A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “Pete?” said my old best friend. He wanted to protect his daughter, his wife—well, I wanted to protect my son. By telling the truth. Finally. “Pete, please?”

  I was welling with it, I couldn’t stop: “And here’s another thing. The baby was alive,” I said. “It was born alive. She smashed in its skull on her own knee. So you tell me that she’s stable, okay? You tell me that whatever she says is worth hearing. That her accusations are worth hearing. Your own daughter is a murderer, okay?”

  “Peter!” Elaine said.

  “So don’t you dare come in here with your accusations and your bullshit and your daughter’s lies. She’s a murderer”

  “Peter!” Elaine said again.

  “Get out of my house,” I said. “Get out of my fucking house.”

  “Pete?” My old best friend Joe.

  “What accusations, Pete?” asked my wife.

  “That’s not true,” Iris said. “What you just said, it’s not true.” I think she might have been crying.

  “Fuck you it’s not true,” I said, standing up. “Don’t you come in here with your accusations, tell me what’s true and what’s not true. I know what’s true. Your husband knows what’s true. Your daughter’s a murderer, that’s what’s true.”

  My son was standing over me, my son’s fist had been balled and I hadn’t even seen it. It slammed across my jaw with just enough force to send me back into the sofa.

  “Alec!” Elaine screamed. The rest of the room was studiously quiet. “Jesus, Alec! Pete, are you okay?” She flew to my side. “Are you okay?”

  Joe and Iris just sat there on the couch opposite. Iris was certainly crying now; tears coursed down her cheeks. Alec stood in the corner and nursed his fist. I worked my jaw up and down for a second. He had a nice, strong fist, Alec did. A nice, solid swing. Just like his old man.

  “Leave this house.”

  “Pete?” My old best friend Joe.

  “Leave my house.”

  I couldn’t say anything else. My mouth tasted as if it was full of blood. I closed my eyes and waited for them all to leave, and after a few more minutes, they did.

  I MOVED INTO Alec’s studio that evening. It was only meant to be a temporary solution, somewhere for me to stay until we figured out what to do next. Alec didn’t want the studio anymore—he didn’t want anything from me — and so there was a place for me to stay. Elaine wasn’t sure what to think (rape, murder, a Sunday afternoon), but it seemed necessary for me to leave the house. Something was very wrong there.

  And as for me, what did I want? I wanted to stay close to home, although I didn’t feel, necessarily, that I deserved to be at home. In my house. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and I knew what I had done.

  And then there was the lawsuit. The papers arrived six weeks later, at my office in the middle of a busy day. There was not enough evidence for wrongful death, even though Arnie Craig, I knew, desperately wanted that, as did his son. (Roseanne’s brute of a brother showed up at my office for the first time a month after the death and barged into the examining room, where I was listening to the lungs of an asthmatic elderly gentleman, screaming, That was my innocent sister! Wrongful death, motherfucker! We’re going to haul your ass away for a thousand years!)

  But I wasn’t hiding from malpractice. That wasn’t my real crime. Anyway, the entire Round Hill community knew about the lawsuit — you know how suburbs are—knew who was suing me, knew why he was suing, knew about the tragic loss of Roseanne Craig, one of Round Hill Country Day’s finest, a promising young lady with a promising future. Still, we were a community of doctors. Doctors tremble at the tremor of a misdiagnosis. Should I have done more? Could I have done more?

  Only one particular physician knew for sure. I had ripped the scab off Joe’s family’s pain. Would he do the same to me?

  MY LAWYER CALLED today just as the last patient was clearing out. Mina knocked on my door, mouthed, “It’s him.”

  “Him?”

  She rolled her heavy-lidded eyes at me. “Your lawyer”

  I thanked her, took a breath. What would it matter, really? What would any of it matter?

  “Nick?”

  A sharp intake of breath. “Great news, Pete. The judge threw out the case.”

  I said nothing.

  “Pete, you there?”

  Good news. It’s been, basically, the story of my life. But still sometimes it’s hard to hear. “Yes,” I said.

