A Friend of the Family (4 page)

“He what?”

Joe laughed, rubbed his hand on his bald head. It was the first smile I’d seen from him that morning.

“Your fucking brother. He said, Joe, I know you’re going through a difficult time right now, and I’d like to offer you something to help. I have Knicks tickets, next week, right on the floor. I want you and Iris to have them.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I took ’em, too,” Joe said. “What the hell? It’ll be good to take Iris out to a game. You know how she ogles the players.” This was another joke between us, that our wives liked to fantasize about muscle-bound yahoos whenever circumstances allowed. As far as we knew, this wasn’t true about either one of them.

The waitress came back for our order, a western omelet for me, oatmeal and a poached egg for Joe, and as she disappeared we lapsed again into silence. I wanted to ask about Laura—how she was doing, of course, and what her shrink thought, but also all the questions everyone else at Round Hill asked when we passed one another in hospital hallways, at the Grand Union, at the Garland Chophouse, where we took our Saturday dinners: How did they not know? He’s an ob-gyn, for Christ’s sake! A high-risk ob-gyn! Their own daughter!

And then, in quieter whispers: Did she really bash in the skull? Just bash it in like a Wiffle ball? And then, quietest of all: So who was the father, anyway?

“She’d stopped talking to us, that’s what it was,” Joe said after a few minutes. He’d been fingering the table-side jukebox, just like our kids did when we brought them here for milkshakes. The songs were throwbacks, they’d never really been popular—B sides by Donovan, Freddy Fender, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap.

“But everyone says that about teenagers — they just go silent one day—and what the hell did we know? Although now, looking back, Iris says she wouldn’t even let us touch her. That should have been a
clue. She’d go to give her a hug, fix a button or something, and Laura would just shrink.”

“Well, kids can—”

“No, no. The psychiatrist said it’s one of the signs — one of the signs, a classic. They don’t want to be touched. They’re sure you’re going to be able to feel it. The baby.”

“Joe, I don’t —”

“She started wearing really baggy clothes — I don’t know. She always wore baggy clothes. She’s been stealing my old sweatshirts since she was twelve. She’s always been shy about her body.” He looked up at me as if for my approval. “Other girls in her class dressing up like Madonna, and there’s Laura in her huge flannel shirts and old jeans, her head in a book.”

“She’s a modest kid.”

Joe grunted. “So she’s not showing, of course she’s not showing. The end of her second trimester, she’s got the abdomen muscles of a seventeen-year-old, she’s hiding everything in flannel shirts. We’re supposed to chart her menstrual cycle or something? Count tampon wrappers in the bathroom?”

“Of course not.”

He waved me off. “That’s what New Jersey says. We should have known.”

“Fuck New Jersey.”

Joe shook his head. I paid closer attention than I should have to my coffee. Laura Stern—what did I know of her? It had been a couple of years since we’d spent time together down in Delaware, and even then she was so much older than the other kids, it had been easy not to see her at all. A heavy crust of teenage acne, flannel shirts, sure, and a precocious taste in literature, head always bent in something absurd,
Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss.
Even at the beach. Who
was she having sex with? Back when I was in high school, nobody had sex with the Laura Sterns.

“The thing is,” Joe said, “we always felt close to her. Or I did, I guess. The other three were the kids, but Laura, she was like our lieutenant. Second in charge. We were so young when we had her, and she always had that grown-up thing about her. A serious kid. So smart.”

“I know, Joe.”

“So then what did she think we would have done to her, exactly? If we’d found out? What would we have done?”

“She was just scared.”

“But why? Why would she be scared of us? Doesn’t she know us?” It was this, I knew, that was really breaking his heart more than anything, even more than the library delivery and the dead baby in the garbage. His own daughter felt she couldn’t tell him the truth.

“Listen, you can’t—”

“Why didn’t she trust us?” His voice cracked and broke.

Back to my coffee. I heard morning regulars shuttle in, the local dentists, the cops, Tim, who managed the Chophouse. Joe was still waiting for an answer.

“She wouldn’t want you to know that she had a boyfriend,” I said. “Or that she was, you know, sexually active.”

Joe didn’t say anything until the waitress brought our food to the table. “A boyfriend,” he said. “As far as I knew, she didn’t even have any
friends.”
I looked down at the burnt edges of my toast.

