A Friend of the Family (28 page)

So kids were cruel. I knew kids could be cruel. “Is this supposed to be some sort of justification, Laura?”

“Justification?” She gave me a look, sadness and disdain. “They would follow me home. They threw used condoms at my bedroom window.”

“Why didn’t you tell your parents?”

“What could they have done about it?”

“Told somebody? Transferred you?”

“Where, to the public school? Are you kidding? Besides, if I told them, it would have broken their hearts. I wasn’t about to do that to them.”

“Your parents would have protected you.”

“Nobody could have protected me.”

Her explanation made no sense at all. Getting a little roughed up in high school gave her the right to do what she’d done? “So instead you went to the Grand Union—”

“Jesus, I don’t know why I’m bothering to explain this.” She stood up with such force that her chair rocked backward, but she didn’t stop talking. “The boys were nice to me there, that’s all. I liked going there. They were nice. It didn’t start out as sex—it was just, I don’t know, it was just a weird kind of companionship at first. Friendship. I was a loser, they were losers, it was almost like we had a little club.” She ran a hand through her hair. “And then I got pregnant, and I panicked.”

“But surely you knew you could see a doctor.”

“What doctor? Who? My
father
? For him to find out? The whole world to find out?”

“The whole world wouldn’t have—”

“I didn’t have the courage to inject myself with bleach, do any of the things I’d read about in books. So I beat myself. On my belly. Beating myself with my fists, running into corners. I threw myself down the stairs a couple of times. Whatever I could to miscarry.”

“Laura, you don’t have to tell me this.”

“My stomach was covered in bruises. So were my thighs, from bumping into things. Totally discolored. And I kept going to the Grand Union, too. Thinking maybe that would somehow dislodge the baby.”

“Laura,” I said. In my head I saw my old best friend Joe. And I saw his wife, Laura’s mother, Iris.

“Finally I started contracting at around six months. I went to the library. It was the first place I could think of. I was sure that I would deliver a dead baby, that nobody would ever have to know. I could pretend the whole thing never even happened. I couldn’t believe the thing started crying when it came out of me.”

“Laura, please. Please,” I said. I felt desperate. How could I have ever thought she was a reasonable woman? “Please stop.”

“Don’t worry, Dr. Pete. I’m not trying to
justify
anything. I’m just telling you what happened.”

“I came to talk about Alec.”

“Bullshit. You came to talk about this. Because this is what you’re afraid of—that someone who could do what I did isn’t fit to be seen with your son.”

“That’s not what I—Laura, I told you, I just want Alec to have a future.”

“You just want Alec to have the future you’ve already chosen for him.”

There was no point to this conversation. I thought about picking up my jacket and leaving, but I did not. “The first time I slammed its head, it was still crying,” she said. “I didn’t know I had it in me. I was panicking, freaking out. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Oh, God,” I said.

“I had to do it a second time to get it to stop.”

And again, for long minutes, we just sat there. I should have picked
myself up, picked up my jacket. I should have taken myself to the door. But I didn’t know how at that very moment. I swear to you I didn’t know how.

“If you want to know the truth,” she finally said, “about why I like your son so much, it’s that he keeps me from the worst part of myself. From my own worst instincts. The truth is, as you seem to have figured out, I don’t really
want
him following me halfway around the world. Of course it would be easier, it would be better for a million reasons, if I could go by myself. But Alec keeps me from hurting myself. He keeps me from panicking. I can just lose myself in that devotion, you know? I can just swim in it. I’m scared to be without it.”

“You can’t use my son as your lifesaver,” I said. “He’s worth more than that.”

“Before I knew how much Alec loved me, I was so lonely,” she said. “My life was going nowhere. I was back here with my parents, out of options. My siblings couldn’t stand me. My own mother couldn’t stand me. I even went down to the Grand Union,” she said. “It’s amazing the way places like Round Hill don’t change. The Dumpster’s the same, the rotting food smell is the same. And there’s still a group of teenage boys back there who are more than happy to do whatever they want to you, who actually can’t believe their luck. I walked behind the store and saw them and I thought, I could do this. I’m still so lonely. I still need to feel something close to human connection.” She paused. “Until Alec came into my life and loved me enough to stop me from needing to feel that.”

