A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “My stomach was covered in bruises. So were my thighs, from bumping into things. Totally discolored. And I kept going to the Grand Union, too. Thinking maybe that would somehow dislodge the baby.”

  “Laura,” I said. In my head I saw my old best friend Joe. And I saw his wife, Laura’s mother, Iris.

  “Finally I started contracting at around six months. I went to the library. It was the first place I could think of. I was sure that I would deliver a dead baby, that nobody would ever have to know. I could pretend the whole thing never even happened. I couldn’t believe the thing started crying when it came out of me.”

  “Laura, please. Please,” I said. I felt desperate. How could I have ever thought she was a reasonable woman? “Please stop.”

  “Don’t worry, Dr. Pete. I’m not trying to justify anything. I’m just telling you what happened.”

  “I came to talk about Alec.”

  “Bullshit. You came to talk about this. Because this is what you’re afraid of—that someone who could do what I did isn’t fit to be seen with your son.”

  “That’s not what I—Laura, I told you, I just want Alec to have a future.”

  “You just want Alec to have the future you’ve already chosen for him.”

  There was no point to this conversation. I thought about picking up my jacket and leaving, but I did not. “The first time I slammed its head, it was still crying,” she said. “I didn’t know I had it in me. I was panicking, freaking out. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Oh, God,” I said.

  “I had to do it a second time to get it to stop.”

  And again, for long minutes, we just sat there. I should have picked myself up, picked up my jacket. I should have taken myself to the door. But I didn’t know how at that very moment. I swear to you I didn’t know how.

  “If you want to know the truth,” she finally said, “about why I like your son so much, it’s that he keeps me from the worst part of myself. From my own worst instincts. The truth is, as you seem to have figured out, I don’t really want him following me halfway around the world. Of course it would be easier, it would be better for a million reasons, if I could go by myself. But Alec keeps me from hurting myself. He keeps me from panicking. I can just lose myself in that devotion, you know? I can just swim in it. I’m scared to be without it.”

  “You can’t use my son as your lifesaver,” I said. “He’s worth more than that.”

  “Before I knew how much Alec loved me, I was so lonely,” she said. “My life was going nowhere. I was back here with my parents, out of options. My siblings couldn’t stand me. My own mother couldn’t stand me. I even went down to the Grand Union,” she said. “It’s amazing the way places like Round Hill don’t change. The Dumpster’s the same, the rotting food smell is the same. And there’s still a group of teenage boys back there who are more than happy to do whatever they want to you, who actually can’t believe their luck. I walked behind the store and saw them and I thought, I could do this. I’m still so lonely. I still need to feel something close to human connection.” She paused. “Until Alec came into my life and loved me enough to stop me from needing to feel that.”

  “You cannot use my son that way,” I said again. “It’s not right.”

  “I need him in Paris with me,” she said. “He protects me from myself.”

  “You cannot use—”

  “It’s not really using him.” She went to the window again, opened it up a little higher to let out our smoke. Then she just stood there in her little underwear in the halo of the sunlight, looking at me with her arms crossed, as if she was challenging me. But why my son, Laura? Why can’t you just leave us all out of your sad story? “Or if it is,” she said, “then clearly your son likes being used.”

  “Laura—”

  “In fact, I think he loves it.” She laughed again, her grumbly, condescending Iris laugh. “You should see him,” she said. “He loves it. He really does. Just like at the Grand Union but a million times better, a million times more grateful. Thank you, Laura, this feels so good, Laura, you’re the only one who gets me, Laura, thank you, thank you. You’re not like my fucking parents, they think they get me but they don’t, I fucking hate them.”

  “Stop it. Stop.”

  “My father, especially, he’s such a pompous bastard, I can’t wait till I never have to listen to his pompous bullshit again—”

  “Stop it, Laura.”

  “Your son really hates you, you know that?” she said. “It takes everything in his power to hide it from you.”

  “That’s not true, Laura.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Pete, but you judge him and me, we’re gonna judge you right back. That’s the way it goes.”

