A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “That’s not my business,” Malva said, her eyes narrowing. She had a daughter in nursing school in Ohio, a son in prison in Kingston. “That’s your business,” she said. “You’re the mother.”

  “I don’t feel like being the mother,” Iris said. “I’m sick of being the mother. Would someone else please be the mother for me? Malva, could you please do that? I’ll give you a raise.”

  Malva crossed her arms. “Iris, you pay me and I will do my job and get more tonic, but I do not, will not, stop your son from doing whatever nasty business he do with his girlfriend upstairs. It makes me uncomfortable.”

  “Oh, fine, Malva. Be that way.”

  Just then, Alec poked his head in the kitchen, looking a little flushed from spiked eggnog. “Alec, go help Malva get the tonic from the basement,” Elaine ordered.

  “Sure,” he said, surprisingly amenable, and he followed the housekeeper down the stairs.

  “That’s not Alec,” Laura said.

  “You haven’t seen him in a while,” Elaine said. “He’s really grown up”

  “The last time I saw him, I think I was babysitting,” Laura said, which was a lie; we never asked her to babysit. “How old is he now?”

  “Neal’s age,” Iris said. “He’s twenty.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Laura laughed, slapping her hand against her forehead. Everything about her felt more and more theatrical. Iris was still leaning back against the window with her eyes closed. “He’s finishing college!”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I stood to pour myself some coffee. In a moment, Malva and Alec appeared at the top of the stairs, each loaded down with a pallet of tonic, and Laura leaped up to help. She took the weight of half of Alec’s pallet in her own hands. “Alec Dizinoff,” she said, “I’m Laura Stern.”

  It was a cartoonish, ludicrous transformation that came over my son. His eyes got big, his mouth opened slightly, he breathed heavily through his nostrils as though he’d just spied the Holy Virgin in a pat of butter. The two of them gently set the pallet on the kitchen counter. I put down my coffee to help Malva.

  “Hello,” Alec whispered. He cleared his throat.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Good.” He still looked like a cartoon. “How are you?”

  “I’m well,” she said. “Just back in town. I don’t think I’ve seen you since you were in grade school.”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “What are you giving me that look for?”

  “A look?”

  “Like you’ve just seen a ghost.” This grown woman was teasing my twenty-year-old son.

  “It’s, you know …,” Alec started. “I just … it’s been a long time.”

  “I know it has,” she said. “What have I missed?”

  “Missed?”

  She tried again. “What have you been up to since we last saw each other?”

  “Oh. A lot of things, I guess.”

  “Like puberty?” Oh, I couldn’t believe this. My poor boy turned scarlet; Laura noticed and tried to soften up. “And high school and college and everything else …”

  “Actually, lately I’ve been, um, making art.”

  “Really? What kind? Where are you working?”

  “Oil paintings, mostly. I have a … I have, like, a studio in the garage at my parents’ house, I’ve been working there for the past six months, so …”

  “You’re kidding. That’s so great.”

  “I’m not. Um, kidding.” They were still standing by the counter. I watched them, forcing myself not to interrupt. “And also I’ve been teaching oils at the Red Barn Cultural Center and, you know, trying to find a gallery to represent me. Maybe somewhere in the city. I don’t know, it’s not that easy to find good representation, but there are a couple of artists’ co-ops in Piermont …”

  “That’s amazing, Alec,” Laura said, and she touched his arm for the tiniest of seconds. “That really is.”

  “Oh, it’s not, really,” he said, but he was blushing. Laura leaned her arms on the counter, and Alec followed suit. They were cordoning themselves off in this way, but I could still hear them. Iris and Elaine shimmied out of the breakfast nook to go pester Joe for some New Year’s martinis.

  “You know,” Laura said, “one of the things I like best about coming home is catching up with people I never would have expected to. In the past three days I’ve seen so many people. Kids I went to school with, my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hammel—”

  “You had her?” Alec said. “Mrs. Camel?”