“She could get life in prison,” Joe said. “They’re going to have a hearing, see if she should be tried as an adult.”

“Oh God,” I said. “Ah, Joe … I don’t—”

“That’s what New Jersey wants, since she’s only ten months shy of eighteen. So they try her as an adult, and they win, she gets life in an adult prison. No possibility of parole for thirty years.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them and looked straight at me with his bleak, bloodshot gaze. “Can you believe that, Pete? My little girl, in jail for the rest of her life?”

“That won’t happen.” Although why wouldn’t it?

“But what do we do? What can we do?” His eyes trapped me. “Pete, we’ll bankrupt ourselves before that happens. We’ll spirit her to Mexico. We’ll figure it out. I’m not kidding.”

“Joe, that won’t happen.”

“Thirty years in medium-security prison. Do you know what those places are
like
? Do you know what can happen to a girl like Laura in a place like that?”

“Listen—”

“She’ll be in confinement, no community, no visits except behind bars, plate glass, no future, her company is murderers and gang members, she’s alone, she grows old, we die, and she’s still behind bars.”

“Come on—”

But he waved me off.

“Come on,” I said again. I don’t know why.

Laura was born our first year out of college, when we were all just twenty-three. Joe and Iris were in Philly together, Iris for an MBA at Wharton, and Joe at Temple for medical school; they’d spent the summer before they started school trying to figure out if they should get engaged or move on to less familiar horizons, since they’d been dating for three years already, after all. Then, during her first week of school and Joe’s third, Iris found herself throwing up between classes, exhausted in the afternoons. Joe proposed, they were married over winter break, Laura was born in early spring. A redhead, just like Iris.

I remember those days with fondness, although of course I wasn’t the one trying to juggle an MBA course load with a newborn, or living with my parents and sisters and brand-new wife in the one-
bathroom North Philly row house where I’d grown up. In those days, I was comfortably stationed in a dorm at Mount Sinai, and Elaine shared a big two-bedroom on Columbus with two roommates; what did we know about cramped and broke? What did we know about mastitis, no privacy, kid sisters taking forty-five-minute baths and the baby needing to be changed and the diapers in the bathroom vanity and everyone in the house screaming? Elaine and I knew nothing — in fact, the cheeriness of home-cooked meals and little babies appealed to us, so we took weekend drives to see Joe and Iris whenever we could tear ourselves away from New York. We liked to walk Laura, in her little stroller, to the zoo or Fairmount Park, let Joe and Iris take in a movie by themselves. Elaine and I were engaged but planned to marry only after I finished medical school. When we visited Joe and Iris for the weekend, Mrs. Stern made us sleep in separate rooms.

After their graduate degrees, the Sterns moved to Baltimore; Joe did his training at Hopkins, and Iris took a job in the corporate services division at First Mariner Bank. They put Laura in nursery school and day care and worked long hours, but despite their benign neglect, the girl seemed to be growing into a well-behaved and intelligent little person. She was fond of finger painting—well, all children are — but Iris treated Laura’s finger paintings as if they were real masterpieces, getting them nicely framed and hanging them above the mantel. And you know, all dressed up like that, the paintings sort of looked like modern art. Elaine cooed about them; we all did.

“And I’m not surprised they’re blaming us, you know?” Joe said, putting down the salt shaker he’d been fiddling with. “If it were someone else’s kid, I’d blame the parents, too.”

“You wouldn’t—”

“I mean, I think I
want
to be blamed. I want it to be my fault. I don’t want it to be hers. It was us, we were shitty parents, we deserve this.”

“But you’ve been wonderful parents, Joe,” I said. What would Elaine say here? I tried to channel my wife. “To all four of your kids, you’ve been wonderful parents.”

“I’m an obstetrician, Pete, and I didn’t even see my own daughter’s pregnancy.”

“She wore baggy clothes — you said it yourself.”

“I would have sworn on my life she was a virgin.”

“Come on.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. If he cried—well, that made sense. Had it been me, maybe I would have cried, too. Alec was eight years old back then and the idea that my own child could be a stranger to me while he lived in my house, that while I worked to keep him warm and clothed and fed, he could harbor terrified secrets — I thought of Alec’s fragile shoulders, his bowl of silky brown hair. I thought of the way he murmured in his sleep, fragments of television commercials, Top 40 songs.

