A Little Help from Above (14 page)

“This is the thanks I get for keeping the family together,” Aunt Roz muttered.

“But let me ask you something, and don’t be insulted,” Lauren said wistfully. “You don’t actually know for sure that you’re right? I mean you don’t have proof, proof.”

Shelby nodded. “You want to know what it is?”

“Only if it’s not, you know, gross.”

“Remember two years ago when my apartment got robbed, and my passport and credit cards were stolen?”

“Not really,” Lauren shrugged.

“Yes, you do. It was around the time I was going to Rome and needed my passport. Which I couldn’t replace without my birth certificate, which was also stolen. So when I flew home for the High Holidays, I went searching in the attic for the original. But when I found the envelope with the birth certificates, there were four of them. One for me, one for you, and two for Eric.”

“Why two?” Lauren nibbled at a hang nail.

“The first one listed Lawrence Joseph Lazarus as his father,” she paused. “And the other one said, ‘Father Unknown.’”

“Oh my God. I always thought he was a Lazarus because Daddy adopted him.”

“Nope.”

“And two years ago…that’s when you stopped speaking to us…” Lauren looked away, trying not to hyperventilate.

“Yep.”

“I think I’m going to puke.”

“See? See what you’ve done?” Aunt Roz suddenly tried inching closer to Shelby to smack her with her cast. “You made your sister
sick, and you spoiled my big day out. I always said you were the bad seed.”

“Me?” Shelby cried out. “Why am I the bad seed? You betrayed my mother, lied to her children, then covered it up for thirty years. All I did was tell the truth.”

“Take me upstairs, Lauren. I never want to see my niece again as long as I live.”

“In a minute.” Lauren’s back stiffened. “I’m sorry, Shel,” she said, hugging her. “I feel terrible that you’ve been carrying this burden all alone. But at least it all makes sense now. I mean why you’re so mad at the world and everything.”

“I’m not mad at the world, Lauren. Just my family, the entire medical establishment, the Republican Party, men, people who insist on bringing cranky babies into fine restaurants—”

“I want to go now,” Aunt Roz interrupted. “I’m suddenly feeling sick to my stomach.”

“Join the crowd.” Lauren wheeled her away. “Join the crowd.”

It seemed only fitting, if not ironic, that for the next three days, Long Island got socked with rain. Not the on again, off again showers that annoyed hairdressers and crossing guards, but the windy, street-flooding downpours that made Shelby feel like Noah. Especially as she felt too immobilized to do anything other than hole up in the guesthouse ark and lick her wounds.

She wondered how long it took Noah to decide he didn’t give a rat’s ass if the sun ever came out again. Self-pity could have that effect. As could having a grandmother who’d filled a young, innocent head with the mishegas that whenever it rained this heavily, it meant God was crying because the children were bad.

Maybe Granny Bea Good was right, Shelby thought as she tried peering out the window through the obliterated view. She had behaved badly. And although she wasn’t totally sorry she spilled the family’s secret beans, she had to admit her timing sucked.

In her defense, however, surely a jury of her peers would have found her innocent of all charges, based on the fact she was provoked and the act was by no means premeditated. But when word came through Avi that the doctors were as puzzled by Aunt Roz’s sudden decline as they had been the other day by her miraculous recovery, Shelby knew she was to blame.

And, too, there was the matter of Lauren’s onset of depression. Once again, Avi, the host of Bad Headline News, told Shelby he had never seen his wife so blue. Given Lauren’s strong affinity for family, it was of no help for her to learn that her odd but otherwise stable childhood had been based on a fraud. This on top of the fact she
might never have her own family was simply more than she could bear. Lauren, too, had gone home to hole up.

Shelby left several messages for Lauren to call her, to no avail. Then for reasons even Shelby did not understand, she dialed Aunt Roz’s hospital room. Also to no avail, for Aunt Roz had the nurse hang up the phone the instant she heard Shelby on the line. Although Aunt Roz did manage to relay to Maria she wanted Shelby out of the guesthouse, and out of her life. First, however, she wanted Maria to remind Shelby to look in the kitchen drawer for the invitation to her nursery school reunion, which in Aunt Roz’s opinion, she should definitely attend.

No way was Shelby going to look for that stupid invitation. But on day two of solitary confinement, she was bored enough to venture into the kitchen to look for a little company. Even a chat with Avi would suffice. Pity he had cut back on his visits after the spigot of neighbors’
CARE
packages was turned off. Why stop by if the fridge wasn’t filled with tuna casseroles and knishes?

Maria wasn’t much company either, as she was ignoring the malevolent daughter rather than engaging her in small talk. Apparently she knew enough to hold Shelby accountable for Lauren’s sadness and the fact Mrs. L’s recovery had mysteriously taken a turn for the worse.