  “I told you not to worry. I told you this was baseless. Judge reviewed the literature on Addison’s. April Frank came through, told her about the referral. So she threw it out.”

  “Thanks, Nick.” I had never told him, either, about Joe Stern’s warning. “That’s really great.”

  “Phew, right, Doc?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Phew.”

  “I’ll send you a bill.” He laughed and hung up the phone.

  Well then.

  Well.

  Mina poked her head in. I gave her a thumbs-up. Mina, wonderful, recalcitrant Mina, threw her arms around me and gave me a kiss on the cheek before shuttling, abashed, back to her cell.

  I sat down behind my desk, fingered the smooth edges, the endless paper. I straightened a pile of journal articles. So this was Joe’s game. He’d been calling to tell me that he hadn’t told. To remind me that despite everything I’d done to him, done to his daughter, his precious one, done to his wife’s peace of mind and the secrets he’d held so close—well, I needed to know that he was still a kind and decent human being. He thought I’d suffered enough, here in my Bergentown office, above a Filipino restaurant, no more fancy Round Hill office for me, no, sir. Living above a garage. My marriage in perverse limbo. Roseanne Craig’s death on my watch. Joe Stern, my jury and executioner, had decided I’d been punished already. He wasn’t going to make it any worse.

  And so now what? What was there to do now?

  I sat in my office for the rest of the afternoon, no more patients, no rounds until tomorrow. I just sat there, watched the asteroid screensaver jet across my computer screen, knew that tomorrow I would be here again. I clicked on my schedule program. My life would go on as it was. And why I had this instinct I still cannot explain, but it took everything I had not to pick up the phone and call Joe and tell him that his martyrdom was his own goddamn business, it meant nothing to me.

  Mina poked her head in once or twice. I nodded at her, pretended to look busy. Monday afternoons I usually went over my files, returned phone calls, did insurance paperwork. I picked up the phone and listened to it hum in my hand.

  I wondered how I would explain this to my son. I knew he’d expected me to lose the lawsuit. Elaine had told me so. I’d lose, and then we’d both have lost something and maybe he’d feel the connection? But now his old man was off the hook again. What would he think? He would have preferred it if I’d suffered. Maybe he would have forgiven me if I had truly suffered.

  Vivaldi. My cell phone. I looked down, prepared to tell Joe this and more: I could have taken it, whatever he’d dished out.

  “Pete? So what happened?”

  I took a breath. “Elaine.”

  “What happened, Pete?”

  “She threw it out.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Pete. Pete! Thank God!”

  “I know.”

  “Why don’t you sound happy?”

  “I don’t know.” Why didn’t I sound happy? “I guess I’m still taking it in.”

  “You coming home now? Will you come into the house?”

  “Sure,” I said. We still had to talk about logistics, procedures. She still had an appointment with the lawyer tomorrow. Well, good. Even Joe Stern couldn’t stand in the way of that.

  When I pulled up to the studio, I saw a U-Haul parked in the curve of the circular drive right in front of the house, Elaine standing on the porch.

  “You’re moving out?” I asked. “Or just getting rid of some of my extra stuff?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well.”

&
nbsp; We sat down on the porch steps together. It seemed easier than going inside, and it was nice out again, warmish, not muggy the way it had been over the weekend. Crocuses, rabbits, magnolias. The deer had returned to the lilac patch in the back of the yard.

  I didn’t know what Elaine was doing with that U-Haul, but I guessed she was taking some of my stuff away, out of the house, finally. Banged-up office furniture. Piles of old magazines. Clothing I hadn’t worn in years, or maybe even clothing I still wore. She had the right to get rid of what she wanted, it was her house now, and she could choose what to keep inside it. But I wondered how she’d load up the stuff herself. I wondered if I should help her.

  “How do you feel?” she asked me.

  “How do you feel?” I returned.

  “Relieved, I suppose,” she said. “Phil told me that a malpractice case like this could lead to wrongful death if things went astray. Years more legal horrors. More bills.”

