Smacked

by Eilene Zimmerman

  Now, as the band launches into its first song, I glance back over my shoulder to see if Peter might be coming. He has missed nearly every event this year involving Evan—college counseling meetings, cross-country meets. He even left Back-to-School night early, saying he was exhausted and not feeling well. And the truth was, he hadn’t looked well that night. The weather was cool and he’d forgotten his jacket, so he shivered as we walked from classroom to classroom, following Evan’s schedule.

  During a break, I asked, “Are you okay? Seems like you’ve had the flu for a long time.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m just working a lot and I’m having trouble sleeping.”

  “What about your weight?” I asked. “You look really thin.”

  “No, I’m fine,” he said. “I’ve actually gained a few pounds in the last couple of weeks.”

  A couple of parents I knew at the school quietly asked me that night if Peter was sick. The next day I ran into one of them at a little market in our neighborhood, picking up groceries for dinner.

  “God, he looked awful,” she said.

  “I know,” I answered. “He’s just working too much, not sleeping enough, smoking a lot.”

  “You sure?” she asked. “He looks like he’s got cancer. Or AIDS.”

  The band starts its second song when I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s Peter.

  “You made it,” I say, relieved to see him. “You only missed the first song.” He waves at Evan, who smiles back. The band plays for about forty-five minutes, and then it’s time for them to pack up so the next act can get on stage. Peter gives Evan a hug. “That was great. You guys sounded really good.” Evan is smiling, proud. “Thanks. Thanks for coming, Dad.”

  “Of course,” Peter says. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  Evan wants to hang out with his friends for a while and get a ride home with one of their parents, so Peter and I grab his amp, guitar, microphone stand, and all his cords and walk to my car. After a few steps, Peter stops. “Hold on,” he says, putting down the guitar case and the box of cords to light a cigarette. I watch as he does this, see his jeans loose around the seat and thighs, which I hadn’t noticed before. He is wearing a tight long-sleeved black shirt.

  “I am so tired,” he says, exhaling. “I barely slept last night.”

  “Why?” I ask. We start walking again. “What’s going on?”

  “Work shit,” he says, inhaling deeply. “Some really bad stuff is happening.” I can feel my stomach drop—it always does this when Peter expresses uncertainty about work, which makes me fear he is about to get fired. But he’s a partner, I think. He’s not going to get fired.

  “What’s happening?” I say, not looking at him. I’ve got Evan’s amp on a wheeled dolly and am maneuvering it around people as we walk.

  “Obviously, don’t say anything to anyone, because I’m not supposed to talk about this.”

  “Obviously, Peter,” I say. Must he preface every work conversation with this disclaimer? You’d think he worked for the CIA. We are talking about a pharmaceutical company, one that manufactures drugs to treat things like asthma and high blood pressure, not state secrets.

  “We had this big filing deadline in court, something that had to be submitted by midnight. And my team fucked up.” Peter pauses to take a drag. “It was a really bad fuckup. Everything was ready to go, all we had to do was sign off and submit it, and something happened, some technical problem that wasn’t even our fault—it was the court’s fault—but the bottom line is we missed the deadline. And I’m the partner in charge, so it’s my ass.”

  My mind fills with questions. Why was it his team’s fault if it was a technical snafu? Why were they sending it at the very last minute? But what I ask is “Where were you?”

  Peter puts his cigarette out carefully on the ground and then throws it in a nearby trash can. We are at my car and stop talking to push the backseat down and slide the music equipment inside. He looks nervous, almost frightened, and that frightens me too. Peter is always in control; he does not make mistakes and he is never weak. But he seems so fragile now, like he might cry.

  “Peter?” I say, more gently. “Were you not there when this happened?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” he says. “All the work was done, I thought it was a no-brainer. Just submit it. But some stuff happened and it wound up that it came right down to the wire. And then the technology failed and it didn’t submit.” The client, Peter says, is understandably furious.

  “Will you get in some kind of trouble? I mean, you’re a partner, and you’re a human and your team is human. Is there no room for error?”

