A Friend of the Family (29 page)

Could I get to Saranac Lake?

I pressed replay on that first message, and then on the second. It was only a five-hour drive from Round Hill, straight up I-87. Could I get there? Did I know anything about the hospital there?

Where are you, Doc?

Sorry to keep calling, Doc, but—

What was Addison’s disease?

What was an Addisonian crisis?

And then the messages changed. A heavy, choking-off voice.

It was too late. Why didn’t you tell us she had this disease? A disease of the adrenal cortex? Which is right above the kidney? Which you can test for?

She had all the symptoms, Doc, I know she did. An endocrine
problem? She had an endocrine problem? My little girl wasn’t depressed at all, not like you said she was.

You did this. You did this, you fucking bastard. This is your fault.

I know she saw you. I know she saw you last week. You told her she was depressed. But she had Addison’s disease. I’m gonna get you, you bastard. You killed my little girl.

R
OSEANNE CRAIG HAD
been diving off a rope swing on an island in a too-shallow finger off Saranac Lake. She’d hit her shoulder hard on a rock, started to thrash and drown. A friend pulled her out of the water in plenty of time and got her up onto the bank of the lake. She sputtered, sat up, nursed her shoulder. But then, a few minutes later, everything changed. The shock of the event sent Roseanne into an Addisonian crisis. She screamed from the pain in her legs. She vomited. Her blood pressure dropped. She lost consciousness. The group of friends — Roseanne and two other girls—were on an island in a deserted part of the lake. They had to load Roseanne into a canoe. No cell phone service, no ambulance access. They paddled alongshore and found a deserted summerhouse with a telephone. They broke in through the porch and called an ambulance. But by the time they got Roseanne to a hospital, by the time the doctors assessed the problem, by the time hydrocortisone and saline and dextrose were administered, the only thing left to do was ask the Craigs whether the doctors could offer Roseanne’s corneas for donation.

The hospital put the time of death at five fifteen that afternoon. I’d been watching the light shift in the synagogue.

My cell phone started ringing again.

“Oh, Arnie,” I said when I answered. “Oh, Arnie.”

“I’m gonna get you for this, you fucking bastard. You killed my little girl.”

“Oh, Arnie,” I said again. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m gonna—”

“Arnie,” I said, maybe moaned. “Oh, Jesus, Arnie.”

Roseanne Craig with the frog tattoo that stared up at me as I palpated. Roseanne Craig with the black suit and the pearl necklace. Roseanne Craig with the Marxist bookstore. Roseanne Craig, salesperson of the year, an Escalade under her belt already. I was crying, but this was not an admission of guilt. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“I’m gonna get you, you bastard.” And Arnie was crying, too. “I’m gonna fucking get you for this.” And the two of us held the phones to our ears and cried at each other and stayed like that for quite some time until our wives arrived and gently put each of us to bed.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
was the eye of the hurricane, but I didn’t know that yet. In years past, before Doppler radar and twenty-four-hour weather channels, when the eye was still not necessarily a familiar part of the hurricane phenomenon, Florida fathers would check on their garages, Georgia farmers would check on their fruit trees, and the second half of the hurricane would arrive as fast and fierce and angry as a Roman god and sweep everything away: father, garages, farmers, and fruit trees. The storm would dump all of them miles away from where they’d started, twisted and mangled and dead as leather. I had a second or so of peace before it hit me that Roseanne Craig was dead of an Addisonian crisis that I had failed to diagnose. Then the entirety of the previous day hit me, too, and I didn’t want to get out of bed. I took Elaine’s hand. It was not yet six in the morning.

“Pete,” she mumbled. “Come here.” I let myself curl up against my wife, felt the thick, reconstructed flesh of her left breast against my fingertips. I smelled her hair. But I was not lulled back to sleep by this comfort, because I was suffering the first horrible inkling that all this might be denied to me in the not-too-distant future. The satiny luxury of lying in bed with my wife and holding her close. I knew even then, maybe not that I was in the hurricane’s eye, but that the angry gods were not done with me. I pulled her closer to me. I ran my
hand down the folds of flesh along her side. The padding over her hip bone. She murmured something in her sleep—Mmm, Pete—and turned to face me. She kissed me groggily, then turned around again and spooned up into me and fell back asleep.

Two hours later, she woke up and we got out of bed. The morning felt ludicrously quiet. I decided to go down to the study with a sheaf of deckle-edged writing paper from the spindly ornamental desk in the corner of our bedroom, Elaine’s little piece of Victoriana for our Victorian.

“What are you doing?” she asked. She was making the bed.

“I’m going to write a letter to Arnie Craig and his wife.”

“You are?”

I looked stupidly at the paper in my hand.

“Pete, honey, you said yourself that Addison’s is incredibly rare, that it almost always presents like something else. What did you call it? A wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“I know,” I said, “but Joe—” I stopped, felt the writing paper in my hand crumple. This was the first time I consciously stopped myself from admitting what Joe had suggested I check for, saying out loud that Joe Stern had put me on notice.

