A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  This is something about himself that Alec still doesn’t know: how much he was wanted, how difficult it was to have him. And during some moments of adolescent rebellion, and again during the wars over his dropping out of Hampshire, when he would scream that he wished he’d never been born, Elaine would grab his flailing arms, hold him still, and say, You can never say that. That’s the one thing you are never allowed to say.

  He was born at Round Hill Medical Center on July 4, 1985, nine fifteen at night. As we held Alec for the first time, the town fireworks began to whiz and bloom, celebrating 209 years of democracy in America and also, Elaine and I were certain, our son’s long-awaited arrival.

  AND SO THE steppe unfolded. Our boy reached a height of six foot four by his fifteenth birthday but, almost certainly to spite his old man, showed little to no interest in basketball. Instead, he began studying art, both at Round Hill Country Day and in private lessons with a local sculptor three evenings a week. Our living room filled with pieces of cherrywood or palm carved into abstracted parts of the female form: almost always gigantic breasts. Alec assured us this was serious Art, so what if our living quarters looked like a Dada bordello? He began painting, too, still lifes of flowers, lemons, and his iPod, or the contents of our bathroom garbage can. Once, he drew a picture of me dozing on the couch, just sketched it while I was sleeping there, completely vulnerable. He showed it to me the second I woke up, and the picture both embarrassed and moved me—how invasive, how impudent, to draw for posterity the way your father drools in his sleep, but then there was something loving, too, about the attention to detail, the way he caught the plaid of my collar, the uneven bump of my chin. I brought the picture to my office to hang up, but then got embarrassed and brought it back home.

  Thus Alec prospered in an entirely different direction than the one I would have expected, but prospered nonetheless, and so, happily, did my wife. Elaine had completed her PhD in English literature at the City University Grad Center a year after we moved to New Jersey, but she’d never plunged into the quicksand of the academic job market. She wasn’t much for competition, and also we’d been trying so hard to start a family — so she kept her PhD to herself, and not once did any invitations arrive at our house addressed to Dr. and Dr. Dizinoff.

  But when Alec began his sixth-grade year, Elaine suddenly felt the urge to go back to school herself. A few calls to former professors landed her an adjunct spot at Bergen State, where she was assigned the perpetually unpopular Beowulf-to-Chaucer survey. It was a position for which she would be criminally underpaid, but she threw herself into the course with gusto, and eventually the chair agreed to give her a per-course raise of five hundred dollars, which fanned her usually unfannable ego. Sometimes, in bed, we’d play variations of games wherein she was the sexy professor and I was the naughty student. I think she liked these assignations more than she would have initially guessed.

  And so this was how I galloped across my steppe, healthy and oblivious, even though people dear to me were strapped into their own hellish roller coasters and couldn’t find the escape latch. Or, to be less preposterous about it, almost fifteen years ago, my best friend, Joe Stern, had a problem with his daughter Laura, a terrifying problem — the kind of thing impossible to imagine when parenthood is new, the baby is six months old and drooling into her rice cereal, and your wife looks like the Madonna, long hair and clear skin, spooning Gerbers into the kid’s peachy face.

  The year Laura turned seventeen, there was a rash of neonaticides across New Jersey. Cheerleaders delivering at their proms, abandoning their babies in Dumpsters, that kind of thing. Iris said to Laura one morning, as the girl was heading out for school, Honey, can you even imagine? and Laura shook her head. Later that same afternoon she was admitted to Round Hill with major blood loss, and her baby, at twenty-five weeks’ gestation, was found dead in a trash can not too far from the Round Hill Municipal Library. Laura had delivered in the second-floor bathroom. The baby’s skull was crushed in like an egg.