  This makes Peter laugh. “No,” he says, smiling. “Never. There is never room for error. And now there are complaints that I’m not in the office enough. I work from home—you know I work from home.”

  I nod. He does work from home. He did when we were married and he does now.

  “They told me that if I’m not physically in the office, where everyone can see me, they don’t know that I’m working. So now I go in every morning by ten, I walk around the entire floor once saying hello to anyone who is in their office, work there for a few hours, and go home. It’s fucking ridiculous.”

  “Did you talk to Jeff about all of this?” I ask. Jeff is the head of the San Diego office; he and Peter have worked together for more than a decade. “Jeff doesn’t care,” Peter says. “He’s got his own shit to deal with. He just wants it done; he doesn’t want to have to deal with my shit too.”

  I’m thinking of the senior associate who works with Peter, a woman whom I know is hoping to be promoted to partner this year. I ask if that’s now in question. “I don’t know,” Peter says. “It might be. Look, I could be fired for this.”

  “Really?” I say. “I mean, is this a realistic concern or are you worst-case-scenarioing it?” Although lawyers, like everyone else, are fallible, I know Peter as a very thorough and careful attorney. It seems unusual that he wouldn’t have been with his team if this filing was as important as it seems to have been. Even if it was just a matter of a few mouse clicks, he has always been the kind of lawyer who would supervise those clicks, to make sure they were done exactly right. At this point, however, I don’t know that Peter isn’t the kind of lawyer he used to be.

  He reaches for another cigarette. Lights it. Breathes in. Breathes out. “I don’t know. I mean, it would take a lot to fire me, but it’s serious. It will definitely affect my disbursement at the end of the year.”

  That disbursement is a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I don’t know how much, but I’m assuming Peter earned about $700,000 last year, although he says the firm has been stingy with salary increases. Last month he told me he needed to borrow against his draw—his monthly base salary, which adds up to $300,000 a year. Year’s end is where the big money comes, when the partners spread the firm’s profits among themselves, like lords of a legal fiefdom. The most senior partners and the biggest rainmakers get the most; the rest of the partners—the less senior ones—split what’s left.

  “Peter, I’m sure you’re doing fine,” I say, mostly to reassure myself.

  He shakes his head no. “Not as well as you think,” he says. “I haven’t gotten much of an increase in the last few years.” I shrug, but I’m anxious. He has built an expensive life for himself here, maybe he really is struggling somehow. He’ll never be transparent about it, though. Instead he’ll keep me in the dark, with my understanding that if anything happens to his job, we’re all in trouble. Nine months from now, I will receive Peter’s 2015 W-2 form from the firm so I can begin the arduous process of filing his 2015 taxes, along with 2012, 2013, and 2014, which he never filed. And I will learn that his gross income is exactly twice as much as I imagined. When Peter died, he was earning $1.4 million a year, although he steadfastly maintained to me—his ex-wife and someone he saw as a direc
t threat to that income—that he was in precarious financial straits. I will be sitting at my desk, going through mounds of paperwork needed by the IRS, and I will open the envelope from Peter’s law firm, unfold the single sheet of paper bearing this number, and it will feel as if I have been slapped in the face.

  I believed Peter was being honest about his financial situation, that his expenses—the mortgage for his new house, the cars, spousal and child support, college and private school tuition—were so great his salary could barely cover it all. When I learn how misled I’ve been, I will feel like a fool.

  Right now though, standing beside my car, Peter isn’t a lying millionaire but just a man who seems jittery with nervous energy, looking vulnerable. Almost weepy. I pat his back, rubbing up and down as I would a child, trying to soothe him. “It’ll be okay. It will work itself out. It’s a missed filing deadline,” I say. “No one died, right?”

