A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “Joe what?” She finished straightening our pillows. “Joe would have checked for Addison’s?” She sighed. “Honey, Joe Stern is a lunatic. You’ve said so yourself a million times, a wonderful doctor but a lunatic as far as second-guessing himself goes. He’ll give a pregnancy test to an eighty-five-year-old woman.”

  I cleared my throat, dropped the paper back down on the Victorian desk. “Joe’s practice doesn’t get eighty-five-year-old women.”

  “You know what I mean. You can’t compare what you should have done to what Joe would have done.”

  But Joe Stern had told me to check for Addison’s. He’d put me on notice. But I was too … sure of myself, full of myself. And my mind was on other things: my son, his daughter. I was too terminally distracted to be my old sleuthy self. And now Roseanne Craig was dead.

  I picked the paper back up off the desk. “I still think I’d like to write him a letter,” I said. “He was almost a family friend.”

  “He sold us a car.”

  “Elaine—”

  “I just don’t want you to take this too hard,” she said. “But go. I’ll make some coffee.”

  I spent the next three hours bent over the letter in my study. I wasn’t used to writing longhand, and I wasn’t used to writing personal letters either. The words didn’t come. And after a while, when they still wouldn’t come, I started going through my journals, through my Physician’s Desk Reference, Medline, to read everything I could about Addison’s disease. My reading told me nothing I didn’t know. Addison’s, a failure of the adrenal glands to produce adequate amounts of cortisol, is distributed equally among the old and young, men and women. The disease can cause depression, irritability, cravings for salty food, some nausea, some skin discoloration. However, in 25 percent of cases, symptoms do not appear until an Addisonian crisis. And even if symptoms do appear, they are usually the same as those present in much more common ailments. Thus Addison’s can be quite tough to diagnose.

  Outside my study, I heard footsteps and some murmuring. Alec was checking to see if I was home. Perhaps he was preparing for a showdown. Perhaps he would come storming into my study, demanding to know why I’d gone through his bag, why I’d tossed his bag out of the house, and what would I say? He’d want to know why I wouldn’t let him live his own life. Why I thought I could still control him. I closed my eyes and listened to my son interrogate my wife. Is he home? Is he planning on staying here? I don’t know. Did you ask him?

  He’d storm into my room, want to know what I had against Laura Stern and his future happiness. I would say to him, Laura Stern? At least she’s still alive, idiot. Other people’s daughters are dead this morning.

  But instead my son, like a coward, slipped away out of the house—I heard the door open and gently close—so I turned back to my letter.

  “Dear Arnie, I inadequately managed your daughter Roseanne’s care during the past twelve months. I wish I knew how to tell you how much I admired your daughter, how well I thought of her. How dear she seemed, and how I wish I could, how if only I had another chance I would …”

  “Dear Mr. Craig, it is hard to know how to sufficiently express how bad I feel. Losing a patient is never easy, but to lose a patient so young, and so full of life …”

  “The truth is, Mr. Craig, an old friend of mine told me to check for Addison’s disease, along with other autoimmune or endocrinologic concerns, but instead I ignored his good advice and then went out and bashed his daughter’s face in.”

  I tore that last piece of paper into tiny shreds and buried them in the bottom of my wastepaper basket.

  “Dear Mr. Craig …”

  I went upstairs, took a long, hot shower, and tried to scald the previous day off me like a fungus. I scrubbed hard inside my ears, under my fingernails; I got soap in my eyes and in my mouth. When I emerged, I sat in a towel on the bed for no particular reason and watched the street below our window. After all that activity yesterday, every phone in the house was silent. The street below was silent, too, for a long time. Then Mark and Kylie Krieger walked down the street, hand in hand, Kylie talking animatedly about — a deer she saw? a puppy? a squirrel? And then nothing again for the next eight minutes. And then a car. And then another car. But as far as I could tell, it was nobody I knew.

  “Pete? You up there?”