“You cannot use my son that way,” I said again. “It’s not right.”

“I need him in Paris with me,” she said. “He protects me from myself.”

“You cannot use—”

“It’s not really using him.” She went to the window again, opened
it up a little higher to let out our smoke. Then she just stood there in her little underwear in the halo of the sunlight, looking at me with her arms crossed, as if she was challenging me. But why my son, Laura? Why can’t you just leave us all out of your sad story? “Or if it is,” she said, “then clearly your son likes being used.”

“Laura—”

“In fact, I think he loves it.” She laughed again, her grumbly, condescending Iris laugh. “You should see him,” she said. “He loves it. He really does. Just like at the Grand Union but a million times better, a million times more grateful. Thank you, Laura, this feels so good, Laura, you’re the only one who gets me, Laura, thank you, thank you. You’re not like my fucking parents, they think they get me but they don’t, I fucking hate them.”

“Stop it. Stop.”

“My father, especially, he’s such a pompous bastard, I can’t wait till I never have to listen to his pompous bullshit again—”

“Stop it, Laura.”

“Your son really hates you, you know that?” she said. “It takes everything in his power to hide it from you.”

“That’s not true, Laura.”

“Sorry, Dr. Pete, but you judge him and me, we’re gonna judge you right back. That’s the way it goes.”

“Laura,” I said. I saw my son, six years old, his palm full of tiny clams. I saw Iris in the kitchen, in a white bikini. I saw my son, a grown man, in bed with this woman. Noises like raccoons trapped behind a wall. I heard Laura and my son laughing at me when they thought I wasn’t listening.

“Assholes like you,” she said, still laughing, “you think you know everything, but you don’t know a goddamn thing.”

And it sprang out of me. I don’t know what it was, or where it came from, but it sprang out of me like a wild animal: I hit her so hard across the face that I heard something crack.

Something cracked. Something broke.

But she didn’t cry out, only breathed heavily. How could she not have cried out? What was the matter with this woman? Because when I looked up at her finally, blood was pouring from her nose, trickling from the corner of her mouth. Her nose was askew at the cartilage bridge. Her lips were already puffy. She was quiet.

The memory of Iris’s bruise.

“Jesus, I’m sorry—”

“You hit me,” Laura said thickly, dumbly, holding up a wrist to her bloody face.

“Laura, let me—’

“You hit me,” she said again.

“Look, I …” Had I broken her cheekbone? Her jaw? Did I have that kind of strength? But no, she was talking clearly, her jaw was clearly intact. Her teeth were in her mouth.

I went to the freezer, looked for some ice, frozen vegetables.

“Get out,” she said. I turned to face her, her nose still pouring blood, and it had gotten on her wrist, her lacy top. God, noses bleed so much more than they really ought to. I pulled some paper towel from the counter.

“You should put some ice …,” I said, but then I faltered.

“If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the police.” The police, Jesus. The police — I’ve always been such a coward. I tried to force the paper towel into her hand, but she wouldn’t take it, so it dropped to the floor. She needed ice.

“Laura, I’m really sorry,” I said. “I didn’t … I didn’t mean …”
But I had meant it, and it could not be undone, and maybe there was some tiny part of me that was glad to see the way her nose gushed. Maybe. For this is what she said to me when I opened the door.

“I used my knee.”

This is what she said. I was opening the door to leave.

“Not a hammer,” she said. “Not a baseball bat. My knee. Just slammed the baby down twice, hard. Didn’t even have to think about it,” she said. “I’m surprised my father never told you.”

L
IKE A CRIMINAL,
Lady Macbeth, I washed the drops of blood off my hands in a McDonald’s bathroom on First Avenue. How had I gotten blood on my own hands? I still had nowhere to go, no good plan of action. So I decided to walk south to Chinatown, to take some comfort in the cacophony there, and then I kept walking, farther south, and then east, over the Manhattan Bridge, which I didn’t even know a person could walk over. It did not occur to me to go anywhere in particular, only to keep walking, walking, walking, to walk farther and farther away from Laura Stern.

