Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  Your first grade classroom was big, with cubbies on the wall. I found your cubby; you were already there. Jacob Neulander. You had the best cubby.

  “Do you need help unpacking?” But you waved me off, private with your stuff.

  Mrs. Dubrov had red hair, just like my first grade teacher did, so I liked her immediately. “Welcome, welcome!” You first graders looked so big, so assured, compared to where we were last year. The boys wore soccer jerseys and baseball T-shirts; the girls wore dresses and leggings I recognize from the Boden catalog. Mrs. Dubrov took family pictures with what was probably the last living Polaroid in New York, and the little girls posed prettily, and the boys just stood there and looked embarrassed.

  “Jacob!” She knew it was you without my having to introduce us. “Is this your mom? Mrs. Neulander?” We shook hands. She looked at me searchingly for just a moment. Then she put the camera to her eye.

  A click, a flash: you submitted to having your photograph taken. Mrs. Dubrov handed us the photo, and together we watched as it assembled into an image: your freckles emerged, your half-curly hair, my hand on your shoulder. Finally, my face, ghostly, so much older than I had ever looked before. Was that what I really looked like? I knew that nobody looked good under fluorescents but—man. Even in my wig.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled to Mrs. Dubrov. I wanted to sound like I meant it.

  She smiled at me again, then patted you on the shoulder. “We’re going to have a great year, Jacob.”

  “You can call me Jake.”

  “We are going to have a great year, Jake.” You were looking down at the picture. I took it from you, left you to your friends. You didn’t have to see me captured like this.

  There were other parents around, milling by the cubbies, and I could see a few that I sort of knew, and we discussed our various summers—the Hamptons, the Catskills—and nobody asked me anything about how I was doing. Maybe I didn’t look as terrible as I thought I did, as I knew I did. And then Mrs. Dubrov told the children to say good-bye to their parents, and we all went for our last hugs, and some of the kids would have us and some of the kids would not. I was glad that you still would have me; I wrapped you in my arms. I ruffled your hair, I kissed your forehead, and then I was gone.

  THE WALK HOME took hours, Jacob. I hate telling you this, but it’s the truth. The walk home took me at least a million years.

  AND NOW IT’S cooler, early September—not quite sweater weather yet, but the sidewalk ginkgos are changing color, and I’m opening the windows rather than relying on the air conditioner at home. I’ve never really been one for symbolism—in my line of work, if you’ve got something to say, you should just say it—but I do feel like the changing of the leaves, the coolness of the evening, I don’t know, maybe it portends. The geese in the sky all seem to be flying in one direction these days, their Vs marking arrows to a country I can’t see.

  I was diagnosed two years ago, in 2011, when I was forty-one years old. The doctors told me that I would live for four or five more years, and now I am halfway through those four or five more years. I am supposed to have two or even two and a half left. I have counted on having every single day, every single hour of those four to five years. Every second. But now I’m not sure what I should be counting on.

  If you want to know the truth, Jacob, about how I’ve lived since my diagnosis, how I’ve planned and how I’ve considered, and how I’ve managed to raise you—even how I’ve written this book—it’s that I’ve always suspected, in the back of my mind, that maybe I would be the miracle. The woman who defied the odds. I didn’t expect to do it with any grand shows of strength, running a marathon five years after my diagnosis or getting hired to run a presidential campaign. I just thought, maybe they’d find something that would keep me alive for six more months. And then six months after that. And then, before you looked too hard at it, it would turn out I’d stuck around for seven years, eight, it would turn out I saw you graduate from high school, and go off to college, and get married, and if I didn’t yell too loud, if I didn’t make my little miracle known, then nobody would catch me having what I wasn’t supposed to have. All those extra years, a little secret treat for me, a brownie I nibbled on after I was supposed to have gone to bed.