  Elaine was making egg salad for lunch. I got dressed, threw my dirty towel in the hamper, smelled the lingering scent of Ivory soap all over me, and went downstairs. Elaine had made me a sandwich with watercress in between the egg salad and the bread. She was going out to do some errands.

  “Listen,” she said. “I want you to be a bit nicer to yourself, okay? You can’t sit around blaming yourself for what happened to Roseanne.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Really, Pete. This isn’t good for you. I know you liked that girl, but—”

  “Just let me grieve a little, Elaine.”

  “Pete—”

  “Please let me be.”

  She put plastic wrap over the egg salad bowl, wiped the crumbs off the petri-patterned marble breakfast bar. She took a sponge to our counters. Her hair was in a maternal strawberry-blond cut just below her ears, she wore khaki pants and a blue polo shirt, and she looked more like an old hausfrau to me than any woman I ever thought would be my wife. Yet we had such a loving, such a tender relationship. Real tenderness. Elaine and I had suffered our trials, our infertility, her illness, my weakness, but still we’d built this life together. She was as much a part of me as my own skin after all these years. What will I tell the world about you, Elaine? You have a beautiful singing voice. You can pronounce Middle English. You are as rare and magnificent as a condor.

  If I had tried to make a life with anyone else, I would have failed. But she held on to me after all these many failures, after I had not been grateful enough to her, time and time again.

  “I’ll be home in a little while,” she said. She straightened her polo shirt. “You want anything at the grocery store?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?” I nodded. “Okay, then.” She came over to my perch and kissed me on the temple. “I love you, Pete.”

  “I love you, too.” And then I watched her walk out of the kitchen. I will not let myself start with those “if only’s” here, because I have been good about not indulging myself yet and I’d like to maintain my strength on that lonely front. So instead I will only say that the eye of my hurricane lasted perhaps seven hours, which is long by meteorologic standards, but which barely gave me time to catch my breath. I finished my sandwich. I stared out the window. I still don’t know what I was hoping to see. I remembered Roseanne Craig leaving my office and how I’d wanted to give her a hug.

  I WAS BACK in my study when the doorbell rang. My first thought was of Girl Scout cookies and Jehovah’s Witnesses, neither one of which was worth getting up for.

  “Pete!”

  “Pete, are you there?”

  Iris and Joe were at the front door. They almost always just came up through the back. I saw them through the window before I opened the door: they both looked worn out for some reason, both slightly stooped. The gray was shining through Iris’s hair, and Joe’s forehead looked red, as though he’d been rubbing it all morning. I was clutching the draft of another letter and it did not occur to me yet to worry.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Laura’s gone, Pete,” Joe said.

  “Gone?” I opened the door wide to let them in. We sat down together in the living room, which we rarely did, in general preferring the friendlier precinct of the kitchen, close to the food and the booze. “I don’t get you.”

  “She’s gone,” Iris said. “She took her passport, her clothes, her medicine. She’s gone. Her roommate said she just packed up and left the apartment.”

  “Does the roommate know where she went?”

  “Did you rape her, Pete?”

  “Did I … I’m sorry?” Did I rape her? Rape her?

 
“Wendy said her face was bruised, she was wearing bloody pajamas.”

  “I’m sorry … did I what?”

  “Were you in her apartment, Pete?” Iris asked.

  No, Iris—you couldn’t believe this, Iris. Come on. Rape? Yes, I did hit her, and yes, I did make her bleed. I probably broke her nose. I might have given her whiplash, even. And these are sins, I know, and I felt terrible about them, but—but I didn’t rape anyone. And a broken nose isn’t insurmountable. It isn’t septicemia, myocardial infarction. It isn’t Addison’s disease.

  “Pete, why don’t you tell us what happened,” Joe said. He was trying to sound reasonable, but there was panic in his voice.

  “Wendy showed us what she’d been wearing,” Iris said.

  “I didn’t rape your daughter.” What a ridiculous, gruesome thing to say.