  Was the baby alive when Laura smashed its skull? That was the crux of the legal battle, and also, secondarily, whether or not Laura had been in her right mind. Joe and Iris, who’d been thinking of moving to the School District, immediately took their house off the market, probably with some relief. Iris was friendly with a wonderful big-firm litigator, and together they found Laura the very best representation to face off against the State of New Jersey, which was battling in the name of Baby Girl Stern. Joe took care of the psychiatric angle, and forget about Round Hill, they went to Columbia, the chief of adolescent psychiatry. Four days a week. Joe and Iris both began seeing therapists themselves and in their spare time tried to fend off the press.

  Where was I during that time? Looking back, all those years ago, it’s hard to remember exactly. Absorbed in my work, I guess, making money, worrying over some stocks and daydreaming about renovating the kitchen. I was captain of the JCC men’s basketball league, thirty-five-and-older division. So maybe that—and then of course there was parenthood, and work, and my own marriage, which was suffering from predictable twelfth-anniversary doldrums (Elaine wanted to try for more children; I refused to even talk about it). But I suppose, in the end, my absence was due to what it was for all of us: discomfort, the general impossibility of knowing what to say, a vague disgust at what Joe’s daughter had done, and the self-satisfaction of not having had it happen to us.

  But one morning, just after six, I was at the JCC shooting the ball around; Elaine’s snoring had woken me up. And who should walk in but Joe, whose calls I hadn’t answered in the past week and a half.

  “Jesus, Joe,” I said. He was gaunt; he’d lost at least ten pounds while I wasn’t paying attention. His Eagles T-shirt hung loose over his shoulders, and his shorts sagged.

  “Pete.” He nodded and threw his ball at me. “Twenty-one?”

  “Twenty-one,” I agreed, dropping my own basketball. Six in the morning was still early at the JCC, and we had the court to ourselves. I thought to myself, The nice guy would let him win, poor bastard, and then I thought, Joe would know if I was letting him win. So I brought up my game, played him hard, our sneakers squeaking on the polished wood. In sixteen minutes we were tied at twelve, and although Joe had elbowed me to the floor twice, I’d hung him up twice myself. In another ten minutes I’d won the game.

  “What are you doing now?” he asked as we toweled the sweat off our necks.

  “What am I doing?” All my days started the same way back then: the JCC, ten minutes in the sauna, then a shower, a stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts for a cinnamon cruller and a large coffee, in the office by 7:45. I’d always toss the doughnut bag in the lobby garbage to hide the evidence from Mina—she disapproved of sugar in the morning, or, frankly, ever.

  “You want to get breakfast?”

  I’d known him at that point for twenty years — I’d been the best man at his wedding, he was my only child’s godfather, I’d eaten a thousand meals with him. What made me feel so strange about eating one more?

  “Or if you’ve got to get going—”

  “Breakfast sounds great,” I said. “I was just thinking about eggs.”

  He had a nine thirty appointment, he said, on the Upper East Side — a Cornell psychiatrist nobody we knew had any ties to. His partners were taking on more than their share in the office so that he could attend to his family problems, his psychiatric needs and those of his daughter, his legal meetings, his lunch breaks with his wife. Joe was now only seeing his high-risk patients three afternoons a week. But still, he said, he liked to make time for breakfast.

  In the car, Imus blared from the radio. I moved to turn it off, but Joe said no, leave it, and we drove to the Old Lantern in silence except for Imus’s yammerings about Janet Reno’s decision to fire ninety-three federal attorneys. In the parking lot, I wedged my Lexus into a corner spot, and Joe and I dashed to the diner with our jackets over our heads. It had just started to rain.

  “So how’s Iris holding up?�
�� I asked after we had sat down and chitchatted the waitress into bringing us some coffee.

  “Iris?” Joe blinked. “You know,” he said. “She’s got everything all figured out. Spreadsheets.” It was an old joke between us that our wives were the brains of our respective operations, and we were just the appendages.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Budgets, strategy plans, doctors’ appointments, lawyers. The trial’s set for December.” Today was the last day of June. “This lawyer we hired, I called your brother about him. Phil and I talked the other night. He said he’s very good.”