“We’ll spirit her to Mexico. You’ll help us, Pete. You’ll help us get her out.”

I nodded. There was nothing to say but, “Of course.”

“We’ve got her on antidepressants. Now Iris is taking them, too. Maybe I’ll start. They don’t seem to be helping that much, but I like the idea of medicating my way out of this.”

“Do you think you’re depressed, Joe?”

“I’m not depressed.” He rolled up his napkin in his hand. “I’m just sad.”

My omelet, flecked with red and pink and green, looked garish, ridiculous, barely like food. I picked up my fork, poked at it.

“At least the kids don’t know what’s going on. I mean, Neal knows something’s up, and we’ve tried to ask around it, to see how much
he’s figured out. But he just thinks Laura’s sick, and he doesn’t want to know more than that, thank God.”

“Thank God.”

“Something like this, it’s so beyond them. It’s so beyond us—how couldn’t it be beyond them? How could they even understand it? How could we explain it to them?”

“Of course you’re not going to talk to a second-grader about what happened.”

He looked at me sharply. “You don’t talk to your kids, that’s how they get in trouble, Pete.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You gotta talk to them. You’ve got to know what’s going on.”

“In the second grade?”

“You underestimate your kids, they’ll crush you. They’ll crush you with what you never could have expected.”

As for me, I thought there was a big space between underestimating your kids and terrifying them, and Joe’s sweet-faced little babies — let them be the last people in Round Hill not to know what Laura had done. When Pauline was born, four years earlier, we’d delighted that there was another baby girl; we slicked Alec’s hair and put him in a button-down shirt for Pauline’s naming at Temple Beth Shalom. I remember watching him watch the newborn little girl and jealously eyeing Neal, who was protective about his new sister. “How come Neal gets one?” He tugged at my sleeve. “How come Neal gets a sister and I don’t?”

I shook my head. So many times in this life I’ve had no idea what to say. But then I had an inspiration. “You know, if you ask nicely, maybe Neal will share his.”

Kids hate to share. “Why can’t I have my own?”

“Because you’re our one and only.” This was lame, I knew, but he seemed to take it okay, plugged his thumb in his mouth, and I was hugely grateful for this odd moment of complacency.

I wanted to find Laura Stern and shake her, hard. Her parents would have taken the baby in.
We
would have taken her in.

“She wasn’t viable.” Joe took a bite of his oatmeal, put the spoon down still half-full. “That’s the thing of it. She wasn’t viable. The autopsy proved it.”

“Conclusively?” I said. “Well, that’s good, right?”

“I’ve seen babies like that, Pete, underweight, underdeveloped lungs,” he said. “Even if you stick ’em in a NICU for fifteen weeks, there’s no guarantee they’ll survive. They’re blind, you know, more than half the time. Brain-damaged. And sometimes they just die no matter what. But if they live, it’s no kind of life.”

“So that’s good, then, for your case.”

“We have to prove it, though. It’s very tough to prove whether a baby was alive when it was born.”

“Can’t an autopsy look for oxygen in her lungs, something?” This was something we never discussed in medical school.

“They could still get her for mutilating a corpse.”

I nodded. “Sure.” Mutilating a corpse.

“She could get eighteen months just for that.”

“Well, that’s … better than the alternative.”

Look, I’d been in the restrooms in the Round Hill Municipal Library. Mint-colored tiles rimmed with black. Old-fashioned pedestal sinks. Lots of mirrors. So I couldn’t help thinking, the stalls — did she use the handicapped stall? — even so, it would have been no larger than a walk-in closet. She probably birthed crouching over the toilet. And then she took the nearest heavy object (or had she come prepared? a hammer? her little brother’s baseball bat?) and cracked in the
wailing newborn’s skull. Took it to the Dumpster behind the library. She used a sweatshirt to clean up the blood from the bathroom floor; the sweatshirt was now official property of the state. And although I didn’t want to think about it, I couldn’t stop myself: Where was the baby when she cleaned up the blood? On the floor? In a sink? Was the skull cracked yet? Was it alive? Crying? Twenty-five weeks: The baby was blind, almost certainly in respiratory distress. Lying on a bathroom floor. Its skull as thin as parchment.