  “Laura,” I said. I saw my son, six years old, his palm full of tiny clams. I saw Iris in the kitchen, in a white bikini. I saw my son, a grown man, in bed with this woman. Noises like raccoons trapped behind a wall. I heard Laura and my son laughing at me when they thought I wasn’t listening.

  “Assholes like you,” she said, still laughing, “you think you know everything, but you don’t know a goddamn thing.”

  And it sprang out of me. I don’t know what it was, or where it came from, but it sprang out of me like a wild animal: I hit her so hard across the face that I heard something crack.

  Something cracked. Something broke.

  But she didn’t cry out, only breathed heavily. How could she not have cried out? What was the matter with this woman? Because when I looked up at her finally, blood was pouring from her nose, trickling from the corner of her mouth. Her nose was askew at the cartilage bridge. Her lips were already puffy. She was quiet.

  The memory of Iris’s bruise.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry—”

  “You hit me,” Laura said thickly, dumbly, holding up a wrist to her bloody face.

  “Laura, let me—’

  “You hit me,” she said again.

  “Look, I …” Had I broken her cheekbone? Her jaw? Did I have that kind of strength? But no, she was talking clearly, her jaw was clearly intact. Her teeth were in her mouth.

  I went to the freezer, looked for some ice, frozen vegetables.

  “Get out,” she said. I turned to face her, her nose still pouring blood, and it had gotten on her wrist, her lacy top. God, noses bleed so much more than they really ought to. I pulled some paper towel from the counter.

  “You should put some ice …,” I said, but then I faltered.

  “If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the police.” The police, Jesus. The police — I’ve always been such a coward. I tried to force the paper towel into her hand, but she wouldn’t take it, so it dropped to the floor. She needed ice.

  “Laura, I’m really sorry,” I said. “I didn’t … I didn’t mean …” But I had meant it, and it could not be undone, and maybe there was some tiny part of me that was glad to see the way her nose gushed. Maybe. For this is what she said to me when I opened the door.

  “I used my knee.”

  This is what she said. I was opening the door to leave.

  “Not a hammer,” she said. “Not a baseball bat. My knee. Just slammed the baby down twice, hard. Didn’t even have to think about it,” she said. “I’m surprised my father never told you.”

  LIKE A CRIMINAL, Lady Macbeth, I washed the drops of blood off my hands in a McDonald’s bathroom on First Avenue. How had I gotten blood on my own hands? I still had nowhere to go, no good plan of action. So I decided to walk south to Chinatown, to take some comfort in the cacophony there, and then I kept walking, farther south, and then east, over the Manhattan Bridge, which I didn’t even know a person could walk over. It did not occur to me to go anywhere in particular, only to keep walking, walking, walking, to walk farther and farther away from Laura Stern.

  Brooklyn felt like another world. I pushed through the parks near the bridge, along the busy shopping streets, the cobblestoned passageways leading out to the waterfront. I kept walking, my feet starting to hurt in
my shoddy sneakers, the crack of my hand against the side of Laura’s face playing and replaying itself in my memory. I made a right and found myself in a district of warehouses, slowly being turned into condominiums and lofts. I kept walking until I found the water. That terrible soundtrack—crack, crack, crack.

  My body still seemed odd to me, and I was nauseated. My hand pulsed where it had made contact with Laura’s cheek. But I felt, oddly, more righteous than ever in my determination to keep Alec home. Everything about Laura proved that he should stay home, that I was right. The problem was how to tell him. The problem was how to return to myself. I had never hit a woman before. I had never broken anyone’s bones. I was a doctor, after all. I had taken the Hippocratic oath.

  My mind was sufficiently with me that when I passed a bank with a clock on its sign and saw that it was almost three, I knew I should call my wife. I found a pay phone and my credit card and dialed.

  “Where are you? I’ve been so worried. You left your phone.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m in the city. I just … I needed to walk around.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “More or less.”

