The Gretchen Question

by Jessica Treadway

  “Best for both of us”? No. You can imagine what went through me, when I read those words. You can imagine that my impulse was to call him right up and say, Don’t do this. Okay? Please don’t do this. All right, I’ll tell you what you want to know.

  The truth is that I’d always intended to tell him, in the far-off “someday”. I understood that he had a right. I just wanted to launch him, first—that’s the phrase I hear my friends using, when they talk about seeing their kids into adulthood and the world. Given Will’s nervous history, I decided it was better to wait.

  I hadn’t figured—who would?—on running out of time. How could I tell him the truth about where he came from when he still didn’t know this other, more immediate thing, which was that the cancer had come back, and I was running out of time?

  Besides, if he meant what he’d said, his asking for a “break” was unrelated to my disappointing him by withholding information he believed would help him find his father.

  I had my doubts it was unrelated, though. Who am I kidding—of course it was related.

  I was not invited to his school for Family Weekend, and he did not return for a visit all through September and October, and for half of November. The day he texted to say he wanted to come home for Thanksgiving and bring his girlfriend, I responded within a minute Yes! Can’t wait! and like a pathetic schoolgirl with a crush hanging onto a scrap of hope tossed to her by the quarterback, I read his text over and over, allowing myself to feel grateful that he’d used the word “home.”

  Sitting next to me in the parked car at the shopping center, Sosi picked at a hangnail, no doubt to give her something besides me to look at. “I know I said I didn’t care about finding my birth parents. The chances that they’re not people I’d ever want to know, considering where I come from, are pretty good.” She yanked the piece of skin off, then had to put her finger in her mouth when it bled. Speaking around it she mumbled, “But Will’s a different story. Sperm donors generally have their lives together, right? They’re vetted and everything. So, I just don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure what more I can say,” I told her, looking not at her but straight ahead through the windshield. “Other than what I’ve said already, which is that I don’t have any information that would be helpful to him.”

  This was the truth. It was a good way to put it, I thought.

  But she went on as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “I can tell this is hard for you. And I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t think you were the only way he might find anything out. There’re no guarantees with those DNA kits, he knows it probably wouldn’t lead to his … paternity.” I appreciated the sensitivity it showed, for her to use this word instead of father. But I wasn’t about to tell her so.

  She took her finger out of her mouth to check it, but the blood hadn’t stopped. “To be honest, I think if he ever does do one, it won’t be for a while. He knows the results would probably just disappoint him. And he has enough on his plate right now, with school and everything.”

  I couldn’t tell if she paused before and everything, as if to emphasize the everything without defining it. But she might have. As much as I hate the expression about people having enough or too much on their plates, I felt relieved to hear that Will hadn’t sent off a swab yet and might not be doing so anytime soon. In the next moment the relief vanished when Sosi said, with a gentleness that threw me off, “Is there some reason you think he might have something to be afraid of?”

  What was it with this girl and her intuitions? I stayed very still and took my time before answering, fully aware that whatever I said would get reported back to him. I began with “I wouldn’t know.” Then, despite realizing it was risky, I said, “This isn’t something I want to talk to you about.” In an effort to reduce the sting I added, “I appreciate your interest” (though I didn’t), “but this is really between him and me.”

  I watched her mind fill up with all the things she might say to me. She had some more words planned, I could tell. But in the end, she only told me she didn’t feel like shopping, after all. I realized I was exhausted, myself, even though it wasn’t even ten in the morning. I started the car and we headed home.

  Though we’d been gone no more than half an hour, when we returned to the house I saw that Will had piled a dozen open boxes of his stuff on the curb. Old games and toys; stuffed animals; the file containing his art projects, essays, tests, class photographs, and report cards from elementary through high school; tennis rackets, T-ball mitt and bat; participation ribbons from the field-day events he’d been forced to enter in middle school—all of this I took in at a glance, understanding that he hadn’t even sorted through the boxes for anything he might wish to save. Balanced at the top of one (and I couldn’t help thinking he’d placed it there on purpose, so I wouldn’t miss it) was Chutes and Ladders, the box faded and battered from so much use. That was a phew! His entire childhood sat outside the house, waiting to be picked up with the trash.