  “Well, Phil knows the field,” I said, guilt-stabbed. My brother had managed to return Joe Stern’s calls, and I hadn’t.

  “He offered me Knicks tickets.”

  “He what?”

  Joe laughed, rubbed his hand on his bald head. It was the first smile I’d seen from him that morning.

  “Your fucking brother. He said, Joe, I know you’re going through a difficult time right now, and I’d like to offer you something to help. I have Knicks tickets, next week, right on the floor. I want you and Iris to have them.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I took ’em, too,” Joe said. “What the hell? It’ll be good to take Iris out to a game. You know how she ogles the players.” This was another joke between us, that our wives liked to fantasize about muscle-bound yahoos whenever circumstances allowed. As far as we knew, this wasn’t true about either one of them.

  The waitress came back for our order, a western omelet for me, oatmeal and a poached egg for Joe, and as she disappeared we lapsed again into silence. I wanted to ask about Laura—how she was doing, of course, and what her shrink thought, but also all the questions everyone else at Round Hill asked when we passed one another in hospital hallways, at the Grand Union, at the Garland Chophouse, where we took our Saturday dinners: How did they not know? He’s an ob-gyn, for Christ’s sake! A high-risk ob-gyn! Their own daughter!

  And then, in quieter whispers: Did she really bash in the skull? Just bash it in like a Wiffle ball? And then, quietest of all: So who was the father, anyway?

  “She’d stopped talking to us, that’s what it was,” Joe said after a few minutes. He’d been fingering the table-side jukebox, just like our kids did when we brought them here for milkshakes. The songs were throwbacks, they’d never really been popular—B sides by Donovan, Freddy Fender, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.

  “But everyone says that about teenagers — they just go silent one day—and what the hell did we know? Although now, looking back, Iris says she wouldn’t even let us touch her. That should have been a clue. She’d go to give her a hug, fix a button or something, and Laura would just shrink.”

  “Well, kids can—”

  “No, no. The psychiatrist said it’s one of the signs — one of the signs, a classic. They don’t want to be touched. They’re sure you’re going to be able to feel it. The baby.”

  “Joe, I don’t —”

  “She started wearing really baggy clothes — I don’t know. She always wore baggy clothes. She’s been stealing my old sweatshirts since she was twelve. She’s always been shy about her body.” He looked up at me as if for my approval. “Other girls in her class dressing up like Madonna, and there’s Laura in her huge flannel shirts and old jeans, her head in a book.”

  “She’s a modest kid.”

  Joe grunted. “So she’s not showing, of course she’s not showing. The end of her second trimester, she’s got the abdomen muscles of a seventeen-year-old, she’s hiding everything in flannel shirts. We’re supposed to chart her menstrual cycle or something? Count tampon wrappers in the bathroom?”

  “Of course not.”

  He waved me off. “That’s what New Jersey says. We should have known.”

  “Fuck New Jersey.”

  Joe shook his head. I paid closer attention than I should have to my coffee. Laura Stern—what did I know of her? It had been a couple of years since we’d spent time together down in Delaware, and even then she was so much older than the other kids, it had been easy not to see her at all. A heavy crust of teenage acne, flannel shirts, sure, and a precocious taste in literature, head always bent in something absurd, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss. Even at the beach. Who was she having sex with? Back when I was in high school, nobody had sex with the Laura Sterns.

  “The thing is,” Joe said, “we always felt close to her. Or I did, I guess. The other three were the kids, but Laura, she was like our lieutenant. Second in charge. We were so young when we had her, and she always had that grown-up thing about her. A serious kid. So smart.”

  “I know, Joe.”

  “So then what did she think we would have done to her, exactly? If we’d found out? What would we have done?”

  “She was just scared.”

  “But why? Why would she be scared of us? Doesn’t she know us?” It was this, I knew, that was really breaking his heart more than anything, even more than the library delivery and the dead baby in the garbage. His own daughter felt she couldn’t tell him the truth.

  “Listen, you can’t—”

  “Why didn’t she trust us?” His voice cracked and broke.