  I mean, if someone got to be a miracle, why couldn’t it be me? Ten months after my diagnosis, after surgery and chemotherapy, I went into remission. The doctors told me that although they couldn’t get all of my tumor, they got most of it. They expected further rounds of chemo to keep those last bits of tumor contained. They expected that my body would respond well to treatment, as young and relatively healthy as it was. They seemed so cheerful about me! The bowel obstruction was just a complication. The exhaustion was just a normal part of treatment. The grayness and the sorrow were just normal parts of cancer. And that I should talk to Dr. Susan if I was feeling sad.

  Steiner promised me—didn’t he promise me?—that the long, slow disgusting infusions would stop the cancer from growing. But now I wonder if it’s just that the tumor isn’t growing where he was looking for it to grow. But it’s in me, Jacob. It’s in me, it’s watching me, it’s waiting for me to become too exhausted to be vigilant so it can start growing again and take me away from you. I don’t know what I did to deserve this. I don’t know why I have to try to sneak in the years that should be rightfully mine. I don’t want to live whatever time I have left full of grayness and sorrow. But the hope that I would be a miracle is dimming.

  Jacob, my beautiful boy. Look: you are in first grade today. Together at least we made it this far.

  AND ALSO, AT least I had my work. It was the heart of campaign season, and my candidate needed me. I’m telling you, kid, thank God for Ace, stupid, incorrigible Ace. After I dropped you off at school, I made it back up the stairs to our apartment, a rest on each landing, then headed to the bathroom to wash up, put on a little more makeup, nicer shoes. In a few hours I had to be in the Bronx for an emergency meeting. The phone was already ringing. And therefore I could not be gray or sorrowful today. I could not be exhausted today. I had too much else to do.

  In the days after Bev’s funeral, Kit Rannells dug just deep enough into Ace’s fidelity to bring the problem back into the spotlight. His first piece—“A Wrap for Reynolds?”—showed up the Friday before Labor Day weekend, a little sidebar on a slow news day. We might have ignored it, but then he wrote another piece, above the fold, for the Sunday paper, and that one was scary enough to catch Ace’s attention. Kit didn’t name any names; he didn’t make any specific accusations. Just picked up on the “rumors floating around Riverdale” that you can’t teach “old dog Ace Reynolds” any “new tricks.” The Sunday Bronx Times had a readership of about eighteen thousand, but the bigger papers picked up on it, started calling me for comments.

  Deny, deny, deny. Crisis management.

  Still, Kit had no comment, no name—just some unsubstantiated stories from old guys in the Bronx with bones to pick and lies to tell. Right? Right?

  Ace had called last night while you and I were having dinner. “Who is this reporter? A twenty-year-old kid? Get him fired!”

  You looked up from your spaghetti. “Is that Ace?”

  “Sure is,” I mouthed. We could both hear him sputtering over the receiver. You laughed, shook your head, watched in amusement while I tried to soothe Ace’s nerves.

  “Have you told the girl to keep her mouth shut? Is she going to go public?”

  “What girl? There was no girl!”

  “Ace, you already told me—”

  “Nothing! There was nobody! Nobody’s saying anything!”

  “Jeez, Ace,” I said while you giggled. I made a crazy gesture, a circle around my ear.

  “He won’t find her, will he?”

  “Not if there’s nobody to find,” I said. (I actually had a feeling Kit was going to find the girl, but there was nothing I could do about it if Ace wouldn’t tell me her name.)

  Then, after I put you to bed, Ace’s dau
ghter called me from South Carolina. She was a sweet girl, late twenties, worked as a golf pro and tried to keep her distance from her grasping father. She asked me to please please kill these rumors. For the sake of her mother, who really couldn’t take any more of this crap.

  I was lying on the couch with a heating pad under my back. Listen, I told her, I can manage the relationship your father has with the public, but I can’t do anything about his relationship with your mother.

  “She might actually leave him this time,” said Ruth. “And he’ll be devastated. Even after all this, he really does love her.” She sounded sniffly. “I don’t think he understands how serious this is.”

  “He understands,” I said, thinking if he loves her so much, why couldn’t he keep his pants on? Why couldn’t he have honored his wedding vows like they actually meant something? Why couldn’t he find life with his wife of thirty-five years and not some twenty-year-old nobody?