  Sosi went inside, while I stood there too stunned to follow. After a few minutes I heard a door open and braced myself for the approach of either Will or Sosi, but instead it was my neighbor Pascal, emerging from her own house next door. “You okay?” she asked gently, and I realized she must have observed Will toting out all his stuff, each item adding to the accumulation of the pain she knew I’d feel when I saw it.

  “Hmm,” I said, hoping it sounded like a yes, but knowing it didn’t. Pascal touched my shoulder, but I jerked away.

  “Okay,” she said, after a moment. In a low voice before she retreated back to her own space she added, “If it makes any difference, it hurts me to see it, too.”

  I murmured and turned to step back toward my house. Inside I found Will sitting at my desk in the corner of the living room, where he had my computer open and appeared to be scrolling through files.

  I was so perplexed that although my brain yelled Stop! I could not form the word with my voice. All I could think was that he had opened my account on the health portal and learned about my recurrence, before I could tell him about it myself.

  But he did not look upset, so I thought maybe I was wrong. My relief didn’t last long, though, because as he clicked away and I moved closer, I saw that he had entered not my own record but the coding system of the hospital I worked for, which of course is highly confidential and restricted by multiple passwords—which, of course, I had never given to Will. “What are you doing?” This I managed to get out, though barely. “How did you get into that?” I wasn’t even sure he’d heard me until he finally looked up and said, with a smugness that might have been bravado or might have been real (I was dismayed not to be able to tell which), “Uncle Hal taught me some things.”

  I lowered myself onto the couch, feeling for it first with my hands to make sure it was solid beneath me. Sosi took a seat, also cautiously, on the other end. “You can’t do that,” I told him. “You’re not supposed to be in there.”

  “Yeah, well. A lot of things aren’t supposed to happen.” He picked up the pad he’d been scribbling on. “So: Celia Santoro? Heart problems, possibly exacerbated by cocaine use. It wouldn’t be good if the hospital found out you were sharing confidential medical files with people who aren’t supposed to see them, would it, Mom?”

  I heard my voice wobble as I asked him, “What are you talking about?” Of course I recognized that he was referring to the file of patient 1998207. But I had never seen her actual name. “What do you mean, Celia Santoro?”

  His shrug looked wobbly, too. But he lifted his chin and tried to bluff his way through. “Like I said. Uncle Hal taught me some things.”

  Sosi gasped. It was as if she made the sound for both of us. And when he heard it, Will started in his seat as if she had just called him back to consciousness, woken him up. He looked at the screen in front of him, then immediately reached to close the file. I saw that his hand was trembling. “You don’t
mean that,” Sosi told him, though by now it was obvious to us all that he’d already come to his senses. “Apologize,” she added in an urgent whisper, and I was as shocked by that—and by the fact that he obeyed her—as by the offense she ordered him to apologize for.

  In fact, he couldn’t stop apologizing. I told him it was all right, though of course it wasn’t. He said he’d never intended to force me, by threatening to disclose those medical secrets, into giving me the information he wanted; he’d opened the computer planning only to look around, to see if there was anything obvious on my desktop that might be a clue. Please, would I forgive him? I said yes, but then I couldn’t help summarizing back to him what he’d just said: “So, you only meant to spy. Not hack into a system you’re not allowed access to. Not blackmail me.”

  He winced. “I didn’t think of it as any of those things.”

  Even now, even though I know better, I’m tempted to believe that he’s stayed away from me all this time because he feels so guilty about what he did that day, that’s how upset he looked.

  I probably don’t need to say that during the rest of our time together, no one spoke much. I had to lie down on my bed for a while, while Will and Sosi did schoolwork in front of the TV. For dinner, we ate turkey leftovers and the faux fettuccini Alfredo I’d made for their arrival. Originally they’d planned to stay until Sunday, but instead, the next morning at breakfast, they said they thought they’d head back to campus. I didn’t mind; I was weary of the visit, something I never thought I’d say about my son.

  Only one more time were Sosi and I alone, when Will went to fill up the gas tank while she packed. “He told me the ipecac story, you know,” she said. Was she making it a point to fold that lacy nightgown right in front of me, and take far longer to do so than the action required? “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but you do know that that could be considered child abuse, don’t you?”

