part, that her upper lip bore the impression of an old pockmark. From kissing, that she had a quick tongue and a tiny creature’s thrumming heartbeat, that she wrapped her legs around him nimbly.

  They fucked once and he had to pause for just fifteen minutes before they fucked again. He wasn’t thinking too hard about what any of it meant. He didn’t owe this family any hard thinking. He was, essentially, responding to a distress call from a bunch of rich white people, suing a half brother who’d caused a half brother mental anguish. Mom would call these his reparations. He took them over and over again, from every crevice Jocelyn made available to him, took them until she was sweating and laughing, laid out on her back looking up at him, saying could he please just give her five minutes in the bathroom to tidy up, she’d honestly never gone that long before. So he let her go and picked up his phone. A few messages from an intern about a class-action suit against the Cleveland Division of Police. An e-mail from a client begging for a waiver of the already low consultation fee. Then his phone was buzzing with an unknown number. He let it go through, as he always did. Five minutes later it was buzzing again. And again one minute later, the same number. On the fourth call he picked up. He heard ragged breathing, throat clearing.

  “Hello?” Caleb said. “You’ve called me four times now. It would be great to know what exactly you want.”

  “Caleb,” the voice said. “I’ve missed you. This what you sound like now?”

  He
held the phone away from his ear, then put it back again. “Who is this?”

  “I been wanting to hear how you sound for years,” the voice creaked. Then the sound of tears. “I knew it’d be different but fuck if it isn’t a full-grown man’s voice.”

  Caleb was sweating. “Tell me who you are or I’ll hang up and block this number.”

  “It’s Reginald Marshall,” the voice spat through its tears. “It’s your dad, goddamn! Just take a blessing when the world gives you one, boy.”

  JOCELYN WOODWARD

  (1973–)

  1991–2009

  Boston and Chicago

  Unlike other girls, Jocelyn hadn’t papered the walls of her childhood bedroom with photo collages. In fact, most of the bedroom walls were beige and bare—she’d expressed a vague desire to her mother to paint them light pink when she was eleven, and they’d never gotten around to it. She had a poster of her crush, Ian Curtis from Joy Division, on the wall across from her bed, and a butterfly made of wire and glittery pink mesh hanging from her ceiling—a gift from her grandma on her third birthday. It wasn’t until after her high school graduation that she finally put something on the wall next to her bed: a photo of her and her friends at the party she threw when she graduated from boarding school.

  In the photo, taken in 1991, big-haired Jocelyn stands in the center of the frame, all high cheekbones, bow lips, and long legs underneath her party dress, face pinched in imitation of a self-satisfied smile. She’s flanked by her friends, fellow Bostonians: all girls, all white, most of them like her but with bigger-than-normal hips, a mole, jagged bangs. Sandy (the big-hipped girl) had invited her younger brother—who went to Allenton Prep, St. Josephine’s brother school across the lake—to Jocelyn’s graduation party. He’d shown up foggy-eyed and had spiked the lemonade with vodka, getting everyone drunk in the middle of the day. Most of them had only been drunk once or twice before, and the novelty of it, plus the fact that they’d just graduated, had them through-the-roof ecstatic. The adults at the party, Jocelyn remembered, sort of just shrugged their shoulders and joined in. Her dad had gotten a little sloppy at the grill, putting a hand on her mother’s chest when she came over to kiss him. Her friends’ parents, seeing the lieutenant governor act like a teenaged boy, had followed suit. The party lasted until long after sundown.