“Joe what?” She finished straightening our pillows. “Joe would have checked for Addison’s?” She sighed. “Honey, Joe Stern is a lunatic. You’ve said so yourself a million times, a wonderful doctor but a lunatic as far as second-guessing himself goes. He’ll give a pregnancy test to an eighty-five-year-old woman.”

I cleared my throat, dropped the paper back down on the Victorian desk. “Joe’s practice doesn’t get eighty-five-year-old women.”

“You know what I mean. You can’t compare what you should have done to what Joe would have done.”

But Joe Stern had told me to check for Addison’s. He’d put me
on notice. But I was too … sure of myself, full of myself. And my mind was on other things: my son, his daughter. I was too terminally distracted to be my old sleuthy self. And now Roseanne Craig was dead.

I picked the paper back up off the desk. “I still think I’d like to write him a letter,” I said. “He was almost a family friend.”

“He sold us a car.”

“Elaine—”

“I just don’t want you to take this too hard,” she said. “But go. I’ll make some coffee.”

I spent the next three hours bent over the letter in my study. I wasn’t used to writing longhand, and I wasn’t used to writing personal letters either. The words didn’t come. And after a while, when they still wouldn’t come, I started going through my journals, through my
Physician’s Desk Reference,
Medline, to read everything I could about Addison’s disease. My reading told me nothing I didn’t know. Addison’s, a failure of the adrenal glands to produce adequate amounts of cortisol, is distributed equally among the old and young, men and women. The disease can cause depression, irritability, cravings for salty food, some nausea, some skin discoloration. However, in 25 percent of cases, symptoms do not appear until an Addisonian crisis. And even if symptoms do appear, they are usually the same as those present in much more common ailments. Thus Addison’s can be quite tough to diagnose.

Outside my study, I heard footsteps and some murmuring. Alec was checking to see if I was home. Perhaps he was preparing for a showdown. Perhaps he would come storming into my study, demanding to know why I’d gone through his bag, why I’d tossed his bag out of the house, and what would I say? He’d want to know why I wouldn’t let him live his own life. Why I thought I could still control
him. I closed my eyes and listened to my son interrogate my wife.
Is he home? Is he planning on staying here? I don’t know. Did you ask him?

He’d storm into my room, want to know what I had against Laura Stern and his future happiness. I would say to him, Laura Stern? At least she’s still alive, idiot. Other people’s daughters are dead this morning.

But instead my son, like a coward, slipped away out of the house—I heard the door open and gently close—so I turned back to my letter.

“Dear Arnie, I inadequately managed your daughter Roseanne’s care during the past twelve months. I wish I knew how to tell you how much I admired your daughter, how well I thought of her. How dear she seemed, and how I wish I could, how if only I had another chance I would …”

“Dear Mr. Craig, it is hard to know how to sufficiently express how bad I feel. Losing a patient is never easy, but to lose a patient so young, and so full of life …”

“The truth is, Mr. Craig, an old friend of mine
told me
to check for Addison’s disease, along with other autoimmune or endocrinologic concerns, but instead I ignored his good advice and then went out and bashed his daughter’s face in.”

I tore that last piece of paper into tiny shreds and buried them in the bottom of my wastepaper basket.

“Dear Mr. Craig …”

I went upstairs, took a long, hot shower, and tried to scald the previous day off me like a fungus. I scrubbed hard inside my ears, under my fingernails; I got soap in my eyes and in my mouth. When I emerged, I sat in a towel on the bed for no particular reason and watched the street below our window. After all that activity yesterday, every phone in the house was silent. The street below was silent, too, for a long time. Then Mark and Kylie Krieger walked down the
street, hand in hand, Kylie talking animatedly about — a deer she saw? a puppy? a squirrel? And then nothing again for the next eight minutes. And then a car. And then another car. But as far as I could tell, it was nobody I knew.

“Pete? You up there?”

Elaine was making egg salad for lunch. I got dressed, threw my dirty towel in the hamper, smelled the lingering scent of Ivory soap all over me, and went downstairs. Elaine had made me a sandwich with watercress in between the egg salad and the bread. She was going out to do some errands.

“Listen,” she said. “I want you to be a bit nicer to yourself, okay? You can’t sit around blaming yourself for what happened to Roseanne.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Really, Pete. This isn’t good for you. I know you liked that girl, but—”

“Just let me grieve a little, Elaine.”

“Pete—”

“Please let me be.”

She put plastic wrap over the egg salad bowl, wiped the crumbs off the petri-patterned marble breakfast bar. She took a sponge to our counters. Her hair was in a maternal strawberry-blond cut just below her ears, she wore khaki pants and a blue polo shirt, and she looked more like an old hausfrau to me than any woman I ever thought would be my wife. Yet we had such a loving, such a tender relationship. Real tenderness. Elaine and I had suffered our trials, our infertility, her illness, my weakness, but still we’d built this life together. She was as much a part of me as my own skin after all these years. What will I tell the world about you, Elaine? You have a beautiful singing voice. You can pronounce Middle English. You are as rare and magnificent as a condor.

If I had tried to make a life with anyone else, I would have failed. But she held on to me after all these many failures, after I had not been grateful enough to her, time and time again.