  I’d stopped being taken aback by the things she said to me. Well, not really. But it had stopped being such a surprise.

  “That’s not your business,” I said, but I was wrong, because Will had made it her business. After they left I watched until the car had pulled away from the house, and gave it enough time to reach the end of the street before I went to the curb and lugged all of the boxes he’d tried to get rid of back into the garage.

  It really didn’t take all that much longer, using the back route instead of the highway, to get from the hospital to Grettie’s house. Despite her assurances about when the garbage and recycling trucks always picked up, the barrel and bins remained full where they’d been placed at the curb. I swore and parked in the driveway. I hadn’t considered this possibility. Should I wait? And if so, for how long? The appointment with the therapist was for three o’clock. It was one-forty-five now. If I did wait, it could only be for half an hour, and that would be cutting it close.

  Or should I leave now and come back later? I couldn’t decide. I’d really wanted to have this chore over with by the time I saw him, so that after our appointment, I didn’t have to worry about anything other than getting home. I swore again and stepped out of the car, feeling hot and a little dizzy. The temp must have gone even higher than what the weather people had said.

  “Roberta!” Almost immediately I was approached by a woman in her mid-forties with a severely angled cut to her obviously dyed black hair. This was Grettie’s next-door neighbor, Trudy Foote. She and her husband are the ones who started the fight in the neighborhood over Arcadia Glen, the subdivision a developer started building last year on the dozen acres of woods at the end of this street. Trudy organized the opposition—circulating petitions, speaking out at Town Meeting, getting people to post signs on their lawns—even before the first six houses went up. Then the developer’s backhoe struck a skull fragment, and it was discovered that the lot contained several unmarked graves, which the previous landowner had not disclosed and swore he’d never known about.

  After that, the protests got even louder, especially when a local archivist surmised that one of the buried bodies belonged to a Civil War veteran who’d had a hand in founding the town. Now, instead of objecting only to the destruction of the woods, crowded classrooms, and an overloaded water supply, Trudy and the other opponents have added “desecration of our history” to the list of things we would suffer if Arcadia Glen went forward.

  Bullshit, Grettie says. She believes their real problem is with the affordable housing the developer included in his plans in order to get the permit he needed from the town. “They just don’t want ‘affordable’ kids in their kids’ classrooms,” she declared when all of it started, on a night last fall when I invited myself over because I hadn’t talked to Will in the three weeks since he’d gone away to college, and I could feel the walls closing in. “They think it’ll lower their property values and the school ratings, end up ruining their kids’ lives. I’m sure they love affordable housing in theory—as long as it’s built somewhere else.”

  Everything’s up in the air right now with Arcadia Glen. Work on the remaining six houses has been halted while the developer tries to figure out if he can legally relocate the graves. Grettie and Jack think he should be allowed to do so, and to finish the construction. That night Grettie told me, “You of all people should understand why this is important, Bert.”

  Me “of all people”? It wasn’t often—hardly ever, in all the years we’d known each other, and it always seemed accidental, to the point that she seemed contrite afterward—that Grettie referred even in passing to the economic differences that had always existed between us. But she’s right, it’s true that I wouldn’t be living out here myself, in the rare rental on the edge of the town next to hers, if a different developer hadn’t been given the go-ahead the year before I gave birth to Will.

  But instead of responding directly, I told Grettie, “I can understand not wanting to lose the woods.” We’ve been walking our dogs there together for years. All I have to say to Scout is “Ready for your walk?” and he lumbers past me to wait, panting and scrabbling, at the door.

  “Well, of course, I can understand that, too.” Grettie opened a bottle of wine, but I declined. I was too depressed, it was too dangerous. She poured herself a glass. “If I thought saving the woods was the real reason for their hysteria, I’d have more sympathy.”

  Her indignation had been ignited afresh by a neighborhood email thread Trudy Foote started when it looked as if there might be a way to make the developer back down. “Please join us in the effort to prevent the further rape of our beloved woodlands,” she’d written. “They are an oasis of tranquility in this stressful, demanding world. There’s a reason we all love living here—we want to be far from the maddening crowd.”