  “I’d cover the bills,” I said. “He told you that?”

  “You know how your brother can be,” she said. “Dramatic. I didn’t really think you’d be arrested for wrongful death.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “Although that would have really been the icing.”

  “It would have.” She smiled, and we were quiet for a minute. If she was getting rid of my stuff, then it was probably time for me to find a new place to live, to get out of the studio and find an apartment. There were places in Bergentown for rent all the time, in the second stories of the commercial buildings, above the grocery stores and H&R Blocks. Or now, with the case thrown out, maybe I could even afford a little house, my own little backyard.

  “You still look put-upon,” my wife said.

  “I do?”

  “Like you’re not happy.”

  “It doesn’t seem right to be particularly happy, even with all this — even with things turning out the way they did.”

  “You just caught a break,” Elaine said.

  “I’m not so sure I did.” What would a lost lawsuit have meant after everything else that I’d lost? I thought about Roseanne Craig and the smile on her face when she sold us a new car.

  “I decided to cancel the appointment tomorrow with the lawyer.”

  “You canceled it?” I looked at her and saw she looked embarrassed.

  “I’m almost fifty-five years old, Pete. I just … you know, I just want to stand still for a while. I can’t stand any more of this you leaving or I’m leaving or we’re selling the house or you’re not here anymore and I have to drive somewhere to find you to talk about the things we need to talk about. I don’t want to plan for my own retirement,” she said.

  “Your own retirement?”

  “I’m really exhausted, Pete.”

  Two joggers put-putted up Pearl Street, a man and a woman, and he was pushing a jogging stroller. There must have been a baby asleep inside the jogging stroller. I didn’t know these people, but I remembered Alec as an infant and the way, when he couldn’t sleep, I would stand up and rock him in my arms, take him outside, walk up and down the street, rocking him.

  After a while I said, “I would never make you drive to find me.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I would always take care of you.”

  “That’s not really true, is it?” she said, but then she waved her hand, waved away an argument she didn’t feel like having.

  “I did not rape Laura,” I whispered.

  “I know.” But she didn’t know. And that’s why she kept me in the studio: even my own wife couldn’t quite believe me. Even after a lifetime of believing in me—there was doubt in our marriage now. There was fear. There was a rumor that had spread as quickly and thickly as lava, smothering our little town of Round Hill, that I had raped Laura Stern. I was an outcast, not because I’d lost Roseanne Craig, but because there were whispers of what I had done to my best friend’s daughter, and I could not prove I hadn’t done it. There was no lawyer in the world, no matter how much I paid, who could win my trial by rumor. So I’d been kicked out of my office. I lived in a studio above the garage. For months my marriage had gasped for breath. This was punishment for something I did not do, but this was also punishment for letting Roseanne Craig die on my watch. Right is right, and it was true that I’d been very wrong.

  Elaine wiped a finger under her eye, but she wasn’t crying. Not really. Through all this, I don’t think my wife ever cried very much.

  “Elaine—”

  “Why would Laura lie, Pete?”

  “I don’t know.” I would go through this a million more times if I had to.

  “Why were there bloody pajamas?”

  “I told you — I told you. We fought. I hit her.”

  “I know,” she said. “You told me.” But she would never truly believe me, and she would have to live with that.

  “I wish I knew how to feel,” she said. “I have no idea how to feel. All I know is that I’m not … I’m not brave enough to start out on my own—”

  “It’s not about bravery, Lainie—”

  “I don’t feel like being alone,” she said. “That’s all.”

  So tomorrow we would tick on, and tick on, and tick on. The forsythia by the driveway were blooming. The rabbits had eaten the heads off the daffodils.

  I looked again at the U-Haul and caught on. “Alec’s leaving because you decided not to go to the lawyer.”

  “Well,” she said, “no matter what, he was going to have to leave sometime.”

  I tucked an errant piece of hair behind her ear, then moved my hand back to my lap. “I suppose he was.”

  “You were always going to have to let him go eventually.”

  “He’s already gone.”