  He nods, looking down at the ground. “Yeah, I know.” I offer him a ride to his car but he wants to walk. “It’s beautiful out,” he says, squinting up at the sky. “The sun feels good—I’ve been inside working so much.” I wave goodbye and back my car out of its spot. In the minute or two it takes me to drive toward the parking lot exit, Peter has lit another cigarette and is on a call, the phone pressed to his ear. They can’t leave him alone for five minutes, I think. Five minutes, just to walk in the sunshine.

  ■ SIX

  February 2015

  TWO MONTHS LATER, AT ten o’clock on a Thursday night, Evan sits on the couch in our family room, waiting for his father to call back. Peter told him a few hours ago he wants the two of them to go to Michigan to visit Anna at school, and he wants to leave tomorrow, he thinks. Or maybe not. Peter says he is waiting to determine if he can take a few days off and says he’s been trying to finish up some work at the office. It’s February break at Evan’s high school, or in the vernacular of the students there, “ski week,” although we don’t ski, so Evan would just be hanging around the house for a week.

  “Do you want to text Dad and see if he got flights?” I ask. Evan is anxious, and I want to relieve that anxiety, but I can’t. He doesn’t know if he should pack for the trip or just go to bed. If they are going, will they leave in the morning? Later in the day? Evan wants to go to Michigan so badly that he won’t reach out to Peter, because he fears pestering his father will cause him to call the whole thing off. Everything related to Peter these days is tenuous and fluid. He is the king of noncommitment.

  “No, Mom, just let it be,” Evan says, irritated. “He said he’ll let me know.” So, we wait. It’s been like this since dinner, four hours of Evan sitting on the couch watching television, biting his nails, trying to avoid thinking about whether or not this trip is actually going to happen.

  At ten-thirty P.M. Peter finally calls. The trip is a go and the flight is early—seven forty-five A.M.—so he is picking Evan up about six. “Thanks, Dad, I can’t wait!” Evan says, and races into his room to pack.

  The next morning Peter is late, and he and Evan have to run through the airport to the gate, with Peter shouting, “Hold it, hold it, we’re here!” along with his last name, as the attendant starts to put a velvet rope in front of the entrance to the jetway.

  When they arrive in Detroit, Peter tells Evan, almost as an aside, that he lost his wallet so cannot rent a car (he has a passport but no driver’s license with him). He calls a cab to take them to Ann Arbor and then phones Anna. “Hey, can you get us a hotel room somewhere within walking distance of campus? I didn’t have time to do it before I left,” he says, explaining about the lost wallet and the lack of a car. Miraculously, Anna finds them a room in an expensive hotel across from campus that is usually booked. Then Peter gives Evan a credit card (which he kept in the back of his phone, not his wallet) and tells him to go hang out with his sister. I’ve been calling Peter to find out if they made it safely to Ann Arbor and where they are staying, but he isn’t answering my texts or calls, so I reach out to Evan instead. He is at a restaurant eating dinner with Anna and a couple of her friends.

  “Are you having a good time?” I ask.

  “Yeah, we’re having a great time,” he says.

  I’m under the impression that Peter just lost his wallet, not that it has actually been missing for days, and I have a photo of his driver’s license somewhere on my computer. “Does Dad want me to send him the photo I have of his license? Or help him rent a car?”

  No, says Evan. Dad’s not even with them. “He’s feeling really sick. Like he has the flu again. He started to feel bad on the plane, so he’s in the room sleeping.”

  “Oh,” I say. “That stinks. He went all the way out there to see Anna and now he’s sick.”

  It doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibilities that Peter could be suffering from the flu again. It is the middle of February, freezing in Michigan, and he has just been on a plane, a good place to catch some kind of bug. What I did not know then, in February 2015, was that withdrawal symptoms look an awful lot like the flu. Eventually, the drugs become necessary just to keep those symptoms at bay.

  What Peter needed that weekend in Michigan was likely cocaine or methamphetamine—to go with the opioid pills, spoon, and syringes he no doubt brought with him—and it was probably all he could think about. I’m guessing he had done some research before leaving San Diego about how and where he could get what he needed in Ann Arbor.