  “Mrs. Camel, oh God, totally.” Moira Hammel had an unfortunate humpback; I’d seen her for her osteoporosis a dozen times over the years, but unfortunately her spine was deteriorating, leaving dozens of small compression fractures.

  “She was the worst, right?”

  “Once I actually did it by mistake in class, was like, Mrs. Camel, I have a question—”

  “You didn’t —”

  “And the whole class got very quiet, and she turned those weird eyes on me—she had eyes like a lizard, remember? — and said, What did you say, little girl?”

  I doubted sincerely that Moira Hammel turned into the Wicked Witch of the West, or that her gentle blue eyes could put anyone in mind of a lizard.

  “And the whole class was silent, and I said, Nothing, Mrs. Hammel, and she just stared at me for, like, five whole minutes and I almost had a seizure I was so scared.”

  “Jesus.” Alec was giving the story more laughter than it warranted.

  “I was so racked with guilt, I went up to her after class and apologized. But then she didn’t accept my apology.”

  “Really?”

  “Just shook her head and said, One day, Laura, you’ll understand. One day. And then she turned her hump on me and I cried the whole way home. It was like I understood right then. Whatever it was she wanted me to understand.”

  “Wow,” Alec said. “And then you bumped into her?”

  “Two days ago at the Grand Union. I introduced myself and we had a very pleasant conversation and I could tell she had no idea who I was.” Moira Hammel has a bit of dementia, true—but trust me when I tell you that everyone in Round Hill knew who Laura Stern was.

  “And I almost cried on the way back home this time, too. She looked so terrible. And she was all alone.”

  “Wow,” Alec said again, all eloquence.

  “I know.” Laura returned her hand to my son’s arm. “She was all by herself, you know?” She let her voice go small and fragile, and I could see Alec’s posture change; she was getting him to protect her, reassure her. “All those single servings in her grocery cart. A single chicken breast. A single pint of ice cream.”

  Oh, please. Moira Hammel was champion of her bridge club, still managed to do water aerobics every day, and had three granddaughters who doted on her.

  “It’s really sensitive of you,” Alec said. “To even notice.”

  “Well,” Laura said. Her hand was still on his arm, stroking it just the tiniest bit, and the rising bubble of panic in my gut, so small I could have ignored it, should have probably ignored it, burst acid inside me. Laura curled a wisp of hair over her ear and sighed. Alec toed the ground like an idiot. He looked up at her, blushed, looked back down. Their mothers toddled back in with glasses full of peppermint schnapps.

  “Elaine,” Laura called, “why didn’t you tell me Alec had grown up to be so handsome?”

  “I know.” She giggled and collapsed back down into the chair next to me. “Isn’t he gorgeous?”

  “Just gorgeous,” Laura said, and Alec shook his head bashfully and grinned like a fool, and her hand was on his arm the entire time. I wanted to jump up and say something. I wanted to pull him away. She was thirty years old, way too old, way too. Well. New Jersey had prosecuted her for murder, let me remind everyone. Murder! Alec was blushing like an idiot. His mother was drunk.

  “So maybe we can see each other again?” Laura whispered.

  “Maybe we can,” Alec whispered
back.

  There were several grown-ups in the room at this point, but it was only apparent to me that the child among us was in big trouble.

  ON THE WAY home from the party, my son was full of questions. How long would she be in town? What was she doing here? Was she seriously just going to crash at her parents’ house?

  “I really have no idea,” Elaine said from the backseat. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I guess I will,” Alec said as we turned onto Pearl Street.

  “You got her number?”

  He gave me a look as if I were the dumbest person in New Jersey. “I know how to find her, Dad. Freeman Court is ten blocks away.”

  But later that afternoon, he came down from his studio to the big house, our house, to forage in our refrigerator. I could hear him rattling in there like a chipmunk. I was lying on the couch in the study with my journals, my laptop perched on my chest, aimlessly scoping out a few wine auctions and debating whether to nap. Alec came into the study with a handful of potato chips; he smelled vaguely like pot, which he sometimes did and which Elaine and I had decided, with the patient help of a psychotherapist, not to get too worked up about. Either it was a phase or it wasn’t, but either way it wouldn’t kill him, unlike many other things he could do in his spare time. Still, it annoyed me.