“Oh, what the hell.” Shelby opened the drawer and started rifling the contents in search of a mailing from Temple Judea. But she found no sign of the invitation in there. No luck in the duck, either. She stared at the ugly ceramic relic. Good God. Who spent fifty grand renovating a kitchen, then kept a cheap, made-in-Taiwan tchachke from A&S, circa 1972, on the counter? Aunt Roz. That’s who.

Shelby threw the miscellany back in the duck’s bill. This whole thing was absurd. Even if she found the invitation, there was no guarantee the committee had located Matty. Or even if they had, that he still had feelings for her. It was time to face the facts. Matty Lieberman represented her past, not her future. As did the desire to have children.

Damn Stacy Rothstein for mentioning those essays on motherhood she swore Shelby penned in third grade. Now she would always have to wonder if as captain of her ship, she’d steered her life so drastically off course, she’d lost sight of her own childhood dreams. Or, if Stacy’s memory was simply as bad as her method of birth control.

But wait. Maybe Shelby could solve this mystery. Her room was practically archive heaven, and the truth could be as close as those musty boxes lying dormant for who knows how long. Shelby bolted out of the kitchen and up the stairs two at a time, then cringed when she flicked on the bedroom light.

Even with the bright sunlight pouring through the darkened shades, the room looked shabby and abandoned. A pyramid of clutter here, a scrap heap of memories there. She hoped her mother wasn’t gazing down now, only to see her once meticulous decor awaiting a bulldozer and a broom.

And yet it wasn’t the disarray that kept Shelby at bay. It was the realization she was about to enter a danger zone. A room filled with mementoes that appeared innocuous in nature yet were powerful enough to graze open wounds. Mementos that would surely remind her how her young life had been blindsided by death and deception.

But five cartons and one hour later, she was breathing easier. There were no ticking time bombs for one very good reason. Sandy Lazarus was not a saver. Hell, she couldn’t even save herself. Her greatest priority had been keeping an immaculate home, not the dreamy-eyed writings of an eight-year-old.

Aunt Roz, on the other hand, seemed to have saved everything, for there in the bottom of one of the boxes were Shelby’s diaries. She knew instantly they were the ones she’d kept in junior high, perhaps the most prolific time of her life, naturally because of the tragic loss of her mother.

And yet to Shelby’s amazement, there was virtually no reference to her mother’s death. Only to her anger and sadness that Matty had never written her back or bothered to visit since his family moved to California two years earlier. Why won’t he write me? she’d scribbled in green ink in large, loopy letters. He promised he’d write EVERY week. I hate his guts. MATTHEW JAY LIEBERMAN IS A RAT FINK!!!!!!

But in her very next entry, Shelby envisioned their life together. Naturally they would reunite to attend the same college, get engaged, get really good jobs that paid at least five thousand dollars a year, get married, and voilà, the smoking gun. She and Matty would have seven children, one for each day of the week. Unbelievable! Stacy had been right.

She wondered what had ever possessed her to want a family large enough to form a baseball team? And how could that ridiculous
fantasy have been more important than expressing her immense grief over the loss of her mother? Looks like good old Dr. Israel, may have been right about her. Maybe she was Da Queen of Da Nile.

“Miss Shelly, Miss Shelly,” Maria called out from the master bedroom. “What in the bejesus are you doing in there?”

“Research,” Shelby called out. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

“That rat! That rat!” Maria ran in, yanked Shelby out, and quickly shut the door.

“How dare you?” Shelby screamed. “I don’t care how long you’ve worked here, I will not tolerate name-calling by the hired help…”

“Take the cotton out of your ears, Missy.” Maria rolled her eyes. “I’m sayin’ there’s a big old rat in there that comes down from the attic.”

“Ewwwww,” Shelby bit her fingers and winced. “A real rat? In my room?”

“Now that you mention it there were two.” Maria snickered. “The big gray one and you.”

“Very funny.” Shelby flew down the stairs. “Thousands of comedians out of work, and they’re all housekeepers. What’s the name of the exterminator they use?”

“Beats me. All I know is a bunch have been here already,” she shouted over the banister.

“Then we’ll call in the goddamn National Guard,” Shelby shouted back. “The last thing we need around here is a dirty rat!”

“You said it, sister,” Maria answered. “And I’m hopin’ she leaves real soon…”

Pity for Maria the pest control company could only set a trap to catch the rat in the attic, not the one from Chicago.

In the meantime, Shelby quietly went about her business, jogging on the treadmill, then closeting herself in the office to work at the computer, all the while listening for scratching sounds on the walls. Soon she forgot about what was lurking in the attic as she was more engrossed in what was lurking on the Internet. Particularly the Tribune’s website.

Just because she was no longer employed by the paper didn’t mean she wasn’t curious as to the status of their on-line editions. Admittedly, the writing was crisp, even irreverent, but no matter how much Irving Davidoff insisted this was the wave of the future, she
knew this year’s Pulitzer Prize Review Board wasn’t scouring the country’s digital editions looking for nominees.