  “Do you think he did it?” Ruth asked.

  “He says he didn’t.”

  “Right, but do you think?”

  “The press hasn’t found the body yet.”

  The daughter sniffled again. “What an asshole,” she said. “And he still wants to be mayor some day.”

  “They all,” I said, “want to be mayor some day.”

  Before I went to bed, I looked at you asleep in your bunk bed, your hand loosely clenching your sheet. I thought, You, my son, you can be mayor one day, and then I kissed your forehead and went to sleep.

  I STOOD IN the bathroom heaping on more eye shadow and the phone started ringing again, and I picked it up and said, “There’s no story,” before I even knew who was calling, because I guess I was feeling a little flustered—I hadn’t had to put down a good crisis in years.

  “That’s good,” said my sister. “It’s better when there’s no story.”

  I should have known it was Allison—she called me every three hours, and if I didn’t pick up, she called back in a half an hour. She wanted me to buy you a cell phone so she could check in on you too but I’m sorry, six-years-olds don’t get cell phones, not even on the Upper West Side.

  “You feeling okay?” she asked.

  Allie had not held my fury against me; when I’d tried to apologize to her, she said she understood, that she was surprised it had taken me so long to snap. When I apologized again, she said that she noticed I was on new medication and that it probably made me a little moody. And then she wouldn’t let me mention it again.

  “Karen? Are you okay?”

  I would not mention the ache in my side. “Great,” I said with enough oomph that she’d believe me but not so much that she’d think I was acting.

  On her way out the door to the airport, she had turned to me and said she didn’t have to go. She would miss her flight, she didn’t care, she could stay. I told her that of course she had to go, that she had a family to take care of on Mercer Island, and a peace to broker between her husband and her son. She said she’d be back in a few weeks. I told her she didn’t have to. She didn’t have to be a martyr or anything. Which was just a pissy-enough thing to say that it got her out the door and into the cab.

  “You have an infusion on Thursday?” she asked.

  “Are my doctor’s appointments still in your calendar?”

  “All of them,” Allie said.

  I looked at myself in the bathroom vanity. Better with the eye shadow on. “How’s everything at home?”

  “Well, Dustin keeps collecting snakes. We found some in the garage the other day.”

  “Dead or alive?”

  “Dead. He overestimates a snake’s ability to live in a sealed plastic box.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “What about Bruce and Ross?”

  “You know, surprisingly, they’re doing a lot better. I guess Ross decided to enroll at U Dub after all, since he found an apartment near campus with some friends.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” Allie said. “And now that he’s leaving soon—I don’t know. They’re getting along a lot better. I think they just realized there’s no time left to waste fighting. He’s going to be gone so soon,” she said. “Why waste a second of it on bullshit?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. And then, after a few moments, “You sound okay. Strong.”

  “I have a lot of work to do right now,” I said. “Ace fucked up again. So I have to deal with that. And I just dropped Jake off at school.”

  “That’s right! Today’s the first day!”

  “I told him about the tennis lessons. He was psyched.”

  “I’m glad!” she said. “The next round’s on me.”

  “You don’t have to pay for everything, Allie.”

  “It’s all I can do from here,” she said.

  The call-waiting beeped; it was the car service. “I better go,” I said. My makeup was only half on, but I could finish in the back of the car.

  “I love you,” Allie said. I knew she did, but it made me sad that she’d started saying it when she got off the phone, as though she was running out of chances to tell me.

  “I’ll call you later.”

  “Please,” she said.

  “I promise.” So for her, I pretended to be my old self, swiped on a little lipstick, grabbed my briefcase, and bounded out the door, not pausing to consider the pain that was now radiating up half my side, not pausing to think about her or you or even myself, just my candidate and my job and the car that was waiting downstairs to take me to my crisis, which I could not have been more grateful for (as I was for you, and her, and my job).