  “Peter, Laura is many things, but she is not a liar.” Iris held Joe’s hand, clutched it. “There were big drops of blood—”

  “But I didn’t—” I was proving a negative here, which was, of course, impossible. There was no way to win a fight with a missing woman. I felt the place where she’d touched my forearm start to throb. “Look, I don’t know how to prove that I didn’t do something I didn’t do. But I did not—I did not rape your daughter. I have no idea why she would accuse me of something like that. I have no idea—”

  “She left the city, Pete, she fled.”

  “— except to say that she’s unstable. She’s unstable.”

  “She didn’t leave any information. We have no idea how to find her. And Wendy said her face was puffy, bruised—and her pajamas.”

  I wouldn’t even respond to Iris; I looked directly at Joe. “You’ve known it for years,” I said. “She makes things up, Joe, come on. You know that.” My voice was betraying me; I was starting to sound nervous. Probably even guilty.

  “Tell me what happened, Pete,” Joe said.

  I looked at each of them, their familiar, beloved faces. The light poured into the living room, making the gray in Iris’s hair glint. How little she knew about her own daughter—what secrets Laura had kept from her her entire life. She’d wanted to protect her parents, she said. But what exactly did these people need protection from? Joe, with his successful OB practice? Iris, with her million-dollar salary? The two of them with their three kids graduating from MIT? “I went to her apartment, that’s true,” I said. “I went to her apartment.”

  “And then?”

  “I just wanted her to see — I wanted her to see what she was doing, okay? I went to her apartment to have a conversation with her. I wanted to talk to her about her future plans with Alec.”

  We were all silent. Iris cleared her throat. “What next?”

  “We talked,” I said. I felt my skin turn clammy. “And then I left.”

  “Nothing else happened?” Joe asked.

  How could I not admit it? But I couldn’t. I was a clammy-skinned coward. I hadn’t raped her, no, but I could not tell the truth about what I had done. I was protecting them, too, and myself. I hit your daughter, Joe. Your precious one, Laura, whom you love best.

  “So then why was she bleeding when Wendy saw her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Why did she say you raped her?” Iris asked. “I know Laura,” she said. “She wouldn’t just make something up, she wouldn’t just lie like this.”

  “You think she’s some sort of angel?”

  “Excuse me?”

  The saddest defense of the guilty coward, to go on the offense when the defense holds no water. “Your daughter Laura, she’s perfect? You believe everything she says?”

  “Peter, I just cannot bring myself to believe that she would lie about this,” Iris said. “And the horrible thing is, I almost don’t know what’s worse—to think that she would, or to think that you could actually do this.”

  “She’s lying, Iris. There’s no way for me to prove it, but she’s lying—”

  “No,” Iris said. “I saw her pajamas.”

  As though Laura were nunlike, squeaky clean. As though getting blood on her clothing was beyond her. As though she hadn’t done the things she’d done behind the Dumpster at the Grand Union. As though she hadn’t clubbed her own baby with her knee. And as though she hadn’t blamed it all on a difficult childhood.

  “Iris, I don’t know how I can prove to you that it’s not true, but you’re going to have to believe me.”

  “Then why did she run away, Peter? Why is she gone?”

  “Did something happen to Laura?” Elaine came into the living room, trailed by Alec. They were casual, happy, wearing sweatshirts. The untainted witnesses. My jury pool.

  “She’s missing,” Iris said.

  “What do you mean she’s missing?” Elaine asked.

  “She took her suitcase last night and her passport and disappeared.”

  “She’s missing?” Alec’s voice went high.

  “Alec, I thought you were with her last night.” He was the first person Elaine would think to accuse.

  “No!” he said. “No, after work I went out with some of the people from work, we went to Film Forum, had a couple of beers. I called Laura’s cell phone to see if she wanted to come along, but she didn’t answer. Do you know where she went?”

  “She’s missing, Alec,” Iris said. “That’s what we’re saying. We have no idea.”

  “What about Wendy? What did Wendy say?”

  They were both quiet. They didn’t want to accuse me in front of my family. But they looked at me.

  “Dad?” Alec was sitting on the upholstered chair opposite me. He had his big hands on his knees. His voice was tentative. “Dad, do you know where she went?”