  Back to my coffee. I heard morning regulars shuttle in, the local dentists, the cops, Tim, who managed the Chophouse. Joe was still waiting for an answer.

  “She wouldn’t want you to know that she had a boyfriend,” I said. “Or that she was, you know, sexually active.”

  Joe didn’t say anything until the waitress brought our food to the table. “A boyfriend,” he said. “As far as I knew, she didn’t even have any friends.” I looked down at the burnt edges of my toast.

  “She could get life in prison,” Joe said. “They’re going to have a hearing, see if she should be tried as an adult.”

  “Oh God,” I said. “Ah, Joe … I don’t—”

  “That’s what New Jersey wants, since she’s only ten months shy of eighteen. So they try her as an adult, and they win, she gets life in an adult prison. No possibility of parole for thirty years.”

  He closed his eyes, then opened them and looked straight at me with his bleak, bloodshot gaze. “Can you believe that, Pete? My little girl, in jail for the rest of her life?”

  “That won’t happen.” Although why wouldn’t it?

  “But what do we do? What can we do?” His eyes trapped me. “Pete, we’ll bankrupt ourselves before that happens. We’ll spirit her to Mexico. We’ll figure it out. I’m not kidding.”

  “Joe, that won’t happen.”

  “Thirty years in medium-security prison. Do you know what those places are like? Do you know what can happen to a girl like Laura in a place like that?”

  “Listen—”

  “She’ll be in confinement, no community, no visits except behind bars, plate glass, no future, her company is murderers and gang members, she’s alone, she grows old, we die, and she’s still behind bars.”

  “Come on—”

  But he waved me off.

  “Come on,” I said again. I don’t know why.

  Laura was born our first year out of college, when we were all just twenty-three. Joe and Iris were in Philly together, Iris for an MBA at Wharton, and Joe at Temple for medical school; they’d spent the summer before they started school trying to figure out if they should get engaged or move on to less familiar horizons, since they’d been dating for three years already, after all. Then, during her first week of school and Joe’s third, Iris found herself throwing up between classes, exhausted in the afternoons. Joe proposed, they were married over winter break, Laura was born in early spring. A redhead, just like Iris.

  I remember those days with fondness, although of course I wasn’t the one trying to juggle an MBA course load with a newborn, or living with my parents and sisters and brand-new wife in the one- bathroom North Philly row house where I’d grown up. In those days, I was comfortably stationed in a dorm at Mount Sinai, and Elaine shared a big two-bedroom on Colum
bus with two roommates; what did we know about cramped and broke? What did we know about mastitis, no privacy, kid sisters taking forty-five-minute baths and the baby needing to be changed and the diapers in the bathroom vanity and everyone in the house screaming? Elaine and I knew nothing — in fact, the cheeriness of home-cooked meals and little babies appealed to us, so we took weekend drives to see Joe and Iris whenever we could tear ourselves away from New York. We liked to walk Laura, in her little stroller, to the zoo or Fairmount Park, let Joe and Iris take in a movie by themselves. Elaine and I were engaged but planned to marry only after I finished medical school. When we visited Joe and Iris for the weekend, Mrs. Stern made us sleep in separate rooms.

  After their graduate degrees, the Sterns moved to Baltimore; Joe did his training at Hopkins, and Iris took a job in the corporate services division at First Mariner Bank. They put Laura in nursery school and day care and worked long hours, but despite their benign neglect, the girl seemed to be growing into a well-behaved and intelligent little person. She was fond of finger painting—well, all children are — but Iris treated Laura’s finger paintings as if they were real masterpieces, getting them nicely framed and hanging them above the mantel. And you know, all dressed up like that, the paintings sort of looked like modern art. Elaine cooed about them; we all did.

  “And I’m not surprised they’re blaming us, you know?” Joe said, putting down the salt shaker he’d been fiddling with. “If it were someone else’s kid, I’d blame the parents, too.”