  THE DRIVE UP the West Side Highway was jerky—traffic that came and went without any particular rhythm. Although I wanted to be sharp for Ace, I popped a codeine; I was so used to the narcotics flowing through me that I doubted he’d know I was drugged. It was going to be him, me, maybe Amani. No family or surrogates—not yet. Until we knew for sure what anybody knew, there was no need to rally the troops.

  My phone rang and it was Ace—suddenly, he was always available. “I just don’t understand where this came from! How did he find out?”

  To my left, the Hudson River sludged toward New York Harbor, steel-colored and dreary. “Ace, you of all people should know there are no secrets in politics.”

  “But it meant nothing!”

  “Oh, Ace, come on.”

  (Look, I know what you’re wondering.)

  “But how did he find out?”

  (I can’t give you a good answer.)

  “How, Karen?”

  Why did I tell Kit Rannells the truth—was I on some sort of quest for justice? Did I want a little revenge and for Ace to stop acting like such a smug asshole? Or did I do it for Bev? Or because I just wanted to keep working a few more months? (Without a crisis, really, I’d have had nothing to do today but go to the emergency room.)

  We pulled through Ace’s gates at 10:30 a.m., the sun dappling through the trees on his property. The window shades were all drawn shut. I looked around the street for any reporters waiting to pounce, any TV vans, but there was nothing. I tipped the driver, kept the receipt, and walked up to Ace’s house with the codeine coursing through my veins. The door opened before I rang the bell.

  “Karen, oh thank God.”

  “Jill, hey,” I said, surprised. I hadn’t expected her to be there. She crushed my hands between her own.

  I knew I looked like shit, but between the two of us, I still came out the winner. The Jill I remembered was handsome in an art-history-professor way, with a reddish-gold bob and chic glasses. This Jill was puffy, her hair a mess, smelling faintly of tobacco. She wore a stained T-shirt and Fordham sweatpants. She didn’t blink at my appearance. I suddenly felt pretty horrible. I had done this to her. I mean obviously Ace had done this to her—but if it hadn’t been for me she might never have had to find out.

  “Mom, is that Karen?” Ruth appeared at her side. Must have taken an early morning flight. How cou
ld I have been so reckless with someone else’s life?

  “Just tell me he didn’t do it again, okay? Because I can’t—I honestly just can’t. I can’t stand by his side one more time. I cannot play the forgiving wife again, okay? Just tell me—Karen, be honest with me. Please.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Karen, I’m asking you, did he do it?”

  The codeine was giving me a tingly feeling in my fingers and along my spine; perhaps I’d taken a few milligrams extra.

  “Jill, of course not.”

  She started to cry, and her daughter held her by the shoulders, removed her from the doorway. “Come on, Mom. Let Karen in.”

  I wanted to hug her, but it wasn’t my place to hug her. Jesus, for a second I really hated myself. I coughed a little, felt worse. “Is Ace here?”

  “He’s hiding in the study,” Ruth said. “A reporter showed up at the house late last night, asked for a comment. My father screamed at the guy and my mom’s been like this ever since.”

  “Don’t talk about me in the third person,” Jill snapped.

  “Mom,” Ruth said.

  “Jill, I promise it will be okay.” She didn’t even look at me, waved a hand in my face.

  Inside, the house was warm and smelled a bit like dog; a terrier yapped in the kitchen. (Remember the Checkers speech, Jake? Is that something they still teach in history class? It’s one of the best political speeches of the twentieth century, and the main reason all politicians should own dogs. Dogs make people seem more human than they are.)

  I followed them to the kitchen table. “Where was the reporter from? Who showed up?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “As long as it wasn’t the Times,” I said. “As long as it’s not in the Times, it’s not real news.”

  “Do you think it’s real news?” Jill sat down heavily at the table with me; her daughter lifted the terrier in her arms and disappeared. “Do you think he could have done this again? In France? After our anniversary trip?”

  “No, Jill, of course not.” The tingling.

  “Because I will not go through this again. It was the most humiliating thing I’ve ever had to do, to stand there with him while he admitted he’s made mistakes in our marriage. Mistakes! Forgetting to turn off the oven is a mistake. A fender bender is a mistake.”