  “He might come back someday,” she said.

  I looked again at the U-Haul, SEE COLORADO in red along its broad white side. My son and all his things. I took a breath; then I put my arm around my wife. We hadn’t touched like this in many months.

  “I could change my mind one day, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s okay.”

  We sat like that, my arm around her, feeling her soft, warm skin under her flowered blouse. My wife, my porch, my forsythia by the driveway. I had done enough to lose them all, and yet here they were.

  “I’m going to go in,” she said. “I’m making stir-fry for dinner.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s some white wine in the fridge. One of the bottles from downstairs. I could open it if you want.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. I listened to her walk up the creaky old porch steps, wonderful, wonderful wife, and open the door and close it behind her, and my eye caught the U-Haul again, SEE COLORADO, and again I was so lost.

  So Now I sit on the porch of this old Victorian house we bought twenty-five years ago with dreams of our children and our lives bursting from us, ambition and hope bursting from us. My wife is inside making dinner. There’s a bottle of white in the fridge. I close my eyes and lean my head back against the wooden banister that leads from the stairs to our front door. Will I sleep in my old bed this evening? Will Elaine want to join me in the studio? Will she want to make love to me? Will I still have even that?

  There’s a stomp stomp stomp behind me. A young man with a heavy box.

  “Alec,” I offer. Of all the undeserved good things that have happened to me today, this is the one I want the most.

  “Alec,” I say again, getting up and walking toward him. He ignores me, balances the box on one knee while he opens the back of the U-Haul. I am standing next to my son. I haven’t stood this close to him in a long time. I watch him heave the box into the back of the truck. The truck is filled with his things — canvases and clothing and palettes and easels. His stereo. His Samsonite. If he holds on a minute, I’ll get him the books from the studio. There’s that pile of magazines. The short stories his friend left him. If he only hangs on a minute, I’ll help him —

  “Alec—” I say as he slams the b
ack of the truck shut again. He climbs into the front seat. He’s so tall, my son. He’s so sure of where he’s going.

  “Alec—” But it’s too late. I watch him turn the engine on and drive away down Pearl Street. He makes a left at the end of the street. He’s heading north, up toward the Palisades. From there, he might be going anywhere. The U-Haul has left a trail of blackish oil on our drive and down our street, and it could lead him back like Hansel if he needs to come back home.

  Although right now, at least, he’s not going to come back home.

  But I cannot, I will not, despair. One day, God willing, my son will understand. He’ll have children of his own and then he’ll understand. There’s nothing a father won’t do for his children. He will steal, he will plunder, he will desecrate himself. It doesn’t matter, as long as the child is safe. One day, I know, my son will understand this: everything I’ve ever done in my life — I’ve done it for him.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’D LIKE TO first thank the physicians in my life: Dr. Brust, for the fact checking, Dr. Erlebacher, for the great idea, Dr. Gross, for showing me the funny side of obstetrics, and Dr. Grodstein, for being such a terrific father. Thanks, too, to Elliot Grodstein, almost a doctor, every bit my shoulder to lean on. Thanks to the Kennedys, especially Jessie, for her perfect title, spot-on editing, and invaluable friendship. Thanks to my writers and readers: Kelly Braffet, Gordon Haber, Hannah Harlow, Val Kiesig, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Adam Mansbach, and Lisa Zeidner, who not only read my drafts but also made sure I ate dinner. My beloved grandmother, the late Carolyn Edelstein, read an early draft and gave me ceaseless encouragement. Adele Grodstein proved it’s possible to be both a wonderful mother and a practicing artist. The Paris American Academy gave me space and time to write, and the faculty at Rutgers-Camden provided sustaining collegiality, especially my friends in the English Department. Dr. Jon’a Meyer shared her illuminating research into neonaticide. Kate Elton and Georgina Hawtrey-Woore showed me how to make a good story better, while Kathy Pories worked brilliantly and tirelessly on this book’s behalf. Rachel Careau provided exceptional copyediting, and William Boggess made me smile every time he picked up the phone.