“You wouldn’t—”
“I mean, I think I want to be blamed. I want it to be my fault. I don’t want it to be hers. It was us, we were shitty parents, we deserve this.”
“But you’ve been wonderful parents, Joe,” I said. What would Elaine say here? I tried to channel my wife. “To all four of your kids, you’ve been wonderful parents.”
“I’m an obstetrician, Pete, and I didn’t even see my own daughter’s pregnancy.”
“She wore baggy clothes — you said it yourself.”
“I would have sworn on my life she was a virgin.”
“Come on.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. If he cried—well, that made sense. Had it been me, maybe I would have cried, too. Alec was eight years old back then and the idea that my own child could be a stranger to me while he lived in my house, that while I worked to keep him warm and clothed and fed, he could harbor terrified secrets — I thought of Alec’s fragile shoulders, his bowl of silky brown hair. I thought of the way he murmured in his sleep, fragments of television commercials, Top 40 songs.
“We’ll spirit her to Mexico. You’ll help us, Pete. You’ll help us get her out.”
I nodded. There was nothing to say but, “Of course.”
“We’ve got her on antidepressants. Now Iris is taking them, too. Maybe I’ll start. They don’t seem to be helping that much, but I like the idea of medicating my way out of this.”
“Do you think you’re depressed, Joe?”
“I’m not depressed.” He rolled up his napkin in his hand. “I’m just sad.”
My omelet, flecked with red and pink and green, looked garish, ridiculous, barely like food. I picked up my fork, poked at it.
“At least the kids don’t know what’s going on. I mean, Neal knows something’s up, and we’ve tried to ask around it, to see how much he’s figured out. But he just thinks Laura’s sick, and he doesn’t want to know more than that, thank God.”
“Thank God.”
“Something like this, it’s so beyond them. It’s so beyond us—how couldn’t it be beyond them? How could they even understand it? How could we explain it to them?”
“Of course you’re not going to talk to a second-grader about what happened.”
He looked at me sharply. “You don’t talk to your kids, that’s how they get in trouble, Pete.”
“Yeah, but—”
“You gotta talk to them. You’ve got to know what’s going on.”
“In the second grade?”
“You underestimate your kids, they’ll crush you. They’ll crush you with what you never could have expected.”
As for me, I thought there was a big space between underestimating your kids and terrifying them, and Joe’s sweet-faced little babies — let them be the last people in Round Hill not to know what Laura had done. When Pauline was born, four years earlier, we’d delighted that there was another baby girl; we slicked Alec’s hair and put him in a button-down shirt for Pauline’s naming at Temple Beth Shalom. I remember watching him watch the newborn little girl and jealously eyeing Neal, who was protective about his new sister. “How come Neal gets one?” He tugged at my sleeve. “How come Neal gets a sister and I don’t?”
I shook my head. So many times in this life I’ve had no idea what to say. But then I had an inspiration. “You know, if you ask nicely, maybe Neal will share his.”
Kids hate to share. “Why can’t I have my own?”
“Because you’re our one and only.” This was lame, I knew, but he seemed to take it okay, plugged his thumb in his mouth, and I was hugely grateful for this odd moment of complacency.
I wanted to find Laura Stern and shake her, hard. Her parents would have taken the baby in. We would have taken her in.
“She wasn’t viable.” Joe took a bite of his oatmeal, put the spoon down still half-full. “That’s the thing of it. She wasn’t viable. The autopsy proved it.”
“Conclusively?” I said. “Well, that’s good, right?”
“I’ve seen babies like that, Pete, underweight, underdeveloped lungs,” he said. “Even if you stick ’em in a NICU for fifteen weeks, there’s no guarantee they’ll survive. They’re blind, you know, more than half the time. Brain-damaged. And sometimes they just die no matter what. But if they live, it’s no kind of life.”
“So that’s good, then, for your case.”
“We have to prove it, though. It’s very tough to prove whether a baby was alive when it was born.”
“Can’t an autopsy look for oxygen in her lungs, something?” This was something we never discussed in medical school.