“I’ll be home in a little while,” she said. She straightened her polo shirt. “You want anything at the grocery store?”

“No.”

“You sure?” I nodded. “Okay, then.” She came over to my perch and kissed me on the temple. “I love you, Pete.”

“I love you, too.” And then I watched her walk out of the kitchen. I will not let myself start with those “if only’s” here, because I have been good about not indulging myself yet and I’d like to maintain my strength on that lonely front. So instead I will only say that the eye of my hurricane lasted perhaps seven hours, which is long by meteorologic standards, but which barely gave me time to catch my breath. I finished my sandwich. I stared out the window. I still don’t know what I was hoping to see. I remembered Roseanne Craig leaving my office and how I’d wanted to give her a hug.

I
WAS BACK
in my study when the doorbell rang. My first thought was of Girl Scout cookies and Jehovah’s Witnesses, neither one of which was worth getting up for.

“Pete!”

“Pete, are you there?”

Iris and Joe were at the front door. They almost always just came up through the back. I saw them through the window before I opened the door: they both looked worn out for some reason, both slightly stooped. The gray was shining through Iris’s hair, and Joe’s forehead looked red, as though he’d been rubbing it all morning. I was clutching the draft of another letter and it did not occur to me yet to worry.

“What’s going on?”

“Laura’s gone, Pete,” Joe said.

“Gone?” I opened the door wide to let them in. We sat down together in the living room, which we rarely did, in general preferring the friendlier precinct of the kitchen, close to the food and the booze. “I don’t get you.”

“She’s gone,” Iris said. “She took her passport, her clothes, her medicine. She’s gone. Her roommate said she just packed up and left the apartment.”

“Does the roommate know where she went?”

“Did you rape her, Pete?”

“Did I … I’m sorry?” Did I
rape
her? Rape her?

“Wendy said her face was bruised, she was wearing bloody pajamas.”

“I’m sorry … did I what?”

“Were you in her apartment, Pete?” Iris asked.

No, Iris—you couldn’t believe this, Iris. Come on.
Rape?
Yes, I did hit her, and yes, I did make her bleed. I probably broke her nose. I might have given her whiplash, even. And these are sins, I know, and I felt terrible about them, but—but I didn’t
rape
anyone. And a broken nose isn’t insurmountable. It isn’t septicemia, myocardial infarction. It isn’t Addison’s disease.

“Pete, why don’t you tell us what happened,” Joe said. He was trying to sound reasonable, but there was panic in his voice.

“Wendy showed us what she’d been wearing,” Iris said.

“I didn’t rape your daughter.” What a ridiculous, gruesome thing to say.

“Peter, Laura is many things, but she is not a liar.” Iris held Joe’s hand, clutched it. “There were big drops of blood—”

“But I didn’t—” I was proving a negative here, which was, of
course, impossible. There was no way to win a fight with a missing woman. I felt the place where she’d touched my forearm start to throb. “Look, I don’t know how to prove that I didn’t do something I didn’t do. But I did not—
I did not
rape your daughter. I have no idea why she would accuse me of something like that. I have no idea—”

“She left the city, Pete, she fled.”

“— except to say that she’s unstable. She’s unstable.”

“She didn’t leave any information. We have no idea how to find her. And Wendy said her face was puffy, bruised—and her pajamas.”

I wouldn’t even respond to Iris; I looked directly at Joe. “You’ve known it for years,” I said. “She makes things up, Joe, come on. You know that.” My voice was betraying me; I was starting to sound nervous. Probably even guilty.

“Tell me what happened, Pete,” Joe said.

I looked at each of them, their familiar, beloved faces. The light poured into the living room, making the gray in Iris’s hair glint. How little she knew about her own daughter—what secrets Laura had kept from her her entire life. She’d wanted to protect her parents, she said. But what exactly did these people need protection from? Joe, with his successful OB practice? Iris, with her million-dollar salary? The two of them with their three kids graduating from MIT? “I went to her apartment, that’s true,” I said. “I went to her apartment.”

“And then?”

“I just wanted her to see — I wanted her to see what she was doing, okay? I went to her apartment to have a conversation with her. I wanted to talk to her about her future plans with Alec.”

We were all silent. Iris cleared her throat. “What next?”

“We talked,” I said. I felt my skin turn clammy. “And then I left.”

“Nothing else happened?” Joe asked.

How could I not admit it? But I couldn’t. I was a clammy-skinned
coward. I hadn’t raped her, no, but I could not tell the truth about what I had done. I was protecting them, too, and myself. I hit your daughter, Joe. Your precious one, Laura, whom you love best.

“So then why was she bleeding when Wendy saw her?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why did she say you raped her?” Iris asked. “I know Laura,” she said. “She wouldn’t just make something up, she wouldn’t just lie like this.”

“You think she’s some sort of angel?”

“Excuse me?”

The saddest defense of the guilty coward, to go on the offense when the defense holds no water. “Your daughter Laura, she’s perfect? You believe everything she says?”

“Peter, I just cannot bring myself to believe that she would lie about this,” Iris said. “And the horrible thing is, I almost don’t know what’s worse—to think that she would, or to think that you could actually do this.”