Brooklyn felt like another world. I pushed through the parks near the bridge, along the busy shopping streets, the cobblestoned passageways leading out to the waterfront. I kept walking, my feet starting to hurt in my shoddy sneakers, the crack of my hand against the side of Laura’s face playing and replaying itself in my memory. I made a right and found myself in a district of warehouses, slowly being turned into condominiums and lofts. I kept walking until I found the water. That terrible soundtrack—crack, crack, crack.

My body still seemed odd to me, and I was nauseated. My hand pulsed where it had made contact with Laura’s cheek. But I felt, oddly, more righteous than ever in my determination to keep Alec home. Everything about Laura proved that he should stay home, that I was
right. The problem was how to tell him. The problem was how to return to myself. I had never hit a woman before. I had never broken anyone’s bones. I was a doctor, after all. I had taken the Hippocratic oath.

My mind was sufficiently with me that when I passed a bank with a clock on its sign and saw that it was almost three, I knew I should call my wife. I found a pay phone and my credit card and dialed.

“Where are you? I’ve been so worried. You left your phone.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m in the city. I just … I needed to walk around.”

“Are you all right?”

“More or less.”

“You threw Alec’s suitcase out the window last night.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

We were both quiet for a moment.

“Pete, if he goes to Paris, it’s not like we’ll never see him again—”

“Not now, Elaine, okay?”

More quiet.

“When are you coming home?”

“Soon.”

“By dinnertime?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I think maybe I’ll go have dinner with someone,” she said. “Alec’s working and I could use the company.”

“Great,” I said.

“Pete, I need you to take care of yourself, okay? Whatever happens with Alec—I just need you to take care of yourself. This isn’t good for you, the way you’ve been acting. This isn’t … healthy.”

I hung up the phone and kept walking. Was I okay? Was I healthy? Why wouldn’t I be? What was unhealthy about wanting to protect
my only child? What was wrong with me that I would do whatever it took to keep him safe? I kept walking, Laura’s choked voice still in my ears, the baby, her knee, and people wanted to know what was wrong with
me.

It only occurred to me where I was going when I got there. Morning services were long over, and this wasn’t the sort of institution that was religious enough for afternoon minhah, but still, it was a comfort just to see the building in front of me. I thought of my grandfather in his old black coat. The dozens of relatives in their black-and-white glory on my parents’ foyer wall. I thought of my dead father, ushering Phil and me into our pressed black pants, walking with us hand in hand to synagogue every week. We were six years old, seven years old. I had never been on an airplane been to a baseball game been ice skating seen a mountainside but I knew the warm firm feeling of my father’s hand in mine, the musty smell of that synagogue, my grandfather kissing me and my brother on our heads and slipping us each a quarter because we’d been such good boys. It’s for us, Phil once told me decades ago in the Yonkers bedroom we reluctantly shared. They did this all for us. We might not like it, but we know why they did it.

And God strike me down if he wasn’t right.

I
GOT HOME
just past nine o’clock. The house was empty. I went outside, shot basket after basket. A good, heavy sweat to wipe off the lingering residue of a horrible day. I’d sweat it off and then I’d shower it off and then I’d figure out what to do next, what to say to my son. I wondered if Laura had gone to the emergency room, if she’d told them what happened. Probably not. Nosebleeds cleared up, broken noses generally healed by themselves, and she seemed like
a tough enough cookie. She’d wait it out. She’d hold some ice to her face. I made a jump shot, and then another one.

Inside, my cell phone started to wail. A few seconds after it stopped, I heard the house phone go. I made another ten free throws. I heard my cell phone start up again, and then the house phone. Christ,
had
Laura gone to the police? Already? My hand started tingling again. I made another fifteen free throws. The air was wonderful, cool and brisk, but the crack, crack, crack was playing in my head. A week before Labor Day, the dying embers of the summer. The house phone started going again, and I finally went in to catch it, but I was too late. I looked at my cell phone.

I had missed thirty-nine calls.

It was tough to piece together exactly what had happened from the fragmented messages, but the last thirty-five of them were all from Arnie Craig. He wanted one thing from me, and then another. And then another.