  “Got the munchies?”

  He rolled his eyes at me. “I just wanted a snack.”

  “I see.”

  “Is there a problem?” Were we going to bristle into a fight? No, Alec licked his palm of potato chip crumbs and sat down in the old leather chair in the corner of the study. He was half smiling.

  I rubbed my eyes, scratched my chin, rolled my ankles around in their sockets. When I turned my head again, he was still sitting there, licking his palm. “So to what do I owe this privilege?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Just a social call?”

  “Can’t I visit?” He frowned, offended. “Do you always have to sound like such a shmuck?”

  “Alec,” I said. “Cool it.”

  He shrugged, then nodded distractedly. He had an anxiety-making habit of bouncing his knee up and down at a split-second pace. He sat in the study chair and bounced, bounced, bounced like a jackhammer.

  “Well, Son, not to be a shmuck, but if you’re going to sit there, please stop doing that thing with your leg.”

  “Did Laura Stern really kill her baby?”

  “What?”

  “Did Laura Stern really —”

  “No.” I sighed, put the computer on the coffee table, rubbed my eyes again, and sat up. “At least not according to the State of New Jersey.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I was wondering what you thought.”

  “I’m content to have faith in the judicial system’s verdict.”

  Alec looked around the room. His expression was alert, his hands wouldn’t be still — maybe he wasn’t stoned after all? He was freshly showered, his head still damp, and he’d shaved. A baby face, his light brown hair curling in the steam heat from the corner radiator.

  “I have these vague memories of it, you know?” he said. “I remember the trial was in all the newspapers. And on the local news, too. And the way you and Mom were always whispering about it.”

  “You were very young.”

  “Not really,” he said. “I was old enough to figure out what’s going on, more or less.”

  I sighed. “We tried to protect you.”

  “Well, the story was all over the place, front page in the Record every day,” he said. “You couldn’t have protected me no matter how much you wanted to.”

  “I suppose.”

  “What did you guys think of it?” he asked.

  “We thought it was a tragedy, obviously.” I could see where he had hurt himself shaving, nicked his Adam’s apple and sutured the wound with toilet paper. “Your mother took a rather … anthropological view of the whole thing, if I remember correctly.”

  “Anthropological?”

  “She read some article by Stephen Jay Gould.”

  The light in the room was dim, and I could hear Elaine outside, doing endless laps on the treadmill while she watched Sex and the City reruns on the living room TV. I used to love to watch that show with her, a guilty pleasure.

  “What about you?”

  “I honestly don’t remember.”

  Alec raised an eyebrow but let me get away with it. “Laura used to scare me,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “It was the part about crushing in the baby’s skull. I don’t know, I don’t even remember what she looked like back then, but I remember imagining her late at night, having nightmares that the baby killer was going to come get me. That’s what we called her in school,” he said. “The Baby Killer.”

  I felt my heart sink. “We should have talked to you about it.”

  “But?”

  “But …” I said, “but we were scared of what she did, too. Scared of what had happened to our friends.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. And we were scared of how close this kind of violence came to breaking through our own little fortress. Round Hill had always felt like the sort of place where violence couldn’t … where it just didn’t happen. And then, one day, it did.”

  “Even though violence happens everywhere.”

  “We pay a lot of property taxes to pretend it doesn’t,” I said, and Alec rolled his eyes. I coughed.

  “Well, anyway, I suppose it all turned out …” And without warning, a feeling I hadn’t felt in years clogged me. It was the desperate, nauseating feeling of revulsion. A blind, suffocating newborn in a sink, waiting to die. I could see the faint lanugo on her head and limbs, her mottled pink chest, her face crumpling in pain. Legs skinny and frantic. A thumb the size of a pea. Struggling to collect oxygen. No mother’s breast, no warmth, the cold porcelain sink.