  “I have no idea.” I turned to Joe and Iris. They were expectant. They expected me to confess. “But I did see her yesterday,” I said. I would explain myself as best I could.

  “You saw her?” Alec’s voice grew stronger. “Why would you see her? What business did you have with her?”

  “Why did you see her?”

  “Pete?” Elaine said. “Is that why you went to the city?”

  “I saw Laura,” I said, a bit stupidly. “I saw her yesterday morning.”

  “You did?”

  “I just wanted to talk to her.” Elaine was sitting next to me on the couch; Joe and Iris were on the sofa opposite. Alec was in the upholstered chair. We were a suburban set piece, a drawing room comedy.

  “What did you say to her, Dad?” My son was boring holes into me. “What did you say?”

  “I just wanted to talk to her about why she wanted to take you to Paris. I wanted to know what her thinking was. What her plan was.”

  “You had no right to—”

  “Let him finish, Alec.”

  “She told me about the clothing store,” I said. “And that you were going to sell paintings in the street.” I looked at my son. “I asked her why she wanted you to come with her.”

  “I could have told you that, Dad,” he spat. “It’s because she loves me. Which I know you might find hard to believe, but—”

  “No,” I said. I couldn’t let him continue to think that way. “I’m sorry, but no, that’s not what she said.”

  He stood, started to come toward me.

  “Alec!” Elaine shouted. “Let your father finish.”

  “You don’t know a fucking—”

  “Pete,” Iris said, “what did she say?”

  “She loves me. You have no idea about fucking anything, you know that? She loves me. Which is impossible for you to understand, I know, but someone else can love me besides you, you know that? You are not the only person in the world entitled to me—”

  “She said Alec helps her feel safe.” I didn’t like interrupting my son, but I felt I had no choice. “She’s using you, Alec. That’s all.”

  “Fuck you, Dad. You don’t know a fucking thing. You don’t know a fucking—” He was standing now. He was ready to let me have everything he could give me, tall and powerful
and impotent, too, because he didn’t know what to do. What could he do but stand there and listen?

  “So what did you do next?” Iris said dully from across the room.

  “Iris.” Joe put his hand on her arm. “We don’t need to—”

  “No,” she said. “No. I want to hear him say it.”

  “Iris, we really don’t—”

  “Shut up, Joe. Just shut up. Yes, we do. We do need to. Pete, tell us what you did.”

  “I won’t admit to something I didn’t do, Iris.”

  “I still don’t know why my daughter ran away, Pete. I still have no idea why she got hysterical and ran away. I don’t know why her pajamas were bloody. I don’t know why she would accuse you of—what she accused you of. My daughter is not a liar.”

  “Her pajamas were bloody?” Alec asked.

  “Pete?” said my wife.

  Yesterday morning. Laura Stern in her flimsy nightclothes, her flimsy little robe. Underdressed in a kitchen. In Saranac Lake, Roseanne Craig was still alive.

  I said nothing. I looked at my locked-together hands.

  “Well?”

  Outrageous. She was the murderer, she was the one who had dumped her own daughter’s body into a Dumpster outside the Round Hill Municipal Library, and yet she was accusing me of unspeakable crimes. Letting her roommate think she’d been raped. Letting her parents believe her roommate.

  “Pete, if you have something to say—”

  “Do you know what she used to do, your daughter?” I wasn’t going to protect them anymore. “Back when she was in high school? Back when she got pregnant?” I would no longer spare these people the truth. I was right and she was wrong. I didn’t rape her. I was in the right.

  “Pete?”

  “She used to fuck half of Round Hill Public behind the Dumpster at the Grand Union. That’s how she got pregnant, Iris. Ask Joe, he knows. That’s how she got knocked up. Couldn’t keep her goddamn legs crossed.” I was amazed at this anger inside me, how it kept my mouth moving, moving, moving. Suddenly I couldn’t have stopped talking no matter what. “That’s how she got herself pregnant, your precious daughter who would never lie about anything. That’s what she used to—”