Shelby’s next stop on the Internet was her now voluminous file on DES, and today’s findings were especially disheartening. According to a report she downloaded, DES wasn’t just a case of drug companies introducing a pill they would later determine to be ineffective. DES was a case of broad-based negligence and total indifference to humanity. It was a case of major pharmaceutical companies marketing dozens of forms of a synthetic estrogen time bomb over a thirty-year period. Then running like hell when the nearly five million pregnant women who downed them on a daily basis discovered that not only didn’t the pills prevent miscarriages, the damn things hampered the normal development of their fetuses.

Mounds of evidence also pointed to the fact daughters were at greater risk than sons as the DES exposure wreaked havoc on the female’s reproductive tract. DES daughters suffered extremely high incidences of miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, premature labor, autoimmune diseases like lupus and MS, rare forms of vaginal and cervical cancers and structural abnormalities such as T-shaped uteruses and deviated cervixes. All because in 1947, the government approved the use of a drug for pregnant women without first testing it on pregnant women.

Finally in 1971, the FDA confirmed a link between DES daughters and vaginal cancer and pulled it off the market. Sorry about that, Shelby guessed the press releases said. Please forgive this little intergenerational tragedy we brought upon millions of families. Who knew?

Shelby was grateful Lauren’s research skills were not as well honed as hers, as her sister might never recover if she understood the real ramifications of being a DES daughter. Lauren was already feeling desperate enough without having to be further victimized by the gory details.

Question was, did this information change Shelby’s mind about becoming Lauren’s surrogate? Nothing doing! She was sympathetic, not insane. She didn’t even care about rediscovering there was a time in her youth she wanted children. That time had long since passed.

Current reality was she was thirty-eight years old, fastidious about her body weight, terrified of doctors, self-centered, and not even remotely maternal. No way would she ever want some alien
being growing inside her, depleting her of her much-needed sleep and vitamins.

And yet these feelings didn’t get in the way of continuing her search for Matty. Knowing full well if she actually was to find him and live out her deepest fantasy, it would be to fall in love with him, get married, and have a family.

On the other hand, there was one thing she couldn’t deny. She was probably the last person on the mind of a man she hadn’t seen in nearly thirty years. All the proof she needed was the fact Matty had never tracked her down. For surely if he’d tried he would have found her. Who was easier to locate than a high-profile journalist with a column in a large metropolitan newspaper?

Maybe it was just as well there was no sign of Matty. By now he was probably happily married, the father of at least two, and owner of that many dogs, if not more. Oh, how Matty loved his dogs. Shelby’s only hope was that he hadn’t sold out to law or medicine, and was instead, teaching comparative literature at a small college in Vermont.

On day three of confinement, out came the sun and dried up all the rain, so the eentsy beensty spider girl, who was positively ecstatic about the change in weather, crawled out of her hut in running gear and embarked on what she hoped would be a pleasant, three-mile jog.

In spite of her recent hiatus from running, Shelby was on course to beat her best time. It was amazing what pent-up adrenaline could do for you. Until one hit a major roadblock, such as the scene of an accident. Like the one at the corner of Royal Lane and Prince Drive.

Shelby noticed traces of blood on the curb and a man’s sneaker off to the side. Brand-new it seemed. Could it be her father’s? Why else would there be a stranded shoe at the very intersection where the accident occurred unless it belonged to the victim of the accident? She walked up the grassy incline to fetch the size 11½ man’s Nike, collapsed on the still wet ground, and cried.

Her poor, innocent father. What a high price he’d paid just to keep his aging body from further deterioration after years of neglect and gluttony. Now his body was shattered, his future instantly redefined. The pain must be indescribable, she thought. How could she not be there to comfort him? She was his daughter, his firstborn, and
the closest link to his beloved Sandy. She would go to see him. Soon. Or at least before Aunt Roz had a chance to tell on her.

Shelby sprinted back to the house, sneaker in hand, arriving in the driveway with sweat pouring off her head. While bent over trying to catch her breath, Maria opened the kitchen door.

“Miss Shelly, phone’s for you.”

“Who is it?” she huffed, no longer bothering to correct the ignorant woman.

“Askin’s not my job, dearie. Only answerin.” Maria let the screen door shut.

It better not be Irma Weiner, that’s all I can say. Shelby wiped her forehead with her shirt and trotted into the kitchen. “Hello?”

“Shelby? I don’t know if you remember me. This is Abby Cohen. Well, now it’s Rosenthal. Scott’s…wife?”

“Sure. Hi. That’s so funny. I was going to call you.”

“Yes, I heard. I ran into Stacy Alter at the dentist.”

God, that woman was everywhere. “So she told you I was looking for…”

“Yes. Are you seeing my husband?”

“Excuse me?”

“Please don’t take me for stupid. Things aren’t exactly great right now. I need to know.”

“Yes, I’m seeing your husband. At the hospital. My father and aunt were in a serious accident, and he’s one of their surgeons.”