  “Dad?”

  I hadn’t believed the State of New Jersey’s verdict for a single second.

  “It all turned out …” I took a deep breath. Began again. “For the best.”

  Alec nodded. His leg relaxed. I forced the old revulsion to seep out of me slowly; I revised all the images in my head one by one. I cleaned up the library bathroom, wiped up the blood, wiped up the toilet seat, took the baby out of the sink, placed her in Laura’s arms (but Laura now looked like thirty-year-old Laura, lustrous red hair, pearl ring). I kept revising, as effortfully as I could. No more Laura, no more baby. After a bit more effort, in my imagination the Round Hill Municipal Library was just a library again, the bathroom was just a bathroom, and we were all going to be all right.

  “It did, I guess,” Alec said. “Turn out for the best.”

  Laura had seemed so graceful in the kitchen, and so clever, not at all the blank, nervous girl I remembered. What had happened in the past thirteen years? Gateway House, first, a psychiatric facility in Morris County that specialized in the mentally ill but not the criminally insane, a crucial victory for the Sterns, as the distinction meant they could legally monitor her treatment and she could leave the place once the doctors pronounced her cured, instead of when New Jersey pronounced her baby avenged. This the doctors did when she was nineteen, deciding that the fog had lifted, the paralyzing depression had been vanquished, and the odd combination of factors (guilt, anguish, serotonin imbalance) that had led to Laura’s infanticidal rage in the Round Hill Municipal Library bathroom would never again conflate. She was released on her parents’ recognizance. Iris picked her up, drove to Newark Airport, and flew with her to her brother Lee’s exotic-animal rescue center on Oahu for a six-month mother-and-daughter sabbatical. Iris, who was already a few steps behind at the bank, who would never become quite the commercial finance powerhouse she could have been, owing to the extraordinary demand on her attention her daughter necessitated, never once blinked about the assignment, even though she was slightly phobic as far as large animals were concerned.

  Tending to the macaws and the
emus, the ferrets and the circus orangutans, Laura took another step in the long process that had begun at Gateway House. She stayed in Oahu for two years, then moved to her aunt Susie’s in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, where she worked as a nanny despite Susie’s husband’s timid objections. From there, the debacle in Vieques, but soon enough onward to her aunt Annie’s welfare-to-work nonprofit, and then her aunt Enid’s goat farm. A gracious network of family members helping Eliza-Doolittle her from the sullen baby killer of her youth into the polished, flirtatious young lady who had frightened me so that morning.

  “Why are you frowning like that?” my son asked, serious in his corner chair. “Do you not want to talk about Laura?”

  “Listen.” I decided to attempt my best paternal insight. “The Sterns have spent a lot of time and energy trying to get past what happened to Laura. I think they’ve finally succeeded as much as they ever will. I think that’s why she came back. She’s going to be part of their family again.”

  “Did they ever find out why she did it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you think they ever will?”

  “Does it really matter?” I had asked Joe the same question, and he had given me the very same answer.

  “She was probably terrified,” Alec said.

  “That’s what I always thought.”

  We were quiet again.

  “So did seeing Laura upset you?” I asked. “You haven’t laid eyes on her since she went to Gateway.”

  “Upset me?” Alec looked confused. “Why would it upset me?”

  “You said it yourself—she used to scare you.”

  “When I was eight.”

  “Well — “

  “No, Dad,” Alec said, folding his hands together. He was smiling beatifically now in the darkening corner. “She didn’t upset me. That’s not the word I’d use.”

  “So then what?”

  “You know” he said. He was still smiling. The shadows separating our house from the Kriegers’ lengthened.

  “I do?” I asked, although I knew what he was going to say. I braced myself. One time, when I was just a few years younger than my son, I’d felt the same way about a girl.

  “She made me feel good.” “Oh.”

  “She made me feel better than anyone ever has.”