  “You threw Alec’s suitcase out the window last night.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  We were both quiet for a moment.

  “Pete, if he goes to Paris, it’s not like we’ll never see him again—”

  “Not now, Elaine, okay?”

  More quiet.

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Soon.”

  “By dinnertime?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I think maybe I’ll go have dinner with someone,” she said. “Alec’s working and I could use the company.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Pete, I need you to take care of yourself, okay? Whatever happens with Alec—I just need you to take care of yourself. This isn’t good for you, the way you’ve been acting. This isn’t … healthy.”

  I hung up the phone and kept walking. Was I okay? Was I healthy? Why wouldn’t I be? What was unhealthy about wanting to protect my only child? What was wrong with me that I would do whatever it took to keep him safe? I kept walking, Laura’s choked voice still in my ears, the baby, her knee, and people wanted to know what was wrong with me.

  It only occurred to me where I was going when I got there. Morning services were long over, and this wasn’t the sort of institution that was religious enough for afternoon minhah, but still, it was a comfort just to see the building in front of me. I thought of my grandfather in his old black coat. The dozens of relatives in their black-and-white glory on my parents’ foyer wall. I thought of my dead father, ushering Phil and me into our pressed black pants, walking with us hand in hand to synagogue every week. We were six years old, seven years old. I had never been on an airplane been to a baseball game been ice skating seen a mountainside but I knew the warm firm feeling of my father’s hand in mine, the musty smell of that synagogue, my grandfather kissing me and my brother on our heads and slipping us each a quarter because we’d been such good boys. It’s for us, Phil once told me decades ago in the Yonkers bedroom we reluctantly shared. They did this all for us. We might not like it, but we know why they did it.

  And God strike me down if he wasn’t right.

  I GOT HOME just past nine o’clock. The house was empty. I went outside, shot basket after basket. A good, heavy sweat to wipe off the lingering residue of a horrible day. I’d sweat it off and then I’d shower it off and then I’d figure out what to do next, what to say to my son. I wondered if Laura had gone to the emergency room, if she’d told them what happened. Probably not. Nosebleeds cleared up, broken noses generally healed by themselves, and she seemed like a tough enough cookie. She’d wait it out. She’d hold some ice to her face. I made a jump shot, and then another one.

  Inside, my cell phone started to wail. A few seconds after it stopped, I heard the house phone go. I made another ten free throws. I heard my cell phone start up again, and then the house phone. Christ, had Laura gone to the police? Already? My hand started tingling again. I made another fifteen free throws. The air was wonderful, cool and brisk, but the crack, crack, crack was playing in my head. A week before Labor Day, the dying embers of the summer. The house phone started going again, and I finally went in to catch it, but I was too late. I looked at my cell phone.

  I had missed thirty-nine calls.

  It was tough to piece together exactly what had happened from the fragmented messages, but the last thirty-five of them were all from Arnie Craig. He wanted one thing from me, and then another. And then another.

  Could I get to Saranac Lake?

  I pressed replay on that first message, and then on the second. It was only a five-hour drive from Round Hill, straight up I-87. Could I get there? Did I know anything about the hospital there?

  Where are you, Doc?

  Sorry to keep calling, Doc, but—

  What was Addison’s disease?

  What was an Addisonian crisis?

  And then the messages changed. A heavy, choking-off voice.

  It was too late. Why didn’t you tell us she had this disease? A disease of the adrenal cortex? Which is right above the kidney? Which you can test for?

  She had all the symptoms, Doc, I know she did. An endocrine problem? She had an endocrine problem? My little girl wasn’t depressed at all, not like you said she was.

  You did this. You did this, you fucking bastard. This is your fault.

  I know she saw you. I know she saw you last week. You told her she was depressed. But she had Addison’s disease. I’m gonna get you, you bastard. You killed my little girl.