  Depending on the drug, where you are, and whether or not you are tapped into a network of dealers in that city, the most common way people find drugs in unfamiliar places is to go where the users go and do what they do. My guess is that Peter found the methadone clinic in Ann Arbor—on the same street, in fact, as my daughter’s sorority house—and hung around outside asking people leaving the clinic if they knew where he could score what he needed. He may have asked someone lurking around a 7-Eleven store in the middle of the night or at a twenty-four-hour bowling alley, or working an overnight shift at a store, if they knew where he could get cocaine or street speed. He might have found a dealer near the university through a contact in San Diego. He may have searched on Craigslist, knowing the slang dealers use for what they peddle. One way or another, he got what he needed, because the next day when I call to see how things are going, Evan tells me Peter is feeling much better, that he rallied overnight. In fact, at that very moment, he tells me, the three of them are having lunch at Zingerman’s, a legendary Jewish deli near campus, eating monstrous corned beef and pastrami sandwiches.

  Evan gets home late that night. He is exhausted and goes right to bed. There are a few days left of his winter break, so the next morning he sleeps late. I am in my office working when Evan wakes up and walks in, still sleepy, and plops down on the little love seat against the wall. “Hey,” I say. “So how was it?”

  Evan tells me he had fun with his sister, but that Peter wound up spending most of the three-day trip in the hotel room. “Do you know what was wrong?” I ask, puzzled. “Was it a stomach flu or something like that?” I don’t tell Evan that I kept texting Peter to find out what flight they were taking back to San Diego and that he didn’t answer. Maybe getting sick caused him to forget to make a hotel reservation and to lose his wallet?

  I am sitting in my desk chair, turned toward Evan on the love seat, who is rubbing a hand over his face. He doesn’t answer. “Well, doesn’t he seem to be acting weird?” I ask.

  There is a long pause before Evan speaks. “Mom, this is how Dad has been acting since Anna left. This is his new normal.” And he proceeds to detail for me all the crazy things that have been happening at Peter’s house, things I didn’t know about because my son figured this was just the way it would be, now that his sister was away at college. Peter leaving at ten or eleven at night when Evan is staying there, saying he’s going up to the Mobil station, a mile away, to get a supersize Diet Coke with lots of ice—just the way he likes it—and tak
ing hours to return. “I usually go to bed before he gets home, but one time I was still up and he came home and said he forgot to get the soda.”

  That autumn, when Evan was learning to drive, his father would get into the passenger side of the Tiguan, watch Evan pull out of the driveway and fall asleep within minutes. Evan was fifteen years old, with a learner’s permit, and he was driving on a five-lane freeway during rush hour with no supervision. “It was crazy,” Evan tells me. “I was so nervous.”

  One night, very recently, Peter asked if Evan wanted to take a ride with him to that gas station convenience store to get a diet soda. He drove there in his Nissan 350Z, doing 60 MPH on a narrow side road near the beach where the speed limit is 35. “He stopped so hard, the car bounced up over the curb and he parked with one wheel on the sidewalk,” Evan says. “I was like, ‘Dad, what the hell?’ and he said ‘Oh, that’s okay. That’s how you’re supposed to drive a sports car.’ ”

  I’m so angry I don’t know what to do. Calling Peter will accomplish nothing—he never answers the phone anymore. What was he thinking? What responsible adult behaves this way? “That is insane, Evan. That is totally unacceptable and dangerous. Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

  Evan just shrugs. “What were you going to do?” he says, his face reddening, anger rising. “I stay at Dad’s one night a week and every other weekend. It’s not like I’m going to stop seeing him; he’s my father. This is just how he is. It’s been like this ever since Anna left. He just doesn’t care if I’m there or not.”

  “That’s not true,” I say quickly. “Of course he cares. He’s just acting like a fucking lunatic.”

  “I don’t know,” Evan says. He long ago stopped crying in front of me, but now I see a reddening around the rims of his eyes, the slight glistening of tears being held in check. “I think sometimes he just doesn’t love me as much as Anna. He’s not as comfortable hanging out with me.”