  “Maddening crowd!” Grettie slapped the kitchen table as she recited the message, which she obviously knew by heart. “Maddening crowd, do you believe that? And really, using the word ‘woodlands’—as if we’re all letting our dogs shit on dryads and nymphs.”

  I laughed, even though I didn’t know what a dryad was. It was one of the reasons I loved her, how Grettie got about things like that. I mean love, not loved. Gets, not got.

  I’d thought she was going to say “And really, using the word ‘rape’,” because that was the one that caught my attention, it seemed too dramatic for what was actually going on.

  I made my murmuring noise. The truth, though I didn’t want to say so, is that I was already hoping the protesters would win. Not so we won’t have affordable housing, but because of the graves. Shouldn’t a “final resting place” be exactly that? My feeling is, once something’s buried, you should leave it alone.

  I want to be cremated and scattered wherever Will chooses. No bones left behind by me.

  Standing before me now between her own house and Grettie’s, Trudy carried several plastic grocery bags that appeared weighed down with pellets of dog waste. After she called my name, I had no choice but to
acknowledge that I’d heard her. I knew her, after all. Our sons were in the same grade, and before the war over Arcadia Glen, I used to see her every year at Grettie and Jack’s holiday open house. Grettie liked to say that Trudy had all the wit and charm of a corn muffin.

  “Trudy! Hi!”

  She moved closer, and for a moment I thought she was going to reach out and touch me. Startled, I pulled away. She said, “Listen, I heard about—I mean, I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay.” If she was going to ask such a stupid question, she didn’t deserve the real answer. “I’m just really hot, that’s all.” I explained my mission with the barrel and the bins.

  “Don’t tell me they asked you to drive all the way over here just for that?” Her expression shifted from one of concern to incredulity. “I would have been happy to take them in.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I was coming over to pick something up, anyway.”

  “You were? What?” Although of course the question was as inappropriate as it could possibly have been, I was the one who felt panicked about answering, because it was, of course, a lie. I could not think of a single item in Grettie’s house that I might have swung by to retrieve. Instead, I gestured at the plastic bags Trudy carried and said, “So, you’ve become a one-woman neighborhood clean-up crew?”

  Trudy grimaced, ineffectually shoving her hair behind one ear with the top of the hand not holding the bags of turds. “People are so irresponsible,” she said, in a tone inviting my agreement. “Not all of them, but too many. I look out my window and see them let their dogs do their business on someone’s lawn, then walk away. It just makes me want to scream. Fenton thought this was a more constructive idea.” She lifted the bags, and I remembered her husband (Fenton Foote—what kind of person names a child Fenton Foote?!), a short and shy-looking man who seemed ready to admit to anyone who’d listen his obsession with JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen murdered on a Christmas night in her own house out in Colorado. One New Year’s Day, just after the tenth anniversary of the girl’s death, I spent more than half an hour listening to Fenton expound upon the case. “The intruder theory makes sense because what are we supposed to believe? It was just a coincidence that JonBenét happened to be a Little Miss pageant queen? No. It could have been some pervert who broke in while the family was out celebrating the holiday with their friends, stayed hidden when they came home, then woke the kid up after everybody else had fallen asleep. Did you know she told two people—one of her friends, and the friend’s mother—that Santa told her he was going to visit her in secret on Christmas night?” Asking me this, Fenton’s blue eyes had widened, as if his own question had only just then reminded him of this disturbing and possibly pertinent detail of the famous crime. I shook my head and told him No, I hadn’t heard that. Part of me wanted to escape the conversation, but another part was fascinated by the fact that Fenton was so fascinated. “But it’s equally plausible—probably even more so—that it was somebody in the family who did it. The mother or the brother. When the police came in the morning, Patsy Ramsey had on full makeup and the same clothes as the day before. And the brother’s penknife was found right next to the body. Not to mention that the father headed straight for that hidden room in the basement, where the body was, when the policewoman told him to start searching the house. And he said, ‘Oh, my God, there she is,’ even before he turned on the light.” Fenton took a sip of Grettie’s famous hot buttered rum as he allowed me to imagine the scene.