  ROSEANNE CRAIG HAD been diving off a rope swing on an island in a too-shallow finger off Saranac Lake. She’d hit her shoulder hard on a rock, started to thrash and drown. A friend pulled her out of the water in plenty of time and got her up onto the bank of the lake. She sputtered, sat up, nursed her shoulder. But then, a few minutes later, everything changed. The shock of the event sent Roseanne into an Addisonian crisis. She screamed from the pain in her legs. She vomited. Her blood pressure dropped. She lost consciousness. The group of friends — Roseanne and two other girls—were on an island in a deserted part of the lake. They had to load Roseanne into a canoe. No cell phone service, no ambulance access. They paddled alongshore and found a deserted summerhouse with a telephone. They broke in through the porch and called an ambulance. But by the time they got Roseanne to a hospital, by the time the doctors assessed the problem, by the time hydrocortisone and saline and dextrose were administered, the only thing left to do was ask the Craigs whether the doctors could offer Roseanne’s corneas for donation.

  The hospital put the time of death at five fifteen that afternoon. I’d been watching the light shift in the synagogue.

  My cell phone started ringing again.

  “Oh, Arnie,” I said when I answered. “Oh, Arnie.”

  “I’m gonna get you for this, you fucking bastard. You killed my little girl.”

  “Oh, Arnie,” I said again. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m gonna—”

  “Arnie,” I said, maybe moaned. “Oh, Jesus, Arnie.”

  Roseanne Craig with the frog tattoo that stared up at me as I palpated. Roseanne Craig with the black suit and the pearl necklace. Roseanne Craig with the Marxist bookstore. Roseanne Craig, salesperson of the year, an Escalade under her belt already. I was crying, but this was not an admission of guilt. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “I’m gonna get you, you bastard.” And Arnie was crying, too. “I’m gonna fucking get you for this.” And the two of us held the phones to our ears and cried at each other and stayed like that for quite some time until our wives arrived and gently put each of us to bed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING was the eye of the hurricane, but I didn’t know that yet. In years past, before Doppler radar and twenty-four-hour weather channels, when the e
ye was still not necessarily a familiar part of the hurricane phenomenon, Florida fathers would check on their garages, Georgia farmers would check on their fruit trees, and the second half of the hurricane would arrive as fast and fierce and angry as a Roman god and sweep everything away: father, garages, farmers, and fruit trees. The storm would dump all of them miles away from where they’d started, twisted and mangled and dead as leather. I had a second or so of peace before it hit me that Roseanne Craig was dead of an Addisonian crisis that I had failed to diagnose. Then the entirety of the previous day hit me, too, and I didn’t want to get out of bed. I took Elaine’s hand. It was not yet six in the morning.

  “Pete,” she mumbled. “Come here.” I let myself curl up against my wife, felt the thick, reconstructed flesh of her left breast against my fingertips. I smelled her hair. But I was not lulled back to sleep by this comfort, because I was suffering the first horrible inkling that all this might be denied to me in the not-too-distant future. The satiny luxury of lying in bed with my wife and holding her close. I knew even then, maybe not that I was in the hurricane’s eye, but that the angry gods were not done with me. I pulled her closer to me. I ran my hand down the folds of flesh along her side. The padding over her hip bone. She murmured something in her sleep—Mmm, Pete—and turned to face me. She kissed me groggily, then turned around again and spooned up into me and fell back asleep.

  Two hours later, she woke up and we got out of bed. The morning felt ludicrously quiet. I decided to go down to the study with a sheaf of deckle-edged writing paper from the spindly ornamental desk in the corner of our bedroom, Elaine’s little piece of Victoriana for our Victorian.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. She was making the bed.

  “I’m going to write a letter to Arnie Craig and his wife.”

  “You are?”

  I looked stupidly at the paper in my hand.

  “Pete, honey, you said yourself that Addison’s is incredibly rare, that it almost always presents like something else. What did you call it? A wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

  “I know,” I said, “but Joe—” I stopped, felt the writing paper in my hand crumple. This was the first time I consciously stopped myself from admitting what Joe had suggested I check for, saying out loud that Joe Stern had put me on notice.