“They could still get her for mutilating a corpse.”
I nodded. “Sure.” Mutilating a corpse.
“She could get eighteen months just for that.”
“Well, that’s … better than the alternative.”
Look, I’d been in the restrooms in the Round Hill Municipal Library. Mint-colored tiles rimmed with black. Old-fashioned pedestal sinks. Lots of mirrors. So I couldn’t help thinking, the stalls — did she use the handicapped stall? — even so, it would have been no larger than a walk-in closet. She probably birthed crouching over the toilet. And then she took the nearest heavy object (or had she come prepared? a hammer? her little brother’s baseball bat?) and cracked in the wailing newborn’s skull. Took it to the Dumpster behind the library. She used a sweatshirt to clean up the blood from the bathroom floor; the sweatshirt was now official property of the state. And although I didn’t want to think about it, I couldn’t stop myself: Where was the baby when she cleaned up the blood? On the floor? In a sink? Was the skull cracked yet? Was it alive? Crying? Twenty-five weeks: The baby was blind, almost certainly in respiratory distress. Lying on a bathroom floor. Its skull as thin as parchment.
“What are you thinking?” Joe, my oldest friend, asked me.
“Nothing.” I forked tasteless, ridiculous food into my mouth. I wondered if he’d ever asked her: Was the child alive? I wondered what she’d said, if she’d even known.
Laura was bleeding profusely: uterine atony, postpartum hemorrhage. She must have been terrified, but she had her wits about her enough to take a cab to the hospital. The cab driver was going to testify for the state that the girl seemed calm, reasonable. The only thing out of the ordinary was the blood. He didn’t ask questions, and Laura didn’t tell anyone the baby’s whereabouts until the next morning. The police waited until the Ativan wore off and the family’s lawyers arrived.
“We buried her in Iris’s family plot,” Joe said. “Next to Iris’s mother.”
I swallowed.
“We had Rabbi Ross come, give a blessing. Iris and I went by ourselves. Laura didn’t want to come. That was fine. My mother stayed with her. Rabbi Ross came out, said a few words. Maybe we’ll put up a headstone some day. I don’t know.”
“Well,” I said, while secretly I was thinking, But won’t they need the body for evidence? I was thinking, Is that even legal? To bury the victim before the verdict? But isn’t the baby in New Jersey’s protection now? What I knew about the law you could fit in a teaspoon.
Lying in the sink of the Round Hill Municipal Library. Waiting for its skull to be crushed in like a can.
“We gave her a name.”
I blinked stupidly.
“The rabbi asked if we wanted to. I didn’t know what to say, but Iris said yes, we did. She said it was the right thing to do.”
He was whispering again, in that fluorescent-lit diner. Our big-bosomed waitress dipped by with her coffeepot, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap crooned on someone else’s jukebox, eggs cooled in front of us, New Jersey rush hour traffic whizzed outside. But in our booth, all was still.
“We couldn’t let her go to heaven as Baby Girl Stern,” Joe whispered. “We just couldn’t let that happen. She needed a name. Iris was right.”
“Heaven, Joe?”
“We named her Sara,” he said. “That was Iris’s mother’s name.”
“Well
,” I said. “Well, that’s a nice name.”
Although I desperately wanted to, I couldn’t look away, so I watched a tear leak from his eyes and trace a spidery path down his cheek.
“Ah, Joe.”
But then, thank God, he blew his nose, rubbed his bald spot again, and apologized that he really had to go, he was sorry, he had a psychiatric appointment to make, and this goddamn doctor charged too much for him to risk being late.
“I’ll call you, Joe,” I said as I dropped him back at his car in the JCC lot.
“That would be great, Pete,” he said. “We’re busy with everything, but—”
“I’ll call you,” I said. But for some reason I kept imagining Sara Stern in a Dumpster behind the library, her skull caved in like a soft piece of fruit, and it took me many weeks to pick up the phone.
I’M A LUCKY MAN, I know that. I was lucky that morning, listening to someone else’s terrible news, and I’m even lucky now, warm in my studio, an unpredictable shower awaiting me in the tiny bathroom, and then a lumpy futon, the squall of the Kriegers outside. The lingering scent of my son’s oil paints in the air in this large-enough room. My son, my wife, my job, my mother, my brother. I have done enough damage to lose them all, but something tells me that no matter how much I deserve to, I won’t lose them entirely. This doesn’t necessarily feel right, but I am chained to my good fortune.
And then the cell phone rings. My wife? No, it’s my old friend Joe, who must have sensed I was thinking about him. What does he want with me now? What’s there for us to talk about? Joe has my future balanced on his fingertips and he knows it. This whole malpractice case—one soft exhale, and he could blow my whole life and livelihood away. It’s an uncomfortable position for old friends to be in, but there it is. My cell phone stops ringing, catches its breath, starts up again. I watch it go, lights and vibrations and an electronic version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Joe doesn’t leave a message. I turn my cell phone off.
I miss talking to Joe sometimes, I really do.
Two neighborhood tomcats are fighting outside; they’ve both got the springtime joneses, but most of the female cats around here have been spayed. The pickings are slim. I like April, never mind Eliot; I like the tomcats, the optimism in the magnolias, the secretaries taking off their stockings, outdoor cups of coffee, smokers clustering again by the front entrance to the hospital. Joe and I used to take long bike rides up the Palisades the first warm Sunday of the month, snow sometimes still receding into the hawthorns along the highway.
Roseanne Craig said to me once that in Northern California it was always springtime, until suddenly, for reasons she still didn’t quite understand, she woke up and it was winter.
AFTER MY BREAKFAST with Joe that morning, I went to the office, unsettled. My patients didn’t notice, but Mina did, and she made decaf in the afternoon instead of regular. I took off by six, no rounds, and back at home Elaine and I made spaghetti while Alec was at soccer practice. I poured us each a big glass of dolcetto before we even got started.
Although we both enjoyed it when it happened, Elaine and I rarely cooked together. She was content to do the lifting in the kitchen in exchange for my dish washing and coffee brewing afterward. Still, every once in a while the urge struck, and she and I would make something simple and happy together: fried chicken, spaghetti and meatballs. That night, still hopped up on guilt and shivers, I thought cooking with my wife would settle me. I downed my wine quickly, and she put NPR on the little kitchen transistor, the market report.
Elaine and I had been married long enough to feel as though the exchange of a few sentences was a momentous conversation, which was all right; what I mean is that we were as comfortably quiet together as most couples we knew, and relied on oldies-but-goodies (Alec, vacation plans, bills) to keep the engine of our marital discourse lubed. Now, of course, we had an enormous thing to talk about in the form of our oldest friends’ daughter, and I was glad not only to have Elaine to talk to, but also, perversely, to have something new to talk about with Elaine.
“They gave the baby a name,” I said as casually as I could, chopping oregano while she scraped carrots into the sink.
“Sara,” she said.
“You knew that?”
“Iris asked me if I knew what the rules were for naming the dead. We talked a couple days ago.”
“What did you tell her?” Elaine and I had been lapsed Jews for many years, but she’d been raised in a semi-Orthodox home in Squirrel Hill, the Jewish part of Pittsburgh; her father had been a cantor, and her mother the longtime president of the Temple Sisterhood. My wife had a religious streak she didn’t try to hide, and a certain depth of Judaic knowledge.
“I told her that whatever she wanted to name the baby was fine, as far as I knew. I was surprised, though. First of all, she never really liked her mother. Remember how she used to bitch? Second, you’d think the name would be up to Laura.”
I was surprised enough to put down my knife. “Why would Laura get to name the baby?”
“She’s the mother,” Elaine said. It was ten of seven, and the light in the kitchen was just starting to slant. I took a bulb of garlic from the basket hanging near the window and started peeling its papery skin.
“She also murdered the child.”
“Murdered? That’s what you think happened?”
“Elaine—”
“You don’t know that. We’re all so quick to condemn, all of us. But we have no idea if the baby was alive, we have no idea what was in that poor girl’s head—”
“She crushed its skull.”
“You don’t know why she did it.”
“So you’re pleading insanity?”
“I’m not pleading anything,” Elaine said. She threw the carrots into the salad bowl and wiped her hands on her jeans. “I just think we should show our friends a little loyalty, and Laura, too. We’ve known her all her life.”
I was honestly surprised at Elaine’s reasoning. Rarely did she disagree with me so staunchly. “I’m being disloyal?” I said.
“You’re not the judge here.”
“Who said I was?”
“Listen, I know how you think. You’re a moralist, you know? You live in black and white. Gray is beyond you.”
“What’s so gray about delivering a baby in a public restroom and smashing in its skull either shortly before or after it took its first breath?” Her whole line was making me feel unreasonable.
“You don’t know the entire story, Pete.”
“But those are the facts, Elaine.”
She looked at me, her hazel eyes colder than I would have preferred. I remember having the strange urge to rub her hair between my fingers, to feel its softness.
“You should know better, is what I mean. You have the moral code of a teenager, that level of sophistication. Right is not always right, and wrong is not always wrong.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Pete,” she said, “the world is not always as easy as you’d like.” Her face turned mottled, then pink. “And just because a teenager delivers a baby in a bathroom and disposes of it …” She paused. “You of all people should know the world is not as easy as you’d like. You’re a doctor, Pete. Come on.”
In all our years together, I’d grown to rely on Elaine’s support — to lean on it like a post. She so rarely contested me or took serious issue with my interpretations of the challenges that buffeted our lives. So why now? What was different about now? If anything, I’d have expected her to take my line more seriously than usual, since this was a more-serious-than-usual event in our lives. In everyone’s lives. In the hospital, at dinner parties, wherever Round Hillers found one another, it was tough to talk about anything else.
“The poor girl, hemorrhaging, panicking, disposed of her baby in a Dumpster, which is, of course, outrageous, but” — Elaine gripped her wineglass — “but because of those very reasons, because of the outrageousness of it, and because we know Laura, we know she’s a go
od, moral person—don’t you think there has to be another reason this happened?” She put a hand on her hip, all earnestness. Maybe this was simply maternal of her—we had, after all, pushed the girl’s stroller around Fairmount Park all those years ago. “Don’t you think something else had to be going on? In her head?”
“How should I know what was in her head?”
“I’m just asking you to show a little sympathy, Pete.”
“Sympathy.” The market report was preaching the gospel of Berkshire Hathaway. Up five points: dispassionately, I listened to myself grow richer for a minute or two. In the morning, Kenny, my stockbroker, would call to congratulate himself on how he’d handled my money.
“Elaine, in my day, baby killers were baby killers. Or to rephrase, when I was growing up, if a girl got pregnant and had the baby and murdered that baby, the reasons why she did it would not overrule the fact that she did it in the first place. Perhaps it was a more black-and-white time, I don’t know.”
“In your day, girls had abortions in back alleys.”
“An abortion would have been a fine alternative. As opposed to murder.”
“You really think she’s a murderer?”
“I don’t know what else you’d call it.”
“It’s happened throughout history, Pete,” she said, using the voice she had used to explain human reproduction to Alec the previous fall. “Iris has talked to sociologists, psychologists. I put her in touch with people at Bergen. Girls who give birth alone, or who cannot support their children, or who consider themselves outcasts from their society—”
“Laura Stern’s an outcast?”
“Pregnant at seventeen? Of course she is.”
“Being pregnant doesn’t make her an outcast. She could have told Joe and Iris. What would they have done to her but been the loving and supportive and wonderful people they are?”
“Presumably she thought they would have punished her. Ostracized her.”
“Joe and Iris?”
“Of course it’s not what they would have done, but it’s what she thought they would have done. She probably felt she couldn’t disappoint them. They’ve always had very high standards for their kids, you know.”
A Friend of the Family Page 4